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

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

#281

Post by tjchear »

threeseed wrote: post #136
aj-4 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla covering 3/6... stock price is definitely still low

I would never trust any self driving car that didn't use LiDAR. It's an essential sensor for helping to fix issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cSw4fXYqWI&feature=emb_logo And it's not contrived since we've seen situations of Telsa Autopilot behaving weirdly when it sees people on the side of billboards, trucks etc.

That same video said they trained a CNN to recognize phantoms using purely video feed and achieved a high accuracy with AUC ~ 0.99.

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

#283

Post by bsder »

dhash wrote: post #152
koeng wrote: post #113

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…

Best part is the Oxford devices are _actually affordable_. Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory. Meanwhile the Flongle [0] is $99 and the main Oxford device can be had for $1k. [0] https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/flowcells/flongle-flow-cel...

> Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory.

You cannot effectively sell this kind of device under $25K--support costs simply eat your profit margin.

This is a constant across industries. You either have a $250 thneed (and you ignore your customers) or a $25K thneed (and you have shitty customer support) or a $250K thneed (and you have decent customer support).

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

#284

Post by BigJono »

CrazyStat wrote: post #206
duckfruit wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can tell you about a WebAssembly killer app for a small niche. lichess uses WebAssembly to run a state-of-the-art chess engine inside your browser to help you analyze games [1]. Anyone who wants to know what a super-human chess player thinks of their game can fire it up on their desktop, laptop, or even phone (not highly recommended, it's rough on your battery life). Obviously very serious chess players will still…

I think chess.com has something similar too, but not sure if it's powered by wasm.

If it's not, I'd be interested to see a speed and feature comparison between the two.

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

#285

Post by pot8n »

iamwil wrote: post #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 nasc…

Rust is awesome and very eye opening and it's a great alternative for almost any Golang use case, I just hope they prioritize enhancing compilation times if possible.

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

#286

Post by abecedarius »

hanniabu wrote: post #191
CalmStorm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important weakness of zkSnarks is that it requires a trusted setup, for example [1]. A new alternative is called zk-STARK [2], which doesn't require the trusted setup, and is post-quantum secure. However, it significantly increases the size of the proof (around ~50KB). In general, hash-based post-quantum algorithms require bigger size and it would be interesting to watch the progress made in this regard. [1] http…

If I'm not mistaken, I believe they're found a way for a trustless setup a few months ago. Unfortunately I don't have any more info on hand, but I remember reading that in passing in regards to research performed by Ethereum developers.

I'm not up on the math, but https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-proof-compositio... sounded like that sort of thing.

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

#287

Post by rishav_sharan »

cxam wrote: post #20
rmason wrote: 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 am also very interested in using worker + kv. Can kv be used as a proper application database? Has anyone ever done that?

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

#288

Post by darksaints »

bionhoward wrote: post #214
chrischen wrote: post #112

1. Functional strictly typed programming patterns. It's hard to say if functional languages themselves will get adoption, but we definitely see functional patterns being used more and more in languages like Javascript, and being pushed in things like React/Redux. 2. Graphql/service-based architectures

The jargon of FP is crazy though! How do you learn all of that?

There are two subcommunities in the world of functional strictly typed programming languages. The Haskell camp is where you get the mind bending jargon and ivory tower ideas. Luckily, there is another camp that eschews this head-in-the-clouds thinking and sticks to practical matters first and foremost. You'll want to look for the ML family of languages: SML, Rust, Ocaml, F#, and Scala (my favorite of them all, but for some reason some people are trying to turn it into Haskell on the JVM).

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

#289

Post by jjcm »

duckfruit wrote: post #117
gpm wrote: 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 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…

If you’re looking for a real world example of Webassembly being used in production at a large scale for performance gains, check out Figma. Their editor is all wasm based, and is really their secret sauce.
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