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Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

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Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#101

Post by kroltan »

poletopole wrote: post #69
kroltan wrote: post #57

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 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 ", or "what country harbors the city…

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?

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 :)

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#102

Post by swyx »

joshlemer wrote: post #86
swyx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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 d…

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 :)

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#103

Post by motohagiography »

kroltan wrote: post #57

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 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 ", or "what country harbors the city…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#107

Post by offtop5 »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #77
3arn0wl wrote: post #37

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…

> " ...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.

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

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#108

Post by segfaultbuserr »

chc4 wrote: post #81
juancn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aggreg…

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.

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#109

Post by kstenerud »

kroltan wrote: post #57

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 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 ", or "what country harbors the city…

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!

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#110

Post by GordonS »

Graffur wrote: post #60
dchuk wrote: post #39

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 programmi…

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.

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.
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