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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?

#221

Post by jalada »

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…

Here in the UK it's incredible how little immunotherapy is prescribed despite the fact that it's been available for ages and known to work. Anecdotally I have heard one problem is that allergy medicine is just not something that GPs are kept well informed about. My GP told me that it was 'unwise to mess with the immune system like this'. Uhh...vaccines?

(source: I have had immunotherapy)

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

#222

Post by AlwaysRock »

distortedsignal wrote: post #166
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…

Yup. Its so shocking when something "new" or at least that feels new is actually created. I don't care about the countless companies that will make it slightly easier for me to get something from point a to point b.

I care a lot about companies that actually make something new or popularize something that already existed but didnt have widespread appeal.

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

#223

Post by macintux »

ryanianian wrote: post #208
KronisLV wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case the nushell link doesn't work for anyone else, consider prefixing it with www: https://www.nushell.sh/ Admittedly, i have no idea why we even need to do that nowadays, but that seemed to work.

It's because the bare TLD isn't setup to accept requests, but the `www` subdomain is (it's DNSed to a different IP): $ curl -v --head https://nushell.sh/ * Trying 162.255.119.254... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connection failed * connect to 162.255.119.254 port 443 failed: Connection refused $ curl -v --head https://www.nushell.sh/ * Trying 185.199.108.153... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to www.nushell.sh (185.199.108.153)…

My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up as an alias for www.. Seemed to work ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside.

A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way. Called up my friend in a hurry, and sure enough, they had just finished deploying the same change.

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

#224

Post by hiq »

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…

> 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).

apt search powershell returns no meaningful result on Debian unstable. I think that's a big barrier to entry, at least for me and people who deploy using docker images based on Debian and Ubuntu.

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

#225

Post by throwaway0xa »

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.

Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are trying to solve have been solved by something like a well maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago.

Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their life...

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

#226

Post by distortedsignal »

lumost wrote: post #197
distortedsignal wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tend to find that if there is a software idea, there are good odds that someone once had it before and probably made some code/prototype/paper/blog post/newspaper article on it. However usually these systems didn't take off because they were "before their time". There were cloud services in the 80s - but PCs got faster and cheaper than internet speeds could keep up. Client side apps looked better than cloud apps. S…

Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that people today are just not interested in.

There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1] talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I'm not exactly a spring chicken (as evidenced by the fact that I used the phrase "spring chicken")!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989454, link to article submitted for the lazy: https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18156250&cid...

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

#227

Post by Robotbeat »

worik wrote: post #209
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.

They are good. But not in very cold environments. I have one and when there is more than two degrees of frost it struggles. So for a lot of continental areas they are almost useless since they do not function when you really need them. For temperate climates and coastal regions they are wonderful.

I think you’ve stumbled on the REAL reason there’s hesitation with heat pumps.

There’s a massive difference in capability and efficiency and usability of heat pumps. The crappy ones don’t even work below freezing. The good ones can operate even down to -20F efficiently, even air source. And ground source ones don’t have a hard limit at all (although they face a similar wide difference in capability).

Low effort cheap heat pumps are gonna do more harm than good in that they’ll convince people that heat pumps suck.

It’s like the difference between a Tesla and a lead acid golf cart. Both are “electric” “cars”, but there’s vastly different capability.

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

#228

Post by jrnichols »

maybe it's been a bit more noticed, but I am enjoying the Fediverse so far, especially peer tube. I think there's a lot of potential there.

now.. the race to see if we can fill it with normal stuff instead of letting conspiracy theorists and racists flood it.

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

#229

Post by squishy47 »

Jamieee wrote: post #36

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

Played around with it a few weeks ago. It was super easy to get going with it. I just dunno what benefits it gives over traditional storage? besides the classic crypto, "censorship resistant". (Also hello HN, this is the first time I've posted anything :p )

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

#230

Post by abetusk »

kscottz wrote: post #194
abetusk wrote: post #186

* FPGAs, and their associated FOSS stack to use them. I haven't been able to really get into FPGAs but I'm optimistic about them. They're pretty clunky right now but I'm hoping they'll just get easier and more accessible. If we want computation that we're able to verify as being secure, FPGAs are the closest I see us getting to it. There's also applications in terms of parallel computation that they can do over more…

OSHWA board member [1] here and developer advocate at Open Robotics (the people who maintain ROS) here. May I suggest you take a look at microROS[3]? I am also super excited about OSHWA certified open hardware [4]. [1] https://certification.oshwa.org/ [2] https://www.openrobotics.org/ [3] https://micro.ros.org/ [4] https://certification.oshwa.org/

I follow you on Twitter! I'm sure you don't remember me at all but I spoke to you briefly at one of the Maker Fairs nearly a decade ago and I've seen you at a few of the Open Hardware Summits. Not that you need to hear it from me but keep up the good work.

I'm also excited about the OSHWA certification. I've found a bunch of great projects through it.

I've been passively watching ROS but it's always seemed a bit heavy weight for a lot of the things I'd want to do or for what's available cheaply right now. I'm sure this will get easier as full Linux systems will become cheaper and more ubiquitous for embedded applications.

I haven't seen microROS, though, so thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

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