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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?

#501

Post by dahfizz »

ianai wrote: post #469
fergie wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What if it's a rental or a lease? In a fully automated car, that's basically a taxi. I don't think I should bear the responsibility of my taxi driver.

If/when we get fully automated cars, this kind of driverless Uber will become extremely common. Who bears the risk then? This is a complicated situation that can't be boiled down to "Of course the owner is to blame"

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

#502

Post by dahfizz »

The_rationalist wrote: post #470
fergie wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That's hard for humans too. I think we need to give up on the idea that fully autonomous driving will be perfect.

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

#503

Post by Eridrus »

therealcamino wrote: post #445
slyall wrote: post #60

Sidewalk delivery robots. The problem is a lot easier that driverless cars (everything is slower and a remote human can take over in hard places) and huge potential to shake up the short-to-medium distance delivery business. It's the sort of tech that could quickly explode into 100s of cities worldwide like escooters did a couple of years ago. Starship Technologies is the best known company in the area and furthest a…

It seems like if they get popular they're going to run into problems with sidewalk availability. We're already using them for walking. You can add a few robots and not have any blowback, but once the novelty wears off, having to navigate around slowpoke robots on your walk is going to get old.

Cities are not immutable objects. It's going to be extremely contentious, because all local politics is, but it's not infeasible to alter our cities.

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

#504

Post by trebligdivad »

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: Yes, but only if they really work - now is the perfect time to sell them if they did; for those of us who normally use public transport but don't currently like the thought of sitting in a petri dish for 2 hours. Utility scale battery storage: Yes but it needs tech improvements to store LOTS of energy; the flow batteries might do it if the hype is true - but currently the UK wholesale electricity price is £-28/MWh due to a wind/solar glut and a quiet weekend, so if anyone wants to get paid to store that energy the opportunity is there.

As for C++ safety; I find modern C++ hard to read - are they going to be able to do safety but end up with something that's actually harder to use/read than Rust?

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

#505

Post by The_rationalist »

dahfizz wrote: post #502
The_rationalist wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's hard for humans too. I think we need to give up on the idea that fully autonomous driving will be perfect.

I'm obviously talking about matching human performance and this is the hard problem

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

#506

Post by a_bonobo »

thewarrior wrote: post #162
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…

Can this be used to make faster corona virus tests ? If so maybe this is the time to Manhattan project this technology.

The Oxford Nanopore people announced that they are in the 'advanced stages' of developing their own Covid-19 test called LamPORE

https://twitter.com/nanopore/status/1263711292868694021

Press release: https://nanoporetech.com/about-us/news/oxford-nanopore-techn...

'Oxford Nanopore is planning to deploy LamPORE for COVID-19 in a regulated setting initially on GridION and soon after on the portable MinION Mk1C.'

The GridION is still expensive and not affordable for a business or private person, a MinION definitely is.

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

#507

Post by benibela »

typon wrote: post #369
Animats wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like "It is the programmer's responsibility to ensure that std::string_view does not outlive the pointed-to character array." "string_view" is a borrow of a slice of a string. Since C++ doesn't have a borrow checker, it's possible to have a dangling string_view if the string_view outlives the underlying string. This is a memory safety error. Rust has educated people to recognize this situation. Now it's standa…

But surely it's a step towards more safety. Compare to passing char * around or ref/ptr to string. Sure C++ doesnt have a borrow checker but these types encourage the idea of "reifying" lack of ownership rather than keeping it ad hoc

I have always used Pascal for memory safe strings. Reference counted, mutable xor aliased, bound checked: their safety is perfect.

Unfortunately there is no string view, so you need to copy the substrings or use pointers/indices. I tried to build a string view, but the freepascal compiler is not smart enough to keep a struct of 2 elements in registers.

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

#508

Post by Gatsky »

koeng wrote: post #181
thewarrior wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can this be used to make faster corona virus tests ? If so maybe this is the time to Manhattan project this technology.

Generally, yes absolutely. I’ve been doing a project called “NanoSavSeq” (Nanopore Saliva Sequencing) in my free time. It’s published on dat right now since the raw files for Nanopore are really big (got too big for hashbase). There is one company doing it as well, but my version is completely open source and I’ve optimized it for affordable automation. To give you a sense, you can buy one for 1k and do as much detec…

Is this with multiplexing? Or are you extending the flowcell life?

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

#509

Post by mrfusion »

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

Why rust over go?

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

#510

Post by benibela »

chx wrote: 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...

>D has @property functions, which are methods that you call with what looks like field access, so in the above example, c.d might call a function. Rust has operator overloading, so the + operator might call a function.

But I love properties and operator overloading

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