Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about? • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by scubbo » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

trasz wrote: post #361

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…

Sadly, Slack is also missing a whole lot of IRC functionality - starting with a proper desktop client. The logging it provides is a joke, even when you actually pay for it. Its search capabilities are nowhere near grep(1).

> Its search capabilities are nowhere near grep(1).

This is again missing the point. Yes, the statement "Slack's search isn't as powerful as grep's" is true - but many of the prospective users of Slack (and, crucially - most of those who make the decisions about corporate IT) are incapable or unwilling to use grep _anyway_. You are judging a tool by how well it suits your needs, without realizing that you are not its only target audience.

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

#532

Post by _carbyau_ » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

md2020 wrote: post #530

_carbyau_ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to see a variation of Signal to add BlogPost like interface. It could then use IPFS to host "Public Facing" posts. People could pin - or pay for pinning - their posts. IPFS is what I hope will lead to further democratization of the internet.

Could you expand on what you mean by a variation of Signal? To me, Signal’s main feature is just that it’s a reliable E2E encrypted messaging app, implying two ends to communication. A blog post interface implies one-to-anyone communication, so I’m confused what part of Signal you want to emulate.

Yeah, I haven't communicated it well.

I am aiming for a decentralised-FB like experience on Signal. And I honestly think it is feasible.

On FB, you tag a post with intended recipients(default:All "Friends"), people log in and get fed these posts with FB fiddling along the way.

Signal with a redesigned UX could show a doom scroll of posts that friends send you. Not that I think this is great, but user adoption for familiarity.

Signal E2E delivers the message, the new UX displays the posts. You apply heuristics as you want, all without ads or data gathering by a MITM.

But... public posting is a thing. I am hoping that IPFS combined with cryptographic signing for authentication, could fill that role.

Hence my comment that IPFS could hopefully lead to democratization. Although, I am also concerned that IPFS will also lead to "undeletable" content, but that seems to be almost a thing anyway.

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

#533

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

ahstilde wrote: post #415

pmarreck wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a very rational multiple-allergy sufferer (before 30? None. Then, like a dozen things!!) who has gotten allergy shots for years now... Have any data to back up this substitute? Also, Zyrtec and Claritin did nothing for me, I’m an Allegra guy

Tons of data! “Patients who have done [allergy drops] and finished a course are now free of taking any allergy medications and they don’t have symptoms anymore.” Dr. Sandra Lin, video interview, Sublingual Immunotherapy (SLIT) for Allergy Treatment: Johns Hopkins | Q&A, author of Efficacy and Safety of Subcutaneous and Sublingual Immunotherapy for Allergic Rhinoconjunctivitis and Asthma (2017) Video: https://www.yout…

Nice! I'm going to review this and see what my allergist says

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

#534

Post by TimJRobinson » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

USDC and other cryptocurrencies that track real currencies. It for the first time allows anyone to be their own bank with programmable money. You can have it on your phone for direct to merchant payments. You can use software to setup auto payment systems for any bills or rent, you could connect it to a service that gives a loans on demand against collateral.

I think a lot of really cool innovation is going to come out of easily transmissible programmable money.

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

#535

Post by FrontAid » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #500

FrontAid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 le…

OK, I see. The tool we are working on is similar but also not quite what you are looking for. In case you want to have a look, it is availale on .io

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

#536

Post by TimJRobinson » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 11:56 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #532

md2020 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you mean by a variation of Signal? To me, Signal’s main feature is just that it’s a reliable E2E encrypted messaging app, implying two ends to communication. A blog post interface implies one-to-anyone communication, so I’m confused what part of Signal you want to emulate.

Yeah, I haven't communicated it well. I am aiming for a decentralised-FB like experience on Signal. And I honestly think it is feasible. On FB, you tag a post with intended recipients(default:All "Friends"), people log in and get fed these posts with FB fiddling along the way. Signal with a redesigned UX could show a doom scroll of posts that friends send you. Not that I think this is great, but user adoption for fam…

Scuttlebutt is the software you're looking for. Check out the patchwork client. Posts are public by default but you can make them encrypted so only your friends can read them.

There's also cabal chat which is based on the same underlying technology but is chat focused rather than Facebook like.

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

#537

Post by cl42 » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

tfehring wrote: post #425

cl42 wrote: post #5

I recently came across Polymarket[1] and am really excited about what crypto has in store for prediction markets and insurance. I've dabbled in prediction markets over the years. I think they have a lot of promise but execution is always an issue. Using ETH to create a two-sided marketplace feels much better than having prediction markets decide what one can bet on. More broadly, decentralizing insurance in this way…

What is Polymarket doing in the insurance space? Didn't see anything along those lines on their site. I've previously encountered https://etherisc.com in passing, but it's not clear that they have a plan to address the hard parts, particularly leverage/capitalization. I'll also mention/disclose that my current employer, https://ledgerinvesting.com , is doing some cool stuff in the direction of decentralized insurance…

They focus only on prediction markets. I just meant that insurance and prediction markets are two sides of the same coin. Thanks for sharing those links though -- I will check them out.

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

#538

Post by CyberRabbi » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #477

CyberRabbi wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the working analogy here, Linux is also at a disadvantage because it doesn’t run the majority of commercially supported consumer software yet many people still use it. It has shown that people are willing to choose free options even if it’s technically less advanced than closed options. A fully featured de10-nano board costs ~$150 [1] so it’s readily accessible, at least in comparison to desktop pcs. [1] https://w…

Steam's system survey shows Linux desktop usage at ~0.85% and general consumer surveys show less than 3% usage even after thirty years of development and that is in spite the fact that it costs nothing. Moreover, a $45 Raspberry Pi 4 costing a third as much will have vastly better performance as a desktop than any logic it's possible to fit on the DE10 board costing $150 that was mentioned. The examples provided ther…

1% of people would make the freedom over convenience trade off, just that there exists people who would and it would be important to them.

I don’t see anywhere near 1% of people running a RISC-V softcore based computer on a de10-nano board but I would and many other hackers like me would.

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

#539

Post by ahstilde » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

meue wrote: post #517

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?

Our treatment can be taken alongside traditional allergy care like antihistamines and corticosteroids to manage allergy symptoms until immunotolerance is established.

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

#540

Post by juancn » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

chc4 wrote: post #81

juancn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra cost is worrying. You're talking at 4 to 6 orders of magnitude increase in resource usage for the same computation. Unless we figure out some awesome hardware acceleration for it, it's not practical but for a few niche applications. It also has the problem that you can use computation results to derive the data, if you have enough control over the computation (e.g. a reporting application that allows aggreg…

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.

Still, 100x is a lot. I would still bet that it depends on the complexity of the workload.