Regardless of likelihood to succeed in adoption or impact, what software do you know if with the highest ceiling for impact (for better or worse)?
Looking forward to reading about some interesting projects!
Ben Halpern
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What is the most potentially-revolutionary software currently being developed?
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Top comments (77)
Forem
(Yeah, I'm smooth)
🌱
😎
Hmm.. I have a lot actually.
Man that crying AI ruined my whole morning. That is so awesome and creepy. Thanks I guess? :)
Yeah, I was super amazed by it which makes me feel this is super duper cool.
There are four things I can answer with:
V Lang - Perfect programming language in my opinion. It has a built-in easy and lovely UI library, also it compiles as fast as C.
MEML - While unreleased, LISP-like HTML is a good idea (which is why I build it), it also has extra tags you might not be able to get elsewhere.
Lumina DE - My favorite DE, lightweight, and ready for work on RPi and Pine64 hardware.
Forem - This is probably the one I am most ecstatic about, it makes hosting a custom community easy for any community.
If I had to pick the most likely one to boom, other than Forum, that would either be MEML or V language.
I think a lot of the work in the open source cloud infrastructure space has a high impact on the entire software ecosystem. I'm talking about most of the projects that fall under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella -- things like Prometheus, Envoy, containerd, etc. -- as well as "cloud native adjacent" stuff like Firecracker or Hashicorp's OSS offerings.
Most of all, though, I want to focus on Kubernetes. 🤩
Kubernetes has democratized the infrastructure automation capabilities of the hyperscalers. It provides a declarative, "self-healing", platform for deploying and running workloads that is (mostly) cloud agnostic. That said, it's still pretty complicated. Fortunately Kubernetes can act as a set of building blocks for building further abstractions on top of it! Kelsey Hightower sums this up better than I ever could in a tweet:
Projects like OpenFaas, Knative, and Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes (I work on this, so shameless plug) enhance Kubernetes further by providing full serverless and PaaS (Platform as a Service) experiences for developers.
By relying on Kubernetes and platforms built on top of it, developers can spend less time reinventing the wheel when it comes to infrastructure and more time developing applications that actually serve their users' needs.
In short Kubernetes and other Cloud Native projects provide devs with the infrastructure automation capabilities of the tech giants and this itself acts as a giant springboard for everything that is later built on top of it.
Disclaimer: I'm biased here cause I work with this stuff all day and would like to believe what I spend time on is meaningful. 😅
I would argue that cloud native is the key innovation here, and that Kubernetes is a great option among many viable platform-for-platforms solutions. (Nomad comes to mind.)
While k8s is an incredible project, I've come to sense that the Cloud Native movement is going through a "DevOps is not tools" phase. In their excellent book, Justin Garrison and Kris Nova stress time and again how the business, culture, and tools must also align in order to get the most out of tools like k8s.
As a result I have increasingly come to see the value of Kubernetes as an add-on to the much more important value of realizing a business and technical process that is capable of defining a pod spec regardless of the syntax.
The Wrong Question About Docker and Kubernetes
Charles Landau ・ May 18 '20 ・ 2 min read
None of which, I think, contradicts what you said, but I think it's easy to miss.
Yep, completely agree that tools alone won't be the force multiplier that folks may be expecting. But the existence of these tools certainly makes it possible. :)
A skilled platform team and the right practices can enable hundreds of developers with k8s. :)
I kinda think what kubernetes has done is establish a common language to declare your application deployments. The API is what’s amazing here. An example of this is how Amazon put the API around fargate. Eventually tho, the kubernetes underlying services will fade into the back ground. What’s a kubelet and why is it running my c?
Ya, I've heard folks describe it as being a "common dial tone" for the cloud.
This is something I'm looking forward to. 😌 Developing nicer and nicer abstractions will continue to lower the barrier to entry to software development. 👍
Effectively saying, using kubernetes lowers the barrier of entering software development? 👀
Maybe what I said is a little broad... I'm just rattling off comments here. 😂
I don't believe Kubernetes lowers the barrier of entry to the field of software development, per se. In fact if someone is starting out and wanting to learn to code it's probably at best a distraction. I do believe, though, it lowers the barrier to entry for writing production-grade software that runs at scale. It provides:
Things that you or someone in your organization would have to do themselves and perhaps do manually. When used correctly it can save a lot of time and more devs can focus on writing their own software instead of learning how to do all of this. That's what I meant. :)
That said, like what @charlesdlandau said above, Kubernetes alone is just a tool and it's not as simple as just throwing a legacy application into a container and calling it a day.
Good take! I believe k8s has its place but waaay to many people with small to medium business jump on the hype train without any justification for using k8s. There is a huge gap betweeen cost and benefit in the low/medium end.
This is badass! ptsjs.org/guide/sound-0800
Looked at this 4 times today. Not revolutionary unless sounds based UI became acceptable. I'm talking UI that pulsates to music, dancing menus, what a world!
