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

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171–180 of 553 posts

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

#171

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.

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.

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

#172

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 desig…

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.

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

#173
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.

3 - proof of stake (Cardano etc) solves this, no?

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

#174

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?

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.

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

#176

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 exce…

Yay, something that wasn't software related!

-A Software Engineer

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

#177
post #139

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.

You should look into Monero.

Yep. I have. RandomX and ECDH ledgers are a big plus.

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

#179
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.

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

#180

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 technol…

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.

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