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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?

#311

Post by Robotbeat »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #296
jimhefferon wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?

Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away - how are we going to afford something like this? The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains…

Fiducials don’t need to be ON the road. They can be on signage or whatever. But fiducials are cheap. Just paint. (And you can, in fact, draw them by hand using a ruler, a square, and patience.)

They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation “for free.” (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch of them all over a deformable object to map back the shape and deformation.... without lengthy registration and with only a single camera... unlike vidicon) And they’re easy to implement in software. Can be extremely fast (<10ms... no real limit as you can implement it in an FPGA) and fairly lightweight and can use basically any kind of digital camera (good or bad).

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

#312

Post by Robotbeat »

Eduard wrote: post #289
jimhefferon wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?

Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?

What if someone redraws road lines (or fakes the speed limit signs or whatever) to confuse drivers today?

With machine-readable signage based on fiducials, not only can you error-correct the signage (making it highly resistant to simple alterations and ambiguous readings), you can also encrypt it and get 6 degree of freedom vehicle vs signage pose information. All from a single camera view. That makes it MUCH more resistant to abuse than machine-learning of human-readable signage... arguably more resistant to abuse even than human readable signage is to humans.

(Also, I’ve thought of additional ways that fiducials could be resistant to such measures.)

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

#313

Post by m463 »

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…

many years ago, I had allergy problems and normal allergy shots (increasing dose injections of small quantities of allergens) would not work. They gave me the scratch test and I was allergic to many things, then later I got the prick test and I was allergic to the rest.

What my doctor told me was -- you're going to get increasing doses a few times a week, it will take a lot of time be hard, and at some point you'll bump into an adverse reaction while you're in the waiting room after the shot.

The medical system was kind of broken wrt to my plight.

After consulting a number of folks, I finally found EPD and went to treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzyme_potentiated_desensitiza...

It was really helping, then they stopped offering it in my area. I was pretty bummed they did away with it, because it helped me without side effects. My symptoms decreased in severity and eventually I felt fine. Apparently it was from the UK and worked well there.

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

#314

Post by Robotbeat »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #309
Robotbeat wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

AFAICT intelligent people are still saying that apart from short-hop 10 seater planes, electric flight is impossible.

Yeah, that’s what they say if you press them on it today. They’ll keep moving the goalposts as soon as it becomes too obviously wrong, and then never admit to having been wrong in the first place. ;)

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

#315

Post by andrew_v4 »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #296
jimhefferon wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?

Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away - how are we going to afford something like this? The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains…

Hello from Montreal, a city that is booming where you can't go a block without hitting a giant hole in the road or a bridge that's about to collapse. Having proper lines painted is pretty far along our hierarchy of needs. That said, I can easily imagine machine readable markers leapfrogging most of the existing infrastructure deficit.

It's easier to get money for a futuristic sounding project than for routine shoring up of infrastructure so it doesn't keep falling apart. (Just like many codebases)

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

#316

Post by lettergram »

Eduard wrote: post #287
lettergram wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiducials are amazing and way under utilized. I’ve worked in the space and there’s a ton of innovation to be done. https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/ Imagine encoding virtual objects or NPCs into a fiducial without a database... basically a 3D model + actions into a piece of paper you can attach anywhere.

So I imagined it, and I came to the conclusion it's not more than a QR code.

QR code’s are a form of fiducial markers. However, detection is far different than orientation. Also for things like AR, you need quicker detection and orientation, which QR code’s don’t afford

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

#317

Post by jldl805 »

robinwa wrote: post #248

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 segmenta…

It is very much a part of your life if you are a member of the military or any number of government agencies. Has been a long time.

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

#318

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

The application of computer science and uncertainty logic to create general human programming frameworks, possibly through applying category theory to neuroscience, psychology, daily life.

I'm the only one I know trying to do this. It's changed my life. I'm now applying my ideas in how to choose to lovingly coevolve with partner and the 2.5-year old we conceived. The results from this experiment are getting to the point that people are noticing. There exists a unifying spiritual path through my (mis?)application of category theory in my daily life. I am a noob at hacking the human and I'm saying that after having had major successes within this human body. I also recognize I'm doing way more than many people, so if I'm a noob, so are most-if-not-all people. The Buddha is an example of an elite hacker of the human.

Still waiting for people willing to take the first step, which is cultivating an ideal learning environment within oneself. This means learning to abandon judgments by default.

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

#319

Post by pedalpete »

Neurotech - Sure there is all the stuff about BCI, but we're barely in control of our own brains ATM, so why are we using them to try to control a computer?

We've learned to optimize our bodies through nutrition and physical fitness (even if not everyone does it, we have the know how), but our brains are the next frontier.

I've seen lots of snake oil in this space so far, I was going to link to Halo Neuro, but they've been acquired by a tCDS company - from what I understand, the technology isn't ready yet.

We're building a sleep headband that monitors your sleep state, and uses sound to improve your Sleep Performance -https://soundmind.co

Others in this space are Emotiv and Muse, Dreem

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

#320

Post by Hizonner »

Robotbeat wrote: post #254

1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every…

> And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses.

Assuming such tunneling is in fact practical, I vote for burying the vehicles and letting the pedestrians have the surface...

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