6 ms·

Ask HN: What do you think the biggest trends will be in 2015-2018?

30 points by thinkingkong 12y ago

Hey HN, We review and read so many bits of technology that we forecast into the future. I was wondering what everyone thought - explicitly - about what will be happening over the next few years.

Jihoon 12y ago
I think it will (or at least should) become easier to meet people online with similar interests - and I'm not talking about dating. Given that there are 2 billion people on the Internet, this shouldn't really be a problem. Yet, social media sites like Facebook limit us, for the most part, to people we know in real life. With that said, I think we should be careful of where our collective conscious takes us.
- NhanH 12y ago
  To expand on this a bit, for better or worse, most of human's collective knowledge is still locked up in people head, be it cutting edge researching knowledge, industrial mainstream knowledge, or obscure hobby one. Notice that how in programming, you only got knowledge of the very basic, and then a glimpse of knowledge on the very high end (multiple distributed huge data center etc.). There is a huge swath of missing information for anything in the middle. That's partly why experience is relevant: there are certain things you just can't know until you meet someone who tell you about it. There are certain attempts to fix the knowledge gap issue, namely Q&A sites, as well as places where people can share their knowledge. But Q&A doesn't seem to work for most things beyond the basics: there isn't an objective answer, as everything is a trade off, and questions aren't as good as a conversation would be for context and everything else. Even for Quora, where the questions and answers can be subjective, there is an implicit requirement that both of them have to be self-contained (otherwise, it just doesn't make sense). It's evident to see in the "naive" question on Quora: sometimes you can tell the asker knows a bit and wanted to ask for more, but the resulting questions just come out very awkward. And finally, I think that people are more reluctant to just share their knowledge (directed at no one), for a variety of reasons: it's actually hard to just write about things - there are a big gap between knowing something, and being able to write it down clearly, we mostly can't write a book, but everyone of you will have a thing or two to teach me regardless. It might seem wasteful (who would read this?), or it's just simply never come to our mind that's the knowledge is valuable - familiarity makes everything seems trivial. Most of those issues would not exists in a small group settings. For a more concrete idea, think of a small but active mailing list, IRC channel, or subreddit, that's approximately the desirable result. If you can, make those mainstream, pretty please :-).
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    Maybe there's a market or an app for the 'Freelance Teacher', if there isn't already and I'm just ignorant. One-on-One connectivity with a (self proclaimed?) subject matter expert, where the subject could be anything. Things like Reddit and Quora exist, and Ask HN, how to wikis, guide web pages, etc. etc. but one issue I have with the forum style is that it doesn't foster a student-teacher / master-apprentice experience because there's always someone saying "no, that's wrong" -- or something to that affect. Connecting students with teachers, where 'student' means someone wanting to learn and 'teacher' means someone willing to share experience and knowledge. Does such an app exist?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - droidist2 12y ago
      True, also the problem with things like Quora is you end up with dogma or regurgitation accumulating most of the upvotes, like hundreds of answers that say "if you're not paying for it, you are the product."
    - lbotos 12y ago
      Hackhands/Codementor/AirPair are in this realm, but you have to pay.
  - Jihoon 12y ago
