Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

That's, unfortunately, the counterproductive effect of current tech fads - UX designed around "engagement" (i.e. sucking money or attention out of people) and not around effectiveness. I believe it's important for responsible engineers to work to counter that thread.

- lots of general network events where only C-level staff attend (often paid networks)

- side by side with consultants and business developers that haven't got technical staff

- get references from companies we've befriended by giving them leads before

You need to find a way into non-technical companies. We find them by going to network meetings with companies not in the IT sector. I have a large network of tech companies, but more non-tech companies. Sometimes a CEO for a marketing firm have a good lead they want in the long term, and then he brings in us to deliver something else for their business, such as an internal app for tracking deliveries. His potential client gets hyped up and I suggest potential marketing angles of the app and in doing so direct the business back to him. Other times I have a few drinks with CEOs from different companies at network events, they get to know me on a more personal level, and then pass me / us as a reference when they hear about jobs. We also go side by side of business developers, letting them add "digitalization" as a part of their brand.

Absolutely! If I could wear some regular looking glasses that could identify objects, give me directions, etc, I would totally wear them.

I'm really good with faces, in that I can see someone after a long time and know that I know them, but I'm really bad with names, so I can never remember their name. If I could have glasses that looked in my contacts or Facebook or whatever and told me the name of the person I'm looking at, that would help me be less awkward at social gatherings.

I don't think I've seen the killer app yet, but if it's awesome, wearing glasses won't be too much of a problem once they become slim and light.

I don't want to carry a big flat phone in my pocket, but its worth it.

I think ARKit has potential, Pokemon Go is still big and Snapchat glasses has generated hype among people that don't identify the glasses with AR.

Imagine the Metaverse exists, fully fledged, and there are two products which can access it:

1) A headset that you strap on your head, and you're "inside"

2) A picture frame that you can hold up and look through, and the Metaverse appears on the other side. You can reach behind the frame with your other hand, and it's then inside, and can touch stuff inside

Which will be more popular?

Now, I know a lot of VR enthusiasts are going say #1, but I suspect a lot of people will prefer #2. It has several benefits:

- No nausea

- If freaky shit starts happening, you can just look away or put the device down

- You can keep talking with real world people

- You can look back and forth between the Metaverse and the real world without taking your headset off or performing any kind of switch

- You can still make eye contact with people in the real world

- A bajillion people already have an iPhone

- There's nothing really to learn, the Metaverse is just a new app on your phone, not a whole new interaction paradigm

The downsides are two:

- Less immersive

- One of your hands is taken up

I can see the uses for both devices, but I predict the picture frame gets at least 50% of Metaverse interactions over the next decade, maybe more.

https://get.google.com/tango/

I haven't heard anything about them for a few years now.

Visual-inertial SLAM has been working for a few years on mobile phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7bjsIqlbS0 So there should be plenty of third-party libraries you can use.

World lens has been around since 2010

Layar since 2009

https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/layar-proves-the-augmented...

Yelp Monocal in 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyOZBqI8FM

ARKit is still the same hold your phone up to do AR. Why is it different now ?

They keep tweaking and iterating and keep saying another couple of months.

this product is a flop. why people even know about it?!

wake me up when I can use it as a real phone keyboard. like the priv already does.

I jest, but only a little bit. The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology. Humans are good about noticing what is not OK to them and focusing on that - while also growing resistant to persistent problems. So they keep the baseline.

Things have changed a lot, however - we've been moving up on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Thanks to technology, most Westerners no longer really worry about food, shelter, personal security and forming relationships. We've moved upwards - that's why we have time and will to bitch about abstract topics on the Internet. The very controversies our society has is the evidence just how far our technology has lifted us. Starving people don't fret about identity politics and gender imbalances in hot industries.

This is a realistic goal for technology - lifting us up and solving the problems we identify. Feeling happy is something we either need to learn individually, or brainwash (or engineer) ourselves into.

Having more material wealth or free time can definitely make you happier, but generally only if you use it to spend time with family and friends. If people use self-driving cars to ferry themselves back and forth between their empty McMansions out in the exurbs, and work, then they're probably not going to be any happier.

