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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?

#241

Post by cunidev »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #182
CyberRabbi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that the availability of Linux saved countless megacorporations from having to pay Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. Yet the availability of Linux has been a boon to people across the board. While I agree there is something not right about cutting into ARM’s profits for the benefit of megacorporations, I think that a royalty-free ISA might genuinely be good for civilization despite that in the same way Linux is…

I hear what you are saying, and that is a good point, and I do agree with the: "Why isn't there an open ISA?" I think the key difference with an OS like Linux and an ISA like RISC-V is that Linux helped literally millions of smart, curious kids get exposed to Unix and tinkering in a OS that wasn't a locked down behemoth: Windows. It changed lives. I don't think it is an exaggeration to overstate the democrization Lin…

To be fair, interest around ISAs has never been so high. Now RISC-V workshops ("build your own core") are kind of everywhere, from Udemy to most universities, some of which are even targeted at teenagers.

The resulting RISC-V cores are mostly emulated, but are expanding knowledge of FPGAs immensely as a side effect.

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

#242

Post by Robotbeat »

Graffur wrote: post #48
pmdulaney wrote: post #46

Electric cars and planes are going to be huge, of course. Increasingly batteries will be replaced by fuel cells, and the hydrogen that powers them will be produced by means of hydrolysis produced by sunlight. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-hydrogen-fuel-machine-ultimate... https://newatlas.com/energy/osu-turro-solar-spectrum-hydroge... https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/April/05152017Ren-Wa...

Is this under the radar?

For electric planes, it is. Up until a year or two ago, I still had fairly intelligent people still saying electric flight is “essentially impossible.”

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

#243

Post by forthwall »

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…

That's really cool that this is a thing, I remember that my friend tried to this to himself by eating fish he was allergic to and then epi-penning himself until his body started to ignore it. (took years!) Glad this appears to be a way safer method

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

#244

Post by jeffreyrogers »

MAXPOOL wrote: post #14

Advances in computational chemistry and computational materials science. Specially using ML to speed up computation. Computational chemistry is already patchwork of different heuristic approaches. Graph neural networks and even some language models seem very promising addition. If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology, medicine and materia…

I have a relative who is a PhD chemist who I talked to about some of this stuff. He is generally skeptical of it because "the interesting chemicals are the ones that have extreme properties and predicting extreme properties is hard". It's a lot easier to model normal behavior than unusual behavior. He wasn't totally against the idea, he just thought it would be much harder than many people assume.

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

#245

Post by posnet »

leeuw01 wrote: post #212

Materialize ( https://materialize.com/ ). Although a bit known here, my coworkers never heard about it. I think it's going to be a game changer.

Materialize is so cool. I think these to blogs have great wow factor for anyone who's worked with streaming data before.

https://materialize.com/lateral-joins-and-demand-driven-quer...

https://materialize.com/temporal-filters/

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

#246

Post by astuyvenberg »

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…

Immunotherapy of all kinds is poised to become the revolutionary medicine of our generation. I'm excited to see what Wyndly does in the future!

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

#247

Post by jayflux »

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.

In the UK there will be a gas boiler ban on new builds in 2025. That’s when we will start to see a market for these.

> 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.

I think there’s genuine reason right now.

For existing houses it only makes sense if you have really good insulation which rules a lot of people out. That’s why they’re only being focused on new builds, so they can guarantee the insolation is adequate.

They’re expensive (for existing housing) and the returns aren’t quite there yet. Parts and expertise are also quite limited compared to boilers (the market isn’t really there yet).

It also depends what climate you live in for how useful they will be

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

#248

Post by robinwa »

Hyperspectral imaging.

It reminds me of a Star Trek tricorder. Imagine having a camera where you can see easily ID greenhouse gases, quantify water/fat content in food, identify plant diseases, verify drug components, identify tumours, and measure blood oxygenation. On the machine vision side of things: it could probably outperform any conventional imaging + DNN combination, and you'd probably get pixel-wise segmentation for free while you're there.

There's been a lot of academic progress going on - it shouldn't be long until hyperspectral imaging makes its way into our lives.

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

#249

Post by RBerenguel »

JProthero wrote: post #135

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…

I thought research on it had stalled (I looked it up for a high-school project… 20-odd years ago). I'm glad to see otherwise (or that at least more people see it as interesting), I always thought it looked promising.

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

#250

Post by signalandnoise »

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.

there have got to be better ways to optimize the design of boilers, surely this is a RF learning problem against heat equations.
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