Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#11

Post by jonny383 »

blumomo wrote: post #2

As you’re talking about Apple, I find System76’s Linux computers, especially their notebooks [1] and their Ubuntu-based Pop! OS [2] a breeze of fresh air. This hardware/software combination gives me an Apple-like experience while committing to free software. The OS’s UX is very developer friendly as windows can be moved around and tiled using keyboard shortcuts. Then there’s a launcher bar similar to CMD+space on mac…

I really want to like system76 laptops, but I can't help but feel they are literally straight out of a prefab China warehouse, same old crummy quality plastic crap.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#12

Post by stenl »

There’s massive innovation in biotech right now. RNA vaccines are winning the COVID battle, based on extremely cool technology (pseudouridine to evade innate immunity, two prolines to lock the spike in prefusion conformation, lipid nanovesicles for delivery,...). RNA drugs are also being developed to treat cancer (by vaccinating against patient-specific neoantigens), MS (by inducing immune tolerance to suppress autoimmunity), etc.

AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.

Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.

I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.

Biotech is where it’s at.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#13

Post by paganel »

Not sure one should be excited about companies themselves, when I was more of a technophile (which I now certainly am not anymore) I used to be excited (for lack of a better word) about some particular people's concrete actions and deeds, most of them programmers or IT people (because I'm a programmer myself), but I'm sure that viewpoint can be extended to other domains, too.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#16

Post by erik_kemp »

1) Personal favourite: Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#18

Post by TimSchumann »

terhechte wrote: post #15

SiFive [1] "SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA" I think they have a bright future ahead. If there was a way to buy their stock / invest in them, I would. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive

Excited about them too. I preordered their new ITX dev board, but it keeps getting pushed back.

Current date says end of March, so I hope it won’t be much longer than this summer.

Re: Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?

#19

Post by rcarmo »

TBH, I’d rather be excited about specific teams/groups of people regardless of where they work. The trouble these days is filtering out the “influencers” and the marketing image, since we seldom get good insights as to how they work together and what their intent is when building a product or part of a technology stack.

Thoughtful approaches are, IMHO, the best indicator of whether a company is going the right way.

So Cognitect seems like an interesting place, for instance.

Post reply on HN