[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you exci...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
Something that the world hasn't yet noticed but you think will be
huge.
Author : ilmoi
Score : 187 points
Date : 2021-04-12 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
| 23d wrote:
| Diamond Batteries! https://ndb.technology/
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE
| shostack wrote:
| Developments in the AR/VR space. The haptics stuff coming out is
| really cool and may be consumer friendly in the near future.
| Meanwhile headset tech is seeing major investment and light field
| technology is going to do amazing things for this space.
| crocsarecool wrote:
| I have a Valve Index. It is the most mind blowing thing to me.
| I'm really excited for AR to get going. I've only seen it for
| shopping (see what item x would look like in your house). I
| think it might be cool for collaboration.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The Oculus Quest 2 is _so cheap_ for a very high quality and
| high resolution experience. And even more importantly, it's
| extremely simple to setup.
|
| Wireless VR really is a necessity for it to become more than
| just a tiny niche.
|
| Not yet mainstream, but it's actually a joy to use and I think
| we'll have significant marginal improvements over time which
| will keep making it more and more worthwhile.
|
| I think the real thing will be commercial applications of VR,
| where companies use it because it's the best way to get certain
| kinds of work done. And NOT desk work, either. We're maybe a
| decade or two from that being mainstream, but it's going to be
| a significant improvement.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull
| heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they
| are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't
| trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty
| boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by
| modern insulation.
| 35mm wrote:
| For new homes absolutely. In the UK gas boilers are the norm
| and every new home should have a heat pump instead.
|
| But retrofitting requires a lot of work - replacing radiators
| with much larger ones, maybe ripping out pipes, and for ground
| source digging up the garden / street.
| jayflux wrote:
| > For new homes absolutely. In the UK gas boilers are the
| norm and every new home should have a heat pump instead.
|
| This is already happening. Redrow for example are focusing on
| new heating technology for new homes in preparation for the
| boiler ban
| standardUser wrote:
| Energy efficiency technology has been an unsung hero for
| decades now. It's probably done more to mitigate carbon
| emissions than any other effort to date.
| jayflux wrote:
| In the UK there will be a gas boiler ban on new builds in 2025.
| That's when we will start to see a market for these.
|
| > I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as
| much is people can't understand them and don't trust them
| because of their ignorance.
|
| I think there's genuine reason right now.
|
| For existing houses it only makes sense if you have really good
| insulation which rules a lot of people out. That's why they're
| only being focused on new builds, so they can guarantee the
| insolation is adequate.
|
| They're expensive (for existing housing) and the returns aren't
| quite there yet. Parts and expertise are also quite limited
| compared to boilers (the market isn't really there yet).
|
| It also depends what climate you live in for how useful they
| will be
| divbzero wrote:
| Along the same line of thinking, tankless water heating [1]
| seems like a no-brainer. It surprises me that places like the
| US have not used it as the default from the start.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankless_water_heating
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Why not heat pump water heaters? Those are even more energy-
| efficient.
| signalandnoise wrote:
| there have got to be better ways to optimize the design of
| boilers, surely this is a RF learning problem against heat
| equations.
| worik wrote:
| They are good.
|
| But not in very cold environments. I have one and when there is
| more than two degrees of frost it struggles.
|
| So for a lot of continental areas they are almost useless since
| they do not function when you really need them.
|
| For temperate climates and coastal regions they are wonderful.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think you've stumbled on the REAL reason there's hesitation
| with heat pumps.
|
| There's a massive difference in capability and efficiency and
| usability of heat pumps. The crappy ones don't even work
| below freezing. The good ones can operate even down to -20F
| efficiently, even air source. And ground source ones don't
| have a hard limit at all (although they face a similar wide
| difference in capability).
|
| Low effort cheap heat pumps are gonna do more harm than good
| in that they'll convince people that heat pumps suck.
|
| It's like the difference between a Tesla and a lead acid golf
| cart. Both are "electric" "cars", but there's vastly
| different capability.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Yeah my parents are an hour south of the Canadian border in
| New England and they still heat the house with a wood stove
| during winter for that very reason. But tell ya what that
| wood stove sure is amazing, keeps it very warm and it's not
| a small house.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have one for my 20m2 shed, it works down to -5c at least.
|
| Granted my shed has quite good insulation, but still.
|
| Worst comes to the worse you could use a ground source heat
| pump.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Me too. I've been obsessing over geothermal systems for a while
| and I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I wrote this
| essay to clear up my thinking:
| https://www.greennewdealio.com/heating/robot-mole/
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Almost all new houses are built with heat pumps where I live
| because it's kind of a no-brainer in those situations. And I
| see one old house after the other being wrapped in new thick
| isolation.
|
| But heat pumps in old homes just aren't a thing because it's
| expensive and a lot of work to adapt the house's existing
| heating. People do understand it, they just don't want to
| bother with that.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| What is "isolation"? Is that a typo of "insulation"?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Force of habit. In my native language we use the same word
| for isolation and insulation.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I was trying to narrow it down, but it turns out a lot of
| languages do that.
| screaminghawk wrote:
| It's cost for me. Electricity isn't cheap where I live and when
| your house is poorly insulated you require even more energy for
| a heat pump.
| slig wrote:
| Related Technology Connections video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
| drojas wrote:
| Temporal Stores/Databases like Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/)
| and Crux (https://opencrux.com/). I can't stress enough how much
| pain they can lift from organizations building teams to "scale"
| in domains that by nature are tied to requirements about past
| knowledge like finance, healthcare, governance, audit systems,
| etc.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Better cryptocurrency Chia
| abetusk wrote:
| * FPGAs, and their associated FOSS stack to use them.
|
| I haven't been able to really get into FPGAs but I'm optimistic
| about them. They're pretty clunky right now but I'm hoping
| they'll just get easier and more accessible.
|
| If we want computation that we're able to verify as being secure,
| FPGAs are the closest I see us getting to it. There's also
| applications in terms of parallel computation that they can do
| over more traditional approaches.
|
| This might go by the way of Transmeta or always remain niche but
| it seems like they have a lot of potential.
|
| * Open Source Hardware, specifically relating to robotics
|
| Electronics production is becoming cheaper and easier. Open
| source hardware has the potential to become as ubiquitous as open
| source software.
|
| Electronics hardware is still way harder than it needs to be, so
| the progress is slow, but if we get within range of having an
| iteration cycle in electronics that's as fast as software
| development, we'll see spectacular innovation. Robotics
| especially, as that's a kind of straight forward physical
| manifestation of electronics that has a potentially large market.
|
| There's a $5k fiber laser that can ablate copper. This could
| potentially fuel the next round of cottage industry board fab
| houses (in the US and other non-Chinese countries) and enable
| rapid turn around time. I wish I could justify the $5k to play
| around with it but it's just outside of my price range.
|
| * Solar
|
| I'm not really sure if this is 'under-the-radar' but for the
| first time, solar has become cheaper than coal. This means
| besides giving a moral incentive for people to use solar, there's
| now an economic one, which means the transition will most likely
| be broad.
|
| Coupled with battery technology advances, this could have drastic
| impacts on the ubiquity and cost of power. I wonder if we'll see
| a kind of "energy internet" where people will create their own
| distributed electrified infrastructure.
| kscottz wrote:
| OSHWA board member [1] here and developer advocate at Open
| Robotics (the people who maintain ROS) here.
|
| May I suggest you take a look at microROS[3]?
|
| I am also super excited about OSHWA certified open hardware
| [4].
|
| [1] https://certification.oshwa.org/ [2]
| https://www.openrobotics.org/ [3] https://micro.ros.org/ [4]
| https://certification.oshwa.org/
| abetusk wrote:
| I follow you on Twitter! I'm sure you don't remember me at
| all but I spoke to you briefly at one of the Maker Fairs
| nearly a decade ago and I've seen you at a few of the Open
| Hardware Summits. Not that you need to hear it from me but
| keep up the good work.
|
| I'm also excited about the OSHWA certification. I've found a
| bunch of great projects through it.
|
| I've been passively watching ROS but it's always seemed a bit
| heavy weight for a lot of the things I'd want to do or for
| what's available cheaply right now. I'm sure this will get
| easier as full Linux systems will become cheaper and more
| ubiquitous for embedded applications.
|
| I haven't seen microROS, though, so thanks for the link, I'll
| check it out.
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Electric cars and planes are going to be huge, of course.
| Increasingly batteries will be replaced by fuel cells, and the
| hydrogen that powers them will be produced by means of hydrolysis
| produced by sunlight.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2021-04-hydrogen-fuel-machine-ultimate...
|
| https://newatlas.com/energy/osu-turro-solar-spectrum-hydroge...
|
| https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/April/05152017Ren-Wa...
| Graffur wrote:
| Is this under the radar?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| For electric planes, it is. Up until a year or two ago, I
| still had fairly intelligent people still saying electric
| flight is "essentially impossible."
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| AFAICT intelligent people are still saying that apart from
| short-hop 10 seater planes, electric flight is impossible.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, that's what they say if you press them on it today.
| They'll keep moving the goalposts as soon as it becomes
| too obviously wrong, and then never admit to having been
| wrong in the first place. ;)
| [deleted]
| krylon299 wrote:
| for me, its https://qloppi.com
| atom-morgan wrote:
| What am I looking at?
| em-bee wrote:
| seems to be a parody of those newfangled non-fungible-token
| markets.
| pkrotich wrote:
| Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) - I think future
| societies will benefit a lot from such organization.
| wyxuan wrote:
| BCI - Brain Computer Interface. Sure it has received a lot of
| attention thanks to the work of Elon and neurallink, I still
| think that it hasn't received enough interest especially for how
| it'll affect all different parts of ours lives.
| JimmyRuska wrote:
| RDFox, a semantic/graph database with incremental reasoning.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Fusion power.
|
| I think traditional tokamaks are 5-10 years from positive power
| due to better superconductor tech. There is finally private
| investment in the space and it has been growing at an absolutely
| crazy pace.
|
| I think in about 5 years there is going to be a fusion power gold
| rush.
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| 3D Printing.
|
| I believe 3D printing will change the world in less than twenty
| years. We currently in the hobby-est stage-think home computers
| in the later 70's early eighties. It took a company to see the
| potential and package it up for anyone to use. I think there will
| be a breakthrough home 3D printer that will start whole new
| industries. You will be able to buy physical products direct from
| anyone. Anyone can design and sell a vase or a bowl or a
| boomerang because manufacturing and distribution are no longer
| barriers to market. Think of when music and video moved from
| mostly only possible with studios to being able to record at a
| studio to home recording. Anyways... I'm super excited.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Can I say "I agree" but also add that there may be more to the
| story than 3D printing? That is, I'd call out "personal
| fabrication" in an even more general sense, to include both 3D
| printing and things like inexpensive, personal CNC milling
| machines and other "personal scale" fabricating devices. Even
| going as far as more highly specialized devices, like at-home
| reflow ovens for SMD soldering, and laser cutters. Heck, even
| items as exotic as plasma cutters are getting cheap enough that
| almost anybody can own one. See, for example,
| https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Portable-Digital-Frequency-Inv...
|
| Edit: I should also add something about the 3rd party
| fabrication / assembly services that are bringing a lot of
| capabilities to bear, for the average person, who would not
| have been able to afford them a few years ago. Look at OSH
| Park, OSH Cut, JLCPCB and the like. Need PCB's? Done. Need
| later cut metal parts? Done. There are similar services for
| injection molding, etc., etc., etc.
|
| I'm pretty excited about this space. I just bought my first
| desktop mill (so new I haven't even unboxed it yet) and my
| first 3D printer. And picked up a cheap Black and Decker
| convection oven to convert into a reflow oven about the same
| time. Definitely excited to start exploring the intersection of
| all of these tools for "building things" without needing a full
| fledged machine shop, wood shop, yadda, yadda, yadda.
| pmurt7 wrote:
| IPFS
| Jamieee wrote:
| https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it
| out, but not seen any uptake yet.
| mariksolo wrote:
| Libgen added a feature to download files with ipfs. It is
| ridiculously faster than a normal download.
| godelski wrote:
| I keep seeing this pop up, but honestly I still don't get it.
