30 ms·

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

• rmason 6y ago
  1. Cloudflare Workers, I don't have the bandwidth to experiment with it right now but it interests me greatly. https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/ 2. Rust - definitely will be the next language I learn. Sadly the coronavirus cancelled a series of meetings in Michigan promising to give a gentle introduction to Rust. https://www.rust-lang.org/learn https://www.rust-lang.org/learn
  • cxam 6y ago
    Cloudflare Workers and their KV service (https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/) is great. I built a side project (https://tagx.io/ https://tagx.io/) completely on their services from hosting the static site, auth flow and application data storage. KV is pretty cheap as well starting around $5/month with reasonable resources.
    • iameoghan 6y ago
      I've seen tagx a couple of times before. Awesome to know who the author is.
    • rishav_sharan 6y ago
      I am also very interested in using worker + kv. Can kv be used as a proper application database? Has anyone ever done that?
      • cxam 6y ago
        If by application database you mean to the level of an RDBMS then no. It's a key-value data store. You get your CRUD operations, expiry, key listing and the ability to do pagination with keys always returning in lexicographically sorted order. Any relation data you want to have would be using the key prefixes, e.g.: article:1 -> {"user": 1, "content": "..."} user:1 -> {"name": "username"} user:1:articles -> [1, ...]
        • rishav_sharan 6y ago
          yep. thats the plan. i will have keys like postid:someid/text postid:someid/author etc. the relation aspect doesnt daunts me. As long as I can have a list/collection as a value, i can define a working schema. I am more worried about if its costlier than normal dbs. and if there are any other gotchas to keep in mind as kv workers have scant documentation.
          • cxam 6y ago
            If you're comparing this to a normal DB, the biggest worry should be that it's not ACID compliant. Definitely something to consider if your data is important. The limitations for KV is listed here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/limits#kv https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/limits#kv You should also consider how you intend to backup the data as there currently isn't a process to do that outside of writing something yourself to periodically download the keys. This will add to your usage cost depending on what your strategy is, for example, backing up old keys that gets updated vs only new keys by keeping track of the cursor.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    I've heard many good things about Cloudfare Workers. Excuse my ignorance & N00Bness, but are they essentially a Cloudfare version of AWS Lambdas, Google Cloud Functions and Netlify functions, or are they something different/better?
    • closeparen 6y ago
      IIRC Cloudflare Workers run at each Cloudflare PoP, which have higher geographical density than AWS regions, so latency experienced by end-users may be lower.
      • iameoghan 6y ago
        Nice. Will check them out. IIRC they are really affordable too (like all serverless stuff tbh)
      • VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
        AWS has the same thing with Lambda@Edge
        • ijpsud 6y ago
          According to this[0] blog post Lambda@Edge has significantly longer latency (due in part to a smaller number of locations). Cloudflare also uses V8 isolates instead of whole VMs, so much lower overhead. Disadvantage is that you can only run JavaScript and WASM. [0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe...
    • thegagne 6y ago
      More lightweight. It’s just v8 so there’s basically no time for warm up time. They have vastly more pops than Amazon, so global performance for these is on a different level. But they are also more limited in compute and serve a slightly different purpose.
  • unixhero 6y ago
    Here https://youtu.be/U1EFgCNLDB8 https://youtu.be/U1EFgCNLDB8
  • sdan 6y ago
    Utilized workers to create one of the fastest website analytics tool after Google Analytics: https://rapidanalytics.io https://rapidanalytics.io (still in development).
    • XCSme 6y ago
      Fast, as in what sense? The tracking code loads fast? The tracking requests are sent fast to the server? The dashboards load fast?
  • stickfigure 6y ago
    I've done a couple neat (IMO) things with CF workers. - I use imgix to manipulate images in my app, but some of my users don't want anyone to be able to discover (and steal) the source images. Imgix can't do this natively; all image manipulation instructions are in the URL. So I put a CF worker in front of imgix; my app encrypts the url, the worker decrypts it and proxies. - A year ago, intercom.io didn't support permissions on their KB articles system. I like intercom's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them to actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a cookie set by my app. These are both trivial, stateless 5-line scripts. I like that I can use CF workers to fundamentally change the behavior of hosted services I rely on. It's almost like being able to edit their code. Of course, this only works for hosted services that work with custom domains.
    • theturtletalks 6y ago
      It’s pretty incredible. You can put it over any site and build your own A/B testing or targeting based on the user or the link used to get to your site.
    • ignoramous 6y ago
      > I like intercom's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them to actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a cookie set by my app. Might be against their terms? I rem someone asked if they could treat Workers as a http reverse-proxy to essentially bypass restrictions, and the answer was "no".
      • stickfigure 6y ago
        Seems unlikely. But if they really want to lose paying customers, that would be one way of doing it.
    • iameoghan 6y ago
      >These are both trivial, stateless 5-line scripts Would it be possible to share these scripts? I would love to see them, they sound really helpful/useful
  • mrfusion 6y ago
    Why rust over go?
    • ncmncm 6y ago
      Different use cases. Go was designed to be easy to use for un-demanding problems. People mostly switch to Go from Ruby, Python, or Java; or from C in places where C was an unfortunate choice to begin with. Rust is gunning for C++ territory, in places where the greater expressiveness of C++ is not needed or, in cases, not welcome. They would like to displace C (and the world would be a better place if that happened) but people still using C at this late date will typically be the last to adopt Rust.
      • mrfusion 6y ago
        So you’re saying it should have better performance than go?
        • ncmncm 6y ago
          Sometimes. Better control of performance.
          • mrfusion 6y ago
            Easier to search for if nothing else.
        • ncmncm 6y ago
          I am mainly saying it is suitable for solving harder problems than Go. Most problems are not hard; Go is good enough for them, and easier to learn and use well. All these languages are Turing-complete. The difference is in how much work it is to design and write the program, and in whether it can satisfy performance needs. C++ wins here by being more expressive, making it better able to implement libraries that can be used in all cases. Rust is less capable, but stronger than other mainstream languages.
  • maxencecornet 6y ago
    At my company, we run 100% of our front-end React/Vue web apps on Cloudflare workers - We love it, deploys are really easy, performance/resilience is built-in
• gavinray 6y ago
  I wrote a guide on connecting Hasura + Forest admin for no-code SaaS apps + admin backends: "14. Connect Forest Admin to Hasura & Postgres" http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-forest-admin-to-hasura-amp-postgres http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-forest... For Heroku specifically you need to make sure that the client attempting to connect does it over SSL, so set SSL mode if possible (many clients will do this by-default). To get the connection string for pasting into Forest Admin config, run this: heroku config | grep HEROKU_POSTGRESQL That should give you a connection string you can copy + paste to access externally from Heroku: HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_YELLOW_URL: postgres://user3123:passkja83kd8@ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6212/db982398 https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#external-connections-ingress https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#exte...
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Awesome, will definitely. I think it was your post in a different thread earlier this year where I came across it originally. I remembered the name as you helped me on the Hasura Discord (Thank you for all your awesome input there) & it looks so promising.
  • seyz 6y ago
    Thank you very much for this article, that's awesome!
    • gavinray 6y ago
      Oh snap, the founder of Forest Admin! Glad you liked the post, I've been using Forest on both realworld SaaS platforms and small side-startups since early 2017. Really cool to watch how much you've evolved since then. Also, Louis S. is amazing! I've sent two emails to you guys over the years, Louis answered both of them within a day. Throwback to 2017 UI ;) https://i.imgur.com/KT9Wtlx.png https://i.imgur.com/KT9Wtlx.png
      • seyz 6y ago
        This comment is epic, thank you very much :-) I'm sure Louis will be super happy to read this as well. See you soon!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sammnaser 6y ago
  Tailscale.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Oh wow, that looks cool AF!
  • mech422 6y ago
    Slick - I was wanting to try tinc + wireguard, might have to try this as well. Thanks for the heads up!
  • derekja 6y ago
    nice, but what is the benefit over zerotier? Seem to provide very similar end results..
  • reinhardt1053 6y ago
    I wouldn't trust such 3th party service. It's better to host everything yourself and for free: https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace
• neonhat 6y ago
  Rainway: https://rainway.com/ https://rainway.com/ Google Stadia: https://stadia.google.com/ https://stadia.google.com/ It's not even about gaming. Fuck gaming. It's about the underlying streaming technology. Imagine this same tech being used by a surgeon to perform surgery remotely. That's the type of use case I'm thinking about!
  • grogenaut 6y ago
    the reason these things work is because they use a datacenter in your city. Thats why low latency. You'd have to have doctor in the same locality, which is not what I think you are thinking.
  • dkarp 6y ago
    Add http://shadow.tech/ http://shadow.tech/ to that list
• bergstromm466 6y ago
  http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org
• followtherhythm 6y ago
  Redpanda https://vectorized.io/ https://vectorized.io/
  • threeseed 6y ago
    Looks like the ScyllaDB playbook i.e. rewrite a popular Java app in C++ and sell it as a much faster product. Going to be interesting to see if they survive as the pace of JVM improvements has been rapidly increasing in the last year or so.
    • agallego 6y ago
      thanks, though what we sell is operational simplicity. speed is nice, but not the main benefit. a single binary that's easy to run is what CIO seem to be interested. though we are young. fingers crossed it works :)
      • philipkglass 6y ago
        I agree that operational simplicity will sell this to more organizations than performance will. There just aren't that many companies in the world that are bumping up against the scaling limits of Kafka. When I look at the landing page of vectorized.io it touts the speed repeatedly without mentioning this simplicity pitch you find deeper in the site: Redpanda is a single binary you can scp to your servers and be done. We got rid of Zookeeper®, the JVM and garbage collection for a streamlined, predictable system. That does sound great! Put that information right up front.
        • agallego 6y ago
          Thank you! Will do! <3
• newsat13 6y ago
  Self hosting - https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io
  • exolymph 6y ago
    "Self-hosting apps is time consuming and error-prone. Keeping your system up-to-date and secure is a full-time job. Cloudron lets you focus on using the apps and not worry about system administration." neat, don't think I've seen something like this before!
    • threeseed 6y ago
      It kind of just looks like a simplified version of CPanel which has been on every VPS for the last 20+ years.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • exolymph 6y ago
        "simplified version of CPanel" is something neat that I haven't seen before in addition, sometimes people don't know things that you know, and you would do well to keep that in mind: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  • lostmsu 6y ago
    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,...]
    • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
      Is that any less secure than “sudo dpkg -i foo.deb”?
      • 6y ago
• poletopole 6y ago
  Wasmer is a project I'm watching closely for many reasons. I feel as WASM becomes more commonplace the role Wasmer plays will become clearer.
• darksaints 6y ago
  SeL4, Nix/NixOS, and 1ML.
• gpm 6y ago
  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, many more performant than the current ones. That's interesting on it's own, but not the main reason why I think the technology is interesting. Both mobile devices, and crypto currencies, are places where hardware acceleration is a thing. If this is going to be a popular ISA in both of those, might we get chips whose native ISA is web assembly? Once we have hardware acceleration, do we see wasm chips running as CPUs someday in the not too distant future (CPU with an emphasis on Central)? A lot of people seem excited about the potential for risc-v, and arm is gaining momentum against x86 to some extent, but to me wasm actually seems best placed to takeover as the dominant ISA. Anyways, I doubt that thinking about this is going to have much direct impact on my life... this isn't something I feel any need to help along (or a change I feel the need to try and resist). It's just a technology that I think will be interesting to watch as the future unfolds.
  • lukevp 6y ago
    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.
• mjirv 6y ago
  1. Fishtown Analytics - makes dbt, a sql data modeling tool that has really caught on in the analytics world over the last year or two 2. Bubble - no-code! 3. Stripe - already big but has the potential to be the next Google/FB/MSFT etc
• keithwhor 6y ago
  If you have time this long weekend, the team behind Autocode (Standard Library) [0] is looking for feedback. We launched a couple months ago here on HN and have been eating up community responses. :) tl;dr is: we provide the entire development stack for API integration on rails. If you've ever wanted to ship some quick webhook or API integration logic but have found Zapier too limiting but spinning up an entire dev stack overkill, Autocode fits cleanly in between both. In-browser IDE, API autocomplete, a drag-and-drop UI that generates code for you, version control, revision history, cloud hosting for your APIs. Takes a minute or two to ship a webhook from scratch. Disclaimer: Am founder. Am also happy to hear questions, thoughts, anything! [0] https://stdlib.com/ https://stdlib.com/
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    I've been using Autocode on & off for a while. Thanks for the reminder to recheck it.
    • keithwhor 6y ago
      No problem! We just released major updates this week. :)
• nostrademons 6y ago
  GPGPU. GPU performance is still increasing along Moore's Law, single-core performance has plateaued. The implication is that at some point, the differential will become so great that we'll be stupid to continue running anything other than simple housekeeping tasks on the CPU. There's a lot of capital investment that'd need to happen for that transition - we basically need to throw out much of what we've learned about algorithm design over the past 50 years and learn new parallel algorithms - but that's part of what makes it exciting.
  • nabusman 6y ago
    Sounds interesting, what language is best positioned for GPGPU's?
    • kekeblom 6y ago
      C++ through CUDA is by far the most popular option. There is some support in other languages but the support and ecosystem is far from what exists for CUDA and c++.
    • lmeyerov 6y ago
      Python via RAPIDS.ai . There first bc most data science community for prod + scale is in it. It feels like the early days Hadoop and Spark. IMO golang and JS are both better technical fits (go for parallel concurrency and js for concurrency/V8/typed arrays/wasm), and we got close via Apache arrow libs, but will be a year or two more for them as a core supporter is needed and we had to stop the JS side after we wrote arrow. Python side is exploding so now just a matter of time.
• akavel 6y ago
  https://luna-lang.org https://luna-lang.org - a dual-representation (visual & textual) programming language RISC-V Zig programming language Nim programming language (also some stuff mentioned by others, like WASM, Rust, Nix/NixOS)
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    > luna-lang Whoa... had to do a double take there. Great to see luna seems to be alive yet again - now "enso lang" per github [i]. A git commit just days ago... so here's hoping! It is such a great concept. [i] https://github.com/luna/ide https://github.com/luna/ide
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sidhanthp 6y ago
  https://www.letsdeel.com https://www.letsdeel.com - super easy payroll for remote teams. Onboarding / payments is awesome.
• seibelj 6y ago
  zksnarks https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/ Essentially let’s you verify computation is accurate without doing the computation yourself, and even treating the computation as a black box so you don’t know what is computed. Many applications in privacy, but also for outsourced computation.
  • CalmStorm 6y ago
    One important weakness of zkSnarks is that it requires a trusted setup, for example [1]. A new alternative is called zk-STARK [2], which doesn't require the trusted setup, and is post-quantum secure. However, it significantly increases the size of the proof (around ~50KB). In general, hash-based post-quantum algorithms require bigger size and it would be interesting to watch the progress made in this regard. [1]https://filecoin.io/blog/participate-in-our-trusted-setup-ceremony/ https://filecoin.io/blog/participate-in-our-trusted-setup-ce... [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf
    • hanniabu 6y ago
      If I'm not mistaken, I believe they're found a way for a trustless setup a few months ago. Unfortunately I don't have any more info on hand, but I remember reading that in passing in regards to research performed by Ethereum developers.
      • abecedarius 6y ago
        I'm not up on the math, but https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-proof-composition-without-a-trusted-setup/ https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-proof-compositio... sounded like that sort of thing.
• randtrain34 6y ago
  Deno.land
  • lukevp 6y ago
    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.
• threeseed 6y ago
  NVME over Fabric. Only started to become available last year in AWS' more expensive instance types. But hoping it will become more widespread. Benchmarks with Spark result in real world performance improvements of 2-3x and SSDs will be much faster with PCIe4.0.
  • cperciva 6y ago
    The m5 instance family was announced in 2017, IIRC.
    • threeseed 6y ago
      Sure but the Elastic Fabric Adapter is only on the top tier of instance types. Hoping it trickles down for us normal people.
      • cperciva 6y ago
        Oh, I thought you were talking about how EBS disks are presented as NVMe even though they run over the EC2 network fabric.
• juvoni 6y ago
  Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ https://roamresearch.com/ A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me. I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.
  • sidhanthp 6y ago
    The hype on Twitter can get a bit annoying - but Roam is seriously awesome.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Good shout - that's been on my watch list for a while now. Thanks for the reminder!
  • gnramires 6y ago
    I've had good experiences with personal Wikis before, but have fallen back to plain notes. I think notetaking by itself is immensely powerful and underappreciated in general (wish I had started earlier), and all that's necessary is building a habit out of it. Maybe this can give it a little extra spice (hopefully not as cumbersome as a full blown personal website).
    • Eugeleo 6y ago
      I can recommend this video [1] from the author of How to Take Smart Notes. The whole Zettelkasten is a great idea, and he explained it succinctly in that talk. He also compares the status quo methods of note taking with the Zettelkasten, which for me was very eye-opening [1]: https://vimeo.com/275530205 https://vimeo.com/275530205
  • typon 6y ago
    How's this different from hypertext? (I genuinely don't know)
    • deleted 6y ago
• rstorr 6y ago
  holochain.org & codelingo.io
• quack01 6y ago
  All the new products around WireGuard. I'm so tired of running VPNs. NAT traversal with protocols like STUN, TURN and ICE are going to allow point-to-point networks for all the clients. https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/ https://portal.cloud/app/subspace https://portal.cloud/app/subspace
  • api 6y ago
    Zerotier.com did this years ago and it works great.
    • aidanhs 6y ago
      I'm kinda sad for you - I've been using and advocating zerotier for a while (it's amazing and indispensable)...but in my circles the word 'wireguard' has got people excited, which (anecdotally) is benefitting tailscale and generating more hype around them than zerotier ever got. Hopefully a rising tide will lift all ships and you find a way to capitalise on it :) (I prefer device-based zerotier-style access rather than login-based tailscale-style so that does sway me to zerotier...but I have to admit tailscale looks more polished, e.g. the screenshot of seeing other devices on the network. I get it's not a fundamental feature! But I can't help but appreciate it)
      • api 6y ago
        We are doing fine and V2 is coming soon with a ton of improvements. I just have to occasionally point out our existence again. The pulldown showing other devices on a network does look spiffy but that wont scale. We have users with thousands of devices on a virtual LAN and the protocol will scale far larger. Not only will that not fit in a menu but any system that relies on a master list will fall down. That list and refreshing it will get huge. We are doing the tech first, spiff second.
        • chanux 6y ago
          Some feedback. I think I stumbled upon Zerotier a while back and didn't really get what it is. IIRC it felt like something that is only useful for big companies, exactly what I felt today. I think the website could do a better job showcasing how it's used. Hope my feedback is helpful and wish all the best!
• bitwize 6y ago
  Combining statistics-based AI with GOFAI to create systems that can both recognize objects in a sea of data and reason about what they saw. The MiSTer FPGA-based hardware platform. RISC-V is gonna change everything. Yeah, RISC-V is good.
  • bionhoward 6y ago
    How do you combine statistics-based AI with GOFAI?
    • sqrt17 6y ago
      GOFAI basically consists of inference and reasoning techniques, some of which cease to work well when you scale them up too much (computational complexity) or when there is uncertainty involved. There have been some efforts to scale reasoning towards greater scale (description logics) as well as problems with uncertainty (ILP, Markov Logic), but they've been de-emphasized or forgotten in recent times because you get a lot of mileage out of end-to-end deep learning - where essentially hidden state within the network deals with the uncertainty on its own, and where the additional compute overhead + rule engineering effort doesn't seem warranted.
• pedalpete 6y ago
  Soft-EEGs inference AI (signed up for the Google Alpha, but also looking at Elastic) Sleep research as a generality
• rsync 6y ago
  NextDNS (nextdns.io) is a genius idea that I very much wish I had thought of. I am a paying customer as of this past week and am integrating it in all the places I always meant to put a pihole ...
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    That's really interesting.
  • hanniabu 6y ago
    Is there nothing like this that's open source and can be used locally instead of the cloud?
    • Yoofie 6y ago
      I think you are looking for Pihole. [1] [1]: https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  Was bitcoin or blockchain mentioned on HN back when it wasn't on many radars?
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Would love to know the answer to this too..
  • coderintherye 6y ago
    It was being talked about as early as 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704924 I remember a lot of discussion in 2011 on it.
    • javert 6y ago
      I don't remember exact dates, but I can confirm this. I heard about bitcoin fairly early on from this site.
• skmurphy 6y ago
  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.