    "For a more concrete idea, think of a small but active mailing list, IRC channel, or subreddit, that's approximately the desirable result. If you can, make those mainstream, pretty please :-)" I've actually been working on a side project for a couple of weeks - it's a chatroom-based community. I think it'd be nice to have a place where people could go and talk about specific topics, without having it be all about "content", and without the judgmental weed-out process that karma-based sites force on users. Kind of like a live version of Reddit, you know? As useful as IRC is, I don't think it will ever become mainstream. Anyways, here it is - let me know what you think! http://www.toka.io/ http://www.toka.io/ *You'll need to sign-up to use it.
- Joona 12y ago
  I agree. MMOs used to fill this purpose for me, but recently they have been becoming less popular, with games like LoL taking over with rounds lasting <1 hour, after which you never see the players again.
wanda 12y ago
Advertising as entertainment. Brand as identity. Testimonial as opinion. News/catastrophes as entertainment. Dating as a catalogue. Love as a service. Reproduction as a life goal. These are already trends and will continue sickeningly in the near future. Anything targeting these new facts of life will do well, but at the cost of entrenching this millenial conceptual scheme.
- M8 12y ago
  "Reproduction as a life goal" Rate dropping in developed countries though? Did you mean consumerism?
  - cylinder 12y ago
    Probably referring to the idea of having children becoming more "trendy" amongst young people ... whereas previously having a baby was seen as not "cool," i.e. something boring people settle down and do, some "trendsetters / influencers / celebrities" have been having kids and making it seem desirable. I need a shower after writing this post.
    - mkaziz 12y ago
      I haven't seen this trend, really. Most of my friends want to wait a fair while before having kids.
- cyberjunkie 12y ago
  Oh, I love your comment. The word to represent all of it as you said is right, sickening. Has humanity and its evolution peaked and are we soon headed into a downward spiral turning into a retarded society? Is the pride of our advancements our undoing?
Joona 12y ago
eSports. There was a large CS:GO/LoL/SC2 tournament last weekend, where CS:GO gathered over 1 million concurrent viewers during finals (last tournament had 460K!). While LoL has been a big player for a while, and probably continues to be in Asia, CS:GO is growing rapidly in the west.
- eswat 12y ago
  It’s worth noting that Counter-Strike has been around far longer than most games in eSports. But a few tweaks made in Global Offensive, such as more reliance on managing money/economy, made it as compelling to watch as games like LoL or SC2 because it’s more than just watching dudes shooting at each other. Now it’s getting more playtime in tournaments than ever.
cannilis 12y ago
Things that we think of as programming and engineering will increasingly trickle down as digestible packages sold to masses. As has been happening for decades.
digitalzombie 12y ago
VR games. Smart watches. Fitness devices. Millenium Generation are putting more money into fitness stuff and Under Armor just bought myfitnesspal app. Google released their own. Those things will amass a good amount of big data for companies so I see that becoming big. Electric cars. Tesla really pushed it. BMW and Nissan is embracing it. All the hyper cars are moving to hybrid right now. It's easy to see where the direction is going. Machine learning/ Data science. It's going to grow. As for the tech stack I'm not entirely sure, but I know Spark will be vying for some market share if they keep the momentum up but Flink can be an underdog. Eventually, we might get a good realtime framework/software instead of batches and micro batches. Scala is going to go down as people are going to see how complicated the language is really. I've seen few move to Clojure. That's the trend I'm predicting for this language. Autonomous cars ain't going to be here by 2018. Things I think will not be a trend: I wouldn't add google glasses type of thing because I don't think the technology is there to make it last more than an hour or two really. Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this. Front side js rendering is going to be still fighting for dominance. React, angular, ember, etc... It'll have massive code base shift with ECMA 6 and nothing will settle and everything is still wild wild west in this frontier.
