Ask HN: What is the next big thing?
In any domain where you think you have some insight: what do you think is the next big thing?
In terms of technical "next big thing" I think some of the better startups showed up in the smoke of the dot com crash and the 2008 crisis. There are so many areas where we are using Rube Goldberg contraptions, both in tooling and products, that I'm confident we will see progress. There's still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. And maybe they were just needing some of the junk crops to be cleared to have space to grow.
There are so many small and medium sized businesses to whom the internet age has caused just more bureaucracy and admin. It may sound counterintuitive to someone from a high tech first world city, but in the developing world there are many businesses that are caught between old ways of doing things, lack of a tech-skilled workforce and modern expectations of what businesses should function like.
This often results in a huge overhead of business processes caught up in a hellhole of excel files, Asana cards, file servers, accounting software with paradigms out of the nineties and revenue services with expectations from the data age but still being run with a mentality from before the nineties.
All that while you guys (FAANG and the lot) talk about VR and self driving cars.
This is where tech could make a real tangible difference in productivity gains for millions, if not billions. But who is actually interested in that if you can build a rocket that lands by itself… (not meant cynically - just saying)
If you ask Zuckerberg, it's VR.
Musk, it's batteries, then space transit, the Mars.
Bezos, it's media power.
Google/Alphabet, it's sort form of self-driving map-navigating vehicle.
Microsoft, it's whatever the next startup they acquire is working on.
For smartphones, it's wafer-thin clear devices that are basically: ID card, credit card, smartphone in one. 2025?
For old people, it's personal robotic assistance.
For travel, it's "multi country visas" (like Schengen in EU or CTA in IE / UK, but for more and more regions that are not in a combined area), but also: "multi product travel agents", like you just go to the app, pick your next city, and you'll see a couple of price tiers of package, with each automatically taking care of: your hotel booking, your flights, your airport to hotel transport, plus any data sims, and other basics you need. And then it works the same for every city you want to go. Just works.
But that’s how travel agents currently work? I guess they just lack snazzy modern apps.
But a foot long and half a foot wide. The industry and consumer have soured hard on hand held phones, you now need giant hands or two hands. That's me on my old pixel 5 boycotting the upgrade.
VR needs a killer app.
The problem is, Zuck thinks it's going to be essentially VRChat, but that won't be it.
It won't be any sort of virtual office either, as the resolution still isn't good enough. Also, I can't imagine someone that does most of their work using a keyboard would actually want to do their work in VR, especially if doing anything in VR still requires a controller.
There are a lot of really good games, but VR gaming is still very niche, even among people that play a lot of games.
Why not? VRChat is pretty popular, as are other digital hang out technologies like Fortnite and Discord.
I think this space has some legs, especially amongst the youth.
I think lots of autonomous system promises won't hold, you'll have people in the loop with VR headsets controlling an entire swarm of drones and vehicles, when the limited autonomy says: "this is too dangerous/weird for me to decide now".
Space internet, especially on every phone anywhere is huge improvement.
Currently, when you start your favorite GUI based editor, and tell it to open a file, it calls on the OS to present a dialog box, who chooses file(s), those names are then passed back to the editor. The editor then uses the users permission to open the file(s), and allow you to edit your data. Note that there is NOTHING stopping the program from getting confused or malicious and opening any arbitrary file using that user's account.
The exact same workflow happens in a Capabilities based OS, except the names of the parts and constraints (that you don't see) are different. It works exactly the same, as far as the user is concerned.
Instead of calling on the OS to present a dialog, then directly accessing the files, the program calls the OS to present a PowerBox to the user, and it returns capabilities to files or folders, the program has NO access to any other folders or files. No matter how confused or rogue the editor can not corrupt anything outside of the objects specifically chosen by the user.
Also, with the ability to internally compartmentalize programs.
"Why KeyKOS is fascinating" - https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
I remember when Gmail first came out, there was a major revolution in how webapps were written. All of a sudden it was all about AJAX! There have been several of those major ebbs and flows, where the whole industry decides that a particular way to do something is the preferred way, and so everybody does it. Entire cottage industries are then developed to train up some programmers on how to do that thing.
And usually, those transitions happened because some big company rewrites a bunch of their stuff. I'd say the most recent one of those is Facebook creating React and doing all their stuff in it. We're still riding that wave.
But, browsers have more or less completed their transition away from being some kind of "document" viewer and into being a fully-fledged execution environment and rendering system. WASM lets you run stuff fast. There are already libraries for languages like Go and Rust that purport to let you compile your app to desktop, mobile, and WASM. Truly one codebase.
I think a big company will come along and do it, and then everyone will do it. Personally, I can't wait for the transition. I never really liked web technologies, despite having worked with them for about 20 years now.
