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Ask HN: What's the next big thing?
Today's (yesterdays?) "hot" things: bitcoin/blockchain/decentralized, AI/DeepNets, VR/AR, genomics/liquid-biopsy, wearables, human-machine neural lace, cloud/GPU/TPU, 3D/additive manufacturing
What's the next big thing that no one or very few people are thinking about? What feels like a toy today, people get a chuckle out of? What's a contrarian play today that looks like genius tomorrow?
It can also be a "comeback" with a twist. Very few people thought yet another messaging tool would prosper (Slack), etc. It could also be obvious.
- muzani 9y agoIf you look at Paul Graham's predictions from 2012, Slack and Stack Overflow are in there: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- dkural 9y agoI see Slack can be in the "better email" category. Where's stack overflow? Better search engine for hackers? This is a great article, thanks for pointing it out!
- muzani 9y agoYeah, I don't think PG had "optimized Q&A" in mind but it fulfills the condition of being something hackers can use effectively to search documentation. There's some other good concepts in there. But the gist of what he's saying is interesting. It's not about things that look great, but rather things that are repulsive to us because they question how we view the world. By that line of thought, Bitcoin would definitely qualify.
- Red_Tarsius 9y agoEfficient C02 removal is top priority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal Our hope hangs on technology we've not invented yet.
- observation 9y agoHaven't heard much on neural lace.
- billconan 9y agoquantum computer and robotics
- dkural 9y agoI agree - I should've added to my "today's hot things" list though :)
- owebmaster 9y agoQuantum computer will be the Next Big Thing™ forever.
- pizza 9y agonew and deeper forms of loneliness
- R0otChiXor 9y agonew layer of internet By shielding users from exposing their metadata, I believe that we can help whistleblowers feel more comfortable with speaking out and can help them to sleep soundly once they do. We can help journalists do important investigative work without putting their well being and the well being of their loved ones at stake. A student can gain access to the near total sum of human knowledge without teaching advertisers how to trick them into buying more stuff they don’t need. With the new layer of the internet, we can create a new world where free communication and free exchange are both safe and easy. You are being tracked. And honestly, at this point, you’re probably getting sick of being reminded. In the last decade or so both developers and the public at large have begun to wake up to the sheer degree of surveillance we are all exposed to every day of our lives. And we’re starting to push back against this brave new world that we’ve stumbled into. It’s finally becoming chic to encrypt your communications. You see this with end to end encryption coming baked into many new messaging apps, for example. Encryption is even supported as an opt-in feature in Facebook messenger now. This is a great step forward. Unfortunately it isn’t quite enough. When you encrypt your communications you make the data very difficult for malicious actors to access, but you’ll usually still create large amounts of metadata, and often, the metadata is what an attacker cares the most about. The National Security Agency’s PRISM project, for example, focused specifically on cataloging and analyzing the metadata created by our communications. Sometimes how you say something is more important than what you say.