  • Balgair 6y ago
    Oh man, I used to research in OCT for deep brain stimulation! It's pretty cool tech, that is for sure. It's got a huge market for bio applications and certain industrials. That said, optics is a super finicky field. You can come in and get a Nobel for 5 hours work, or you can spend 50 years in a dark room trying to get things together. Alignment is crazy difficult, thought it seems it shouldn't be. Anyone that wants to dive into optics: Just do it for 2 years, no more.
    • duncanawoods 6y ago
      Tell me more about getting a Nobel in 5 hours. I’ll buy your ebook :)
    • jl2718 6y ago
      Alignment should be done system-wide by orders of magnitude. If you are on a breadboard, get everything to within a cm of final location, then everything within a mm, etc. Don’t ever spend more than 1 minute at a time on any component. This stuff was not in the textbooks.
      • Balgair 6y ago
        It's especially hard with OCT as it's in the IR spectrum. You just have to go on your meters alone. It takes forever.
• cxam 6y ago
  Caddy, specifically v2 (https://caddyserver.com/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.
• autosage 6y ago
  Materialize https://materialize.io/ https://materialize.io/ Incremental update/materialization of database views with joins and aggregates is super interesting. It enables listening to data changes, not just on a row level, but on a view level. It's an approach that may completely solve the problem of cache invalidation of relational data. Imagine a memcache server, except it now also guaranties consistency. In addition, being able to listen to changes could make live-data applications trivial to make, even with filters, joins, whatever. Similarly, someone is developing a patch for postgres that implements incrementally updating/materializing views[1]. I haven't tried it so I can't speak of its performance or the state of the project, but according to the postgres wiki page on the subject [2] it seems to support some joins and aggregates, but probably not something that would be recommended for production use. [1] https://www.postgresql-archive.org/Implementing-Incremental-View-Maintenance-td6064280.html https://www.postgresql-archive.org/Implementing-Incremental-... [2] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenance https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenanc...
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    That's super interesting. Will need to read a lot more about it though.
  • nojito 6y ago
    Very similiar to https://www.datomic.com/ https://www.datomic.com/
    • blain_the_train 6y ago
      How are they close?
    • estebarb 6y ago
      Materialize is based on differential dataflow, that is based on timelly dataflow. The abstraction works like magic: distributed computation, ordering, consistency, storage, recalculation, invalidations... All those hard to since problems are handled naturally by the computing paradigm. Maybe the product is similar, but not the principles behind
• interestica 6y ago
  3D Bioprinting : corneas.
• pot8n 6y ago
  eBPF
• nickreese 6y ago
  Cloudflare workers. It was on my watch list at the beginning of the year and I’m just about to out a 20k page “static” (with tons of interactivity) site into production them. Using it is an API gateway and Kv store for truly static assets is amazing.
• cinquemb 6y ago
  Brain computer interfaces and related research papers/techniques
• blackrock 6y ago
  I recently wondered if you can take your saliva, or blood, and get a diffraction scan of it. Kind of like a spectrograph. You’d feed this into a machine learning system, and it would match up your pattern against a known dataset. This might allow for faster identification and recognition, of known viruses and diseases. Especially if the technology can identify the virus from just your spit.
  • umvi 6y ago
    Sounds suspiciously like Theranos
    • blackrock 6y ago
      Hah! I didn’t think of that. What kind of fraudulent product was she selling anyways?
      • sergiotapia 6y ago
        spit in = diseases.json out
  • azureus 6y ago
    We're working on this, its fun, and already possible at lab scale. Check out Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS). And we've got a huge shot in the arm with covid. At consumer scale the hard problem is skipping any kind of sample prep. Requires unrealistically high sensitivity - we're trying to work around this with different no-prep based amplification techniques. There is actually a lot of interesting work happening in this space. Further, currently the substrates use gold to enhance the raman scattering of the incident light. As you can imagine, this can get pretty expensive. There has been some success in using low cost paper/inkjet, textile/dye based approaches to introduce gold nanoparticles onto more familiar and easily mass produced substrate to achieve the same effect. SERS is pretty cool, hasn't got its due and I think its going to be one of the underdogs in the diagnostic/detection market in the coming years. Whats especially cool about it is - it doesn't restrict you to one thing - only genomes, only proteins etc. You may need a different strategy for different pathogens, detecting the a gene or cell wall for one, a synthesised protein for another, or even the waste product / metabolite to check if a reaction took place - its not a hammer looking for a nail.
• abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Libresilicon [1]. Extremely important to our freedoms from corporate and state tyranny to make chip manufacturing libre. > We develop a free (as in freedom, not as in free of charge) and open source semiconductor manufacturing process standard, including a full mixed signal PDK, and provide a quick, easy and inexpensive way for manufacturing. No NDAs will be required anywhere to get started, making it possible to build the designs in your basement if you wish so. We are aiming to revolutionize the market by breaking through the monopoly of proprietary closed source manufacturers! [1] https://libresilicon.com/ https://libresilicon.com/
  • Vinceo 6y ago
    This is really really exciting. Thanks
    • abdullahkhalids 6y ago
      It is. They are down to 1 um, so they need to make a bit more than an order of magnitude improvement to become performance competitive - 100 nm is early 2000s technology, Raspberry Pi is 40 nm size.
• slyall 6y ago
  Sidewalk delivery robots. The problem is a lot easier that driverless cars (everything is slower and a remote human can take over in hard places) and huge potential to shake up the short-to-medium distance delivery business. It's the sort of tech that could quickly explode into 100s of cities worldwide like escooters did a couple of years ago. Starship Technologies is the best known company in the area and furthest advanced. https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/
  • jibolso 6y ago
    Seen a bunch of these doing deliveries within Milton Keynes.
  • Ozzie_osman 6y ago
    We've been ordering through them once every couple weeks during the pandemic. It's really cool. Even though the robot itself is really slow (takes a good 40 mins for a 1 mile journey), they're usually pretty available and responsive, and so we'd get things faster than human-based platforms (who has to be available, then go to the pick up point, then deliver).
  • bubba1236 6y ago
    Amazon scout is way ahead of them in technology
  • therealcamino 6y ago
    It seems like if they get popular they're going to run into problems with sidewalk availability. We're already using them for walking. You can add a few robots and not have any blowback, but once the novelty wears off, having to navigate around slowpoke robots on your walk is going to get old.
    • Eridrus 6y ago
      Cities are not immutable objects. It's going to be extremely contentious, because all local politics is, but it's not infeasible to alter our cities.
  • 6y ago
• stanislavb 6y ago
  It's definitely Elixir/Phoenix/Phoenix-LiveView. I'm even planning on using that tech stack in an upcoming project.
• chrdlu 6y ago
  Circle.so (https://circle.so/ https://circle.so/) With a rapidly growing creator economy, the tooling around building custom communities is very far behind. The cutting edge is a Facebook group, Slack channel, or a Discord server.
  • hanniabu 6y ago
    Would totally use it if they had discord login integration so it'd be easy to migrate our community over.
    • chrdlu 6y ago
      Hmm I'll ask the founders if they have a solution for that! They allow bulk upload of profiles, but may require emails currently.
• iamwil 6y ago
  Rust lang - Memory safety through zero cost abstraction as a way to eliminate a large class of errors in systems languages is interesting. Especially if it allows more people to write systems programs. WASM - Mostly as a compile target for Rust, but I think this changes the way software might be deployed. No longer as a website, but as a binary distributed across CDNs. ZK-SNARKS - Zero knowledge proofs are still nascent, but being able to prove you know something while not revealing what it is has specific applicability for outsourcing computation. It's a dream to replace cloud computing as we know it today. Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, will be pretty interesting. BERT - Newer models for NLP are always interesting because the internet is full of text. RoamResearch - The technology for this has been around for a while, but it got put together in a interesting way. Oculus Quest - Been selling out during COVID. I sense a behavioral change. Datomic - Datalog seems to be having a resurgence. I wonder if it can fight against the tide of editing in-place.
  • chx 6y ago
    > Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, You can stop the tape right there. You know it doesn't and it can't.
    • sosodev 6y ago
      Genuinely curious, what’s wrong with the lightning network?
      • dane-pgp 6y ago
        I don't know why the parent comment talked in such absolute terms, but these recent problems may be relevant: https://news.bitcoin.com/hidden-lightning-network-bug-allowed-spending-of-fake-bitcoins/ https://news.bitcoin.com/hidden-lightning-network-bug-allowe... https://news.bitcoin.com/mishap-sees-user-lose-30000-btc-on-lightning-network/ https://news.bitcoin.com/mishap-sees-user-lose-30000-btc-on-...
        • CraigRood 6y ago
• grahamg 6y ago
  comma.ai - They produce the aftermarket hardware for openpilot. It's a open source driver-assistance system that performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) for compatible vehicles. Many car vendors already do this, but based on some footage it requires less user intervention.
  • mindfulplay 6y ago
    The most dangerous type of technology: putting silicon valley mindset to a critical, deadly torpedo is not just risky but callous. Falling to these (hotz/musk) people's perceived intellect as somehow determining the success of self-driving cars is a bit disingenuous.
• EvanWard97 6y ago
  - Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm) such as Ushio's Care222 tech. This light destroys pathogens quickly while not seeming to damage human skin or eyes. - FPGAs. I'm no computer engineer, but it seems like this tech is going to soon drastically increase our compute. - Augur, among other prediction platforms. Beliefs will pay rent. - Web Assembly, as noted elsewhere. One use case I haven't read yet here is distributed computing. BOINC via WASM could facilitate dozens more users to join the network. - Decision-making software, particularly that which leverages random variable inputs and uses Monte Carlo methods, and helps elicit the most accurate predictions and preferences of the user.
  • formercoder 6y ago
    FPGAs have been around for quite awhile. Is something changing?
    • hikarudo 6y ago
      One thing that is changing quickly: deep learning, particularly inference on the edge. FPGAs are more versatile than ASICs.
      • formercoder 6y ago
        This just provides a cost advantage though right? I mean that’s great, love me some margin, but it’s not really a new frontier. Unless I’m wrong?
      • BooneJS 6y ago
        Everyone making ML ASICs would disagree.
    • Kliment 6y ago
      Non-stupid open toolchains are slowly happening. Vendor toolchains are the biggest thing holding back FPGAs. Everyone hates them, they're slow, huge, and annoying to use.
  • wtfno009887466 6y ago
• peralp 6y ago
  Sysdig [1] great monitoring platform for containers on K8S https://sysdig.com/ https://sysdig.com/
• mrleinad 6y ago
  So many interesting links. This post should be a regular on HN.
