

Ask HN: What are the new ideas of the last 10 (or 5) years? - nadam

Let's look at the following statements:<p>"Personal computers will be a big hit."
"Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business."<p>These statements were absolutely not trivially true at the time when personal computers started, or when Google started.<p>Can we collect important statements, which were not trivial 10 years ago, but seems to be fairly trivial now? (Regarding topics in which HN can be interested: mostly innovations.)
A more interesting, but harder question: what happens if we take 5 years instead of 10? (Can we see clearly enough in this case? In what time-granularities can we think? What is the pace of development?)
======
patio11
Mobile phones will be your primary communication device.

Most software will eventually be accessed from a browser.

People will pay $15 a month in perpetuity for a single video game.

Talking to someone about your finances will be the exception, not the rule.
All of your routine transactions are automated. So are many of the non-routine
ones, such as opening a new account for anything smaller than a mortgage --
and we'll automate most of that, too. You'll laugh in the general direction of
what people used to pay for money management, unless you're very rich or very
poor.

It used to take effort to find out where you were going. It now takes effort
to not know where you are.

~~~
dagw
_Talking to someone about your finances will be the exception, not the rule._

Isn't this already done? I haven't visited or talked to anyone at a bank
(other than a couple of calls to the help desk for my online banking when
strange things happen) for years. Paying bills, transferring money, applying
for loans smaller than a mortgage, opening and closing accounts, managing my
investments. All that is trivially done on-line these days. I don't know
anybody who doesn't do all their personal financial management over the
internet.

~~~
didroe
>Isn't this already done?

That's the point of this topic, to discuss things that have been done but
didn't seem obvious 5-10 years ago.

~~~
dagw
Sorry, I completely misread the question. I read it as things which will seem
obvious in 5-10 years, but have yet to be fully implemented.

------
halo
I'm not convinced this is a particularly useful exercise because most changes
are the evolution of what came before. You're trying to create a neat package
of discrete changes when the real world is continuous and evolutionary.

Take "Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business",
for example. But Yahoo and AltaVista were both important and profitable before
Google even existed, and their existence is because of the web's lack of
built-in search, which was a design decision, for example. If you'd told me 15
years ago that the most popular and profitable website in the world was a
search engine making money through delivering ads, I wouldn't have been
particularly surprised.

------
stefano
Different languages hosted on the same VM. Ten years ago if you said JVM the
only language to come to mind was Java. Now it's common to think of Clojure,
Scala, JRuby, Rhino, etc. too.

~~~
SwellJoe
And JavaScript will be the most popular language, by far, for most types of
applications.

~~~
eru
Excel is a close contender. It's still the world's most popular programming
language. It incorporates a zeroth order functional language (the
spreadsheet).

~~~
IsaacL
Off-topic, but what's a zeroth order functional language? What are the other
orders (something reqiring lambdas, closures, etc)? Google and Wikipedia
didn't help.

~~~
eru
This is a quote from a talk at the International Conference on Function
Programming (or more specifically the Workshop for Commercial Users of
Functional Programming <http://cufp.galois.com/2009/abstracts.html>). But Lee
Benfield who said it, attributed the saying to Simon Peyton-Jones.

A higher-order functional language allows higher order functions like map,
filter and foldl (functions on functions). A first order language allows to
define functions, but not on other functions. And a zeroth order language does
not allow you to define functions (or name anything) as far as I figure.

------
btn
_What is the pace of development?_

Obviously not fast enough for the moon colonies and jet-packs I was promised.

------
ianbishop
I truly feel that 3D printers will change the way we live. Maybe not in the
next 5-10 years though.

~~~
rodrigo
How? What could we be doing different if we have them?

Not rethorical, please share your opinion.

~~~
fnid
rapidly innovating physical products. fixing our own physical devices. 3d
printers are to the physical world what 3gl languages are to software, or
maybe assembly, or maybe machine language over punch cards.

~~~
BobCat
The time you waste instructing the 3d printer to recreate your broken widget
is better spent carving it out with the methods at hand.

That little steel thingy that wore out I can drill, file and bend by hand
faster than you can CAD/CAM it up. You'll beat me if you're making many of
something. But your home shop 3d printer still won't print steel.

~~~
ianbishop
You raise a good point - but consider:

* It is very possible that 3D printers may be able to craft some sort of metal in the future.

* You will have massive CAD sharing websites if 3D Printers were to ever become a home standard. You would be able to simply grab and print anything you need - quickly.

Your comment overlooks the fact that most people cannot drill, file or bend by
hand.

The unfortunate reality is that most of us are not machinists. Much like how
most of us cannot compute large mathematical equations. For this, we created a
tool to make it so everyone could do. The result has grown far from that
simple goal.

~~~
flashgordon
funny you mention the "cannot drill, file or bend" comment... i love using my
drills and angle grinders... but never thought they were a big deal... felt
they were common and easy until i met a whole bunch of family friends who
found such work "beneath them" and/or were simply found it too "tricky"!

------
10ren
I like 15 years, because that's 10 doublings by Moore's Law... 1024.

What becomes trivial with an iPhone that's 1,000 times faster?

If instead of Crysis fps of 20, you have 20,000. If instead of 2GB RAM, you
had 2TB RAM; instead of 1TB HDD, 1PB. Instead of 2 MB/sec broadband, 2 GB/sec.
That's just the standard, average device - not high end.

Of course, these might be disrupted by something less powerful but more
convenient. One trend is HDD being disrupted by SSD, and by the cloud.

Flat-screens probably will be disrupted by 3D/hemispherical/projectors/e-ink
screens.

------
arethuza
To nitpick, isn't it really that "Selling advertising on the top of search is
an extremely important and profitable business"?

~~~
tlrobinson
...for essentially a single company.

------
herval
augmented reality on contact lenses (or anything as intimate as them) - no
more clunky cellphones with screens: everything right there in front of your
eyes (and the voices inside your head). Introducing the iYou.

edit: that's my take for something for the NEXT 5-10 years - re-reading the
question, it makes me wonder if it was about things that were created on the
PAST 5-10 years... doh!

------
didip
"different mode of revenue for web software"

Ads was and is obvious now, but there's a limit to how much ads budget the
world have.

A number of startups are now experimenting with various freemium or one time
fee or granular pay-as-you-use.

I'm expecting this trend to go up. And maybe there will be companies that make
some of these payment plans automated.

------
herval
Funny to notice that the Internet is already "an extremely important business"
- but it's still NOT profitable for the vast majority of people (quite the
contrary, if you analyze how many businesses/industries are getting dismantled
as technology spreads its wings and everything goes digital)...

------
iterationx
I think you would enjoy the book "Megatrends"
[http://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-
Transforming...](http://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-Transforming-
Lives/dp/0446356816)

------
jamesbritt
Ubiquitous recording. Capturing damn near everything on video, and storing it
in some endless cloud.

Not _quite_ there yet, but headed that way.

------
csbartus
Code won't be written but generated

------
c00p3r
Open source web browsers will be next development platform.

P2P networks will change the way of distribution of digital media.

Linux-based systems will dominate server market.

Linux become the supply of reusable software components for mobile devices.

Mobile carriers will dominate internet-access market.

OMG! I forgot facebook. Social networks as the second major place for a
product placements (indirect advertisement) and brain-washing after TV.

