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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?

#481

Post by elric »

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,…

> GNU Name System

Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? As far as I can tell, GNS has been around as a proposal for years and has gained no traction.

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

#482

Post by swagtricker »

scubbo wrote: post #324
swagtricker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!?!"

This isn't _as_ short-sighted as the famous "Dropbox comment"[1], but it's pretty close. a) Slack _clearly_ offers a lot of meaningful functionality over-and-above IRC channels. "Searching" - and, implicitly, persistence - is so fundamental to the offering that it's (apocryphally) part of the acronymic name. Threading, bot support, and channel discovery are all useful features. Sure, all of those things _can_ be impl…

Fair enough. And I'll admit the above statement is exactly why I'm not a business person:)

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

#483

Post by i_have_an_idea »

kroltan wrote: post #57

Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-relatedly things like Prolog? I recently decided to fiddle with Wikidata, and it is fascinating to be able to query for any part of a statement, not just the value! In SPARQL you write statements in the form But the cool part is that any of those three parts can be extracted, so you can ask things like "what are the cities in ", or "what country harbors the city…

I studied SPARQL in university, about 10 years ago. I checked on it recently and found out nothing has changed. Needless to say, I am not hopeful about its feature.

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

#484

Post by curioushacking »

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…

I worked for a number of years on making invisible fiducials that can appear only in infrared, and am one of the chief inventors on 3M's smart code. The idea was that on any retroreflective surface you can place this fiducial sticker and relay some information. We were originally looking at approximately 64 bits of information. This isn't a ton, but we thought it a good balance of error correction, and module (the pixels in the code) size.

At least from an IR perspective, it was generally loved by nearly everyone we spoke to, but there was no takers in the end due to the IR requirement and such cameras not being everywhere yet.

Here is a link to some of our first work. That picture of a stop sign is our first prototype with hand cut special film.

https://www.businessinsider.com/3m-hides-tech-in-sides-to-he...

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

#485

Post by robinwa »

theaussiestew wrote: post #459
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.

Yeah! Ping me anytime, email in profile.

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

#486

Post by curioushacking »

Robotbeat wrote: post #297
TeMPOraL wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing that happens to humans. You see parts of the signage. Or none of it, and drive on memory (and follow the behavior of other cars). The idea behind adding special markings for computers is that you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to perfect algorithms interpreting signage optimized for human consumption, or... you can spend much less time and effort, to much better effect, setting up additional sig…

Yup. Or have signage at an angle that deflects snow. Or has a heater or wiper. Or as others have said, use non-visible-light fiducials. Humans rely on road lines and signs as well and when those are covered, human capability is reduced and they have to drive slower.

For the fiducials we previously worked on, the goals was to maximize error correction for the types of occlusions commonly on signs. Because most signs are vertical, there is a lower likely hood of a ton of snow on them. The more common occlusion is an edge occlusion from either a natural road feature, or other vehicles.

For snow that generally disrupts the sign fiducial, we had a few solutions. The first is that if fiducials are dense enough, then dead reckoning may be sufficient until the next fiducial is observerd. The second is to try and build different layers of data with different error correction capabilities. One system developed could relay a low number of bits from a far distance and reasonable error correction capability. The remaining bits were then much smaller and readable from up close. The thought being that if you are able to fully resolve a fiducial in one area then assuming an apiori map of fiducials, the first 16 to 24 bits of a 64 bit code is likely enough to accurately resolve location.

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

#488

Post by TeMPOraL »

curioushacking wrote: post #484
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…

I worked for a number of years on making invisible fiducials that can appear only in infrared, and am one of the chief inventors on 3M's smart code. The idea was that on any retroreflective surface you can place this fiducial sticker and relay some information. We were originally looking at approximately 64 bits of information. This isn't a ton, but we thought it a good balance of error correction, and module (the pi…

Nice! Thanks for sharing! Didn't realize 3M was working in this space (but then again, whenever I ask or check if 3M is working on $randomThing, it turns out they do; it's a real-world ACME).

> but there was no takers in the end due to the IR requirement and such cameras not being everywhere yet

I wonder why that's the case. What kind of IR camera it required? I was under the impression that turning a regular camera into an IR one was just a matter of digging out its IR filter and replacing it with a visible light filter. Or did it require the kind of cameras that are used in thermal imaging? Unfortunately, I don't really know what the technical and business challenges are for ubiquitous IR. Could you share some information about it?

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

#489

Post by AlwaysRock »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #465
swagtricker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm still shocked how many companies basically pay for slack and use it the exact same way they used email before.

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

#490

Post by mikewarot »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #261
corebuffer wrote: post #124

Yosys and open source FPGA toolchains. I think FPGA are vastly underrated and hard to use because of tooling and this is promising in changing it.

I work on FPGAs professionally and it is hard for me to come up with many commercial applications for them outside of what they're currently used for.

What if FPGAs were $1 each, would that change it for you?
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