| I'm also weirded out by the filecoin aspect of it. Could you
| maybe explain it better for the dumb folks like me?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Think of it as a distributed filesystem with content
| addressable by hash values. If you want to publish some
| content instead of posting a torrent file and seeding it, you
| can announce the content on IPFS to your IPFS peers. Anyone
| else can now find it by hash (or by name if you use IPNS). If
| anyone else downloads it, like with a torrent, they'll begin
| sharing it back out creating redundancy and, potentially,
| reducing access time for others as more people are sharing it
| out (imagine you're on a 10Mbps network connection and the
| only one sharing it versus having 100 others sharing it out,
| even if they're also all on 10Mbps connections it will be
| faster). Content can be "pinned" which ensures it remains on
| your IPFS node, if it's unpinned anything you download will
| eventually disappear (basically an LRU cache). So if you
| download the entire run of Dungeon Magazine but _don 't_ pin
| it, it will disappear if you continue downloading content via
| IPFS when the cache you've set aside for IPFS fills up
| (eventually). But if you pin it, the content will remain
| hosted by your node indefinitely, even if no one ever
| accesses it or pins it again and the original disappears.
|
| Filecoin is a separate thing (mostly), and can (kind of) be
| thought of as pinning-as-a-service. It's built on a private
| IPFS network, not the main public one most people use or are
| directed to. So it's _using_ IPFS, but it is _not_ IPFS.
| squishy47 wrote:
| Played around with it a few weeks ago. It was super easy to get
| going with it. I just dunno what benefits it gives over
| traditional storage? besides the classic crypto, "censorship
| resistant". (Also hello HN, this is the first time I've posted
| anything :p )
| beauzero wrote:
| Same here. IPFS seems to have been lumped into the whole
| "crypto" scene because of filecoin. In my opinion, IPFS is much
| more interesting and potentially beneficial to individual
| freedom than crypto. The problem is the only people really
| talking about it are people focused on crypto, also forcing
| dapp conversations to focus on quick money vs. long term
| usability/functionality. I don't hold the money conversations
| against anyone...just not interested in that side of it. More
| interested in the preservation of knowledge long term and
| how/if that gets built. IPFS seems to be an interesting
| potential step towards those goals.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| I find it really cool that Brave implemented IPFS.
| imglorp wrote:
| There's still a bunch of questions around filecoin, but if
| you set aside the token and speculative nature, the it's the
| first realistic proof of storage system and represents (1) a
| departure from proof of work that's sucking up the power
| output of several countries for no good reason, (2) a useful
| base for IPFS to store its bits persistently and (3) perhaps
| funding Protocol Labs so they can continue to advance this
| state of art.
| raitucarp wrote:
| I agree with you. And we also need technology like dApps that
| don't cost when running it by opcodes -with its vm, but use
| hourly pricing like cloud based hosting, so it will run your
| software deliberately without throw decentralized capabilities
| and it will enable decentralized economy to the mass.
| 3arn0wl wrote:
| I'm really excited, to the point of distraction by the RISC-V
| ISA.
|
| Some people say that there's nothing new in it, but to my mind,
| they're missing the point : the Berkeley Four took what couldn't
| be appropriated for profit, and built a statement about what
| computing is... They revealed the Wizard of Oz to everyone, so
| that anyone with some computing background can build a processor,
| freely.
|
| And now this freed wizard is working his magic, and will change
| the computing landscape irrevocably.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| You do realize that RISC-V processors aren't free right? Making
| an open source ISA is no small feat, but all they really did
| was help save some megacorporations a little extra money.
|
| Perhaps it will lead to a processor startup, but follow that to
| its logical conclusion: it takes a huge, profitable company to
| sustain processor delivery for years. There's a very good
| reason why only a handful of companies make the top 6 CPU
| architectures. There's still Synopsys ARC, Renesas, Atmel, PIC
| just to name a few of RISC-V competitors.
|
| In reality, the Berkeley Four just made a handful of semi
| companies richer. WDC, NXP, NVIDIA, Microchip, etc. don't have
| to pay Arm for IP if they use RISC-V. Did that really help
| anything? Meh.
| 3arn0wl wrote:
| Sure, RISC-V designs can be open or not... And of course
| there's always the cost of fabbing.
|
| There're already designs freely available to use though,
| either as they are, or to build upon.
|
| And there are also now many other companies designing using
| the ISA; decentralising the production of chips.
|
| But - over and above the revolutionary economics of it - it's
| being recognised as a good ISA, and RISC-V cores are already
| being incorporated into consumer electronics.
| 3arn0wl wrote:
| Actually... What they did, ten years ago, was build a much
| better Computer Engineering course!
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| You could argue that the availability of Linux saved
| countless megacorporations from having to pay Microsoft, IBM,
| or Sun. Yet the availability of Linux has been a boon to
| people across the board.
|
| While I agree there is something not right about cutting into
| ARM's profits for the benefit of megacorporations, I think
| that a royalty-free ISA might genuinely be good for
| civilization despite that in the same way Linux is. It's
| tough though, I'm still not fully sold on that opinion.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I hear what you are saying, and that is a good point, and I
| do agree with the: "Why isn't there an open ISA?"
|
| I think the key difference with an OS like Linux and an ISA
| like RISC-V is that Linux helped literally millions of
| smart, curious kids get exposed to Unix and tinkering in a
| OS that wasn't a locked down behemoth: Windows. It changed
| lives. I don't think it is an exaggeration to overstate the
| democrization Linux had.
|
| However, I don't see RISC-V touching the world in an
| analogous way. No kid is gonna tinker with an ISA and fab a
| CPU. Maybe they will stick it on an FPGA? But it seems less
| accessible.
|
| Plus RISC-V's biggest propopent, Patterson, isn't really
| giving the world anything like Linus Torvald did. Linus
| busted his butt (and still does!) whereas Patterson flies
| around getting big speaker fees to pump up RISC-V while
| delegating. Just seems a bit... off? Or its just me.
| theon144 wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the amount of curious kids
| who are more on the electrical engineering side of
| things. Who, sure, probably won't get to play with a CPU
| fab line, but then again that's somewhat like sending
| kernel contributions is to "tinkering with Linux".
|
| It really is a just question of _any level of_ hobbyist-
| accessibility (think photo-etching 2 PCBs of less
| sophistication vs. making a run of 100 perfect 3-layered
| PCBs in a factory) - and I 've seen quite a lot of
| projects popping up around FPGAs lately that seem to
| indicate they're starting to approach the Arduino-ish
| level of approachability (though it's still obviously
| very far).
|
| RISC-V just might be one of the things on the way to a
| whole "sillicon-tinkering" scene, so I'm pretty hopeful.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million
| person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests,
| small startups, and people who can't afford expensive
| computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized
| programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects
| like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for
| hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can
| see a similar development happening in the computer
| space. Actually I'm surprised homebrew computers
| architected around an FPGA haven't yet become more
| popular. Maybe as the popularity of RISCV grows we'll see
| more of that. Would be great to see a project that
| implements a risc-v based computer on a de10-nano board
| as a starting point.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I spent most of my career is a microarchitect at Intel in
| the late 80's till mid-90's on 486 & Pentium and then
| again in the late 2000's on Xeon. So the idea of
| tinkering with an ISA is something that gives me the
| cold-sweats today! It's a wee bit more complicated than
| hacking the RTL/VHDL, but I am not saying curious kids
| should not have the chance to have a go at it! RISC-V is
| more akin to if I handed a kid a Boeing 747 and said,
| hey, go nuts! :)
|
| However, I taught programming in an afterschool program
| in the mid-80's and the Apple //e had an amazing
| graphical program that stepped through an assembly
| program, showing the data moving through the busses from
| register to memory, etc. And it was instrumental to kids
| learning. There's a few more wires in a 32-bit RISC
| compared to an 8-bit 6502, but someone will benefit!
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Interesting perspective. It's true the jump from 8-bit to
| 32-bit architectures involved a lot more than just
| increasing the data bus width, it came with advances in
| processor architecture so I understand where you are
| coming from. That said, I think the hobbiest community
| will find a happy medium in terms of complexity /
| hackability. Establishing a base platform seems to me the
| most important first step.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Somebody knows the name of this Apple //e program?
| cunidev wrote:
| To be fair, interest around ISAs has never been so high.
| Now RISC-V workshops ("build your own core") are kind of
| everywhere, from Udemy to most universities, some of
| which are even targeted at teenagers.
|
| The resulting RISC-V cores are mostly emulated, but are
| expanding knowledge of FPGAs immensely as a side effect.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| > " _...so that anyone with some computing background can build
| a processor, freely._ "
|
| They could already do that. I designed and laid out in silicon
| a 32 bit processor as part of my undergraduate studies in
| computer engineering.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Can I run Linux on it ? I almost feel like being able to
| completely rebuilt computer technology from raw materials
| should be encased in a book somewhere. Hypothetically if we
| dropped you and 100 other engineers in the woods with metal
| working equipment could you get something resembling a
| computer working in 5 years ? Or in this post-apocalyptic
| landscape would it be more practical to dig in landfills for
| old GameCubes to retrofit
| analognoise wrote:
| Yes. OpenSPARC has been free/available since 2005. There
| are a multitude of others of similar vintage that can also
| boot Linux.
|
| It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.
| 3arn0wl wrote:
| On RISC-V? Yes... Well sort of. There are people working on
| ports of Fedora, Debian and OpenSuse (I think) and I've
| seen some version of BSD working on SiFive's boards. Debian
| is said to be 95% complete. Ubuntu have also announced that
| they're working on a port, and SkiffOS is said to be ready
| to run on RISC-V too. There was also a demo of AOSP working
| on 3 XuanTie 910 cores a few weeks ago.
|
| Of course, then you need apps to be ported over, and that
| might take longer.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Elixir.
|
| Yes, most of you have heard of it, but I think it is still very
| underrated.
|
| Especially interesting is the ML libraries that have come out
| recently and OTP24 whose new JIT compiler gives a ~2x speed
| improvement to Elixir code, depending on the task.
| anthonyskipper wrote:
| IPFS and WASM - Combined they let you build apps that don't need
| a cloud provider, and can effectively be immortal.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| Huh, I've looked at IPFS and WASM a lot but never really
| considered them together as a way to distribute apps in a
| decentralized way. That is a really exciting possibility. I
| wonder if IPFS will ever gain enough momentum to make it usable
| by enough "normal" people (not just devs who have it installed)
| astlouis44 wrote:
| This x 1000...the metaverse will be built on WASM, WebGPU,
| WebXR, and IPFS. Also an ingenius way to disrupt Apple's
| walled garden and empower developers and consumers to a new
| era of seamless, universal application distribution and
| discovery on the web. My team is working on this btw :D
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Passivhaus. Rust (performance == energy efficiency). EV
| conversions (hybrid drivetrain to replace an ICE).
| Electromobility in a wider sense. Heat pumps (not so much under
| the radar anymore tho).
| ahstilde wrote:
| Allergy immunotherapy. I started a company on the backs of this
| treatment.
|
| The way we treat allergies today, with Zyrtec and Claritin, is
| medieval medicine. It doesn't solve the underlying problem; it
| just tries to cover it up.
|
| Allergy immunotherapy is the future. Most people don't realize
| that allergies are now a curable disease. In the future, taking
| Claritin for allergies is going to seem like taking Tylenol for
| an ear infection. Why would you treat the symptoms when you could
| just cure the disease?
|
| I started Wyndly (https://www.wyndly.com) to bring immunotherapy
| for pollen, pets, and dust across the USA. But we'll expand into
| food allergies soon, too.
| forthwall wrote:
| That's really cool that this is a thing, I remember that my
| friend tried to this to himself by eating fish he was allergic
| to and then epi-penning himself until his body started to
| ignore it. (took years!) Glad this appears to be a way safer
| method
| jalada wrote:
| Here in the UK it's incredible how little immunotherapy is
| prescribed despite the fact that it's been available for ages
| and known to work. Anecdotally I have heard one problem is that
| allergy medicine is just not something that GPs are kept well
| informed about. My GP told me that it was 'unwise to mess with
| the immune system like this'. Uhh...vaccines?
