Ask HN: What are your predictions in technology for 2016? - Numberwang
======
ChuckMcM
1) Gigafactory comes on line and the price of batteries hits a new low.

2) The first re-use of a rocket booster to launch a payload into orbit.

3) A commercially exploitable use for Graphene is found.

4) Some genetic condition is completely cured in mice using CRISPr techniques.

5) VR/AR actually ships in underwhelming quantities.

6) Power companies sue to block people from installing whole house batteries.

7) Biometric firearms see widespread adoption.

8) Drone "mortar" shells (single use drone carrying a shrapnel grenade) see
use in the battle fields of the middle east.

9) Google has its first wide spread layoff not associated with an acquisition.

10) Nintendo ships a fun to use game console.

~~~
personlurking
I was wondering why 8 isn't more wide-spread. We tend to see all these fun
applications in tech news but the unfortunately obvious route for UAVs is for
war/terror purposes (beyond the predator drones). On a smaller scale, these
will be used as a replacement for suicide bombers and even targeted kills.

~~~
velox_io
2016 Anti-drone defenses will boom.

I am surprised too that NATO troops don't use smaller drones to check for
snipers and ambushes.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I see tiny surveillance drones on every helmet, with HUD controls. Look into
every room before entering; see what's coming up around every bend. And land
back on the helmet to recharge! Like the SAW, need one on every team.

------
lewiscollard
The ad blocking war is going to go hot.

1) Ad blocker usage doubles on the desktop in Western Europe and the US by the
end of the year.

2) Websites locking out users of ad blockers becomes routine, rather than
exceptional.

3) There will be at least one successful legislative attempt to outlaw ad
blocking, in Europe.

4) Long shot: Apple ships a minor (+0.1) update to iOS with ad blocking
enabled by default. (Blackberry might do the same, but it would not be as
consequential as Apple doing it.)

Bookmark so you can all laugh at how wrong I was!

~~~
buro9
As an addendum to this, things caught in the cross-fire will be hurt.

1) Analytics will move back to the server, either with proxies providing log
processing or new tools to provide log processing.

2) Google Analytics will react to this by providing/supporting plug-ins for
most major CMS and web app software for server-side reporting

~~~
diminish
Google will buy a hot server side analytics software providing ease of
installation on most of the web servers.

~~~
SSLy
New Relic?

------
yongelee
1) Super bleeding edge technologies like Virtual reality / augmented reality
doesn't take off or become popular, still viewed as 'super high tech'

2) The majority of the population still does not know / appreciate what it
takes to make a website

3) Computer science grads are pissed because they can't find jobs despite
constantly reading news about how there is a shortage of programmer jobs

4) Native iOS / Android is still dominant, Javascript hybrid apps are only
used by technically advanced companies

5) JavaScript loses popularity, MEAN stack loses popularity but alternatives
aren't appearing, just more criticism of the javascript frameworks

~~~
anonx
> 5) JavaScript loses popularity, MEAN stack loses popularity but alternatives
> aren't appearing, just more criticism of the javascript frameworks

I think, there will be alternatives. WebAssembly will let developers write
client-side frameworks in C/C++, C#, Go, etc. Very likely, JS will start
losing its popularity as the selling point "works both on client and server"
will work for any language. However, I don't believe we can say goodbye to JS.
At least, not in 2016.

------
anaip1
My 2016 JavaScript predictions:

1) React.js starts to lose popularity due to it's ultra complex tooling
ecosystem. People want to feel like what they learn will be still be useful at
their next job. The React ecosystem doesn't provide that; the React ecosystem
tends to burn people out.

2) Smaller frameworks like Vue or Riot takes the spotlight.

3) Angular 2 is a hit thanks to its "batteries included" design, which will
appeal to React burnouts.

4) A new JavaScript rendering-based framework will come out and become a hit.
Something like Turbolinks or Glimmer, except it doesn't break jQuery or
sandboxes you to an ecosystem.

~~~
enraged_camel
3.1) Angular team announces Angular 3, which is a complete re-design and not
backwards-compatible with Angular 2.

------
nl
1) Deep Learning-based techniques outperform hand engineered natural language
processing stacks in every measurable way.

2) There will be considerable progress made on the Winograd Schema challenge.

3) The (unconstrained) Turing test won't be "officially" passed until October
2017 though (it will actually be passed in July or August, but the news won't
leak until October)[1].

4) Some people will continue to insist that Deep Learning is nothing different
to what was being done in the 1990s. At some point someone will get frustrated
enough with this to blog everything that is different now.

[1] Specific enough prediction?

