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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?

#311
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are underrated.

On driving? I would posit that most humans are vastly overrated . I suspect if you crunch the numbers, accidents are going to be above normal for a while after Covid-19 reopenings. Anecdotally, I'm seeing people doing mind-blowingly stupid things on the roadways right now. It seems like people have forgotten how to drive. I suspect the issue is that people rely too much on other cars to cue them how to behave and the…

No they’re underrated. We all know the stats. Driving isn’t the safest activity. Having said that there’s a lot of wishful thinking that the current state of ML can do any better if we were to just put them on the roads today as-is.

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

#312
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If by application database you mean to the level of an RDBMS then no. It's a key-value data store. You get your CRUD operations, expiry, key listing and the ability to do pagination with keys always returning in lexicographically sorted order. Any relation data you want to have would be using the key prefixes, e.g.:

  article:1 -> {"user": 1, "content": "..."}
  user:1 -> {"name": "username"}
  user:1:articles -> [1, ...]

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

#313
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, You can stop the tape right there. You know it doesn't and it can't.

Genuinely curious, what’s wrong with the lightning network?

I don't know why the parent comment talked in such absolute terms, but these recent problems may be relevant:

https://news.bitcoin.com/hidden-lightning-network-bug-allowe...

https://news.bitcoin.com/mishap-sees-user-lose-30000-btc-on-...

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded that dipping a toe in to Rust has changed how I think about C++ and object ownership. Loose pointers and copy constructors now make me feel un-clean! Move ftw. However I feel like most of the heavy lifting features came with C++11. Span, optional, variant and string_view are nice additions to the toolkit but more as enhancements rather than the paradigm shift of C++11 (move, unique_ptr, lambdas et-al).

> Seconded that dipping a toe in to Rust has changed how I think about C++ and object ownership. Loose pointers and copy constructors now make me feel un-clean! Move ftw. It's funny, because while it's certainly become more influential lately, that subculture existed as a niche in the C++ world before Rust and before C++11. So much so that when I first heard about Rust I thought "these are C++ people."

The original (and long dead) Rust irc channel used to be full of C++ people chatting with OCaml people. Those were the days :)

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

#315
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.

If I were driving I'd definitely stop for the person in the road projection at https://youtu.be/1cSw4fXYqWI?t=85

LiDAR also isn't a silver bullet. Similar attacks are possible such as simply shining a bright light at the sensor overwhelming the sensor as well as more advanced attacks such as spoofing an adversarial signal.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LIDAR vs camera is a red herring. The fact that Elon and his fan club fixate on this shows you how little they understand about self driving. The fundamental problem is that there is no technology that can provide the level of reasoning that is necessary for self driving. Andrej Karpathy's most recent presentation showed how his team trained a custom detector for stop signs with an "Except right turn" text underneath…

Why does it need to work in any human language? It isn't as if self driving cars need to work on Zulu road signs before they can be rolled out in California. I'd be surprised if they ever needed to train it on more than 4 languages per country they wanted to roll out to.

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

#318
post #235

Oxide Computer Company https://oxide.computer/ “True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.” Corey Quinn interviewed the founders on his podcast "Screaming in the Cloud", where they explain the need for innovation in that space. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/scre…

I’d second that podcast recommendation. The episode with Jon Masters is an incredible conversation.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, for example, humans don't need anywhere near the amount of training data that AIs need.

I learned to drive a car when I was 13. My older cousin took me to warped tour, got hammered and told me I had to drive home. I didn’t know what a clutch was, let alone a stick shift. After stalling in the parking lot a couple of times, I managed to drive us from Long Beach all the way back to my parents house in Pasadena. Love to see an AI handle that cold start problem.

Cold start? You had 13 years!
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