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

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

#271

Post by uyhso8 »

goatlover wrote: post #193
uyhso8 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thread…

I see, thanks for that info on Julia's performance. As for OOP, I feel like that's more a matter of preference. I don't buy the functional is better (generally speaking not specific situations where it might be). But I could be wrong, I just don't see evidence, only anecdotal claims by fans of functional programming (which doesn't mean they're wrong only that I'm not convinced). To be fair, they have arguments agains…

Ruby did/does have a nice OOP approach. I remember when Python and Ruby were first kind of being touted as alternatives to Perl, and Ruby always seemed more well-thought out to me--the Python 2-3 split was something I sort of saw coming.

I wouldn't say I'm a functional purist (at least so far), but inheritance in particular has caused me some headaches in the past. I like Rust's approach to all of that, but it's much lower level.

Honestly, if Crystal ended up taking over the programming world, I wouldn't mind. Its a very nice language with a lot of advantages over what people are using now.

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

#272

Post by kstenerud »

jostylr wrote: post #39

Textblade: https://waytools.com/ Single row keyboard that has minimal finger movement. It was to be delivered March 2015 or so, but it has yet to be released. They have testers who rave about it and it looks incredible, but it is perpetually around the corner. Originally designed as an ultra-portable phone keyboard, those who have used it tend to use it for all their machines. It has jump slots to quickly switch from…

I'm one of the testers, and yes it is awesome. They severely underestimated the development time required for it, but considering where they're at, I'd expect it to be released first quarter of 2018.

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

#273

Post by ntobto »

Eye tracking - mouse and keyboard control using eyes. Microsoft has already started working on this.

I read a novel published in 1999 which predicted how VR headsets would be followed by eye tracking eye boards,etc. which would then be followed by control directly via the brain using electrodes,etc.

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

#274

Post by lolive »

scottmf wrote: post #223
lolive wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with IDs misalignment between data sources?

Could you clarify what you mean? Got an example?

Let's say you want to query Wikipedia for village descriptions, and get a map of matched villages from openstreetmap. Would it be a use case where GraphQL could help? Then it would need a "translation" layer for both systems. And joins between datasets would be based (for example) on the couple "country+postalCode". Is it a possible use case of GraphQL?

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

#275

Post by vladimir-y »

scottmf wrote: post #237
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 genuinely surprised by the number of people on HN who seem to know very little about what has been safe to call the successor to REST for quite some time. Forgive me if this sounds hyperbolic, but unless you have unusual or strict requirements, building a new app in 2017 REST-first is most likely a terrible mistake. Let me clear up some misconceptions I see in almost every HN comment thread on GraphQL: 1. GraphQL…

OData appeared before the GraphQL with the similar ideas.

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

#276

Post by Cerium »

nulagrithom wrote: post #218

New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…

Construction management is another similar field. People routinely have secretaries who print people's emails so they can write responses, or print drawings, Mark them up, then scan them back in. A YC startup net30.io is working on construction payment tracking.

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

#277

Post by icc97 »

goldensnit wrote: post #234

I think voice controlled apps (on Alexa, Cortana, Siri, google home) will be pretty big.

Certainly the voice recognition is impressive.

All the regular things I asked Google Assistant were recognised almost perfectly. Andrew Ng talked about the difference between 95% accuracy and 97% accuracy being the massive difference. Google Assistant is at 95% [2], but feels very impressive already.

It felt like going back a decade when trying out the Firefox Voice Fill [0], where trying repeatedly to say the word you want doesn't work (I was trying to search for 'React Router Redirect', which it kept interpreting 'React' as 'Really').

However I think the personality of the assistants are lacking. It doesn't feel like there is any real interaction. Google assistant feels like little more than a better version of Voice Fill.

I'm waiting for things much along the lines of Ironman's JARVIS (or KITT). But what I really really want is a full blown version of Jeeves voiced by Stephen Fry. I'll have to settle for the TomTom Stephen Fry voice for now [1].

Is there a turing test for Butlers?

[0]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/voice-fill

[1]: https://www.tomtom.com/en_us/drive/maps-services/shop/naviga...

[2]: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/31/15720118/google-understand-...

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

#278

Post by lordnacho »

goatlover wrote: post #84
lordnacho wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'll be deciding that for future generations. Isn't the premise that they can decide for themselves?

There is the possibility of editing the germline so that all future generations will have the improvement. Now imagine parents deciding this for their future kids, grandkids, etc.

Point is your kids can revert your changes.

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

#279

Post by zaptheimpaler »

slg wrote: post #158
baron816 wrote: post #130

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 think self-driving cars might not change anything here unfortunately :( If we take silicon valley as an example, the wages going up has just driven rents and housing costs up. Essentially housing is a good with inelastic demand, so it gets priced more like a tax at "x% of income". Same seems to be true for restaurants, grocery stores - they just raise the prices to match the income level of an area.

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

#280

Post by zimablue »

sixdimensional wrote: post #207
zimablue wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I believe that someone needs to build some kind of a scalable, security-hardened SQL interface that can be queried directly from the browser using actual SQL. Part of that need involves federated data from multiple services/data sources. We already have a query language that can even handle nested values (see ISO SQL:2016 standard), why not just adapt it for use in the browser?

I don't really like SQL either, it's hard to generate and doesn't support any abstractions, it might be an OK target format for some amazing query generator.
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