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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?

#491

Post by [deleted] »

2rsf wrote: post #447
vagrantJin wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

[deleted]

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

#492

Post by mikewarot »

23d wrote: post #263

Diamond Batteries! https://ndb.technology/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE

Why are you interested in this?

If it is for anything other than very LOW power (microwatts), you're going to be disappointed.

It is essentially a beta emitter hooked to a capacitor via some electronics to handle voltage conversion. The thing is the beta source is use it or lose it, and very low power. If you scaled this up to power a Tesla, it would be a nightmare, as it would need to dissipate the full power the car requires, all the time, or it would melt down (aka Fukashima)

For a longer debunk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM

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

#493

Post by kstenerud »

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?

Yes, much like AI was here for 40+ years with very little penetration into the mainstream.

Technologies like this remain stagnant until the landscape is ready for them. In this case, the advent of AI and big data is what will make relationship data important. "Semantic web" as in human edited XML/HTML with semantic data embedded was never going to happen and was silly from the get-go. But RDF-style semantic data transferred between machines that infer meaning is an absolute certainty.

It's one of those things that's forever a joke until suddenly it's not. There's a fortune of oil out there, but we have to get past the steam age first (and that'll come sooner than you think).

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

#494

Post by vagrantJin »

jayd16 wrote: post #349
vagrantJin wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You'd need, what, 50 years of enforcement before you'd have enough cars on the road to trust it, and then of course what happens if its broken? What about pedestrians?

Well, yes ofcourse, object detection will still be a feature no doubt. The vehicle must have context of where it is. But overhauling infrastructure to be machine readable is an excellent idea to implement on high risk situations like suburbia and cities where pedestrians and dogs are actual factors. The vast majority of roads and infrastructure have no pedestrians. It's just highway and freeway. It would make sense for the car to follow other cars and calibrate its position accordingly without neccesarily "seeing".

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

#496

Post by vagrantJin »

the_arun wrote: post #339
vagrantJin wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wouldn't super high resolution longitude/latitude coordination (measuring close to a feet) help this to do it without any external tool?

True, that does give direction but not context. LAT/LONG gives no opinion on traffic speed and how to overtake when to switch lanes. My idea is that the pings are the other cars saying "I'm here, I'm here..." and the car can compute it's position relative to the other cars without having to see them. This is obviously not the main system, and more of an auxillary measure so the car can function in any condition.

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

#497

Post by 3arn0wl »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #78
SavantIdiot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that RISC-V processors aren't free right? Making an open source ISA is no small feat, but all they really did was help save some megacorporations a little extra money. Perhaps it will lead to a processor startup, but follow that to its logical conclusion: it takes a huge, profitable company to sustain processor delivery for years. There's a very good reason why only a handful of companies make the top…

You could argue that the availability of Linux saved countless megacorporations from having to pay Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. Yet the availability of Linux has been a boon to people across the board. While I agree there is something not right about cutting into ARM’s profits for the benefit of megacorporations, I think that a royalty-free ISA might genuinely be good for civilization despite that in the same way Linux is…

Arm deserve all that's coming to them.

A generation ago, their forerunners - Acorn - were happy to take, use and make a profit from the work of American universities, yet when Berkeley asked to be able to use Arm's ISA for research purposes, they got short shrift.

So Berkeley cobbling together a next-generation RISC ISA, and Foundation-ing it out of reach of the same thing happening again, is smart retribution.

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

#498

Post by southerntofu »

closeparen wrote: post #343
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,…

Declarative is awesome for bootstrapping an infrastructure from nothing, but once it’s running and people are depending on it, it actually matters a lot which operations are done to it, in what order, and with what dispersion in time. Doubly so if it’s stateful. In the real world we see either hints in the “declarative” config to tweak execution order, or procedural workflows expressed ad hoc as a sequence of goal st…

> I think the future of sysadmin will be more explicitly procedural.

I think that's true for the lower levels of abstraction because sysadmin is a finite list of steps. Being able to program your infrastructure in a type-safe, fail-safe way is very important. In the grandparent comment, i was arguing for building higher-level abstractions (semantic sysadmin) on top of that to make it easier to understand how your infrastructure is configured, and make it reproducible/forkable.

Think of it like there's two kinds of state stored on your system: useful state (eg user data) and infrastructure byproducts (eg TLS certificates). The former must be included in backups, the latter can be regenerated on the go from server config. The kind of declarativeness i'm interested in is that which enables any member/customer to fork the entire infrastructure by editing a single config file if they're not happy with provided services, and from there they can import their own useful state (eg a website/mailbox backup). Hypothetically, the scenario would be like "is Google Reader closing down? Let's just fork their infra, edit the config file, and import our our feeds and all we have to do is use a different URL to access the very same services".

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

#500

Post by southerntofu »

FrontAid wrote: post #129
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,…

> 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned repository. Did you have some specific tool in mind? Because I completely agree that this is a great way of working with content. We have been doing that for a couple of months with our own tool. It uses Git and stores content in a pretty-printed JSON file. Techies can update that directly and push it manually. Content editors can use our tool to edit and comm…

The closest i can think of is NetlifyCMS, but it's terrible because it's a bunch of JavaScript both server side and client side, and is really not intended to be selfhosted despite being open-source.

If NetlifyCMS was a robust library for abstracting over versioning system and static site generator to build WebUI/TUI/GUI clients with, that would fit what i have in mind. I don't know of any such program yet, please let me know if you find something :)

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