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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?

#161

Post by simonswords82 »

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 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)

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

#162

Post by mindcrime »

corebuffer wrote: post #124

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.

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

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

#163

Post by screaminghawk »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #149

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.

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.

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

#165

Post by schappim »

ruffrey wrote: post #8

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.

Most importantly for adoption, it is backed by the major Telcos.

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

#166

Post by distortedsignal »

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.

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.

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

#168

Post by b0tzzzzzzman »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #71
SavantIdiot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you explain what you mean by shielded ledgers?

I am also curious what you mean.

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

#169

Post by walterbell »

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/…

Time travelers unite! Is JSON-LD the modern incarnation of semantic web? Which organizations are contributing to, or using, concise-encoding?

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

#170

Post by iSnow »

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.

zk-SNARKs are a practical application of ZKPs in crypto.
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