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

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

#44

Self hosting - https://cloudron.io

A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance.

Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a self-hosted platform as a service.

[1] https://twitter.com/umaar/status/1256155563748139009

[2] https://caprover.com/

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

#45
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) occupies a intermediate position in accuracy / skin depth for soft tissue between ultrasound and MRI

Optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) approaches SQUID level accuracy without need for supercooled device, can be worn or used as a contact sensor like ultrasound.

LoRA long range (10km +) low power sub-gigahertz radio frequency protocol useful for battery powered IoT devices transmitting small amounts of data.

Heat cabinet for infectious diseases, an old technology used to fight polio and other diseases that went out of favor with introduction of antibiotics. May find utility against novel viral infections.

UV light treatment of blood. Another old technology that may find use against novel infectious agents. Stimulates immune system to fight viral infections.

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

#46

Deno.land

Have you given it a try yet? I LOVE TypeScript and think the concept is really cool, but the compatibility story for NPM packages needs to be fleshed out somehow. Otherwise I fear it will fall into the same fate as Python 2 to 3.

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

#47
Caddy, specifically v2 (https://caddyserver.com/v2)

I've been using Caddy v2 all through beta/RC and glad it's finally stable with a proper release. I moved away from using nginx for serving static content for my side projects and prototypes. I'm also starting to replace reverse proxying from HAProxy as well. The lightweight config and the automated TLS with Let's Encrypt makes everything a breeze. Definitely has become part of my day-to-day.

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

#48
post #19

Web Assembly It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a wider impact than anyone has really realized yet. It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, and so on. It looks like it's going to enable a wider variety of languages on the web…

I agree! WASM is very interesting. Blazor is an exciting example of an application of Web Assembly - it's starting out as .net in the browser, but you can imagine a lightweight wasm version of the .net runtime could be used in a lot of places as a sandboxed runtime. The main .net runtime is not really meant to run unprivileged. It would be more like the UWP concept that MS made to sandbox apps for the windows App Store, but applicable to all OSes.

One thing I haven't heard much about is the packaging of wasm runtimes. For example, instead of including all of the .net runtime as scripts that need to be downloaded, we could have canonical releases of major libraries pre-installed in our browsers, and could even have the browser have pre-warmed runtimes ready to execute, in theory. So if we wanted to have a really fast startup time for .net, my browser could transparently cache a runtime. Basically like CDN references to JS files, but for entire language runtimes.

This would obviate the need for browsers to natively support language runtimes. It's conceptually a way to get back to something like Flash or SilverLight but with a super simple fallback that doesn't require any plugin to be installed.

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

#49
post #25

Self hosting - https://cloudron.io

They'd be so much more successful, if "Install" button did not have this: wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup chmod +x ./cloudron-setup ./cloudron-setup --provider [digitalocean,ec2,generic,ovh,...]

There's a cloudron 1-click image on Digital Ocean

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

#50
post #44

Self hosting - https://cloudron.io

A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem to prefer charging per app instance. Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an alternative.…

Would love to get your opinion as I'm building a competing product to ServerPilot in this space. Is the $5 too expensive for the service? or is it just too expensive because the billing increases as you have more servers under management, and they charge you per app as well?

Are there features ServerPilot is missing that would justify the price more for you? Some examples might be monitoring, analytics, automated security patching, containerization of workloads, etc.

Would the plan be more appealing if the cost of the plan, the portal, and the VM hosting itself were all rolled into one? (i.e. you would just pay one company, rather than having to sign up for DO as well as ServerPilot).

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