|
| (source: I have had immunotherapy)
| m463 wrote:
| many years ago, I had allergy problems and normal allergy shots
| (increasing dose injections of small quantities of allergens)
| would not work. They gave me the scratch test and I was
| allergic to many things, then later I got the prick test and I
| was allergic to the rest.
|
| What my doctor told me was -- you're going to get increasing
| doses a few times a week, it will take a lot of time be hard,
| and at some point you'll bump into an adverse reaction while
| you're in the waiting room after the shot.
|
| The medical system was kind of broken wrt to my plight.
|
| After consulting a number of folks, I finally found EPD and
| went to treatment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzyme_potentiated_desensitiza...
|
| It was really helping, then they stopped offering it in my
| area. I was pretty bummed they did away with it, because it
| helped me without side effects. My symptoms decreased in
| severity and eventually I felt fine. Apparently it was from the
| UK and worked well there.
| yomansat wrote:
| I understand that each person is different, but how long does
| the therapy go for until someone becomes "immune"? I see other
| comments mentioning 20-30 years, which sounds a lot more
| expensive than having to take the medieval equivalent for just
| as long.
|
| I hope I'm wrong!
| bb123 wrote:
| Hey if someone said by the time I'm 40 I wouldn't have to
| live in fear of peanuts anymore, I'd pay whatever they asked.
| astuyvenberg wrote:
| Immunotherapy of all kinds is poised to become the
| revolutionary medicine of our generation. I'm excited to see
| what Wyndly does in the future!
| pmarreck wrote:
| Speaking as a very rational multiple-allergy sufferer (before
| 30? None. Then, like a dozen things!!) who has gotten allergy
| shots for years now...
|
| Have any data to back up this substitute?
|
| Also, Zyrtec and Claritin did nothing for me, I'm an Allegra
| guy
| hwatkins wrote:
| This look interesting, it took some digging to get to what the
| actual treatment is, so it gets your body use to the allergen
| to build up tolerance. What happens when you have multiple
| pollen allergies, how does it track all of them. Also seems
| like many pollens will be region specific, different trees,
| etc.
| cpitman wrote:
| Surprised to hear this is uncommon, I received allergy shots
| >20 years ago and it was the only allergy treatment (after many
| attempted medications) that had a sizable impact.
|
| Besides the delivery vehicle, what are the differences between
| allergy shots and these droplets?
| DoingSomeThings wrote:
| I've received allergy shots in the past. Seems to be a
| relatively common treatment in the south. It's just
| inconvenient due to office visits.
|
| Looks like the innovation here is the move the serum from
| intradermal to a liquid, oral treatment?
| nbardy wrote:
| That's a big leap for me. I spent 1 hour twice a week
| commuting to get allergy shots.
| king_magic wrote:
| I've had allergy immunotherapy shots going on 30 years now. I'd
| say there has been an improvement, but... is the technology
| going to get significantly better anytime soon? I'm skeptical -
| but happy to be convinced otherwise.
| timdaub wrote:
| - Native File System support coming to the browser:
| https://web.dev/file-system-access/
|
| - jamstack.wtf
|
| - federation-based networks
|
| - CRDTs: https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/
|
| - data-oriented programming paradigm (https://rugpullindex.com/
| shameless plug)
|
| - web components: https://docs.ficusjs.org/index.html
| timdaub wrote:
| > federation-based networks
|
| e.g. lemmy.ml
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| Advances in computational chemistry and computational materials
| science. Specially using ML to speed up computation.
| Computational chemistry is already patchwork of different
| heuristic approaches. Graph neural networks and even some
| language models seem very promising addition.
|
| If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex
| chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology,
| medicine and materials science.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I have a relative who is a PhD chemist who I talked to about
| some of this stuff. He is generally skeptical of it because
| "the interesting chemicals are the ones that have extreme
| properties and predicting extreme properties is hard". It's a
| lot easier to model normal behavior than unusual behavior. He
| wasn't totally against the idea, he just thought it would be
| much harder than many people assume.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex
| chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology,
| medicine and materials science.
|
| That's probably far less true than you imagine. See Derek
| Lowe's take on it:
| https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/19/ai...
|
| The rate-limiting steps in drug discovery is in figuring out a)
| what you need to muck up to improve health or b) how to muck it
| up without mucking up other things badly enough to kill you.
| Computational chemistry has generally focused more on solving
| problems c) how to muck up this target more effectively or d)
| how to make the mucker-upper in the first place, which, while
| not useless, is not going to be a revolutionary change by any
| stretch of the imagination.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes! This would be fantastic, I'd love to see this happen.
|
| If anyone is working on this, and is looking to hire a
| computational organic chemist-turned-ai engineer, let me know!
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| https://www.schrodinger.com/careers
|
| There are many others.
| asdff wrote:
| >If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex
| chemistry accurately
|
| There is the rub. Biological simulations have been written for
| 40 years now. It's an extremely difficult problem considering
| how many latent variables are at play, and people have been
| working on it for a very long time now.
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| I suspect that the recent breakthrough in protein structure
| prediction is just a start.
|
| ML techniques will be used to cut that latent variable space
| in both quantum chemistry and molecular mechanics based
| methods.
| joelg wrote:
| Database applications of category theory!
| elihu wrote:
| ReBCO tape is interesting stuff. It's a high-temperature
| superconductor (high-temperature meaning still really cold, but
| you don't need liquid helium to get there) that can carry a lot
| of current before it stops being superconducting.
|
| It's being used in new tokomak fusion reactor designs, like
| SPARC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| An excellent video on this from one of the best Youtube
| channels in existence (IMHO):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpDGKH9_SE
| dang wrote:
| Similar-but-different recent threads:
|
| _Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites
| /apps?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959 - April
| 2021 (320 comments)
|
| _Ask HN: What startup /technology is on your 'to watch' list?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540583 - Dec 2020 (248
| comments)
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| www.store-dot.com perhaps.
| AntonioL wrote:
| Automated green farms - https://www.optimal.ag
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| Smartphone ad hoc networks
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network
| jrnichols wrote:
| maybe it's been a bit more noticed, but I am enjoying the
| Fediverse so far, especially peer tube. I think there's a lot of
| potential there.
|
| now.. the race to see if we can fill it with normal stuff instead
| of letting conspiracy theorists and racists flood it.
| robinwa wrote:
| Hyperspectral imaging.
|
| It reminds me of a Star Trek tricorder. Imagine having a camera
| where you can see easily ID greenhouse gases, quantify water/fat
| content in food, identify plant diseases, verify drug components,
| identify tumours, and measure blood oxygenation. On the machine
| vision side of things: it could probably outperform any
| conventional imaging + DNN combination, and you'd probably get
| pixel-wise segmentation for free while you're there.
|
| There's been a lot of academic progress going on - it shouldn't
| be long until hyperspectral imaging makes its way into our lives.
| jldl805 wrote:
| It is very much a part of your life if you are a member of the
| military or any number of government agencies. Has been a long
| time.
| kickout wrote:
| Autonomous vehicles...for agriculture...
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...
| mperreux wrote:
| The GET (Guaranteed Entrance Token) Protocol https://get-
| protocol.io/
|
| The protocol offers blockchain-based smart ticketing which
| eliminates fraud and prevents scalping. This has the potential to
| get huge when events start coming back post-covid.
| nojito wrote:
| Hydrogen cars and autonomous delivery.
| michelpp wrote:
| The GraphBLAS[1] is an amazing API and mathematical framework for
| building parallel graph algorithms using sparse matrix
| multiplication in the language of Linear Algebra.
|
| There are Python and and MATLAB bindings, in fact MATLAB 2021a
| now uses SuiteSparse:GraphBLAS for sparse matrix multiplication
| (A*B) built-in.
|
| [1] https://graphblas.github.io/
| cunidev wrote:
| I am working on GraphBLAS-based implementations right now.
| While the API itself is great, using it full-time I notice
| documentation is still quite behind and still not too many
| features. Also there is almost no community outside academia.
| Crazy efficient though, and very solid overall
| bitcoinmonger wrote:
| I think Bitcoin is genuinely exciting. I know it's not exactly
| "under-the-radar", but a lot of the discussion on HN is
| unfortunately only related to the price. It's a bit of a shame,
| but I can understand it's hard to see through the noise
| sometimes.
|
| The fact that there isn't more discussion around the
| cryptography, networking, etc. suggests to me that many are still
| unfamiliar with the power of the underlying technology.
| babuloseo wrote:
| yeah I am doing more research on p2p and things like merkle
| trees. https://www.codementor.io/blog/merkle-trees-5h9arzd3n8
|
| I am pretty excited about Ethereum and related ecosystem.
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Don't get too distracted by the shiny. The ethereum ecosystem
| is a train wreck. What we see today is the reinvention of the
| same of scum tricks that Wall Street has played on the people
| for decades. More printing of funny money, tricks on yield,
| relending and rehypothication. Its is unscalable, and PoS is
| a insecure trick. I don't think the value proposition of
| ether can exist in a PoS world. I also think some elements
| are interesting, but I am far more excited about bitcoin!
| Bitcoin cannot be inflated, takes mass energy to create it
| (this is good thing!), censorship resistant and not under any
| kind of central control. As long as we are careful, this
| technology can be scaled responsibly.
| [deleted]
| m_j_g wrote:
| Dependent types and homotopy type theory for general purpose
| programming. I am definitely excited about it, but not really
| sure if those hopes will ever materialize as some useful (even in
| the limited scope) technology.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| The application of computer science and uncertainty logic to
| create general human programming frameworks, possibly through
| applying category theory to neuroscience, psychology, daily life.
|
| I'm the only one I know trying to do this. It's changed my life.
| I'm now applying my ideas in how to choose to lovingly coevolve
| with partner and the 2.5-year old we conceived. The results from
| this experiment are getting to the point that people are
| noticing. There exists a unifying spiritual path through my
| (mis?)application of category theory in my daily life. I am a
| noob at hacking the human and I'm saying that after having had
| major successes within this human body. I also recognize I'm
| doing way more than many people, so if I'm a noob, so are most-
| if-not-all people. The Buddha is an example of an elite hacker of
| the human.
|
| Still waiting for people willing to take the first step, which is
| cultivating an ideal learning environment within oneself. This
| means learning to abandon judgments by default.
| tubularhells wrote:
| IoT smart spoons.
| buescher wrote:
| Put a chip in it!
| [deleted]
| joshlemer wrote:
| https://temporal.io/
| swyx wrote:
| what do you like about it? (disclaimer, i work at temporal, but
| just genuinely interested in how you'd describe it in your
| words, good or bad lets hear it)
| poletopole wrote:
| I may be able to answer your question. I only watched the
| video on the landing page and glanced at the docs, but it
| reminds me of what a saga system would do (like redux-saga
| perhaps), meaning that much of the side effects, such as
| networking, are abstracted away from the business logic, and
| there is the concept of compensation when things don't go as
| planned. Very neat!
| swyx wrote:
| yeah, "saga for the backend" is an appealing angle to some
| folks (eg our Coinbase testimonial has that) but i'm not
| sure how many developers know about sagas so I've been
| hesitant to push that too hard (bc then we'd have to teach
| people an extra concept before they get to us).
|
| i'd say something that is maybe hard to appreciate until
| you really get into it is just how much goes into making
| this ultra scalable with distributed transactions. If you
| have ~20 mins for it, I wrote this up recently:
| https://docs.temporal.io/blog/workflow-engine-principles
| joshlemer wrote:
| I would say that it allows one to write statefu, long lasting
| workflows or processes in a durable and persistent way using
| all the niceties of regular programming languages such as
| Go/Java, like control structures, abstraction, etc. In a
| similar way that generators in Python/JS allow one to write
| even complicated iterators much more easily than manually
| keeping track of state yourself, Temporal allows one to
| easily define long-lived stateful processes (on order of
| years even) with the simplicity of roughly:
| while(true) { Thread.sleep(1, MONTH);
| sendReminderEmail(user); }
|
| ...which would normally require one to manually keep track of
| state in queues and key-value stores and idempotent updates,
| but with temporal the developer can just focus on the simple
| business rules. The runtime of Temporal takes care of
| compiling that down into proper state-machine logic.
| swyx wrote:
| yeah nice, exactly. i like calling Temporal a "framework"
| for that reason - you'd have to code + provision all this
| stuff anyway if you're doing anything async, and you're
| probably not testing it properly/thinking through
| scalability needs or lacking debugging tools to investigate
| issues.
