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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?

#381

Post by duncanawoods »

signaru wrote: post #267
hnick wrote: post #108

VR. It seems just about ready, but still a little too expensive. While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Would an infinite desktop with an appropriate interface beat the reliable old 2x24" screen setup I have? I think it could.

Not just for games. Imagine VR tourism, meetings... or even escapism. Especially these days. Last time I used one the graphics isn't as immersive yet. I don't mind tethering it to a powerful computer. But image quality is a must.

I enjoy VR games but none of those sound attractive to me or at least with head-seats and controllers.

Interactive virtual worlds are wondrous but not actually terrible practical for traditional tasks. Something that is perfect though is training for roles involving a lot of awareness and physical interaction in rare and extreme environments e.g. emergency workers, police, soldiers etc.

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

#382

Post by fergie »

Animats wrote: post #95

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,…

> 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.

Still don't see fully (fully automated) self driving cars happening any time soon:

1) Heavy steel boxes running at high speed in built up areas will be the very last thing that we trust to robots. There are so many other things that will be automated first. Its reasonable to assume that we will see fully automated trains before fully automated cars.

2) Although a lot is being made of the incremental improvements to self-driving software, there is a lot of research about the danger of part-time autopilot. Autopilot in aircraft generally works well until it encounters an emergency, in which case a pilot has to go from daydreaming/eating/doing-something-else to dealing with catastrophy in a matter of microseconds. Full automation or no automation is often safer.

3) The unresolved/unresolvable issue of liability in an accident: is it the owner or the AI who is at fault.

4) The various "easy" problems that remain somewhat hard for driving AI to solve in a consistent way. Large stationary objects on motorways, small kids running into the road, cyclists, etc.

5) The legislative issues: at some point legislators have to say "self driving cars are now allowed", and create good governance around this. The general non-car-buying public has to get on board. These are non-trivial issues.

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

#383

Post by duncanawoods »

dvt wrote: post #238
hnick wrote: post #108

VR. It seems just about ready, but still a little too expensive. While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Would an infinite desktop with an appropriate interface beat the reliable old 2x24" screen setup I have? I think it could.

> While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Good games are most definitely not there. The consensus is that Alyx is really the only worthwhile VR title. Just about everything else is gimmicky and trite. VR still has a long way to go.

Skyrim and Fallout 4 are breathtaking in VR.

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

#384

Post by niftylettuce »

statictype wrote: post #371
niftylettuce wrote: post #362

I wasn't impressed with the engineering and JS client-side bundles on Integromat.

What was wrong with it? And why did you need to interact with it at all, I'm curious.

A customer wanted me to help them integrate the API I built for https://forwardemail.net with it. They have client-side bundles that threw errors and the pages rendered blank.

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

#386

Post by runawaybottle »

julianeon wrote: post #263
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 think there might be killer apps that companies aren't publicizing, because it's part of their competitive advantage. Example of WASM being used in a major product: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... You can infer from this that it's making them 3x faster than anything a competitor can make, and probably inspired a lot of those 'Why is Figma so much more awesome than any comparable tool…

Adobe XD uses some Wasm also.

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

#387

Post by seyz »

gavinray wrote: post #3

I wrote a guide on connecting Hasura + Forest admin for no-code SaaS apps + admin backends: "14. Connect Forest Admin to Hasura & Postgres" http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-forest... For Heroku specifically you need to make sure that the client attempting to connect does it over SSL, so set SSL mode if possible (many clients will do this by-default). To get the connection string for pasting into…

Thank you very much for this article, that's awesome!

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

#388

Post by modeless »

1. https://www.starlink.com/ Finally, truly global and low latency satellite internet.

2. Generative models for video games - https://aidungeon.io/ is barely scratching the surface. Story, art, animation, music, gameplay, it will all be generated by models in the future.

3. New direct drive robotics actuators such as https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-hasel+actuators I think actuators are holding robotics back more than software now. Breakthroughs are needed. No general purpose robot will ever be practical with electric motors and gearboxes.

4. Self-driving cars are still happening, despite delays. I think discounting Tesla's approach is a mistake, but Waymo is still in the lead.

5. NLP is finally starting to work. The potential for automation is huge. Code generation is very exciting as well.

6. I was excited for Rust but I now believe it's too complex. I'm looking for a much simpler language that can still achieve the holy grail of memory safety without GC pauses or refcounting. But I'm not holding my breath. If ML models start writing a large part of our code then the human ergonomics of programming language design will matter less.

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

#389

Post by bklaasen »

als0 wrote: post #62
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…

Cautionary tale: we’ve been here before with JVM CPUs like Jazelle. They didn’t take over the world.

See https://vintageapple.org/byte/ and search on the page for "Java chips" or download the PDF directly at https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199611_Byte_Magazine_Vol_2...

I remember being really excited at the concept. Of /course/ we needed Java co-processors!

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