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

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351–360 of 700 posts

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

#351
post #140

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…

An example I can give: I use WebAssembly for a few cross-platform plugins. E.g. An AR 3D rendering engine in C++ and OpenGL. With very little effort it is working in browser. No bespoke code, same business logic, etc. Saved a lot of time vs creating a new renderer for our web app. For me it allows a suite of curated plugins which work cross-platform. The web experience is nearly just as nice as the native mobile and…

This is really great work and exactly the kind of response I was hoping for - thank you. I wonder why tech like this is not being more widely used, for example on Amazon product pages. Especially with the well known reluctance as you mentioned of people downloading apps.

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

#352
post #268

Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.

How accurate are those sensors? I've often thought how nice it would be to get rid of the mouse and use sensors to figure out where exactly on my screen I'm looking.

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

#353
post #268

Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.

I agree. While there are natural limits to how precise the eye is for interactions (eyes naturally flicker back and forth) I definitely also feel like there's potential here. I did a university project on combining voice and gaze tracking for programming - and while gaze is good for e.g. selecting a region of the screen, it's hard to click small things with it.

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

#354
Solar energy, carbon dioxide and water directly to butanol. In other words, store solar energy directly as fuel. There are other versions that generate hydrogen, but that has a much lower energy density than liquid fuel.

Just modify your existing ICE to run on butanol and you're good to go.

See https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-co2-wa... for where we were a year ago.

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

#355
post #303
post #212

Zig. There's a Why Zig When There is Already CPP, D, and Rust? writeup at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...

I came here to say the same thing: Zig. The design decisions are spot on. For example, Modeling Data Concurrency w/ Asynchronous I/O in Zig by Andrew Kelley: https://t.co/VYNqNcrkH1?amp=1

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLToGnjIUM

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

#356
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all math/logic most fundamentally geometry?

Don't think so. Geometry requires space, which has certain features which constrain its properties (sorry for a tautology). If you avoid such constraints, you can still have math, but it doesn't make sense to call it geometry. Looks a bit surprising math definition include concept of space. Geometry looks underappreciated, yes, but to replace the whole math...

Ah, but you can't encode math except for in some necessarily geometric form.

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

#357

I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist. It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor. I feel that Obsidian’…

Gonna check this out, seems very useful!

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

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don’t need LiDAR to recognize billboards

Self driving cars can't rapidly move their cameras in multiple spatial directions like humans do on a continuous basis. Also we have a pattern and object detection computer behind our eyes that nothing on this planet even remotely comes close to.

Also we have a pattern and object detection computer behind our eyes that nothing on this planet even remotely comes close to.

Not defending those who say that LIDAR isn't useful/important in self-driving cars, but this assertion is only marginally true today and won't be true at all for much longer. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06969 (2017), for instance.

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

#360
post #329
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. The PS5 and Xbox One X are commodity PC hardware, optimized for gaming, packaged with a curated App Store. Sony also won’t just sell you hundreds or thousands of them for some kind of groundbreakingly cheap cluster. They will say no, unless you’re GameStop or Walmart. Everyone with a high-mid-range PC already has more horsepower than a PS5 and it’s not doing anything particularly innovative or groundbre…

I think you've vastly understating current hardware prices. An 8 core 2nd generation Zen chip appears to retail for $290. The PS5 reportedly has a custom GPU design, but for comparison a Radeon 5000 series card with equivalent CU count (36) currently retails for $270 minimum. Also, that GPU only has 6GB GDDR6 (other variants have 8GB) but the PS5 is supposed to have 16GB. And we still haven't gotten to the SSD, PSU,…

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