Never heard of seam carving before. Not sure if it's used anywhere, but what a fun idea it is!
Lepton is interesting (as is brotli), although it doesn't quite rise to the level of "opening gates to new worlds" that the innovations around 2000 did. Virtual machines were funny in that they implemented an idea from mid-century mathematical logic, but VMWare was founded in 1998 and cygwin (not quite virtual machines but similar) is even older.
Oh yeah, lots of innovation in spam, social engineering and trolling, but that's not computing per se :)
Well aware of the march of big data and "quantity becoming quality"-based services over the last 20 years. But Google Earth and Wikipedia started in 2001, and everything that came thereafter would mostly be less exciting and more closed-down. OpenStreetMap deserves a mention, not for innovation but for stealing the fire from the gods. Windy.com is a fresh breeze, too; good point.
Never found DropBox exciting. Even git, which I love and use for 3 different purposes every day, just doesn't feel particularly novel. Maybe that's because torrenting (with all its deduplication, hash-indexing and various other innovations) had set my expectations so high long ago that everything that came after looked like the Dark Ages.
Drones... now these are some new grounds. In hindsight, I feel stupid forgetting them in my comment above!
Not OP but Dropbox for example was unique and game-changing when it showed up.
I agree with OP that nothing interesting like that has shown up in years. It's all "we're gonna make your kubernetes better" now and hardly anything that makes an actual impact on your daily life as an individual.
Couldn't disagree with you more. To name just a dozen new internet things from the last 10 years that I did not have in 1990s.
o Google
o Wikipedia
o Netflix
o iTunes
o Spotify/Pandora
o Stack Exchange/Overflow
o RSS (Google Reader/Feedly/etc..)
o GitHub
o Facebook
o Instagram
o Whatsapp
o Gmail
o Google Earth/Maps.
I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.
1. Google Search - before Google came out, it was wading through Alta-vista and Yahoo's hand picked pages and ignoring the 50% adult content spam, or using a physical 'phone book' of web pages
2. Google Email - when it game out, the fact that it had gigabytes of storage was astounding
3. Wikipedia - this became one of the first resources for most queries that weren't highly specialized and, even, then, sometimes Wikipedia would come through
4. Stack Overflow - hours or days of debugging are reduced to a search with an occasional copy/paste
5. Arduino - suddenly electronics became within reach and was reduced, for the most part, to software, all for a fraction of the cost microcontrollers and electronics were just a decade previously
6. Amazon, Aliexpress, Ebay - to a certain extent. Each provided a trove of sellers with access to items that were previously very difficult and expensive to find, sometimes with a 10x difference in price or accessibility. They've all kind of normalized out now but there was a time when they were more differentiated.
7. Raspberry Pi - A full linux box with a Ghz processor for $20-$50. There was a time when we were talking about the $100 laptop as the great white whale
8. Archive.org - one of the few resources that has an astounding amount of public domain work that can be searched, sorted and downloaded
9. Github - the amount of free/libre/open source software that can be accessed and used is at least an order of magnitude larger than it's closest competitor (Gitlab? Sourceforge?). It's not just investing in Git's source management model, it's also providing a clean interface to search code and present projects cleanly
Maybe these are all obvious but you did ask...
Here are some software projects that I think give me a "10x" boost or I think have large potential:
* Bootstrap - Before bootstrap, I could barely cobble a website together that didn't look like it came out of the 90s
* Clipperlib - When you need to do 2d polygon boolean operations, in a programmatic way, Angus Johnson's clipperlib is it
* WebAudio - I'm still playing with this but this provides an entry point to music creation that was orders of magnitude more painful before. Currently I'm playing with Gibber (gibber.cc)
* Face Recognition - This is now a Python package that you can use to find faces in images. This used to be bleeding edge technology just a decade ago
* Mozilla's DeepSpeech - though it still has it's problems, for someone who has a mind to, they could theoretically make (an offline and FOSS) competitor to Google's Dot and Amazon's Alexa
Unix/Linux in general provides many orders of magnitude more productivity than any other environment I've worked in (at least for me) so I'm not sure it's worth going into all the tools, "classic" and recent, that help me build software, analyze data, do data wrangling or any of the other myriad of tasks that I do.
Sam left out the two innovations that have made the most difference to my life in the past 10 years:
1) the Google Library project, which scanned tens of millions of books and made them free online.
2) ebook readers (first the Kindle, and now AMOLED or super high res smartphones)
I now have access to so much human knowledge, and can take this vast library anywhere.
Much of the other great innovation in the last ten years were in expansions or second versions of existing ideas:
1) Stackoverflow is so much better than experts exchange and random forums.
2) Wikipedia is infinitely better than about.com
3) Between Crashplan, Dropbox, and OSX time machine, backups are in much better shape now. I never worry about losing my files.
4) Smart phones were not life changing, but they did save the annoyance of printing directions and then carrying a moleskin, crossword puzzle, paperback book, etc, everywhere I go.
