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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?

#461
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,…

> Also I don't expect Sony to be making any money off the hardware at those prices, so I agree that they're unlikely to sell them to anyone who won't buy games for them.

I think console hardware cost is generally budgeted at a slight loss (or close to break-even) at the beginning of a console generation, and then drops over the ~7 year lifespan.

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

#462
post #382
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…

You could be right.

My alternative possible timeline interpretation is that two forces collide and make self-driving inevitable.

The first force is the insurance industry. It's really hard to argue that humans are more fallible than even today's self-driving setups, and at some point the underwriters will take note and start premium-blasting human drivers into the history books.

The second force is the power of numbers; as more and more self-driving cars come online, it becomes more and more practical to connect them together into a giant mesh network that can cooperate to share the roads and alert each other to dangers. Today's self-driving cars are cowboy loners that don't play well with others. This will evolve, especially with the 5G rollout.

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

#463
post #382
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…

> Its reasonable to assume that we will see fully automated trains before fully automated cars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_14

Fully automated since 1998, and very successful.

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

#464
post #434

https://immersedvr.com/ Virtual monitors in an Oculus Quest that actually works. What’s coming up that will be amazing is hand controls (including a virtual keyboard) and conferencing and collaboration tools.

I'm going to try this out. I assumed the resolution of the Quest wasn't quite there to make coding in a virtual desktop comfortable. How has your experience been?

I use it every day. With wifi-direct there is zero lag.

I work with 3 1440x900 virtual screens. It’s more than enough for coding and the convenience of multiple screens for free offsets the low resolution.

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

#465
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those. Mmm, this sounds like exactly what people said at the time the PS3 was going to be released, and I can only recall of one example where the PS3 was ever used in a cluster and that probably was not that…

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…

While the individual components might not be as fast as a high end PC, they way the system is architected and the components are connected to each other (eg. super high bandwidth from SSD to CPU/GPU memory) gives it some advantages especially for gaming. For the price it certainly is impressive.

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

#466
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.

I think it's at an interesting tipping point.

Products like the Quest are crossing the threshold to where it's affordable, completely self-contained and high quality enough to provide a great true VR experience. They need to about halve the cost while maintaining quality and if they can do that then there is no reason why this shouldn't explode into the market place.

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

#467
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blazor seems like the only one application of WASM at the moment that goes in the completely wrong direction. People are already whining about JS bundle size and even the small .net runtimes are >60kb. Yew on the other hand seems to fit right into what WebAssembly was made for.

The download size does make it hard to use for a "public" site, like a webshop. But it is a different story for an application, like an intranet solution or app like Figma. A first time download of a few MB's is not a problem, as you regularly use it. Like a desktop application. It is the first time you can develop a full stack application (client and backend) in one language in one debugging session. For C# that was…

I understand the appeal for .net devs.

I just don't think it's a good idea in general.

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

#468
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.

Nobody wants to wear a VR headset all day

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

#469
post #382
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…

Of course the owner is to blame.

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

#470
post #382
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…

Another hard problem for AI is to "see" through rain
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