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

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41–50 of 417 posts

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

#43
The Arcan display server is a really cool idea. Even if it doesn't manage to get popular, I think there are ideas here that we could mine to use them in popular programs.

- https://arcan-fe.com/2022/10/15/whipping-up-a-new-shell-lash...

- https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/

- https://arcan-fe.com/2020/12/03/arcan-versus-xorg-feature-pa...

- https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-de...

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

#44
Chinese Text Analyzer https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/

Tokenizes chinese text into "words" for learning purposes and then renders the text in a GUI where you can click on a word to get the definition. It's not perfect, but a LLM fine tuned for it will eventually result in much better "tokenization".

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

#45
post #24

GnuPG/PGP and the web of trust[0]. A lot of things I see blockchain being used for today (e.g. NFTs) seems like it would be better solved using standard OpenPGP signatures with no backing chain. Additionally, as machine-generated content proliferates, I think having services use something like the web of trust concept for membership would be super powerful. The problem is, of course, the terrible UX of cryptographic…

> seems like it would be better solved using standard OpenPGP signatures with no backing chain.

Programmability though

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

#46
post #8

Just making the links clickable: Couple of things I like - tarantool https://www.tarantool.io/en/ - rebol/red-lang https://www.red-lang.org/ - U++ : https://www.ultimatepp.org/ - lazarus: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ - fasm: https://flatassembler.net/

I've to admit i tried to edit the post multiple times, even checked the formatting options https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc (having links between angle brackets didn't work :( ) sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for doing the effort :)

> Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.

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

#47
post #12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system This has accounted for about 90% of everything I've built since 1985. Pick code generates my side project: https://eddiots.com/1

My first job involved working on a Pick system. The system started life on a Prime mainframe and was migrated to UniVerse on Solaris.

I seriously miss it.

Every once in a while I try to get back into it. Usually it takes the form of trying (and failing) to get a demo/personal version of UniVerse, but lately I've been poking at ScarletDME a little bit. I'd even pay money (not much since this is just hobby stuff, but some) for UniVerse, but even the cost of it seems to be a closely guarded secret.

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

#50
Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager).

What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific dev shells that install the packages (at the correct versions) to work with that project can almost replace 90% of the docs for getting setup to work on a project.

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