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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?

#551

Post by frellus »

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…

Yesterday, while driving in downtown Mountain View, CA, one of these damn things stopped short of coming into the crosswalk. So I and the opposite direction person stopped, like we would if it were a person.

The damn thing made us wait for what felt like an eternity. And it still didn't move. So I started to roll forward and I swear to you, I was almost hoping I would hear the crunch of electronics if the thing had decided to roll forward given I had given up on it.

A year ago I was in a Bevmo trying to get beer and an inventory robot was in the isle. The thing was bulky (morbidly obese?) and I couldn't get by it as it was rolling slowly up the isle taking pictures on both sides, so I went down the parallel isle hoping to get infront of it to get to my beer. Nope, the thing got there first and blocked me.

Robots are our future. And it will be annoying during our lifetime. There was a reason Han Solo snapped at C3PO to shut up. I don't know what Han has had to deal with in his lifetime, but I can take some guess now on where his "shoot first" mentality came from.

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

#552

Post by ignoramous »

stickfigure wrote: post #365
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

I've done a couple neat (IMO) things with CF workers. - I use imgix to manipulate images in my app, but some of my users don't want anyone to be able to discover (and steal) the source images. Imgix can't do this natively; all image manipulation instructions are in the URL. So I put a CF worker in front of imgix; my app encrypts the url, the worker decrypts it and proxies. - A year ago, intercom.io didn't support per…

> I like intercom's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them to actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a cookie set by my app.

Might be against their terms? I rem someone asked if they could treat Workers as a http reverse-proxy to essentially bypass restrictions, and the answer was "no".

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

#553

Post by wpietri »

freehunter wrote: post #111
wpietri wrote: post #94

Darklang: https://darklang.com/ I've tried out an early version of their product, and I really like where they're headed.

I’d love to try it if they didn’t tie the language to their hosting service. I understand the necessity of the coupling but until someone can start a competing hosting company with the same language, it’s not something I’m interested in.

Totally reasonable. I feel the same way, but there are a lot of people who just want something up and running and are happy to accept vendor lock-in risks. I'm sure they'll get there eventually.

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

#554

Post by brightball »

autosage wrote: post #51

Materialize https://materialize.io/ Incremental update/materialization of database views with joins and aggregates is super interesting. It enables listening to data changes, not just on a row level, but on a view level. It's an approach that may completely solve the problem of cache invalidation of relational data. Imagine a memcache server, except it now also guaranties consistency. In addition, being able to liste…

I’ve always wanted to take the time to try to build this. It’s been possible in PG for a while to use a foreign data wrapper to do something like directly update an external cache via trigger or pubsub it to something that can do it for you.

Making it easy here would be absolutely fascinating.

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

#555

Post by askjdlkasdjsd »

ashishrvce wrote: post #336
askjdlkasdjsd wrote: post #176

A friend of mine is working on coscout. It's in beta right now, but he showed me some pretty insane machine learning based insights for companies, investors and founders. Things like - When will this company raise the next round? - What is the net worth of ? - What is the probability that this investor will invest in you? (given your sector, founder age, pedigree, gender, market conditions, do you have an MVP or not…

Is there any way I can get access to this? The product seems intriguing and I can be a paid customer.

They said they're in the final stages of testing right now, they'll first roll out slowly to customers that they're already working with, then the waitlist and then do a wider release for everyone by the end of next month.

Best bet would be to sign up on the waitlist for now https://coscout.com/dashboard

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

#557

Post by ethbro »

scarface74 wrote: post #513
ethbro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, modern Google was half-built on the back of the Gmail web app...

Gmail was introduced after Google was already popular. The Google home page’s claim to fame was always its simplicity and fast load time.

To an average user, Google in 2003 was a search page. In 2004+, it was essential internet infrastructure.

That's a pretty big difference.

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

#558

Post by stickfigure »

ignoramous wrote: post #552
stickfigure wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a couple neat (IMO) things with CF workers. - I use imgix to manipulate images in my app, but some of my users don't want anyone to be able to discover (and steal) the source images. Imgix can't do this natively; all image manipulation instructions are in the URL. So I put a CF worker in front of imgix; my app encrypts the url, the worker decrypts it and proxies. - A year ago, intercom.io didn't support per…

> I like intercom's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them to actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a cookie set by my app. Might be against their terms? I rem someone asked if they could treat Workers as a http reverse-proxy to essentially bypass restrictions, and the answer was "no".

Seems unlikely. But if they really want to lose paying customers, that would be one way of doing it.

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

#559

Post by mindfulplay »

northern-lights wrote: post #310

https://www.sens.org : Solving the problem of aging and diseases of aging. Watch a few interviews of Aubrey de Grey to get a better idea of the possibilities of their research. Though this would come under the "to watch" not for the immediate future but for the next decade or two.

One thing that's not clear to me is the advantage of living longer. Why do some people feel the need to live longer?

When I hear of blood transfusion and such, it also feels like a lot of these technologies are being developed by snakeoil salespeople to other nongullible but strictly egocentric humans.

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

#560

Post by scarface74 »

ethbro wrote: post #557
scarface74 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail was introduced after Google was already popular. The Google home page’s claim to fame was always its simplicity and fast load time.

To an average user, Google in 2003 was a search page. In 2004+, it was essential internet infrastructure. That's a pretty big difference.

Gmail is popular but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that popular for email. I’m sure that most people get most of their utility from email from their corporate email. Their personal email is mostly used for distant relationship type communications. Most personal interactions these days happen via messaging and social media. AKA “Email is for old people”.

Also, a lot of computer use is via mobile these days and I doubt too many people are using the web interface on mobile for gmail.

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