|
| I'll volunteer that we don't have Python or JS SDKs right
| now but are working on it
| (https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-node).
|
| i think `Thread.sleep(1, MONTH);` is a profound paradigm
| change in programming that I have been struggling to find
| the words to describe. It's like, where you used to need to
| write "multiuser" code, you can now write code as if you
| simply have _one machine per user_ and it idled or did work
| as long as your user 's activity is still going, whether
| we're talking the end-to-end journey of a food delivery
| startup or machine learning data pipelines or
| infrastructure provisioning at a cloud startup (you can
| even run a workflow for forever, with some careful
| segmentation https://docs.temporal.io/docs/concept-
| workflows#faq).
|
| this is useful market research for us, thank you for taking
| up the suggestion :)
| aaron695 wrote:
| Cheap, 4K, bigger than 24 inch monitors.
|
| I think a lot of people are only allocated one monitor in most
| industries. This will change the way they work.
|
| It will also change design.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| https://darklang.com/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985429
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394166
|
| I think it's inevitable that darklang's vision will be achieved
| eventually, at least in part, whether by darklang or by other
| projects. We are already at the stage where you can define your
| infrastructure in code, and execute functions on managed
| "serverless" runtimes. It's not too much further to the point
| that cloud providers will build tightly integrated developer
| experiences that allow a developer to "just code" while handling
| all of the complexity that comes after. Within some large
| software companies, there is something close to this experience,
| but it hasn't yet been wrapped up and sold to the public.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the
| physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it's
| not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower.
| Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for
| anything you want. It's like a cheat code for computer vision as
| it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on
| all public streets within 10 years. On every Consumer product.
| All over the place, and some of them maybe invisible.
|
| 2) Custom silicon. Open source tools & decentralization of fab
| tech (by countries not wanting to be subject to international
| trade problems... as well as Moore's Law slowing) are gonna make
| this like making a PCB.
|
| 3) Electric airplanes. With wings. "Drones" as VTVL electric
| helicopters have been big for a decade, but there are physical
| limitations to that approach. if you want to see the future, look
| at drone delivery in Rwanda by Zipline. But also, I think we'll
| see passenger electric flight start small and from underserved
| regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds
| comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency)
| but much more granular and without massive infrastructure.
|
| 4) Small tunnels by The Boring Company and probably competitor
| companies with similar ideas. When you can build tunnels for one
| or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an
| urban surface lane, then why NOT put it underground? And they'll
| be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London
| Underground uses. Gets lot of hate from the Twitter Urbanist
| crowd, but what TBC has done for tunneling cost (on the order of
| $10 million per mile) is insanely important for how we think
| about infrastructure in the US.
|
| 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn't grok this.
| They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to
| really long distance airfare or air freight.
|
| 6) Geoengineering. I'm not happy about it, but it's insanely
| cheap so... it'll probably happen.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Fiducials_
|
| If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything
| that encode information to help computers figure out what
| they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been
| waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying
| to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a
| saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-
| readable markers on roads and posts and traffic signs. I'm
| still hoping someone will wake up and make use of this "cheat
| code".
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| machine readable can involve more than visible spectrum.
| Radar and light beam reflectors,non-vis spectrum strobes,
| radio beacons, swarm. Volvo was working on this years back,
| before "autonomous" - cars sharing data via wireless comms.
| There are ways, just no will.
|
| Google, among others, is using private (external, not owned
| or controlled by google ) wi-fi access points as beacons
| for navigation today. Good old wardriving google.
|
| Centralized, standardized solution would be better, more
| reliable, not require mobile internet access for alignment
| with beacons, as they would be in a stored database in the
| vehicle, etc.
| Eduard wrote:
| Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a
| cliff?
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I mean you'd hope that self driving cars had a certain
| amount of error correction and weren't just looking at
| one data point...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| What if someone redraws road lines (or fakes the speed
| limit signs or whatever) to confuse drivers today?
|
| (Also, I've thought of ways that fiducials could be
| resistant to such measures.)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Same thing that happens to humans. You see parts of the
| signage. Or none of it, and drive on memory (and follow the
| behavior of other cars).
|
| The idea behind adding special markings for computers is
| that you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to
| perfect algorithms interpreting signage optimized for human
| consumption, or... you can spend much less time and effort,
| to much better effect, setting up additional signage that's
| easy for computers to consume _and_ provides information
| relevant to computers (which is not necessarily the same as
| what humans need).
|
| Note that roads are controlled, artificial environments.
| There's always someone responsible for maintaining a road
| and signage on it. The infrastructure to deploy additional
| markings dedicated to self-driving cars already exist.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup. Or have signage at an angle that deflects snow. Or
| has a heater or wiper. Or as others have said, use non-
| visible-light fiducials.
|
| Humans rely on road lines and signs as well and when
| those are covered, human capability is reduced and they
| have to drive slower.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries
| we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow
| lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away -
| how are we going to afford something like this?
|
| The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists
| like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and
| more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX.
| Humans brains are cheap in comparison.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Fiducials don't need to be ON the road. They can be on
| signage or whatever. But fiducials are cheap. Just paint.
| (And you can, in fact, draw them by hand using a ruler, a
| square, and patience.)
|
| They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital
| signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation "for
| free." (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch
| of them all over a deformable object to map back the
| shape and deformation.... without lengthy registration
| and with only a single camera... unlike vidicon) And
| they're easy to implement in software. Can be extremely
| fast (<10ms... no real limit as you can implement it in
| an FPGA) and fairly lightweight and can use basically any
| kind of digital camera (good or bad).
| andrew_v4 wrote:
| Hello from Montreal, a city that is booming where you
| can't go a block without hitting a giant hole in the road
| or a bridge that's about to collapse. Having proper lines
| painted is pretty far along our hierarchy of needs. That
| said, I can easily imagine machine readable markers
| leapfrogging most of the existing infrastructure deficit.
|
| It's easier to get money for a futuristic sounding
| project than for routine shoring up of infrastructure so
| it doesn't keep falling apart. (Just like many codebases)
| lettergram wrote:
| Fiducials are amazing and way under utilized. I've worked in
| the space and there's a ton of innovation to be done.
|
| https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/
|
| Imagine encoding virtual objects or NPCs into a fiducial
| without a database... basically a 3D model + actions into a
| piece of paper you can attach anywhere.
| Eduard wrote:
| So I imagined it, and I came to the conclusion it's not more
| than a QR code.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Yes, I too thought this, how does a QR code not already
| accomplish this need?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| A QR code IS a type of fiducial.
|
| There's an entire spectrum of fiducial types based on 2D
| bar code matrices. QR code is the most well known.
|
| But 2D matrices are not as resistant to motion blur, so
| there are advantages to some of the other types.
| lettergram wrote:
| QR code's are a form of fiducial markers. However,
| detection is far different than orientation. Also for
| things like AR, you need quicker detection and orientation,
| which QR code's don't afford
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| From what I understand (which is limited) a QR code can
| function as a fiducial but the cutting edge of fiducials
| far exceed QR codes in terms of recognition speed and can
| be understood in terms of their relative 3D orientation to
| the scanner much more accurately and efficiently than QR
| codes.
|
| The docs page for AprilTag[0] makes for an explanatory
| example,
|
| "AprilTags are conceptually similar to QR Codes, in that
| they are a type of two-dimensional bar code. However, they
| are designed to encode far smaller data payloads (between 4
| and 12 bits), allowing them to be detected more robustly
| and from longer ranges. Further, they are designed for high
| localization accuracy-- you can compute the precise 3D
| position of the AprilTag with respect to the camera."
|
| [0]https://april.eecs.umich.edu/software/apriltag
|
| Something with the recognition speed and 3D orientation
| understanding of an AprilTag and with the information
| density of a QR code seems like it could be quite a useful
| innovation.
| dchuk wrote:
| This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks
| ago: https://chia.net
|
| It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that
| front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very
| efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with
| transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for
| having a secure digital currency.
|
| It also has an interesting, Lisp based programming language on
| it.
|
| But what excites me is that it's lead by Bram Cohen, the dude who
| invented BitTorrent, one of the best pieces of tech I've used
| nearly my whole tech life.
| Graffur wrote:
| The people who have the most hard drive space will mine the
| most Chia. How is that any different to just paying with USD to
| get more? In terms of it being a "much more" fair model.
| GordonS wrote:
| Like you, I'm struggling to see how this is substantially
| different from proof of work, besides trading one limited
| resource (GPUs and power) for another (disks). It surely
| still comes down to real-world money - whoever can afford to
| buy the most disks can mine the most crypto.
| idlewords wrote:
| Not just the most hard drive space, but the very specific
| fast kinds of hard drives you need to farm it efficiently.
|
| The idea that you can do a sustainable cryptocurrency that
| remains sustainable no matter how valuable the tokens become
| in real money terms is self-evidently ridiculous. There's
| always _some_ limiting resource you 'll hit first, and if the
| cryptotokens are worth real money, that resource will get
| scarce.
|
| But Chia is a good example of a brilliant person being so
| seduced by a challenging technical problem that they lose any
| ability to see foundational problems that people with a tenth
| of the brampower would be able to spot instantly.
| dchuk wrote:
| I think the big part is that farming with hard drives is a
| much more approachable thing to do than to try and mine
| BTC/ETH, considering both of those at a minimum require crazy
| GPU hardware, if not full blown custom chips, that no normal
| people will buy. Also, insane energy usage too, which Chia
| doesn't really have.
|
| That being said, yes, with the right amount of investment,
| someone could try and take over the network. That being said,
| look how many Full Nodes are already in the network...
|
| https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/nodes
| Murrawhip wrote:
| I think you mean https://www.chia.net
| dchuk wrote:
| yep, you're right. I'll fix.
| [deleted]
| galfarragem wrote:
| "Good artists copy, great artists steal".
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space
| KerryJones wrote:
| Graphene -- generally has a bunch of uses that are not fully
| explored and I think it has a lot of potential.
|
| Example company creating anti-COVID solutions with it:
| https://www.zengraphene.com/
| leeuw01 wrote:
| Materialize (https://materialize.com/). Although a bit known
| here, my coworkers never heard about it. I think it's going to be
| a game changer.
| posnet wrote:
| Materialize is so cool. I think these to blogs have great wow
| factor for anyone who's worked with streaming data before.
|
| https://materialize.com/lateral-joins-and-demand-driven-quer...
|
| https://materialize.com/temporal-filters/
| mindcrime wrote:
| OK, to add my own answer, instead of just commnenting.
|
| Ummm... to start with "what everybody else has already said." If
| I have anything to add it might be (and somebody might have said
| this already as well, and I just missed it)
|
| Synthetic Biology - this entire field fascinates me, and I expect
| big things to come in the future when we can customize DNA and
| grow items we need, that are tailor made to various parameters.
| This is also the beginning plot-line to many horror novels and
| movies though, so "everything isn't rainbows and sunshine" as
| they say.
|
| Nanotech - related to above, but as with synthetic biology, it
| fascinates me to think what we can do when we have atomic scale
| self-assembling machines.
|
| AR/VR - maybe not "under the radar" anymore, but I think there's
| a ton of untapped potential in this space.
|
| Semantic Web - Yes, I'm still a believer in the idea of RDF /
| SPARQL / etc. I've said enough about this in the past, so I'm not
| going to drill any deeper here.
|
| AI - maybe more "AGI" than the ML stuff we have today that gets
| labeled "AI". And saying that is _not_ an attempt to denigrate ML
| or any of the radical stuff going today. It 's just that for as
| much as contemporary "AI" can do, I think there's a lot it still
| can't do, and I like to daydream about the potential of AI's that
| get closer and closer to (and exceed?) human abilities. See above
| about horror movie plots though. :-(
|
| Fusion: this has definitely been mentioned already, but add me to
| the list of people who are hopeful/excited about the prospects.
|
| Time Travel: Actually no. I kinda hope this is impossible. I have
| a feeling that if unrestricted "Doctor Who" like time travel was
| possible, causality would collapse and all of reality would just
| become a big, jumbled mess, incapable of supporting life.
