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

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

#241

Post by throwaway1984s »

pkkm wrote: post #43

The Arcan display server is a really cool idea. Even if it doesn't manage to get popular, I think there are ideas here that we could mine to use them in popular programs. - https://arcan-fe.com/2022/10/15/whipping-up-a-new-shell-lash... - https://arcan-fe.com/2021/04/12/introducing-pipeworld/ - https://arcan-fe.com/2020/12/03/arcan-versus-xorg-feature-pa... - https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-…

This. A hundred times this. The Cat9 stuff alone is so far ahead of what some have thrown millions at cut and paste cookie cutter things like Warp yet that is not even close to what was just presented as a fun thing.

The latest EU funded 'a12' things are also soooo high concept but not fever dream.

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

#242

Post by whartung »

anon1253 wrote: post #32

RDF 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 abou…

I’m doing a personal project using RDF. Not semantic web. Not OWL. Just “raw” RDF. And I really like it.

It’s perfect (so far) for my purposes of an extensible data model.

I’m sure others have augmented applications with “generic” data types (like properties and such). You always walk this fine line that if you fall to far you find you’re writing a database on top of a database.

We’ve also in the past fallen into that hole when building a DB schema that we stumble into what we coined the “absurd normal form” or, also colloquially, the “thing-thing” table that relates everything to everything.

Well, RDF is the thing-thing table, and it just embraces it. And for my project it’s a lot of fun. I have structured types, with specialized forms and screens. But, if desired, the user can jump into adding relations to anything. It’s essentially an RDF authoring environment with templates and custom logic to make entities. And in the end they can always dive into SPARQL to find whatever they want.

It’s not intended to work with zillions of data items, it’s just a desktop tool. I always found it interesting early on that the primary metric for triple stores was how fast they could ingest data, I guess nobody actually queried on anything.

Anyway, it’s fun and freeing to work with.

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

#243

Post by lannisterstark »

jhot wrote: post #229
touseefliaqat wrote: post #227

Magic Wormhole: https://magic-wormhole.io/ An easy and secure file transfer program. I use it almost everyday since I discovered it. Author has a very good video on it at pycon-2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrTqQw0_3c

I used to do some professional services work, and magic wormhole was one of the most reliable ways for me to get files to clients who's companies blocked traditional file sharing hosts like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Check out croc, I've been using it for years, and it works pretty great too!

https://github.com/schollz/croc

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

#244

Post by esafak »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #33

Most 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 gr…

I think it's passe. These days I'd suggest something comparable to Notion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/16zon95/are_there_a...

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

#245

Post by phillypham »

calamari4065 wrote: post #235

Analog computation. 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 integ…

In ML/AI space, at least some people thing analog computing is the next big thing, https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlfreund/2021/09/23/ibm-resea.... It hasn't taken off, yet, though.

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

#247

Post by nikshepsvn »

touseefliaqat wrote: post #227

Magic Wormhole: https://magic-wormhole.io/ An easy and secure file transfer program. I use it almost everyday since I discovered it. Author has a very good video on it at pycon-2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrTqQw0_3c

seems like its down

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

#248

Post by jvm___ »

calamari4065 wrote: post #235

Analog computation. 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 integ…

Analog tide-predicting machines are fascinating.

The tide height is a function of the earth/sun/moon systems. Earth and Moon aren't at a fixed distance from eachother, and neither is the sun, so every day is a unique tide but you can predict the range.

The analog way to do it is to make a gear for each point of data in the system and synchronize all their gears. Then you use them all to rotate one final gear, which will show you the prediction for the time you've chosen.

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

#249

Post by esafak »

georgelyon wrote: post #231

- FoundationDB's testing philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc - VSCode devcontainers: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

Does VSCode do it better or differently than the competing CDEs?

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

#250

Post by esafak »

xwowsersx wrote: post #2

Not 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

More power to nim. It just needs better tooling, IDE support.
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