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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?

#561

Post by ClayShentrup »

keenboy wrote: post #123

Can I say what I hope/wish were on the horizon? 1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly. 2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that build…

LVT wouldn't reduce mortgage or rent prices, but what WOULD reduce them is eliminating property taxes. and that's easier to do if you can offset it with another more efficient tax, like LVT.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z...

approval voting is also great.

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

#562

Post by cauthon »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #557
cauthon wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence. Personally, I think this interpretation of polygenic risk scoring is a crock of irreproducible shite. I don’t think it’s your fault, I think a lot of people in the field are shilling something they don’t have for grant money, and the…

> Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”. I don't know why that would be the standard, since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental…

> since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible

Yes, that is my point.

Both intelligence and attractiveness have a significant amount of variation attributable to environmental or other external factors, and have the additional complication that they cannot be measured by a single objective unit (like height can).

> do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome

The quantification of intelligence is notoriously confounded by socioeconomic factors. I do not think talking about predicting a feature makes sense while we are currently unable to describe it well.

IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.

Kind of like ignoring climate work in favor of Mars colonization. There seems to be a cultural bias in tech towards moonshot panaceas vs doing the unglamorous grind. It makes me think of the Bill Gates quote that "a lazy person will find an easy way to do a hard job," and while that's valuable in some contexts I don't think it's universally applicable.

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

#563

Post by adamsmith143 »

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/

John Deere can and likely will swallow up anything that seems interesting in this space. They already largely are.

Source: Worked on AI in the Ag Industry.

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

#564

Post by O__________O »

clavalle wrote: post #296

The US codifying privacy as a Right. Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent. When it changes, its going to be all at once.

Governments source huge volumes of information from private organizations, very unlikely they would limit these organizations unless they had a way to gain the information in other ways that are unlikely to be cut off long-term.

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

#565

Post by s1artibartfast »

cauthon wrote: post #556
s1artibartfast wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”. This has been done. Not to 1cm but ~3cm, and it has been reproduced by many labs all over the world That said, most genetic prediction aren't targeting exact vales, but avoiding the worst outcomes, whi…

I haven't previously read the Lello paper [1] that review is citing, but a quick skim makes me skeptical. Particulary the legend for figure 5: > Activated SNPs are distributed roughly uniformly throughout the genome. If the authors were actually identifying a genetic component to a heritable trait, I'd expect them to observe some linkage disequilibrium. And without any analysis of the SNPs (are they coding/noncoding?…

>it's hard to believe that they're uncovering actual biology and not just chance correlates with external/socioeconomic factors

Do you think no biological basis exists? Either way, they are still correlates, even if some aren't causative.

These models are still predictive when tested against control groups outside the training population.

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

#566

Post by entropicgravity »

Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric.

First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.

Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.

Remember, you read it here first.

EDIT ... a few typos

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

#567

Post by Geee »

blackoil wrote: post #495
Geee wrote: post #284

General purpose humanoid robots. They're kind of mainstream idea, but very few people talk about them or take them seriously. Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future. Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software wil…

Why do robots need to be humanoid. I wouldn't care of the robot building the cabin looks like a human or a box with 8 tentacles.

They're doing human things in human spaces with human tools. Human compatibility will enable the same range of genericity as humans. Same robot can operate a bulldozer, cook a dinner, play an instrument, interact with humans etc.

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

#568

Post by walls »

O__________O wrote: post #558
walls wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably because it's not true. You can see the definition of M1 changed at the exact time that chart shows a spike. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.h...

What exactly was the change in definitions and is it possible to account for the change or is information missing?

Seems like this is probably it:

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/05/savings-are-now-more...

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

#569

Post by moralestapia »

elicash wrote: post #490
moralestapia wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.

I'm not familiar at all with this space. Is vertical farming a possible solution here?

It would be very expensive.

One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes.

But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vertical farming is in economic terms.

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

#570

Post by s1artibartfast »

dont__panic wrote: post #268
JasserInicide wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite worried about the future of cars, especially EVs. I will never own a Tesla due to their always-on tracking and blatant anti-consumer practices like hiding upgrades on the car behind a paywall. Sadly ICE manufacturers are following suit with more and more useless dogshit like touchscreens everywhere, always-on data connections, and subscriptions for shit like seat warmers. I think this apprehension is partia…

I see a lot more negative anti-car sentiment online these days than I used to. I hope this leads to more car-free parts of the world. I don't want to use a car on a daily basis, owning one is a chore, but I'm forced to by the world that I live in. I'm also worried about the future of cars, of course. I'm an optimist, though -- I hope that the oncoming car dystopia leads to a rejection of cars by a bigger chunk of soc…

I hope there are space for both of us in whatever future comes to pass.

I love cars, trucks, and the things they enable me to do. Literally most of the things that make my life worth living are tied to using one.

Perhaps people can segregate into different cities or areas based on their preferences .

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