| southerntofu wrote:
| 1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible
| manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of
| IP addresses) and with strong guarantees against known attacks
| against the DNS (DNSSEC doesn't solve everything).
| https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html
|
| 2. Semantic sysadmin to declare your intent in regards to your
| infrastructure no matter how it is implemented (i.e. with a
| standard specification, interoperability/migration becomes
| possible) https://ttm.sh/dVy.md
|
| 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned
| repository. Sort of what netlify is doing, but using a standard
| so you can use the client of your choice and we tech folks can
| hold onto our CLI while our less-techie friends can enjoy a great
| UI/UX for publishing articles to collective websites.
|
| 4. Structured shell for the masses. Powershell isn't the worst,
| but in my view nushell has a bright future ahead. For the people
| who don't need portability, it may well entirely replace bash,
| Python and perl for writing more maintainable and user-friendly
| shell scripts. https://nushell.sh/
|
| 5. A desktop environment toolkit that focuses on empowering to
| build more opinionated desktops while mutualizing the burden of
| maintenance of core components. Most desktop environments should
| have a common base/library (freedesktop?) where features/bugs can
| be dealt with once and for all and we don't have to reinvent the
| wheel every single time. Last week i learnt some DE folks want to
| fork the whole of GTK because it's becoming too opinionated for
| their usage, and GNOME is nowadays really bloated and buggy
| thanks to javascript hell. Can't we have a user-friendly desktop
| with solid foundations and customizability?
| joeyaiello wrote:
| PM lead for PowerShell here, thanks for the callout! I'll take
| "isn't the worst". ;)
|
| I'd love to get more of your thoughts around how PowerShell
| might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking
| about. We see a lot of folks writing portable CI/CD
| build/test/deploy scripts for cross-platform apps (or to
| support cross-platform development), but we're always looking
| to lower the barrier of entry to get into PowerShell, as it can
| be quite jarring to someone who's used Bash their whole life
| (myself included).
|
| Structured shells have so much potential outside of that,
| though. I find myself using PowerShell to "explore" REST APIs,
| and then it's easy to translate that into something scripted
| and portable. But I'd love to get to a place one day where we
| could treat arbitrary datasets like that, sort of like a
| generalized SQL/JSON/whatever REPL.
|
| Plus, PS enables me to Google regex less :D
| hiq wrote:
| > we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get
| into PowerShell, as it can be quite jarring to someone who's
| used Bash their whole life (myself included).
|
| apt search powershell returns no meaningful result on Debian
| unstable. I think that's a big barrier to entry, at least for
| me and people who deploy using docker images based on Debian
| and Ubuntu.
| zaat wrote:
| Don't return everything, return what I specifically returned
| (yeah, I know about objects, talking about everywhere else).
| I know it will never happen, but one can dream. Painpoints
| aside, you and your team are doing excellent job. Thank you
|
| Edit: unless you are also responsible for DSC, than I'll take
| it back. It's terrible.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Stop shipping your org chart!
|
| Microsoft has always had this problem, but with PowerShell --
| which is supposed to be this unified interface to all things
| Microsoft -- it is glaringly obvious that teams at Microsoft
| do not talk to each other.
|
| To this day, the ActiveDirectory commands throw exceptions
| instead of returning Errors. Are you not allowed to talk to
| them?
|
| The Exchange "Set" commands, if failing to match the provided
| user name, _helpfully_ overwrite the first 1,000 users
| instead because... admins don 't need weekends, am I right?
| Who doesn't enjoy a disaster recovery instead of going to the
| beach?
|
| I'm what you'd categorise as a power user of PS 5.1, having
| written many PS1 modules and several C# modules for customers
| to use at scale. I've barely touched PowerShell Core because
| support for it _within Microsoft_ is more miss than hit.
|
| For example, .NET Core has caused serious issues. PowerShell
| needs _dynamic_ DLL loading to work, but .NET Core hasn 't
| prioritised that, because web apps don't need it. The runtime
| introduced EXE-level flags that should have been DLL-level,
| making certain categories of PowerShell modules impossible to
| develop. I gave up. I no longer develop for PowerShell at
| all. It's just too hard.
|
| It's nice that Out-GridView and Show-Command are back, but
| they launch _under_ the shell window, which makes them hard
| to find at the best of times and very irritating when the
| shell is embedded (E.g.: in VS Code)
|
| The Azure commandlets are generally a pain to work with, so
| I've switched to ARM Templates for most things because
| PowerShell resource provisioning scripts cannot be re-run,
| unlike scripts based on the "az" command line or templates.
| Graph is a monstrosity, and most of my customers are still
| using MSOnline and are firmly tied to PS 5.1 for the
| foreseeable future.
|
| Heaven help you if you need to manage a full suite of Hybrid
| Office 365 backoffice applications. The _connection time
| alone_ is a solid 2 minutes. Commands fail regularly due to
| network or throttling reasons, and scripts in general aren 't
| retry-able as mentioned above. This is a usability disaster.
|
| Last, _but not least:_ Who thought it was a good idea to
| strip the help content out and force users to jump through
| hoops to install it? There ought to be a guild of programmers
| so people like him can be summarily ejected from it!
| flower-giraffe wrote:
| > we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get
| into PowerShell
|
| I've used powershell regularly since way back when (it was
| still called monad when I first tied it).
|
| I'm extremely comfortable in the Windows environment but even
| yesterday I found it easiest to shell out to cmd.exe to pipe
| the output of git fast-export to stop powershell from messing
| with stdout (line feeds)
|
| I really like the idea of a pipeline that can pass more than
| text streams but it absolutely has to be zero friction to
| pipe the output of jq, git (and awk, sed etc for oldies like
| me) without breaking things.
| BadInformatics wrote:
| In case you haven't seen it already, I found
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 to be a pretty
| succinct list of the biggest stumbling points (latency,
| telemetry and documentation).
|
| A couple of more specific points I'd like to add after
| experience writing non-trivial PS scripts:
|
| - Tooling is still spotty. Last I used the VS Code extension,
| it was flaky and provided little in the way of formatting,
| autocomplete or linting. AIUI PowerShell scripts should be
| easier to statically analyze than an average bash script, so
| something as rigorous as ShellCheck would be nice to have
| too.
|
| - Docs around .NET interop still appear to be few and far
| between. I recall having to do quite a bit of guesswork
| around type conversions, calling conventions and the like.
|
| It's nice to see the docs have had a major overhaul since I
| last dug into them though :)
| haecceity wrote:
| Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.
| [deleted]
| readingnews wrote:
| I am a lifelong sysadmin, and have thought about #2 frequently.
| I am thinking seriously about making it a research project. Who
| is behind this document you linked to? Is it tildeverse? Parts
| of that document are pretty up to date, so it does not seem
| very old. I am not really familiar with the null pointer site,
| or even how to find things on it (as in, every now and then I
| am surprised). I am surprised I have not seen this before.
| FrontAid wrote:
| > 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned
| repository.
|
| Did you have some specific tool in mind? Because I completely
| agree that this is a great way of working with content. We have
| been doing that for a couple of months with our own tool. It
| uses Git and stores content in a pretty-printed JSON file.
| Techies can update that directly and push it manually. Content
| editors can use our tool to edit and commit to Git with a
| simple Web UI. Would that go into a direction you were thinking
| of?
| zoover2020 wrote:
| NetlifyCMS comes to mind!
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know
| for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my
| girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you
| need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash?
| The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the
| same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost
| every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they actually use
| zsh now, but still)
| KronisLV wrote:
| In case the nushell link doesn't work for anyone else, consider
| prefixing it with www: https://www.nushell.sh/
|
| Admittedly, i have no idea why we even need to do that
| nowadays, but that seemed to work.
| ryanianian wrote:
| It's because the bare TLD isn't setup to accept requests, but
| the `www` subdomain is (it's DNSed to a different IP):
| $ curl -v --head https://nushell.sh/ * Trying
| 162.255.119.254... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connection
| failed * connect to 162.255.119.254 port 443 failed:
| Connection refused $ curl -v --head
| https://www.nushell.sh/ * Trying 185.199.108.153...
| * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to www.nushell.sh
| (185.199.108.153) port 443 (#0)
|
| Most hosts will alias or redirect away the www subdomain, but
| that's just a convenience. Of course technically foo.com and
| www.foo.com can have different DNS entries.
| macintux wrote:
| My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up
| <ourdomain> as an alias for www.<ourdomain>. Seemed to work
| ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery
| through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't
| figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside.
|
| A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who
| still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way.
| Called up my friend in a hurry, and sure enough, they had
| just finished deploying the same change.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Why even have www.<ourdomain>.<tld> in the first place
| then, if <ourdomain>.<tld> is entirely sufficient on its
| own?
|
| It does appear that it's mostly done for historical
| reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but
| overall it feels like it probably introduces
| unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't
| really seem to be all that useful apart from the
| mentioned situation with CNAMEs.
|
| That's kind of why i asked the question above - maybe
| someone can comment on additional use cases or reasons
| for sticking to the www convention, which aren't covered
| in the linked page.
|
| When i last asked the question to a company who only had
| their website available with wwww but didn't without, i
| got an unsatisfactory and non-specific answer where spam
| was mentioned. I'm not sure whether there's any truth to
| that.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#WWW_prefix
| tootie wrote:
| There was a time I did all my shell commands just directly in
| Perl. If you have it all in your head you can do crazy stuff
| pretty quickly. Especially by having libraries that you can
| import and invoke in one line.
| spullara wrote:
| > 4. Structured shell for the masses.
|
| I wonder if shell stuff would work better in a notebook like
| environment.
|
| Edit: At least one exists: https://shellnotebook.com/
| holoduke wrote:
| 1. Cost per kg for orbital payloads. Soon every company can send
| payload to space. In 10 years from now we will have 50 launches
| every day. The sky will contain at least 100 times more satelites
| than today. every single square cm on earth has connectivity to
| the great web. And not a single part is invisible or unmonitored.
|
| 2. VR and AR In 10 years from now when hardware is capable of
| displaying 16k per eye in a casual lightweight not bigger than
| regular sunglasses devices. Everyone will be wearing one making
| all mobilephones obsolete. Every object, animal or human you
| watch at will be argumented. It will be the greatest new
| technological impact since the rise of mobile phones. Changing
| the live of human being so dramatically
| Dowwie wrote:
| United Therapeutics is trying to "3D print" human kidneys. I pray
| that they succeed at this venture. It will be yet another world-
| changing endeavor for Rothblatt. If you aren't familiar with
| Martine Rothblatt, listen to this interview with Tim Ferriss:
| https://tim.blog/2020/12/16/martine-rothblatt/
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm bullish on Fusion energy.
| ludsan wrote:
| Perovskite for cheaper/more-efficient solar cells. Liquid metal
| batteries (a la Ambri) for grid-scale storage.
| frankus wrote:
| Maybe not exactly under the radar, but when I was last doing
| professional EE/hardware/embedded work around the turn of the
| millennium, the software (EDA, compilers, CAD) and hardware
| (instrumentation, evaluation boards, PCB fabrication) were all
| super expensive, to the extent that they weren't really
| accessible to non financially-independent bootstrappers.
|
| Sometime in the last two decades (and again, I'm probably _super_
| late to the party on this) it 's become extremely affordable to
| dip one's toe into electronic hardware and embedded software. And
| not just at the "breadboarding something with an Arduino" level,
| but at the level of building small production runs of a product
| that people would actually pay money for.
|
| In a way it reminds me of the mid-2000s era of web technology,
| where over the course of a few years you went from "putting
| expensive servers in a data center" to "filling out a web form"
| in order to host an app in a reasonably high-availability
| environment.
|
| Or another way of looking at it, a lot of things that maybe you
| previously had to fund-raise for are now things you can
| bootstrap, and many things are cheap even by hobby standards.
|
| That means for a lot of projects (for technical folks) you don't
| need to convince anyone else that your idea has merit, you can
| just build it and find out.
| cl42 wrote:
| I recently came across Polymarket[1] and am really excited about
| what crypto has in store for prediction markets and insurance.
| I've dabbled in prediction markets over the years. I think they
| have a lot of promise but execution is always an issue. Using ETH
| to create a two-sided marketplace feels much better than having
| prediction markets decide what one can bet on.
|
| More broadly, decentralizing insurance in this way would be very
| cool too... There's little difference, in my mind, between a
| prediction market predicting weather changes or elections, and
| insurance contracts around risk.
|
| ... and what's even cooler is: can we build bots and models to
| actually get an edge on these predictions? Imagine applying HFT
| strategies from stocks to predicting real-world events... Now it
| sounds like we can actually get good at forecasting difficult-to-
| predict human events, rather than just stock prices.
|
| [1] https://polymarket.com/
| hanniabu wrote:
| Doesn't seem much different than Auger
| cl42 wrote:
| When I played with Augur, the community was very quiet and
| not a lot was going on. That was a big challenge for me. I
| also didn't like that you had to use their crypto to actually
| participate -- in Polymarket's case, I understand that they
| are using ETH smart contracts.
|
| There are definitely a few players in this space and I'm
| excited to see where it goes.
| nojito wrote:
| Fees are borderline insane if you are a small volume trader.
|
| If you're in the US there is a regulated prediction market set
| to launch soon.
| cl42 wrote:
| Agreed. _Very_ expensive if you 're throwing in a bit of
| cash.
|
| Do you have more info about the regulated prediction market?
| I'd love to learn more.
| nojito wrote:
| Yup. It's https://kalshi.com/
| cl42 wrote:
| Thanks!!
