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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?

#511

Post by elric »

southerntofu wrote: post #504
elric wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Really? Can you elaborate a bit on the why? It's the only serious proposal i've seen to replace the DNS protocol. It's backwards-compatible with existing zones (same RR types plus a few new ones like PKEY), with existing governance (the protocol has a notion of global root, which is very likely to be ICANN), and replacing traditional DNS recursive resolution with GNS recursive resolution is not such a challenge.. a…

Thanks for the very comprehensive reply. It does sound like GNS is gaining more traction than I thought, and I hadn't heard of re:claimID, which sounds pretty interesting in its own right.

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

#512

Post by swyx »

poletopole wrote: post #321
swyx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, "saga for the backend" is an appealing angle to some folks (eg our Coinbase testimonial has that) but i'm not sure how many developers know about sagas so I've been hesitant to push that too hard (bc then we'd have to teach people an extra concept before they get to us). i'd say something that is maybe hard to appreciate until you really get into it is just how much goes into making this ultra scalable with dis…

Not hard at all to appreciate. I know the consistency woes of juggling thousands of message queues with millions of messages and containers with enormous databases. The problem though, as I found out ironically, is that most dilbert bosses don't appreciate solutions like temporal, unless a tech "guru" tells them about it. For example, I get laughed at when I tell other developers that databases are an antiquated idea…

jeez, you had me until knot theory lol.

sounds good, you get it. if you are interested in working with us... we're hiring haha. or happy to help promote if you want to write up your thoughts

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

#513

Post by curioushacking »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #488
curioushacking wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We could tune the material to whatever wavelength we wanted, but for ours we targeted above 850nm as that was a common filter. Regarding the actual camera to IR, you are right. Even the front facing camera on a iPhone is sufficient to read them.

Many cars use front facing cameras that with minimal adjustment could read at the proper wave lengths, but one issue for a lot of vehicles right now is that the windshield has an IR filter to minimize heat and interior damage. For cameras behind the rear view mirror, the standard windshield creates an issue. Windshields with a small cut of the film would be sufficient, but they are not manufactured to my knowledge.

For general fiducials not related to these, I had hoped to put them everywhere. Think even hidden everywhere and read by phones. But at least for a while I think the read facing cameras on phones will continue to have the filter and using the phone backwards with the front facing camera is awkward.

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

#514

Post by rhindi »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #108
chc4 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern homomorphic encryption schemes only have a ~100x performance hit. That sounds bad, until you remember that computers are really fast and spend the majority of time doing nothing, and that the difference between writing a program in Python or C is already something like 10x.

> Modern homomorphic encryption schemes only have a ~100x performance hit. Really?! Now I'm curious. If I have a simple program for an 8-bit CPU @ 1 MHz, when can I run this program on a virtual machine using homomorphic encryption, under a reasonable runtime? Is it possible yet? If the performance hit is only 100x, the runtime should not be much longer than the actual chip. But the last time I checked, the hypotheti…

8 bit is definitely doable today, fast

There are basically 2 strategies:

- do fast operations, with a limit on how many you can do. This is called Leveled Homomorphic Encryption, with CKKS being the most popular scheme. Microsoft open sourced a lib called Seal for it.

- do unlimited operations, but with extra overhead. This is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, with TFHE being the fastest implementation. My company Zama has open sourced an library in Rust called Concrete.

Reminds me a lot of deep learning in 2010, just before it took off!

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

#515

Post by poletopole »

swyx wrote: post #512
poletopole wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hard at all to appreciate. I know the consistency woes of juggling thousands of message queues with millions of messages and containers with enormous databases. The problem though, as I found out ironically, is that most dilbert bosses don't appreciate solutions like temporal, unless a tech "guru" tells them about it. For example, I get laughed at when I tell other developers that databases are an antiquated idea…

jeez, you had me until knot theory lol. sounds good, you get it. if you are interested in working with us... we're hiring haha. or happy to help promote if you want to write up your thoughts

I'll check out your hiring page.

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

#516

Post by scubbo »

swagtricker wrote: post #482
scubbo wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:)

Big same. I appreciate that they exist, so that I don't have to worry about it :)

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

#517

Post by meue »

ahstilde wrote: post #202

Allergy immunotherapy. I started a company on the backs of this treatment. The way we treat allergies today, with Zyrtec and Claritin, is medieval medicine. It doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just tries to cover it up. Allergy immunotherapy is the future. Most people don't realize that allergies are now a curable disease. In the future, taking Claritin for allergies is going to seem like taking Tylenol for a…

This is super interesting, thank for you sharing! I am curious - how does you handle symptom management? Are there antihistamines in the drops, or, perhaps some other form of system/method for controlling response?

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

#518

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#519

Post by wainstead »

kstenerud wrote: post #493
yread wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tran…

> Technologies like this remain stagnant until the landscape is ready for them.

So true it should have a name, like kstenerud's Law or something.

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

#520

Post by jeffreyrogers »

mikewarot wrote: post #490
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problem is getting data to/from the FPGA, which imposes unavoidable latency. If you want to do this fast it can't be done cheaply because it requires too much silicon. Aside from simulation type tasks, the tasks best suited for FPGAs are streaming tasks for this reason since once you've started streaming data through the FPGA you don't need to worry about latency too much.
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