~~~
sushirain
What do you mean by hand engineered? Is a part-of-speech tagger trained on a
manually annotated corpus hand engineered? If not, then which "stacks" are
hand-engineered and still popular today?

~~~
nl
Yes this is true. Perhaps I should better express it as a hand engineered
feature pipeline, ie the way people these days will POS tag, then lemmatize,
then do something with WordNet, then maybe some Semantic Frame thing and
finally have an application they can benchmark. Writing that pipeline is
manual, and it has hand engineered features in it too, though some may be
trained.

------
chipsy
1\. Battery powered automotive devices, both small(hoverboards, drones) and
large(cars), continue picking up steam; articles circulate about the potential
danger and disruption of the new devices

2\. Multiple new operating system projects announced, targeted for unikernel
VM deployment

3\. Emerging AI techniques commercialized for creative applications, e.g. a
new wave of selfie apps, professional art or music tools

4\. Distributed apps using blockchain protocols start making small ripples

5\. Software and devices that successfully bridge the mobile/desktop gap are
demonstrated

6\. VR/AR devices ship, but demand remains modest and mostly in professional
niches

I would have said something about the economy and finance too, but this is a
tech predictions thread. So I'll go for a tech-economic one:

7\. Trends turn against one or more of the current leading social networks, as
a bold newcomer finds an opening

8\. Bubble mania in the Valley peaks and shifts towards panic as key macro
indicators start sagging

~~~
soared
Regarding #8, has a situation ever occurred where a large majority of people
assumed there was a bubble, reacted accordingly, and created negative
outcomes, despite there not being a bubble?

And I hope (7) Twitter's death will be quick, and not painfully slow.

------
fanquake
1) Autonomous farm machinery (more than just auto steer) becomes more
commonplace.

1a) Release of the first non major brand (JD, Case etc) autonomous machine.

2) Drone see uptake in precision spraying applications. Although this will be
on small farms. Broad acre will still be too hard for a while yet.

3) NDVI becomes one of the most commonly used inputs pre seeding and for
nutrient applications.

~~~
random778
Can you please point me to communities / sources around these topics? Super
interesting!

------
molecule
_> Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2015?_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723)

------
gautamb0
1) 2-4 Unicorns die

2) VR successful on a small scale, no successful AR products

3) 2016 is the year of drones

4) Marijuana startups heavily funded

5) More JS frameworks come in and out of vogue

5) Neither native apps nor web are going anywhere

6) YC's average founder age increases to slightly over 30

7) Apple releases a tablet/laptop hybrid which flops

8) Property values decline in the Valley yet relentlessly surge in SF

------
mitchtbaum
1\. Linux Founder Linus Torvalds: “2016 Will Be The Year of ARM Laptops"

[http://fossbytes.com/linux-founder-linus-
torvals-2016-will-b...](http://fossbytes.com/linux-founder-linus-
torvals-2016-will-be-the-year-of-arm-laptops/)

Soon thereafter, fully free software ARM handhelds could take foot if common
tooling accelerates both innovation and stability. So..

2\. Base-level (free) software [and possibly hardware] (frameworks, languages,
and developer tools) will coalesce and clear winners will emerge, while side-
level interests will continue within ongoing and offshoot communities whose
work then funnels back for mainline user adoption.

Bonus (re: emergent winners). Communities will pick targets and sets their
aims based on principle more so than popularity.

------
logn
Firefox decides to incorporate Tor Browser in private browsing mode.

Digital Ocean gets acquired.

Google Fiber buys Cincinnati Bell.

IoT still hasn't gained much traction.

Bitcoin suffers 51% attack.

Archaeological evidence of human life found on Mars/Moon from some time > 12K
years ago.

4G meshnets become popular in developing countries.

~~~
partisan
Most of these make plenty of sense, but where does this come from?

