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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?

#271

Post by yomansat »

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…

I understand that each person is different, but how long does the therapy go for until someone becomes "immune"? I see other comments mentioning 20-30 years, which sounds a lot more expensive than having to take the medieval equivalent for just as long.

I hope I'm wrong!

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

#272

Post by Robotbeat »

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.

Your post is about software, but it applies pretty well for hardware.

Like looms.

Robotics is actually generally pretty slow. Regular (serial) robot arms are usually significantly slower than a human arm. Some parallel robots (ie where the motors are mostly stationary and don’t have to be waved around by other motors), like a SCARA or Delta robot, can go about 2-3x the speed of a human, but the difference isn’t massive (60 vs 150 picks per minute?).

But looms are insane. Their task is simpler, but they can do over 2000 picks per second (!). The yarn in air jet looms can be moving over 200 mph. And even mechanical looms like Rapier looms or projectile looms are super fast. The mechanisms are also super advanced and hard to wrap your mind around. Centuries of optimization of the first really good industrial automation instance will do that, I suppose.

It makes me think we haven’t reached a completely flat plateau in mechanical development. Our robots today are actually pretty primitive compared to where they could... where they really should be. It also shows just how hard I think a lot of futurists have underestimated human mechanical capability. Human dexterity and force density is crazy impressive. Humans are actually super strong, fast, AND precise.

And hard automation like looms are also underestimated vs “robot arms.” Hard automation is so much more effective if you can do it. Just robot arms aren’t that great vs people

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

#274

Post by haecceity »

BadInformatics wrote: post #215
joeyaiello wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, autocompl…

Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.

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

#275

Post by alpaca128 »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #264
alpaca128 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all new houses are built with heat pumps where I live because it's kind of a no-brainer in those situations. And I see one old house after the other being wrapped in new thick isolation. But heat pumps in old homes just aren't a thing because it's expensive and a lot of work to adapt the house's existing heating. People do understand it, they just don't want to bother with that.

What is "isolation"? Is that a typo of "insulation"?

Force of habit. In my native language we use the same word for isolation and insulation.

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

#276

Post by flower-giraffe »

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

I’ve used powershell regularly since way back when (it was still called monad when I first tied it).

I’m extremely comfortable in the Windows environment but even yesterday I found it easiest to shell out to cmd.exe to pipe the output of git fast-export to stop powershell from messing with stdout (line feeds)

I really like the idea of a pipeline that can pass more than text streams but it absolutely has to be zero friction to pipe the output of jq, git (and awk, sed etc for oldies like me) without breaking things.

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

#277

Post by jl6 »

xqyf wrote: post #253
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.

So why post in a thread that's implicitly about little-known or emerging tech? "The best under-the-radar car? It's a horse and buggy I tells ya!" Every one of these posts on HN has to have a hot take that's contrarian.

I’m completely serious. There’s a ton of very old boring software that is still somehow little-known to some developers. It’s under the radar the way soil is under the radar - hiding in plain sight, ignored by the folk looking to the sky when the problem they actually have is how to grow some plants.

I’m also genuinely excited that there is growing momentum away from software churn, because we’re not going to solve the complexity crisis with another framework.

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

#278

Post by holoduke »

1. Cost per kg for orbital payloads. Soon every company can send payload to space. In 10 years from now we will have 50 launches every day. The sky will contain at least 100 times more satelites than today. every single square cm on earth has connectivity to the great web. And not a single part is invisible or unmonitored.

2. VR and AR In 10 years from now when hardware is capable of displaying 16k per eye in a casual lightweight not bigger than regular sunglasses devices. Everyone will be wearing one making all mobilephones obsolete. Every object, animal or human you watch at will be argumented. It will be the greatest new technological impact since the rise of mobile phones. Changing the live of human being so dramatically

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

#279

Post by devmunchies »

takoid wrote: post #139
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.

You should look into Monero.

monero is proof of work? is there a proof of stake alternative to monero?

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

#280

Post by spullara »

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,…

> 4. Structured shell for the masses.

I wonder if shell stuff would work better in a notebook like environment.

Edit: At least one exists: https://shellnotebook.com/

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