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Ask HN: What upcoming technological development interests you the most?

• jpedrosa 17y ago
  Lots of things interest me so it's hard to pick just one. So I am going to list a few. * WebKit - decidedly the web brick that should help with introducing new developments faster in order to keep things open and modern; * IronRuby - might take a while, but eventually it should make programming for the .net world much more pleasurable and help folks with bridging different worlds with the same interface, thing that's quite difficult to plan out; * Google JavaScript Engine, v8 - it's quite a beast of technology that deserves to take off outside of the browser as well. If Ruby is going to get its ass kicked, I hope it will be by Javascript that's quite dynamic and has closures and so on; * Canvas on the browser - graphics, widgets and games, all fully printable by the browser, all starting instantaneously; * Javascript on the browser - programming the dynamic way without having to compile, recompile, deploy, to test things... no, just a small change and a refresh and you get to develop the feature! * Misc: YUI 3, Bazaar VCS, Ubuntu, computer hardware, broadband, Google Chrome, Ruby implementations, Flash (I just tried to see some videos on Microsoft using Moonlight the Silverlight clone and it made me feel little sympathy for Microsoft and their technologies again)... * Wishful thinking: Microsoft coming to terms and creating their Windows on top of a Unix-like infrastructure; ;-)
  • vamsee 17y ago
    Re: point 5, you might be interested in Mozilla Ubiquity - you don't even need to compile ;).
    • jokermatt999 17y ago
      It's also slated to be built in to Firefox(https://wiki.mozilla.org/Taskfox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Taskfox) soon, so picking up on it now would be a good idea.
• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  • lunchbox 17y ago
    Here's a good one: http://www.technologyreview.com/ http://www.technologyreview.com/ For instance, they had a feature called "10 Emerging Technologies of 2009": http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37 http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport...
• nostrademons 17y ago
  E-ink. Sunlight-readable displays that consume no power could open up a whole bunch of new markets. The Kindle is just the beginning - could you imagine replacing road signs with E-ink? They could change to reflect traffic conditions, automatically routing traffic around jams without requiring that drivers glance down at their cell phones. If only they were available in color... If someone ever invents a worthwhile holographic display, that would be huge as well. The limiting factors on most portable electronic devices are the display and keyboard: if you could have a full-sized, immersive 3D display and an accelerometer-based pointer, you could do so much more with your phone.
• plinkplonk 17y ago
  Robotics - There's a ton of work happening on robotics (e.g Anybots) and robots with greater and greater degree of autonomy are being deployed. Robots in warfare is a topic of particular interest to me. think warfare is going to get an order of magnitude more horrendous (hard as it may be to imagine that)
  • danteembermage 17y ago
    In a matrix-related vein powered exoskeleton technology is becoming good/cheap. A reasonable way to prevent brain injuries from getting rattled around by an IED is to make yourself REALLY heavy and then power it so you don't get really tired walking around on patrol (i.e. powered armored exoskeleton) Speaking of horrendous there's also those supposedly non-lethal ray guns they are testing on journalists holding mattresses.
• DenisM 17y ago
  Stem-cell grown teeth. Imagine your future dentist visit: a really big dude punches you in the teeth the moment you walk into the dentist office, then you spit out your old teeth and they plant you a new set. In 6 month you have perfect teeth - good for next 10 years of abuse. I can hardly wait.
• rivo 17y ago
  E-Readers. Improved resolution, better usability, a sleek design, and an SDK could make it the iPod for text. Combine this with an iTunes-like model for newspaper articles, PDFs, feeds, and books of independent authors and you may even have a business model.
