
Ask HN: What are top promising technologies of tomorrow must get involved today? - bignet
Hello, What are the top promising technologies of tomorrow must learn today? for example, I hear a lot of buzz around &quot;Blockchain&quot;<p>shot
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trjordan
Kubernetes -> Envoy -> Istio.

Yeah, yeah, it's not rockets to mars or whatever, but I think we've spend
DECADES trying to figure out how to abstract away the lower parts of the
stack. The last big leap was AWS, and it forced a choice for a lot of people:
do you want to work at AWS? or do you want to work on applications that run on
AWS? The API is so strong that you can't do both.

There's a similar thing around operating systems, networking tools, and
containers. Heroku was a cool PaaS, but ultimately is a little too inflexible
to work for everybody. Companies keep rebuilding these internal PaaS systems,
and I think Kubernetes has finally nailed it. It's lacking the primitives to
do traffic management and introspection, and Envoy / Istio provide those
primitives.

Many people see these technologies as an endgame to themselves, but the Istio
community has started talking about how they're a platform themselves, and
that feels correct. Like AWS, you can abstract away a TON of this stuff, and
you will divide people into those that keep a cluster running vs. those that
build apps on top of it. The specialization gains will be on the same level as
dynamic infrastructure, imho.

Disclaimer: I work at a company that wants to build on top of this new world,
but I joined them because I believe this, not the other way around.

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brianmcc
Agree, and I think cloud is very much becoming a must-know technology. I
suspect many here on HN will be shocked that anyone -doesn't- yet fully grok
cloud ecosystems, but there are plenty of us in enterprise environments where
physical or at least virtual hosts are still dominant.

3 -4 years go in my sector cloud felt very much like an emerging thing. Now
it's absolutely "here", and I would encourage anyone with an interest in
staying current over the next 5 - 10 years to get into this stuffif you're not
doing so yet!

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alistproducer2
More so than just "blockchain" I'd say getting into distributed computing will
pay dividends in the future. Understanding DC is plenty good for lots of
current tech trends (big data, ML, etc), but also looks forward to the switch
to trustless systems to be used in everyday life.

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darkmighty
Indeed I'm not a fan of "blockchain" as a buzzword at all (especially now that
people are trying to apply it to things that _shouldn 't_ be distributed); but
clearly there are many things that do benefit from distribution.

Things that come to mind are Namecoin, I2P, IPFS, and other tech on the
pipeline that can bring the internet closer to it's original ideal of
distributivity, each person responsible for their content, etc.

Those are also free software ideals: while great strides have been made in
open sourcing user-side software, (mainstream android, Linux on servers, etc),
the internet just hides a massive closed system: before you could at least
inspect how things work through reverse engineering, but querying web servers
is literally a black box model. The problem that not everyone wants to run
their own server or even deal with renting out can largely vanish from certain
applications. We've started with the easiest ones, which were file sharing
(reputation-free), then Bitcoin, with more basic web tasks incoming.

It's important to keep in mind most of those are fit for low-efficiency.
Unless we have a breakthrough with Fully Homomorphic encryption, the bulk of
computing itself will be centralized (or you will have to accept a mix of high
cost or unreliability).

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diggan
I agree with most things in your comment, I'm just curious what things you see
that "shouldn't be distributed"?

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alistproducer2
I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't
benefit from adding censorship resistance. The main reason blockchains need
complicated and, in many cases, wasteful consensus algos is because they were
first designed to promote open membership to the network. This meant that you
had to design a system that allowed strange machines to work together while no
entity trusting any other to not cheat it. Open membership means that the
ledger can not be effectively censored, and by extension, neither could one's
wealth. Outside of that use case (censorship resistance), very few things
benefit from transitioning from central authority to blockchains.

I didn't cover the case of smart contracts, but it's essentially the same
thing.

~~~
diggan
> I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't
> benefit from adding censorship resistance

Ok, and what concrete, real examples does not benefit from that?

~~~
darkmighty
You have some private data. You want to compute a hard function of this data,
and your computer isn't powerful enough.

For example, this could be a rendering problem: you provide the models, a
distributed system computes it (for a cost). This system cannot be private,
efficient and reliable. It can be private and reliable, but hugely
inefficient, or efficient but non-private and non-reliable. With a non-
distributed system (i.e. Google compute, Amazon cloud, etc) you get pretty
much all 3 of them, with a slight caveat that privacy is guaranteed
circumstantially/legally instead of mathematically. But it's extremely safe to
assume you'll be fine.

You want to run and real time multi-user application.

For example, and MMORPG. This one is a fun challenge for sure, but it's a
complete nightmare to develop, and again needs sacrifices. In this case you
probably can't achieve speed, security, and large number of players
simultaneously. Every decision (like "what did this monster drop?") needs to
be done through some large scale consensus to guarantee security, which kills
latency completely. If you're extremely lax with security and consistency,
then you can probably make it work, but accepting users might cheat, possibly
game-breakingly. Or you could achieve it all with a handful of players, and
reasonable efficiency[1], but your scope will inevitably be limited. I believe
Ubisoft's ForHonor[2] uses P2P gameplay, but I'm not sure how safe their
system is. Also I'm sure stats and most persistent data is stored centrally.

[1] See Mental poker:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker)

[2] Some reddit discussion from quick googling:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhon...](https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhonors_p2p_is_preferable_over_dedicated)

Note that the players largely loathe this system.

