Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#321

Post by aeternum » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:10 AM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #300

threeseed wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never trust any self driving car that didn't use LiDAR. It's an essential sensor for helping to fix issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cSw4fXYqWI&feature=emb_logo And it's not contrived since we've seen situations of Telsa Autopilot behaving weirdly when it sees people on the side of billboards, trucks etc.

LIDAR vs camera is a red herring. The fact that Elon and his fan club fixate on this shows you how little they understand about self driving. The fundamental problem is that there is no technology that can provide the level of reasoning that is necessary for self driving. Andrej Karpathy's most recent presentation showed how his team trained a custom detector for stop signs with an "Except right turn" text underneath…

A surprising number of human drivers would also not be able to 'detect' that 'except right turn' sign. Only 3 states offer driver's license exams in only English and California for example offers the exam in 32 different languages.

Even so, it is quite possible to train for this in general. Some human drivers will notice the sign and will override autopilot when it attempts to stop, this triggers a training data upload to Tesla. Even if the neural net does not 'understand' the words on the sign, it will learn that a stop is not necessary when that sign is present in conjunction with a stop sign.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#322

Post by onion2k » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:10 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #264

ekianjo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those. Mmm, this sounds like exactly what people said at the time the PS3 was going to be released, and I can only recall of one example where the PS3 was ever used in a cluster and that probably was not that…

This exactly. The PS5 and Xbox One X are commodity PC hardware, optimized for gaming, packaged with a curated App Store. Sony also won’t just sell you hundreds or thousands of them for some kind of groundbreakingly cheap cluster. They will say no, unless you’re GameStop or Walmart. Everyone with a high-mid-range PC already has more horsepower than a PS5 and it’s not doing anything particularly innovative or groundbre…

Then when the console breaks you have to pay your technician $100/hour in compensation, benefits, and taxes to remove and replace it.

No, you pay your minimum wage junior IT assistant to unplug the broken one and plug in a new one. That's the point of commodity hardware - it's cheaper to buy and cheaper to support.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#323

Post by elevenoh » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #121

I guess I'm much more conservative than other folks, but I think we've scratched only 10% of the surface of the benefits that things like Kubernetes, Consul, Vault and Terraform should/will provide. So they're on the list. I feel like at my job I'm pushing at the edges (as far as running large scale, stable production) and we've still got miles left. Also Bazel. I guess this is a boring answer.

>I think we've scratched only 10% of the surface of the benefits that things like Kubernetes, Consul, Vault and Terraform should/will provide.

What benefits are we not seeing?

So many apps over-engineer their scalability.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#324

Post by sandov » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #229

zamalek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a lot of compute engine for $400. So excited for this as a PC gamer, hardware prices are going to have to plummet. I don't think supercomputers a likely, the PS2 was a candidate because there was [initially] official support for installing Linux on the thing. Sony terminated that support and I really can't imagine them reintroducing it for the PS5.

And if they do it would be wise not to trust them, because dropping support for advertised features with hardware-fused irreversible software updates is SOP at this point. FFS, they even dropped support for my 4K screen in an update and I wound up playing the back half of Horizon Zero Dawn in 1080p as a result.

What? How and why did they drop support for your screen?

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#325

Post by jack_pp » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #234

reitzensteinm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are underrated.

You are right, for example, humans don't need anywhere near the amount of training data that AIs need.

You're forgetting the million years of evolution

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#326

Post by Findeton » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

Light-field technology. I believe its time has come. Actually I'm working on creating a cheap light-field camera and the pipeline from the video processing to the video player.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#327

Post by elevenoh » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:17 AM UTC

aabajian wrote: post #115

Geometric algebra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo It makes a lot of hard physics problems (Maxwell's equations, relativity theory, quantum mechanics) much more understandable and (I'm told) unifies them in a common framework. I think it will help your average developer become comfortable with these areas of physics.

Is all math/logic most fundamentally geometry?

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#328

Post by beambot » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #251

sedgjh23 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don’t need LiDAR to recognize billboards

Self driving cars can't rapidly move their cameras in multiple spatial directions like humans do on a continuous basis. Also we have a pattern and object detection computer behind our eyes that nothing on this planet even remotely comes close to.

People don't have eyes in the back of their heads. Self-driving cars don't get drunk or distracted by cell phones. Comparing humans with AVs is apples & oranges. The only meaningful comparison is in output metrics such as Accidents & Fatalities per mile driven. I'd be receptive to conditioning this metric on the weather... so long as the AV can detect adverse conditions and force a human to take control.

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#329

Post by Reelin » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #264

ekianjo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those. Mmm, this sounds like exactly what people said at the time the PS3 was going to be released, and I can only recall of one example where the PS3 was ever used in a cluster and that probably was not that…

This exactly. The PS5 and Xbox One X are commodity PC hardware, optimized for gaming, packaged with a curated App Store. Sony also won’t just sell you hundreds or thousands of them for some kind of groundbreakingly cheap cluster. They will say no, unless you’re GameStop or Walmart. Everyone with a high-mid-range PC already has more horsepower than a PS5 and it’s not doing anything particularly innovative or groundbre…

I think you've vastly understating current hardware prices.

An 8 core 2nd generation Zen chip appears to retail for $290. The PS5 reportedly has a custom GPU design, but for comparison a Radeon 5000 series card with equivalent CU count (36) currently retails for $270 minimum. Also, that GPU only has 6GB GDDR6 (other variants have 8GB) but the PS5 is supposed to have 16GB. And we still haven't gotten to the SSD, PSU, or enclosure.

Of course it's not supposed to hit the market until the end of the year - perhaps prices will have fallen somewhat by then? (Also I don't expect Sony to be making any money off the hardware at those prices, so I agree that they're unlikely to sell them to anyone who won't buy games for them.)

Re: Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

#330

Post by aeternum » Sat, May 23, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #251

sedgjh23 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans don’t need LiDAR to recognize billboards

Self driving cars can't rapidly move their cameras in multiple spatial directions like humans do on a continuous basis. Also we have a pattern and object detection computer behind our eyes that nothing on this planet even remotely comes close to.

Chimps have us beat when it comes to short-term visual memory (Humans can't even come close).

Mantis shrimp have us beat when it comes to quickly detecting colors since they have twelve photoreceptors vs. our three.

Insects have us beat when it comes to anything in the UV spectrum (we're completely blind to it). Many insects also cannot move their eyes but are still have to use vision for collision detection and navigation.

Birds have us beat when it comes to visual acuity. Most of them also do not move their eyeballs in spacial directions like we do but still have excellent visual navigation skills.