The real answer would be the
<portal>element.That's a nifty niche library, but I don't see it as "revolutionary" compared to, say, safenetwork.tech, Discovery.earth, deep learning algorithms, CRISPR tools, or BioBricks software.
That's what I said.
Hasura. Postgres + easily scalable GraphQL API with support for realtime updates is a great foundation for quickly creating admin panels, dashboards without too much fuss. Plus the Hasura team is awesome!
I’ve been using Hasura with a React side project and it’s been absolutely fantastic! I love how easy it is to work with Hasura and creat actions and events with my database. It’s so easy to use that even beginners like myself can get started and build complex backends in little to no time
Second this. I find it a close alternative to strapi.
THIS!!!!!!!!!
1) wasm+wasi.
A good proxy for impact is to take time and perspective into consideration. One could argue that Docker was revolutionary, and it was, but for perspective the creator of Docker is quoted for saying he would have never needed to invent docker has wasm+wasi existed at the time
Likewise kubernetes is also great but maybe anchored to the period when wasm+wasi had not existed. Kubernetes was definitely revolutionary for the time of Docker.
Wasm+wasi technologies are still early in thier lifetime but will likely change many technology spaces in the near future in way that were not possible prior.
2) Rustlang.
It's has a slower adoption curve than some other programming languages but has consistently proven to be effective at solving and preventing problems not possible in other languages that exist today.
This is of particular importance where security is of interest and efficiency of energy consumption where the future of earths environment and natural non renewable resources are of interest! Rustlang tends to run more efficiently and cheapy than other language runtimes which economical benefits that would be difficult to achieve otherwise - aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-f...
jsPsych is a library that allows scientists to run behavioral experiments in a browser. What I found interesting is that the introductory paper has been cited more than 290 times in academic publications, yet only has ~520 stars on GitHub. 🤔
This project (and many like it) could very well help create the most potentially-revolutionary software without anyone even knowing it.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is most software has dependencies written by others. Next time you run
npm install, and you see something like "added 84 packages from 72 contributors" those contributors are real people who are all working on software that will help create the next big thing. 🎉SpaceX Falcon 9 booster reentry software 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
MaidSafe with their SAFE Network
safenetwork.tech/
Think a distributed operating system, think zero boundaries, think privacy. Think censorship resistent. That's what Maidsafe can achieve with their SAFE network.
It's basically the next generation of the internet going way beyond where cloud services are now. Basically providing services that run on a multitude of machines regardless if they're operating in a data center or privately owned.
It will also feature a payment system through SafeCoin, safenetwork.tech/safecoin/
Projects like these are creating the future
maybe if it ran over dn42...
They have created everything from scratch, this project is on going now for over 10 years.
so they made a BGP replacement? it looked to me like it all runs over the normal internet...
yes it does run over the regular internet, but it has created it's own autonomous distributed network
I guess you don't see the problems with this? running over IP space not owned by the users?
many of these type of systems work on the basis of user provided nodes and there are many systems in place to deal with data duplication, network errors, (un)availability of nodes etc.
Hence, they're working on this for over 10 years. It's complex obviously
Face recognition + machine learning software.
It will revolutionize how governments can control us (a glimpse into the future is available in china already).
Or how can recognize dangerous context and try to save human life.... All technologies can be used to help or not.
What would be some examples of that use of facial recognition?
Industrial plant. If there are problems in some area and need to check who is present or able to help.
Read what china is doing with social scoring of the whole population. Pretty Orwellian stuff.
Yep very sad, but we should split technology and use of it. Facial recognition is not more dangerous of ML, blockchain or other.... The problems come from man's choice.
What would face recognition bring here that classic pager duty tech can't?
Into industrial plant, the face recognition could be useful for retrieve information about who was involved into dangerous problems or call someone with right skills and near to dangerous area to help quickly.
Dangerous problems lead to serious investigations, in which humans will examine security/CCTV footage. I don't think they'll rely on automatic face recognition for this. And that technique is already used in China for far lesser offenses, like littering.
How does face recognition help in this case, vs. an employee directory?
The more I read about facial recognition software, the more scared I become of what harm it could do to our societies...
I don’t know if I can call it revolutionary, but Hey has been amazing. I just love the idea of having a Screener and controlling who can send me emails, I wonder why I haven’t seen this before in order services.
Nothing new here:
I think you are entirely missing the point. Reading your posts feels like Hey burned down your house.
Perhaps I am missing the point, because I don't see $99 worth of value in there. But I'm also one of those people that thinks that stupidly expensive cellphones are, well, stupid, as are expensive alloy wheels for your mac 🤷♂️ Convince me of something the Hey does that's honestly worth the cost. I'm all ears, except for my toes, which are really just fingers in disguise.
*obligatory Deno* 😂
Yeah I was reading the first comment and thinking "what happened to deno ? a few weeks ago every single post on the frontpage was about deno and now it's not even considered revolutionary ?"
Clickup.com I really like the pace to make a best version of jira
There have been tons of attempts to bring together project management, group chat and issue trackers. There's been no clear winner.
You can just say "not Jira" and I would be interested :P