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Is there really? I worked at Intrade when I was in college.
| It was messy internally but a great concept. Pity the US Gov
| smashed it. It had a lot of potential.
| brunoTbear wrote:
| Absorbent panels for aircraft and angular design that prevents
| reflection of emitted waves.
|
| Oh wait, that's under-the-radar technology.
| grumpymonk77 wrote:
| Just sprayed my coffee out my nose... thanks for the morning
| laugh
| sumnole wrote:
| angular? i thought we are all using vue now.
| fchu wrote:
| It's not very stealth tech if it's vue
| noir_lord wrote:
| Is that a startup in stealth mode?
| thisispete wrote:
| soil science influenced agriculture, watch 'kiss the ground' on
| netflix.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| This stuff seems so obviously correct that it shocks me that
| all farmers aren't already doing it. It makes me wonder if
| there is some catch that the proponents of regenerative ag,
| etc. avoid talking about.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| blockchain internet addresses?
| awb wrote:
| Training AI on CPUs faster than on GPUs (SLIDE):
|
| https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-rice-intel-optimize-ai-c...
| sahaskatta wrote:
| https://tryfinch.com
|
| It's an API for Payroll. The number of use cases is pretty
| amazing!
| philip1209 wrote:
| https://paddle.com - it's like Stripe, but their "Reseller of
| record" means that they handle all sales tax / VAT issues. For
| most SaaS businesses it seems to reduce headaches a lot.
| comprev wrote:
| https://www.fonoa.com/ These guys also have an API for dealing
| with different tax laws around the world. Founded by some ex-
| Uber people.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Ex-Uber isn't really a selling point for a service where you
| face large fines if they get fiddly little legal details
| wrong.
| GordonS wrote:
| Not sure if I'm missing something, but there have been
| companies operating the same way for decades, such as
| FastSpring. These existing companies all charge a pretty penny
| though - is Paddle different in that regard?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Former Paddle customer, don't believe the hype. Everything is
| duct tape and half assed with the API, the checkout process is
| happy path or bust, and you're going to have a hard time
| migrating to a different processor.
|
| Stripe + TaxJar was cheaper and easier to implement and
| maintain.
| allie1 wrote:
| I'm a customer, and it handles a lot of headaches for
| accounting. Basically you have 1 client - paddle, as far as the
| law is concerned. Plus has an easy checkout feature that's
| inline for collecting payment info that never touches your
| server, no headaches securing that info.
| GordonS wrote:
| Did you compare them to others in this space, like
| FastSpring? Would be really interested to see how it stacks
| up.
| dividuum wrote:
| Can you share an approximate percentage they take from a
| transaction for offering that service? Their pricing
| information seems to be hidden behind an email form.
| anomaloustho wrote:
| Around the internet, I saw 5% transaction fee. But, like
| Plaid, they probably customize the fee based on the product
| sold and volume.
| tootie wrote:
| Gaze tracking. There are retail solutions that are easy to use
| and highly accurate. It's a very low-friction way to do hands
| free interactivity.
| corebuffer wrote:
| Yosys and open source FPGA toolchains. I think FPGA are vastly
| underrated and hard to use because of tooling and this is
| promising in changing it.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Indeed. It seems like we're finally seeing a smidgeon of
| movement in this direction lately as well. Lattice have been at
| least semi-friendly to people building OSS support for some of
| their FPGA's and now QuickLogic have come out with some
| explicit support[1] for OSS as well. And I have to admit, given
| that AMD have been at least a nugget more friendly to the OSS
| world over the years, I'm harboring a faint kernel of hope that
| Xilinx may move in this direction a bit as well, under their
| stewardship[2].
|
| [1]: https://www.quicklogic.com/qorc/
|
| [2]: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/xilinx-acquisition
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I work on FPGAs professionally and it is hard for me to come up
| with many commercial applications for them outside of what
| they're currently used for.
| csbartus wrote:
| Javascript and Typescript replacements.
|
| Started learning Clojure / ClojureScript and keeping an eye on ML
| languages like ReScript and ReasonML.
|
| I wish soon I'll be able to never write JS/TS code again.
| haxiomic wrote:
| Take a look at haxe[0] for a compile-to-js ML inspired
| language. It's relatively mature these days and integrates with
| existing typescript definitions via dts2hx[1]
|
| I talk about this more here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26084187
|
| [0] https://haxe.org/
|
| [1] https://github.com/haxiomic/dts2hx
| mdm12 wrote:
| In a similar vein, Fable (an F#-to-JS compiler) is gaining a
| lot of momentum in the F# community. https://fable.io/
| ruffrey wrote:
| Narrowband IoT data service. Very low power, low bandwidth,
| cheap, with increasingly great coverage. It's like an offshoot of
| LTE but classified as a 5G technology for massive numbers of low
| power internet connected devices.
| schappim wrote:
| Most importantly for adoption, it is backed by the major
| Telcos.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I've implemented some use-cases for t-mobile, they basically
| peddle our products as a whitelabel solution to municipalities.
| One of my biggest beef with nbIoT is that 90% of all the use-
| cases I designed would have been better of using LoRaWAN
| instead. The reason why nbIoT is chosen is obviously that it
| provides the operator recurring revenue via a data-SIM but
| apart from costs there are other massive drawbacks such as
| energy draw of an nbIoT enabled sensor when compared to LoRa.
|
| nbIoT is justified if I know that the data volume of my
| "solution" might increase due to feature/scope creep (and
| replacing the battery/sensor isn't going to become an annoyance
| in 2-3 years at end of life).
|
| For most use-case LoRaWAN makes more sense but doesn't have the
| same marketing budget that is available to T-mobile, Vodafone
| and Co.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I work adjacent to this space and LoRa is great (really
| great, the specs look impossible on paper) but everyone has
| been peddling proprietary cloud-based SaaS solutions that
| come and go every year, for about a decade now. For non-
| cloud/SaaS solutions, nothing seemed to be able to compete
| against the branding of wifi and bluetooth. I think this is
| the main reason it didn't take off. 802.11ah looked like it
| was going to finally become a good option, with wifi
| branding, but it somehow was never really released into the
| market.
| SolubleSnake wrote:
| I am really surprised this isn't already more of a 'thing'.
|
| When I did my postgrad research project, back in 2016, I was
| using LoRaWAN and thought it was so obviously going to be huge
| in e.g. AgriTech. Surprised not that much has happened with it
| tbh.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Cheap LoRa chips are finally hitting the market for long
| enough that ecosystems can grow around them. As an example,
| for Radio Control vehicles (planes, drones, cars) there have
| been 3 different systems released over the past year or so,
| and now an open source system called ExpressLRS which is
| gaining traction.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| I have to admit, the idea of a run-of-the-mill security-hole-
| ridden IoT device being exposed to the bare internet over a
| wireless connection that's out of my control gives me the
| heebie-jeebies... and that's ignoring the possibilities for
| malicious use (e.g. using a low powered wireless connection for
| uncontrollable surveillance/data collection).
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 200% this. Pretty soon I'd have to live in a Faraday cage, or
| put all my devices in a Faraday case/jacket.
| g_p wrote:
| The operators would argue this is where their "managed
| service" offering kicks in and gives you value.
|
| Most operators haven't figured out their business model for
| NB-IoT quite yet (at least in Europe) - they're still
| dabbling. Some seem likely to try pair it with enterprise
| "private APN" type solutions. Under such a setup, you can
| actually get quite an interesting system in place - the
| operator locks the SIM to a custom APN, and that APN only
| allows comms to a managed, operator-provided IoT backend.
|
| Then the operator's enterprise services team turns that into
| dashboards and other things the customer can use and access.
| In a sense, they're using "extra slack capacity" on their FDD
| cellular networks (as an NB-IoT carrier is only 200 kHz wide
| and can sit inside or adjacent to a regular 4G or 5G
| carrier), and delivering higher margin managed enterprise
| services.
|
| Some other comments point out the potential to use LoRa -
| indeed, although if you can use LoRa, you probably aren't the
| target market for NB-IoT. If you want to deploy 50 million
| smart meters, a nationwide existing network and managed
| service from the operator starts to get appealing, as does
| them handling security, isolating the devices onto a private
| APN, and helping you update devices in the field.
|
| If you are using LoRa, you need to handle this and deploy the
| infrastructure. To date though, I've seen lots of "unmanaged"
| NB-IoT testing taking place, but not a whole lot of the "full
| service managed offering".
|
| Otherwise I would agree entirely with your point about
| connecting modern IoT devices to the internet, but in this
| case I think it will end up for enterprise type deployments
| where they're restricting that for you.
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| DNA digital data storage
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage
| mariodiana wrote:
| > DNA digital data storage is the process of encoding and
| decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA.
|
| If each "bit" of DNA can be either A, C, G, or T, why call that
| _binary_?
| dinero_rojo wrote:
| I think it's kinda like modern SSDs which also have more
| states than just on or off per storage cell, but it's still
| holding data that can be written/interpreted in binary.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| The _data_ is binary, the _encoding_ doesn 't have to be.
| Most modulation schemes in high-speed digital communication
| uses more than 2 states, but it doesn't make it less
| "digital" (in the end, everything is analog). Gigabit
| Ethernet's PAM-5 uses 5 different voltage levels, but one
| would not call it "quinary computing". Similarly, Wi-Fi's
| QAM-64 uses 64 possible combinations of phases and
| amplitudes, Base64 uses 64-symbol alphabet, but the data
| represented by all of them is still binary.
| silasb wrote:
| dapr.io
| Darmody wrote:
| I can't believe nobody mentioned new natural teeth growth.
|
| No more ceramic implants, no more root canals. Grow new shiny and
| healthy teeth.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| A link please? I've never heard of this before and sounds very
| interesting.
| Darmody wrote:
| https://www.news-medical.net/health/Repairing-Teeth-using-
| St...
| rhindi wrote:
| Homomorphic encryption, which enables you to process data without
| decrypting it. Would solve privacy / data security issues around
| sending data to be processed in the cloud
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Zero knowledge proofs for the win! This is one of the things I
| need to see in a cryptocurrency before I believe it will
| succeed at scale.
|
| 1 Zero-knowledge proofs,
|
| 2 shielded ledgers,
|
| 3 democratized and energy efficiency mining,
|
| 4 inflationary control, and
|
| 5 wallet recovery.
|
| No one has all of these yet, but ZKP is a big part of it.
| iSnow wrote:
| zk-SNARKs are a practical application of ZKPs in crypto.
| 35mm wrote:
| 3 - proof of stake (Cardano etc) solves this, no?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Like I said, lots of coins touch some of these, but I don't
| know of any that has all of them.
| takoid wrote:
| You should look into Monero.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Yep. I have. RandomX and ECDH ledgers are a big plus.
| devmunchies wrote:
| monero is proof of work? is there a proof of stake
| alternative to monero?
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean by shielded ledgers?
