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Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

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Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#191

Post by CyberRabbi »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #182
CyberRabbi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that the availability of Linux saved countless megacorporations from having to pay Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. Yet the availability of Linux has been a boon to people across the board. While I agree there is something not right about cutting into ARM’s profits for the benefit of megacorporations, I think that a royalty-free ISA might genuinely be good for civilization despite that in the same way Linux is…

I hear what you are saying, and that is a good point, and I do agree with the: "Why isn't there an open ISA?" I think the key difference with an OS like Linux and an ISA like RISC-V is that Linux helped literally millions of smart, curious kids get exposed to Unix and tinkering in a OS that wasn't a locked down behemoth: Windows. It changed lives. I don't think it is an exaggeration to overstate the democrization Lin…

You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can see a similar development happening in the computer space. Actually I’m surprised homebrew computers architected around an FPGA haven’t yet become more popular. Maybe as the popularity of RISCV grows we’ll see more of that. Would be great to see a project that implements a risc-v based computer on a de10-nano board as a starting point.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#192

Post by nynx »

JProthero wrote: post #135

Muon-Catalyzed Fusion [1]. Briefly it's a genuine, and scientifically uncontroversial, form of 'cold' fusion enabled by muons — a more massive relative of the electron that was in the news recently thanks to the potentially interesting results coming out of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab [2]. Like conventional 'hot' plasma fusion, in all experiments to date the energy input needed to sustain the process has exce…

It's disappointing that MCF doesn't get more attention.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#193

Post by alpaca128 »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #149

Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.

Almost all new houses are built with heat pumps where I live because it's kind of a no-brainer in those situations. And I see one old house after the other being wrapped in new thick isolation.

But heat pumps in old homes just aren't a thing because it's expensive and a lot of work to adapt the house's existing heating. People do understand it, they just don't want to bother with that.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#194

Post by kscottz »

abetusk wrote: post #186

* FPGAs, and their associated FOSS stack to use them. I haven't been able to really get into FPGAs but I'm optimistic about them. They're pretty clunky right now but I'm hoping they'll just get easier and more accessible. If we want computation that we're able to verify as being secure, FPGAs are the closest I see us getting to it. There's also applications in terms of parallel computation that they can do over more…

OSHWA board member [1] here and developer advocate at Open Robotics (the people who maintain ROS) here.

May I suggest you take a look at microROS[3]?

I am also super excited about OSHWA certified open hardware [4].

[1] https://certification.oshwa.org/ [2] https://www.openrobotics.org/ [3] https://micro.ros.org/ [4] https://certification.oshwa.org/

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#195

Post by rolandog »

jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

I've come to appreciate so many old FOSS tools that are incredibly well built and thought of in their design.

Emacs and org-mode (and many things GNU) have started to make more and more sense to me in this day and age.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#196

Post by vavooom »

jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

I agree with the concept that many industries still rely on old technology that with a 10% improvement could already surpass current "advanced" implementations. A good example being the Besides Tool Import Wizard that can scrape PDF data with way more ease and simplicity than a manual implementation with say Python. And that tool has been around for 20+ years!!

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#197

Post by lumost »

distortedsignal wrote: post #166
jl6 wrote: post #116

Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.

As I've gotten more experience in tech, I came up with a saying - "Everything great was created in the '80s, and we've been rediscovering those things every ten years since." I'm not firm on "the '80s" - maybe this stuff is older than I think - but I think the principle still holds. If it's a problem today, somebody probably thought about it before, and then others came around and wrapped things differently. It's not…

I tend to find that if there is a software idea, there are good odds that someone once had it before and probably made some code/prototype/paper/blog post/newspaper article on it.

However usually these systems didn't take off because they were "before their time". There were cloud services in the 80s - but PCs got faster and cheaper than internet speeds could keep up. Client side apps looked better than cloud apps. Similarly modern data centers, and cloud computing primitives didn't exist so reliability was more miss than hit.

Now the economics have turned and people need data shared across multiple devices. Cloud services are the defacto method of developing applications.

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#198

Post by galfarragem »

dchuk wrote: post #39

This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks ago: https://chia.net It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for having a secure digital currency. It also has an interesting, Lisp based programmi…

"Good artists copy, great artists steal".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_space

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#199

Post by cl42 »

nojito wrote: post #183
cl42 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Very expensive if you're throwing in a bit of cash. Do you have more info about the regulated prediction market? I'd love to learn more.

Yup. It’s https://kalshi.com/

Thanks!!

Re: Ask HN: What under-the-radar technology are you excited about?

#200

Post by zaat »

joeyaiello wrote: post #126
southerntofu wrote: post #114

1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of IP addresses) and with strong guarantees against known attacks against the DNS (DNSSEC doesn't solve everything). https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html 2. Semantic sysadmin to declare your intent in regards to your infrastructure no matter how it is implemented (i.e. with a standard specification,…

PM lead for PowerShell here, thanks for the callout! I'll take "isn't the worst". ;) I'd love to get more of your thoughts around how PowerShell might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking about. We see a lot of folks writing portable CI/CD build/test/deploy scripts for cross-platform apps (or to support cross-platform development), but we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get int…

Don't return everything, return what I specifically returned (yeah, I know about objects, talking about everywhere else). I know it will never happen, but one can dream. Painpoints aside, you and your team are doing excellent job. Thank you

Edit: unless you are also responsible for DSC, than I'll take it back. It's terrible.

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