  • kpierce 6y ago
    Especially now. Ive been using HN for years and before covid I could see all the posts from the day before in 20 mins. Now it will take 2-3 hours. Everyone is sharing.
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Low-level stuff & Linux: RISC-V, Vulkan, Wayland, Sway WM, Wireguard, Zig. Web or high-level stuff: deno, Svelte, Vue, Webassembly, WebGPU, Flutter.
  • bionhoward 6y ago
    I had a blast writing a graph editor in Svelte but it was hard to debug. That was right after 3.0 came out, if it’s easier to debug now then I would love to build with it
• wpietri 6y ago
  Darklang: https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/ I've tried out an early version of their product, and I really like where they're headed.
  • freehunter 6y ago
    I’d love to try it if they didn’t tie the language to their hosting service. I understand the necessity of the coupling but until someone can start a competing hosting company with the same language, it’s not something I’m interested in.
    • Gollapalli 6y ago
      Huh, Dark looks pretty similar to what I'm doing, albeit significantly more work since they went and developed a whole language and editor. If you're not averse to Clojure, give this a look: https://github.com/acgollapalli/dataworks https://github.com/acgollapalli/dataworks
    • wpietri 6y ago
      Totally reasonable. I feel the same way, but there are a lot of people who just want something up and running and are happy to accept vendor lock-in risks. I'm sure they'll get there eventually.
  • topher200 6y ago
    I agree here. It's really exciting to have a platform where the friction of releases is totally removed. I'm excited to see where they end up with this product.
• Animats 6y ago
  Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars get more resolution, and the software improves. UE5's rendering approach. They finally figured out how to use the GPU to do level of detail. Games can now climb out of the Uncanny Valley. 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. C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time. Electric cars taking over. The Ford F-150 and the Jeep Wrangler are coming out in all-electric forms. That covers much of the macho market. And the electrics will out-accelerate the gas cars without even trying hard. Utility scale battery storage. It works and is getting cheaper. Wind plus storage plus megavolt DC transmission, and you can generate power in the US's wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) and transmit it to the entire US west of the Mississippi.
  • zhenchaoli 6y ago
    > C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time. Would love some links to read over weekend. Thanks!
    • Teknoman117 6y ago
      Things like: - std::string_view - std::span - std::unique_ptr - std::shared_ptr - std::weak_ptr (non owning reference to shared_ptr, knows when the parent is free'd) - ranges - move semantics - move capture in lambdas - std::variant - std::optional To be honest, learning rust has made me a better c++ programmer as well. Having to really think about lifetimes and ownership from an API perspective has been really neat. It's not so much that I wasn't concerned about it before, more that I strive to be more expressive of these conditions in code.
      • jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
        string_view, span and ranges are not conductive to safety, quite the opposite.
• KhoomeiK 6y ago
  Deep Learning driven NLP. We've seen massive advancements in research, but from personal experience working with a few startups, these new forms of NLP are just beginning to hit the market now (most companies are still using Classical NLP techniques like part of speech tagging etc). It's a huge space and I can't wait to see its use cases expand. Brain-Computer Interfaces. Augmented Reality. As someone in this thread mentioned for self-driving cars, I think the hype cycle for AR is in the right spot for us to begin seeing real advancements in the next couple years, especially with Apple's recent announcement.
• Balgair 6y ago
  Optogenetics [0]. Light changes electrical behavior in cells. AKA, point laser, neurons fire, I know kung-fu Memristors [1] Rebuilding the entire computer from EE basics. New 'color' added to EE spectrum, now computers process huge datasets on a watch battery CRISPR-CaS9 [2] Tricks bacteria used to keeps viruses out are pretty slick. Crtl-C, Ctrl-V for gene editing. $100B technology, easily. Strangely (encouragingly?) all these words are 'misspelled' NOTE: I am massively oversimplifying things. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
  • freehunter 6y ago
    I was excited for memristors in 2008 when HP announced they were right around the corner. They even built a new computer and a new OS to take advantage of memristors [1]. And then it never happened and no one has ever built one and it’s pretty much vaporware. I would be hesitant to trust anyone who says they’re anywhere close. It’s just not a technology that actually exists. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-mach...
    • hanniabu 6y ago
      > They even built a new computer and a new OS to take advantage of memristors I could be wrong but I think I remember reading somewhere they ran into patent infringement issues that they couldn't get around or something like that.
  • hobofan 6y ago
    CRISPR-CaS9 seems to be pretty much "done" already. It's already used by many labs and high-profile projects, has transformed upcoming gene therapy pipelines and the main problems are being ironed out. I don't think that there is any doubt anymore that CRISPR is a big milestone in biotech.
• hnick 6y ago
  VR. It seems just about ready, but still a little too expensive. While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Would an infinite desktop with an appropriate interface beat the reliable old 2x24" screen setup I have? I think it could.
  • dvt 6y ago
    > While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Good games are most definitely not there. The consensus is that Alyx is really the only worthwhile VR title. Just about everything else is gimmicky and trite. VR still has a long way to go.
    • duncanawoods 6y ago
      Skyrim and Fallout 4 are breathtaking in VR.
    • hnick 6y ago
      I'm in no position to judge having played none, but I've heard glowing reviews for more than just Alyx but didn't commit any titles to memory since I'm not planning to be an early adopter. However, some do admit current VR is heavily carried by the novelty of using your hands (much like the Wii's motion controls made many average games enjoyable while it was fresh).
    • XCSme 6y ago
      I play Eleven Table Tennis (as the table tennis clubs were closed due covid). That game is the best simulation game you can play today. The physics are very close to reality, so close that in-game and IRL skills are immediately transferable. The biggest issues of the game that I encounter are not with the game itself, but with the tracking limitations of the Rift S inside-out tracking.
  • signaru 6y ago
    Not just for games. Imagine VR tourism, meetings... or even escapism. Especially these days. Last time I used one the graphics isn't as immersive yet. I don't mind tethering it to a powerful computer. But image quality is a must.
• kiwicopple 6y ago
  If anyone is particularly brave, we are a new platform which is like Firebase, except it's built with Postgres: https://app.supabase.io https://app.supabase.io We are are essentially rebuilding [DabbleDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB) for the UI, and you get a bunch of middleware which is auto-generated: REST APIs, Realtime (CDC), auto-updating documentation. Also we will tackle some of the more difficult tasks for Postgres like replicating your database close to your users. Also we're opensource! https://github.com/supabase/ https://github.com/supabase/
  • npv789 6y ago
    implement graphQL would be nice
• chrischen 6y ago
  1. Functional strictly typed programming patterns. It's hard to say if functional languages themselves will get adoption, but we definitely see functional patterns being used more and more in languages like Javascript, and being pushed in things like React/Redux. 2. Graphql/service-based architectures
  • bionhoward 6y ago
    The jargon of FP is crazy though! How do you learn all of that?
    • darksaints 6y ago
      There are two subcommunities in the world of functional strictly typed programming languages. The Haskell camp is where you get the mind bending jargon and ivory tower ideas. Luckily, there is another camp that eschews this head-in-the-clouds thinking and sticks to practical matters first and foremost. You'll want to look for the ML family of languages: SML, Rust, Ocaml, F#, and Scala (my favorite of them all, but for some reason some people are trying to turn it into Haskell on the JVM).
• koeng 6y ago
  Oxford nanopore sequencing. If a few problems can be figured out (mainly around machine learning and protein design), then it will beat every other biological detection, diagnosis, and sequencing method by a massive amount (no 10x, but more like 100x-1000x) It's hard to explain how big nanopore sequencing is if a few (hard) kinks can be figured out. Basically, it has the potential to completely democratize DNA sequencing. Here is an explanation of the technology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWZvHIi3i0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWZvHIi3i0
  • dhash 6y ago
    Best part is the Oxford devices are _actually affordable_. Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory. Meanwhile the Flongle [0] is $99 and the main Oxford device can be had for $1k. [0] https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/flowcells/flongle-flow-cell.html https://store.nanoporetech.com/us/flowcells/flongle-flow-cel...
    • bsder 6y ago
      > Illumina has had such a stranglehold on the market - devices start at around 35k and go up into “this is a house now” territory. You cannot effectively sell this kind of device under $25K--support costs simply eat your profit margin. This is a constant across industries. You either have a $250 thneed (and you ignore your customers) or a $25K thneed (and you have shitty customer support) or a $250K thneed (and you have decent customer support).
    • zmmmmm 6y ago
      Depends what you mean by affordable - low barrier to entry, yes. But bases / $ is still orders of magnitude below where needed to displace Illumina for sequencing of large genomes (eg: human).
  • thewarrior 6y ago
    Can this be used to make faster corona virus tests ? If so maybe this is the time to Manhattan project this technology.
• aabajian 6y ago
  Geometric algebra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo 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.
  • bmcahren 6y ago
    I can't wait to read into this. Switching formulas to tau was incredibly useful for me when I was doing a lot of 3D math for game dev.
  • adamnemecek 6y ago
    The speaker in the video runs a community for people interested in geometric algebra. https://bivector.net/ https://bivector.net/ Check out the demo https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits Job the discord https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk
  • elevenoh 6y ago
    Is all math/logic most fundamentally geometry?
    • avmich 6y ago
      Don't think so. Geometry requires space, which has certain features which constrain its properties (sorry for a tautology). If you avoid such constraints, you can still have math, but it doesn't make sense to call it geometry. Looks a bit surprising math definition include concept of space. Geometry looks underappreciated, yes, but to replace the whole math...
      • carapace 6y ago
        Ah, but you can't encode math except for in some necessarily geometric form.
• edoo 6y ago
  Jeeva wireless has been on my radar for years now. Wifi at 1/1000th of the normal power. They were supposed to be at market by now with $0.50 transceiver chips. Last I heard they made a cell phone that didn't require batteries. https://www.jeevawireless.com/ https://www.jeevawireless.com/
• nkg 6y ago
  Machine Learning. I want an Alexa that would know how to learn and extend itself.
• hackerbabz 6y ago
  https://immersedvr.com/ https://immersedvr.com/ Virtual monitors in an Oculus Quest that actually works. What’s coming up that will be amazing is hand controls (including a virtual keyboard) and conferencing and collaboration tools.
  • dkarp 6y ago
    I'm going to try this out. I assumed the resolution of the Quest wasn't quite there to make coding in a virtual desktop comfortable. How has your experience been?
