Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

news.ycombinator.com

281–290 of 362 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#281
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not an expert, but I tend to trust them. and blockchain proponents want an infallible system audit-able by the public, instead of having to trust anyone. they haven't figured it out completely, they push towards it. in any case blockchain networks can function without computers. very cumbersome though.

Voting systems are hard because most democracies expect ballots to be confidential. Is there a blockchain-based voting system that allows a voter to have high confidence that their vote was counted, but doesn't allow someone else to be able to know how that voter voted?

Not only that; to insure that all of the other anonymous votes correspond to other real, eligible voters!

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not available? I didn't go through the full check-out process; but what happens when you go to buy it? I don't see any reference that it's unavailable.

I just tested it; eventually you get to the end of the shopping cart that asks for credit card details. The submit button says "Pre-order Now".

Yes, you can pre-order it. I have. They will charge you right away and then you will probably wait months, maybe years, until they are ready to release it.

Given how amazing it seems, it was worth it to me to take this gamble for $100.

Unlike a kickstarter, they do offer a full refund if you ever get tired of waiting. I went through that process once when I bought an iPad Pro with the keyboard case; this was before people were testing the Textblade. They did promptly refund my money. I then decided I really did not like the Apple keyboard case, returned it to Apple, and re-pre-ordered the Textblade. That was over a year ago.

The really annoying thing is that they do not do any push notifications, such as emailing status updates. To get their randomly timed updates, one has to be on their forums.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#283
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were excited about VRML in the 90s...

Two things have changed since the 90s: - hardware acceleration is everywhere, we all have an SGI Onyx in our pocket - good positional tracking give us a natural 3D input technique Without those, the tech doesn't work.

Don't forget:

- always connected

- population increase

- boredom increase

- social networking (ie. highly targeted ads)

- mobile payment

- global map / elevation / city map / traffic data free online

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#284
post #39

Textblade: https://waytools.com/ Single row keyboard that has minimal finger movement. It was to be delivered March 2015 or so, but it has yet to be released. They have testers who rave about it and it looks incredible, but it is perpetually around the corner. Originally designed as an ultra-portable phone keyboard, those who have used it tend to use it for all their machines. It has jump slots to quickly switch from…

I saw the videos and it looks really innovative and great.

Although, my concern is that it will not catch on, because people don't usually like to learn "two" keyboards, even though Textblade is essentially a QWERTY keyboard.

The same happened with Dvorak and other variations of the keyboard. While it's easier to type on Dvorak (my own experience), you're going to have to type in QWERTY on other computers. Sometimes you'll get confused about where keys are.

This is also true when switching from Mac to PC and vice-versa. I spend an hour on a PC and when I switch back to Mac, I automatically press Fn instead of CMD.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#285
Truly and honestly, the automated food preparation and retail systems we're building at http://infinite-food.com/ ... constantly available, broader choice of higher quality food for more people with less supply chain waste and at a lower cost in time and money.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#286

New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…

This. There are so many "boring" companies out there that could become so much more competitive if they brought in a couple of full-stack devs to write a basic domain-specific CRUD monolith running on AWS hooked up to a basic mobile app.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#287
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it different now ? Because it doesn't require hardware and it's incredibly accurate...

it never required hardware it was the same exact implementation. you hold up your phone in a magic window

Surely you realize that there's a tremendous difference between on the one hand using solid API's and tools that are baked into the OS (and thus 'installed' on a huge number of people's devices), and on the other hand either building it yourself or relying on yet another app that needs to be installed?

Not to mention execution: my experience with Layar is that it was pretty shit for the most part. Wordlens was cool, but it's not like I can just build an app that uses Wordlens' tech, and even if I could, it would be, well, Word Lens. Not AR in the broader sense.

Everything I've seen from ARKit seems much more solid and much more practically useful than the 'floaty overlay that roughly stays in place' glorified tech demos I mostly see.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#288
post #269

Fusion, of course. It actually is right around the corner now, this time.

Yeah. Fusion will happen in the year of the linux desktop.

I wish I had a fusion reactor that worked as well as my desktop Linux computer. Far from perfect, but it's still a net positive.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#289
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of PicoC, Cling (nee CINT), and Ch (commercial), but that's only three. What others are there? I'm curious about canonical C interpreters as well as things that aren't quite interpreting C but are somehow related.

tcc ? https://bellard.org/tcc/ has: C script supported : just add '#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run' at the first line of your C source, and execute it directly from the command line.

Ah, I forgot tcc. Such an amazing system, so sad that development stalled.

FWIW, I think tcc compiles into RAM, then jmp-s to the result. Pretty much just eliminates the creation of an output file.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of PicoC, Cling (nee CINT), and Ch (commercial), but that's only three. What others are there? I'm curious about canonical C interpreters as well as things that aren't quite interpreting C but are somehow related.

Here is another http://compcert.inria.fr [08/2011] Release of version 1.9 of the Compcert C compiler. Novelties include a reference C interpreter and stronger semantic preservation results.

Oh, another C compiler! I like collecting these - thanks! :)

Question for anyone handing out unofficial legal opinions:

This one is dual-licensed. There are a small kerfuffle of custom licenses that say "no commercial use", but everything is also variously covered by the GPL (v2 or later), LGPL v3, and BSD 3-clause.

Ref: https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert/blob/master/LICENSE

I'm curious if I could use this in a commercial setting if I perfectly comply with the various GPL and BSD licenses.

If I could, that could be a problem for this group, because the repo readme (at https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert) explicitly states "this is not free software."

Post reply on HN