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

Exciting app :) . Have requested access to the private beta

fly.io . Not just for their current product (which is already awesome in a space that no one else seems to be in), but because the infrastructure they're building seems to position them to address many adjacent areas very easily, including areas that need more competition.

An infrastructure built around firecracker VMs at scale is exactly what I'd like to be running on.

And not something like Spark on EMR?

I also use some more mainstream things like Heroku, so these are my more-indie/alternative services I'm watching/playing with:

• Backblaze B2 https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html: super-cheap and straightforward data management. I made a Node.js library around it: https://www.npmjs.com/package/backblaze

• Bunny CDN https://bunnycdn.com/: it looks like a great indie CDN solution. The normal CDN is dead cheap, and the very wide CDN has great coverage. Self reported metrics are amazing as well. The company is based in EU, which is a plus on my book.

• Gandi https://www.gandi.net/: they have a lot of types of domains so you can search across many at a glance. They do show some unrelated panels and push for their own services but less than other registrars. Based in France (EU).

I have been following genode since ~4 years and am surprised this hasn't caught on more.

(from https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index)

== Mastering complexity through application-specific trusted computing bases

> Because software complexity correlates with the likelihood for bugs, having security-sensitive functionality depending on high-complexity software is risky. The term trusted_computing_base (TCB) was coined to describe the amount of code that must not be compromised to uphold security. In addition to the code of the sensitive application, the TCB comprises each system component that has direct or indirect control over the execution of the application (affecting availability and integrity) or that can access the processed information (affecting confidentiality and integrity). On monolithic OSes, the TCB complexity can be regarded as a global system property because it is dominated by the complexity of the kernel and the privileged processes, which are essentially the same for each concurrently executed application. On Genode, the amount of security-critical code can largely differ for each application depending on the position of the application within Genode's process tree and the used services. To illustrate the difference, an email-signing application executed on Linux has to rely on a TCB complexity of millions of lines of code (LOC). Most of the code, however, does not provide functionality required to perform the actual cryptographic function of the signing application. Still, the credentials of the user are exposed to an overly complex TCB including the network stack, device drivers, and file systems. In contrast, Genode allows the cryptographic function to be executed with a specific TCB that consists only of components that are needed to perform the signing function. For the signing application, the TCB would contain the microkernel (20 KLOC), the Genode OS framework (10 KLOC), a minimally-complex GUI (2 KLOC), and the signing application (15 KLOC). These components stack up to a complexity of less than 50,000 LOC.

> Genode tailors the trusted computing base for each application individually. The figure on the right illustrates the TCB of the yellow marked process. Naturally, it contains the hierarchy of parents and those processes that provide services used by the application (the left component at the third level).