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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?

#441

Post by vdqtp3 »

wildfire wrote: post #389
KronisLV wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even have www. . in the first place then, if . is entirely sufficient on its own? It does appear that it's mostly done for historical reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but overall it feels like it probably introduces unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't really seem to be all that useful apart from the mentioned situation with CNAMEs. That's kind of why i asked the question abov…

While there are plenty of domain which only exist to serve a website, quite a few others have more than that. With a website, if you want to push it onto a Content Delivery Network (CDN) it is easy to change www.example.com to point (via a CNAME record) to the right place. If, however, you want to do that with the just example.com and also want to run things like mail, you can not use the CNAME record. The why is lon…

Is it long and boring? I thought it was just if you declare a CNAME, you can't declare any other types. Full stop.

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

#442

Post by ssivark »

Robotbeat wrote: post #435
ssivark wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there such fiducials+libraries available today?

You can use almost any 2D matrix barcode as a fiducial, and those include error correction/detection already. Signing it would be easy.

I’m familiar with ARUCOs, but in my experience they tend to be somewhat finicky (Eg: mid-identified with a little bit of noise or unfavorable lighting), and accurate poses tend to require a lot more fiducial markers than might be considered “reasonable”.

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

#443

Post by ddorian43 »

jwalton wrote: post #406
TeMPOraL wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pretty easy, make it a felony. Punk kids (usually) don't go around killing people.

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

#444

Post by SeriousM »

Murrawhip wrote: post #41
dchuk wrote: post #39

This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks ago: https://chia.net It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for having a secure digital currency. It also has an interesting, Lisp based programmi…

I think you mean https://www.chia.net

Thank you very much! The idea to have all the computations already in place and just play bingo/lotto is awesome. This is the true spirit of defi

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

#445

Post by nairboon »

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…

> 2) Custom silicon

I know about libresilicon [1], are there any others in this space?

[1]: https://libresilicon.com/

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

#446

Post by yread »

kstenerud wrote: post #140
bobthechef wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you forget the /s? This sounds like you just read the first chapter of a book on the semantic web (SW) from the 90s and how great ontologies are and how they'll CHANGE EVERYTHING. The SW folks have been hyping this stuff for years. It sounds great until you begin to see the practical realities around it and it starts to look a little less, shall we say, "magical" and more like a huge pain in the ass.

Wow... haven't seen such a mean spirited and openly hostile reply in some time. You don't seem to engage much, so please take some time to familiarize yourself with the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW I didn't read it as mean and hostile. It's just the reality - semantic web is here for 20+ years with very little penetrating mainstream. And huge amounts of efforts spent on the technology, filling the databases and creating tooling. What do you think is needed so that people actually use it and it solves some problems for them?

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

#447

Post by 2rsf »

vagrantJin wrote: post #329
TeMPOraL wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What about attaching normal cars with "beacons" that ping every 5ms? Cheaper?

Not the same. It could complement but not replace a general purpose system.

Scania has a self driving truck convoy where a manned truck is followed by several driver less trucks using such beacons. It is not a trivial solution once you dig into it- normal wifi is too slow at highway speeds, and once the air is congested and re-transmissions occur it is even slower. Scania is using 802.11p [1] and still has backups for when connection is lost or delayed.

[1] https://www.nxp.com/products/wireless/dsrc-safety-modem/road...

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

#448

Post by TeMPOraL »

gitgud wrote: post #396
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.

Such a sad perspective of innovation... new ideas don't always result in better technology, but they're certainly not aimless. I suppose you're writing this on a 1982 Commodore 64...

A lot depends on what you value in "innovation". Better, more useful things? The industry has been falling short here. Perpetually reinventing solutions to the same problems, to secure a money flow? Yeah, we're good at it.

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

#449

Post by 2rsf »

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…

It could complement but not replace a general purpose system, and anyway the bigger problem is not navigation but avoiding other cars, pedestrians and obstacles on the road.

Since your solution is based on sending someone to mark the roads, why not use the same someone to simply build a map of the road, Google Maps style with higher accuracy? I think there are a few startups doing just that now.

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

#450

Post by 2rsf »

Robotbeat wrote: post #370
bsmitty5000 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight. I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings. since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all.…

Not that I'm aware of. But I do know others in the industry have changed their minds, like for instance RocketLab. Peter Beck, who said that if they ever were going to make a reusable rocket he'd eat his hat, actually did announce a reusable rocket and later did actually eat (part of) his hat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk&t=188s (Love that he actually did it haha!)

so did the ESA European Space Agency with their Themis project [1]

[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/12/Themis

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