- proveanegative 12y ago
  >Scala is going to go down as people are going to see how complicated the language is really. I've seen few move to Clojure. That's the trend I'm predicting for this language. Interesting prediction. What do you think will be the fate of other JVM languages? >Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this. Why not OrientDB?
iisbum 12y ago
VR in particular gaming Podcasting will get even bigger Wearables eSports
jhildings 12y ago
Internet of things seems to be one of the buzzwords for nowdays, with wearables and smart watches and everything controlling your home
- Jayd2014 12y ago
  Internet of Things will have somehow the same fate as IPv6. Some will adopt it, manufacturers will push for it, but nobody will care about it. It will be a niche for a few years before the market is ready for it.
lordnacho 12y ago
Consumer health testing. Tech has advanced to the point where a tiny sample can be used to look for all sorts of chemical markers. This will lead to people getting tests done much more frequently than currently, and being informed on a running basis. Had a chat with a founder about it today.
nanoGeek 12y ago
No one can predict this, but in my opinion (in no particular order): 1) Health (e.g. theranos) 2) Artificial Intelligence 3) Virtual Reality 4) Internet of things
bbcbasic 12y ago
Microinvesting - ordinary people able to invest in a share of company (startup or established but unfloated) or land in an easy and realistic way. Conversely any company, new, small or large can attract money this way. Caveat emptor! Middle finger to the city - smart people use big cities for networking and to meet people, then start up their businesses in a town miles away and say fuck you to those overheads. Tech could facilitate this. Previously unknown small towns around the world become the next silicon valleys.
- tptacek 12y ago
  I have a blog post I've been playing with for about 4 months now about how broader, more diverse investor communities for startups is likely to backfire. The right people to be investing in them is probably the group that's doing it now. They could be smarter, but it's unclear to me that there should be more of them. What set me off was the Startup Podcast episode on equity crowdfunding platforms.
- dhagz 12y ago
  I especially see your second point becoming big by the end of this year. Especially with the rising costs in Silicon Valley. I see smaller cities doing everything they can to bring in these startups and even more established businesses. I work in a suburb of Atlanta, and it's fantastic. The commute is less than half an hour, the location is great - downtown Lawrenceville - and I don't have to lose out on the benefits of Atlanta networking.
tptacek 12y ago
Shift in tech from full-time employment to contracting, working it's way down from the high-end specialties towards generalist programming. Tools and business services that make contracting easier to manage as a sole practitioner. Maybe, if we're lucky, new business systems (insurance?) that de-risks the contracting sales pipeline and utilization volatility.
cyberjunkie 12y ago
Here are some of mine - Emergence of VR and related technologies (it's a trend in this thread as well) Failing startups in the hundreds, who've exhausted their funding by then. Smartwatches/health bands Beginning or mobile phone stagnancy 4K TVs and displays may start picking up

