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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?

#81

Post by chc4 »

juancn wrote: post #58
rhindi wrote: post #29

Homomorphic encryption, which enables you to process data without decrypting it. Would solve privacy / data security issues around sending data to be processed in the cloud

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.

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

#82

Post by rPlayer6554 »

beauzero wrote: post #51
Jamieee wrote: post #36

https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it out, but not seen any uptake yet.

Same here. IPFS seems to have been lumped into the whole "crypto" scene because of filecoin. In my opinion, IPFS is much more interesting and potentially beneficial to individual freedom than crypto. The problem is the only people really talking about it are people focused on crypto, also forcing dapp conversations to focus on quick money vs. long term usability/functionality. I don't hold the money conversations aga…

I find it really cool that Brave implemented IPFS.

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

#84

Post by crocsarecool »

shostack wrote: post #34

Developments in the AR/VR space. The haptics stuff coming out is really cool and may be consumer friendly in the near future. Meanwhile headset tech is seeing major investment and light field technology is going to do amazing things for this space.

I have a Valve Index. It is the most mind blowing thing to me. I’m really excited for AR to get going. I’ve only seen it for shopping (see what item x would look like in your house). I think it might be cool for collaboration.

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

#85

Post by mariodiana »

ratsforhorses wrote: post #54

DNA digital data storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage

> DNA digital data storage is the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA.

If each "bit" of DNA can be either A, C, G, or T, why call that binary?

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

#86

Post by joshlemer »

swyx wrote: post #18
joshlemer wrote: post #4

https://temporal.io/

what do you like about it? (disclaimer, i work at temporal, but just genuinely interested in how you'd describe it in your words, good or bad lets hear it)

I would say that it allows one to write statefu, long lasting workflows or processes in a durable and persistent way using all the niceties of regular programming languages such as Go/Java, like control structures, abstraction, etc. In a similar way that generators in Python/JS allow one to write even complicated iterators much more easily than manually keeping track of state yourself, Temporal allows one to easily define long-lived stateful processes (on order of years even) with the simplicity of roughly:

    while(true) {
      Thread.sleep(1, MONTH);
      sendReminderEmail(user);
    }
...which would normally require one to manually keep track of state in queues and key-value stores and idempotent updates, but with temporal the developer can just focus on the simple business rules. The runtime of Temporal takes care of compiling that down into proper state-machine logic.

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

#88

Post by idlewords »

Graffur wrote: post #60
dchuk wrote: post #39

This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks ago: https://chia.net It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for having a secure digital currency. It also has an interesting, Lisp based programmi…

The people who have the most hard drive space will mine the most Chia. How is that any different to just paying with USD to get more? In terms of it being a "much more" fair model.

Not just the most hard drive space, but the very specific fast kinds of hard drives you need to farm it efficiently.

The idea that you can do a sustainable cryptocurrency that remains sustainable no matter how valuable the tokens become in real money terms is self-evidently ridiculous. There's always some limiting resource you'll hit first, and if the cryptotokens are worth real money, that resource will get scarce.

But Chia is a good example of a brilliant person being so seduced by a challenging technical problem that they lose any ability to see foundational problems that people with a tenth of the brampower would be able to spot instantly.

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

#90

Post by isoprophlex »

MAXPOOL wrote: post #14

Advances in computational chemistry and computational materials science. Specially using ML to speed up computation. Computational chemistry is already patchwork of different heuristic approaches. Graph neural networks and even some language models seem very promising addition. If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology, medicine and materia…

Yes! This would be fantastic, I'd love to see this happen.

If anyone is working on this, and is looking to hire a computational organic chemist-turned-ai engineer, let me know!

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