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Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#351

Post by rusticpenn »

calamari4065 wrote: post #255
phillypham wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In ML/AI space, at least some people thing analog computing is the next big thing, https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlfreund/2021/09/23/ibm-resea... . It hasn't taken off, yet, though.

I know, I've had my eye on this topic for a while. Honestly it seems like a perfect application. Neural networks are analog systems. An analog computer can represent neurons very accurately and the entire network is inherently parallel, for free! I can't wait to see what comes out of this research

My research was in this direction. We already know that these analog neural chips could be orders of magnitude faster than digital equivalents. There is also a lot of military research going on in this area for few decades. However architecture innovations are much faster on software level and dedicated hardware approaches have not been able to catch up. Once things slow down on software level, slowly hardware llms could become the norm.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#353

Post by aquariusDue »

wwfn wrote: post #200
aquariusDue wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenclip is exactly what I've been looking for! Thanks! Also how do you use zimwiki? I've been trying it for a month and I don't find it that great compared to something like Obsidian or QOwnNotes or even TiddlyWiki. Do you have a specific workflow?

Yeah! On the actual notetaking side: I think I stumbled into a less deliberate "interstitial journaling" paradigm (a la roam research?). I setup the journal plugin to create a file per week from there keep a list of links to project specific files (hierarchies like :tools:autossh, :studies:R01grant:datashare). I also backlink from the project file to the journal file. So each page looks like a log. I try to aggressiv…

Thank you for the long answer! You've made some really great points, and regarding markdown and org-mode I've been thinking about switching to something like djot instead (from the author of pandoc) but I can't deny the power of emacs and org-mode when combined.

Also your "interstitial journaling" paradigm seems great, I'll try to apply it because I enjoy grounding what I do into some loose chronology kinda.

Thanks again for taking the time to expound on your approach!

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#354

Post by ornornor »

mirthturtle wrote: post #62

Unpopular, at least compared to cars: e-bikes. - costs next to nothing to charge - fast and fun to get around - never pay for parking - cheap maintenance - hauls groceries easily - good exercise

To add, you can convert acoustic bikes to e-bikes with torque sensing using the tsdz2 which is pretty decent once flashed with the open source firmware by casainho.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#355

Post by nprateem »

Honestly, yoga. I'm not talking about the stretching contests they do in most gyms, I'm talking about the real deal. When your sexual energy gets drawn up into your body as your nervous system is awakened you get a new definition for the word 'ecstasy'. It makes you want to jump up and down like a child. You laugh out loud spontaneously at discovering the best secret in the world.

A few people on HN are into Buddhist meditation - I read mentions of Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated or Ingram's book. Indeed I've done several Vipassana and Zen retreats, but they just aren't as integrated as yogas 8 limbs. They may lead to the same place eventually, but I think they take much longer.

If there was a device that made people feel as good as the awakening nervous system, the inventor would be a multi-millionaire, no question (in fact I think I heard a Western monk is involved in a startup to try to create one). It is truly unparalleled and something actually worth experiencing (from what I've seen so far).

For those interested in resources I've found helpful to experience these changes for myself here are 2 I recommend:

* https://www.aypsite.com/10.html

* https://morrismethodsandmore.com/schedules/

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#356

Post by ParetoOptimal »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #264
corethree wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1) not just as well because docker is repeatable, not reproducible Not sure what you're saying here but most likely you're referring to some obscure pedantic difference. Effectively speaking docker and nix shell achieve similar objectives. >2) not if you need GPU acceleration which is a headache in docker, but not Nix shells This is true. But this is the only clear benefit I see. >- devenv.sh - arion - https://flaku…

I assume what they're getting at is that when you download a Docker image it'll always be the same (repeatable), but the image which is built from a Dockerfile may change even if the file does not (not reproducible).

Yes, exactly.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#357

Post by ParetoOptimal »

corethree wrote: post #313
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ReproducibleBuild.html and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds and https://reproducible-builds.org/ says just because something is "repeatable", doesn't mean it is "reproducible".

byte for byte builds? I knew it was some pedantic thing. I'm sorry if some timestamp changes one byte of the build.

No, the biggest issue is you rebuild an image that has apt-update and 20 dependencies break.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#358

Post by ornornor »

aredirect wrote: post #48
pknerd wrote: post #31

Windows :-)

While this sounds very sarcastic, but I actually want to give windows a try, didn't use it for ~ 20 years, I don't even have no idea how it looks like now, but I keep hearing good things

It’s a dumpster fire now. Microsoft shoving their products and choices down your throat, sneaking “updates” that change your settings back to what MS would prefer then to be… windows stopped being good after win2k and has been going downhill ever since. It’s basically a big advertising platform now with an OS on the side.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#359

Post by quickthrower2 »

josephcsible wrote: post #236
quickthrower2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a PITA from an ops point of view unless you use vanilla with no extensions. Each upgrade tends to break a bunch of extensions and you have to hunt around for solutions.

Isn't that only a problem if the extensions you use are third-party? If you use 100 different extensions, but they're all ones Wikipedia uses too, won't you be fine?

Probably.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#360

Post by hypercube33 »

chubot wrote: post #239

(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…

You mentioned regex and there used to be an awesome web engine to basically boil samples down to regex search patterns but now it's a non working creepy SEO page or something http://txt2re.com/

I'd love for it to be back online but can't find the author.

now I just use chatgpt

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