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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?

#461

Post by treszkai »

ddorian43 wrote: post #443
jwalton wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because killing people feels bad, but destroying objects feels like a prank (especially to those who don't understand the consequences). I don't think laws hold back punks from murder; customs do.

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

#462

Post by vitorbaptistaa »

Hizonner wrote: post #320
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…

> And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Assuming such tunneling is in fact practical, I vote for burying the vehicles and letting the pedestrians have the surface...

For a real world example of this, check Madrid's city centre. This is exactly what happened in the last few years, and the result is amazing.

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

#463

Post by fapjacks »

stuntkite wrote: post #344
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…

Natural feature tracking is cooler. I mean.... little black boxes are alright but just establishing that a bespoke 3D shape or hierarchy of shapes to orient your targeting looks less crappy and has a lot more interesting potential. One time many many years ago I went to kinkos and printed giant fiducial squares like 48"x48" and wheat pasted them all over Austin, TX to do large at scale AR with markers. Just putting g…

I did something similar in Europe about ten years ago but lost access to the domain I used as part of the process. That happened through no fault of my own, but it really took the wind out of my sails to run into such bad luck with one of the critical components. However it was a lot of fun working on it, and I've been thinking about this and things like it but rather in the context of "street art" that only machines can see and interpret.

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

#464

Post by lovemenot »

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. Yes good. The more the better. But we humans cannot read them. So use UV or near infrared instead of visible spectrum. Same low-cost sensors, less territorial conflict.

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

#465

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

swagtricker wrote: post #257
AlwaysRock wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Its so shocking when something "new" or at least that feels new is actually created. I don't care about the countless companies that will make it slightly easier for me to get something from point a to point b. I care a lot about companies that actually make something new or popularize something that already existed but didnt have widespread appeal.

Yeah. I remember looking at the Slack IPO and saying to myself, "Your F'ing kidding me. They went public for doing IRC channels in a web browser with emojis?!?!"

Well, I agree only in part. Their biggest feat wasn't doing IRC in a browser with emojis, it was convincing many companies they actually need it. They also managed to somehow convince the geeks saying "look, you can always use IRC gateways" only to kill them once they secured their position.

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

#466

Post by fapjacks »

jayd16 wrote: post #408
Robotbeat wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Links have implied costs far greater than a few KB.

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

#467

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

throwaway0xa wrote: post #225
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.

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...

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Active Directory is Microsoft's proprietary tech that is a modification of the Kerberos standard, reimplemented most notably in Samba, but client solutions (open and proprietary) also exist.

Group permissions predate AD by decades, PAM by a few years. SSO in today's form is a web phenomenon, so a web-oriented solution makes more sense, and there is a lot of work being done in this direction.

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

#468

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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...

How long ago did you learn that? Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

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

#469

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

flukus wrote: post #404
TeMPOraL wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was the communication encrypted?

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

#470

Post by sloaken »

yread wrote: post #446
kstenerud wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I agree with you.

Not that I have looked recently, what I see missing is a 'northwid' or 'contoso' database. As well as some MOOC with a gentle ramping up of skills.

If you know of a good MOOC on RDF I would love to know about it.

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