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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?

#671

Post by mbzi »

duckfruit wrote: post #351
mbzi wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, much appreciated!

I think WebAssembly is more used than it appears, just difficult to see/tell.

A few years ago I actually tried integrating AR via WebAssembly with Amazon. We couldn't get the approval due to poor performance on Amazon fire devices (which have low end hardware). It is a shame but it is what it is.

What is disappointing/annoying is - as a CTO - it is near impossible to hire someone with WebAssembly skills. It requires an extra curious Engineer with a passion for native and web. Training is always important for a team but when going down the WebAssembly route you need to extra focused and invest more than what a typical Engineer would be allocated (E.g. Increase training from 1 day a week to 2-3). I suppose this may put people off?

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

#672

Post by peteforde »

amurthy1 wrote: post #659
peteforde wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to ignore the snark and pretend as though this is a good faith argument, because we're on Hacker News - and I believe that means you're a smart person I might disagree with, and I'm challenging you. I want to understand why being in a high-speed steel/plastic box with humans (overrated in some views) controlled by a computer scares you so much. Is it primal or are you working off data I do not have? Please…

The risk is a bad actor could hack into this network and control the cars

Security-minded thinking dictates that we should move forward with the assumption that it will happen. The important outcome is not "we can't do anything as a society because bad men could hurt us" but "how do we mitigate and minimize this kind of event so that progress can continue".

Look: I don't want my loved ones in the car that gets hacked, and I'm not volunteering yours, either. Sad things are sad, but progress is inevitable and I refuse to live in fear of something scary possibly happening.

It is with that logic that I can fly on planes, ride my bike, deposit my money in banks, have sex, try new foods and generally support Enlightenment ideals.

I would rather trust a mesh of cars than obsess over the interior design of a bunker.

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

#673

Post by mbzi »

entha_saava wrote: post #415
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…

I don't like to see wasm replacing native for stuff like development tooling, and desktop apps. JITs may approach native performance in theory - but the battery consumption and memory consumption are not very good. ("Better than JS" is a low bar). As hardware becomes stronger, I would like to do more with it, and when it comes to portable devices, I want more battery life. Nothing justifies compiling same code again…

When dealing with Health or Military systems installing or updating a native application could result in months of delays (e.g. quarterly OS image update cycles). However running within Chrome, Firefox, and other typical software preinstalled, this becomes Without WebAssembly I wouldn't have been able to ship 2 products pro-bono within intensive care units and operating theatres directly helping with COVID.

I understand your dislike towards WebAssembly (albeit Web stack trends / flavour of the month esque development). I am not the largest fan of modern web development. Nevertheless love for WebAssembly is not due to developer productivity. After shipping 20+ WebAssembly products (alongside native counterparts) I am yet to meet an Engineer who enjoyed the WebAssembly/Emscripten/Blazor pipeline. However what WebAssembly has achieved for me is: Do people use your app? and within certain markets it allowed me to grow, do good, and say yes. This is the only real reason why someone should go down this route.

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

#674

Post by Reelin »

Johanx64 wrote: post #407
Reelin wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ryzen 2nd-gen 2700 is out of stock currently, but it used to go for as low as $135-150, it's absolutely not a $290 CPU (perhaps you're looking at 3rd gen ryzen? 3700x?). I haven't looked at what a GPU equivalent would be, but by the time PS5 hits the market, I doubt going to be anywhere near 270$. As long as there aren't any supply chain disruptions (as there are now). It appears that the real killer is the hardware-…

Ack my bad! I wrote "2nd generation Zen" but I meant to write "Zen 2" which is (confusingly) the 3rd generation.

I found some historical price data and I'm surprised - the 2700 really was $150 back in January! Vendors are price gouging the old ones now, and the 3700X is currently $295 on Newegg.

As far as the GPU goes, an 8GB from the 500 series (only 32 CU, released 2017) is still at least $140 today. And noting the memory again, that's 8GB GDDR5 versus (reportedly) 16GB GDDR6 so I'm skeptical the price will fall all that much relative to the 6GB card I mentioned.

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

#675

Post by ethbro »

scarface74 wrote: post #630
ethbro wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty popular for email, at 25%+ market share [1]. That's a LOT of information to mine. And point about conversations moving to post-email protocols, but email is certainly still up there with HTTP as a bedrock standard that everyone eventually touches. Without pushing JavaScript and a full featured web client, it's fair to say Google wouldn't have grown as quickly and be nearly as dominant today. As for their…

The question is not about how many people use Gmail - and that still doesn’t take into account corporate users. It’s about how many people use the web interface as opposed to using a mobile app.

Yes. And we're both clear that there wasn't always a mobile app version of Gmail, right?

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

#676

Post by azureus »

koeng wrote: post #583
iameoghan wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to know more. This is fascinating.

The dat website is at dat://aaca379867bff648f454337f36a65c8239f2437538f2a4e0b4b5eb389ea0caff You can visit with the beaker browser, or share it through dat so it won't ever go down. You can also visit it at http://www.nanosavseq.com/ (DNS is not up yet, http://167.172.195.83/book/index.html is direct) It's embarrassingly barren right now, mainly since I've encountered some big problems with getting my DNA quantifier…

Would you like to work together on this? This is very interesting stuff.

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

#677

Post by ninjachen »

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…

Cool! It's interesting!

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

#678

Post by vanderZwan »

ekianjo wrote: post #208
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,…

> 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…

Well that just goes to show that you shouldn't trust hearsay, even if that hearsay is your own vague recollection of something. There is an Wikipedia page dedicated to the ways the PS3 was used as a cheap HP computing cluster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

The only reason that stopped happening was because Sony killed it on purpose:

> On March 28, 2010, Sony announced it would be disabling the ability to run other operating systems with the v3.21 update due to security concerns about OtherOS. This update would not affect any existing supercomputing clusters, due to the fact that they are not connected to PSN and would not be forced to update. However, it would make replacing the individual consoles that compose the clusters very difficult if not impossible, since any newer models with the v3.21 or higher would not support Linux installation directly. This caused the end of the PS3's common use for clustered computing, though there are projects like "The Condor" that were still being created with older PS3 units, and have come online after the April 1, 2010 update was released.

And in case you were wondering, the reason Sony killed was because they sell their consoles at a loss and make up for that through game sales (which indirectly is what made it so affordable for people interested in cluster computing). If the PS3 is merely bought for creating cluster computers they would end up with a net loss (Nintendo is the only console maker that sells consoles at a profit)

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

#679

Post by agallego »

philipkglass wrote: post #624
agallego wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks, though what we sell is operational simplicity. speed is nice, but not the main benefit. a single binary that's easy to run is what CIO seem to be interested. though we are young. fingers crossed it works :)

I agree that operational simplicity will sell this to more organizations than performance will. There just aren't that many companies in the world that are bumping up against the scaling limits of Kafka. When I look at the landing page of vectorized.io it touts the speed repeatedly without mentioning this simplicity pitch you find deeper in the site: Redpanda is a single binary you can scp to your servers and be done…

Thank you! Will do! <3

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

#680

Post by exolymph »

threeseed wrote: post #28
exolymph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Self-hosting apps is time consuming and error-prone. Keeping your system up-to-date and secure is a full-time job. Cloudron lets you focus on using the apps and not worry about system administration." neat, don't think I've seen something like this before!

It kind of just looks like a simplified version of CPanel which has been on every VPS for the last 20+ years.

"simplified version of CPanel" is something neat that I haven't seen before

in addition, sometimes people don't know things that you know, and you would do well to keep that in mind: https://xkcd.com/1053/

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