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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?

#131

Post by gryn »

motohagiography wrote: post #103
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…

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.

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

#132

Post by dswalter »

abraxas wrote: post #20
willvarfar wrote: post #9

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.

is that stuff like Presto?

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/

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

#133

Post by TranquilMarmot »

anthonyskipper wrote: post #67

IPFS and WASM - Combined they let you build apps that don't need a cloud provider, and can effectively be immortal.

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)

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

#134

Post by secfirstmd »

nojito wrote: post #52
cl42 wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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.

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

#135

Post by JProthero »

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.

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

#137

Post by elihu »

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

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

#138

Post by godelski »

Jamieee wrote: post #36

https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it out, but not seen any uptake yet.

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?

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

#139

Post by takoid »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #47
rhindi wrote: post #29

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

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.

You should look into Monero.

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

#140

Post by kstenerud »

bobthechef wrote: post #121
kstenerud wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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
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