>> Archaeological evidence of human life found on Mars/Moon from some time >
12K years ago.

~~~
logn
Ha, definitely a long shot. I was watching a Joe Rogan podcast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8).
In summary, there's evidence for a cataclysmic asteroid strike 12K years ago
that nearly wiped out humanity. If true that upends traditional archaeological
theories and suggests that humanity rebooted 12K years ago instead of a
gradual move from hunter-gatherer to society. What the world was like before
the reboot is unknown, but maybe we were advanced enough for space travel?

~~~
partisan
Yeah, I've heard quite a few interviews with Graham Hancock. I don't know if I
can make the leap from a lost history to a lost space-faring history. I also
can't make the further leap to "we will discover that space-faring history in
the next year".

I guess if it happens then we heard it from you first!

------
buro9
Just two big predictions from me:

1) FinTech will start to shine through, the first consumer banks built using
modern tech will open to customers in Europe (London FinTech scene is strong,
Zurich has ex-Googlers and strong finance, or Frankfurt but they are currently
trailing - my bet is on London). These banks will experience very strong
growth, the question really is: Will they go with it or go for acquisition

2) The "Family Plan" will emerge as a new sales market in most of the
established consumer products, with Dropbox, Google, and others all building
strong offerings for managing the product use and sharing of a group of users.
This is ground-work for centralising both "family" and "home", and lays the
foundation for the command and control of IoT over the next few years - it is
how the big established players stay in the game.

Neither of those predictions is quite there, the leading new bank is Mondo
[https://getmondo.co.uk/](https://getmondo.co.uk/) but it's in beta, is
currently iPhone only which limits adoption in the UK, and the benefits of the
new tech hasn't yet been fully realised.

And I'm not yet seeing the "family plan" head this way but I'd be surprised if
the penny doesn't drop somewhere and this be the path taken. Control of the
home is control of the family, and vice versa... the family want tools for
this better than the ones they have today.

An entirely different thing I'd like to see exist but do not know of anyone
working on at all:

3) A dating app that acknowledges the hook-up culture that seems to be growing
in the millenial generation of users, and instead of hiding that under the
carpet uses it's data to encourage responsible tracking of STDs and other
risks.

That one is inspired by news this morning on Gonorrhoea becoming immune to
antibiotics
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35153794](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35153794)
. The app should function similar to whatever the core function of Tinder is,
but allow tracking of whom you've done what with for the sole purpose of
allowing notifications of STDs to be quickly disseminated to people who may be
exposed.

It may be infeasible, I don't know what the willingness of those who do hook-
ups is to track risk-related activity and test results is. The core idea is
"disease tracking in social networking and dating apps".

~~~
bastijn
On the banking thing. In NL we have Bunq which is a virtual bank with banking
license. It combines social with banking. The idea is nice but I'm not sure if
the world is ready yet. [https://www.bunq.com/en/](https://www.bunq.com/en/)

~~~
buro9
Nice.

I like that they have one of the things I anticipate will emerge "Instantly
switch your debit card between accounts".

I hope to see features that allow the management of accounts by splitting an
account into virtual buckets, allowing transactions from frequent providers to
be tagged/labelled in some way.

Or even to map retailers/companies such that "transactions from them are bills
and are always associated with this account", even though you only carry the
one debit card it will act intelligently as simply a payment card and you
would have control over where the money actually comes from.

------
r3bl
1\. Windows 10 usage ratio explodes. Linux distributions might see a small
increase on the desktop market (up to something like 2%).

2\. Major browsers will start experimenting with warning the users that they
are visiting a site that does not support HTTPS (although I think that they
won't be adding that to stable versions until 2017).

3\. Google+ is going away for good.

4\. European Union makes the progress in uniting as a single market to fight
against geo-blocking.

5\. Self-driving cars are still not ready to be commercially available.

------
patrick_99
Random predictions from the top of my head: 1\. Funding for start ups is lower
than 2015 2\. Genomics and anything related to autonomous vehices (including
drones) will be the hottest sectors 3\. Google's revenue from non ad based
products will double

------
personlurking
One of my predictions (rather, hopes) is the same as every year: that we find
more ways, socially, to get us offline through the use of technology.

