Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

- VSCode devcontainers: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

I don't mean just vacuum tubes or even electronics at all. Mechanical analog computing is insane when you get down to it. You have special shapes that move against each other and do calculus.

We make these mechanical models as analogs of more complex physical systems. We can turn huge calculations into relatively simple machines. That we can roll two weirdly shaped gears together and get an integral out says to me something very profound about the universe. I find it to be one of the most beautiful concepts in all of the sciences.

What's even more wild is that we can take those mechanical analogs of physical systems and build an electronic analog out of vacuum tubes. That vacuum tubes work at all is just completely insane, but it's some absolutely beautiful physics.

And yes, there are equally beautiful problems that can only be solved in the digital domain, but it just doesn't speak to me in the same way. The closest thing is the bitwise black magic like fast inverse square root from a special constant and some arithmetic. Besides, that's more a property of number systems than it is of digital computation.

I understand how and why digital took over, but I can't help but feel like we lost something profound in abandoning analog.

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years).

I started using it in 2016, and used it for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html