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Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#291

Post by toss1 »

volkk wrote: post #237
epicureanideal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except somehow the required education is much higher and the pay is much worse than software, right? I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.

i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surroundi…

Yup, Theranos attracted more than $700 million, was valued at $10 billion, and silently returned bogus test results for thousands of people. They weren't doing anything like altering people's DNA, immune systems, endocrine systems, etc.

Yes the barriers and regulations are (rightly) much higher than just business or consumer software, but I fully expect that the VC money will be, and in fact is already moving there. VC is very herdlike, and it'll only take a few really hot biotech hits to open the floodgates. I'd predict 5-10 years away, maximum.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#292

Post by wojciii »

Currently there's an intense war in which drone tech is being used in ways that I didn't imagine possible.

I think that this technology will evolve rapidly based on what I have seen so far:

- drone picking a dropped radio

- the usual fire correction of

- race drones with explosives

- dropping ordinance from 3d printed attachments

- machine gun drone (prototype)

The above are just off the shelf drones modified or built from scratch racing drones.

The military drones used (that I have seen video of) are both expensive and give a large explosion) but not very creatively designed.

It's just a question of time before autonomous systems will be able clear up a trench by dropping smaller drones which only kill humans. The technology to detect specific range of temperaturs generated by our skin is already available and used in alarms.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#293

Post by anarticle »

epicureanideal wrote: post #224
raptor556 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities. I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

Except somehow the required education is much higher and the pay is much worse than software, right? I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.

The marginal and capital costs of biotech are way higher than tech. It is absolutely fascinating however.

In the research field (my old field) most things don't work!

"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go the pub." -- me to grad student after 12h of imaging cells that took months to grow up :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#294

Post by kragen »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122
lqet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "general" here? The classic shortest path problem (which the psalm addresses) is described as finding the shortest path between two nodes, and given non-negative edge weights, Dijkstra's algorithm is perfectly general here. It will find such a shortest path in any graph, no further restrictions. For A*, everything depends on the heuristic, as you said. If h(v) = 0, A* is equivalent to Dijks…

> Dijkstra's algorithm is a general one, That can be used in any case, I take issue with this statement. "any case" implies it's more general than A star, which is not true, it's a specialization of A star with (ok you win) h(v) set to nothing. It necessarily cannot solve as many problems as a star. And Dijkstra's won't work in "any case" at all, esp graphs with negative edge weights. The explanation struck me as glo…

i would rather say that a* is an optimization of dijkstra's algorithm

they both solve the single-pair shortest-path problem in digraphs with nonnegative arc weights

a* which explores nodes in a different, better order thank dijkstra's algorithm, but can only be applied in cases where you can compute an admissible heuristic

that makes it less general than dijkstra's algorithm, which works to find shortest paths in any digraph with nonnegative arc weights, not just the ones where an admissible heuristic can be computed

any problem you can solve with a* can be solved with dijkstra's algorithm (usually more slowly) but the converse is not true

now, in a sense, a* with an inadmissible heuristic such as h(v)≡0 is 'more general' in the sense that it can emulate dijkstra's algorithm and also do other things; you could say that a* is a class of algorithms of which dijkstra's algorithm is one

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#295

Post by twic »

bglazer wrote: post #270
twic wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wild misstatement of what is going on. Morphogenesis is primarily governed by chemical interactions between proteins, on cell surfaces and secreted into intercellular space, as has been studied for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology And the proteins, and the maps and schedules for their production, and the machinery which gives them effect, are all encoded in the DNA. I haven't act…

I don’t think Levin is a crank. He went on Lex Fridman’s podcast and talked about his bioelectricity work and morphogenesis. Like you said, I think people who don’t know much about development took that to be the whole story, when in reality it’s just one academic doing what academics do best: talk about their own work. Edit: one small quibble with your comment is that it’s too reductive to say that morphogenesis is…

Thanks, this makes sense.

I think my reduction and your quibble is really a matter of semantics. It's true that the genome doesn't contain explicit coordinates for every feature of every cell. But at the same time, if you start with the same DNA, you get the same morphogenesis, and if you start with different DNA, you get different morphogenesis, so i would say the morphogenesis is very much encoded in the DNA. It's just that it's in a highly compressed representation, and the decompression machinery includes the laws of physics!