\- A Tinder not for hookups (perhaps even for friends - see below)

\- A small-scale Meetup.com for exchanging knowledge

\- Time banks take off

~~~
arrmn
Could you tell me more about the meetup for knowledge exchange, what exactly
do you imagine? Sounds interesting.

~~~
personlurking
Sorry, I hadn't seen your comment til now. Well, it'd work just like
Meetup.com, except it'd probably be an app, or at least have a mobile
component. Everyone would have a profile with their interests and when two
people in the same geographic area with the same interest(s) sign up, the
system would alert them both so they could set up a one-on-one meetup. There'd
also be an optional GPS function where if you're free (w/ nothing to do) and
wouldn't mind having a good conversation with someone regarding your
interests, the app could ping you when two similar users are near each other.

------
yulaow
1\. Windows Phone/Mobile will probably die. Its market share will fall under
1% and so Microsoft will make only one model (Surface Phone?) just for those
who want to have the "continuum" experience, but they will not invest a lot on
it.

2\. Windows 10 Store will remain totally unused. Microsoft won't say it is a
fail but well, everyone will still prefer to use old x86 applications

3\. Self-driving Cars not ready

4\. Still a very low number of electric cars sold, but their price will drop
making them probably a good investment in 2017/2018\. In europe the situation
will remain the same as today (almost no one use them)

5\. Some move by apple in the low-price smartphone market. This time really
low-price, they won't go for a 5C like before but for something else more
simple

6\. Touch screen laptop still ignored by most

7\. Arm laptops hit the consumer market with linux or android on them

8\. VirtualReality devices are a flop because of their costs (both for the
devices and for the pc you need to use them). Almost no AAA game will support
them

9\. Vulkan will be a great revolution in gaming

10\. All companies going back to native development on mobile instead of
hybrid solutions.

11\. React will slowly fall losing against Angular2

------
beeboop
1) Hillary will become (or even more so than now) the dominate contender
between both parties for next presidential election

2) Trump will die in popularity after taking a controversial stance too far

3) We will see scare pieces on local news stations about Oculus technology
being for perverts and losers and it is destroying the fabric of society

4) Expansion of TSA pre-check program, including more options that cost more
money and require some new hardware, like retina scanning, at the cost of
billions of dollars in new machines

5) New NSA privileges are granted by congress by silently slipping into some
entirely unrelated bill

6) Obama will make some sort of grand, popular gesture (ala taking credit for
Bin Laden kill) in an attempt to make Democrats as a whole look better to
improve Hillary's chances (edit: actually, this is more likely in 2017)

7) Standard of living will continue to decline for Americans as compared to
other first world countries

8) Police corruption/tyranny will continue to be a hot button issue and we
will continue to see a push for body cams throughout the country (thank god)

9) Some scandal will be unveiled or manufactured around Elon Musk

~~~
RaitoBezarius
I am intrigued in this one:

    
    
      9) Some scandal will be unveiled or manufactured around Elon Musk
    

Could you elaborate?

~~~
beeboop
He's too much of a golden child who's pissing off large, politically connected
American companies (either in the automotive, energy, aerospace, or defense
industries). There is a lot of potential damage that can be done to his
personal brand and the brand of his companies (and therefore money to be made)
by a smear campaign. It just seems like a ripe opportunity against someone who
has reason to have many enemies.

------
isolate
1\. Incremental improvements all around.

2\. Digital rights weakened all around.

3\. Analog media makes a comeback (books, art, film, letters, photos, vinyl,
etc.)

4\. Phones become uncool.

5\. Donald Trump wins the election. (Democracy is a technology, or at least it
is in Civilization.)

------
sandij
<script type="application/swift">

~~~
mitchtbaum
<script type="application/lua">

~~~
alextgordon
Please not, Lua would be easy to implement but if we can only pick _one_
language then it's too similar to JS. We need more diversity, static
types+AOT+noGC would be a good start.

Also if we do get Swift it will be for the same reason we got <canvas>. Apple
wanted to make dashboard, so they put an extension in webkit, people started
using it on the open web and...

