Ask HN: What’s a big trend we should all be following?

Mushrooms, a satisfying customer service or labor position, are a couple ways.

Blazor's WebAssembly variant is much more interesting and exciting in my opinion than the server-side model. Finally, a language for the frontend that's a joy to use.

Still early days of course, but something I'll be watching closely.

The golden age of web app development was 2012-2013.

The state of the art in the browser was jQuery and ES5. CoffeeScript was mature and stable. The Express framework and Node.js 0.8 were perfect for server-side JavaScript.

It was blazing fast, unopinionated, and minimal. It's too bad it didn't last.

Indeed, like Next.js, a React based server side rendering framework which can also produce static html for the pages that can be precompiled.

https://nextjs.org/

What % do you see Blazor eating React's lunch?

Blazor (client-side) is definitely interesting technology if it ever gets uptake.

I can just imagine the performance of a desktop app on the browser (via WASM) without having to fiddle around with JS, front-end frameworks, event models etc. and just write software as if they were targeted towards the desktop.

Software development would get easier again and it would be possible for more people to write desktop-class software for the browser. I'm thinking a lot of engineering/technical software that were previously not feasible on a browser could be rewritten for the browser.

Black Lives Matter.

It needs to be said more. Not sorry.

No tech in history has ever included everyone. All ideologies are lies, “buy low sell high” bullshit. Build any tech that makes the world a better place, and try to make it as inclusive as possible. My intuition is that for breakthroughs to occur, we need new technologies in creating markets for activities with high positive externalities. Look at education, for example. The budget on that seems mostly wasted, because there is not a good market to direct the spending to efficient solutions. If we look at MOOCs and KhanAcademy and similar projects, it’s clear that they are more or less worse versions of a traditional class. They could be so much more. We could have great interactive, multimedia textbooks with integrated teacher support that answer questions, and integrated exercises that auto-grade and tell you how to fix your mistakes. We could have platforms that measure and certify productivity of workers, so that the current credentialism and mad-high university prices crash down. Our problems won’t be solved by religions. Religions have never worked. The only thing that can solve our problems is social innovation. We need better institutions that align incentives of decision-makers to their people, and create competition to drive progress. If you look at why first world countries are better than third world countries, you’ll see it’s because of better institutions, not religions. In fact, third world countries are much more keen on religion and virtue signaling. Religion thrives on poverty and corruption.

> We know the safest communities in America are places that don’t center the police.

Worth thinking about: https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-policing-saves-black-lives...

I vehemently disagree. This hysterical scramble to label everything as racist regardless of merit, and suffocate any rational discussion of issues, is tearing the fabric of society apart, and only serves to dilute the message against police brutality.

I think this comment exhibits a few problems as part of the conversation on systemic racism.

"Information bubbles on all sides" is vague, but it seems to imply people trying to fight racism are either fighting for the wrong reasons or misunderstand the problem they're facing. Without more detail, it doesn't contribute anything meaningful for people to take away.

And what is there to compromise on racism? The comment doesn't say any more, so it's again hard to know what it's referring to.

Commenting on the "refusal to take small steps" or "making bogeymen" also detracts from the issue by shifting the conversation to the methods and approach the movement is taking. You may earnestly believe that the protesters and the movement could benefit from changing their approach. Unfortunately, on a wider scale, this sort of rhetoric is consistently used to delegitimize dissenting voices by refusing to cooperate or acknowledge a problem unless dissenters behave themselves. It also implies that doing things in a "respectable" manner is more important than hearing and addressing the problems people are protesting.

I think the parent is pointing out the trend, as a worrying trend. Trust in science is definitely getting worse, primarily because the truth is becoming more and more inconvenient.

I think you misunderstood the parent, who seems to be pointing out a broader cultural trend towards skepticism of science as a trend to follow closely, not necessarily one to embrace or support.

There is no replication crisis. The correct approach is always to just see each study as one data point and in Popper's suggestion each time a study points in one direction this lends the relevant theory more weight. You might be able to repeat experiments but outside the hard sciences there simply is no one truth to rule them all, and even if you manage to replicate this is neither proof nor disproof that the theory/interpretation is fully right or that the results ate generalisable.