    • hackerbabz 6y ago
      I use it every day. With wifi-direct there is zero lag. I work with 3 1440x900 virtual screens. It’s more than enough for coding and the convenience of multiple screens for free offsets the low resolution.
      • jmiskovic 6y ago
        Did you try increasing internal texture resolution? It makes text crispier. The framerate will drop, but it's tolerable for this use case. I find it very useful. There are various resolutions supported, this is the highest where increase in quality should be most noticeable: $ adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 2048 && adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureHeight 2048 You have to start application after this is executed. To go back to original, you can reboot device or run this: $ adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 1280 && adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureHeight 720
        • hackerbabz 6y ago
          I don't even know where to type that in. Do you somehow access a terminal on the oculus or does that send a command from my computer to the oculus?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• busterarm 6y ago
  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.
  • thundergolfer 6y ago
    Was also going to post Bazel. Here's the best 'elevator pitch' for Bazel that I know of. 3 minutes from Oscar Boykin about why Bazel (or at least a Bazel-like system) is the future. https://youtu.be/t_Omlhh7IJc?t=40 https://youtu.be/t_Omlhh7IJc?t=40
  • bionhoward 6y ago
    Terraform is a game changer and easy to learn
  • kortex 6y ago
    Is there anything like "terraform provider for bare metal"? Would be soo convenient to just go from full nuke and pave to functional dev machine with a single config repo.
    • jcims 6y ago
      pxe boot?
    • busterarm 6y ago
      https://github.com/Roblox/terraform-provider-maas https://github.com/Roblox/terraform-provider-maas
    • redis_mlc 6y ago
      Terraform alone just does infra provisioning, but it can call a script for application setup.
  • elevenoh 6y ago
• alphast0rm 6y ago
  Ethereum becoming the value settlement layer of Web 3.0 [1]. Stablecoins have proven to be the killer dApp and there are ~$10B in circulation currently [2]. [1] https://ethereum.org/ https://ethereum.org/ [2] https://stablecoinstats.com/ https://stablecoinstats.com/
  • dudus 6y ago
    10B Distributed Monopoly dollars.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• choonway 6y ago
  What I'm watching is not on anyone's list.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    ....
    • choonway 6y ago
      If you have to know, it's the engineering equivalent of trying to divide by zero in Math.
      • yters 6y ago
        An invention invention?
• dnautics 6y ago
  Zig Programming language. Because it's basically C-+, It's extremely easy to use, and also extremely easy to parse, so (and maybe this is self-serving because I did it) I see a lot of automated code-generation tools to hook Zig into other PLs. C's age is starting to show (and it's becoming a problem), and I think it has the opportunity to be sort of a place for old C heads like me to go to stay relevant, modern, safe, and productive.
• api 6y ago
  The general trend toward returning computing to the edge, which is just starting and has been accelerated due to COVID forcing BeyondCorp type practices on us. Cognitive radio, ultra wide spread spectrum, and other radio tech that promises great range and license free or minimal licensing operation due to lack of interference with other stuff. Rust is the first serious C/C++ replacement contender IMHO. RISC-V and other commodity open source silicon. Cheaper faster ASIC production making custom silicon with 100X+ performance gains feasible for more problems. Zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic crypto, etc.
  • mwcampbell 6y ago
    > The general trend toward returning computing to the edge By "the edge", do you mean users' devices, or just more local data centers a la Cloudflare?
    • api 6y ago
      I mean users' devices and to a lesser extent things like federated infrastructure that's "closer to the user" socially speaking. It's a trend in the earliest stages, sort of like cloud was in the early 2000s.
• zubairlk 6y ago
  No/low code platforms such as bubble.io
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Absolutely. I enjoy Bubble - should have put it on the list. Any other platforms that have caught your attention?
• vich 6y ago
  Not sure if this counts, but I look forward to seeing the future of meat alternatives - impossiblefoods.com, beyondmeat.com, eatnuggs.com, etc.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    BioTech definitely counts haha
• askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago
  A friend of mine is working on coscout. It's in beta right now, but he showed me some pretty insane machine learning based insights for companies, investors and founders. Things like - When will this company raise the next round? - What is the net worth of <literally anyone>? - What is the probability that this investor will invest in you? (given your sector, founder age, pedigree, gender, market conditions, do you have an MVP or not etc.) - A bunch of other complicated stuff I didn't really understand Definitely worth keeping an eye on if you're into this kinda stuff: https://coscout.com/ https://coscout.com/
  • ashishrvce 6y ago
    Is there any way I can get access to this? The product seems intriguing and I can be a paid customer.
    • askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago
      They said they're in the final stages of testing right now, they'll first roll out slowly to customers that they're already working with, then the waitlist and then do a wider release for everyone by the end of next month. Best bet would be to sign up on the waitlist for now https://coscout.com/dashboard https://coscout.com/dashboard
  • mindvirus 6y ago
    Feedback loops in this sort of thing always scare me. For example - say people of one demographic are less likely to fund raise, so the model says they're less likely to succeed, so investors using the model don't invest in them and they are put at an even further disadvantage. And so something that is inherently data driven can end up moving further away from the meritocratic ideal it's likely trying for. And the thing is, it's hard to get this bias out of models - almost everything ends up correlating to age, race, gender and so on - zip codes, income, schools, past employers, etc.
    • askjdlkasdjsd 6y ago
      Agreed. It's definitely up to the user to make smart decisions. However, it's not so cut and dry either. In my last company (B2C mobile app based), we were pretty much getting beat by several competitors. And it showed across all metrics, ratings/reviews/downloads/web traffic/retention/engagement - what have you. And later on we found out that the founders had been fudging up the metrics and presenting to investors which is why they actually were never able to raise the round, but came very close. By straight up lying. If some form of business/product intelligence is used to identify such red flags, it can save a lot of bad decisions and heartache from ever happening for everyone involved. In that regard, I welcome more empirical evidence based decision making (aka statistics/machine learning etc.) where it's appropriate.
• markthien 6y ago
  https://crowdmanager.qloth.app https://crowdmanager.qloth.app
• tmaly 6y ago
  I think 3d printing still had enormous potential. They are printing jet engine parts with it these days.
  • holler 6y ago
    when can I print a hamburger? that’s when I’ll know we have made it to the future!
    • tmaly 6y ago
      I think something like this is already in the works. But I think the food replicators from Star Trek Next Generation would be better is we had the tech.
• bionhoward 6y ago
  Ubuntu, ParrotOS, Kali Julia Lang is fun For devops, Pulumi/CDK I watch graph dbs but they all suck or are too expensive or have insane licenses (Neo4j, RedisGraph) Differentiable programming, Zygote, Jax, PyTorch, TF/Keras Optimal transport (sliced fused gromov-wasserstein) AGI, levin, solomonoff, hutter, schmidhuber, friston Ramda is amazing George Church’s publications im also super interested in molecular programming DEAP is fun for tree GP a la Koza Judea Pearl’s work will change the world once folks grok it Secure multiparty computation
  • maccam94 6y ago
    I looked into pulumi last week, and it seems cool but I think they need to rework their library design to avoid fracturing their ecosystem for each language (or just standardize on one language).
  • andrewnc 6y ago
    As a optimal transport lover working on differential programming, I approve this message. :)
• zadler 6y ago
  AI assisted code completion.
  • darksaints 6y ago
    We have had AI-assisted code completion for a long time now. It used an obscure and esoteric form of Symbolic AI better known as type systems.
  • elevenoh 6y ago
    Student at UWaterloo killed it: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708542/coding-autocompleter-deep-tabnine-ai-deep-learning-smart-compose https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708542/coding-autocompl... I use this ~50% of the time.
• bra-ket 6y ago
  Datadog
  • caogecym 6y ago
    Yep, they are great! Using them for my cloud version HTTP client - https://ihook.us https://ihook.us
• chx 6y ago
  Zig. There's a Why Zig When There is Already CPP, D, and Rust? writeup at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-CPP,-D,-and-Rust%3F https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...
  • jtolds 6y ago
    seriously, zig is so amazing. if all zig was was https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replacement-gcc-clang.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace... it would be unbelievable, but it's so much more than that.
  • jorangreef 6y ago
    I came here to say the same thing: Zig. The design decisions are spot on. For example, Modeling Data Concurrency w/ Asynchronous I/O in Zig by Andrew Kelley: https://t.co/VYNqNcrkH1?amp=1 https://t.co/VYNqNcrkH1?amp=1
    • carapace 6y ago
      Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLToGnjIUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLToGnjIUM
  • pot8n 6y ago
    You just made learning Zig on my todo list. Thanks :D
  • benibela 6y ago
    >D has @property functions, which are methods that you call with what looks like field access, so in the above example, c.d might call a function. Rust has operator overloading, so the + operator might call a function. But I love properties and operator overloading
• sidcool 6y ago
  Rocket propulsion tech. Not just because of SpaceX, but I really hope we develop newer and more efficient propulsion techniques.
  • sq_ 6y ago
    I'm definitely excited to see how the VASIMR tech being developed by Ad Astra pans out, and whether anybody manages to build a functional nuclear thermal rocket. Hopefully the new super-heavy-lift capacity that's expected in the coming decade will help to enable the groups working on those and other designs.
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  Node Red is nice. I used it today inside of Home Assistant to automate some stuff.
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  Augmented reality. With every major tech company working on it, the next fee years will be interesting.
• thetwentyone 6y ago
  Programming languages count as technology, right? I'm really excited for what Julia is doing - making a really nice ecosystem of modern, dynamic, high performance code.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Absolutely.
• caogecym 6y ago
  Neuralink - reduce friction of verbal commutation
• mindvirus 6y ago
  Subvocal recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition Imagine how much more people would use voice input if they could do it silently. Also neural interfaces like CTRL-labs was building before being acquired. Imagine if you could navigate and type at full speed while standing on the subway. I think that rich, high fidelity inputs like those are going to be key to ambient computing really taking off.
  • mNovak 6y ago
    Been wanting subvocalization since reading the Ender series
  • McTossOut 6y ago
    Google assistant circa 2012 felt a bit like this already... and then scope creep made things too dumb for me to even use.
• jdub 6y ago
  Honeycomb will hopefully (continue to) upend the "logs, metrics, and traces" world. https://honeycomb.io/ https://honeycomb.io/
• ayushgp 6y ago
  +1 for Hasura. It's such a pleasure to use. Having a configurable backend with so much fine grained Authorization. It's just awesome. It literally cuts your project time in half.