• danteembermage 17y ago
  Super Capacitors: instantly chargeable batteries would be really handy in about a million things, electric cars being most notable Augmented Reality: If we get it right, it will obsolete/improve a whole bunch of stuff (laptops, books, phones, movie theaters come to mind) Cloud computing: I don't mean avoiding the pain of buying servers, I mean the final ultimate realization of dumb terminal and central processing hub (combined with augmented reality and you've got an always-on computational extension of self with zero bulky hardware) growing things with algae: Oil, steak, ears (likely in that order) 3D printers: I just want to have an infinite cheap supply of standard rectangular Lego blocks. Further out: Fusion, hopefully cold: water in, power out (and I suppose whatever elements we're short on at the moment) my physics gets a little shaky here but I think fusion up to Fe is energy positive so an unlimited supply of iron could turn into some interesting things. Hole diggers: Bullet train from New York to Paris that falls to its destination (and of course climbs to decelerate the second half of the trip)
  • jodrellblank 17y ago
    Augmented Reality Yeah! There was a recent press release from Nokia about their prototype service where you can take a picture of a poster, and it recognises the event and finds the details for you, and local showings if it's a film, etc. There's a recent video link on HN of an android/G1 app which pulls location-aware data from the web and allows you to hold your G1 up with the camera looking at the horizon, and it annotates the video feed with information about the main things you can see. Shazzam has been able to recognise currently playing music for ages, and snaptell can recognise a photo of almost any common CD, book or DVD and pull up more data. Android/the G1 has a change-behaviour-based-on-GPS-location feature. Augmented reality is here if you look for it and want it. I hope it's not too long before I can take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, and have it OCR'd and the text run through Google Translate.
    • jodrellblank 17y ago
      Followup: This http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789 (How did that pass by with no votes and no replies?)
• noaharc 17y ago
  Brain-computer interface. Once we get that, everything else (except power generation) is irrelevant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
  • endtime 17y ago
    I'm really surprised more people aren't with us on this one. BCI isn't that far off, and it's pretty much the holy grail of future tech/sci-fi.
    • jodrellblank 17y ago
      It isn't really far off? Basic BCI is here already - the kind which is 'think of nothing to move the cursor left, focus on something to move the cursor right', but that's mostly picking up electrical activity in brain regions. It's a million miles off picking up what you want and making it happen. Impressive BCI has been done, e.g. William Dobelle's work on brain-linked-cameras for blind people, but that involves major surgery and, if I may say so without meaning any insult to his work, is still on the easy side - feeding signals into the visual cortex and let the brain learn what to do with them without needing to understand how the brain does so. To interpret anything like "send an email to John Hancock" and other general instructions, but not non-instructions, lifted from your thoughts ...
• twism 17y ago
  clojure
• davidw 17y ago
  I think if we ever get widespread, flat rate mobile data connections, that there will be lots of innovation in that space.
• manvsmachine 17y ago
  GPGPU Processing - I find it amazing that you can essentially build yourself a personal supercomputer with cheap hardware that you can pick up at a Best Buy. This has the potential to do for research what the Web did for software startups. +1 for Robotics and Augmented Reality. Met a prof last month that researches in AR, showed us some things he did with ARToolkit; it completely blew my mind.
• alex_c 17y ago
  Affordable, reliable, universal wireless Internet access. The iPhone is a great start, but it's still far from truly universal Internet access being the status quo. Of course, this has a lot more to do with infrastructure and business interests than it does with pure technological advancement. And I still want to have my own 3D printer.
• jamespitts 17y ago
  Simulating physics and chemistry to overcome limits of the Von Neumann architecture. Specifically, using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate neurons and synapses. "Performance measurements show good scaling behavior on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer up to 8,192 processors. Several key phenomena seen in the living brain appear as emergent phenomena in the simulations.": http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375994 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375994 Also, "Massively parallel simulation of brain-scale neuronal network models": http://www.bgconsortium.org/Past%20Results/kth%20bgwreport06.pdf http://www.bgconsortium.org/Past%20Results/kth%20bgwreport06...
