Ask HN: What’s the Next Big Thing?

I'm speculating that some well-funded company is going to fork NixOS (or at least copy its design) and take it mainstream and/or enterprise.

It's being kept a secret by early investors to maximize their profits.

Electric RVs

AI. There are things it will do extremely well, but life will go on. Despite all the chainsaws and cranes, humans are still cutting wood and lifting bricks. Despite all the robotics, humans still operate production lines. Some fields will get hit hard by AI (e.g. copywriting, ghost writing, stock images).

At some point we'll probably see new tools emerge, the kind of things that emerge like Facebook. I'd bet on a change in gaming where the games can give a lot more agency to players, rather than being just a storytelling medium or skill based.

Creative jobs will morph. Writing will be like product management or sculpting, where the author has a vision and context. Art may be like directing or DJing.

Living a life without work (and without intensive money spendings).

AI companions. People are becoming increasingly lonely and increasingly willing to surrender their lives to computers. Seems inevitable.

Ubiquitous real-time content. Agora as the AWS of real-time media.

Language-specific drivers for datasources (like JDBC) being replaced with Arrow FlightSQL (gRPC by default, but transport agnostic)

Substrait as a standard for communicating query operations between systems

Data of the future will be exposing your datasource over FlightSQL endpoint so every language can use it, and consuming/producing Substrait IR for query plans

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/02/16/introducing-arrow-f...

https://substrait.io/

Apache Arrow and Facebook's experimental query engine Velox are already doing this

Water and alternate food source.

Many people don't discuss these issues. But we are sitting on a time-bomb that is ticking.

If you want to understand how severe this problem is, then look at just the number of farmers that commit suicide each year in India.

VR.

Headsets will become as ubiquitous as tablets, possibly as phones.