Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#531

Post by jmiskovic » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

kanakiyajay wrote: post #413

Wrote a blog post on the technologies I believe are going to change industries 1. No-Code Tools 2. GraphQL 3. Oculus Quest 4. FPGA 5. Netflix for Gamers 6. Windows for Linux 7. Notion 8. Animation Engines https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-in-2020...

FPGA is still too cumbersome to make it big. It's too expensive for general appliances, talent is hard to find, and development process is still stuck where software was 20 years ago. FPGA vendors are still trying roll out their own everything-included non-standard solutions. Those solutions don't scale well. I've seen engineers struggling to trace where some signal ends up, it's complete insanity.

I find GPUs conceptually similar to FPGAs for most soft applications (video processing and similar number crunching). They also provide huge number of re-purposable blocks for programmable parallel computing. GPUs have won out because they became mainstream through gaming and they more readily opened up to general software practices and methodologies. It's no surprise machine learning community is avoiding FPGAs for most part.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#532

Post by roenxi » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #391

fergie wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars get more resolution, and the software improves. Still don't see fully (fully automated) self driving cars happening any time soon: 1) Heavy steel boxes running at high speed in built up areas will be the very last thing that we trust to robots. There are so many…

The hype around self driving cars is still very much around. I tend to view any debate about full autonomous cars (level 5) as unserious if they work with less than a 15 - 20 year time horizon.

In 2014 top humans could give a good Go playing AI 4 stones (a handicap that pushes games outside of being between comparable players).

In 2017 AlphaGo could probably give a world champion somewhere between 1 and 3 stones.

From an algorithmic perspective the range between "unacceptably bad" and superhuman doesn't have to be all that wide and it isn't exactly possible to judge until the benefit of hindsight is available and it is clear who had what technology available. 15-20 years is realistic because of the embarrassingly slow rate of progress by regulators, but we should all feel bad about that.

We should be swapping blobs of meat designed for a world of <10kmph for systems that are actually designed to move quickly safely. I've lost more friends to car accidents than any other cause - there needs to be some acknowledgment that humans are statistically unsafe drivers.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#533

Post by machinehermit » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #505

dahfizz wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hard for humans too. I think we need to give up on the idea that fully autonomous driving will be perfect.

I'm obviously talking about matching human performance and this is the hard problem

There is also an easy solution of just staying put.

I have driven in snow a few times that I was not sure I was even on the road. Or the only way I knew I was going the right direction was because I could vaguely see the break lights of the car going 15mph in front of me through snow.

That is an easy problem to solve though because I simply should not have been driving in that.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#534

Post by Kliment » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

formercoder wrote: post #81

EvanWard97 wrote: post #78

- Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm) such as Ushio's Care222 tech. This light destroys pathogens quickly while not seeming to damage human skin or eyes. - FPGAs. I'm no computer engineer, but it seems like this tech is going to soon drastically increase our compute. - Augur, among other prediction platforms. Beliefs will pay rent. - Web Assembly, as noted elsewhere. One use case I haven't read yet here is distributed com…

FPGAs have been around for quite awhile. Is something changing?

Non-stupid open toolchains are slowly happening. Vendor toolchains are the biggest thing holding back FPGAs. Everyone hates them, they're slow, huge, and annoying to use.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#535

Post by onimishra » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

Uizard - Using machine learning to get from a drawing to ui and code. As a programmer, I’m looking forward to getting a head start on my personal projects, before I need to involve a designer

https://uizard.io/

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#536

Post by kanakiyajay » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

jmiskovic wrote: post #531

kanakiyajay wrote: post #413

Wrote a blog post on the technologies I believe are going to change industries 1. No-Code Tools 2. GraphQL 3. Oculus Quest 4. FPGA 5. Netflix for Gamers 6. Windows for Linux 7. Notion 8. Animation Engines https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-in-2020...

FPGA is still too cumbersome to make it big. It's too expensive for general appliances, talent is hard to find, and development process is still stuck where software was 20 years ago. FPGA vendors are still trying roll out their own everything-included non-standard solutions. Those solutions don't scale well. I've seen engineers struggling to trace where some signal ends up, it's complete insanity. I find GPUs concep…

Agreed, FPGA is too expensive currently with a non-standard toolset present across the industry. But if someone is able to create an industry coalition (think Wi-Fi Alliance or Bluetooth SIG) it can definitely make a large impact for everyone involved with several companies reaping the benefits

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#537

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

elevenoh wrote: post #327

aabajian wrote: post #115

Geometric algebra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo It makes a lot of hard physics problems (Maxwell's equations, relativity theory, quantum mechanics) much more understandable and (I'm told) unifies them in a common framework. I think it will help your average developer become comfortable with these areas of physics.

Is all math/logic most fundamentally geometry?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#538

Post by polishdude20 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #136

aj-4 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla covering 3/6... stock price is definitely still low

I would never trust any self driving car that didn't use LiDAR. It's an essential sensor for helping to fix issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cSw4fXYqWI&feature=emb_logo And it's not contrived since we've seen situations of Telsa Autopilot behaving weirdly when it sees people on the side of billboards, trucks etc.

But at the end of that video they state they were able to train a network to detect these phantom images. So this is something that can be fixed and had been proven to work. Only a matter of time before it's in commercial cars.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#539

Post by lmeyerov » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

nabusman wrote: post #393

nostrademons wrote: post #24

GPGPU. GPU performance is still increasing along Moore's Law, single-core performance has plateaued. The implication is that at some point, the differential will become so great that we'll be stupid to continue running anything other than simple housekeeping tasks on the CPU. There's a lot of capital investment that'd need to happen for that transition - we basically need to throw out much of what we've learned about…

Sounds interesting, what language is best positioned for GPGPU's?

Python via RAPIDS.ai . There first bc most data science community for prod + scale is in it. It feels like the early days Hadoop and Spark.

IMO golang and JS are both better technical fits (go for parallel concurrency and js for concurrency/V8/typed arrays/wasm), and we got close via Apache arrow libs, but will be a year or two more for them as a core supporter is needed and we had to stop the JS side after we wrote arrow. Python side is exploding so now just a matter of time.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#540

Post by mrweasel » Sat, May 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #532

mrweasel wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype around self driving cars is still very much around. I tend to view any debate about full autonomous cars (level 5) as unserious if they work with less than a 15 - 20 year time horizon.

In 2014 top humans could give a good Go playing AI 4 stones (a handicap that pushes games outside of being between comparable players). In 2017 AlphaGo could probably give a world champion somewhere between 1 and 3 stones. From an algorithmic perspective the range between "unacceptably bad" and superhuman doesn't have to be all that wide and it isn't exactly possible to judge until the benefit of hindsight is availab…

I don’t disagree that computer are better driver, under certain conditions, but that’s not the point.

I can drive myself home relatively safely in conditions where the computer can’t even find the road. We’re still infinitly more flexible and adaptable than computers.

It will be at least 20 years before my car will drive me home on a leaf or snow covered road. Should I drive on those roads? Most likely not, but my brain, designed for <10 km/h speeds, will cope with the conditions in the vast majority of cases.