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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?

#421

Post by ssivark »

Robotbeat wrote: post #311
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away - how are we going to afford something like this? The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains…

Fiducials don’t need to be ON the road. They can be on signage or whatever. But fiducials are cheap. Just paint. (And you can, in fact, draw them by hand using a ruler, a square, and patience.) They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation “for free.” (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch of them all over a deformable object to map back the shape an…

Are there such fiducials+libraries available today?

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

#422

Post by mycall »

cunidev wrote: post #241
SavantIdiot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear what you are saying, and that is a good point, and I do agree with the: "Why isn't there an open ISA?" I think the key difference with an OS like Linux and an ISA like RISC-V is that Linux helped literally millions of smart, curious kids get exposed to Unix and tinkering in a OS that wasn't a locked down behemoth: Windows. It changed lives. I don't think it is an exaggeration to overstate the democrization Lin…

To be fair, interest around ISAs has never been so high. Now RISC-V workshops ("build your own core") are kind of everywhere, from Udemy to most universities, some of which are even targeted at teenagers. The resulting RISC-V cores are mostly emulated, but are expanding knowledge of FPGAs immensely as a side effect.

There are so many hardware hackers and makers these days, such as Hackster.io [0], that they are transforming the world around us. We need more of them and RISC-V is well positioned in this space.

[0] http://hackster.io

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

#423

Post by hanniabu »

cl42 wrote: post #38
hanniabu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem much different than Auger

When I played with Augur, the community was very quiet and not a lot was going on. That was a big challenge for me. I also didn't like that you had to use their crypto to actually participate -- in Polymarket's case, I understand that they are using ETH smart contracts. There are definitely a few players in this space and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Interesting, and yeah I will always favor platforms that use ETH vs creating their own token so I'll check this out.

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

#424

Post by disabled »

asdff wrote: post #40
MAXPOOL wrote: post #14

Advances in computational chemistry and computational materials science. Specially using ML to speed up computation. Computational chemistry is already patchwork of different heuristic approaches. Graph neural networks and even some language models seem very promising addition. If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology, medicine and materia…

>If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately There is the rub. Biological simulations have been written for 40 years now. It's an extremely difficult problem considering how many latent variables are at play, and people have been working on it for a very long time now.

A lot of my work revolves around human physiology. I think a lot of that will be improved with very accurate, high resolution, and continuous sensors. When that happens (with BioMEMS of course for most cases), AI will be able to fill in a gap, in a lot of various applications.

In the early 2010s, I was an undergraduate electrical engineering student with type 1 diabetes playing around with such models by reprogramming stuff that had been presented in peer-reviewed journal articles. I eventually programmed a closed loop control system (also known as "Artificial Pancreas System") as a spring break project to inform my insulin dosages. Mostly, it was a soul-searching project as engineering school was physically enduring for me, as I have serious health problems. I had found a paper about a sliding mode control with respect to type 1 diabetes that looked solvable to me, but I did not know if it was actually solvable. I decided to see what I could do with it, and I was successful, in 2011 and barely old enough to legally drink!

Anyways, I can assure you that while research on control systems is drying up, including for physiological systems, that the excitement is just about to begin for what you mention, starting in about 5 years.

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

#425

Post by tfehring »

cl42 wrote: post #5

I recently came across Polymarket[1] and am really excited about what crypto has in store for prediction markets and insurance. I've dabbled in prediction markets over the years. I think they have a lot of promise but execution is always an issue. Using ETH to create a two-sided marketplace feels much better than having prediction markets decide what one can bet on. More broadly, decentralizing insurance in this way…

What is Polymarket doing in the insurance space? Didn't see anything along those lines on their site. I've previously encountered https://etherisc.com in passing, but it's not clear that they have a plan to address the hard parts, particularly leverage/capitalization. I'll also mention/disclose that my current employer, https://ledgerinvesting.com, is doing some cool stuff in the direction of decentralized insurance.

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

#426

Post by networkimprov »

everybodyknows wrote: post #392
networkimprov wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end attacks and promote productivity." https://mnmnotmail.org/ https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail

Serious money may be required. Support for MNM by way of Patreon is requested on the home page. There's also JMAP, with credible standards people involved: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/photos/ Serious industry involvement however appears limited to FastMail.

JMAP is an extension of the email protocol stack; it only replaces IMAP.

TMTP is an alternative to the entire email protocol stack. It will be standardized after it's been proven in a range of real-world scenarios.

The mnm client & server, which implement TMTP, work well today, and have nearly all the features most users need. See docs menu in the online demo.

https://mnmnotmail.org/demo.html

Re "serious money", could you elaborate?

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

#427

Post by hinkley »

coolspot wrote: post #409
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.

Roads cost a ridiculous amount of money. They start at a million per mile and go up from there. Think about how many miles of road their are just in your neighborhood.

The people who complain about how much of our cities are paved have a substantial point.

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

#428

Post by hnick »

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.

The real problem seems to be experience transfer. People reinvent because they don't even know what already exists. They run into the same problems because they don't know they've already been solved. They come up with a flawed solution because they don't know someone else already had the same idea, took their hits, and learned from it.

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

#429

Post by hnick »

ahstilde wrote: post #202

Allergy immunotherapy. I started a company on the backs of this treatment. The way we treat allergies today, with Zyrtec and Claritin, is medieval medicine. It doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just tries to cover it up. Allergy immunotherapy is the future. Most people don't realize that allergies are now a curable disease. In the future, taking Claritin for allergies is going to seem like taking Tylenol for a…

I ran a quick search and apparently it works for stuff like bees and mosquitoes too. Interesting. If I had a couple thousand spare which seems to be the going rate in AU it could be worth trying for my wife who gets giant mosquito bumps that itch for days (they love her blood).
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