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Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

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Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#81

Post by lm28469 »

Hard to get excited when I already feel like I have more tech than I need. I feel like we've reached all the low hanging fruits of quality of life before the 90s (health/medical care, electricity, fridges, central heating, running water). Computers are nice, smartphones are convenient, google map is the 8th wonder of the world, but I feel like we're now going backwards, products are becoming more and more unrepairable, unreliable, complex, made to be consumed and discarded. We're in an age of infinitely small incremental updates to existing technologies.

It's also hard to get excited about gadgets when most of the real world issues are social or economical.

When I want to dream a bit I open an old book about medicine/chemistry/woodworking/metalsmithing/1900s inventions. Back in these days a single person could still take giant steps, nowadays progress is extremely slow and requires huge teams if not megacorps with unlimited amount of money.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#82

Post by villasv »

WhisperingShiba wrote: post #4

I'm enthusiastic about block chain. Is it in a bubble? Yes, but so is virtually every speculative asset... Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems equitably, for example, online representative voting with open source software, anonymity, verifiability, higher efficiency and powered by the people. Otherwise, I'm getting pretty stoked about computer vision techniques. If I had more time I w…

> Blockchain legitimately has potential to solve major social problems

Blockchain was cool and novel, but the hype should be over already. We’re nearing 15 years of blockchain tech and it is still not magic powder that solves society’s problems.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#83

Post by villasv »

genewitch wrote: post #75
okaleniuk wrote: post #74

Photonic computing and the return of Fortran. These are two separate things but to some degree they're both boosted by the rise of heterogeneous computing.

Electrons are photons, aren't they? I'm guessing you mean computing with light instead of voltage, but even then, aren't a lot of the same restrictions there, clock fanout and speed (6ghz or whatever)?

> Electrons are photons, aren't they?

They’re not

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#84

Post by ilaksh »

Pretty excited about Algorand's AVM 1.0 release and new features. But I am biased since that is what I have been working on recently.

Looking forward to more comfortable lighter weight VR/AR glasses. Think that upcoming displays will be 10X more comfortable and use optical wave guide instead of phone on face and that will make a huge difference.

Looking forward to Neuralink and that type of thing, ie brain computer interfaces.

Artificial muscles have come a long way. Especially promising are the high voltage types which I can't remember now, HASEL or something. 3d-printed artificial muscles and limbs could be a real thing.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#85

Post by nautilius »

caffeine wrote: post #67

What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots. I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc. The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new develo…

I love space, and get excited about seeing BlueOrigin/ SpaceX/ Virgin now flying tourists - but I think I am still missing the actual business case.

Where do you see the value beyond novelty? What's the killer application? Settlements on Mars, or something more short-term? I think I'm still stuck in a 'a computer on every desk - yeah, but why would anyone need a computer!?' stage, and it bugs me to no end! ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#86

Post by sethammons »

I'm not interested in "new" usually (but I do enjoy anything Heidi Howard releases in her research). I like distributed systems, highly available services, and operating at scale. I like thinking how we can improve systems to make customers happier and grow the bottom line. Sometimes, I'd probably keep optimizing a given service, but I also like monitoring services and determining ways to know if the service is meeting customer needs, and I let that guide or influence "good enough to delight customers." I like ownership. I want to own my services from data layer to public API, and to promote devops culture.

Not sure if this is the spirit of your question. I like moving products forward, and the tech is usually an implementation detail.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#87

Post by softwaredoug »

Honestly one of the most stressful things about tech is feeling like you have to "keep up".

So when I have time to toy around, its with something dumb or old. Or its more of a foundational thing/idea that lasts. Dumb things like 'how does a relational DB work' or 'how does bumpy work'.

At my day job, it feels like I always have to push the envelope. Its fun to just relax and fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#88

Post by jazzyjackson »

genewitch wrote: post #75
okaleniuk wrote: post #74

Photonic computing and the return of Fortran. These are two separate things but to some degree they're both boosted by the rise of heterogeneous computing.

Electrons are photons, aren't they? I'm guessing you mean computing with light instead of voltage, but even then, aren't a lot of the same restrictions there, clock fanout and speed (6ghz or whatever)?

electrons pop into higher energy orbitals when they absorb a photon, but electrons’ energy is represented as a voltage, while a photons energy is expressed as its frequency.

im no photonics engineer but iirc the attractive part is, you’re not dealing with charged particles anymore, so you can go even smaller with your “transistors” without getting interference.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#89

Post by singularity2001 »

remexre wrote: post #40
singularity2001 wrote: post #38

WASM! Being able to write your own language that compiles to something that can run almost at native speed in the browser (pretty much without js) feels like a magical watershed moment.

Can I ask what kind of languages you're thinking of compiling? I was pretty excited about WASM too, until I realized it was bring-your-own-GC (which makes sense in retrospect I suppose), and libgc's WASM support had heavily atrophied last time I tried it (last year), such that it was freeing memory that was still in use(!!). If there's a high-quality GC for WASM you've used, I'd love to know about it for my own use!

I am currently experimenting with my own language wasp/angle:

https://github.com/pannous/wasp/wiki/

As you pointed out true GC is currently postponed, so no long running processes yet. The hope is to get the language finalized just in time when all wasm 2 features become standardized

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#90

Post by Trex_Egg »

arcanist_union wrote: post #71

The race for breakeven fusion is heating up, and it's exciting to see. That old adage about reaching breakeven being 'always 30 years in the future' is actually, finally looking more like 5-10 years. Relevant projects, all tokamaks: The largest ever fusion reactor so far which is being built now -- ITER in France, then there's MIT/Commonwealth Fusion's SPARC (they just demoed a type 2 superconductor magnet that devel…

Nice listings by the way
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