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Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#341

Post by justsomelittle »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #274
kurthr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason you assume people won't simply charge at night with relatively standard 240V (or even 120V) chargers? Most cars don't average more than 60 miles a day, which is less than 20kWh. In much of the US you could install 10-15 solar panels to do that even in the winter. Now solar panels are mostly made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solv…

Charging in cities and apartment compexes is still an unsolved problem, and most people live in cities. For example, just to provide enough chargers for Philadelphia's 1.5M residents (63% of them drive to work), one of every ~6 car lengths on every residential sidewalk would need concrete dug up and a charger installed. The city will never pay for that, and it would be a logistical and political nightmare. Even if in…

Why would it require that? In the UK instead of doing all that the councils have been installing EV charging points into streetlights, negating any requirement to dig up the pavements (beyond that required to replace a streetlight) to install these.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#342

Post by markisus »

kickout wrote: post #208

Autonomous machines operating in farm land in the USA. Several billion dollar companies could be spun up. Ripe for the taking right now/

I heard about many companies in this space that have since shut down / become acquihired. Root AI acquired by AppHarvest [1], Abundant Robotics (shut down) [2], Traptic acquired by Bowery [3].

To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes.

A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks.

To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem.

[1] https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires... [2] https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-b...

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#344

Post by kanzure »

dont__panic wrote: post #257
ChadNauseam wrote: post #247

Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes,…

[Gattaca]( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ ) is about the long term consequences of this exact technology for society. In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.

"If the audience is supposed to accept that genetic determinism is true in Gattaca, then no amount of Vincent's hard work should make Vincent a hero. He's just a fraud. If the audience is not supposed to believe that in the world of Gattaca genetic determinism is true (that is, it's false), then it should be interpreted as a story of discrimination, and a story of the underdog's heroic hard work overcoming the negative effects of a corrupt, wrong, erroneously-discriminating society."

from http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Gattaca.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#345

Post by throw123123123 »

dont__panic wrote: post #257
ChadNauseam wrote: post #247

Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes,…

[Gattaca]( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ ) is about the long term consequences of this exact technology for society. In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.

This is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time - it really captures one essence of being a human being, that motivation and drive vastly outcompete better opportunity.

"You know, my son was never what they promised me he would be" gets me to tears every time.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#346

Post by afiori »

neon_electro wrote: post #327
Chris_Newton wrote: post #101

I wonder what the future holds for WebAssembly. If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously. On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applica…

What does securing a WebAssembly runtime look like? Have browser developers made good strides on that front yet? Flash declined in part because of its poor security compared to the Web proper (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), so I'm curious where WebAssembly stands.

Until threads are included in WASM its security model is essentially the browser sandbox and scope limitation (WASM modules cannot access the global object nor call arbitrary functions)

Essentially WASM can be transpiled to Javascript (or ASM.js more likely) almost line by line and it would have almost the same security.

Flash and Java applet were so dangerous because the plugins introduced a ton of new APIs that skipped the browser sandbox. Wasm introduces no new API.

For non browser environments WASM mostly brings static validation, opaque external references, and bound checking on linear memory access.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#347

Post by emehex »

I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today!

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#348

Post by theptip »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #101

I wonder what the future holds for WebAssembly. If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously. On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applica…

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few years, and recently did a deep dive on Rust wasm.

I think it’s unlikely to be a single new language that replaces the current JS hegemony. My bet is that wasm makes it possible for any backend language to embed frontend logic, and each language will have framework(s) to take advantage of this capability in idiomatic ways.

I want to avoid specific language comparisons because they tend to veer into religious territory and shed more heat than light, but perhaps I can just note that Java, Rails, Elixir, Python and may others have great productive backend frameworks which could easily be extended to build and ship wasm to clients.

(I think the model of the new JS framework Fresh is interesting to hold as a comparison for what sort of thing you can do with unified FE/BE stack; shipping client JS only when the specific page needs interactivity is one cool feature for example. But with wasm you’re free to pick any point along the MPA - SPA spectrum.)

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#349

Post by irthomasthomas »

monodeldiablo wrote: post #334
irthomasthomas wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantity of CO2 needing to be dumped in to the atmosphere to manufacture new cars to meet this is going to be astronomical. The majority of the CO2 cost of a car is in the manufacturing. I don't understand why they are doing this?

Because the CO2 cost of manufacturing a new ICE car is comparable to that of a new EV, but the lifetime CO2 contribution of a new EV is far lower than that of an ICE car.

Can you prove that, because that is not my understanding. EVs use way more CO2 in their manufacturing. Not to mention the added environmental impact of battery manufacturing and lithium mining. We can't solve climate change by buying a new car.

Edit. I'm sure Musk and Tesla are super proud of the CO2 savings their company provides, so it shouldn't be hard to find the data they are publishing showing the net cost to carbon for the entire manufacturing and life time use of their product.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#350

Post by c7DJTLrn »

woeirua wrote: post #273

Nuclear war. It has fallen out of favor to talk about this as a serious possibility, but the world is in many ways closer to nuclear armageddon right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.

Ironically this could all be happening because a lack of nukes. Ukraine gave theirs away and have been left essentially naked and defenceless since. Would Putin have thought twice if they had a nuclear arsenal? Who knows.
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