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

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

#561

Post by jl2718 »

Balgair wrote: post #103
skmurphy wrote: post #45

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) occupies a intermediate position in accuracy / skin depth for soft tissue between ultrasound and MRI Optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) approaches SQUID level accuracy without need for supercooled device, can be worn or used as a contact sensor like ultrasound. LoRA long range (10km +) low power sub-gigahertz radio frequency protocol useful for battery powered IoT devices transmit…

Oh man, I used to research in OCT for deep brain stimulation! It's pretty cool tech, that is for sure. It's got a huge market for bio applications and certain industrials. That said, optics is a super finicky field. You can come in and get a Nobel for 5 hours work, or you can spend 50 years in a dark room trying to get things together. Alignment is crazy difficult, thought it seems it shouldn't be. Anyone that wants…

Alignment should be done system-wide by orders of magnitude. If you are on a breadboard, get everything to within a cm of final location, then everything within a mm, etc. Don’t ever spend more than 1 minute at a time on any component. This stuff was not in the textbooks.

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

#562

Post by luckylion »

tootie wrote: post #528
luckylion wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How accurate are those sensors? I've often thought how nice it would be to get rid of the mouse and use sensors to figure out where exactly on my screen I'm looking.

Mouse-level accuracy requires a well-calibrated setup and the correct size monitor and sitting posture. If you want to do something like a Square POS checkout and need to distinguish a random visitor looking at 4 buttons, it would be pretty forgiving.

Thank you, so not yet an option for me; I doubt my posture and sitting position is regular enough that calibration would work for me.

Might, at some point, be a welcome addition to a touch pad though. If you touch the pad and your pointer is far away to where you're looking, jump to the area and do the fine tuning with the fingers.

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

#563

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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…

When you're mentioning AlphaGo, you're committing a fallacy that's so famous that it has a name and a wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox). The things that are easy for humans are very different from those that are easy for robots.

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

#564

Post by [deleted] »

prrls wrote: post #253
prrls wrote: post #235

Oxide Computer Company https://oxide.computer/ “True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.” Corey Quinn interviewed the founders on his podcast "Screaming in the Cloud", where they explain the need for innovation in that space. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/scre…

And for people wondering why caring about on-premises hosting when you have the cloud, a few weeks ago there was a thread about why would you do the former in favor of the latter. It puts on display that actually a lot of people are still on-premises, and for good reasons, which makes a good case for a company like Oxide to exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999

[deleted]

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

#565

Post by mindfulplay »

grahamg wrote: post #74

comma.ai - They produce the aftermarket hardware for openpilot. It's a open source driver-assistance system that performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) for compatible vehicles. Many car vendors already do this, but based on some footage it requires less user intervention.

The most dangerous type of technology: putting silicon valley mindset to a critical, deadly torpedo is not just risky but callous.

Falling to these (hotz/musk) people's perceived intellect as somehow determining the success of self-driving cars is a bit disingenuous.

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

#566

Post by quodlibetor »

slow_donkey wrote: post #522
autosage wrote: post #51

Materialize https://materialize.io/ Incremental update/materialization of database views with joins and aggregates is super interesting. It enables listening to data changes, not just on a row level, but on a view level. It's an approach that may completely solve the problem of cache invalidation of relational data. Imagine a memcache server, except it now also guaranties consistency. In addition, being able to liste…

This looks great - I've been looking into debezium for a similar idea but they don't natively support views which makes sense from a technical pov but is rather limiting. There's a few blog posts on attaching metadata/creating an aggregate table but it involves the application creating that data which seems backwards. Would be huge if materialize supports this out the box. I believe it's a very useful middle ground b…

This is exactly what we do! This is a walkthrough of connecting a db (these docs are for mysql, but postgres works and is almost identical) via debezium and defining views in materialize: https://materialize.io/docs/demos/business-intelligence/

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

#567

Post by ianai »

joshspankit wrote: post #474
ianai wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the owner is to blame.

Counterpoint: In a fully-autonomous situation, of course the AI is to blame.

I think we need to consider that case when/if it happens. For the foreseeable future there needs to be a responsible driver present.

To go contrary to this is to invite outright bans of the tech.

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

#568

Post by ianai »

mkl wrote: post #493
ianai wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy idea time. Is anyone piping randomly generated code into nix and selecting for AI in the output? (I’m pretty far out of my realm here so sorry in advance)

The search space of possible code is unfathomably enormous. I think you'd have better luck generating amazing art with random colours for each pixel (i.e. still none). People have done more limited genetic programming for a long time now (essentially randomly mutating formulas, keeping ones that do better), but neural networks are doing the arbitrary function-fitting better at the moment. What does it have to do with…

Bleary eyed me thought nix sounded well defined enough to make searching the input space more tractable.

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

#569

Post by rimliu »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
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