StateCharts - similar to Finite State Machines but in a Tree Data Structure
This is probably old-hat to you, but I enjoyed this recent StateChart video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VzMNoHhtU
Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
331–340 of 417 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#332Rebol
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#333(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them. (only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make…
Zulip is great. I tried and failed to convince a group to use it due to not being interested in early adoption, but hope this picks up.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use it in production. Handling roles and permissions in the DB is a game changer.
But beware row-level security. It's great, but the query planning is a huge mess, and you can end up with serious performance issues real fast if you're not careful.
My understanding, perhaps flawed, is that row security policies add predicates to the SQL, which then encounters the query planner like any other. Is this not the case?
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#335Turn your Postgres database into a REST API: https://postgrest.org Previous discussions on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest
At one point, I really thought it was used in Supabase. But I guess they only wrote the js wrapper for it. https://github.com/supabase/postgrest-js Came here to mention Hasura as well (not sure of it's popularity though) https://hasura.io/graphql/database/postgresql
I would not recommend Hasura if you're on PostgreSQL.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like Soviet water computers?
Look around on YouTube. There's some fascinating videos from the 1950s on US Navy mechanical firing computers. These machines can calculate ballistic trajectories with incredible accuracy, accounting for the relative motion of the ships, wind speed, and even the curvature of the earth. Those calculations are not at all trivial!
Yes. They are like sliding rules on steroids.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#337The Haxe programming language ( https://haxe.org/ ). It's insane how unpopular this is compared to its value. "Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash, and allows access to each platform's native capabilities. Haxe has its own VMs (HashLink and NekoVM) but can also run in interpreted mode." It's mostly popular in game dev circles, and is used by: No…
I’ll second this by saying I am currently building a game with Kha, a low level rendering Haxe library that targets all major platforms including consoles. I am utilising the extremely performant 2d immediate mode api which is refreshingly minimalist and exceptionally well designed.
Kha is awesome! I'm using it for https://rpgplayground.com
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#338Tcl. RDF. XML.
Thank you for this. I would add: XSLT
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#339Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#340Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…
It's good for a c or c++ project where libraries are very environment specific. But most modern languages have their own package/environment managers which makes Nix redundant.
No way. Language specific managers are terrible at managing external dependencies. Trying to get python packages to link to system libraries is terrible. Nix makes it infinitely better.