I am 100% s believer in science but the challenge is the signal to noise ratio - there's so much outputs that even niche experts struggle to follow their own field; for the population it's really hard to follow what is or isn't right. And often the advice/results are contradictory due to different focus. Nutrition research suggests to eat frequent small meals (is this still the right advice?), but also that fasting can be helpful. And if I stick to the small meals schedule my dentist will tell me that snacking is not good for the teeth as it keeps the mouth constantly acidic.

Similarly at policy level: there is much research, but often its application is very much dependent on the frame (eg city vs region vs national scale; strong-trust Nordic country context vs low-trust Balkans or US; etc).

In the end you need the policy decision to be well reasoned and evidence-based, but this is often difficult to manage and even more difficult to communicate (especially in a polarized society like the US where everyone is either friend or enemy in the political space).

Lesswrong.com

Nearly every reply in this thread only lists one answer though?

Politically, I'm a bit anarchistic, so I totally get this. It feels like sometimes you need shit to start flying before change happens. Look at the talk on M4A since the virus started and I think we've gotten more accomplished for civil rights in 3 weeks than 40 years after the George Floyd murder. (Still we're less than 10% of where we need to be though to wrap that up).

Several of those weren't really great times.

The Renaissance, particularly, was particularly troubled, according to a source ... I cannot locate presently. (Podcast, history hasn't turned it up).

Economic downturns are also often times of great wars, social unrest and revolution.

“Cancel culture” is making it worse for everyone. Say or do the wrong thing on social media at any point in time in history and you can lose everything.

Social media has become a groupthink bent toward disorder. I just pick up on a lot more hostility than I remember from even 10 years ago.

All the polls showing people expecting to wind up worse off than their parents and the consistent results for older generations views.

Personally, this feels different. The Golden Age fallacy is where one person goes "hey I dislike this because it's different". This is speedily increasing amounts of young people suffering mental illness. https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html#:~:text=....

Lower birth rates, marriage rates, wage growth (negative even), home ownership comes later in life, education is more expensive, fewer areas with job markets with good wages, so housing is more expensive, etc.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/national-marriage-divorce-...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINUSA

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

There is plenty of space in "space" or more like in the earth orbit. Trash is a problem because it may be hard to track or even have unknown trajectory, space isn't. It need global coordination ofc but its not like with planes where everything can changes within minutes due to whether or some kind of emergency. and there is no need for high vehicle density like around an airport.

> Will China Russia and North Korea respect ownership at 10KM up?

I'm guessing you mean 100KM altitude? What happens at ten is clearly regulated and done so with excellent international cooperation, probably more efficiently than any other aspect of global politics.

> What happens when GPS and GLONAS go out because of debris and some stupid war?

Geostationary Earth Orbits are kept incredibly clean at 38,000km away.

Regardless we use Beidou? Or the Indian version? I have cheap retail gps sensors bought online for a few dollars here that can pick up all of them.

People should be wary of the kneejerk pessimism that permeates online discourse and not underestimate human ability to solve seemingly insurmountable issues.

By calling it junk I feel like you’re editorializing.

Some time after that (hopefully) technology will reach a new kind of escape velocity where something like an escape to a cabin in the woods becomes viable. If humans are still around that option will do interesting things for regulation. They probably wont see it that way and look back at us in disbelief.

Relevant Kurzgesagt https://youtu.be/yS1ibDImAYU

The gist: we could trap ourselves on earth for generations with space debris.

you don't have to be a digital nomad. We've been living in a rural'ish city (Cedar city, UT), that isn't a tech hub for awhile now. I'm a freelance dev (underpaid probably $40/hr).

But, I like living wherever I want, and not having to move. Plus wife's family is nearby which comes in handy.

I think one big thing though about the have-nots divide increasing is this is going to speed up automation unlike anything we've seen before. Walmart is already testing getting rid of cashiers completely.

Remote work I think (and hope) will end the big cities / tech hubs and make people move further and further out and be more rural, and keep remote working growing..

