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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?

#401

Post by presentation »

jjeaff wrote: post #383
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…

Regarding the boring company, i have seen at least one engineer's breakdown of their tech and it appears they are using off the shelf tunneling equipment and their costs are in line with and sometimes higher than several other established companies that dig smaller tunnels like the Boring Company does. It seems the only competitive advantage they have is the bully pulpit that is Elon Musk and his blind followers that…

To me, seems the real problem is, why are tunnels built in the US orders of magnitude more expensive than tunnels built literally anywhere else? It's a people problem, not a technical one. There are plenty of tunnel projects around the world that are in my opinion far more valuable than shuffling around private cars (the scale of public transit through such tunnels is many orders of magnitude more impactful). But until the US gets its labor costs in check building infrastructure is poor cost-value ratio there.

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

#402

Post by CyberRabbi »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #337
CyberRabbi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can see a similar development happening in the…

> " At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. " No, they won't. By definition, FPGAs always give you less performance per dollar than custom silicon. If they can't afford an expensive computer, then FPGAs and the tooling to use them is even more out of reach by a long way.

By the working analogy here, Linux is also at a disadvantage because it doesn’t run the majority of commercially supported consumer software yet many people still use it. It has shown that people are willing to choose free options even if it’s technically less advanced than closed options. A fully featured de10-nano board costs ~$150 [1] so it’s readily accessible, at least in comparison to desktop pcs.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Terasic-Technologies-P0496-DE10-Nano-...

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

#404

Post by flukus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #351
throwaway0xa wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are trying to solve have been solved by something like a well maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago. Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their life...

The other day I got around to finally learn some COM/DCOM, and realized Windows had microservices built in for 2+ decades, and with better protocols and security...

Recently I ported a suite of 30 year old c/c++ programs, each one was deployable and runable on their own and communicated via sockets, microservices from the early 90's. Likewise FaaS doesn't add much that couldn't be done via apache cgi in the 90's.

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

#405

Post by alfiedotwtf »

mey wrote: post #119
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in general? (As an example) * Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc. Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead of a vendor co-opting.

... that also doesn’t rely on DNS!

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

#406

Post by jwalton »

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…

And punk kids would be covering them over with stickers that machine read as something entirely different. :P Not as easy a thing to crack as it could be. You could cryptographically sign them (sign your signs!) and maybe encode approximate GPS coordinates to prevent them from being moved too far from their original position, but that’s a lot of data to encode in a marker.

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

#407

Post by mikewarot »

1) Capability Based Security - Makes it possible to have actually secure computers, and return the fun to computing by allowing experimentation without fear.

2) Reconfigurable computing - The power of the FPGA without the hassle, a homogeneous lattice of computing nodes as small as single bits allows for fault tolerance, almost unlimited scaling, and perfect security. It offers the power of custom silicon without the grief.

3) Magnetic core logic, initially realized when transistors still weren't reliable enough to build computers out of, may be making a comeback for extreme environments, such as that on Venus.

4) Reversible compilation - being able to work from source --> abstract syntax tree --> source in any language (with comments intact) will be a quite powerful way to refactor legacy codebases in relative safety.

5) Rich source / Literate Programming - embedding content in the program instead of having a ton of "resources" helps reduce the cognitive load of programming.

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

#408

Post by jayd16 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #368
jayd16 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ident…

I haven't seen any formats that give you that much space in a reliable way, but even then, you won't get any texture mapping, normal mapping, animation, etc etc. Why bother when you can reliably store a link and have anything you want?

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

#409

Post by coolspot »

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…

> 4) ... When you can build tunnels for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an urban surface lane ...

Didn’t Las Vegas 1.5 mi tunnel cost ~$50MM ? I don’t think 1.5mi of surface road (not considering right-of-way costs) costs that much.

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

#410

Post by Qu3tzal »

lettergram wrote: post #284
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 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.

Color is tricky because it varies way too much depending on the lighting conditions, right?
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