• prrls 6y ago
  Oxide Computer Company https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ “True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.” Corey Quinn interviewed the founders on his podcast "Screaming in the Cloud", where they explain the need for innovation in that space. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/hyperscaler-infrastructure-for-the-masses-with-jessie-frazelle-steve-tuck-and-bryan-cantrill-of-oxide-computing/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... Basically, on-premises hardware is years behind what companies like Facebook and Google have in-house, it may be time to close that gap. They also have a podcast, "On The Metal", which is such a joy to listen to. Their last episode with Jonathan Blow was really a treat. https://oxide.computer/podcast/ https://oxide.computer/podcast/ It's mostly anecdotes about programming for the hardware-software interface, if that's your thing ;).
  • prrls 6y ago
    And for people wondering why caring about on-premises hosting when you have the cloud, a few weeks ago there was a thread about why would you do the former in favor of the latter. It puts on display that actually a lot of people are still on-premises, and for good reasons, which makes a good case for a company like Oxide to exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999
    • input_sh 6y ago
      Also see this meta comment which summed up other top-level comments by their arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098654 8/10 is cost related.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • kimburgess 6y ago
    I’d second that podcast recommendation. The episode with Jon Masters is an incredible conversation.
• jatinshah 6y ago
  zk-S[NT]ARKs and related zero knowledge tech along with scalability improvements to Ethereum is poised to revolutionize financial tech. It will take decades to play out much like consumer PC and internet and we are still in very early stages. But when it really picks up the impact will be as big as when Dutch invented modern finance in early 1600s.
• x3haloed 6y ago
  Uh mine. Duh.
• vijayshankarv 6y ago
  https://hash.ai/ https://hash.ai/ Hash is a platform for simulation and I think this kind of stuff will become increasingly important.
• imsofuture 6y ago
  Cadence https://cadenceworkflow.io/ https://cadenceworkflow.io/
• data_ders 6y ago
  dbt (data built tool). Brining SWE best practices to analytics engineering. about damn time!
• n_t 6y ago
  Unikernels - seems promising and yet ecosystem is not there. I think it's matter of time.
• tootie 6y ago
  Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    How accurate are those sensors? I've often thought how nice it would be to get rid of the mouse and use sensors to figure out where exactly on my screen I'm looking.
    • tootie 6y ago
      Mouse-level accuracy requires a well-calibrated setup and the correct size monitor and sitting posture. If you want to do something like a Square POS checkout and need to distinguish a random visitor looking at 4 buttons, it would be pretty forgiving.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        Thank you, so not yet an option for me; I doubt my posture and sitting position is regular enough that calibration would work for me. Might, at some point, be a welcome addition to a touch pad though. If you touch the pad and your pointer is far away to where you're looking, jump to the area and do the fine tuning with the fingers.
        • mokanfar 6y ago
          I already do that without the need of a touch pad, just use your numpad keys as a mouse if you're on windows look into mouse.ahk. Tobii will snap mouse to where you're looking at and senses mouse is moving. Works great when you want to stay on home row, selecting text with it though, not as good.
  • geewee 6y ago
    I agree. While there are natural limits to how precise the eye is for interactions (eyes naturally flicker back and forth) I definitely also feel like there's potential here. I did a university project on combining voice and gaze tracking for programming - and while gaze is good for e.g. selecting a region of the screen, it's hard to click small things with it.
• treelovinhippie 6y ago
  Holochain: https://developer.holochain.org https://developer.holochain.org When you eventually grasp it, makes blockchain look like we took took a wrong turn in 2008.
  • WookieRushing 6y ago
    I took a quick look at Holochain and its got the regular set of better than bitcoin/ethereum claims that most alt coins say. Its saying its more efficient and safer to use than other blockchain languages. Now these are really big claims so let's see what its got! Looking at https://holochain.org/ https://holochain.org/ , most of my scam senses are not going off tooo much. Its got some weird testimonials and then a white paper! So far so good. Ok, lets skip to the white paper. Now what I'm looking for here is mainly how do you verify computations are valid amidst BFT and sybil attacks. So its got some stuff about how every message received can be verified by the receiver by using "validation rules". Okay... so we can use custom validation rules that each receiver can define and run themselves. Fine, one such rule could be Bitcoins proof of work. So it can be as expensive as Bitcoin. Now of course there can be other rules that are less expensive of Bitcoin, but theres a big reason Bitcoin's PoW is so expensive... Its been battle tested and looked at by 1000s of people to verify that its correct and can resist just about anything up to a 51% bad node attack. Allowing any program to define its own set of validation rules in the hopes that they will be faster doesn't make things safer. It just makes it more likely for fails. This looks like the major contribution that Holochain is trying to make. Let everyone write their own proof of work functions that suits their needs and mess it up. The number of ethereum dapps that failed to write safe contract is proof enough that this will happen in an identical fashion. Did I miss something? Maybe there really is something here thats new, but I'm not seeing it at first glance. Its doesn't look a scam though so its got that going for it
    • treelovinhippie 6y ago
      If you're coming from the blockchain scene you really won't get it at first glance. I first started mining Bitcoin in 2010 at $0.50 each, then went heavy into Ethereum from 2014. It took me a few weeks of deep-diving to unlearn a lot of the conditioning imprinted in the blockchain bubble. Holochain has no mining, no staking, no core token, no fees, no global consensus, no global ledger, it's not a platform, and there's no possibility of a 51% attack. It's more akin to a P2P protocol/framework/pattern where users store their data and run apps locally, and where each app is its own private distributed network. Underpinning all of that are cryptographic counter-signing events and immutable hash chains. In addition they have a parallel project called Holo (yeh confusing) that acts as an _optional_ hosting bridge for Holochain apps to offer a simple UX for normal web users. With Holo, developers can pay a distributed network of hosts in HOT (this is the coin you see on exchanges) to serve their happ/dapp like any regular website via Cloudflare DNS. No browser extensions required, nor any need to buy crypto to interact with Holochain apps. HOT for now is an ERC20 but will swap for a Holo mutual credit currency in the near future. Sidenote: when you grasp mutual credit cryptocurrencies you'll also see all traditional cryptocurrency tokens as nothing more than speculative gambling chips. This is a pretty good Holochain intro podcast if you're coming from the blockchain scene: https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/holo-mixdown https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/holo-mixdown Also checkout HoloREA and REA accounting (resource-event-agent). This is a good podcast on it with some mates of mine; we all worked at ConsenSys with a longer history in Ethereum before coming to the difficult realisation that Ethereum was the perpetuation of everything wrong with the global economy: https://soundcloud.com/user-376287461/holochainpodcast-2-pospi-sam-holo-rea-resource-event-agent https://soundcloud.com/user-376287461/holochainpodcast-2-pos...
• BIackSwan 6y ago
  Tailscale - riding on the wireguard wave - https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/ Also Wireguard - https://www.wireguard.com/ https://www.wireguard.com/
  • pot8n 6y ago
    I am sure I wouldn't use a service that can literally get into each and every device of my private network if they want to or worse, they get hacked. Each and every device in the network automatically accepts whatever public keys and endpoints that get advertised by their servers and automatically connect to them. It's not only an overpriced mediocre product. From a security perspective, it's the most dangerous SaaS service I've ever seen. My biggest fear is once this company gets tied to WireGuard and the security disasters come out, WireGuard's fate will be tied to a mediocre commercial product that put money above engineering decisions.
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    > Tailscale I'd recommend this alternative that doesn't require a 3rd party - which is one of the reasons to implement wireguard over a traditional VPN: https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace
• KerryJones 6y ago
  1. Wing - Drone Delivery (https://wing.com/ https://wing.com/) 2. Nanorobitics for dentistry (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3723292/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3723292/)
• signaru 6y ago
  Dot Net Core (C#/Winforms) compiling to native code. ReactOS/Wine. Lately I'm getting worried about where the Windows OS seems to be headed. ReacOS slowly catching up, but recent developments seem to be promising. There's still many things I need that are not multi/cross-platform.
• jes5199 6y ago
  Heliogen https://heliogen.com/ https://heliogen.com/ Prometheus Fuels https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ C2CNT https://www.c2cnt.com/ https://www.c2cnt.com/
• LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  [1] https://www.yokogawa.com/yjp/solutions/solutions/minimal-fab/ https://www.yokogawa.com/yjp/solutions/solutions/minimal-fab... [2] https://www.searchforthenext.com/ https://www.searchforthenext.com/ [3] https://www.efinixinc.com/products-trion.html https://www.efinixinc.com/products-trion.html
• michaelbrave 6y ago
  My list would be: 1. Swift - you can mix functional and object oriented code in a way I've not seen anywhere else. It's also going to be multi platform including windows in the next version and it's making inroads with Swift-Tensorflow. I can see a lot of really cool things coming from this once it's multi platform. 2. Jai Language by Jonathan Blow. I'm not sure when it will come out but what's been shown looks promising, a game specific language could cause other innovations that could later carry over to other languages. 3. Next Gen Consoles. X-box Series X and PS5 are both doing some cool things with memory management, SSD's and GPU's. Many of these innovations will make it to PC's later. 4. New Email features (superhuman and HEY - by DHH) It seems like innovation is finally actually happening in this space. 5. Game Engine Innovations. Hammer 2 has some really cool UI for level design, Unreal 5 has some great lighting and handling of 3D, ID tech is using 3D decals to cool effect while not being expensive. A lot of the technology happening in games will spill over into other areas, Unity is doing stuff with the automative industry, Unreal with Architecture. 6. AI in use of Making Art. A good example is Unity's new artengine (artomatix). https://artomatix.com/ https://artomatix.com/ 7. Generative Design for engineering. 8. Dreams on ps4 - How quickly people can make something in this is amazing, if it ended up on PC or VR it could change everything. 9. AR as a tool for creators more than as a tool for consumers. 3D interactive CAD like Iron Man is more exciting than a game that makes you dizzy.
  • modeless 6y ago
    +1 for Dreams; it's revolutionary. Their rendering technology is black magic. It deserves far more attention than it will ever get trapped on PS4 with a $40 price tag. Dreams on PC with a free-to-play model and real-time collaborative editing would be the next Minecraft/Roblox.
