Windows :-)
Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
31–40 of 417 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#32RDF and semantic web used to be my goto's for this, as I believe many of the core ideas are still valid and often overlooked and sometimes even poorly re-implemented. Which says something.
However, lately I've come to like llama.cpp and friends, yes it's not ChatGTP miracle whatever but how often do you /actually/ need that? Despite its tremendous popularity, it still seems like something more people should know about. For me, I've had great fun with running LLMs locally and experiencing their different "flavors" from a more "phenomenological" (what is it like to use them) perspective rather than a technological one.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#33Most people know about MediaWiki even if they don't realize they do, because it powers Wikipedia, but I wish more people used it for documentation.
You can create highly specialized templates in Lua, and there's a RDBMS extension called Cargo that gives you some limited SQL ability too. With these tools you can build basically an entirely custom CMS on top of the base MW software, while retaining everything that's great about MW (easy page history, anyone can start editing including with a WYSIWYG editor, really fine-grained permissions control across user groups, a fantastic API for automated edits).
It doesn't have the range of plugins to external services the way something like Confluence has, but you can host it yourself and have a great platform for documentation.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#34In no particular order:
- PHP
- RSS
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#35Memory safe systems languages, including their uses before C and UNIX took off.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#36Plan 9 in general.
I keep hearing about it and its influence, but I can't really figure out if it's active or dead or even If I can use it on a virtual machine or so. 9p.io doesn't seem to even load on my machine
Since 2000 Plan9 has been open source. Official website: https://p9f.org/
You can also try out a derivative like Inferno: https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#37Dye lasers.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#38Windows :-)
Related to this, Revo Uninstaller. Sometimes programs don't clean up after themselves properly or the uninstaller is broken. Revo doesn't care, it tries to uninstall nicely first then resorts to scanning the drive for any remaining files, then scans the registry for remaining keys.
Not many people seem to know about it and everyone I show it to loves it!
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#39Plan 9 in general.
There's a whole category of utopian developer environments and languages with far bigger aspirations than they were able to achieve but that still influenced others. Smalltalk being another example.
One of my favorite things about the old C2 Wards Wiki is that it's like an archaeological site where time is frozen in this period and you can browse through preserved arguments about how Smalltalk and Extreme Programming will take over the world.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#40Not sure if you're looking for things as "trifling" as programming languages, but I do wish more people knew about Nim. It's fast, statically typed, reads more or less like Python, has a great effect system, etc. It's a joy to use. I've been working through writing an interpreter in it: https://youtu.be/48CsjEFzyXQ
I was using Nim for some of last years Advent of Code problems. I was mostly liking the syntax. Was a bit bother by the standard library have a snake case and camel case reference for each function (if I'm remember that correctly).
At the time nimble also required me to have NPM to install the the Nim package manager, Nimble. This was not ideal, but looking at [the nimble project install docs](https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble#installation) it seems like it is now package with the language.
Might try dusting it off for some AoC puzzles this year :)