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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?

#321

Post by angryasian »

mercer wrote: post #287
angryasian wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it never required hardware it was the same exact implementation. you hold up your phone in a magic window

Surely you realize that there's a tremendous difference between on the one hand using solid API's and tools that are baked into the OS (and thus 'installed' on a huge number of people's devices), and on the other hand either building it yourself or relying on yet another app that needs to be installed? Not to mention execution: my experience with Layar is that it was pretty shit for the most part. Wordlens was cool,…

we'll have to agree to disagree. These AR kit demos are still apps. When it comes to usability for users they are still holding up their phones and looking through a magic window. Apple users have surprised me before, so I'm not discounting it. If you try the Ikea app everything you state is certainly doable without AR kit. I just don't see it as around the corner or necessarily new and emerging.

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

#322

Post by jdc0589 »

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…

this. A company in my town has an RFID (active and passive) material tracking system for large construction projects that does some pretty cool stuff. Imagine having a $10b construction site, thousands of parts, materials, and pieces of equipment laying around in a stock yard, and being able to know where every single one is, know if someone takes the wrong part out of the yard, know if someone takes a part to an area of the jobsite it doesn't need to be in, etc... Snowfall covered your entire stock yard? no problem, still works.

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

#323

Post by scottmf »

vladimir-y wrote: post #275
scottmf wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool, which ones? I think the concept of requesting a response shape was inevitable. It's one of those "obvious in hindsight" ideas.

You see many "GraphQL is similar to x, and x failed" comments on here, but I'm not sure x ever came close to where GraphQL is at the moment.

Good ideas fail sometimes. E4X failed, but JSX and its variations are game-changers.

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

#324

Post by tim333 »

amelius wrote: post #136
allpratik wrote: post #83

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…

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.

The AR in Pokemon Go is already kind of a thing. 750m app downloads to date.

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

#325

Post by scottmf »

lolive wrote: post #274
scottmf wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Could you show me a quick example of what a request and response would look like with REST? I'm still not quite sure what you mean.

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

#326

Post by slg »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #279
slg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Essentially housing is a good with inelastic demand

I apparently wasn't clear in my post, I think this technology can alter the elasticity of that demand in urban environments. Yes, everyone will still need housing so the demand as a country will not change. However people are going to be willing to live further away from their jobs because commutes will be quicker and easier. Demand will shift from urban areas to suburbs and suburbs to exurbs, getting cheaper at every step of the way.

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

#327

Post by miguelrochefort »

bobosha wrote: post #309

The advent of AI-based search. I'm not sold on the siri/cortana et al conversational agent approach. AFAIK it's mostly UI/UX layered atop the "keyword->10 links" paradigm. Search is missing the key concept of iteration and exploration and (hopefully) someone somewhere is working on it.

I'm working on it.

I believe the future of UI will be like Tinder or Akinator, where your browse through results and apply constraints to the search space by answering simple yes/no questions.

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

#328

Post by Im_a_throw_away »

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…

But how do you find jobs like that?

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

#329

Post by bobosha »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #327
bobosha wrote: post #309

The advent of AI-based search. I'm not sold on the siri/cortana et al conversational agent approach. AFAIK it's mostly UI/UX layered atop the "keyword->10 links" paradigm. Search is missing the key concept of iteration and exploration and (hopefully) someone somewhere is working on it.

I'm working on it. I believe the future of UI will be like Tinder or Akinator, where your browse through results and apply constraints to the search space by answering simple yes/no questions.

Nice! can you share some details on your work? do you have a write up somewhere? also is this academic research? or a commercial enterprise?

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

#330

Post by petra »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #304
Trundle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole. Serious question. Has any technology done this? We don't appear to be happier than any other animal. Even in the developed world plenty of people are downright miserable. Unless primitive humans were just far sadder than the average animal, I can't see how technological advancement has made us happier as a whole, because we're not all that happy. If antibiotics, elect…

Yes. Alcohol and various drugs, for example. I jest, but only a little bit. The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology. Humans are good about noticing what is not OK to them and focusing on that - while also growing resistant to persistent problems. So they keep the baseline. Things have changed a lot, however - we've been moving up on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Thanks to technology, most…

>> The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology.

>> Thanks to technology, most Westerners no longer really worry about food, shelter, personal security and forming relationships.

In the buddhist tradition, one dedicated to happiness, one barrier to happiness(or happiness training), was the need to take care of all those things. So happiness seems like a decent goal for technology, but maybe not the best ideology to win in the tech dev market.

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