------
chvid
One year is not really that long - but here is what I am seeing in the
foreseeable future:

1\. Development for proprietary mobile platforms (such as iOS/ObjectiveC/Swift
and Android/Java) will drop in popularity.

2\. Continuing increase in client-side JavaScript/HTML5 popularity. The
dominant platform will be ES6/React not TypeScript/Angular2.

3\. The "App Store" will start to loose its relevancy.

4\. Mobile (vs. web) usage continues to grow.

And for business:

5\. Social networks coming out of Asia (China, Japan, Korea, SEA - such as
WeChat or Line) becoming globally popular.

6\. Crash/collapse/accounting fraud scandal in a major internet company. (No
idea for specifics but look at the ride subsidies of uber for an example of
something that can go wrong).

7\. Xiaomi starts selling in USA and Europe with considerable success.

~~~
anonx
> 2\. Continuing increase in client-side JavaScript/HTML5 popularity. The
> dominant platform will be ES6/React not TypeScript/Angular2.

My prediction is a better alternative to JS for client-side development.
WebAssembly, I'm pointing at you. And as a result, a lot of new client-side
frameworks.

------
mindcrime
I hate these kinds of questions, because I have such a hard time divorcing the
things I _think_ will happen, from the things I _want_ to happen. That and I
am probably too enamored with the belief that "making predictions is hard,
especially about the future".

There's another saying as well, which I think _might_ be a billg thing (but
don't quote me on that) which goes something like this (paraphrased a bit
probably) "People tend to overestimate the magnitude of technological change
in the short-term (2-3 years out) and under-estimate the magnitude of
technological change in the long-term (say, 10+ years)".

I find that's largely true. Next year, most things will be mostly like they
were this year, just incrementally different. 2017 will be mostly like 2016,
and so on. But somehow these amazing things tend to sneak in there just the
same...

I guess I still didn't actually make any predictions, did I? OK, find, you
twisted my arm. I'll take a stab at some:

1\. Wikidata will continue to grow in maturity and scope and will be a
terrifically import piece of the Semantic Web as it continues to grow.

2\. People will continue to insist that the Semantic Web is dead, and you'll
see a continuation of something like an analog to the old saying "once it
works, people stop calling it AI". Nobody will ever say that the Semantic Web
has arrived, but we'll be using Linked Data and related technologies (although
perhaps not the RDF/SPARQL stack)

3\. I'll predict that at least one new (or new'ish) probabilistic programming
language will gain some major traction in 2016.

4\. Hadoop / Spark / etc. will continue to grow in the enterprise and start to
move beyond POC's and demos.

4.5 - but most businesses are still just spitting in the wind, stumbling in
the dark, etc. when it comes to _actually_ becoming more scientific / data-
driven. But you'll see more "stuff" (tools, technology, methodologies) etc.
promoting the use of scientific thinking, analysis, etc. in business decision
making.

5\. Zeppelin will grow in popularity as people write additional integrations /
interpreters for it.

6\. MOOCs will continue to eat the foundation out from underneath traditional
education. It's arguably already the case for programmers and people like us
that a traditional university degree isn't all that important for many jobs;
and more employers will start really looking at certificates from things like
Coursera classes and hiring people without those traditional degrees.

~~~
viraptor
The best part is that you can read others' predictions and they're not
necessarily what you want to happen. In that case you can be surprised and
actually think about the "can it happen" part.

------
bitcuration
1\. iPhone7 will finish the android dominance finally. Apple Pay become
prevalent. 2\. Google will re-license android so only Google can make android
phone. Chinese and Samsung will either stuck with the last android OS or
pushing into a fork. 3\. Driver assistance AI will become standard in 2017
model car, we will see car industry the most active AI research and
acquisition market. 4\. AMD and nVidia competition heat up and will drive deep
learning into deeper and ever increasing number layers, and hit a breaking
point when the next Google emerges to replace search and Wikipedia, at finger
tip. 5\. Microsoft Hololens will be a hit, it actually revives Microsoft from
doom. But we will find Amazon enter into VR market. 6\. Amazon drone delivery
will start in a limit number of area, suburban mostly. 7\. Elon Musk will
bankrupt as the oil price continue in downward trend, and solar panel adoption
slowdown as punished by power company. 8\. We will see the first
Bitcoin/blockchain based crowdfunding, may even be equity based. Meanwhile
Bitcoin price will double as bankers busy push their own blockchain based
banking infrastructure, while ignorant to Apple Pay is eating them alive. 9\.
Facebook enter China market, and increases its size of user by another
quarter, while Facebook breakthrough in online translation for the first time
makes choice language irrelevant. 10\. Trump wins presidential election, WWIII
becomes the predominant theme of the computer games released in the years
followed.