5) Yelp and Amazon reviews are so much more extensive now, making accessing high quality products so much easier.
6) Goole maps now support transit directions. Finding the right city bus or set of stops to take when traveling is much easier.
Some things have gotten worse. I think newsgroups+AIM+IRC+blogs&RSS were better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. Obviously, many will disagree.
Right now, the biggest area we need innovation in is in food and energy. In most other spaces, we are reduced to solving the most minor of "first world problems". Major kudos to Sam and to YC for actually investing in energy startups in the recent rounds.
Since 1996 we've gotten deep learning, the iPhone, Google (search, maps, translate, youtube), bitcoin, landing rockets for re-use, social networks, and the ability for the whole world to switch to remote work without advance notice (and yes those are all software innovations).
Quantum computing, cryptocurrency (Bitcoin with its 10tps vs Visa is analogous to Engelbart's GUI vs MacOS), lots of AI stuff that can kind of just barely be intelligent today, the Boston Dynamics robots, self driving cars, and last but definitely not least early DIY bio hacking / anarcho-transhumanist stuff and DIY medicine (search for Four Thieves Vinegar).
The things I listed are at varying levels of maturity and gravity but they are all things I expect to look back upon as "wow" moments that revealed new things that will be big in the future.
This blog reminds me of why I've overlooked a lot of new technologies. Most people miss the relevance of new things because they don't understand the technology, but sometimes too much background can work against you as well.
Browsers: Browsers didn't seem like a big deal to me when the first hit the scene. Ok, yeah, so you download a file over a network and display it in a client program. Ok, so it has a markup language. Ok, there's a way to send commands (cgi) to influence which file is sent. Nothing new so far.
Blogs: OK, RSS is cool, but what else is new here? It's a way to post to a website, right?
Facebook: Ok, so you can search a bunch of web pages and create connections. Sounds nice. Didn't those guys from "the globe" fail at this during the first boom?
Humans: Ok, you have an idea for a really smart primate.? They use tools? Ok, you mean like using a twig to eat ants. Oh, they make tools, you mean like a crow? I just don't see where you're going with this ;)
Here are some of the great things (IMO) from the Internet in this decade: https://href.cool/2010s
It would be cool to see a similar list of promising/essential software. I would personally list Julia, Elm and Redis, for instance. But I could see people putting Kubernetes or Mastodon. Breaker Browser, SSB, Webmentions are already on my list.
I recently re-read this post (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html) by PG from 2008, listing ideas YC would like to fund back then. I thought it’ll be interesting to revisit and discuss what he was absolutely right about, what is still relevant today and what didn’t pan out as anticipated.
I realize there’s a new set of RFS’s out there, I still think this is an interesting exercise simply because the no. of startups he was right about.
Some obvious winners:
2. Simplified browsing: I’d say iPad fits the bill. My mother, who’s never touched a computer in her life is quiet happy browsing our pics on the ipad.
9. Photo/Video sharing: Besides posterous and tumblr, there’s also instagram and picplz that have generated a lot of excitement in the area.
16. Some form of search that depends upon design: Not perfect, but this seems to the main USP of Bing.
17. New payment methods: Seems like the field is wide open but there’s been lot of activity in the area. Square, Zong and NFC related hype are good recent examples.
19. Application/data hosting: There’s been a recent gold rush in this area, Heroku being the poster child. As PG said, there’s room for more.
27. Hardware/Software hybrids: Well, square is one good example. This is something that I’m very keen on tackling personally as I believe there are a lot of opportunities still wide open in this area.
Would you mind elaborating on some of those 'fun' items - part of the problem of being aware of certain technologies without really 'following' them is understanding why they change.
Most of the things that made up the internet in 2014 were created in the second half of the internets lifespan at that point in time. Assuming that this trend continues, most of the things people will use in 2044 still have to be invented. You don't now what the new things will be. But looking back we notice that a lot of things came into our lifes recently.
We are so used to these big innovations that it feels like they have always been there.
Lepton is interesting (as is brotli), although it doesn't quite rise to the level of "opening gates to new worlds" that the innovations around 2000 did. Virtual machines were funny in that they implemented an idea from mid-century mathematical logic, but VMWare was founded in 1998 and cygwin (not quite virtual machines but similar) is even older.
Oh yeah, lots of innovation in spam, social engineering and trolling, but that's not computing per se :)
Well aware of the march of big data and "quantity becoming quality"-based services over the last 20 years. But Google Earth and Wikipedia started in 2001, and everything that came thereafter would mostly be less exciting and more closed-down. OpenStreetMap deserves a mention, not for innovation but for stealing the fire from the gods. Windy.com is a fresh breeze, too; good point.
Never found DropBox exciting. Even git, which I love and use for 3 different purposes every day, just doesn't feel particularly novel. Maybe that's because torrenting (with all its deduplication, hash-indexing and various other innovations) had set my expectations so high long ago that everything that came after looked like the Dark Ages.
Drones... now these are some new grounds. In hindsight, I feel stupid forgetting them in my comment above!
reply