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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?

#351

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwaway0xa wrote: post #225
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are trying to solve have been solved by something like a well maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago. Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their life...

The other day I got around to finally learn some COM/DCOM, and realized Windows had microservices built in for 2+ decades, and with better protocols and security...

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

#353

Post by arriu »

Alright, I'll bite.

We're probably going to see a wave of disruptions from technologies like GPT3.

For example, we might see something like this in the long term:

A) Someone will create a model to accurately convert low level source code to higher level source code that does the same thing when compiled down. Think assembly / machine code to high level code or even English descriptions of the underlying semantics.

B) At this point, why not pipe in some DNA/RNA into the model from A) to get high level insights

C) Give it a couple iterations and it might be possible to create a compiler. For example... C to RNA

D) Finally... solve problems by creating sequences from scratch instead of re-using bits from mother nature

If we ever do get to D), I sure hope no country tries to use this in a terrible way...

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

#354

Post by Robotbeat »

DanHulton wrote: post #338
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…

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?

But this is actually the advantage of this approach vs the alternative. Self-driving (or "autopilot") cars today try to use machine learning to read human-readable signage, but they don't have any good way to verify the values with a checksum and so are really vulnerable to graffiti (as are human drivers to some extent). It's easy to checksum a fiducial. So machine-readable signage is actually much more resistant to that kind of attack than human readable signage.

Error detecting and correcting signage would be able to correct or at least detect the error, and it’s also possible to encrypt or, um, sign the signage. None of those are terribly feasible with human readable signage.

A human can take a crowbar to a railroad track. A human can drop a brick from an overpass. But modifying a signed and error corrected fiducial is gonna be pretty tough.

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

#355

Post by narag »

Robotbeat wrote: post #272
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

Your post is about software, but it applies pretty well for hardware. Like looms. Robotics is actually generally pretty slow. Regular (serial) robot arms are usually significantly slower than a human arm. Some parallel robots (ie where the motors are mostly stationary and don’t have to be waved around by other motors), like a SCARA or Delta robot, can go about 2-3x the speed of a human, but the difference isn’t massi…

I made a search in the page for "robots" and got to your comment.

It's also appropiate to put this comment under some other mentioning old tech. Because robots have become steampunk. Very dear to first sci-fi writers, now they're démodé.

As soon as NLP gets another frog leap, we'll start seeing a comeback.

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

#356

Post by narag »

xqyf wrote: post #253
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

So why post in a thread that's implicitly about little-known or emerging tech? "The best under-the-radar car? It's a horse and buggy I tells ya!" Every one of these posts on HN has to have a hot take that's contrarian.

Some tech appears before its time has come. It gets some popularity but stagnates because some complementary development isn't there yet.

Some form of tablets and smartphones were there years before the iPhone or iPad.

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

#357

Post by choward »

Robotbeat wrote: post #354
DanHulton wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

But this is actually the advantage of this approach vs the alternative. Self-driving (or "autopilot") cars today try to use machine learning to read human-readable signage, but they don't have any good way to verify the values with a checksum and so are really vulnerable to graffiti (as are human drivers to some extent). It's easy to checksum a fiducial. So machine-readable signage is actually much more resistant to…

What good does encryption do? All someone has to do is copy or move the sign.

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

#358

Post by megameter »

distortedsignal wrote: post #166
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying - "Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been rediscovering those things every ten years since." I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and then others came around and wrapped things differently. It's not…

One could say that memory safety is exactly the kind of "sanding off" we need on the concept of the traditional coding paradigms that have governed the software industry since there was a software industry(which, conveniently, is something that got started in the 70's and came of age in the 80's). One long period of structural debt and organizational consolidation, most of it piled on the conceptual framework of Unix, C, and core Internet technologies. There's a shift in the cosmology of computing taking place now, where the base layers are getting reexamined.

And now, a period of reinvestment in the bottom layers and signs of a diasporic divergence emerging. Movements that are ideologically different from yesteryear's FOSS, and a tightening of SV's grip on events that increasingly causes sand to pour through, new purposings of old tech and roads previously untaken. It's like Alan Kay put it: The future is the past AND the present.

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

#359

Post by jayd16 »

lettergram wrote: post #284
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 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.

You're not going to be able to encode that much data on a little stamp. Its way more reliable to use a WebVR link.

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

#360

Post by zamfi »

choward wrote: post #357
Robotbeat wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is actually the advantage of this approach vs the alternative. Self-driving (or "autopilot") cars today try to use machine learning to read human-readable signage, but they don't have any good way to verify the values with a checksum and so are really vulnerable to graffiti (as are human drivers to some extent). It's easy to checksum a fiducial. So machine-readable signage is actually much more resistant to…

What good does encryption do? All someone has to do is copy or move the sign.

The sign could easily be tied to location, no?
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