DeepL.
Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
181–190 of 417 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#182- Capability Based Security (NOT the permissions flags on your phone or "app") - Offers the possibility for honestly secure computing
- Data diodes (unidirectional networks) - allow you to monitor a network without allowing external control (or only submit info, never ever exfiltrate it)
- GNU Radio - you can play with your audio ports, and learn instinctively how do deal with all the stuff that used to require DSP chips... then apply that knowledge with a $30 RTL-SDR dongle.
- Lazarus - seconding the above... a really good Pascal GUI IDE. The documentation needs work, but it's pretty good otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#183Lithium Titanate batteries. Nothing else is lightweight, safe, currently available, and lasts 20000 cycles.
ESPHome. It's a framework for declaratively building firmware for microcontrollers, based on rules like "This pin is an input with debouncing, when it changes, toggle this".
Contributing to them has probably been the most fun I've had programming in years.
We just need power management, and a C++ implementation of the Native API client. It's so close to being able to replace most of what I'd normally code by hand in Arduino.
RealThunder's fork of FreeCAD: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD
They fix so many issues. Linear patterns can duplicate other linear patterns!
Vorta: It's the best backup technology I've seen. Just an easy guided GUI for Borg, which gives you deduplication. I just wish they let you deduplicate across multiple repositories somehow.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#184Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…
Have you tried compiling software with a nix shell? It gets linked to the Nix store. Needless to say it was a frustrating revelation.
Sometimes it matters, many times not.
For example I tried to run pip install yesterday on MemGPT on Nix.
It failed with a C++ error because they use miniconda.
I just created a nix shell with python, pip, etc and ran the pip install command.
Things work fine.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#185U++ looks interesting, what do you like about it and what is your use case?
It is. I encountered it around Qt4 time. I really liked Qt4 backthen, but I was also open to using/trying other things. Like Lazarus and U++.
It offers a more compact i'd say approach to develop and it's quite straightforward.
I only used it for small GUI applications, but you can see what others been building https://www.ultimatepp.org/www$uppweb$apps$en-us.html
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that works. Or I can have it all in a single shell.nix file that covers everything and is super simple to use. It's great for handing off to coworkers that don't usually use Python.
It's not simple. The nix programming language is like untyped ML. Most people aren't used to it and even if you are familiar with it it gets hella hard to read. Learning curve is huge. One docker file and a poetry file works just as well. And is simpler. It's literally the same thing but using os primitives to manage the environment rather then shell tricks. Makes more sense to me to use a dedicated os primitive for…
> One docker file and a poetry file works just as well. And is simpler. It's literally the same thing but using os primitives to manage the environment rather then shell tricks. Makes more sense to me to use a dedicated os primitive for the task it was designed to be used for.
1) not just as well because docker is repeatable, not reproducible
2) not if you need GPU acceleration which is a headache in docker, but not Nix shells
> Additionally docker-compose allows you to manage a constellation of environments simultaneously. This is nowhere near as straightforward with nix.
- devenv.sh - arion - https://flakular.in/intro
> Most people won't know what to do with a shell.nix
The same was once true for Dockerfile
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#187Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#188Haxe - no idea why it isn't more popular.
I really like the idea, and the language itself looks very reasonable. (added to my forever opened tabs list) :D
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried compiling software with a nix shell? It gets linked to the Nix store. Needless to say it was a frustrating revelation.
Sometimes it matters, many times not. For example I tried to run pip install yesterday on MemGPT on Nix. It failed with a C++ error because they use miniconda. I just created a nix shell with python, pip, etc and ran the pip install command. Things work fine.
Oh God miniconda is a horrible piece of software on Nix.
I fell down the Nix rabbit hole, and miniconda was one of the worst things to get working. My first pass used an FHS environment, but eventually I just got the environment.yml file working in micromamba and used that instead. Except micromamba ships it's own linker that I had to override with SHAREDLD, or some random python c++ dependencies wouldn't compile correctly.
I love Nix, but my list of complaints is a mile long. If you want to do anything with opengl in nix, but not on nixos, just give up. NixGl just doesn't really work.
Good luck getting something like Poky (Reference project for Yocto) running in Nix. The only working example puts it in an FHS environment, which uses bubble wrap under the hood. But then because you're in a container with permissions dropped, you can't use a vm. The solution I see in the support forums is roll your own alternative FHS environment based on something else.
/Rant
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#190Plan 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…
And they did, in the usual half-a**ed, broken, honoured-more-in-the-breach-than-the-observance way such ideas usually get mass adopted.