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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?

#451

Post by 2rsf »

worik wrote: post #209
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #149

Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.

They are good. But not in very cold environments. I have one and when there is more than two degrees of frost it struggles. So for a lot of continental areas they are almost useless since they do not function when you really need them. For temperate climates and coastal regions they are wonderful.

Here in Sweden they are very common, my old and beaten heat pump works down to -20C (-4F) although less efficiently.

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

#452

Post by 2rsf »

martythemaniak wrote: post #252
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #149

Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.

Me too. I've been obsessing over geothermal systems for a while and I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I wrote this essay to clear up my thinking: https://www.greennewdealio.com/heating/robot-mole/

Geothermal is not uncommon here in Sweden, I think that some goes deep instead of wide maybe because we have a lot of rocky ground which is easier to drill into.

But like your article says the installation is too expensive for the expected savings. There is another problem you didn't bring up and is scalability, geothermal works fine for detached houses but not so great in a city where most of the energy goes to.

District heating is a great solution for denser population areas, here we burn trash and solve two problems, and in theory it can be combined with Geothermal heating

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

#453

Post by robinwa »

jldl805 wrote: post #317
robinwa wrote: post #248

Hyperspectral imaging. It reminds me of a Star Trek tricorder. Imagine having a camera where you can see easily ID greenhouse gases, quantify water/fat content in food, identify plant diseases, verify drug components, identify tumours, and measure blood oxygenation. On the machine vision side of things: it could probably outperform any conventional imaging + DNN combination, and you'd probably get pixel-wise segmenta…

It is very much a part of your life if you are a member of the military or any number of government agencies. Has been a long time.

Yeah for sure, the current ones are disgustingly expensive and atrociously hard to use though!

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

#454

Post by elihu »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #185
elihu wrote: post #137

ReBCO tape is interesting stuff. It's a high-temperature superconductor (high-temperature meaning still really cold, but you don't need liquid helium to get there) that can carry a lot of current before it stops being superconducting. It's being used in new tokomak fusion reactor designs, like SPARC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide

An excellent video on this from one of the best Youtube channels in existence (IMHO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpDGKH9_SE

You're right, that's a great video.

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

#455

Post by 2rsf »

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…

> passenger electric flight

There are unsolved physical limitations to that with no solution in the near horizon AFAIK, the energy density of batteries is simply to low (energy per kg) for airplanes to be efficient.

> from underserved regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency) but much more granular and without massive infrastructure

I didn't understand that, is there a limitation for using normal jet fuel planes from regional airports?

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

#456

Post by TeMPOraL »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #190
southerntofu wrote: post #114

1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of IP addresses) and with strong guarantees against known attacks against the DNS (DNSSEC doesn't solve everything). https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html 2. Semantic sysadmin to declare your intent in regards to your infrastructure no matter how it is implemented (i.e. with a standard specification,…

Serious question: Who is the target audience of Nushell? I know for a fact that I couldn't get someone like my parents or my girlfriend to use something like that day to day, and if you need a shell to work more efficiently, why not just learn bash? The learning curve for the 2 seems pretty much exactly the same, and bash has the benefit of being installed on almost every Linux/Unix system, even Macs (I think they ac…

> Who is the target audience of Nushell?

People who a) are trying to escape from the insanity of traditional shells and use something that works with structured data, and b) want something other than PowerShell.

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

#457

Post by elkos »

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #340
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…

> 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.…

It is cost effective if you charge the federal government 3-4 times more than you charge private interests.

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

#458

Post by KaiserPro »

worik wrote: post #376
KaiserPro wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one for my 20m2 shed, it works down to -5c at least. Granted my shed has quite good insulation, but still. Worst comes to the worse you could use a ground source heat pump.

Yes to ground source. Obvious thing to do in a cold climate. I am very sceptical of a Heat Pump working efficiently down to -20F (-28C in modern units) I found -3C was the lowest. It is a new heat pump obtained with the advice of experts. Physics. What is the operating fluid that will evaporate at -28C? As it stands I think it is untrue.

> What is the operating fluid that will evaporate at -28C?

remember that its operating at a much higher pressure than normal plus there is a pressure differential between the "hot" side and the "cold" side.

my refrigerant is propane, which is a gas until -48c at atmospheric pressure.

The main issue is not the refrigerant, but ice build up on the condenser coil. this (I assume) stops the airflow over the coils and generally stops the condenser from absorbing heat(ice might also be less conductive).

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

#459

Post by theaussiestew »

robinwa wrote: post #248

Hyperspectral imaging. It reminds me of a Star Trek tricorder. Imagine having a camera where you can see easily ID greenhouse gases, quantify water/fat content in food, identify plant diseases, verify drug components, identify tumours, and measure blood oxygenation. On the machine vision side of things: it could probably outperform any conventional imaging + DNN combination, and you'd probably get pixel-wise segmenta…

Out of curiosity, do you work in this space? Would be interested in finding out more about the state of the field.

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

#460

Post by refset »

gnat wrote: post #363
drojas wrote: post #219

Temporal Stores/Databases like Datomic ( https://www.datomic.com/ ) and Crux ( https://opencrux.com/ ). I can't stress enough how much pain they can lift from organizations building teams to "scale" in domains that by nature are tied to requirements about past knowledge like finance, healthcare, governance, audit systems, etc.

How mature is performance optimisation in Datalog? I've joined a place that uses SQL Server, and brought my open source perception of SQL Server as an expensive lumbering behemoth. I'm astonished by how fast SQL Server is, and how mature the tools around it are. We rely on them to tune queries, diagnose contention, etc. My big concern about adopting something like Datomic or Crux is that we'd lose the insight that le…

I work on Crux so can share a few details about our implementation of Datalog. The query is compiled into a kind of Worst-Case Optimal Join algorithm [0] which means that certain types of queries (e.g. cyclic graph-analytical queries, like counting triangles) are generally more efficient than what is possible with a non-WCOJ query execution strategy. However, the potency of this approach relies on the query planner calculating a good ordering of variables for the join order, and this is a hard problem in itself.

Crux is usually quite competent at selecting a sensible variable ordering but when it makes a bad choice your query will take an unnecessary performance hit. The workaround for these situations is to break your query into smaller queries (since we don't wish to support any kind of hinting). Over the longer term we will be continuing to build more intelligent heuristics that make use of advanced population statistics. For instance we are about to merge a PR that uses HyperLogLog to inform attribute selectivity: https://github.com/juxt/crux/pull/1472

EDIT: it's also worth pointing out that the workaround of splitting queries apart is only plausible because of the "database as a value" semantics that make it possible to query repeatedly against a fixed transaction-time snapshot. This is useful for composition more generally and makes it much simpler to write compile-to-Datalog query translation layers on top, such as for SQL: https://opencrux.com/blog/crux-sql.html

[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/chrismre/papers/paper49.Ngo.p...

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