151–160 of 700 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cautionary tale: we’ve been here before with JVM CPUs like Jazelle. They didn’t take over the world.
Even closer to home. Palm, RIM, Microsoft, Apple and Google have all said at one point that web apps were the answer for mobile apps....
Oxford nanopore sequencing. If a few problems can be figured out (mainly around machine learning and protein design), then it will beat every other biological detection, diagnosis, and sequencing method by a massive amount (no 10x, but more like 100x-1000x) It's hard to explain how big nanopore sequencing is if a few (hard) kinks can be figured out. Basically, it has the potential to completely democratize DNA sequen…
[0] https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/flowcells/flongle-flow-cel...
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 nasc…
Cognitive radio, ultra wide spread spectrum, and other radio tech that promises great range and license free or minimal licensing operation due to lack of interference with other stuff.
Rust is the first serious C/C++ replacement contender IMHO.
RISC-V and other commodity open source silicon.
Cheaper faster ASIC production making custom silicon with 100X+ performance gains feasible for more problems.
Zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic crypto, etc.
NextDNS (nextdns.io) is a genius idea that I very much wish I had thought of. I am a paying customer as of this past week and am integrating it in all the places I always meant to put a pihole ...
What I'm watching is not on anyone's list.
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/
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 want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential, however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or 5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove m…
I've been playing with WebAssembly lately and the moment where it clicked for me how powerful it was was building an in-browser crossword filler (https://crossword.paulbutler.org/). I didn't write a JS version for comparison, but a lot of the speed I got out of it was from doing zero memory allocation during the backtracking process. No matter how good JS optimization gets, that sort of control is out of the question.
I also think being able to target the browser from something other than JS is a big win. 4-5 years is a long time for JS, but not a long time for language tooling; I feel like we're just getting started here.
zksnarks https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/ Essentially let’s you verify computation is accurate without doing the computation yourself, and even treating the computation as a black box so you don’t know what is computed. Many applications in privacy, but also for outsourced computation.
[1]https://filecoin.io/blog/participate-in-our-trusted-setup-ce...
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…
+1, very excited about this. They're marketing it in the OLAP space right now, but at some point I'd like to try integrating it with a web framework I've been working on.[1][2] It'd be a more powerful version of firebase's real-time queries. Firebase's queries don't let you do joins; you basically can just filter over a single table at a time. So you have to listen to multiple queries and then join the results by han…
Initially we went for the metaphor of "what if you could keep complex SQL queries (e.g. 6-way joins and complex aggregations, the kinds of queries that today are essentially impossible outside a data warehouse) incrementally updated in your application within milliseconds? What would you build?
We're moving away from that metaphor because it seems it's more confusing than helpfuL. Tips always appreciated!