The opposite is happening, JS/HTML/CSS are becoming the standard for desktop apps rather than something else replacing them on the web.
> But, browsers have more or less completed their transition away from being some kind of "document" viewer and into being a fully-fledged execution environment and rendering system. WASM lets you run stuff fast. There are already libraries for languages like Go and Rust that purport to let you compile your app to desktop, mobile, and WASM. Truly one codebase.
We don't need WASM for this, we already have things like Electron, React Native, and Flutter.
Yes, I am predicting that trend will reverse. I'll need to remember to check this comment in 10 years!
> We don't need WASM for this, we already have things like Electron, React Native, and Flutter.
Electron: slow. Flutter: uses Dart, which lots of people don't want to learn or don't like. React Native: yeah this one is pretty good, unless you are just not a huge fan of JS/HTML/CSS/JSX/etc. Or if you want frontend/backend to be in the same language, but don't want the backend to be in JS.
I am betting that programmers will prefer making applications in other popular languages the more it becomes possible, and that the impetus for the big shift will be a big company going that direction.
Really asking, not following AI so closely these days...
And that's just one tiny example. There are uncountable tasks and entire jobs that require people to do intellectual "grunt work" that could not only be relieved of this drudgery, but also saved from simple human error.
AI will revolutionize every part of our lives.
A hundred years from now people will still be using little rectangular screens in their pockets like we do today.
Their batteries may last a lot longer or maybe they will be as thin as paper but they will still be recognizable to us as smartphones.
The laptop and desktop PC form factors will also persist.
Their basic form hasn't even remotely changed over the past 30 years. There have been improvements – smaller, lighter, more powerful. There have been tweaks – convertible laptops, for example, but those haven't really stuck nor displaced the standard laptop. We are approximately, what, 40 years since the first thing that resembles a modern laptop, and it's fundamentally the same form factor.
Even phones have grown in capabilities much more than they have changed in form factors.
I wish we were closer to the 'next big thing', but I'd put bets on things staying largely the same. VR/AR, either via a headset, glasses, or contacts seem like the safest bet, but in no way a given.
Even if we integrate the internet directly into our heads via wireless brain-computer interface, I don't see that as revolutionary compared to what we have now.
Now that we have computers small enough to be on our person at all times and wireless bandwidth fast enough for text, images, and videos, the idea of a 'cyborg' is a reality.
Connecting the smartphone to my brain via direct link rather than through eyeballs and fingers is a small leap compared to going from 'person with no computer' to 'person with todays smartphone'.
TO be honest I am also skeptical that direct brain-computer interfaces are the future but on a long enough timescale anything is possible.
Anyway, I agree this is far-fetched given the current state of the tech, and I think your skepticism is certainly well grounded, but I think we will make advancements in that direction. To me it feels like the natural evolution is to gradually get rid of personal device reliance... I think in our lifetime we will see the first steps towards this.
Wouldn't energy saving apps just reduce your current quality of computing?
Professionals who are bottlenecked by typing speed have been using stenographs rather than qwerty keyboards since before computers were invented.
Backyard pizza ovens like (like Ooni) are going to explode in popularity really soon. Similar if not more than Traegers.
Homeschooling curriculum/resources. Huge uptick since Covid that might be here to stay.
Kit/manufactured homes. Huge demand for prefab home options that don't suck. We're seeing this with tiny homes and upscale ADUs - someone who brings the costs down will control the space.
Mala - this flavor profile exploded in popularity in Asia. It's currently really hard to find good recreations in the US consistently, but I would almost guarantee the first chain restaurant that offers a decent mala fried chicken sandwich would basically print money for themselves.
On this topic, I can't help but feel like a franchise system based on japanese-dome-house would work well. https://www.i-domehouse.com/
They're essentially made out of styrofoam with a cement stucco, but the moulding option with styrofoam present some very interesting architecture options Things like straight walls to counter height, than a gothic arch for snow/wind load, or a patterned exterior for growing ivy on? Obviously a bunch of modules that connect together.
I also feel like there are some advances in styrofoam (polystyrene foam) materials, like fiber-reinforcement.
Easily mouldable, inexpensive, and a great insulator. That plus some twinwall plastic windows and you've got great insulation and a building that should last a long time. I recognize that there are environmental concerns with building a house out of hydrocarbons, but I figure as long as the building stick around long enough it probably isn't that bad for the environment. Depending on heating/cooling requirements it may even being a better choice than wooden houses environmentally.
Today, models are trained on massive GPUs that live very far away from CPUs (microseconds). This means the models end up having extremely predictable workloads (dense linear algebra). If CPUs were closer to that much compute, you could efficiently execute substantially more dynamic work. Apple and Intel are both getting there with AMX coprocessors (that live only nanoseconds away).
