
Ask HN: What do you think the biggest trends will be in 2015-2018? - thinkingkong
Hey HN,<p>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.
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wanda
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
_" Reproduction as a life goal"_

Rate dropping in developed countries though? Did you mean consumerism?

~~~
cylinder
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
I haven't seen this trend, really. Most of my friends want to wait a fair
while before having kids.

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Jihoon
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
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
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?

~~~
droidist2
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."

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tptacek
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.

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Joona
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
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.

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digitalzombie
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
>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?

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lordnacho
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.

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bbcbasic
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
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.

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cyberjunkie
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

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cannilis
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.

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

~~~
Jayd2014
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.

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nanoGeek
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

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iisbum
VR in particular gaming

Podcasting will get even bigger

Wearables

eSports

