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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?

#261

Post by jodrellblank »

jvm___ wrote: post #248
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 w…

I used to know nothing about Lord Kelvin except he said things like "It seems, therefore, on the whole most probable that the sun has not illuminated the earth for 100,000,000 years, and almost certain that he has not done so for 500,000,000 years"[1] and allegedly "everything which can be discovered, has been discovered"; until last year's Veritasium video on YouTube[2] about analog computers, and learned he invented tide-predicting analog computers to "substitute brass for brains" and add sinusoidal curves, and a mechanical integrator to separate out individual sinusoidal frequencies from the sum.

[1] https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_the_age_of_the_suns_he...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w from about 3 minutes.

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

#263

Post by gcanyon »

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…

Veritasium did a very nice video about the analog tide computers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w

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

#264

Post by bigstrat2003 »

corethree wrote: post #210
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>1) not just as well because docker is repeatable, not reproducible Not sure what you're saying here but most likely you're referring to some obscure pedantic difference. Effectively speaking docker and nix shell achieve similar objectives. >2) not if you need GPU acceleration which is a headache in docker, but not Nix shells This is true. But this is the only clear benefit I see. >- devenv.sh - arion - https://flaku…

I assume what they're getting at is that when you download a Docker image it'll always be the same (repeatable), but the image which is built from a Dockerfile may change even if the file does not (not reproducible).

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

#265

Post by beeburrt »

veqq wrote: post #105
aredirect wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An update was released just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485309 N.b. practically plan9 has become 9front.

9front was just on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485309

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

#266

Post by dsrw »

gemstones wrote: post #259
mb7733 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the whole language is "style insensitive" for variable names. So it's not just a feature of the stdlib.

Are you serious?

Yes. It’s so you can maintain a consistent style in your code base even if your dependencies use different styles. Nim has excellent C/C++ interop and it’s relatively common to interact with C or C++ symbols directly, and being able to do this without needing to adopt the dependency’s style or wrap everything is nice.

In python, for historical reasons the logging module uses camelCase while most other modules use snake_case, so it isn’t really possible to use the logging module and maintain a consistent style. This is a non-issue in Nim.

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

#267

Post by pixelmonkey »

kaycebasques wrote: post #59

Sphinx [1] gets my vote. It's the docs system that powers most sites in the Python ecosystem so it probably looks familiar to you. I call it a docs system rather than static site generator because the web is just one of many output targets it supports. To tap into its full power you need to author in a markup that predates Markdown called reStructuredText (reST). It's very similar to Markdown (MD) so it's never bothe…

Just want to +1 this, and also add a twist. The Sphinx community also has a great extension called hieroglyph, which lets you use rST directives to build slide presentations which also double as single-page HTML notes documents.

https://hieroglyph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started....

This meant I could first write a blog post on learning Clojure as a Pythonista[1]; then turn some code samples and tables and images into slides I could present at a public talk on my laptop or desktop[2]; and then finally publish a public notes document that talk attendees could use to easily study or copy-paste code examples[3]. (The notes are the exact same contents of the slides, just rendered in a simple single-page HTML format, with each slide transformed into a section heading, with permalinks/ToC auto-generated.) So, this is generated HTML from a single .rst source[4], all the way down! And, of course, I could version control and render the .rst file powering the slides / notes / etc. in GitHub.

[1]: https://amontalenti.com/2014/11/02/clojonic

[2]: https://amontalenti.com/pub/clojonic/

[3]: https://amontalenti.com/pub/clojonic/notes/

[4]: https://amontalenti.com/pub/clojonic/notes/_sources/index.tx...

Note: the slides in [2] do not play well on mobile. You are meant to use keyboard arrows to advance and tap “t” to switch into tiled mode (aka slide sorter) and “c” to open a presenter console. The slides are powered by a fork of html5slides, which will look familiar if you’ve seen the JS/CSS slide template that Go core developers use in https://go.dev/talks (they generate those with “go present,” a different tool, though).

More recently, I have also used a similar-in-spirit tool called marp (https://marp.app) for generating technical slides from source, but the output and functionality was never quite as good as rST + Sphinx + hieroglyph. The big advantages to marp: Markdown is used as the source, some tooling allows for VSCode preview, and PDF export is fully supported alongside HTML slides.

I have a soft spot for Sphinx, not only because it was responsible for so much great documentation of Python open source libraries (including Python’s own standard library docs at python.org), but also because the first comprehensive technical docs I ever wrote for a successful commercial product were written in Sphinx/rST. And the Sphinx-powered docs stayed that way for a ridiculously long time before being moved to a CMS.

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

#268

Post by calamari4065 »

kolinko wrote: post #257
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…

Yes! Also, most people don’t know that the word „Analog”, as in „analog circuits” comes from „analogy”.

I didn't make that connection until my late 20s and when I finally did, it radically changed how I look at and understand analog systems.

In today's world, we still build analogs, we just coerce them into strictly numerical, digital models. I don't know if you can call it better or worse, but digital is definitely less magical and wondrous than mechanical analog systems.

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

#269

Post by interfixus »

simpleandnice wrote: post #84
gal_anonym wrote: post #74

I wish Lua Server Pages (LSP) were more widely adopted. It's similar to PHP, but utilizes Lua instead. I dream of a CMS akin to WordPress, but developed in LSP. Lua is lean, with minimal syntactic sugar, and it feels like a 'complete' language. Therefore, we don't anticipate any additional bloat in the future.

Lua in OpenResty is one of my favorite ways to ingest events. I publish them into Redis and then have some Python workers subscribed to process them.

For an alternative take developed in a different galaxy, have a look at redbean, https://redbean.dev/

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

#270

Post by vitiral »

emporas wrote: post #171

Definitely Forth and Factor. Every programmer should get a little bit familiar with the concatenative style. 3 days ago i discovered a channel on YT which talks about Forth, even Chuck Moore himself did a talk there talking about GreenThreads and the like. Given that webassembly is a stack language with no GC, i do expect a comeback of concatenative programming some time in the future. https://www.youtube.com/@silico…

Agreed, but recommend thinking of wasm that way. Wasm is not written as a proper stack machine, it's just a way to represent computations that can be optimized across architectures.

I literally made this mistake, creating a wasm interpreter, before I realized it was a terrible runtime bytecode.

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