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Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

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Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#381

Post by variable11 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #235
shostack wrote: post #34

Developments in the AR/VR space. The haptics stuff coming out is really cool and may be consumer friendly in the near future. Meanwhile headset tech is seeing major investment and light field technology is going to do amazing things for this space.

The Oculus Quest 2 is so cheap for a very high quality and high resolution experience. And even more importantly, it’s extremely simple to setup. Wireless VR really is a necessity for it to become more than just a tiny niche. Not yet mainstream, but it’s actually a joy to use and I think we’ll have significant marginal improvements over time which will keep making it more and more worthwhile. I think the real thing w…

Not spending money on hardware that Facebook can brick whenever it feels more evil than normal.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#382

Post by 908B64B197 »

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #340
Robotbeat wrote: post #254

1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every…

> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight. I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings. since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all.…

> I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective.

When you sell the rocket and not the launch on cost plus contract, it's indeed not cost-effective.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#383

Post by jjeaff »

Robotbeat wrote: post #254

1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every…

Regarding the boring company, i have seen at least one engineer's breakdown of their tech and it appears they are using off the shelf tunneling equipment and their costs are in line with and sometimes higher than several other established companies that dig smaller tunnels like the Boring Company does. It seems the only competitive advantage they have is the bully pulpit that is Elon Musk and his blind followers that can popularize the idea of small tunnels.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#384

Post by iskander »

High accuracy long read DNA sequencing. The new chemistry for Oxford Nanopore is getting close to where you can use it exclusively without polishing (down to ~1 in 100 base errors), and the price per gigabase has become competitive with Illumina (but with reads in the 10s or 100s of kilobases in lengths). On the other hand, PacBio HiFi reads are really reliably high accuracy and still long enough to resolve complex variants missed by Illumina, and only ~2x more expensive than ONT.

Both technologies totally redefine what we mean by "sequencing a genome" and open up broad categories of mutations that are completely invisible to more common forms of genotyping or sequencing.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#385

Post by greggman3 »

megameter wrote: post #358
distortedsignal wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying - "Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been rediscovering those things every ten years since." I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and then others came around and wrapped things differently. It's not…

One could say that memory safety is exactly the kind of "sanding off" we need on the concept of the traditional coding paradigms that have governed the software industry since there was a software industry(which, conveniently, is something that got started in the 70's and came of age in the 80's). One long period of structural debt and organizational consolidation, most of it piled on the conceptual framework of Unix…

Security and privacy are another big thing. In the 90s and 200Xs I installed pretty much anything as a native app and didn't worry about it as only "bad" people made viruses/trojans and legit companies had no incentive.

That all changed with big data and marketing. Now, every native app company, and every library those native apps use, has an incentive to mine your machine for data and then use and or sell that data. And further, the vectors for exploits of various native apps have increased as well and the always connected nature of our devices has increased the incentives.

Many people complain about MacOS's new security features. Me, I love them and I don't think they go far enough. Sure I want control of my machine. I don't want to secede control to Apple. But that to me is what MacOS (not iOS) is delivering (or attempting to deliver). Stop every app from doing anything without permission. Give me way to grant that permission if I really want. I wish Windows would do the same. I wish all Steam games were sandboxed.

In other words, getting all that cool tech from the 80s to be secure and privacy respecting is a ton of work.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#386

Post by 908B64B197 »

distortedsignal wrote: post #226
lumost wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to find that if there is a software idea, there are good odds that someone once had it before and probably made some code/prototype/paper/blog post/newspaper article on it. However usually these systems didn't take off because they were "before their time". There were cloud services in the 80s - but PCs got faster and cheaper than internet speeds could keep up. Client side apps looked better than cloud apps. S…

Even as a different perspective to that - a lot of what AWS/GCP/Azure are doing today, IBM was doing in the 80's with Cobol and DB2 and a bunch of tech that people today are just not interested in. There's a post that I saw on HN a couple weeks ago[1] talking about what an AWS Lambda service would look like in Cobol and I was blown away. This is the stuff my dad used to work on when he was fresh out of college, and I…

The problem was, undergrads in top 50 CS programs were not using IBM mainframes during the 80's. They were using UNIX.

Same thing today (and a few PC here and there).

Getting access to a mainframe was and still is very expensive. That's why Google, Facebook, everyone post 2000 basically got started on commodity hardware. Because it's cheap, it's what the founders knew and it works. It's also what the top 50 alumni know, and there's no vendor lock-in.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#387

Post by toomuchtodo »

Robotbeat wrote: post #379
zamfi wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Tesla try this for the Model 3 (a fully-automated factory) and it turned out to be a total disaster? Are they too far ahead of the curve? Or is it just rare that your task remains identical enough (i.e., textiles) for the decades it takes to optimize hardware?

A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting. There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.

Tesla also patented a wiring harness rigid enough to be robotically manipulated.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#388

Post by 908B64B197 »

throwaway0xa wrote: post #225
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

Indeed. The amount of "new tech" around auth leaves me head scratching. So many of the problems these start-up types are trying to solve have been solved by something like a well maintained Active Directory 10+ years ago. Group permission, PAM, SSO, etc. It's like these developers have never been exposed to Active Directory ever in their life...

Windows isn't used in academia.

So you get new grads that are re-inventing the wheel.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#389

Post by wildfire »

KronisLV wrote: post #267
macintux wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first IT gig, 25 (sigh) years ago, I tried to set up as an alias for www. . Seemed to work ok, but somehow I noticed that I had broken email delivery through our firewall, so I reverted the change. Couldn't figure out exactly what was going on, and set it aside. A few months after I left, I sent an email to a friend who still worked there, and it bounced exactly the same way. Called up my friend in a hurry, and su…

Why even have www. . in the first place then, if . is entirely sufficient on its own? It does appear that it's mostly done for historical reasons and sometimes you need CNAME records[1], but overall it feels like it probably introduces unnecessarily complexity, because the www. prefix doesn't really seem to be all that useful apart from the mentioned situation with CNAMEs. That's kind of why i asked the question abov…

While there are plenty of domain which only exist to serve a website, quite a few others have more than that.

With a website, if you want to push it onto a Content Delivery Network (CDN) it is easy to change www.example.com to point (via a CNAME record) to the right place.

If, however, you want to do that with the just example.com and also want to run things like mail, you can not use the CNAME record.

The why is long and boring, but that is the situation right now.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#390

Post by 908B64B197 »

bob1029 wrote: post #308
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

Not just old tech. But old tech made new again. Think about how much server-side web hosting de-complicates websites. If you had to start with a blank linux box, PHP is still one of the fastest ways to get something with a shopping cart functional to this very day. If you are into new-fangled shiny shit and can't be bothered with old, proven tech, look no further than Blazor Server for 99% of the same idea. But also…

> Put your entire application on a single server somewhere, and all of its dependencies live in the same box. Optimize the vertical before you rewrite for horizontal, because 99% of the time you will go bankrupt before you get as big as Netflix so it wont matter anyways.

Worse case, you'll get bottlenecked by the DB and move it to a different (bigger) server.

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