• carapace 6y ago
  https://terminusdb.com https://terminusdb.com https://www.categoricaldata.net https://www.categoricaldata.net - - - - "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
• gok 6y ago
  Arm and RISC-V are both getting scalable vector compute support. Could lead to GPU-like compute capabilities without all the goofiness of GPUs. The H.266 / VVC video compression standard will be finalized in a few months. Ignoring licensing issues (yes patents blah blah blah) industry-wide efficiency wins like that are always nice. Generative machine learning (think GANs for images or GPT-2 for text) can be applied to video games. Truly unique narrative experiences! Everything remote work-related. I previously thought my career would miss the WFH revolution and most knowledge workers would still go to the office until at least 2050, but now it seems clear that is going to get dramatically accelerated.
• frostcs 6y ago
  6
• jppope 6y ago
  Ginkgo bioworks, Oxidize, WASM (& Deno), Serverless via Isolates (e.g. Cloudflare workers), Neurolink, OpenAI
• northern-lights 6y ago
  https://www.sens.org https://www.sens.org : Solving the problem of aging and diseases of aging. Watch a few interviews of Aubrey de Grey to get a better idea of the possibilities of their research. Though this would come under the "to watch" not for the immediate future but for the next decade or two.
  • mindfulplay 6y ago
    One thing that's not clear to me is the advantage of living longer. Why do some people feel the need to live longer? When I hear of blood transfusion and such, it also feels like a lot of these technologies are being developed by snakeoil salespeople to other nongullible but strictly egocentric humans.
    • mindvirus 6y ago
      One thing with aging research is it's also about healthier living - for example, letting people be healthier well into old age, even if the number of years is the same. In terms of why people want to live longer, I think it's just human nature at the end of the day - more time to do the things you enjoy and help the people you care about. Practically speaking, there are a lot of advantages to longer lives: - Generally, it means people will be healthier, which means reduced societal burden. - A deeper family structure can mean better education and childcare. You have more time to be with your friends and family, more time to pursue hobbies, more time to explore the world. - Scientists, engineers and researchers can spend more time building and leveraging their expertise. If people live 20% longer for example, I suspect there's more than a 20% increase in advancement because in so many fields breakthroughs happen near the end of your career. Of course, there will be consequences that need to be addressed. - Does this only lead to increased inequity, where the wealthy are able to accumulate wealth and knowledge even more easily due to access to anti aging. Already there's a 14 year difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1%, imagine if that was 50 years. - How do we adjust our social safety nets when people are living to 100 instead of 80? - How does this change over-population and over-consumption?
      • 6y ago
• elevenoh 6y ago
  Life extension interventions. We're just beginning to see the dam break on funding life extension R&D.
• Findeton 6y ago
  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.
• gsvclass 6y ago
  I'd say my project Super Graph it's a GraphQL to SQL compiler in GO. It saves developers thousands of man-hours and 10x their productivity. 80% of web backend coding is struggling with ORMs, SQL and writing APIs. Super Graph does away with all that. A simple GraphQL queries get you the data you need. https://github.com/dosco/super-graph https://github.com/dosco/super-graph
• kvz 6y ago
  Nix—It takes buy-in, but very worth it for us. Builds are reliable, reproducible, can exist alongside one another. Plug an S3 powered CloudFront cache into it, and you’re never building the same thing more than once. Deno—Sandboxed by default seems a powerful way to offer our customers to run custom code. Native TypeScript, build single bins. I have still to play around with it but those all seem like compelling advantages over Node.js
  • ianai 6y ago
    Crazy idea time. Is anyone piping randomly generated code into nix and selecting for AI in the output? (I’m pretty far out of my realm here so sorry in advance)
    • mkl 6y ago
      The search space of possible code is unfathomably enormous. I think you'd have better luck generating amazing art with random colours for each pixel (i.e. still none). People have done more limited genetic programming for a long time now (essentially randomly mutating formulas, keeping ones that do better), but neural networks are doing the arbitrary function-fitting better at the moment. What does it have to do with Nix, though?
      • ianai 6y ago
        Bleary eyed me thought nix sounded well defined enough to make searching the input space more tractable.
• lpaone 6y ago
  I am very interested in new energy solutions as a way to de-carbonize and provide consistent supply of low cost energy. 1. Green hydrogen production and fuel cells. We are just scratching the surface of green hydrogen production. Hydrogen can be the energy carrier we need in the various use cases where batteries are not viable. 2. Nuclear SMRs. Definitely something that is more of a "something to watch". 3. Pumped hydro. The longest lasting, highest capacity, lowest cost, 0 carbon, grid-scale energy storage solution. I have been closely follow a company I found on HN call Terrament. https://www.terramenthq.com https://www.terramenthq.com
• mister_hn 6y ago
  Rust programming language for its claimed safety Stripe for payments Kubernetes for cloud services and K8S on raspberry pi clusters
• clouddrover 6y ago
  Further EV improvements. Companies like Lucid and Lightyear are doing interesting things on the EV efficiency side, though their cars are not aimed at the mass market. Lightyear is looking to commercialize their solar panels for other automakers as well: https://lucidmotors.com/ https://lucidmotors.com/ https://lightyear.one/ https://lightyear.one/ Volkswagen and Hyundai are doing interesting things on the mass market side of EVs. Volkswagen is now the number 1 BEV maker in Europe and will probably become number 1 in China in a year or two: https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-electric-car-market-top-sellers https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-elec... Hyundai is also starting a big EV push. Their future 800-volt cars should be interesting: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-prophecy-concept-ride-review https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-pro...
• Awtem 6y ago
  Homomorphic encryption.
• Eugeleo 6y ago
  I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist. It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor. I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format). Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features are implemented as plugins and can be turned off. And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience with Obsidian). (Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user. I copied most of this comment from another comment of mine) [1]: https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    Gonna check this out, seems very useful!
  • sho 6y ago
    I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist. It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten Just so you know, I consider myself probably a fairly typical HN user. Got my own little daily tech concerns, but keep a toe in the water of the larger zeitgeist. I have no idea what anything you just said means. You could be talking about brands of car or my little ponies for all I know. Googling it - seems it's something to do with notes? Just remember that not everyone is in your little concern-bubble, and one or two explanatory sentences would be very welcome.
    • anotheryou 6y ago
• Blammar 6y ago
  Solar energy, carbon dioxide and water directly to butanol. In other words, store solar energy directly as fuel. There are other versions that generate hydrogen, but that has a much lower energy density than liquid fuel. Just modify your existing ICE to run on butanol and you're good to go. <a bit of hand waving there.> See https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-co2-water-microorganisms/ https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-co2-wa... for where we were a year ago.
• niftylettuce 6y ago
  https://lad.js.org https://lad.js.org used to build https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net
• niftylettuce 6y ago
  I wasn't impressed with the engineering and JS client-side bundles on Integromat.
  • statictype 6y ago
    What was wrong with it? And why did you need to interact with it at all, I'm curious.
    • niftylettuce 6y ago
      A customer wanted me to help them integrate the API I built for https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net with it. They have client-side bundles that threw errors and the pages rendered blank.
• yeslibertarian 6y ago
  https://numenta.com/ https://numenta.com/
• codeisawesome 6y ago
  I'd like StarLink (or something else like it!) to succeed increase internet adoption massively around the planet.
• fergie 6y ago
  Solid state batteries. The tech is tantalizingly close, although not perfected yet. If and when they become available, these batteries will have a far higher energy density and degrade at a far lower rate than existing batteries.
  • ianai 6y ago
    I agree. Is there any chance this is what Tesla’s battery day could include?
• modeless 6y ago
  1. https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ Finally, truly global and low latency satellite internet. 2. Generative models for video games - https://aidungeon.io/ https://aidungeon.io/ is barely scratching the surface. Story, art, animation, music, gameplay, it will all be generated by models in the future. 3. New direct drive robotics actuators such as https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-hasel+actuators https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-hasel+actuators I think actuators are holding robotics back more than software now. Breakthroughs are needed. No general purpose robot will ever be practical with electric motors and gearboxes. 4. Self-driving cars are still happening, despite delays. I think discounting Tesla's approach is a mistake, but Waymo is still in the lead. 5. NLP is finally starting to work. The potential for automation is huge. Code generation is very exciting as well. 6. I was excited for Rust but I now believe it's too complex. I'm looking for a much simpler language that can still achieve the holy grail of memory safety without GC pauses or refcounting. But I'm not holding my breath. If ML models start writing a large part of our code then the human ergonomics of programming language design will matter less.
  • losthobbies 6y ago
    Jai? Jonathan Blow’s new programming language might be an option for you. https://inductive.no/jai/ https://inductive.no/jai/
    • AsyncAwait 6y ago
      Jai doesn't do very much in terms of memory safety, Zig [1] might be a better alternative + it actually exists. 1 - https://github.com/ziglang/zig https://github.com/ziglang/zig
      • littlestymaar 6y ago
        What does Zig offers regarding memory safety? Isn't pointer manipulation as unsafe as C in Zig?
        • AsyncAwait 6y ago
• rajaravivarma_r 6y ago
  Is there any technology/start up trying to cure baldness?
• peter_retief 6y ago
  [7]http://www.graphene-battery.net/index.htm http://www.graphene-battery.net/index.htm
• mandown2308 6y ago
  Neuralink
• treelovinhippie 6y ago
  Svelte is my go-to for personal projects. My speculative hunch is it will begin to rival React within the next 5 years for its simplicity and thus cost reductions. There are a lot of advantages, but this 5min video comparing React hooks to Svelte should be enough to trigger interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtD2mWDQnxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtD2mWDQnxM
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    I’m really curious how my 100kloc enterprise app would work in Svelte, but my hunch is it just wouldn’t be possible to build. Svelte always seems really cool in these toy examples, but I want to see a significant app built with it instead.
    • treelovinhippie 6y ago
      Yeah that's a common myth. Svelte isn't some fringe alternative JS framework. It performs exactly the same functions and same structure as any React/Vue app, but does so with far less code and runs far faster since it's a compiler. You're not going to find many brand-name companies using it because the PM decision-makers at large enterprises are always going to be many years behind and going with the "safe" JS framework leader at the time. Well-known companies currently using Svelte: Apple [1], New York Times [2], Spotify [3] and GoDaddy [4] 1: https://twitter.com/mansur_ashraf/status/1204542852581273600 https://twitter.com/mansur_ashraf/status/1204542852581273600 2: Svelte creator Rich Harris works for them 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/f18n33/companies_using_svelte_in_production/fh2jpxw/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/f18n33/companies_... 4: https://svelte.dev https://svelte.dev
      • XCSme 6y ago
        "as any React/Vue app" From my experience, and what I heard from others, a lot of devs prefer React over Vue even though Vue syntax is cleaner and allows for shorter code. React just feels more robust when the app grows large enough compared to Vue. Note that we're not talking only about the library itself and its syntax, but also the ecosystem and support around it. That being said, I think Svelte -> Vue comparison might be even more imbalanced than Vue -> React.