------
bjourne
1\. E-bikes will take off. Before the end of the year I suspect almost
everyone will have one because Chinese manufacturers will flood the market. A
bike with a 500-750w engine is an amazing way to ride to work. You save money,
are environmentally friendly and get exercise. Even an untrained fatty can
easily handle a 15 km commute on one. Awesome.

2\. Mozilla and MS will abandon their own html rendering engines and start
using WebKit.

3\. The eye-balls as revenue model will fail. Ad-supported magazines, video
sites and many more will become subscription-based instead.

3.5. As a sad consequence, Google will lay of A LOT of personnel. Facebook too
I guess.

4\. HiDpi 3200x1800 screens will become the norm. Tablets will make
specialized devices like Kindle obsolete.

5\. Bitcoin will not take of. Visa, Mastercard or a European bank organization
will launch a crypto-currency that might take off. Critics will complain that
it won't guarantee any anonymity.

6\. Multi-threading and multi-processing won't go anywhere because it is to
hard. A new language might be created by any of the big companies promising to
make parallel processing easy, but it won't, and the language won't be
adopted.

7\. I predict a lot of health and self-improvement tech being marketed. Like
do it yourself genome sequencing, apps to monitor your stats and help you live
more healthy.

8\. GPU:s will be equipped with chips to support raytracing and raytracing-
based games will be released and they will look completely mind-blowing.

~~~
twic
Why WebKit?

------
sandij
A company stands up that people will refer to as ‘the Apple of smart
textiles’.

------
choult
1\. Privacy becomes more important to social networks

2\. Social networks withdraw more APIs to protect not only privacy but their
own business interests

3\. Privacy becomes more annoying to lawmakers

4\. Lawmakers in the US vote in more surveillance powers to force social
networks to comply with their information demands

5\. Lawmakers in the EU create new laws to constrain their citizens' data to
EU countries

6\. Distributed social networks pick up traction in both the EU and US in
response to #3 and #4. One will be promoted by a major player, probably Google
as a play against Facebook.

~~~
akshatpradhan
Organizations start taking Security Compliance seriously (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO
27001, SOC 2, FEDRAMP, NIST 800-53)

------
askafriend
Marijuana Unicorns

~~~
nickthemagicman
Yessss. Warren Buffet is already all over this.

------
tmaly
1\. Troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan increase, but more use of drones in
army this year and going forward.

2\. First use of railgun in Navy in active campaign

3\. More car companies go the battery powered route with newer models

4\. It becomes even easier to make an app on the phone, but the landscape
continues to fracture on the phone OS front

5\. someone comes up with something interesting using a small computer like
raspberry pi zero and 3d printing

6\. Encryption for general population gets better with some really great app.

------
diminish
1\. Several unicorn IPOs

2\. Google becomes highest valued tech conpany before Apple

------
CryoLogic
Social Networking Sites and Apps are in a lot of trouble when we realize that
once again they aren't producing profit (Snapchat, Twitter, Etc.).

------
armini
I hope more things are voice enabled, here's a small demo I've been working on
using Arduino and VeeaR
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFRUFZU4FHE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFRUFZU4FHE)

The tools make it really easy to put together cool projects for 2016.

------
middleclick
Anonymity and privacy apps are going to see an increase in users.

~~~
Smaug123
Not a particularly surprising prediction, given that the world's population is
increasing ;)

------
elwell
Will mixmax finally deliver?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025709)

------
vmorgulis
Aerial corridors and traffic systems for drones ...

------
billions
Facebook acquires Snapchat by force after IPO

------
int0x80
To add to what already has been said: Vulkan.

------
karlcoelho1
D R O N E S

------
kutch
Robots must be anywhere

