Really? Seems to me that Lisp has strongly resisted adopting any syntactic sugar whatsoever for terse array manipulation. I can hardly imagine where in any mainstream dialect this APL influence is palpable.
Driverless cars and a lot of AI - to me these technologies are beginning, and Im expecting to see a lot of bad AI in the coming years before it settles down
AR I can see becoming a part of everyday life. VR not so much. I think the challenges, primarily locomotion will not be solved without a big investment. VR will succeed as arcades and amusement park settings.
With a high resolution I could see full VR being pretty great for programming, considering how hard developers often try to remove distractions and go deeper into the problem, and how useful multiple monitors are
Just a pitch black room, full body tracking, voice and gesture interface, probably a few keyboards around the room (glowing within the headset) if you want to those for some tasks
Look back 20 years to 1997. Before Windows 2000 brought together the home and server codebases. Before the internet was available on mobile phones. Heck, back then the internet was used by less than 2% of the global population.
What was 20 years ahead of its time then? What would you have looked at and thought "That'll be massive in 20 years"?
About the only thing I can think of is VR. Which Sega tried to launch in the late 90s, and only now is selling over a million units.
> What would you have looked at and thought "That'll be massive in 20 years"
I was on the internet in the early/mid 90s, and was told that "the web" was growing massively and was going to be huge. This was more common knowledge by 1997.
The kind of DNA sequencing that 23andme sells to people for £150 now? It's not "millions of units" massive yet, granted.
Minor nitpicking: the 23andMe kits use microarrays for genotyping, not DNA sequencing. It's an older and more limited technology but it is much cheaper than sequencing.
Many of the web startups in the late 1990s had good ideas but were about 20 years too early.
A lot of things that have succeeded today were tried then and failed either because the technology couldn't scale, or the bandwidth wasn't there, or because people just weren't ready for it.
20 years ago I read about software as a service. The idea was that everyone would use thin clients and run graphical applications remotely. The idea was not new, as it is similar to the mainframes of the past.
The infrastructure and technology was not quite there 20 years ago, but we are getting close with today's cloud and webapps
Crispr-Cas9 - A unique technology that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR#Cas9)
This is a great question. The acceleration of technology has made it important for entrepenuers to look further ahead than ever when deciding where they want to make their impact in the world. Tomorrow's successful leaders in business will be the ones that peered into the most obscure places of the future to find it's problems and it's solutions.
What do you mean by fake? I'll admit everytime i checked out magic leap it seemed very unspecific and vague, without any actual demos. Are you saying the company doesnt even exist or just that it has unrealistic goals?
And if their goal isn't even to release a product what is it?
1. they sent a pre-recorded video to the media instead of inviting the media to witness the test flight. those who are capable of building such flying cars don't make stupid mistakes in such scale.
2. it has 36 engines, good luck for the vibrational modes.
Funny how I encountered one of the problems this tries to solve. My smartphone died so I booted up my trusty Samsung Galaxy S (yea that's S without a number on it) and went about trying to flash a newer version of android to it, only to find about 90% of download links to the necessary programs to be dead. This is only 6-7 years ago. Imagine how much of the internet becomes useless so quickly.
Nuclear fusion is mostly some amount of investment away. It's never been funded at the levels that predict "30 years away". In fact, funding has been continuously reduced: http://imgur.com/sjH5r
Fusion is not ahead of it's time... The future of energy has to be simple scalable and safe, fusion at terrestrial scales is extremely complex and very limited in fuel source, even if sustainable fusion is cracked that will always be true just like fission, it just has different complexities and different fuels.
I very much doubt that. Tech people love it as a nice invention with a libertarian twist. But what is the incentive for my grand-mother to use it over regular cash?
Imagine the same thing with your grand-mother and the web 20 years ago, she would have no reason to visit it. But now, everyone is there and she can see pictures of grand-children via the web. I could imagine similar reason for your grand-mother to use crypto-currencies in 20 years.
Well, exactly. She can see the picture of her grand-children. But what's the equivalent of the grand-children incentive for using bitcoin over her credit card or cash?