It's older research, but this work [0] found that when choosing a city to move, roughly 65% of moves were based on employment and housing (cost, proximity to job, size, etc), and only 25% came from desirability (neighborhood, crime, amenities, etc).

They also assessed the difference in motivation between low-income and high-income movers; the role of desirability was reduced to about 17% for low-income moves, which seems to make intuitive sense since they are less likely to have the luxury of basing a move on less-economic factors.

The authors also observed a trend that younger and more well-educated movers were more likely to choose an urbanized destination, but not by too much (single-digit percentages). In contrast, marital status and whether or not you had children were substantially more influential.

I didn't do too much digging through the followup work, so I can't say anything conclusively about changes in these trends over the last 30 years.

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9906...

You don't move to the city until you have the job (or are already the wealth to do so).

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It's anecdotal, but a few of my team members have been making moves out of Seattle. I can only imagine the life they can live in other cities on a Seattle-salary.

Nearly everyone I know on my team moved to Seattle for work. I'd say less than 5% are "from" Seattle.

Fresh out of college, I moved from Lubbock (small town) to Dallas (big city), again, for work. Moved from Dallas to Seattle, again, for the job not "for Seattle"

It is first career for me then I saw all these art scene and food and stuff but that I can lose.

It’s kind of both. More people in smaller places means more of the amenities and lifestyle of bigger cities without the cost and hassle. Will there be a massive outmigration? Probably not sufficiently to make NYC a ghost town, but it could absolutely turn second and third tier cities into places where a lot more people want to live. There are a sufficient number of people that move specifically for jobs, but would be happy to live in a smaller place. Even if that’s 5% or 10% of professionals, that’s still a huge impact on the communities they move to.

For an N=1 sample, I'm a younger person who moved to the Bay just for work and chose as out of the way of a place as I could find to live. If I had found a comparable opportunity nearly anywhere else I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

I did wind up liking it here and have a preference toward staying, but starting every morning with a swim in the ocean and having plentiful hiking opportunities is much more of a contributing factor than the city amenities.

I'm in for an anecdote. I moved to Manhattan from Upstate for work, primarily. Transit being present and inexpensive takeout options are important when starting off a career ;)

As a 30 something, single developer in boulder, if I knew my current job was going to be remote for the long haul, I would leave this place in heartbeat for some tiny town in Wyoming. Boulder and the rest of colorado have become entirely too crowded.

You can get most of what you need in a large town or a small city. I live in a large university town; we have malls, movies, some of the best fashion in the country, every kind of food but no Michelin restaurants, excellent education and schools.

Compare to the big city (Kuala Lumpur) where there's... zoos, opera, symphonies, IKEA, nicer restaurants, libraries.

The offices are there because they're near to rich people homes. The rich people homes are there because they're next to offices.

The city has few parks. Parks are kept clean by shooing away anyone 'loitering', so there's no real leisure spots in the city except malls. It takes half an hour to get to a supermarket because of the traffic, weird highways, and another half hour to find parking. Delivery startups took off, but only in the big city.

This might not be the case with say, NYC, but it's probably similar in many large cities like Jakarta or Bangkok.

It's no coincidence that the highest paying jobs are also in the heart of traffic jams - you'd need to pay me a lot more to commute there and even more to live in such a noisy, polluted area.

Not the OP, but as I live in a "lifestyle city" (Knoxville, TN) there are several middling big cities that are in close proximity to activities (hiking, climbing, skiing, beaches, etc).

Pretty sure the cities the OP was referring to are Boulder Colorado, Boise Idaho, and Chattanooga Tennessee. My family prefers Knoxville due to it being closer to the Smoky Mountains, but Chatannooga was on our list when we were deciding where to live.

Boulder, CO is about a hundred times more populous than the next one. I was unable to find another city named Boise. The most populous Chattanooga is about 400 times ahead of the next. It is obvious which cities are being referred to.

Time zone differences make talent in similar time zones more preferable.

But I agree that SV will get greatly affected in a detrimental way by remote work.

JME, Kano, the god father of grime: Wiley. Chip, Trim, CASISDEAD, cadet, jay jar. Enjoy.