Ask HN: What have been the biggest technical achievements of the 2010s? - alltakendamned
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magneticnorth
The use of CRISPR-Cas9 for gene editing has the potential to be one of the
most important technical advancements we've discovered this decade. One of the
first major papers on it, from 2012:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22745249](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22745249)

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Engineering-MD
I would second this. CRISPR is a potentially hugely influential tool which has
massively changed research already, allowing production of novel strains much
more cheaply. Not to mention the possibility for in Vivo genetic editing. I
would say is the biggest technical advancement in genetics ever.

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mrlala
These are both web related.. but I think javascript frameworks like
angular2+/react.. they have basically made it possible to make enterprise
level applications on the web without the spaghetti code garbage that is
javascript or hacking it together with jquery. After that will be
webassembly/blazor type projects, but it's not mature enough quite yet to
say.. it might change the way everything works in the next decade.

Biased of course because this is what I know, but it's really opened up web
application design to people who were NOT web coders. I was a C# person for
many many years and trying to do anything web related before proper frameworks
was an absolute nightmare.

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ArtWomb
Cloud point of presence distribution. Most humans on the internet are now
within 120ms. Speed is the most important adaption metric ;)

[https://www.cloudflare.com/network/](https://www.cloudflare.com/network/)

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ogou
A U.S. president elected by leveraging a single Twitter account, supported by
semi-anonymous organic and sponsored posts on other social networks. Despite
the ethical or political implications, the actual phenomenon will be seen
historically as a milestone in technology's impact on society.

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wyclif
This isn't a technological breakthrough, though— Twitter is a jacked up,
turbocharged shortcode SMS for the web. Also, I don't think it's true that
Trump was elected solely by leveraging Twitter (though there's no doubt he has
leveraged it more effectively than any other president). There are a number of
factors that played into Trump's election.

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whb07
Bitcoin [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

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muzani
Hard to say whether bitcoin and blockchain are going to be world changing, but
as a difficult technical achievement it's certainly a competitor.

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adventured
Tesla's success at demonstrating the large, present day commercial potential
of electric cars, causing every major auto maker on the planet to shift
directions and chase after them.

SpaceX wrecking the old launch club and proving booster landing as a practical
and economically successful approach. Helping to ignite a new space race in
the process.

Mobile fully coming into its own thanks to the iPhone and later the follow-on
clones. While the iPhone wasn't created this decade, the extreme share of its
impact was in this decade (the app store is about 11 1/2 years old). It's a
truly massive system overall, worth trillions of dollars; it has reshaped the
majority of all communication and financial interaction globally in the span
of one decade (comparatively few people globally had smartphones by Jan 1st
2010). Also, mobile sparking the gig economy (for better or worse, we'll see
over time), the sharing economy (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc), the delivery
services boom. Faster mobile and the improvements of the smartphone also hyper
charged social media. The monetary investment needed and the number of people
required to build all of that is rather epic.

The spread of inexpensive, commercial drone technology.

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pequalsnp
The advent of GANs by Ian Goodfellow and the experimentation done regarding
adversarial attacks was extremely important for the ML research space.

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yummypaint
Alot of the tech developed for astronomy was applied to microscopy. There have
been some pretty insane leaps forward that will probably lead to new insights
in biology.

[https://www.hhmi.org/news/new-microscope-captures-
detailed-3...](https://www.hhmi.org/news/new-microscope-captures-
detailed-3-d-movies-cells-deep-within-living-systems)

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turingbook
The penetration of deep learning and other machine learning technologies.

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dyingkneepad
We were able to build lots of physics telescopes and other 'devices' necessary
for experiments, which were able to confirm/deny theories and move physics
forward. E.g., gravitational waves with LIGO in 2016.

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zubairq
Containers

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kapv89
maps

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8draco8
Absolutely this! I would add to this: street view, traffic prediction, search
on maps and smartphone that can handle all of that. In last decade I've moved
a lot and applications like Google Maps and Apple Maps saved me countless
times. This is not sexy tech but actual, useful tech that improved lives of
millions of people.

