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

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71–80 of 700 posts

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

#71
Rust lang - Memory safety through zero cost abstraction as a way to eliminate a large class of errors in systems languages is interesting. Especially if it allows more people to write systems programs.

WASM - Mostly as a compile target for Rust, but I think this changes the way software might be deployed. No longer as a website, but as a binary distributed across CDNs.

ZK-SNARKS - Zero knowledge proofs are still nascent, but being able to prove you know something while not revealing what it is has specific applicability for outsourcing computation. It's a dream to replace cloud computing as we know it today.

Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, will be pretty interesting.

BERT - Newer models for NLP are always interesting because the internet is full of text.

RoamResearch - The technology for this has been around for a while, but it got put together in a interesting way.

Oculus Quest - Been selling out during COVID. I sense a behavioral change.

Datomic - Datalog seems to be having a resurgence. I wonder if it can fight against the tide of editing in-place.

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

#72

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…

That's super interesting. Will need to read a lot more about it though.

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

#73

NVME over Fabric. Only started to become available last year in AWS' more expensive instance types. But hoping it will become more widespread. Benchmarks with Spark result in real world performance improvements of 2-3x and SSDs will be much faster with PCIe4.0.

The m5 instance family was announced in 2017, IIRC.

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

#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.

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

#75
post #20
post #2

1. Cloudflare Workers, I don't have the bandwidth to experiment with it right now but it interests me greatly. https://workers.cloudflare.com/ 2. Rust - definitely will be the next language I learn. Sadly the coronavirus cancelled a series of meetings in Michigan promising to give a gentle introduction to Rust. https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

Cloudflare Workers and their KV service ( https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/ ) is great. I built a side project ( https://tagx.io/ ) completely on their services from hosting the static site, auth flow and application data storage. KV is pretty cheap as well starting around $5/month with reasonable resources.

I've seen tagx a couple of times before. Awesome to know who the author is.

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

#76
post #44

Self hosting - https://cloudron.io

A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance. Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative.…

Dokku is an excellent option for this sort of thing, and manages subdomains for you.

http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

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

#77

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…

Very similiar to

https://www.datomic.com/

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

#78
- Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm) such as Ushio's Care222 tech. This light destroys pathogens quickly while not seeming to damage human skin or eyes.

- FPGAs. I'm no computer engineer, but it seems like this tech is going to soon drastically increase our compute.

- Augur, among other prediction platforms. Beliefs will pay rent.

- Web Assembly, as noted elsewhere. One use case I haven't read yet here is distributed computing. BOINC via WASM could facilitate dozens more users to join the network.

- Decision-making software, particularly that which leverages random variable inputs and uses Monte Carlo methods, and helps elicit the most accurate predictions and preferences of the user.

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

#79
post #48
post #19

Web Assembly It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a wider impact than anyone has really realized yet. It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, and so on. It looks like it's going to enable a wider variety of languages on the web…

I agree! WASM is very interesting. Blazor is an exciting example of an application of Web Assembly - it's starting out as .net in the browser, but you can imagine a lightweight wasm version of the .net runtime could be used in a lot of places as a sandboxed runtime. The main .net runtime is not really meant to run unprivileged. It would be more like the UWP concept that MS made to sandbox apps for the windows App Sto…

I look forward to in browser DLL hell /s

I'm cautiously optimistic about blazor, it definitely makes streaming data to the Dom much easier

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