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

Not hard at all to appreciate. I know the consistency woes of juggling thousands of message queues with millions of messages and containers with enormous databases. The problem though, as I found out ironically, is that most dilbert bosses don't appreciate solutions like temporal, unless a tech "guru" tells them about it. For example, I get laughed at when I tell other developers that databases are an antiquated idea and should be avoided in general.

What I've been working on in recent years is actually not too far off in terms of how to approach making truly simple code, but is far off in the sense that it'll take me (alone) years to make a pragmatic implementation, probably as a language in its own right. Rather than attempt to make a system partition tolerant I started thinking what if network partitions were assumed as the default? To answer that question you have to do things like measure the information entropy of data, use knot theory, representation theory such as young lattices, symmetric group mapping, character groups, prime number theory, among other goodies, to represent event-states, workflows, etc. Most of all (this is where things get weird) is rather than code programs, the emphasis becomes how to easily declaratively code and build "homotopic" multiplexed protocols instead (while keeping the business logic familiar), that way SDKs and integrations are a thing of the past. All this has of course has to use existing web standards like HTTP, otherwise it won't be adopted. My friend always laughs at me when I try to explain it to him, so I apologize, ha. But that's all the more reason to appreciate technology like temporal because it's something a developer can use today.

This reminds of Nintendo’s philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology.

https://medium.com/@adamagb/nintendo-s-little-known-product-...

> I'll take "isn't the worst". ;)

You should! It was definitely a compliment.

> I'd love to get more of your thoughts

On a technical level, i would say PowerShell is a breakthrough because it democratized the concept of structured data REPL as a shell. This pattern was well-known to GNU (and other LISP) hackers but not very popular otherwise, so thank you very much for that. Despite that, having telemetry in a shell is a serious problem in my view. That, and other technical criticisms others have mentioned (see previous HN discussions about PowerShell) is why i don't use PowerShell more.

On a more meta level, i'd say the biggest missing feature of the software is self-organization (or democracy if you'd rather call it that). The idea is great but the realization is far from perfect. Like most products pushed by a company, PowerShell is being developed by a team who has their own agenda/way and does not take time/energy to gather community feedback on language design. I believe no single group of humans can figure out the best solutions for everyone else, and that's why community involvement/criticism is important. For this reason, despite being much more modest in the current implementation, i believe NuShell being the child of many minds has more potential to evolve into a more consistent and user-friendly design in the future.

Beyond that, i have a strong political criticism of Microsoft as part of the military industrial complex, as a long-standing enemy to free-software (still no Github or Microsoft XP source code in sight despite all the ongoing openwashing) and user-controled hardware (remember when MS tried to push for SecureBoot to not be removable in BIOS settings?), as an unfair commercial actor abusing its monopoly (forced sale of Windows with computers is NOT ok, and is by law illegal in many countries) and more generally as one among many corporations in this capitalist nightmare profiting from the misery of others and contributing its fair share the destruction of our environment.

This is not a personal criticism (i don't even know you yet! :)) so please don't take it personally. We all make questionable ethical choices at some point in life to make a living (myself included), and i'm no judge of any kind (i'll let you be your own judge if you let me be mine). In my personal reflection about my own life, I found some really good points in this talk by Nabil Hassein called "Computing, Climate Change, and All our Relationships", about the human/political consequences of our trade as global-north technologists. I strongly recommend anyone to watch it: https://nabilhassein.github.io/blog/computing-climate-change...

> how PowerShell might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking about

I don't think i've seen any form of doctests in PowerShell. I think that would be a great addition for many people. A test suite in separate files is fine when you're cloning a repo, but scripts are great precisely because they're single files that can be passed around as needed.

> Structured shells have so much potential outside of that, though.

Indeed! If they're portable enough, have some notion of permissions/capabilities and have a good type system they'd make good candidates as scripting languages to embed in other applications because these applications usually expose structured data and some form of DSL, so having a whole shell ecosystem to develop/debug scripts would be amazing.

I sometimes wonder what a modern, lightweight and consistent Excel/PowerShell frankensteinish child would look like. Both tools are excellent for less experienced users and very functional from a language perspective. From a spreadsheet perspective, a structured shell would for example enable better integration with other data sources (at a cost of security/reproducibility but the tradeoff is worthwhile in many cases i think). From a structured shell perspective, having spreadsheet features to lay data around (for later reuse, instead of linear command history) and graph it easily would be priceless.

> I'd love to get to a place one day where we could treat arbitrary datasets like that, sort of like a generalized SQL/JSON/whatever REPL.

Well that's precisely what nushell's "from" command is doing, supporting CSV, JSON, YAML, and many more! https://www.nushell.sh/book/command_reference.html no SQL there yet ;-)

PS: I wish you the best and hope you can find some time to reflect on your role/status in this world. And i hope i don't sound too condescending, because if you'd asked me yesterday what i would tell a microsoft higher-up given the occasion, it would have been full of expletives :o... so here's me trying to be friendly and constructive as much as possible, hoping we can build a better future for the next generation. Long live the Commune (150th birthday this year)!

Yup. And Actually, you need to know the corners of the QR code pretty precisely to actually de-skew the QR tag to pull out the code from it, and it’s an easy transformation to get 6dof orientation and translation from that (although you need some idea about the camera optics, but that’s easy to calibrate with similar techniques beforehand). You’re right about about speed, though, and some fiducials are much more resistant to motion blur than QR codes are (and work with much lower resolution cameras).

What about attaching normal cars with "beacons" that ping every 5ms? Cheaper?