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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?

#331

Post by stonogo »

isoprophlex wrote: post #90
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…

Yes! This would be fantastic, I'd love to see this happen. If anyone is working on this, and is looking to hire a computational organic chemist-turned-ai engineer, let me know!

Contact info?

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

#332

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #138
Jamieee wrote: post #36

https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it out, but not seen any uptake yet.

I keep seeing this pop up, but honestly I still don't get it. I'm also weirded out by the filecoin aspect of it. Could you maybe explain it better for the dumb folks like me?

[deleted]

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

#333

Post by southerntofu »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #190
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,…

Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash? The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they ac…

> I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone (...) to use something like that day to day

I know for a fact the opposite is true for me. A simple shell syntax with an amazing documentation is all it takes for people to write useful scripts.

I'm confident i can teach basic programming to a total newbie using a structured shell in a few minutes. Explaining quirks of conditionals and loops in usual shells is trickier: should i use "-eq" or "=" or "=="? why am i iterating over a non-matching globset? etc.

> why not just learn bash?

I have a love-hate relationship with bash. It's good, but full of inconsistencies, and writing reliable, fail-safe scripts is really hard. I much prefer a language in which i'm less productive, but doesn't take me hours of debugging every time i'm reaching an edge case.

Also, bash has very little embedded tooling, compared to nushell. In many cases, you have to learn more tools (languages) like awk, jq. In nushell, such features are built-in.

> being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system

Well, bash is definitely very portable. But at this game, nothing can beat a standard POSIX /bin/sh. Who knows? It may outlive us all :)

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

#335

Post by btgeekboy »

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 happens today when some kids move road cones so they point to oncoming traffic as a prank? You can have a car react the same way I did in that situation - slow down, take in the entirety of the situation ("cones say X, but that leads you into oncoming traffic") and ask the operator for directions or maneuver accordingly.

Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't continue improving the technology.

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

#336

Post by john-state-moz »

candiddevmike wrote: post #72
philip1209 wrote: post #7

https://paddle.com - it's like Stripe, but their "Reseller of record" means that they handle all sales tax / VAT issues. For most SaaS businesses it seems to reduce headaches a lot.

Former Paddle customer, don't believe the hype. Everything is duct tape and half assed with the API, the checkout process is happy path or bust, and you're going to have a hard time migrating to a different processor. Stripe + TaxJar was cheaper and easier to implement and maintain.

Another former Paddle customer: I agree with Mike here. Additionally, issuing anything other than the most trivial coupon was a huge hassle, to the point that it distracted from other work (small team).

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

#337

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #191
SavantIdiot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can see a similar development happening in the…

> "At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs."

No, they won't. By definition, FPGAs always give you less performance per dollar than custom silicon. If they can't afford an expensive computer, then FPGAs and the tooling to use them is even more out of reach by a long way.

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

#338

Post by DanHulton »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #281
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…

> Fiducials If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything that encode information to help computers figure out what they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-readable markers on roads and posts and…

It would seem like the attack vector for this technology is SUPER simple to pull off. How do you trust self-driving cars that use this in a world where graffiti exists?

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

#339

Post by the_arun »

vagrantJin wrote: post #329
TeMPOraL wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fiducials If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything that encode information to help computers figure out what they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-readable markers on roads and posts and…

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

Wouldn't super high resolution longitude/latitude coordination (measuring close to a feet) help this to do it without any external tool?

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

#340

Post by bsmitty5000 »

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…

> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight.

I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings.

since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all. Do you know if ULA changed their stance after all the successful launches?

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