• jah242 6y ago
  Robotics + Deep Learning - I think we just quietly passed a milestone where robots using deep learning can perform useful real world tasks (selecting items, packing boxes etc) If true we could be at a watershed for robotics adoption and progress as large scale deployments generate the data to train on more complex tasks, leading to more deployments and so snowballing onwards This seems like a much more likely process that will lead to a type of “general AI” than researchers pushing us all the way there Covariant AI (and their partnerships) is what got me thinking: https://covariant.ai/ https://covariant.ai/
• brainzap 6y ago
  Javascript libraries that compile instead of shipping a runtime.
• cpursley 6y ago
  Hasura + React Admin. Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours. This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    That's really handy to know. Was looking for an alternative to forest admin.
• buboard 6y ago
  Anything to do with Genomics - DNA sequencing costs less than $200 nowadays. Info-tech doesnt have much more to offer with humans being as faulty as they are. Biotech is the next frontier
• kanakiyajay 6y ago
  Wrote a blog post on the technologies I believe are going to change industries 1. No-Code Tools 2. GraphQL 3. Oculus Quest 4. FPGA 5. Netflix for Gamers 6. Windows for Linux 7. Notion 8. Animation Engines https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-in-2020-and-2021/ https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-in-2020...
  • jmiskovic 6y ago
    FPGA is still too cumbersome to make it big. It's too expensive for general appliances, talent is hard to find, and development process is still stuck where software was 20 years ago. FPGA vendors are still trying roll out their own everything-included non-standard solutions. Those solutions don't scale well. I've seen engineers struggling to trace where some signal ends up, it's complete insanity. I find GPUs conceptually similar to FPGAs for most soft applications (video processing and similar number crunching). They also provide huge number of re-purposable blocks for programmable parallel computing. GPUs have won out because they became mainstream through gaming and they more readily opened up to general software practices and methodologies. It's no surprise machine learning community is avoiding FPGAs for most part.
    • kanakiyajay 6y ago
      Agreed, FPGA is too expensive currently with a non-standard toolset present across the industry. But if someone is able to create an industry coalition (think Wi-Fi Alliance or Bluetooth SIG) it can definitely make a large impact for everyone involved with several companies reaping the benefits
  • colemanfoley 6y ago
    Great post, thanks.
• pgt 6y ago
  Differential Dataflow is going to change the way apps are built: https://materialize.io/ https://materialize.io/
• x_stealth 6y ago
  We are in stealth for a while. And our demos have been getting WOWs. For early access here : https://bit.ly/36mEU6Q https://bit.ly/36mEU6Q
• stevekIabnik 6y ago
  > it's a great alternative for almost any Golang use case This is bad shilling even by rust evangelism strike force standards.
• stevekIabnik 6y ago
  Looks like nix shills are outnumbering rust shills. Pretty bad for us.
• maccam94 6y ago
  1. Starship - https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/ Completely reusable rocket that can carry 100 tons into low Earth orbit, refuel, and then continue on to places like Mars. Launches are estimated to cost SpaceX about $2M, compared to the SLS $1B (estimated, similar lift capability) and space shuttle $1B (27 tons). The engines are real, test vehicles are flying (another test launch is likely to happen in the next week or two). Follow the SpaceX subreddit for progress updates 2. Commonwealth Fusion Systems - http://cfs.energy http://cfs.energy Lots of reactors have struggled with scale and plasma instability. CFS has adopted a design using new REBCO high temperature superconductor magnets that are stronger and smaller, which can be used to build smaller reactors and better stabilize the plasma. They are building a prototype called SPARC, expected to produce net energy gain by 2025.
• entha_saava 6y ago
  Svelte Flutter Zig, Nim & Crystal programming languages Please.build (bazel clone in Go) GraalVM's native image and CoreRT for .NET (though not much is heard about progress on CoreRT)
  • akudha 6y ago
    I've wanted to try mobile programming for a while (I am a web dev). Is Flutter a good choice for a mobile beginner like me, who hasn't done any mobile programming at all?
    • entha_saava 6y ago
      I'd say yes, although learning dart maybe take a week or two in worst case. Flutter, as opposed to react native, is quite easy to set up. The declarative UI paradigm is nice.
      • akudha 6y ago
        one two weeks is not bad at all for a new language. Thank you for answering. I hope Google doesn't lose interest in Flutter and shutter it. Any thoughts on using Flutter for the web?
        • entha_saava 6y ago
          Haven't used flutter for web. Apparently it uses canvas. Ok for getting shit done in some cases.
• idoby 6y ago
  Quantified self tech and personalized medicine tech. Stem cell stuff. Genetic therapy stuff. We're moving from an age where a doctor was a static map of symptoms => treatments to an age where far more personalized data and processes are considered. The paradigm is also slowly shifting on being able to reverse rather than just avoid or prevent certain conditions and situations. The level of sophistication is already making some doctors feel obsolete, by their own admission to me. If we don't get to live in exciting times, our children and grandchildren surely will.
• nuclid 6y ago
  https://resistant.ai https://resistant.ai looks pretty sci-fi. They basically protect AI systems from AI-enabled attackers.
• SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  https://www.pulumi.com/ https://www.pulumi.com/
• mudge 6y ago
  Webscript: https://github.com/mudgen/webscript https://github.com/mudgen/webscript
• setudeora 6y ago
  it's deem true https://www.programmingoneonone.com/ https://www.programmingoneonone.com/
• vbezhenar 6y ago
  Rust. It's an extremely interesting language for me, I'm trying to learn bits of it every few years and while I still don't have any real tasks, I just love its development. May be it'll be the last and only programming language that everyone will use for the foreseeable future.
• _____smurf_____ 6y ago
  https://endrainc.com/ https://endrainc.com/ This technology can have a huge impact on people's lives (specially in the global south).
• fortran77 6y ago
  Push-to-talk "walkie-talkie" style audio. It's very handy, bit it's a learning curve and 20-somethings today hate talking to people. I think it could catch on (again) eventually. see the "CB Radio" craze of the 1970s.
• m101 6y ago
  www.CloudNC.com Basically, 1) bringing down the cost of CNC machined parts down to their marginal cost through automation, 2) reducing that marginal cost through higher machine utilisation rates, and 3) reducing turn around times and accuracy of parts to clients.
  • enginoor 6y ago
    ProtoLabs is already successful in this space. I wonder what competitive advantage CloudNC has?
    • m101 6y ago
      They are trying to automate the g-code generation that controls the CNC machine. At the moment a human operator uses an intermediary piece of software to create that.
• bjourne 6y ago
  Velomobiles! A velomobile is a recumbent bike with fairing which enables them to be more convenient and much faster than a regular bike. A fit rider can easily overtake the peloton in Tour de France (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBb7YIRcBe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBb7YIRcBe0). The velomobile in the clip is a standard model and there are racing models that are faster still! Just like with regular bikes, you can add electric assist to them to extend their range and make the job of the rider easier. In this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCo4cRQMBlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCo4cRQMBlo) the rider gets an average speed on 37.5 km/h (top speed 84 km/h) over a distance of 73 km with over half the battery remaining. And that is without wearing the racing hoodie which significantly reduces drag. The main problem with velomobiles is that they are expensive. The frame is made from carbon fiber and needs to be handcrafted. So the price ranges from about €5000 - €10000 which is too expensive to most. If some Chinese giant or billionaire investor set out to mass produce velomobiles I'm sure they could totally revolutionize transportation.
• jhoechtl 6y ago
  Contact me in private so I can charge you my valuable advice for profitable investment.
• bayesian_horse 6y ago
  Synthetic biology. Microalgae (food, biofuel, Co2 sequestration).
• onimishra 6y ago
  Uizard - Using machine learning to get from a drawing to ui and code. As a programmer, I’m looking forward to getting a head start on my personal projects, before I need to involve a designer https://uizard.io/ https://uizard.io/
• javiramos 6y ago
  I am particularly interested in food products that will replace animal-based foods. There will be a major consumer shift in the upcoming decades as consumers shift to more sustainable alternatives. This will changes industries, towns and regions.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• CareyB 6y ago
  Energy generation, and storage.
• ur-whale 6y ago
  Next generation autonomous evtols: https://www.jobyaviation.com/ https://www.jobyaviation.com/ https://kittyhawk.aero/ https://kittyhawk.aero/ https://lilium.com/ https://lilium.com/ https://www.volocopter.com/ https://www.volocopter.com/ https://www.daedalean.ai/ https://www.daedalean.ai/
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• leke 6y ago
  The one that has me most excited on OP's list is Strapi. It's the only one that I see myself using in the very near future.
  • iameoghan 6y ago
    I really like it. My one criticism is that the docs are always slightly out of date. I would love more flexibility in the queries i.e. being able to do advanced queries on multiple collections, rather than having to resort to raw SQL. It'll get there I'm sure.
• machinesbuddy 6y ago
  About [4]: The dumbest idea I've ever seen is to provide a platform to build software without writing code. You make the job 1000x harder to prevent a few lines of code! Just make the coding part easier.
  • machinesbuddy 6y ago
    Take PlantUML sequence diagrams for example. Which one is easier? Drag-drop, fix, etc or just few lines? https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram
• yters 6y ago
  Applying intelligent design theory to bioinformatics and AI. A lot of untapped potential IMHO.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Ken_Adler 6y ago
  My current favorite Shiny new thing: www.Grain.co
• _theory_ 6y ago
  Electric VTOL for the masses: basically flying cars. https://www.agilityprime.com/ https://www.agilityprime.com/
• diehunde 6y ago
  - Anything in the NVRAM space - Modern database companies such as Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, MemSQL - Hashicorp
• vaibhavthevedi 6y ago
  I had hopes with MagicLeap but then it's going through a roller coaster ride. Still they are on my "to watch" list. Things like Apple AR glass leak makes me hooked to AR and VR.
• mab122 6y ago
  More IPFS applications, integrations and services build on it. As for "competition" like scuttlebut. I would love sneaker-mesh -net type mobile killer app that would actually work. Hell I would even mind if facebook implemented something that would work when centrilized infrastructure fails.
• fastbmk 6y ago
  FreeBSD