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Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

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Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#341

Post by clouddrover »

Further EV improvements. Companies like Lucid and Lightyear are doing interesting things on the EV efficiency side, though their cars are not aimed at the mass market. Lightyear is looking to commercialize their solar panels for other automakers as well:

https://lucidmotors.com/

https://lightyear.one/

Volkswagen and Hyundai are doing interesting things on the mass market side of EVs. Volkswagen is now the number 1 BEV maker in Europe and will probably become number 1 in China in a year or two:

https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-elec...

Hyundai is also starting a big EV push. Their future 800-volt cars should be interesting:

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-pro...

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#342

Post by Eugeleo »

gnramires wrote: post #97
juvoni wrote: post #37

Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me. I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.

I've had good experiences with personal Wikis before, but have fallen back to plain notes. I think notetaking by itself is immensely powerful and underappreciated in general (wish I had started earlier), and all that's necessary is building a habit out of it. Maybe this can give it a little extra spice (hopefully not as cumbersome as a full blown personal website).

I can recommend this video [1] from the author of How to Take Smart Notes. The whole Zettelkasten is a great idea, and he explained it succinctly in that talk. He also compares the status quo methods of note taking with the Zettelkasten, which for me was very eye-opening

[1]: https://vimeo.com/275530205

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#343

Post by duckfruit »

jjcm wrote: post #289
duckfruit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove m…

If you’re looking for a real world example of Webassembly being used in production at a large scale for performance gains, check out Figma. Their editor is all wasm based, and is really their secret sauce.

Thank you! I just checked them out, and I stand corrected. Really an excellent design tool and very responsive. I see now that for certain applications WASM is indeed the right tool for the job.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#344

Post by duckfruit »

paulgb wrote: post #158
duckfruit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove m…

> I'd love to see examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it. I've been playing with WebAssembly lately and the moment where it clicked for me how powerful it was was building an in-browser crossword filler ( https://crossword.paulbutler.org/ ). I didn't write a JS version for comparison, but a lot of the speed I got out of it was from doing zero memory allocation during the backtracki…

This is brilliant, thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#346

Post by Eugeleo »

juvoni wrote: post #37

Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me. I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.

I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist. It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor.

I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format).

Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features are implemented as plugins and can be turned off.

And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience with Obsidian).

(Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user)

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#347

Post by rainyMammoth »

jaxn wrote: post #169
threeseed wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never trust any self driving car that didn't use LiDAR. It's an essential sensor for helping to fix issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cSw4fXYqWI&feature=emb_logo And it's not contrived since we've seen situations of Telsa Autopilot behaving weirdly when it sees people on the side of billboards, trucks etc.

I use autopilot every day. It stops for stoplights and stop signs now.

It is misleading. driving on the highway is by far the easiest part of self driving.

Going from 3 nines of safety to 7 nines is going to be the real challenge.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#348

Post by duckfruit »

julianeon wrote: post #263
duckfruit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove m…

I think there might be killer apps that companies aren't publicizing, because it's part of their competitive advantage. Example of WASM being used in a major product: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... You can infer from this that it's making them 3x faster than anything a competitor can make, and probably inspired a lot of those 'Why is Figma so much more awesome than any comparable tool…

Agreed - Figma is a very good example. I stand corrected.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#349

Post by Eugeleo »

typon wrote: post #106
juvoni wrote: post #37

Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me. I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.

How's this different from hypertext? (I genuinely don't know)

Not sure about the specific features of hypertext, but in general: bi-directional linking, block references (Roam is an outliner like Dynalist or Workflowy), block transclusion, graph view of your page network...

Of course, you could throw a bunch of scripts together to approximate these features — but you don’t have to, since Roam (and Obsidian and others) exists.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#350

Post by Eugeleo »

I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist.

It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor.

I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format).

Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features are implemented as plugins and can be turned off.

And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience with Obsidian).

(Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user. I copied most of this comment from another comment of mine)

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

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