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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?

#312

Turn your Postgres database into a REST API: https://postgrest.org Previous discussions on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest

Is there anything similar for Sqlite?

Exactly that (same api structure) https://docs.subzero.cloud/

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ReproducibleBuild.html and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds and https://reproducible-builds.org/ says just because something is "repeatable", doesn't mean it is "reproducible".

byte for byte builds? I knew it was some pedantic thing. I'm sorry if some timestamp changes one byte of the build.

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

#315

The Haxe programming language ( https://haxe.org/ ). It's insane how unpopular this is compared to its value. "Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash, and allows access to each platform's native capabilities. Haxe has its own VMs (HashLink and NekoVM) but can also run in interpreted mode." It's mostly popular in game dev circles, and is used by: No…

I’ll second this by saying I am currently building a game with Kha, a low level rendering Haxe library that targets all major platforms including consoles. I am utilising the extremely performant 2d immediate mode api which is refreshingly minimalist and exceptionally well designed.

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

#316

Bulma is not as widely known and used as it should be. It’s a very capable and easy to use CSS framework.

I just visited bulma.io and couldn't help but notice the sketchy-looking Patreons/GitHub sponsors that Bulma has listed. Lots of casinos are supporting Bulma. Are these genuine Bulma customers happy to support a product they use, or am I witnessing some new way of money laundering here? What is the Phone Tracking app doing there? I mean, Bulma needs all the support it can get, but what does a casino want from Bulma?

I can't imagine it's money laundering, they could just be using the sponsorship as advertising. I don't really like it, but there are 56 logos on the homepage, presumably mostly at the 100$/month tier, which is a decent income for the project. The fact that the project needs to advertise casinos to make money is a sign the FOSS model isn't sustainable, but I prefer this to Bulma not existing or becoming paid.

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

#317

- D (the programming language). It's a lot like C++ if C++ were rebuilt around modern concepts like modules. - Matrix. It's pretty popular but I see way too many open source projects still saying "join our Discord!" instead of "join us on Matrix!"

+1 for D. Python took 20 years after its introduction to become popular as today, thanks to its more intuitive syntax that was based on ABC. I really hope after 20 years of its introduction that D will be appreciated and becomes a de-facto language not unlike Python is now. Perhaps even more popular with the advent of connected tiny embedded sensors and machine in the form of IoT are upon us.

D has been out for 20+ years, or did I misread you?

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

#318

Chinese Text Analyzer https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ Tokenizes chinese text into "words" for learning purposes and then renders the text in a GUI where you can click on a word to get the definition. It's not perfect, but a LLM fine tuned for it will eventually result in much better "tokenization".

The same thing for Japanese: https://ichi.moe/

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

#319

For writing documentation: AsciiDoc [1] as fileformat. For publishing documentation / to build the web site: Antora [2]. AsciiDoc has a bit more features compared to Markdown which allows for a richer and more pleasant presentation of the docs. Antora allows you to have the project documentation in the actual project repositories. It then pulls the docs from all the different repos together to build the site. This al…

When I read about the "Docs as Code" approach, I never see mention of Antora. Is this an oversight ?
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