It was the same thing with blockchains a few years ago. Sure they solve some problems, but 90% of the applications people were looking at they provided no real value, it would just be slower and worse.
Also, I love getting newsletters from meetglimpse.com
It'll be up to many factors if this nationalism is peaceful, pragmatic, and without many frills like Mexico's recent push for self-sufficiency in gasoline/agriculture[1][2], France's energy nationalization[3], etc. or radical, discriminatory and even violent, like Trumpism, Brexit, etc.
In terms of policy I expect we'll see more tariffs, fewer new free-trade agreements, some countries might roll back on theirs, and we'll see much more government intervention to help national industry compete. Beyond economic policy this will include immigration policy, but it doesn't necessarily mean forbidding immigration. Countries that do it pragmatically will keep using it as a tool to capture value and protect national interests (getting the right workers, strategically capturing investment from some foreigners but maybe not others, etc). Countries that don't will base policy on prejudice.
I don't expect free trade to end anytime soon, or for things to get as tense and divided as during the Cold War, but do expect "soft" blocs to be better defined. In terms of the tech industry, I wouldn't expect more "great firewalls" like China's, but perhaps more regulation over data collection and physical location, taxes, and even bans (like Huawei's in the USA, TikTok in India) or forced sales (like what almost happened to TikTok in the USA).
[1]: https://mexicobusiness.news/agribusiness/news/mexico-will-ac...
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/12/28/mexico-plans-to...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-announce-deta...
90 years ago they’d tell you ford is doing some cool stuff with the Model T but they wonder what’ll be next… there’s so many startups! The next thing is around the corner.
80 years ago they’d tell you ford is a massive player and is probably working on something new and exciting.
70 years ago they’d thank ford for a job, and tell you how exciting their mustang is.
60 years ago…
50 years ago they’d tell you how depressing Detroit got. Everyone left and the jobs left and it’s just ford still and they didn’t change much about cars!
40 years ago they’d tell you the same and cars are still basically the same but now everyone is buying a Japanese car because gas is so expensive! Ford will come back and show off a fuel efficient one shortly for sure!
30 years ago they’d tell you how depressing Detroit is. There’s so many Asian car brands now!
20 years ago they’d tell you about alternative fuel. Batteries (terrible!), hydrogen (promising!), biogas (maybe?). So many people working on alternative fuels for cars… that are just cars.
10 years ago everyone would tell you Tesla is the future. A car… but make it electric! The fuel efficient American car of the 80s came true.
Now? People tell you Tesla. Maybe every other car company will be electric.
TLDR. There might not be a next big thing for a while, but no one in tech will see it they way no one in Detroit saw the next big thing (it wasn’t cars). Tech is broader than cars, but we “figured out” computers, phones, etc.
Maybe VR and alternative interfaces aren’t established and have room to grow but maybe it’s just a toy. Maybe crypto will change how people do things… but maybe it’s a Ponzi scheme. Batteries may be big in the future, but that’s hardly a bold prediction based on how much we use batteries. Maybe AI generated content will supplement existing media but maybe that’s too uncanny for people and the tech won’t mature fast enough. People seem to be rejecting mass-social media (fb, twitter) in favor of more personal forms (DMs, BeReal) but maybe that’s just a reversion to normal after a temporary phase of society. Voice assistants exploded a few years ago, but now players are starting to back out (Cortana). Was that because every tech company FOMOed that trend that didn’t come?
Every business you see today wants more stability. Does Alexa exist because Amazon thinks the world needs a voice assistant and they can do better or because it gets people to buy more stuff? Every trend from a major company should be inspected for the line they share with their VPs when they fund it to know who wants this product.
The tech world is controlled by just a fraction of the world population. we need to find a way the majority makes money , else the inequality just kills
If there's one thing you can bank on, it's capitalism seeking a) efficiency (defined by its own metric of profit), b) to penetrate new markets, c) to do more of this faster, with as few costs and obligations and possible. It pushes the boundaries of what's acceptable and feasible to make that happen.
I don't think "web3" in its current form fulfills much of this. But it's probably the harbinger of something that does.
Not saying this is a good thing. It should probably be stopped. That will be hard.
1. People treating it like a Ponzi and are just trying to avoid holding the bag.
2. Non-technical people that have no idea that databases have existed for decades.
All it takes is a basic rudimentary analysis of most Web3 "solutions" to determine that they're entirely overengineered and unnecessary. Everything about Web3 is a solution in search of a problem.
In any case, every time I get a recruiter pinging me about some "crypto" job I almost want to respond with "Not interested. But do you have any jobs that are actively working to suppress crypto?"
I don't like working for government, but man I'd almost take pleasure in working for an entity doing forensics to trace illegal transactions through the blockchain.