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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?

#361

Post by trasz »

scubbo wrote: post #324
swagtricker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I remember looking at the Slack IPO and saying to myself, "Your F'ing kidding me. They went public for doing IRC channels in a web browser with emojis?!?!"

This isn't _as_ short-sighted as the famous "Dropbox comment"[1], but it's pretty close. a) Slack _clearly_ offers a lot of meaningful functionality over-and-above IRC channels. "Searching" - and, implicitly, persistence - is so fundamental to the offering that it's (apocryphally) part of the acronymic name. Threading, bot support, and channel discovery are all useful features. Sure, all of those things _can_ be impl…

Sadly, Slack is also missing a whole lot of IRC functionality - starting with a proper desktop client. The logging it provides is a joke, even when you actually pay for it. Its search capabilities are nowhere near grep(1).

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

#362

Post by Robotbeat »

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.

I think your question was rhetorical, but there's an answer:

Because it means that modifying the sign is not useful. (Unlike, say, modifying a speed limit sign.) Also, the fiducial can encode its orientation or position (perhaps in relation to other nearby signs... and could be a hash or checksum of its position, to save space), so the vehicle would be able to know there's a mismatch and thus mark the sign as suspect/unreliable if it was in any other spot or orientation.

There are other solutions to these. But the same problem you describe occurs if someone moved a human-readable sign (but without any way to checksum).

I think fiducials are not a panacea. They are just one additional data source in what needs to be a robust sensor-fusion approach. But they make a whole bunch of stuff in machine vision a LOT easier to solve. Machine-learning approaches have the same problems but with less opportunity to address them, less robustness, and more overhead.

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

#363

Post by gnat »

drojas wrote: post #219

Temporal Stores/Databases like Datomic ( https://www.datomic.com/ ) and Crux ( https://opencrux.com/ ). I can't stress enough how much pain they can lift from organizations building teams to "scale" in domains that by nature are tied to requirements about past knowledge like finance, healthcare, governance, audit systems, etc.

How mature is performance optimisation in Datalog? I've joined a place that uses SQL Server, and brought my open source perception of SQL Server as an expensive lumbering behemoth. I'm astonished by how fast SQL Server is, and how mature the tools around it are. We rely on them to tune queries, diagnose contention, etc. My big concern about adopting something like Datomic or Crux is that we'd lose the insight that lets us increase performance without increasing hardware spend.

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

#364

Post by zamfi »

kristov wrote: post #345
Robotbeat wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The potential with arms and other humanoid robotics is to be able to plug them into existing processes without having to make massive structural changes. Robot arms in car factories look like an evolution from a human production line, rather than a completely redesigned production line (or a mashup of the two). Still, redesigning the production around the robot still makes good sense: consider a dishwashing android v…

Didn't Tesla try this for the Model 3 (a fully-automated factory) and it turned out to be a total disaster?

Are they too far ahead of the curve? Or is it just rare that your task remains identical enough (i.e., textiles) for the decades it takes to optimize hardware?

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

#365

Post by jayd16 »

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.

I supposed location and information could be added to a sign along with a certification or checksum. As long as its done in a way that doesn't require exact placement, signs found outside their location are ignored.

...something like, "Forest St. Northbound CLOSED (lat,lon) "?

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

#366

Post by frombody »

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?

FYI - This is literally no different than the current state of affairs.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-...

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

#367

Post by frombody »

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…

I always thought coded signs that also emit some sort of signal to match would make the most sense .. and some sort of consortium to set standards.

Then you could zone off areas that are designated safe for self-driving, among other things.

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

#368

Post by Robotbeat »

jayd16 wrote: post #359
lettergram wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3 kilobytes (what you can store on a little fiducial QR code stamp) is a pretty large amount of data. But you don't need that much. If you just encode a 64bit identifier plus 48 bits of data encoding a bounding box in half-precision floating point for a total of 112 bits (14 bytes). Or maybe 1 byte of precision in each dimension and about 100 points defining the shape for a total of 300 bytes (and another 8 for identification).

You really can store plenty of info in a fiducial. And you can use multiple fiducials to store more if you like. This is still a pretty rich vein to mine.

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

#369

Post by Robotbeat »

frombody wrote: post #366
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?

FYI - This is literally no different than the current state of affairs. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-...

Yeah, in fact it'd be a LOT harder to modify a fiducial that has been checksummed/signed/encrypted.

Human readable signage is potentially much easier to attack than machine-readable signage.

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

#370

Post by Robotbeat »

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #340
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.…

Not that I'm aware of. But I do know others in the industry have changed their minds, like for instance RocketLab. Peter Beck, who said that if they ever were going to make a reusable rocket he'd eat his hat, actually did announce a reusable rocket and later did actually eat (part of) his hat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk&t=188s

(Love that he actually did it haha!)

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