Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 553 posts

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

#211

Post by hwatkins »

ahstilde wrote: post #202

Allergy immunotherapy. I started a company on the backs of this treatment. The way we treat allergies today, with Zyrtec and Claritin, is medieval medicine. It doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just tries to cover it up. Allergy immunotherapy is the future. Most people don't realize that allergies are now a curable disease. In the future, taking Claritin for allergies is going to seem like taking Tylenol for a…

This look interesting, it took some digging to get to what the actual treatment is, so it gets your body use to the allergen to build up tolerance. What happens when you have multiple pollen allergies, how does it track all of them. Also seems like many pollens will be region specific, different trees, etc.

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

#213

Post by mindcrime »

OK, to add my own answer, instead of just commnenting.

Ummm... to start with "what everybody else has already said." If I have anything to add it might be (and somebody might have said this already as well, and I just missed it)

Synthetic Biology - this entire field fascinates me, and I expect big things to come in the future when we can customize DNA and grow items we need, that are tailor made to various parameters. This is also the beginning plot-line to many horror novels and movies though, so "everything isn't rainbows and sunshine" as they say.

Nanotech - related to above, but as with synthetic biology, it fascinates me to think what we can do when we have atomic scale self-assembling machines.

AR/VR - maybe not "under the radar" anymore, but I think there's a ton of untapped potential in this space.

Semantic Web - Yes, I'm still a believer in the idea of RDF / SPARQL / etc. I've said enough about this in the past, so I'm not going to drill any deeper here.

AI - maybe more "AGI" than the ML stuff we have today that gets labeled "AI". And saying that is not an attempt to denigrate ML or any of the radical stuff going today. It's just that for as much as contemporary "AI" can do, I think there's a lot it still can't do, and I like to daydream about the potential of AI's that get closer and closer to (and exceed?) human abilities. See above about horror movie plots though. :-(

Fusion: this has definitely been mentioned already, but add me to the list of people who are hopeful/excited about the prospects.

Time Travel: Actually no. I kinda hope this is impossible. I have a feeling that if unrestricted "Doctor Who" like time travel was possible, causality would collapse and all of reality would just become a big, jumbled mess, incapable of supporting life.

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

#214

Post by frankus »

Maybe not exactly under the radar, but when I was last doing professional EE/hardware/embedded work around the turn of the millennium, the software (EDA, compilers, CAD) and hardware (instrumentation, evaluation boards, PCB fabrication) were all super expensive, to the extent that they weren't really accessible to non financially-independent bootstrappers.

Sometime in the last two decades (and again, I'm probably super late to the party on this) it's become extremely affordable to dip one's toe into electronic hardware and embedded software. And not just at the "breadboarding something with an Arduino" level, but at the level of building small production runs of a product that people would actually pay money for.

In a way it reminds me of the mid-2000s era of web technology, where over the course of a few years you went from "putting expensive servers in a data center" to "filling out a web form" in order to host an app in a reasonably high-availability environment.

Or another way of looking at it, a lot of things that maybe you previously had to fund-raise for are now things you can bootstrap, and many things are cheap even by hobby standards.

That means for a lot of projects (for technical folks) you don't need to convince anyone else that your idea has merit, you can just build it and find out.

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

#215

Post by BadInformatics »

joeyaiello wrote: post #126
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 int…

In case you haven't seen it already, I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 to be a pretty succinct list of the biggest stumbling points (latency, telemetry and documentation).

A couple of more specific points I'd like to add after experience writing non-trivial PS scripts:

- Tooling is still spotty. Last I used the VS Code extension, it was flaky and provided little in the way of formatting, autocomplete or linting. AIUI PowerShell scripts should be easier to statically analyze than an average bash script, so something as rigorous as ShellCheck would be nice to have too.

- Docs around .NET interop still appear to be few and far between. I recall having to do quite a bit of guesswork around type conversions, calling conventions and the like.

It's nice to see the docs have had a major overhaul since I last dug into them though :)

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

#216

Post by CyberRabbi »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #206
CyberRabbi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can see a similar development happening in the…

I spent most of my career is a microarchitect at Intel in the late 80's till mid-90's on 486 & Pentium and then again in the late 2000's on Xeon. So the idea of tinkering with an ISA is something that gives me the cold-sweats today! It's a wee bit more complicated than hacking the RTL/VHDL, but I am not saying curious kids should not have the chance to have a go at it! RISC-V is more akin to if I handed a kid a Boein…

Interesting perspective. It’s true the jump from 8-bit to 32-bit architectures involved a lot more than just increasing the data bus width, it came with advances in processor architecture so I understand where you are coming from. That said, I think the hobbiest community will find a happy medium in terms of complexity / hackability. Establishing a base platform seems to me the most important first step.

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

#217

Post by SavantIdiot »

drexlspivey wrote: post #204
SavantIdiot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If by inflationary control you mean non limited supply, grin (mimblewimble protocol) has all those attributes.

yes, i did mean that. also pegging it to a real currency, like USDCoin. I have not heard of Mimblewimble. Thanks for the reference, I'll add it to my list of coins to study.

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

#218

Post by SavantIdiot »

35mm wrote: post #173
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.

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

Like I said, lots of coins touch some of these, but I don't know of any that has all of them.

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

#219

Post by drojas »

Temporal Stores/Databases like Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/) and Crux (https://opencrux.com/). I can't stress enough how much pain they can lift from organizations building teams to "scale" in domains that by nature are tied to requirements about past knowledge like finance, healthcare, governance, audit systems, etc.

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

#220

Post by networkimprov »

mey wrote: post #119
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.

Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in general? (As an example) * Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc. Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead of a vendor co-opting.

There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end attacks and promote productivity."

https://mnmnotmail.org/

https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail

Post reply on HN