Still, people in dense cities who endure higher living costs tend to be happier and healthier than those outside of them (even when controlling for income). People are willing to pay crazy amounts of money to live there for a reason, after all.

I wish we could build new cities. That would provide an opportunity to do it right, and with a design that is appropriate for the 21st century.

Start out with some tutorials and learn the basics, but keep in mind, that there are frameworks like three.js [1], which abstract away all the nitty-gritty details, like setting up a render context, initialize texture buffers or load 3d models from known formats. By using a framework you will save a lot of time and you can concentrate on the fun stuff.

But even three.js can be kind of low-level, because depending on what you want to achieve, you still need more 'boilerplate'. If you want to write a game, you need stuff like a ui framework within the render context, a physics engine, particle generators, pathfinding etc etc. If you need this, maybe take a look at Unity [2] or Unreal Engine [3], which provide said extensions and alot more. Those engines provide ways to build applications for different targets like direct3d, opengl or webgl, so you basically can cover browsers, pc's and mobile platforms with the same codebase which is truly awesome. But be prepared for a step learning curve (but it's fun!).

When you start working on stuff like this, you realize, that those frameworks and game engines are just tools. In the end, you need to combine those tools with some kind of domain knowledge, like art, game design, architecture, interface design or something similar to increase chances finding a job in such a sector.

It's alot to ask for, but you need to start somewhere. And if it doesn't work out, you maybe find a new cool hobby and gain programming and design experience on the way.

[1] https://threejs.org/ [2] https://unity3d.com [3] https://www.unrealengine.com

Things mature at different rates.

- hardware acceleration is everywhere, we all have an SGI Onyx in our pocket

- good positional tracking give us a natural 3D input technique

Without those, the tech doesn't work.

From my understanding, the thing I like about payment channels is that the capacity of the payment channel depends on how much of the cryptocurrency is deposited/locked away under it.

So with everyone competing for a payment channel toll, they have taken large amounts of crypto off the market, constricting the supply, while distributing the marketing out for their own use case, some of which will be successful at increasing the demand. Any limited supply commodity performs the same under these circumstances, up, and that is exciting because the capacity can also scale for the new attention, while the "centralized" payment channels stay optional ways to transact on the network at all.

As for OOP, I feel like that's more a matter of preference. I don't buy the functional is better (generally speaking not specific situations where it might be). But I could be wrong, I just don't see evidence, only anecdotal claims by fans of functional programming (which doesn't mean they're wrong only that I'm not convinced). To be fair, they have arguments against OOP in favor of functional, but I'm not personally sold. Or maybe I just like Ruby and it's approach to OOP.

I never understood the phrase compiled language.

The core matrix-y stuff can pretty much all be ported to Python with similar or better perfomance, especially using Numba.

And then there is Ruby 3.0, which will have concurrency and (optional) static types according to Matz. But that's slated for 2020.

Use cases in industry abound. On a trip to the doctor's office, your physician can overlay your medical file and get pertinent information about you. If you are a politician holding a fundraising dinner, AR + facial recognition will supply you with the biographical information, social media profiles, voting records, donation history, etc. of the people in the room allow you to schmooze ever so effortlessly and ever more efficiently. AR tailor made for athletes could do a number of physiological measurements like heart rate, VO2, etc. (with wearables or implanted sensors) that could combine to produce some sort of stamina bar, allowing for more effective substitution patterns. An activity like paintball can will feel closer to an actual military engagement or a video game if a minimap that includes your teammate's location will be in the corner of your vision.

The Terminator franchise did a great job of showing it's utility by giving Arnold "Terminator vision" in shots from his POV. Video games also make extensive use of OSD. A 1st person shooter's OSD really shows the advantages of AR.

Advances in computer vision and networked IoT devices will be a multiplier for AR's utility. Imagine an app that overlays your vision with the mathematical patterns of nature: illustrating the Fibonacci sequence in the leaves, petals and seeds of plants or in the way tree branches form and split. It could highlight all of the phenomenon that exhibit golden ratios. It could show the equations of motion for objects moving or spinning in your field of view or detail the biomechanics of the elegant dancers of the Bolshoi ballet. In a way, you get to experience what the mind of a Leonardo Da Vince or John Nash might be like, like you are able to get an insight into the mind of a genius.

