HN Poll: Fads – Hype and Hope | Hacker News Reader

HN Poll: Fads – Hype and Hope

4 pointstabtab10 comments

Vote for the top 3 most-hyped fads, and then the top 3 most likely to succeed. Example: Hype: A,B,C; Hope: D,E,F. Write-ins okay. Left-most letter considered ranked the highest.

  A. AI
  B. Microservices
  C. IOT
  D. Blockchain/Bitcoin
  E. Quantum computing
  F. Cloud
  G. Serverless/Edge-Computing
  H. Detox/De-Troll/Fake-News-Cleaning
  I. Node.js/JavaScript-everywhere
  J. Dark-Data/Multi-tech Data Mining

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Hope:

D. Blockchain - I'd say the blockchain is overhyped by the mainstream but severely underappreciated by Silicon Valley types. It works, it's fundamentally novel. Money is a big deal and this changes money as we know it. A huge challenge to governments and legal systems. It has this 90s Internet feel to it.

H. Detox - Having a safe world where you can trust people is a catalyst for all kinds of progress.

J. Dark data - It works and is underutilized.

Hype:

A. AI - It's great just don't see us hitting the Kurzweilian hypergrowth.

C. IOT - Mostly has to do with improving the legacy-world. Boring.

B. Microservices - whatever.

Blockchain is just glorified check-sums (on money value and content); I don't see how it allows things that couldn't be done before. Was check-sum tech simply too crappy or hack-able back then? Maybe I'm missing something.

Detox = bouncer/moderator. Again, I don't see what's new technology-wise. It's a business decision to have scrubbers of some kind, and it takes resources to scrub well. I could see it as a "business trend" or customer preference trend maybe, but typically the pendulum swings back and forth on such.

Will you forgive me for putting AI on both lists? Because AI is, I think, significantly over-hyped, and yet also is succeeding and will continue to do so - just not enough to live up to the hype.

As far as AI, I suspect the limits of neural nets will become obvious and there will be an AI slump as investors pull back. R&D will continue, but often there's a lemming effect where if enough pull out at the same time, investors in general get spooked and follow. There is too much R&D money in it right now.

Neural nets will probably need to be combined with rule-bases, simulators, etc. to give AI more "common sense". Powerful pattern-matching alone is not enough, only part of the AI puzzle. There will be a slump until somebody figures out how to combine these well.

Hyper: D, B, G; Hope: E, A, C

Hype: C, H, I. Hope: E, A, G.

Hype: D, I, B; Hope: C, A, E

Hype: D,G,C; Hope: A,B,E

Hype: C,B,D; Hope: A,E,G

Microservices burned our org. Make sure you have a clear need before diving in. Microservice-like technologies have been around for roughly 3 decades. If they were clearly a better general way, they'd have taken off back then. The reasons they failed back then (as a general technique) are pretty much the same reason they failed for us.

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