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a_d
Robotics, but more specifically Tele operated robots. Remotely driven vehicles
and remotely controlled robots.

There is a chance that all factory work becomes like a video game.

Tele-ops robotics would lead to:

\- large-scale redistribution of physical/blue-collar jobs (bigger than
"software" over last 20 years)

\- allow new business models that were never possible in manufacturing (e.g.
robots for "rent" \- subscription model, gamification, flex-work like Uber for
tele-operated robots in manufacturing; low-volume sales)

\- order of magnitude better physical health of workers (lower injuries, more
fun)

\- savings for manufacturers (not just on labor, but lower insurance etc.)

\- a 20 to 30 year hedge against the invention of general AI that seems far
away and what other roboticists are chasing.

There is a potential to release huge latent wealth by creating a new industry
(potentially trillions in value could be released over the next 10 years - no
single company would capture it, but it would create something at least as big
as "software").

Tele-ops is already successful for surgeries and dangerous situations. But it
should be it’s own “field”

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IpV8
DC Microgrids. Massive improvements in storage, solar panels, and DC circuitry
is having a massive effect on the way that people think about power.
Especially utilities, appliance companies, and regulators. Also the push for
electric cars is changing the demand for rapid DC charging.

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nikolasburk
GraphQL, Serverless & The Graphcool Framework

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nikolasburk
The new kinds of building blocks provided by these technologies are straight
out revolutionary for backend development! I think this has a lot to do with
the declarative programming model they are following.

Backend development in the way it was done using Ruby on Rails, Laravel or
Express.js will become less and less appealing since the abstractions offered
by the mentioned technologies are increasing development speed and generally
very cost-efficient.

GraphQL minimizes the data transfer over the network by letting client
applications ask for exactly the data they need, thus also making the life
easier for frontend developers! Having productive engineers also makes product
iteration a lot faster and cheaper, which directly results in business value!

Finally, Serverless enables great deployment workflows and minimizes the
overhead companies need to invest in DevOps.

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IpV8
How do you do backend optimizations with GraphQL? For example can I limit the
number of records someone can ask for from the backend? Can I limit the time
the query runs on my database from the backed? Can I change the order of joins
so that my indexed column is hit first? Or hard set what index is used for
that rare case that the database tries to use the wrong one?

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etrautmann
Brain machine interfaces and neurotechnology. The cycle time is a little
longer than releasing a new tinder app but movement in this space has been
speeding up with Neuralink, Braingate, heavy investments in neuroscience
worldwide with the NIH brain initiative, DARPA's numerous programs, European
brain project, and massive investments from private foundations like the
Simons, Wellcome trust, Allen institute, HHMI, etc.

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pascalxus
Automation and tools that augment human productivity and time saving tools.

For instance, we're helping web developers to automate their regression test
construction. This frees the developer up to develop their code, rather than
spend all their time developing test cases:
[https://swif.club/?s=hn1](https://swif.club/?s=hn1)

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olalonde
The field of deep learning seems to produce breakthrough results every other
day.

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mamon
But I wouldn't call deep learning a "technology". DL is a branch of
mathematics, technology (e.g programming language, ML framework) is secondary,
and most important non-mathematical advancements in the field of DL are those
in hardware, not in software.

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allenz
I consider DL to be a technology. Of course there is DL theory, but most
people doing DL are engineers. To say that most advancements are in hardware
really trivializes the engineering breakthroughs made in computer vision,
language understanding, robotics, etc. DL is enabled by better hardware, but
it still requires a lot of work.

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torbjorn
CRISPR

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bobosha
AI/ML - specifically Deep Bayesian approaches. The Deep neural network might
have run its course, but Bayesian approaches (Probabilistic Graph Models) hold
a lot of promise.

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aoeuasdf1
This comes off as pretty biased. "Run its course?" \- really? Remind me, did
DeepMind use Probabilistic Graphical Models to beat Lee Sedol at Go? Does any
of OpenAI's research use them?

~~~
bobosha
I will leave this here: [http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-
intelligenc...](http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-
intelligence/11135--geoffrey-hinton-says-ai-needs-to-start-over.html)

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kapauldo
Not block chain, Internet of things, self driving cars.

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anonu
Drones.

Design: increased efficiency and distance. Automation and auto pilot.

Applications: find new verticals to apply this technology. Many industries can
be disrupted.

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altern8tif
Don't mean to be a downer, but it feels like we'll get to self-driving cars
before we can automate/autopilot drones.

Having to consider additional degrees of freedom (z-axis, correction for
wind/weather conditions) makes autopiloting drones additional degrees of
magnitude harder.

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0x4f3759df
WebAssembly and decentralization are big ideas. Things are moving very rapidly
there are probably 100 right answers to this question.

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nairboon
Memristors

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mindcrime
Yep. I really want to get my hands on some to start experimenting with, but
the ones that are available are still fairly expensive. :-(

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kk58
Algorithmic mechanism design, agent based neural nets design and lastly
Network science

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robotresearcher
Machine Learning in general. Not just the NN flavour du jour, but the area in
the large.

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deepaksurti
3D (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal et al), GPGPU and AR. Not so sure about VR though.

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cartoonfoxes
Formal methods and provably-correct software.

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jhanschoo
I have a soft spot for formal methods, but how do you see this taking off?

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richardboegli
VR and AR

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argo_
Cryptocurrencies

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richardboegli
AI and ML