• michaelkeenan 17y ago
  Robot cars. Car accidents cost over a million lives worldwide every year - 45,000 in the USA - and injure about 40 times that number. They are the leading cause of death for people aged 18-34. In the USA, the total cost of accidents is about $230 billion (1.7% of American GDP according to my calculations). Robot cars will reduce car accidents, probably by a lot (human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents; 80% of accidents are due to human inattention). They'll make parking vastly more efficient (the car can drop you off and go and park in some optimal place). 50 billion person-hours are spent driving every year. In productive hours, that's worth a trillion dollars. Even if the hours aren't productive (watching TV or whatever), it's still worth a lot. Congestion would be reduced because robot cars don't need the follow space between cars that human reflexes require. It's like quadrupling the capacity of existing roads for free. Since the crash rate might be so low, cars might be ultralight rather than made of armor, so they'll use less energy and less metal. I first became excited about robot cars from reading this essay: http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future
  • endtime 17y ago
    Well, in some ways we already have robot cars. Audi and VW and others already have a lot of driver assistance features like blind spot checking, rear camera, etc. Some cars even steer autonomously to assist with parallel parking. However, if you're hoping to see fully autonomous driving in consumer casr you're going to be waiting a while. There are a lot of regulatory and comfort/psychological issues with such systems. Disclaimer: I spent last quarter working on a driver assistance system on Junior for changing lanes on the highway.
    • elidourado 17y ago
      What is your prediction for how long we will have to wait for autonomous driving?
      • endtime 17y ago
        The technology could be there within 10 years easily if people were working on it (which, AFAIK, no one is for consumers), but because of the psychological issues involved I'm not sure people will be investing the time. But if you look at the DARPA Urban Challenge you'll see that many (not all) technical hurdles have already been overcome.
• ippisl 17y ago
  technologies for construction , and technologies for energy. while the cost of most other things is going down (at least in the long term), the cost(and technology of) housing and energy are basicly the same. also housing and energy are probably the biggest expenses per family , so any technological improvement there would have huge effects.
• cool-RR 17y ago
  Google Native Client. So many programmers are wasting their time trying to make web apps that will work on all browsers...
• jodrellblank 17y ago
  - LED and OLED lighting. When prices fall enough, classic bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, CFLs will be out the window. Lighting, and therefore atmosphere, will completely change. Can you imagine an office without strip lighting? With varying warm, friendly colours and intensities of low power OLED panels dotted around? Computer controlled lighting features will become common because they will be cheap and easy. Homes without a kilowatt of halogen uplighters? - The next iPhone. Even after owning one for a year, which was a year old when I got it so it was being designed three years ago or more, I still turn it over and marvel at it, at what it does, how well it does it and how good it looks and feels while doing so. It's the biggest consumer success of HCI in a long time, and that's really pleasing. They're addressing the lag when opening the SMS app, adding MMS, adding better bluetooth support, an autofocus camera, enabling and encouraging an accessory market, and twisting the arms of the mobile carriers like other handset makers haven't been. It's exciting. - Small, LED driven, no-moving-part "pocket" projectors. See: Microsoft surface and Epson's coffee table and similar. One day they wont be driven by a big expensive noisy projector hidden a few feet beneath or behind. It need not be a massive screen itself, but an improvement of today's pocket projectors - when they can do 1280x1024 at better brightness, look out basic office CRTs and LCDs.
• mechanical_fish 17y ago
  The lifelog. Short explanation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm Long explanation: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...
• obxerve 17y ago
  I will add my vote to OLED and e-ink. Additionally, transformation of everyday electronic devices into low-power consuming devices, and for this, I think nanotechnology will help us get there.
• csbartus 17y ago
  the next metasystem transformation. uploading & sharing myself on the internet, having my multiple identities living a complete life, chat with myselves and learn from them. cloning me in into the digital, no life expansion but more parallel lives
• tremendo 17y ago
  Whatever happened to last next big thing, the memristor?
• Titanous 17y ago
  Health nanorobots. I can't wait until we can inject single-purpose nanorobots to heal and augment our bodies. Imagine a injection that would completely eradicate cancer from your body. Or improve your eyesight. It may be a long way off, but it will be amazing when science reaches that point
• wlievens 17y ago
  Head-up-display eye gear. WANT!
• sleepingbot 17y ago
  A 100% clean source of energy cheaper than coal. Period.