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Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
371–380 of 553 posts
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you haven't seen it already, I found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26779580 to be a pretty succinct list of the biggest stumbling points (latency, telemetry and documentation). A couple of more specific points I'd like to add after experience writing non-trivial PS scripts: - Tooling is still spotty. Last I used the VS Code extension, it was flaky and provided little in the way of formatting, autocompl…
Tooling?? I write powershell scripts in notepad.
Notepad? Amateurs and your IDEs. REAL developers work without single-level undo, conveniences of vi or emacs.
Real developers use `edlin`.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#3731) 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…
> And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Assuming such tunneling is in fact practical, I vote for burying the vehicles and letting the pedestrians have the surface...
I completely agree. That really is the ideal scenario and we should indeed make the surface safe for kids to walk around with no fear of getting run over... Banish the cars underground. However there are cases where that isn’t practical or where there are weather constraints that make tunneling desirable (for instance, in Minnesota).
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#374Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.
My condo uses a water source heat pump. It took me more than a few minutes to understand, but it’s so sensible. The building runs water in a loop through all the units. An individual unit’s heat pump can either add energy to or take energy from the water. If the water is too hot it can be cooled in a cooling tower on the roof, and if too cold it can be heated in a central water heater. The unit lives in an interior closet and there is no outdoor component, yet it’s central A/C.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#375Developments in the AR/VR space. The haptics stuff coming out is really cool and may be consumer friendly in the near future. Meanwhile headset tech is seeing major investment and light field technology is going to do amazing things for this space.
I work full time in VR, using virtual screens (ImmersedVR). I was never really all that excited about AR/VR outside of entertainment until the first time I accidentally spent 8 hours of focused work.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are good. But not in very cold environments. I have one and when there is more than two degrees of frost it struggles. So for a lot of continental areas they are almost useless since they do not function when you really need them. For temperate climates and coastal regions they are wonderful.
I have one for my 20m2 shed, it works down to -5c at least. Granted my shed has quite good insulation, but still. Worst comes to the worse you could use a ground source heat pump.
Yes to ground source. Obvious thing to do in a cold climate.
I am very sceptical of a Heat Pump working efficiently down to -20F (-28C in modern units)
I found -3C was the lowest. It is a new heat pump obtained with the advice of experts.
Physics. What is the operating fluid that will evaporate at -28C? As it stands I think it is untrue.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?
What happens today when some kids move road cones so they point to oncoming traffic as a prank? You can have a car react the same way I did in that situation - slow down, take in the entirety of the situation ("cones say X, but that leads you into oncoming traffic") and ask the operator for directions or maneuver accordingly. Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't…
You’re actively paying huge dollar figures to experiment with your survival. Which I don’t judge even if I find it too risky for my taste. But your giant expensive experimental hunk of alloys and minerals is also a death sentence for others when it messes up.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’ve stumbled on the REAL reason there’s hesitation with heat pumps. There’s a massive difference in capability and efficiency and usability of heat pumps. The crappy ones don’t even work below freezing. The good ones can operate even down to -20F efficiently, even air source. And ground source ones don’t have a hard limit at all (although they face a similar wide difference in capability). Low effort cheap…
Yeah my parents are an hour south of the Canadian border in New England and they still heat the house with a wood stove during winter for that very reason. But tell ya what that wood stove sure is amazing, keeps it very warm and it’s not a small house.
I have a buddy who put in a fireplace insert and pellet stove. Besides the fact that he picked up very modern implementations of these two devices, he lives on a 10 acre property that's mostly Cherry Trees, so an electric log splitter was purchased along-side the fireplace insert.
He put them in after discovering that heating his house on LP (the only fuel source outside of electric available where he lives) cost about $650/mo to keep his home as warm as he wanted it. IIRC, he was basically keeping his house at 85 on those two devices, alone. He added geothermal a few years later.
His home is in the middle of the windiest parts of the thumb -- very, very cold in the winter with a lot of snow.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting.
There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.
Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?
I mean you’d hope that self driving cars had a certain amount of error correction and weren’t just looking at one data point...
Hope is not a great thing to depend on when it comes to multi-ton fast moving objects