Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 362 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#41

Post by adventured »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #19

Gene editing, particularly on living people. I'm looking forward to cancer treatments being no more involved than an antibiotics regimen. I don't know if its around the corner, but considering the human genome was completed circa 2003, I'm pretty enthusiastic that it isn't too far away.

I'm looking for a CRISPR (or equivalent gene tech) loading system to be implanted, so we can easily install upgrades to our genome as a species. Patches that fix common flaws that dramatically increase disease / shorten life expectancy, along with improvement patches that make us better in various ways. It's not coming anytime soon, but it's inevitable and will be more beneficial than the vaccination programs we've spread globally that work similarly in how they benefit the species as a whole as a sort of upgrade. I don't know whether it'll be more efficient/ideal to have it function as an implanted system that check & regulates constantly, or as something that is performed every so many years (you'd get your first patch in the womb).

It probably seems like sci-fi now, some early concepts in this space will be possible within 30 years.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#42

Post by Yoric »

mrfusion wrote: post #37
miheermunjal wrote: post #17

ARkit finally pushing AR to the masses. From a developer perspective, having an SDK that simplifies "environment detection/reasoning" is huge. Previously required pretty deep hardware requirements and now is turning into an AI/ML/software problem. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/building_a_b...

Does it have Ocr built in?

I wouldn't hold my breath on it. Real-world OCR is hard. According to my tests, even Microsoft, Google or IBM's APIs get it wrong very, very often.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#43

Post by arstin »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #3
amirouche wrote: post #2

Without doubt, GraphQL is the next technologo I will learn. The idea is so brillant compared to REST. If you are convinced by SQL and in general by Domain Specific Languages, I think you should give GraphQL a try.

I'm intrigued ... can you elaborate on the wow factor beyond REST that you see in GraphQL? When I looked at it in the past, it seems to make sense for things that could be represented by graph (e.g. FB's social graph), and graphql allowed you to run complex operations in the backend without fetching each individual node on the client. I clearly missed something?

This frontend code.

  const ProfileImage = ({ user }) => ;
  
  const query = gql`{
    user(id: 3) {
      name
      avatarUrl
    }
  }`

  export const ProfileImageWithData = graphql(query)(ProfileImage);
You can ask for data in the structure the UI expects and only get exactly that data, letting the GQL client handle batching network requests for needs distributed across the whole app, caching, UI updating, etc under the hood. Also does a great job of decoupling product and data management code.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#44

Post by Yoric »

noiv wrote: post #40
Yoric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a 15 seconds explanation on how that's going to be much better than WebGL?

ELI7: WebGL crunches numbers fast to end up as pixels, WebGPU crunches numbers fast to end up as numbers again.

Got it, thanks for the clear explanation.

So this means that we'll soon have web ads mining bitcoins using our GPUs, right? :)

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#45

Post by anotheryou »

better search, always

Find me:

- an aggregation of everything I have to know to run a porcelain store in my country (taxes, suppliers, how to find staff or better yet: showing candidates directly, best location in my town, etc.)

- Fuzzy stuff like: the pic of that tree I took when I was on hollidays in XY a few years ago; or the note I took a few days ago about that band with some greek name

- a ready to paste, non-ancient js-script for XY

- a cafe where nobody cares about how long I sit with my laptop with a not too modern ambiente

- the lesser known types optical illusions

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#47

Post by whiskeySix »

Jackalopiate wrote: post #32
Numberwang wrote: post #16

There are rumors of phones with batteries lasting longer than 5hrs. I'm still not sure if true or not but when it happens it will revolutionize what you use your phone for. It may even replace the watch completely some day. Obviously I insist they still need to be as thin as they are now. That is much much more important than batteries.

? I get at least 10 hours out of my Pixel on a daily basis, what rumor are you talking about?

can't tell if you're being serious or not...

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#48

Post by cosinetau »

Jackalopiate wrote: post #32
Numberwang wrote: post #16

There are rumors of phones with batteries lasting longer than 5hrs. I'm still not sure if true or not but when it happens it will revolutionize what you use your phone for. It may even replace the watch completely some day. Obviously I insist they still need to be as thin as they are now. That is much much more important than batteries.

? I get at least 10 hours out of my Pixel on a daily basis, what rumor are you talking about?

It might be a lark, or a very high performance phone. :'))

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#49

Post by gpsx »

mayank wrote: post #22
pryelluw wrote: post #6

AR. Being able to superimpose software on top of real objects is amazing. It has so much economic potential that it hurts not being in the space already (working on that though). I feel AR will be the app craze 2.0.

> It has so much economic potential that it hurts not being in the space already (working on that though) As someone not familiar with the area, could you elaborate on some examples of what you think the economic potential is? To an outsider like me, being able to overlay virtual objects on a scene seems like a nice curiosity, not particularly an engine for commerce. Edit: specifically, I was curious about areas wher…

To me the benefit of AR is not just overlaying virtual objects on the physical world but specifically highlighting real objects in your field of view. Granted, this does just come down to placing a virtual object on the physical world. I can give a specific example that is perhaps of not so great financial advantage, but I think this kind of thing will be useful - using AR to give you directions to build IKEA furniture. You are sitting in front of a pile of materials and the AR will tell you to put _this_ bolt (highlighted) in _this_ hole in _this_ piece of wood. You would not have directions on a piece of paper but rather using the actual objects.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#50

Post by adventured »

idlewords wrote: post #34
adventured wrote: post #25

I'm looking for a company to successfully implement what I call on-behalf AI. AI legally allowed to take actions on behalf of someone, in a large number of ways in relation to daily life. This may be 5, 10, or 20 years out yet, hard to say. It'll be very hard to pull off, and whichever company does it first at a high function + comprehensive level will be another Airbnb or Uber, as the legal/regulatory hurdles will b…

Why do you think it's "ideal to move first and apologize later" when rolling out a socially transformative technology in a democratic society?

Because I occasionally don't respect the restraints that tend to exist in democratic societies when it comes to entrenched regulation & interests vs innovation (or really anything new or different), which frequently dramatically slow down progress (see: zoning law abuse, or the FDA's countless abuses or otherwise slow & meandering approach (what I call backwards), or the present US healthcare system (vast entrenched interests, fear of change, etc)). That is, it's my opinion that that restraint is what always must be pushed back against to generate any positive change in any culture or society at any point in history. Failure to push in this regard, guarantees stagnation.

The vast majority - in my opinion - overwhelmingly tend toward being either aggressively anti-change, or they're at best very cautious about it. That has been demonstrated non-stop throughout history with practically every step forward in technology for example. It may even be a beneficial evolutionary attribute for the survival of humanity. I don't belong to the dislikes change group, my personality type is to push. That's the honest answer.

Am I biased because of my own world-view or personality type? No doubt to one extent or another. I'm not advocating for chaos or anarchy though; rather, I'm advocating for constantly testing assumed or entrenched notions/boundaries, as a means to find out if there is new progress to be found there. My opinion is that there's almost always progress to be found in challenging such, with some areas blatantly worth focusing on more than others (due to favorable upside vs downside risk ratio). If you ask permission first every time you attempt to find progress at the edge of what a society presently finds comfortable, you're not likely to get very far.

Post reply on HN