"Because we won't give her the choice" isn't the way bitcoin is going to go mainstream.
If you can figure that out, let me know and maybe I'll loop you in on the billions generated :)
Seriously though, most people could not conceive of what the internet of today would have looked like 20 years ago, so I'm thinking it's going to be something similar for crypto. Remember that some, like ethereum specifically, are applications platforms for running arbitrary code in a distributed way. Exactly what applications will come of that I really don't know, but I'm sure they will be figured out, and by that time the value will be obvious.
Well, to be honest, search engines, emails, ICQ, amazon, porn, mp3s and DivX came pretty quickly! Facebook, Uber and Wikipedia come to my mind as a later thing that was difficult to predict. Today's internet is better, we can even use it from a toilet stall with a device that fits in one's pocket! But is it really that different from the late 90s? I'm not so sure.
From a business perspective, its worlds different. Snapchat (say what you will), with its multi-billion dollar valuation, wouldn't have existed until we had the ability to get internet from a toilet stall with a pocket-sized device. My company, a SaaS for farmers, would not have been as valuable to our customers had mobile devices not been around, and people still had to use dial-up.
The internet used to be a bunch of usenet forums for geeks, now everybody uses it to some degree, which means that lots of businesses with real-world value are possible where they weren't before.
For crypto, anonymous payments, speculation trading, and currency exchange are the immediate innovations, but the Facebooks and Ubers of crypto have yet to be created.
Transactions won't be free. Somebody has to do some mining. Some googling indicates that a typical bitcoin transaction costs about two dollars today. In my experience, paying money via Paypal or credit card costs about the same.
> Transactions won't be free. Somebody has to do some mining.
Proof-of-Stake (as opposed to Proof-of-Work) will change that.
> Some googling indicates that a typical bitcoin transaction costs about two dollars today.
This is because Bitcoin reached the limit of transactions that can fit in a block, which causes a bottleneck, which increases fees. This has been fixed for other cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin will soon (August 1st) fix it.
If a tipping point comes, it won't come from your grandparents, or your parents in 20 years time. It will come from India or Africa where banking is not entrenched (or even available) for most of the population. Where the technology landscape is completely different and they are already leapfrogging the west in some areas such as mobile payments and banking.
I don't think that cryptocurrencies will take off in a big way, but Im pretty certain that if we do, it won't be from the west, and won't be for a reason that we recognise (or that the crypto-fanatics are shouting about).
Back in 2002, I started working on "automated digital doubles of real people" with an eye on automated actor replacement. I'd been working in VFX, with a history in 3D development going back to the early 80's. Long story short: started with a stellar team and I wrote and was awarded a global patent on automated actor replacement in filmed media. The company, patent and seed funding all come together just as the financial crisis at the end of Bush's term climaxed. Team scattered, I went it alone building a freelancer tiny team. Pivot to a game character service. I was never able to achieve more than a half way decent game character creation web API, which no one would pay to use. All that is left now is 1) the twitter account https://twitter.com/3davatarstore?lang=en, and of course I still have all the tech. I use it for facial recognition now, and no longer make avatars. It's even better now, but even when contacted by interested parties, no one want to pay for it, at all.
The various object-capability projects alive right now, like Tahoe-LAFS, Monte, Cap'n Proto, Sandstorm, and Genode, are all very much future technology. Imagine:
* No accounts, no passwords, just secret keycaps
* Instead of messy and complex role-based tables, capabilities always know exactly what they are capable of doing
I didn't know you were on HN. Tangential to the discussion, thanks for your book The Way of Z. That was one of the first books I read in my efforts to understand and formal methods and specifications.
I am being sarcastic. But it's very hard to see, today, any technology that could make my life significantly better (at least than fixing climate change).
Some current things are either going to be huge, normal, mainstream and just work in a boring way in 20 years time, or they are current fads which will pass.
Mine: to motivate people to choose to lower their pollution and greenhouse gas emissions (significantly, not just raising awareness or things like using electric cars instead of driving significantly less).
People can do it but they prefer living the way they do, which is what is causing the problems, knowing in principle that they should change their behavior but not actually doing so.