Beyond that, with AR you can make certain classes of digital goods and marketing "exist" in the real world. The margins for AR merchandise will be significantly higher than real physical merch, although I'm guessing the prices will be a lot lower. Selling virtual items that you can see in real life opens up a lot of cool and fantastic options as well as more mundane stuff or a mix between the two.

If AR becomes ubiquitous it gives big tech companies a lot of data that no one currently has. Specifically you would have a detailed, 3D map\point cloud of most of the real world at various points in time. You could build an awesome developer platform on this, use it for VR tourism, simulation, license it to film or games producers, etc.

There are already many use cases for industry and enterprise customers when it comes to training and data overlays for workers.

A boring, but lucrative use case happens when resolution and tracking get good enough and assuming the form factor gets to eye glass size. AR could potentially replaces all conventional screens and be more comfortable to use than smartphones.

Note I'm using AR more broadly and including Google Glass\HUD style stuff, ARKit\Vuforia SmartPhone AR, and Hololens or Magic Leap style MR or "holograms".

  const ProfileImage = ({ user }) => <img src={user.avatarUrl} alt={user.name} />;
  
  const query = gql`{
    user(id: 3) {
      name
      avatarUrl
    }
  }`

  export const ProfileImageWithData = graphql(query)(ProfileImage);

If there were GraphQL for Spotify's API and you wanted an artist's discography, you don't have to make multiple calls to endpoints and work through huge objects where 90-95% of the data is not needed.

For the front-end, it's a no-brainer. I've read that it is a bit more involved on the server-side but Apollo seems to be making great tooling for it.

I am glad you have heard it now! I am typing this on a T420s because I refuse to use anything but the old seven row keyboard and hope I can move to the Retro in October :)

"Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. […] I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them"

from 1995 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

today google shows it right away: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=date%20of%20the%... (powered by the now slightly more semantic wikipedia I think)

The 10 minute wait is only ok if the result is really really good. If I use google I do maybe 15 searches to crack a mildly hard nut, if each search would take more than 10 seconds I'd be too annoyed.

I would pay, but again it would depend on the quality and I would probably use it just once a week. If I could do it myself with google in 20min, I would not pay more than 2 bucks. If you can do the china-shop thing, I might pay 15 or even 40 if I knew it was good.

When I search for myself I get a feeling for whether there is more information out there or not. I'd have to trust the service to be good enough not to miss much.

The vast majority - in my opinion - overwhelmingly tend toward being either aggressively anti-change, or they're at best very cautious about it. That has been demonstrated non-stop throughout history with practically every step forward in technology for example. It may even be a beneficial evolutionary attribute for the survival of humanity. I don't belong to the dislikes change group, my personality type is to push. That's the honest answer.

Am I biased because of my own world-view or personality type? No doubt to one extent or another. I'm not advocating for chaos or anarchy though; rather, I'm advocating for constantly testing assumed or entrenched notions/boundaries, as a means to find out if there is new progress to be found there. My opinion is that there's almost always progress to be found in challenging such, with some areas blatantly worth focusing on more than others (due to favorable upside vs downside risk ratio). If you ask permission first every time you attempt to find progress at the edge of what a society presently finds comfortable, you're not likely to get very far.

Proceed to witness extreme bandwidth usage every query.

http://www.yacy.net/en/

and blockchain proponents want an infallible system audit-able by the public, instead of having to trust anyone. they haven't figured it out completely, they push towards it.

in any case blockchain networks can function without computers. very cumbersome though.

And that's even without the continual joy of demoing to people who've never tried proper VR. It's genuinely rewarding every time you pop a headset on someone new.

While both of those APIs offer nearly full programmability, they do so with an API structure that retains a ton of legacy cruft from the days of fixed-function pipelines. Neither are low-level graphics APIs; many assumptions are made. This makes doing general purpose compute tasks on WebGL extremely hacky at best.

Think of WebGPU as Vulkan or Metal for the web. Lower level with much more work, but ultimately cleaner with superior performance and capability.

VR will be cool later, when Oculus and others get more perf and fix more current problems.