Mass adoption of electric vehicles. Battery prices are plummeting and the advantages of EV are so great that the moment they break that $20k barrier with zero subsidies (which should be within the next five years) the switch will be rapid. I suspect at least 1 in 3 personal vehicles in use in major metro areas will be an EV by 2025.
Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
121–130 of 362 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if this is the solution, but I agree improvements in human-computer-interaction is one of the big things holding back tech for a lot of problems. Obviously a non-invasive brain interface would be the holy grail.
Do you really want to hook your brain directly up to the internet? I'd have serious reservations about that.
That makes it sound like it'd be a two-way street - like an Ono-Sendai from Neuromancer, and not just an input device. To offer an analogy, are Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, or Cortana "hooking your voice directly to the internet?" In a sense, yes, but that isn't going to take over your voice...
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#123AR. 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…
Its to the smartphone what television was to radio. Adds a whole new dimension of information delivery. That's the financial advantage.
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#124WebRTC for all real time communications/broadcast.
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#125Gene 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.
It's a way's off, but I'm looking forward to the day genetic engineering lets people see colors they aren't able to see today. Those and other sensory enhancements could revolutionize art, culture, and society.
You may be excited about a technology from the sixties called "acid" that allows you to do just this. (Somebody had to say it)
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#126Crystal & Julia 1.0. Crystal because it's a blazing fast, compiled and statically typed version of Ruby (or 80% anyway), and it's web server is awesome. Now it just needs full concurrency. Julia because it offers a nice, performant alternative to Python & R in data science, while avoiding Java & C++. It has some really nice features like multiple dispatch and the ability to run R, Python, Fortran and C code inside of…
I can't wait to never use MATLAB again.
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#127ARkit 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...
A usable AR SDK has been available from Qualcomm/Vuforia for years on more devices than ARKit supports. The only thing that came out of it was marketing gimmicks.
ARKits ease of use and is way ahead of vuforia. The advantage of ARKit is also OS integrated.
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, can't wait for Crystal 1.0 release, awesome language.
From crystal-lang.org, Crystal is a compiled language I never understood the phrase compiled language .
Do you genuinely not understand what they mean (that it produces binaries and isn't run in an interpreter or VM)?
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#129Edge computing.
Basically shifting off of cloud onto separate peer-to-peer connections. Faster, more secure, more distributed, and no middleman. Think 1990s/mid 2000s but no servers, just client to client.
Soon everyone will want a home server.
Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?
#130Much of what people have mentioned here will be really great. I think self-driving cars have the most potential to impact people lives day to day, followed by AR. I guess infinite, cheap, clean energy could also spark another industrial revolution.
But all these things aren't likely to impact the happiness and life satisfaction of those living in the developed world. The internet has been huge, but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole.
I would like to see someone create something that will make people's lives happier. That probably means doing something that will foster good human relationships and real world experiences.
I guess there's a lot of potential for driverless cars to help with that, but they could do the opposite as well. I think we need better tools for connecting with each other, understanding each other, forming social organizations and communities, and maybe changing the geography of cities to bring us closer together, rather than making it possible for us to be further apart. It's likely that new technology isn't needed, we just need to use what we already have in a new way.