Miami flooding more and more is not enough of a burning platform yet. Nature will provide it if we don't choose to change ourselves.
All those dHTML shit, like DirectX, MIDI, .htc (Javascript Components), <img dynsrc> for videos, a sane CSS box model, css and inter-page transformations, VML for vector graphics, VRML for VR (buzzword), XML islands (influenced e4x and later JSX), the original xhr object, native cryto APIs, etc.
You can even program jscript on server side with asp, or execute standalone with ActiveScript, even control native GUI like customizing your folder, the browser can be morphed to the file explorer. You can make apps with few kb of jscript unlike 55MB electron install bundle.
The Windows help files (CHM) are like thousand years better than macOS counterparts and linux man files. CHM was the de facto ebook format back then and it works really well with features like indexable topics and full text search. We now have to use devdocs.io or dash.
yes it has its quirks and worms, but it was way ahead of its time.
Generally, reading MSDN docs is a much nicer experience than reading most OSS sources, or specs, not to mention collecting workarounds from the ocean of issue tracker comments.
However I do agree OSS is important and great, especially when times that you do need to debug & trace into source code.
Disclaimer: I have't developed around M$ platform for 10+ years now, not sure if the situation has changed
That was actually specific to the IE 5.5 feature set and that era's Microsoft in general. Microsoft has been doing some amazing stuff in the last years, with many of them being open source and community-driven.
> Generally, reading MSDN docs is a much nicer experience than reading most OSS sources, or specs, not to mention collecting workarounds from the ocean of issue tracker comments.
This is a big part of what helped PHP take off in my mind. The documentation was fantastic! In the early 2000's reading php docs online was going to give you tons of clues and hints if you bothered to look at them.
EDIT: just for laughs I went and looked at the PHP manual. It still has some of the 13 year old references in there. That might be good or bad. I haven't spent much time with PHP in the last 3 years so YMMV.
No one values good documentation as much as they should.
I'm a bit late to this discussion but wanted to add that Microsoft started developing desktop apps that were web-like in appearance and behaviour back in 2000 (e.g, MS Money). Here we are in 2017 and we've returned to the same idea. Here are Microsoft's Inductive User Interface (IUI) Guidelines from 2001:
"The IUI is a new user interface model that suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand. Microsoft has implemented this model in Microsoft Money 2000"
120 comments
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Now it's mostly lagging behind and making their products less consumer friendly.
https://paperap.com/
https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-js
Does that count?
Just a pitch black room, full body tracking, voice and gesture interface, probably a few keyboards around the room (glowing within the headset) if you want to those for some tasks
What was 20 years ahead of its time then? What would you have looked at and thought "That'll be massive in 20 years"?
About the only thing I can think of is VR. Which Sega tried to launch in the late 90s, and only now is selling over a million units.
I was on the internet in the early/mid 90s, and was told that "the web" was growing massively and was going to be huge. This was more common knowledge by 1997.
The kind of DNA sequencing that 23andme sells to people for £150 now? It's not "millions of units" massive yet, granted.
Minor nitpicking: the 23andMe kits use microarrays for genotyping, not DNA sequencing. It's an older and more limited technology but it is much cheaper than sequencing.
A lot of things that have succeeded today were tried then and failed either because the technology couldn't scale, or the bandwidth wasn't there, or because people just weren't ready for it.
Failure reasons were the ones you list plus lack of TCP/IP provision.
The infrastructure and technology was not quite there 20 years ago, but we are getting close with today's cloud and webapps
Neuralink - Develops high bandwidth and safe brain-machine interfaces. (https://neuralink.com/)
Magic Leap - Mixed Reality (https://magicleap.com)
Crispr-Cas9 - A unique technology that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR#Cas9)
This is a great question. The acceleration of technology has made it important for entrepenuers to look further ahead than ever when deciding where they want to make their impact in the world. Tomorrow's successful leaders in business will be the ones that peered into the most obscure places of the future to find it's problems and it's solutions.
And if their goal isn't even to release a product what is it?
1. they sent a pre-recorded video to the media instead of inviting the media to witness the test flight. those who are capable of building such flying cars don't make stupid mistakes in such scale.