30 points by thinkingkong 12y ago

Hey HN, We review and read so many bits of technology that we forecast into the future. I was wondering what everyone thought - explicitly - about what will be happening over the next few years.

Jihoon 12y ago

I think it will (or at least should) become easier to meet people online with similar interests - and I'm not talking about dating. Given that there are 2 billion people on the Internet, this shouldn't really be a problem. Yet, social media sites like Facebook limit us, for the most part, to people we know in real life. With that said, I think we should be careful of where our collective conscious takes us.

NhanH 12y ago
To expand on this a bit, for better or worse, most of human's collective knowledge is still locked up in people head, be it cutting edge researching knowledge, industrial mainstream knowledge, or obscure hobby one. Notice that how in programming, you only got knowledge of the very basic, and then a glimpse of knowledge on the very high end (multiple distributed huge data center etc.). There is a huge swath of missing information for anything in the middle. That's partly why experience is relevant: there are certain things you just can't know until you meet someone who tell you about it. There are certain attempts to fix the knowledge gap issue, namely Q&A sites, as well as places where people can share their knowledge. But Q&A doesn't seem to work for most things beyond the basics: there isn't an objective answer, as everything is a trade off, and questions aren't as good as a conversation would be for context and everything else. Even for Quora, where the questions and answers can be subjective, there is an implicit requirement that both of them have to be self-contained (otherwise, it just doesn't make sense). It's evident to see in the "naive" question on Quora: sometimes you can tell the asker knows a bit and wanted to ask for more, but the resulting questions just come out very awkward. And finally, I think that people are more reluctant to just share their knowledge (directed at no one), for a variety of reasons: it's actually hard to just write about things - there are a big gap between knowing something, and being able to write it down clearly, we mostly can't write a book, but everyone of you will have a thing or two to teach me regardless. It might seem wasteful (who would read this?), or it's just simply never come to our mind that's the knowledge is valuable - familiarity makes everything seems trivial. Most of those issues would not exists in a small group settings. For a more concrete idea, think of a small but active mailing list, IRC channel, or subreddit, that's approximately the desirable result. If you can, make those mainstream, pretty please :-).
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  Maybe there's a market or an app for the 'Freelance Teacher', if there isn't already and I'm just ignorant. One-on-One connectivity with a (self proclaimed?) subject matter expert, where the subject could be anything. Things like Reddit and Quora exist, and Ask HN, how to wikis, guide web pages, etc. etc. but one issue I have with the forum style is that it doesn't foster a student-teacher / master-apprentice experience because there's always someone saying "no, that's wrong" -- or something to that affect. Connecting students with teachers, where 'student' means someone wanting to learn and 'teacher' means someone willing to share experience and knowledge. Does such an app exist?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - droidist2 12y ago
    True, also the problem with things like Quora is you end up with dogma or regurgitation accumulating most of the upvotes, like hundreds of answers that say "if you're not paying for it, you are the product."
  - lbotos 12y ago
    Hackhands/Codementor/AirPair are in this realm, but you have to pay.
- Jihoon 12y ago
  "For a more concrete idea, think of a small but active mailing list, IRC channel, or subreddit, that's approximately the desirable result. If you can, make those mainstream, pretty please :-)" I've actually been working on a side project for a couple of weeks - it's a chatroom-based community. I think it'd be nice to have a place where people could go and talk about specific topics, without having it be all about "content", and without the judgmental weed-out process that karma-based sites force on users. Kind of like a live version of Reddit, you know? As useful as IRC is, I don't think it will ever become mainstream. Anyways, here it is - let me know what you think! http://www.toka.io/ http://www.toka.io/ *You'll need to sign-up to use it.
Joona 12y ago
I agree. MMOs used to fill this purpose for me, but recently they have been becoming less popular, with games like LoL taking over with rounds lasting <1 hour, after which you never see the players again.

wanda 12y ago

Advertising as entertainment. Brand as identity. Testimonial as opinion. News/catastrophes as entertainment. Dating as a catalogue. Love as a service. Reproduction as a life goal. These are already trends and will continue sickeningly in the near future. Anything targeting these new facts of life will do well, but at the cost of entrenching this millenial conceptual scheme.

M8 12y ago
"Reproduction as a life goal" Rate dropping in developed countries though? Did you mean consumerism?
- cylinder 12y ago
  Probably referring to the idea of having children becoming more "trendy" amongst young people ... whereas previously having a baby was seen as not "cool," i.e. something boring people settle down and do, some "trendsetters / influencers / celebrities" have been having kids and making it seem desirable. I need a shower after writing this post.
  - mkaziz 12y ago
    I haven't seen this trend, really. Most of my friends want to wait a fair while before having kids.
cyberjunkie 12y ago
Oh, I love your comment. The word to represent all of it as you said is right, sickening. Has humanity and its evolution peaked and are we soon headed into a downward spiral turning into a retarded society? Is the pride of our advancements our undoing?

Joona 12y ago

eSports. There was a large CS:GO/LoL/SC2 tournament last weekend, where CS:GO gathered over 1 million concurrent viewers during finals (last tournament had 460K!). While LoL has been a big player for a while, and probably continues to be in Asia, CS:GO is growing rapidly in the west.

eswat 12y ago
It’s worth noting that Counter-Strike has been around far longer than most games in eSports. But a few tweaks made in Global Offensive, such as more reliance on managing money/economy, made it as compelling to watch as games like LoL or SC2 because it’s more than just watching dudes shooting at each other. Now it’s getting more playtime in tournaments than ever.

cannilis 12y ago

Things that we think of as programming and engineering will increasingly trickle down as digestible packages sold to masses. As has been happening for decades.