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| I am also curious what you mean.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| See my peer comment.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| The fact that wallet IDs are visible in the blockchain
| breaks it completely for me. I do NOT want an immortal
| record of every penny I spent and to whom I gave it.
| Fuuuuuuuck that. Today I have a choice, but with many
| cryptocurrencices (ETH, BTC) that is a "feature" not a
| "bug".
|
| Monero and Ravencoin have transparent and shielded entries.
| I believe the node is encrypted with an ECDH shared secret,
| so the payer and the payee know each other's wallets, but
| no one else does.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| If by inflationary control you mean non limited supply,
| grin (mimblewimble protocol) has all those attributes.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| yes, i did mean that. also pegging it to a real currency,
| like USDCoin. I have not heard of Mimblewimble. Thanks
| for the reference, I'll add it to my list of coins to
| study.
| juancn wrote:
| The extra cost is worrying. You're talking at 4 to 6 orders of
| magnitude increase in resource usage for the same computation.
|
| Unless we figure out some awesome hardware acceleration for it,
| it's not practical but for a few niche applications.
|
| It also has the problem that you can use computation results to
| derive the data, if you have enough control over the
| computation (e.g. a reporting application that allows aggregate
| reports).
| chc4 wrote:
| Modern homomorphic encryption schemes only have a ~100x
| performance hit. That sounds bad, until you remember that
| computers are _really fast_ and spend the majority of time
| doing nothing, and that the difference between writing a
| program in Python or C is already something like 10x.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _Modern homomorphic encryption schemes only have a ~100x
| performance hit._
|
| Really?! Now I'm curious. If I have a simple program for an
| 8-bit CPU @ 1 MHz, when can I run this program on a virtual
| machine using homomorphic encryption, under a reasonable
| runtime? Is it possible yet? If the performance hit is only
| 100x, the runtime should not be much longer than the actual
| chip. But the last time I checked, the hypothetical runtime
| seems to be still impractical.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Data Hubs.
|
| It's queriable like a database but it doesn't store your data -
| it proxies all your other databases and data lakes and stuff, and
| let's you join between them.
|
| Trino is a great example.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Sounds like graphQL
| busterarm wrote:
| Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers
| abraxas wrote:
| is that stuff like Presto?
| dswalter wrote:
| Trino is the community-open-source fork of Presto (they were
| recently required to change the name from PrestoSQL, which
| they had been using to make the Presto lineage clear).
|
| (not affiliated in any way). https://trino.io/
| giantg2 wrote:
| I've used Presto within Hue. I'm not sure if Presto is, but I
| know Hue is.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't think these are really under the radar. We have Hue. We
| also have other apps that act as data hubs, but are slightly
| more constrained.
| ajcp wrote:
| I'm not too deep into the data side of things, but this is
| interesting to think about.
|
| Aren't stuff like data lakes and warehouses supposed to address
| the need for a centralized datastore?
|
| Outside of perhaps an easy-to-apply interface, what benefit
| would a data hub provide over just streaming duplicates from
| all of your databases into a single data lake like Snowflake?
| willvarfar wrote:
| Want to cross ref the erp database with that stuff team x has
| in a lake and join with what team z has in a dwh? You don't
| need pipelines and jobs and working out where to store that
| data... you just need a hub! And you can query it ad hoc too.
|
| We used to have to copy and shuffle data into centralized
| systems so we can query and join it.
|
| Data hubs do away with all that. Stop needing to think about
| storage. Instead, it's just about access.
|
| There have always been fringe tools, eg I once did some cool
| stuff with MySQL spider engine. But modern systems like Trino
| (formerly called Presto) make it easy. And, I predict, will
| hit the mainstream soon.
| ajcp wrote:
| > Stop needing to think about storage. Instead, it's just
| about access.
|
| 100% resonates when you put it that way. Thanks for the
| explanation!
| [deleted]
| sebslomski wrote:
| NativeScript ;-)
| rolivercoffee wrote:
| Any grid energy storage technology. Whether it's small home units
| (smart batteries, vehicle to grid, hydrogen packs...) or huge
| grid scale (liquid air, gravity, liquid metal batteries...)
| momentmaker wrote:
| - oracles for blockchain -
|
| Blockchains are secure systems because they're isolated systems.
| But smart contracts aren't very exciting without data from the
| real world. Oracles are the bridges to supply data from the real
| world to the blockchain world.
|
| However, a system is only as strong as its weakest link. You'd
| want the same security guarantees as what blockchain can provide.
| So the blockchain needs to "trust" oracles to deliver the correct
| data that's immune to manipulations.
|
| With the rise of smart contracts and full automations, I think
| oracles will play a huge role in all of this.
|
| The leading project that's working on this is Chainlink.
| codethief wrote:
| > oracles
|
| Oh no, not another term the "crypto" people have taken from the
| "cryptography" people and re-interpreted in a completely
| different way. :(
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Digital vaccine passports, as in the HealthIT that revolves
| around that space
| jayd16 wrote:
| I'm not sure this is exactly under the radar but I'm excited
| about wearable AR. No it doesn't look real but once you get past
| that we have some amazing tech on the horizon.
|
| Microsoft and Oculus have hands free controls that actually work.
| Inside out tracking is progressing quickly. New UX patterns are
| getting forged.
|
| I'm exited to see what we'll have in a few years time. In my mind
| its far more exciting than something like crypto but gets much
| less press.
| justinlilly wrote:
| Any specific devices? Or just generally the brands of oculus &
| microsoft?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Inside out tracking is crazy good. I have a Quest 1, and this
| technology is seriously impressive. Quest 2 is significantly
| better and cheaper.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| IMHO, it is Restya Core. (Disclosure: I'm on their private beta.)
| It can eat the market of Jira, Slack and Asana.
| fsflover wrote:
| Qubes OS, the _desktop_ OS providing strong security through
| isolation: https://qubes-os.org.
| kroltan wrote:
| Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-relatedly
| things like Prolog? I recently decided to fiddle with Wikidata,
| and it is fascinating to be able to query for any part of a
| statement, not just the value!
|
| In SPARQL you write statements in the form
| <thing> <relation> <thing>
|
| But the cool part is that any of those three parts can be
| extracted, so you can ask things like "what are the cities in
| <country>", or "what country harbors the city <city>", but most
| importantly, "how does <city> relate to <country>".
|
| For example, if you wanted to find out all the historical
| monuments in state capitals of a country (using my home country
| as an example, also pseudocode for your time's sake):
| fetch ?monumentName, ?cityName given ?monument "is
| called" ?monumentName. ?monument "is located within"
| ?city. ?city "is capital of" ?state. ?city "is
| called" ?cityName. ?city "is located within" "Brazil".
| kstenerud wrote:
| I'm super excited about RDF as well. It's going to be the next
| big thing as we finally start connecting our machines and data
| sources together in semantically meaningful ways. I added
| relationships to CE because of this: https://concise-
| encoding.org/#relationships c1 {
| // Marked base resource identifiers used for concatenation.
| "resources" = [
| &people:@"https://springfield.gov/people#"
| &mp:@"https://mypredicates.org/"
| &mo:@"https://myobjects.org/" ] //
| Map-encoded relationships (the map is the subject)
| $people:"homer_simpson" = { /* $mp refers
| to @"https://mypredicates.org/"" * $mp:"wife"
| concatenates to @"https://mypredicates.org/wife"
| */ $mp:"wife" = $people:"marge_simpson"
| // Multiple relationship objects $mp:"regrets"
| = [ $firing
| $forgotten_birthday ] }
| "relationship statements" = [
| &marge_birthday:($people:"marge_simpson" $mp:"birthday"
| 1956-10-01)
| &forgotten_birthday:($people:"homer_simpson" $mp:"forgot"
| $marge_birthday)
| &firing:($people:"montgomery_burns" $mp:"fired"
| $people:"homer_simpson") // Multiple
| relationship subjects ([$firing
| $forgotten_birthday] $mp:"contribute" $mo:"marital_strife")
| ] }
|
| RDF is gonna be so awesome when it finally hits the mainstream!
| walterbell wrote:
| Time travelers unite! Is JSON-LD the modern incarnation of
| semantic web? Which organizations are contributing to, or
| using, concise-encoding?
| bobthechef wrote:
| Did you forget the /s? This sounds like you just read the
| first chapter of a book on the semantic web (SW) from the 90s
| and how great ontologies are and how they'll CHANGE
| EVERYTHING. The SW folks have been hyping this stuff for
| years. It sounds great until you begin to see the practical
| realities around it and it starts to look a little less,
| shall we say, "magical" and more like a huge pain in the ass.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Wow... haven't seen such a mean spirited and openly hostile
| reply in some time. You don't seem to engage much, so
| please take some time to familiarize yourself with the
| guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kroltan wrote:
| A small addendum because I forgot to actually _show_ something
| cool:
|
| Another example, demonstrating the querying for the relation
| part, would be to find Leonardo DaVinci's family members:
| (again in pseudocode so you don't need to dwell in the syntax)
| fetch ?kinName, ?linkName given ?link "is called"
| ?linkName. ?kin "is called" ?kinName. "Leonardo
| DaVinci" ?link ?kin. ?link "is" "familial".
|
| Line 3 was the "mindblow" moment for me, you can ask how two
| objects are related without knowing either one! (though I did
| know one of them in this example, Leonardo)
| poletopole wrote:
| I've been considering writing a graph database on top of SPARQL
| and RDF. Beyond the official docs (which are pretty good), can
| you recommend any other resources for easily getting the hang
| of SPARQL?
| mindcrime wrote:
| _can you recommend any other resources for easily getting the
| hang of SPARQL?_
|
| I'll second the recommendation of Jena (and associated sub-
| project Fuseki). If you know Java (or any JVM language) you
| can use the Jena API directly for manipulating the
| triplestore, and submitting SPARQL queries. If you don't want
| to do that, Fuseki exposes an HTTP based API that you can
| interact with from any environment you prefer.
| keefe wrote:
| I worked in a semweb company ~10 years ago -
| https://jena.apache.org/ as a general starting point is a
| useful library. I remember distinctly OWLIM
| https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Owlim as a great triple
| store.
| kroltan wrote:
| I cannot! I have just recently learned about it and am doing
| so for leisure, not for skill. I'm sorry I couldn't be of
| much use.
|
| In fact I would love to know if someone else does have any
| other resources too :)
| samsquire wrote:
| I am a huge fan of triples to represent things.
|
| I've even written an engine that takes triples and renders web
| apps.
|
| This is effectively a todo MVC as triples: var
| template = { "predicates": [ "NewTodo leftOf
| insertButton", "Todos below insertButton",
| "Todos backedBy todos", "Todos mappedTo
| todos", "Todos key .description",
| "Todos editable $item.description", "insertButton
| on:click insert-new-item", "insert-new-item 0.pushes
| {\"description\": \"$item.NewTodo.description\"}",
| "insert-new-item 0.pushTo $item.todos", "NewTodo backedBy
| NewTodo", "NewTodo mappedTo editBox", "NewTodo
| editable $item.description", "NewTodo key .description"
| ], "widgets": { "todos": {
| "predicates": [ "label hasContent
| .description" ] }, "editBox":
| { "predicates": [ "NewItemField
| hasContent .description" } } },
| "data": { "NewTodo": { "description": "Hello
| world" }, "todos": [ {
| "description": "todo one" }, {
| "description": "todo two" }, {
| "description": "todo three" } ]
| }
|
| }
|
| See https://elaeis.cloud-angle.com/?p=71 and
| https://github.com/samsquire/additive-guis
| motohagiography wrote:
| I've built a few solutions with graph databases (cypher is my
| query language preference, oddly) and use an RDF/OWL ontology
| for some personal documentation projects, and what I think
| holds it back in production is it is too powerful.
|
| "Too powerful" doesn't seem like a thing until you realize it
| undermines DBA's skill investments, means business level people
| have to learn something and solve their own problems instead of
| managing them, disrupts the analyst level conversations that
| exist in powerBI and excel, seems like an extravagent
| performance hit with an unclear value prop to devops people,
| and gives unmanageable godlike powers to the person who
| operates it. (this unmanagability aspect might be what holds
| graph products back too)
|
| If you don't believe me, the list of companies who use them
| also get a rep for having uncanny powers because of their
| graphs, FB, twitter, palantir, uber, etc.
