HACKER Q&A
📣 nharada

What technology are you excited or optimistic about?


It feels like Hackernews lately(?) reflects the pessimistic state of the world -- every technology related comment thread seems like a big list of complaints and reasons why the thing being discussed isn't actually any good.

I thought it would be interesting to see what things Hackernews is excited about in the world of tech. What are you looking forward to or optimistic about?


  👤 rikroots Accepted Answer ✓
A few years back I got very excited by the advances in electronic paper displays. I still live in hope that one day I will be able to buy a roll of e-paper (at a reasonably cheap price), hang it on the wall, add a receiver and watch TV on it.

Is there any hope that such a technology could become reality in 10 years?


👤 he11ow
Natural Language Processing. To me it epitomizes the Bezos saying on how it's always Day 1 of the Internet.

In just a few years we've moved from an Internet where nearly every website could be listed in a directory, where CONTENT was precious, to an Internet where content is being created on an exponential curve.

So now comes the next phase where you start looking at content in aggregate. All your sentiment analysis, summarization, text analytics, pattern spotting...the shift to thinking about text in bulk.

This is a new way of thinking about text. It was downright radical in the 1960s (see also the Federalist papers), and only in recent years a bunch of factors have come together to make this new view of text more common.


👤 dangus
5G. I don’t know why it has such a bad rap. Perhaps millimeter wave tech was over-hyped. 5G is a significant improvement and will allow wireless carriers to compete directly against home Internet providers.

Sure, it isn’t like 3 cellular carriers is a huge level of choice, but it sure beats “Comcast is my only option.”

This generation of graphics cards is exciting and I’m hoping AMD will have a strong showing with the RX 6000 series.

Depending on the specifics on pricing and hardware I’m excited for the small iPhone 12, as long as it doesn’t eschew too many high-end features compared to the larger ones.


👤 higerordermap
Svelte (JS framework focused on efficiency)

Zig (systems programming language)

Crystal, Nim (Application programming languages with ergonomics focus)

Value types support in Java

OCaml multicore

Mini-pass compilers

Google Fuchsia


👤 helph67
Geothermal power generation would allow us to use the earth's heat to provide environment friendly power, 24/7/365! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power

👤 non-entity
I'm interested to see what will happen with 802.11bb if it gains traction, how it will be implemented, etc.

https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbb_update.htm


👤 pickle-wizard
VMware is going to show ESXi on ARM at VMworld in a couple of weeks. I don't have any production use for it, but it is neat and look forward to adding it to my home lab.

👤 verdverm
Augmented Reality, as demonstrated by the Hololens 2

👤 jolmg
Linux distros for phones.

👤 GretchenKlein91
Musks' Neurolink!

👤 k0t0n0
Kubernet?