Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by bobthechef » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #109

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/…

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.

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

#122

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #116

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.

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.

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

#123

Post by Dowwie » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

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/

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

#124

Post by corebuffer » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

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.

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

#125

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#126

Post by joeyaiello » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:52 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #114

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,…

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

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

#127

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

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?

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.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #114

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,…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by FrontAid » Mon, Apr 12, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #114

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,…

> 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?