|
| Using ML to parse and normalize data to fit categories in RDF
| graphs is singularity-level tech, imo and where that exists
| today, I'd bet it's mostly secret.
| gryn wrote:
| It's very fascination field with a lot of potential, but
| we're still far from that singularity, unfortunately.
|
| I'm interested in this field and find it fascinating but
| we're still in it's early dark ages.
|
| when it comes to Knowledge representation and reasoning
| there's too much emphasis on the representation part and less
| on the reasoning part, but even this representation part is
| not a solved problem.
| dominotw wrote:
| datomic is the only database that i know that does this, afaik.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-
| relatedly things like Prolog?_
|
| I couldn't agree more. I know a lot of this kind of "semantic
| web" stuff has some pretty vocal detractors and that adoption
| seems limited, but I still think there is a ton of "meat on
| this bone". There's just too much potential awesomeness here
| for this stuff to _not_ be used. I think this is an example of
| where incremental refinement is the name of the game. As
| computers get faster, as we get more data, as algorithms
| improve, etc. we 'll get closer and closer to the tipping point
| where these technologies really start to reveal their
| potential.
| JProthero wrote:
| Muon-Catalyzed Fusion [1].
|
| Briefly it's a genuine, and scientifically uncontroversial, form
| of 'cold' fusion enabled by muons -- a more massive relative of
| the electron that was in the news recently thanks to the
| potentially interesting results coming out of the Muon g-2
| experiment at Fermilab [2].
|
| Like conventional 'hot' plasma fusion, in all experiments to date
| the energy input needed to sustain the process has exceeded the
| output, but it may be possible to use it to generate power.
| Unlike conventional fusion though, it receives relatively little
| attention, and there is no well-funded international effort to
| tackle the associated technical challenges. As with conventional
| fusion the technical challenges seem formidable, but it could be
| an interesting technology if a way could be found to make it
| work.
|
| Listeners of Lex Fridman's podcast may recall that it was briefly
| mentioned in the episode he made last year with his father,
| Alexander Fridman, who is a plasma physicist [3]. As someone who
| has been interested in the idea for years and barely hears any
| mention of it, I was pleasantly surprised it came up.
|
| It was also covered on the MinutePhysics YouTube channel in 2018
| [4].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_catalyzed_fusion
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNCz-8QIWuI
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc
|
| Bonus fact: Muon-Catalyzed fusion was first demonstrated by the
| Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, who, with his geologist son Walter
| Alvarez, later proposed the 'Alvarez hypothesis' for the
| extinction of the dinosaurs by asteroid impact.
| sroussey wrote:
| Could muons generated from this work?
|
| https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/24852.ht...
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Yay, something that wasn't software related!
|
| -A Software Engineer
| nynx wrote:
| It's disappointing that MCF doesn't get more attention.
| RBerenguel wrote:
| I thought research on it had stalled (I looked it up for a
| high-school project... 20-odd years ago). I'm glad to see
| otherwise (or that at least more people see it as interesting),
| I always thought it looked promising.
| NortySpock wrote:
| The MinutePhysics video you linked seemed pretty firm in saying
| we had no clear path to reducing the energy input required to
| create muons or increasing the energy output of the fusion,
| thus never generating net energy.
|
| Are there recent developments in this field that change that?
| [deleted]
| Balgair wrote:
| 1) Dr. Rafael G. Gonzalez-Acuna's analytical solution on the
| Wasserman-Wolf problem
|
| TLDR: We can now make lenses in any shape we please, not just
| with parabolas and circles (kinda).
|
| Should have implications for anything that has to do with light:
| Telescopes, lasers, com-sats, AR/VR, etc.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/a-mexican-physicist-solved-a-2-000-year-...
|
| 2) Memristors. We've not found a cheap and stable little
| component yet like the rest of the 2-lead elements, but it seems
| to be on the way (says every futurist)
|
| TLDR: We'll be forced to re-do a lot of computer HW as the
| memristive ones will be (likely) much faster and cheaper on
| power. Think coin-cell batteries powering very good image
| recognition systems cheap as a dollar-store watch.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
| mam2 wrote:
| defi
| andy99 wrote:
| Uncertainty quantification and OOD detection in machine learning.
| It's on some people's radar, but has the potential to get ML
| adopted much more widely as people understand what it is actually
| really good at, and stop giving it things to do that it's bad at.
|
| For a great recent example that get at some of this, see "Does
| Your Dermatology Classifier Know What It Doesn't Know? Detecting
| the Long-Tail of Unseen Conditions" -
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03829
|
| I'm not affiliated with this work but I am building a company in
| this area (because I'm excited). Company is in my profile.
| siruva07 wrote:
| Atmospheric Water Generators
| jl6 wrote:
| Old tech.
|
| New software development is 99% aimless churn.
|
| We don't need more new tech. We need better applications of old
| tech. There is _so much_ software that works perfectly fine
| already. What's missing is connecting it to real world problems.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying
| -
|
| "Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been
| rediscovering those things every ten years since."
|
| I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I
| think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a
| problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and
| then others came around and wrapped things differently.
|
| It's not BAD to wrap things differently, but the old stuff had
| more of the sharp corners sanded off, and sometimes we lose
| that battle-hardened aspect when we rewrite code.
|
| Except for garbage collection/whatever is happening with memory
| safety today. That's the good stuff.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. Its so shocking when something "new" or at least that
| feels new is actually created. I don't care about the
| countless companies that will make it slightly easier for me
| to get something from point a to point b.
|
| I care a lot about companies that actually make something new
| or popularize something that already existed but didnt have
| widespread appeal.
| swagtricker wrote:
| Yeah. I remember looking at the Slack IPO and saying to
| myself, "Your F'ing kidding me. They went public for doing
| IRC channels in a web browser with emojis?!?!"
| lumost wrote:
| I tend to find that if there is a software idea, there are
| good odds that someone once had it before and probably made
| some code/prototype/paper/blog post/newspaper article on it.
|
| However usually these systems didn't take off because they
| were "before their time". There were cloud services in the
| 80s - but PCs got faster and cheaper than internet speeds
| could keep up. Client side apps looked better than cloud
| apps. Similarly modern data centers, and cloud computing
| primitives didn't exist so reliability was more miss than
| hit.
|
| Now the economics have turned and people need data shared
| across multiple devices. Cloud services are the defacto
| method of developing applications.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what
| AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's
| with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that people today
| are just not interested in.
|
| There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1]
| talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in
| Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used
| to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I'm not
| exactly a spring chicken (as evidenced by the fact that I
| used the phrase "spring chicken")!
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454, link to
| article submitted for the lazy: https://developers.slashdot
| .org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid...
| throwaway0xa wrote:
| Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head
| scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are
| trying to solve have been solved by something like a well
| maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago.
|
| Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers
| have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their
| life...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Your post is about software, but it applies pretty well for
| hardware.
|
| Like looms.
|
| Robotics is actually generally pretty slow. Regular (serial)
| robot arms are usually significantly slower than a human arm.
| Some parallel robots (ie where the motors are mostly stationary
| and don't have to be waved around by other motors), like a
| SCARA or Delta robot, can go about 2-3x the speed of a human,
| but the difference isn't massive (60 vs 150 picks per minute?).
|
| But looms are insane. Their task is simpler, but they can do
| over 2000 picks per second (!). The yarn in air jet looms can
| be moving over 200 mph. And even mechanical looms like Rapier
| looms or projectile looms are super fast. The mechanisms are
| also super advanced and hard to wrap your mind around.
| Centuries of optimization of the first really good industrial
| automation instance will do that, I suppose.
|
| It makes me think we haven't reached a completely flat plateau
| in mechanical development. Our robots today are actually pretty
| primitive compared to where they could... where they really
| _should_ be. It also shows just how hard I think a lot of
| futurists have underestimated human mechanical capability.
| Human dexterity and force density is crazy impressive. Humans
| are actually super strong, fast, AND precise.
|
| And hard automation like looms are also underestimated vs
| "robot arms." Hard automation is so much more effective if you
| can do it. Just robot arms aren't that great vs people
| mey wrote:
| Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in
| general? (As an example)
|
| * Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent
| spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing
| MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc.
| Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead
| of a vendor co-opting.
| networkimprov wrote:
| There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end
| attacks and promote productivity."
|
| https://mnmnotmail.org/
|
| https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail
| StreamBright wrote:
| Amen. We need to walk back from convoluded and bloated software
| to the era when every software was simple.
| https://collapseos.org
| xqyf wrote:
| So why post in a thread that's implicitly about little-known or
| emerging tech?
|
| "The best under-the-radar car? It's a horse and buggy I tells
| ya!" Every one of these posts on HN has to have a hot take
| that's contrarian.
| jl6 wrote:
| I'm completely serious. There's a ton of very old boring
| software that is still somehow little-known to some
| developers. It's under the radar the way soil is under the
| radar - hiding in plain sight, ignored by the folk looking to
| the sky when the problem they actually have is how to grow
| some plants.
|
| I'm also genuinely excited that there is growing momentum
| _away_ from software churn, because we're not going to solve
| the complexity crisis with another framework.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| I kind of agree but I think I can be more specific.
|
| We need to find more/better ways of integrating people with
| tech.
|
| Tech on its own is 10% of the solution. Integrating humans with
| technology is underrated.
|
| (I say this as the owner of various enterprise SaaS businesses
| but I'm sure it applies in all aspects of software)
| mindcrime wrote:
| I think you just won this thread. Seriously, I agree very much
| with your sentiment. The question isn't so much about the very
| latest-and-greatest new technologies per-se, but rather about
| the _applications_ of technologies that are quite often fairly
| old. That 's not to say that there isn't really cool stuff just
| over the horizon, but as you say, we really need better
| applications more than more new tech.
|
| And sometimes the tech we need is "out there" and has been for
| a while, but just hasn't hit "critical mass" yet.
|
| Take @kroltan's answer. I am also _extremely_ bullish on RDF,
| Wikidata, and the like. But most of this stuff is pretty old
| now, especially in "Internet years". Which leads, of course,
| to the question of where the line is between incremental
| refinement of "old tech" and actual "new tech" as a discrete
| thing.
| rolandog wrote:
| I've come to appreciate so many old FOSS tools that are
| incredibly well built and thought of in their design.
|
| Emacs and org-mode (and many things GNU) have started to make
| more and more sense to me in this day and age.
| vavooom wrote:
| I agree with the concept that many industries still _rely on_
| old technology that with a 10% improvement could already
| surpass current "advanced" implementations. A good example
| being the Besides Tool Import Wizard that can scrape PDF data
| with way more ease and simplicity than a manual implementation
| with say Python. And that tool has been around for 20+ years!!
| bob1029 wrote:
| Not just old tech. But old tech made new again. Think about how
| much server-side web hosting de-complicates websites. If you
| had to start with a blank linux box, PHP is still one of the
| fastest ways to get something with a shopping cart functional
| to this very day. If you are into new-fangled shiny shit and
| can't be bothered with old, proven tech, look no further than
| Blazor Server for 99% of the same idea. But also way better
| because you have C# 8.0 and one of the best IDEs + first-class
| debugger support at your disposal.
|
| In some circles, you might even be accused of being a boomer
| for using SQL. I think a lot of developers are missing out on
| just how much runway you can get out of SQL and libraries like
| SQLite. You would also be missing out on one of the greatest
| breakthroughs in the history of computer science with regard to
| our ability to model problem domains and perform inhuman
| queries against them with millisecond execution times. But hey,
| maybe machine learning and mongodb are working for your shop.
|
| The final thing a lot of people miss are old ideas. Put your
| entire application on a _single_ server somewhere, and all of
| its dependencies live in the same box. Optimize the vertical
| before you rewrite for horizontal, because 99% of the time you
| will go bankrupt before you get as big as Netflix so it wont
| matter anyways. Plus, you would go bankrupt faster anyways by
| chasing delusions of web-scale grandeur when you could have had
| the MVP done 3 years ago with just a simple SQLite database
| back-end and a T3a.micro. More likely than not you would have
| discovered it was a bad idea to start with and could more
| quickly move on to the actual thing you should have been
| focusing on.
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