digitalzombie 12y ago

VR games. Smart watches. Fitness devices. Millenium Generation are putting more money into fitness stuff and Under Armor just bought myfitnesspal app. Google released their own. Those things will amass a good amount of big data for companies so I see that becoming big. Electric cars. Tesla really pushed it. BMW and Nissan is embracing it. All the hyper cars are moving to hybrid right now. It's easy to see where the direction is going. Machine learning/ Data science. It's going to grow. As for the tech stack I'm not entirely sure, but I know Spark will be vying for some market share if they keep the momentum up but Flink can be an underdog. Eventually, we might get a good realtime framework/software instead of batches and micro batches. Scala is going to go down as people are going to see how complicated the language is really. I've seen few move to Clojure. That's the trend I'm predicting for this language. Autonomous cars ain't going to be here by 2018. Things I think will not be a trend: I wouldn't add google glasses type of thing because I don't think the technology is there to make it last more than an hour or two really. Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this. Front side js rendering is going to be still fighting for dominance. React, angular, ember, etc... It'll have massive code base shift with ECMA 6 and nothing will settle and everything is still wild wild west in this frontier.

proveanegative 12y ago
>Scala is going to go down as people are going to see how complicated the language is really. I've seen few move to Clojure. That's the trend I'm predicting for this language. Interesting prediction. What do you think will be the fate of other JVM languages? >Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this. Why not OrientDB?

iisbum 12y ago

VR in particular gaming Podcasting will get even bigger Wearables eSports

jhildings 12y ago

Internet of things seems to be one of the buzzwords for nowdays, with wearables and smart watches and everything controlling your home

Jayd2014 12y ago
Internet of Things will have somehow the same fate as IPv6. Some will adopt it, manufacturers will push for it, but nobody will care about it. It will be a niche for a few years before the market is ready for it.

lordnacho 12y ago

Consumer health testing. Tech has advanced to the point where a tiny sample can be used to look for all sorts of chemical markers. This will lead to people getting tests done much more frequently than currently, and being informed on a running basis. Had a chat with a founder about it today.

nanoGeek 12y ago

No one can predict this, but in my opinion (in no particular order): 1) Health (e.g. theranos) 2) Artificial Intelligence 3) Virtual Reality 4) Internet of things

bbcbasic 12y ago

Microinvesting - ordinary people able to invest in a share of company (startup or established but unfloated) or land in an easy and realistic way. Conversely any company, new, small or large can attract money this way. Caveat emptor! Middle finger to the city - smart people use big cities for networking and to meet people, then start up their businesses in a town miles away and say fuck you to those overheads. Tech could facilitate this. Previously unknown small towns around the world become the next silicon valleys.

tptacek 12y ago
I have a blog post I've been playing with for about 4 months now about how broader, more diverse investor communities for startups is likely to backfire. The right people to be investing in them is probably the group that's doing it now. They could be smarter, but it's unclear to me that there should be more of them. What set me off was the Startup Podcast episode on equity crowdfunding platforms.
dhagz 12y ago
I especially see your second point becoming big by the end of this year. Especially with the rising costs in Silicon Valley. I see smaller cities doing everything they can to bring in these startups and even more established businesses. I work in a suburb of Atlanta, and it's fantastic. The commute is less than half an hour, the location is great - downtown Lawrenceville - and I don't have to lose out on the benefits of Atlanta networking.

tptacek 12y ago

Shift in tech from full-time employment to contracting, working it's way down from the high-end specialties towards generalist programming. Tools and business services that make contracting easier to manage as a sole practitioner. Maybe, if we're lucky, new business systems (insurance?) that de-risks the contracting sales pipeline and utilization volatility.

cyberjunkie 12y ago

Here are some of mine - Emergence of VR and related technologies (it's a trend in this thread as well) Failing startups in the hundreds, who've exhausted their funding by then. Smartwatches/health bands Beginning or mobile phone stagnancy 4K TVs and displays may start picking up