Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

Photonics and its impact in (classical and quantum) computing, VR/AR/Lidar, telecoms, particle accelerators, etc.

There are some incredible advances being made in many areas of photonics, including in everything from how to perform computations on chip (which are marked improvements over how were trying to do this back in the 90s, to little success) [0] all the way to how to construct tiny, ultrafast on-chip lasers for Lidar [1], all the way to how to do in-vivo measurement of quantities of certain compounds (which is useful for things like diabetes monitoring among many, many other things) [2]. There are also the usual applications to AR/VR as we've recently also seen [3], and other medical uses like chip-sized particle accelerators for therapy [4]. The classic other use case, for further in the future, is as a quantum computational platform [5].

The problem is that, like many physics fields, photonics is really, really damned technical and unintuitive (and I say this as a mathematician who works in the field!), so it's very hard to simply take a glance at it and know the benefits. On the other hand, I think this is where a huge amount of innovations in the next 2-5-10 years will be coming from and it's really going to change how we view and interact with the world.

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Note: I've mixed in both papers and popular descriptions of much of the work, but either can be found for all of the things I've stated above!

[0] https://www.osapublishing.org/prj/abstract.cfm?uri=prj-1-1-1

[1] https://phys.org/news/2020-04-key-component-autonomous-cars....

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7782291

[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200603151151.h...

[4] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3mgn5/scientists-built-a...

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-018-0008-9?proof=true...

Serverside Rendering

* https://laravel-livewire.com

* https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

* https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor

edit: added blazor

Black Lives Matter

Increasing skepticism of science and evidence-based decision making.

Applied Machine Learning. Areas such Real Time communications like Zoom, Meet, etc were very mature technologies, now with ML you can add features like Face recognition, echo cancellation, backgrounds, etc