2. it has 36 engines, good luck for the vibrational modes.
I want to believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III
https://lineageos.org/
You mean deuterium? Because plain hydrogen is quite easy to obtain.
> fusion at terrestrial scales is extremely complex
Lockheed Martin is allegedly working on a fusion reactor about the size of a truck payload: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm... - But of course, I cannot judge from such a webpage whether that is real in any way.
"Because we won't give her the choice" isn't the way bitcoin is going to go mainstream.
Seriously though, most people could not conceive of what the internet of today would have looked like 20 years ago, so I'm thinking it's going to be something similar for crypto. Remember that some, like ethereum specifically, are applications platforms for running arbitrary code in a distributed way. Exactly what applications will come of that I really don't know, but I'm sure they will be figured out, and by that time the value will be obvious.
The internet used to be a bunch of usenet forums for geeks, now everybody uses it to some degree, which means that lots of businesses with real-world value are possible where they weren't before.
For crypto, anonymous payments, speculation trading, and currency exchange are the immediate innovations, but the Facebooks and Ubers of crypto have yet to be created.
Proof-of-Stake (as opposed to Proof-of-Work) will change that.
> Some googling indicates that a typical bitcoin transaction costs about two dollars today.
This is because Bitcoin reached the limit of transactions that can fit in a block, which causes a bottleneck, which increases fees. This has been fixed for other cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin will soon (August 1st) fix it.
BUT...
If a tipping point comes, it won't come from your grandparents, or your parents in 20 years time. It will come from India or Africa where banking is not entrenched (or even available) for most of the population. Where the technology landscape is completely different and they are already leapfrogging the west in some areas such as mobile payments and banking.
I don't think that cryptocurrencies will take off in a big way, but Im pretty certain that if we do, it won't be from the west, and won't be for a reason that we recognise (or that the crypto-fanatics are shouting about).
* No accounts, no passwords, just secret keycaps
* Instead of messy and complex role-based tables, capabilities always know exactly what they are capable of doing
* No more confused deputies
* Fine-grained trust
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
I am being sarcastic. But it's very hard to see, today, any technology that could make my life significantly better (at least than fixing climate change).
Cryptocurrencies. 3d printers.
People can do it but they prefer living the way they do, which is what is causing the problems, knowing in principle that they should change their behavior but not actually doing so.
Miami flooding more and more is not enough of a burning platform yet. Nature will provide it if we don't choose to change ourselves.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18350910/netscape-enterp...
All those dHTML shit, like DirectX, MIDI, .htc (Javascript Components), <img dynsrc> for videos, a sane CSS box model, css and inter-page transformations, VML for vector graphics, VRML for VR (buzzword), XML islands (influenced e4x and later JSX), the original xhr object, native cryto APIs, etc.
You can even program jscript on server side with asp, or execute standalone with ActiveScript, even control native GUI like customizing your folder, the browser can be morphed to the file explorer. You can make apps with few kb of jscript unlike 55MB electron install bundle.
The Windows help files (CHM) are like thousand years better than macOS counterparts and linux man files. CHM was the de facto ebook format back then and it works really well with features like indexable topics and full text search. We now have to use devdocs.io or dash.
yes it has its quirks and worms, but it was way ahead of its time.
However I do agree OSS is important and great, especially when times that you do need to debug & trace into source code.
Disclaimer: I have't developed around M$ platform for 10+ years now, not sure if the situation has changed
And MSDN platform performs very poorly imo compared with "comparable" OSS platforms like Github, Linux development, GNU development.
This is a big part of what helped PHP take off in my mind. The documentation was fantastic! In the early 2000's reading php docs online was going to give you tons of clues and hints if you bothered to look at them.
EDIT: just for laughs I went and looked at the PHP manual. It still has some of the 13 year old references in there. That might be good or bad. I haven't spent much time with PHP in the last 3 years so YMMV.
No one values good documentation as much as they should.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997506.aspx
"The IUI is a new user interface model that suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand. Microsoft has implemented this model in Microsoft Money 2000"