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Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

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41–50 of 176 posts

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#41

Hombrew advanced material fabrication (especially with graphene) Open lab equipment. Open Sensor designs.

Also demand for solarpunk architecture and design themes, also those incorporating smart biological controls (probably uv filters and Biocidal surfaces) for at least a few years after covid.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#42
post #4

Augmented Reality. Apple seems poised to release some AR Glasses based on the patents they've been registering and the investment they've made in the ARKit framework. This will probably become another iPhone-like platform for developing apps on, and will likely present opportunities like the early days of the App Store. There's a cool project trending on Github right now showing how magic-like some of the technology…

I think it has been tried unsuccessfully many times. There is even a Silicon Valley episode about it. Certainly it does not fit the "non-obvious" criterion.

Apart from gamers, people just don't want it.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#44

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

I have been reading the same prediction my whole life so I'm sure this will be a boom at some point by pure chance. But I tend to think that those solutions already exists, and the typical tool coming to mind is WordPress. You literally don't need to know code, just install some plugins that give what you want and go ahead. Pay someone to maintain it (there are tons of companies already). It doesn't need to be WordPress, there are many other platforms. For low code Django comes to mind.

For the very typical use cases there are well suited SaaS tools e.g. Shopify for shops.

I do think that the very typical cases are well covered. Sure, there's room for improvement but not sure if a real boom is around the corner but as I said I heard this so many times (and also seen so many tries) that well, at some point something may actually happen I guess.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#45
post #43

Honestly, why would anyone share a good idea here? I get it that ideas are cheap, but if someone actually thinks they have slam dunk they're not going to share it on HN.

Ideas may be cheap but they can be insanely valuable.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#46
Existing technology business models will be adapted and re-launched as services which are coupled to cryptocurrency tokens.

Also, we may see the rise of cryptocurrency communities which attempt to manipulate company insiders and governments to gain control of the proceeds of production to drive the value of their cryptocurrencies. Private property rights will be eroded (due to lack of enforcement and increasing systemic corruption) and so cryptocurrency, which offers a cryptographic means of ownership (which does not rely on law), will gain increasing significance.

The proceeds of production will no longer go to shareholders, they will be diverted to cryptocurrency holders. The shareholders who embrace this mindset of moving profits to cryptocurrencies will see their ownership stake of company profits increase at the expense of those who resist this shift. In the end, nobody will want to own stocks since they will no longer yield profits. Corporations will behave like non-profits; the profits will be funneled to cryptocurrencies.

All of this will be completely legal and almost everyone will support it. In 10 years, this will be completely obvious.

We are in a post-scarcity economy. Wealth creation will have little to do with productivity and everything to do with redefinition and redistribution of existing ownership rights. We will see cryptographic ownership rights surpass legal ownership rights. Once this new, highly fluid, decentralized financial infrastructure is firmly in place, the transfer of wealth will end up facilitating a new wave of massive decentralized productivity with a stronger focus on social principles.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No code = someone else's code, it's been around forever, used to be called cots

And "cloud" means someone else's computer, been around forever, used to be called mainframes. Didn't stop it from being a marketing explosion.

In the "cloud" space I think the difference was being able to sell it as a commodity and in as large or small chunks as the client wanted, not the concept itself.

Not sure what the equivalent in no/low-code would be.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#49

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

Every VC in the world right now is betting on this becoming a thing... problem is that No Code/ Low Code as a product doesn't actually solve the problem that they are trying to solve.

The overarching concept of No Code/ Low Code is that "code" is the hard part of building software, ergo if we can make it so "normal" people don't have to code the problem is solved. Of course we all know that code isn't the hard part of the job- if code was the issue software developers would all be using No Code/ Low Code solutions already (as it's been pointed out, they've been around forever).

No Code/ Low Code is about selling accessibility to the wantrepreneur crowd... the same people that have an "app idea" that they want you to build. It's a huge market, but it isn't going to have an impact on software development any more than model rockets would have on the aerospace industry.

If the No Code/ Low Code tools were any good software developers would already be using them.

(When I am talking about No Code/ Low code, I am not talking about things like Webflow / Dreamweaver NOT solutions like Serverless.)

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