Ask HN: Where are the innovations happening today?

davedx · 2026-09-12T09:06:10.000000Z

There's a lot going on in energy, manufacturing, mining, and of course defence at the moment. For example, we're still making progress towards economically positive fusion power; Vehicle-to-Grid for EVs is starting to roll out as trials; hydrogen is still being seriously looked at in different parts of the energy supply chain; the first flight of a mid-sized electric aircraft happened the other day; a "quantum" based navigation system that doesn't need GPS did a couple of trials in the last weeks; laser based mining, new geothermal tech, and lots and lots of autonomous/drone defence tech is being developed.

Then there's also "newspace", an interesting area to watch!

CM30 · 2026-09-11T22:01:38.000000Z

Maybe not a product per se, but I feel like video game mods, homebrew, recompilation projects, etc are seeing a ton of innovation nowadays. People are creating games and software that was thought impossible for years, like 3D platformers on the Game Boy Advance or First Person Shooters on the Neo Geo. Modders have made the SNES run games with a level of animation quality on par with something like Metal Slug, and turned games like Super Mario 64 in generic game engines. Breath of the Wild on 3DS, Minecraft on Nintendo 64, Super Mario Galaxy on DS, that browser based Super Smash Bros game where you can just create any character you feel like based on a picture and import them in minutes... the communities for these systems and games have gone absolutely wild in the last decade or so, and every glimpse on social media leaves me thinking "how in God's name is this even possible?"

It's not without drama; the effects of vibe-coding and generative AI usage in general have severely split the community in many places, with poorly coded, poorly tested projects popping up all over the place now.

But as far as sheer innovation (especially on a technical level) is concerned, older games and computer systems are going through a renaissance period.

jaredsohn · 2026-09-11T22:55:56.000000Z

>The software industry is at a standstill

Citation needed.

I see software I am working on at work and personally improving tremendously thanks to AI in that it gets used to solve problems that we previously thought "would have been nice" but didn't have time for.

To give a concrete example - I see lots of improvements in tooling for the SDLC that previously maybe only existed in bigger tech companies.