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#296

Post by tbenst »

roughly wrote: post #214

If you're not in the bio field, you may not be aware just how routine genetic modification has become. For the larger companies, projects can involve thousands of different iterations on DNA sequences, all of which are created, put in a cell, grown, sequenced, and analyzed. It's absolutely routine at this point - it's not a science or even engineering challenge project it's an operations project. The one that really…

As an experimental neuroscientist that has recorded fairly extensively from brain organoids, I would advise that these are HIGHLY underdeveloped cultures. When patch clamping, I had to depolarize neurons in a human brain organoid to -25mV to trigger action potentials (normally -60mV is sufficient; healthy neurons resting membrane potential is -70mV) Despite imaging organoids for hours with light sheet—a functional imaging technique that allows for observation of nearly all neurons in the organoid simultaneously, I did not observe any spontaneous action potentials, only diffusive waves of calcium activity.

Of course, not all organoids are created equal, and the protocols around extracellular matrices are improving constantly, but for folks interested in systems neuroscience the organoid field is still too underdeveloped to ask interesting questions around functional activity.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#297

Post by hassancf »

roughly wrote: post #231
raptor556 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities. I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

> I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities. Oh there Absolutely is! In general, there are four really high impact areas for computer folks - automation of lab equipment allows for scaling the number of experiments and the data that can be gathered by orders of magnitude; data science and engineering to sort, catalog, and investigate that data; b…

Glorified tech support for scientists? No thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#298

Post by kevstev »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #257
kevstev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect, but this is an absolutely enormous leap from anything else I have seen in my lifetime, and this crosses the chasm IMHO between "AI is unlikely to really be able to have general applicability" to "AI is probably going to upend life as we know it in our lifetimes." Maybe it will just peter out at this level like self driving car technology did, but I really doub…

Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect In fact, I'd submit that phenomenon as its own entry in the Weirdest or Most Surreal Tech Trend contest. People who, when confronted with a talking dog, say things like, "This talking dog is an idiot. It thinks 429 is prime, its painting looks like something from Bob Ross on acid, and the C++ code it wrote for me is full of bugs. I don't see what all the hype i…

I feel this way about self driving cars as well. Its like even 10 years ago, the capabilities they have today would be considered mind blowing, yet they receive so much hate because they aren't yet adapted to all situations. Its baffling to me, every time I watch a video of one I get all giddy and I am like we are living in the future! Yet even from tech circles, they get so much criticism because they aren't 100% there yet.

Its just a mindset I don't understand. And on places like reddit there is definitely some astroturfing going on or at least some definite "camps" that don't like SDC technology, but on HN AFAICT its been genuine disdain. So weird.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#299

Post by ericpauley »

alistairSH wrote: post #207
LeonM wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the EU country I live in does not allow them. And that is unfortunate, because whenever I visit another EU country I find them very useful.

I doubt many people would argue against their usefulness. The problem is management of the scooters when not in use. Even out in the suburbs, the local sidewalks have them discarded haphazardly. Not in a charging stand, not in a group, just ad hoc lying across the sidewalk. The bike share has dedicated stands for groups of 10-20 bikes - this makes far more sense to me than users just dropping them in the sidewalk or…

This feels like largely an issue of societal norms. People leave their cars sitting all over the place and nobody complains.

For sure there are places they shouldn’t be left, like right in the middle of the sidewalk. But maybe the expectation of every scooter being in a dock is too extreme.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#300

Post by SqueamOssi »

raptor556 wrote: post #225
Acutulus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incredibly striking piece of technology and really shows which way the future winds will likely be blowing. A particular exchange I had with it left a mark on me, in which I requested it to behave like a used car salesman attempting to close a deal with a hungry customer. It proceeded to repurpose idioms, make dad-jokes and sling double entendres about the shared joy of cars and hamburgers and how they both a…

I've been talking about this for awhile now, but I used to run a marketing service that streamed all reddit content in real time and did text analysis and bot detection. It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot. I am entirely convinced that there are large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites like reddit to si…

Yeah - I can't believe how much this HN discussion seems like a human generated thread.
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