
Ask HN: What's the next big thing? - dkural
Today&#x27;s (yesterdays?) &quot;hot&quot; things: bitcoin&#x2F;blockchain&#x2F;decentralized, AI&#x2F;DeepNets, VR&#x2F;AR, genomics&#x2F;liquid-biopsy, wearables, human-machine neural lace,  cloud&#x2F;GPU&#x2F;TPU, 3D&#x2F;additive manufacturing<p>What&#x27;s the next big thing that no one or very few people are thinking about?  What feels like a toy today, people get a chuckle out of?  What&#x27;s a contrarian play today that looks like genius tomorrow?<p>It can also be a &quot;comeback&quot; with a twist.  Very few people thought yet another messaging tool would prosper (Slack), etc.  It could also be obvious.
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Red_Tarsius
Efficient C02 removal is top priority.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal)
Our hope hangs on technology we've not invented yet.

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muzani
If you look at Paul Graham's predictions from 2012, Slack and Stack Overflow
are in there:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

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dkural
I see Slack can be in the "better email" category. Where's stack overflow?
Better search engine for hackers? This is a great article, thanks for pointing
it out!

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muzani
Yeah, I don't think PG had "optimized Q&A" in mind but it fulfills the
condition of being something hackers can use effectively to search
documentation.

There's some other good concepts in there. But the gist of what he's saying is
interesting. It's not about things that look great, but rather things that are
repulsive to us because they question how we view the world.

By that line of thought, Bitcoin would definitely qualify.

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R0otChiXor
new layer of internet

By shielding users from exposing their metadata, I believe that we can help
whistleblowers feel more comfortable with speaking out and can help them to
sleep soundly once they do. We can help journalists do important investigative
work without putting their well being and the well being of their loved ones
at stake. A student can gain access to the near total sum of human knowledge
without teaching advertisers how to trick them into buying more stuff they
don’t need. With the new layer of the internet, we can create a new world
where free communication and free exchange are both safe and easy.

You are being tracked. And honestly, at this point, you’re probably getting
sick of being reminded. In the last decade or so both developers and the
public at large have begun to wake up to the sheer degree of surveillance we
are all exposed to every day of our lives. And we’re starting to push back
against this brave new world that we’ve stumbled into.

It’s finally becoming chic to encrypt your communications. You see this with
end to end encryption coming baked into many new messaging apps, for example.
Encryption is even supported as an opt-in feature in Facebook messenger now.
This is a great step forward. Unfortunately it isn’t quite enough.

When you encrypt your communications you make the data very difficult for
malicious actors to access, but you’ll usually still create large amounts of
metadata, and often, the metadata is what an attacker cares the most about.
The National Security Agency’s PRISM project, for example, focused
specifically on cataloging and analyzing the metadata created by our
communications. Sometimes how you say something is more important than what
you say.

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pizza
new and deeper forms of loneliness

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observation
Haven't heard much on neural lace.

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billconan
quantum computer and robotics

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dkural
I agree - I should've added to my "today's hot things" list though :)

