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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?

#371
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the actual case: many thousands of entities, who confirmed hundreds of thousands of previous results?

Would many thousands of entities, who confirmed hundreds of thousands of previous results be preferable over hundreds of thousands of entities, who confirmed many thousands of previous results?

I think I'm pretty much ok with either one.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it matters, many times not. For example I tried to run pip install yesterday on MemGPT on Nix. It failed with a C++ error because they use miniconda. I just created a nix shell with python, pip, etc and ran the pip install command. Things work fine.

Oh God miniconda is a horrible piece of software on Nix. I fell down the Nix rabbit hole, and miniconda was one of the worst things to get working. My first pass used an FHS environment, but eventually I just got the environment.yml file working in micromamba and used that instead. Except micromamba ships it's own linker that I had to override with SHAREDLD, or some random python c++ dependencies wouldn't compile cor…

Yes, this is where I am at. Used it for over a year in a DevOps role and have developed a huge distaste for it. Despite the language itself being one of the most complained about things, I didn't mind it so much. It was the mile-long stack traces, which were often wrong, and constantly fiddling with things I didn't want to fiddle with to get something working. Just ended up costing me way too much time.

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

#374

Definitely Forth and Factor. Every programmer should get a little bit familiar with the concatenative style. 3 days ago i discovered a channel on YT which talks about Forth, even Chuck Moore himself did a talk there talking about GreenThreads and the like. Given that webassembly is a stack language with no GC, i do expect a comeback of concatenative programming some time in the future. https://www.youtube.com/@silico…

Came here to say this, so I entirely agree. I found Forth and the concept of concatenative languages after deep study of the fundamentals of computing, specifically studying Lisps and the Lambda Calculus. Eventually found combinators and the Iota combinator. Finally hit the bottom of the rabbit hole! It really does give the lightbulb moment. “Don’t try to generate code, that is impossible. Only try to realize the tru…

I went through a similar path! Concatenative appeared to me like the most economic paradigm one can possible come up with, a ultimate reduction, for which there’s practically no path to further downward abstraction. It feels more like a primitive building block than anything else. I always admired the design of Unix pipes, and flow oriented programming in general, then you realize that these things are just natural to stack processing, you need to introduce nothing. It’s like you’re programming with order itself. Programming is taught and practiced in a very convoluted way, and it makes you think that complexity must somehow stem for the lower levels of abstraction, until you get a grip of stack virtual machines, they couldn’t be simpler in their innate mechanics. I don’t know if it’s only me, but I used to think Turing Completeness was something challenging to achieve in a system, a hallmark of sophisticated complexity, but as I understood stack based languages I realized it’s the opposite, it’s the hallmark of simplicity. I wonder what it's like to have had Forth et al as a first language…

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

#375
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what you want? You are reliably linking to the specific dynamic libraries you are compiling against. Or was the issue that you expected them to be portable? Or use commonly known dynamic library locations?

It was just surprising, is all. When I use use application from a nix shell, it pretty much always works the way I think. The compiler experience was very jarring, but yes I understand why it works the way it does. I was more or less pointing out the UX issues with Nix that end up turning many people away.

There is definitely a learning investment in order to write good Nix expressions. But, if you write a good nix shell expression for your project, other devs should be able to jump in without really needing to understand those Nix expressions and still get a working environment.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious?

Nim 2.0 changed the default to treating style mismatches as warnings. E.g. it's something to check but not an error. You can easily set a config to make them an error or ignore them.

Cool, that definitely sounds like a welcome improvement.

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

#377

Most people know about MediaWiki even if they don't realize they do, because it powers Wikipedia, but I wish more people used it for documentation. You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's gr…

Mediawiki is huge and very complex. Why not something more simple like instiki? Personally I would prefer a wiki with git backend. I wrote one [1] but I dont recommend using it. https://github.com/entropie/oy

Fossil, the bespoke VCS used by sqlite includes a wiki & web server out of the box. It's not normally what people think of in this domain but I've used it for that purpose and it works great for it. https://fossil-scm.org

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I don't venture too far into analog electronics so I don't know for sure, but it seems like an analog FPGA type system could really take off.

Cypress has been doing something like that for a long time now. Reconfigurable Analog electronics is an interesting field.

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

#379

Analog computation. I don't mean just vacuum tubes or even electronics at all. Mechanical analog computing is insane when you get down to it. You have special shapes that move against each other and do calculus . We make these mechanical models as analogs of more complex physical systems. We can turn huge calculations into relatively simple machines. That we can roll two weirdly shaped gears together and get an integ…

What are some... surprising and relatively easy ways to feel the magic of analog computation?

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

#380

Definitely Forth and Factor. Every programmer should get a little bit familiar with the concatenative style. 3 days ago i discovered a channel on YT which talks about Forth, even Chuck Moore himself did a talk there talking about GreenThreads and the like. Given that webassembly is a stack language with no GC, i do expect a comeback of concatenative programming some time in the future. https://www.youtube.com/@silico…

Came here to say this, so I entirely agree. I found Forth and the concept of concatenative languages after deep study of the fundamentals of computing, specifically studying Lisps and the Lambda Calculus. Eventually found combinators and the Iota combinator. Finally hit the bottom of the rabbit hole! It really does give the lightbulb moment. “Don’t try to generate code, that is impossible. Only try to realize the tru…

How are you using the Forth philosophy? Did you build your own, using another system?
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