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

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171–180 of 362 posts

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

#171
post #133

ARKit. Apple has solved few real world AR problems, which were usually hard for an average app developer to get started with. But with ARKit, apple, is "trying" to do the heavy lifting in terms of plane and object recognition etc. Another thing is the platform of distribution. People will use AR apps, which will hit the app store after September like crazy. And these same people, will be primary audience for Apple he…

ARKit seems like one of those technology breakthroughs that actually has gotten way less hype than you would think, but is legitimately a huge advancement.

why do you say this ? https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/world-lens-translates-word...

World lens has been around since 2010

Layar since 2009

https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/layar-proves-the-augmented...

Yelp Monocal in 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyOZBqI8FM

ARKit is still the same hold your phone up to do AR. Why is it different now ?

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

#172

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.

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.

I'm not sure if gene editing is really the quickest way to see more colors-- I would assume that a Brain Computer Interface solution would happen sooner.

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

#173

Crystal & 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…

Not trying to be a troll, but...

I was on the Julia train full-force until I started using it more heavily. My sense is that the benchmarks are a little misleading.

These benchmarks give a little flavor of what I'm talking about: https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

If you look at them, you'll see that Julia is indeed crazy fast in some cases. But in other cases, the performance is kind of middling. The native threads implementation of matmul is obscenely fast, but the "pure Julia" implementation is pretty slow--faster than R or Python for sure, but not in the same ballpark as C.

You could argue "well, why would you not use the native threads implementation in that case?" However, for someone implementing a routine in Julia, the implementation would be the pure one. That's the point.

With something like Rust, or Crystal, or Nim, what is promised is basically what you get: something in the ballpark of C. But with Julia, I feel like it's kind of unpredictable.

The problem is that the slow parts end up being a bottleneck that slows down the rest of the code, and that slow code is slow enough that it's not worth it relative to C or Python/R. That is, if you're writing heavy numerics, when you get to 20x slower than C, you might as well write it in C (or Rust or Crystal or Nim), and wrap Python or R around it, because that 20x is enough to kill it. At that point you might as well go with the established language even though it's 100x slower as an interface, and use something fast for the heavy lifting.

Crystal I can't say much about. It seems great, but the "everything is an object" makes me nervous--I tend to get anxious about inheritance because it drives me nuts. Nim seems more attractive to me. But who knows--it's also not like you can't have more than one language out there.

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

#174

I am suprised applications of blockchain outside cryptocurrency is not higher on this list. For example: * Election fraud and recounts can become a thing of the past * Everything that requires a contract could become completely electronic (the mortgage industry alone is probably a multi-billion dollar opportunity)

I think it's a crypto-utopian view that election fraud can be fixed with a better record. Election fraud is a fairly small problem in countries like the US and the problems are around voters not voting in the right place, having a new address, losing their proof of identity, etc.

The security community thinks a paper trail is essential - less computers, not more - not a public database. I'm not an expert, but I tend to trust them.

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

#175
post #158

Much 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 m…

I think one of the under reported aspects of self driving cars is what it might do for urban income inequality. The prices of cars and housing are two big things that keep poor people poor. If you can't afford the upfront or ongoing costs of a car, you need to live along mass transit lines to get to your job or endure a much longer commute which costs extra time and money. Housing along mass transit lines can be much…

I agree. Driverless cars will be awesome. I hope they will make people happier, but people tend to quickly adjust to changes in their environment and revert back to their "steady-state" level of happiness. Good relationships and experiences are the only things (other than maybe drugs) that can boost long term happiness.

Having more material wealth or free time can definitely make you happier, but generally only if you use it to spend time with family and friends. If people use self-driving cars to ferry themselves back and forth between their empty McMansions out in the exurbs, and work, then they're probably not going to be any happier.

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

#176

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-a…

I think you can already find that tree of yours today with Google Photos

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

#178

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 was really not sold by GraphQL, I'm totally down to not use REST as I think that's daft but GraphQL seems to be less powerful than SQL and only really useful if the thing you're querying really is a graph, and not lots of rows of relational data. I do work with data all the time so it's not actually that useful, I wish someone would invent something similar but with a more logical foundation (joins and aggregations and stuff, not only through ugly plugins). Maybe like datalog although I never learned that enough to find the payoffs.

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

#179

Much 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 m…

If you want to bring people physically closer together, just lean into NIMBYism and keep housing supply small. As current trends continue and require more people to live in city centers, we'll see more and more instances of people forced to have roommates when they'd rather not, multiple families forced to share a single apartment when they'd rather have their own, etc. But somehow I think you will actually create co…

I disagree. Living in a dense city does not necessitate living in some sort of tenement and being at each other's throats. Living costs are high in cities because people who bought property early like it that way. They want their properties to appreciate, so they prevent others from increasing supply. Governments seem happy to object out of some mistaken sense of social justice or historical preservation.

Still, people in dense cities who endure higher living costs tend to be happier and healthier than those outside of them (even when controlling for income). People are willing to pay crazy amounts of money to live there for a reason, after all.

I wish we could build new cities. That would provide an opportunity to do it right, and with a design that is appropriate for the 21st century.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think AR will become a "thing"? Do people really want to run around wearing glasses/headsets all the time? If you'd ask me, this idea could just as well end the same way as 3D TV.

> Do people really want to run around wearing glasses/headsets all the time? Absolutely! If I could wear some regular looking glasses that could identify objects, give me directions, etc, I would totally wear them. I'm really good with faces, in that I can see someone after a long time and know that I know them, but I'm really bad with names, so I can never remember their name. If I could have glasses that looked in…

If the glasses can name people from your contacts, it's only one more step to name and recognize everyone it can including strangers, including showing any related info like reddit aliases (known and suspected), reputation in some reputation tracker or even criminal history, favorite alcoholic beverages and other interests to help with dating... enough people don't want that so they'll ban AR devices and punch out people they catch wearing them. This stuff is already going on to varying degrees, but mostly businesses watching people. Getting people watching people and really kicking off AR needs, besides the tech, more assurances that no one can tell you're watching. I agree there wouldn't be much adoption barrier for having to wear hardware, so many people wear glasses and sunglasses and hats all the time anyway, the barrier is just being inconspicuous.
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