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

It was being talked about as early as 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704924

I remember a lot of discussion in 2011 on it.

We're working on this, its fun, and already possible at lab scale. Check out Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS).

And we've got a huge shot in the arm with covid. At consumer scale the hard problem is skipping any kind of sample prep. Requires unrealistically high sensitivity - we're trying to work around this with different no-prep based amplification techniques. There is actually a lot of interesting work happening in this space.

Further, currently the substrates use gold to enhance the raman scattering of the incident light. As you can imagine, this can get pretty expensive. There has been some success in using low cost paper/inkjet, textile/dye based approaches to introduce gold nanoparticles onto more familiar and easily mass produced substrate to achieve the same effect.

SERS is pretty cool, hasn't got its due and I think its going to be one of the underdogs in the diagnostic/detection market in the coming years.

Whats especially cool about it is - it doesn't restrict you to one thing - only genomes, only proteins etc.

You may need a different strategy for different pathogens, detecting the a gene or cell wall for one, a synthesised protein for another, or even the waste product / metabolite to check if a reaction took place - its not a hammer looking for a nail.

Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars get more resolution, and the software improves.

UE5's rendering approach. They finally figured out how to use the GPU to do level of detail. Games can now climb out of the Uncanny Valley.

The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those.

C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time.

Electric cars taking over. The Ford F-150 and the Jeep Wrangler are coming out in all-electric forms. That covers much of the macho market. And the electrics will out-accelerate the gas cars without even trying hard.

Utility scale battery storage. It works and is getting cheaper. Wind plus storage plus megavolt DC transmission, and you can generate power in the US's wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) and transmit it to the entire US west of the Mississippi.

I've had good experiences with personal Wikis before, but have fallen back to plain notes. I think notetaking by itself is immensely powerful and underappreciated in general (wish I had started earlier), and all that's necessary is building a habit out of it. Maybe this can give it a little extra spice (hopefully not as cumbersome as a full blown personal website).

Optogenetics [0]. Light changes electrical behavior in cells. AKA, point laser, neurons fire, I know kung-fu

Memristors [1] Rebuilding the entire computer from EE basics. New 'color' added to EE spectrum, now computers process huge datasets on a watch battery

CRISPR-CaS9 [2] Tricks bacteria used to keeps viruses out are pretty slick. Crtl-C, Ctrl-V for gene editing. $100B technology, easily.

Strangely (encouragingly?) all these words are 'misspelled'

NOTE: I am massively oversimplifying things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR