36 ms·

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

• thisispete 5y ago
  soil science influenced agriculture, watch 'kiss the ground' on netflix.
  • jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    This stuff seems so obviously correct that it shocks me that all farmers aren't already doing it. It makes me wonder if there is some catch that the proponents of regenerative ag, etc. avoid talking about.
• dang 5y ago
  Similar-but-different recent threads: Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959 - April 2021 (320 comments) Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540583 - Dec 2020 (248 comments)
• marshmallow_12 5y ago
  www.store-dot.com perhaps.
• joshlemer 5y ago
  https://temporal.io/ https://temporal.io/
  • swyx 5y ago
    what do you like about it? (disclaimer, i work at temporal, but just genuinely interested in how you'd describe it in your words, good or bad lets hear it)
    • poletopole 5y ago
      I may be able to answer your question. I only watched the video on the landing page and glanced at the docs, but it reminds me of what a saga system would do (like redux-saga perhaps), meaning that much of the side effects, such as networking, are abstracted away from the business logic, and there is the concept of compensation when things don't go as planned. Very neat!
      • swyx 5y ago
        yeah, "saga for the backend" is an appealing angle to some folks (eg our Coinbase testimonial has that) but i'm not sure how many developers know about sagas so I've been hesitant to push that too hard (bc then we'd have to teach people an extra concept before they get to us). i'd say something that is maybe hard to appreciate until you really get into it is just how much goes into making this ultra scalable with distributed transactions. If you have ~20 mins for it, I wrote this up recently: https://docs.temporal.io/blog/workflow-engine-principles https://docs.temporal.io/blog/workflow-engine-principles
        • poletopole 5y ago
          Not hard at all to appreciate. I know the consistency woes of juggling thousands of message queues with millions of messages and containers with enormous databases. The problem though, as I found out ironically, is that most dilbert bosses don't appreciate solutions like temporal, unless a tech "guru" tells them about it. For example, I get laughed at when I tell other developers that databases are an antiquated idea and should be avoided in general. What I've been working on in recent years is actually not too far off in terms of how to approach making truly simple code, but is far off in the sense that it'll take me (alone) years to make a pragmatic implementation, probably as a language in its own right. Rather than attempt to make a system partition tolerant I started thinking what if network partitions were assumed as the default? To answer that question you have to do things like measure the information entropy of data, use knot theory, representation theory such as young lattices, symmetric group mapping, character groups, prime number theory, among other goodies, to represent event-states, workflows, etc. Most of all (this is where things get weird) is rather than code programs, the emphasis becomes how to easily declaratively code and build "homotopic" multiplexed protocols instead (while keeping the business logic familiar), that way SDKs and integrations are a thing of the past. All this has of course has to use existing web standards like HTTP, otherwise it won't be adopted. My friend always laughs at me when I try to explain it to him, so I apologize, ha. But that's all the more reason to appreciate technology like temporal because it's something a developer can use today.
• cl42 5y ago
  I recently came across Polymarket[1] and am really excited about what crypto has in store for prediction markets and insurance. I've dabbled in prediction markets over the years. I think they have a lot of promise but execution is always an issue. Using ETH to create a two-sided marketplace feels much better than having prediction markets decide what one can bet on. More broadly, decentralizing insurance in this way would be very cool too... There's little difference, in my mind, between a prediction market predicting weather changes or elections, and insurance contracts around risk. ... and what's even cooler is: can we build bots and models to actually get an edge on these predictions? Imagine applying HFT strategies from stocks to predicting real-world events... Now it sounds like we can actually get good at forecasting difficult-to-predict human events, rather than just stock prices. [1] https://polymarket.com/ https://polymarket.com/
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    Doesn't seem much different than Auger
    • cl42 5y ago
      When I played with Augur, the community was very quiet and not a lot was going on. That was a big challenge for me. I also didn't like that you had to use their crypto to actually participate -- in Polymarket's case, I understand that they are using ETH smart contracts. There are definitely a few players in this space and I'm excited to see where it goes.
      • hanniabu 5y ago
        Interesting, and yeah I will always favor platforms that use ETH vs creating their own token so I'll check this out.
  • nojito 5y ago
    Fees are borderline insane if you are a small volume trader. If you’re in the US there is a regulated prediction market set to launch soon.
• brunoTbear 5y ago
  Absorbent panels for aircraft and angular design that prevents reflection of emitted waves. Oh wait, that's under-the-radar technology.
  • noir_lord 5y ago
    Is that a startup in stealth mode?
  • grumpymonk77 5y ago
    Just sprayed my coffee out my nose... thanks for the morning laugh
  • sumnole 5y ago
    angular? i thought we are all using vue now.
    • fchu 5y ago
      It's not very stealth tech if it's vue
• philip1209 5y ago
  https://paddle.com https://paddle.com - it's like Stripe, but their "Reseller of record" means that they handle all sales tax / VAT issues. For most SaaS businesses it seems to reduce headaches a lot.
  • allie1 5y ago
    I’m a customer, and it handles a lot of headaches for accounting. Basically you have 1 client - paddle, as far as the law is concerned. Plus has an easy checkout feature that’s inline for collecting payment info that never touches your server, no headaches securing that info.
    • dividuum 5y ago
      Can you share an approximate percentage they take from a transaction for offering that service? Their pricing information seems to be hidden behind an email form.
      • anomaloustho 5y ago
        Around the internet, I saw 5% transaction fee. But, like Plaid, they probably customize the fee based on the product sold and volume.
    • GordonS 5y ago
      Did you compare them to others in this space, like FastSpring? Would be really interested to see how it stacks up.
  • candiddevmike 5y ago
    Former Paddle customer, don't believe the hype. Everything is duct tape and half assed with the API, the checkout process is happy path or bust, and you're going to have a hard time migrating to a different processor. Stripe + TaxJar was cheaper and easier to implement and maintain.
    • john-state-moz 5y ago
• ruffrey 5y ago
  Narrowband IoT data service. Very low power, low bandwidth, cheap, with increasingly great coverage. It’s like an offshoot of LTE but classified as a 5G technology for massive numbers of low power internet connected devices.
  • SolubleSnake 5y ago
    I am really surprised this isn't already more of a 'thing'. When I did my postgrad research project, back in 2016, I was using LoRaWAN and thought it was so obviously going to be huge in e.g. AgriTech. Surprised not that much has happened with it tbh.
    • snovv_crash 5y ago
      Cheap LoRa chips are finally hitting the market for long enough that ecosystems can grow around them. As an example, for Radio Control vehicles (planes, drones, cars) there have been 3 different systems released over the past year or so, and now an open source system called ExpressLRS which is gaining traction.
  • CarelessExpert 5y ago
    I have to admit, the idea of a run-of-the-mill security-hole-ridden IoT device being exposed to the bare internet over a wireless connection that's out of my control gives me the heebie-jeebies... and that's ignoring the possibilities for malicious use (e.g. using a low powered wireless connection for uncontrollable surveillance/data collection).
    • SubiculumCode 5y ago
      200% this. Pretty soon I'd have to live in a Faraday cage, or put all my devices in a Faraday case/jacket.
    • g_p 5y ago
      The operators would argue this is where their "managed service" offering kicks in and gives you value. Most operators haven't figured out their business model for NB-IoT quite yet (at least in Europe) - they're still dabbling. Some seem likely to try pair it with enterprise "private APN" type solutions. Under such a setup, you can actually get quite an interesting system in place - the operator locks the SIM to a custom APN, and that APN only allows comms to a managed, operator-provided IoT backend. Then the operator's enterprise services team turns that into dashboards and other things the customer can use and access. In a sense, they're using "extra slack capacity" on their FDD cellular networks (as an NB-IoT carrier is only 200 kHz wide and can sit inside or adjacent to a regular 4G or 5G carrier), and delivering higher margin managed enterprise services. Some other comments point out the potential to use LoRa - indeed, although if you can use LoRa, you probably aren't the target market for NB-IoT. If you want to deploy 50 million smart meters, a nationwide existing network and managed service from the operator starts to get appealing, as does them handling security, isolating the devices onto a private APN, and helping you update devices in the field. If you are using LoRa, you need to handle this and deploy the infrastructure. To date though, I've seen lots of "unmanaged" NB-IoT testing taking place, but not a whole lot of the "full service managed offering". Otherwise I would agree entirely with your point about connecting modern IoT devices to the internet, but in this case I think it will end up for enterprise type deployments where they're restricting that for you.
• willvarfar 5y ago
  Data Hubs. It’s queriable like a database but it doesn’t store your data - it proxies all your other databases and data lakes and stuff, and let’s you join between them. Trino is a great example.
  • ed25519FUUU 5y ago
    Sounds like graphQL
  • abraxas 5y ago
    is that stuff like Presto?
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I've used Presto within Hue. I'm not sure if Presto is, but I know Hue is.
    • dswalter 5y ago
      Trino is the community-open-source fork of Presto (they were recently required to change the name from PrestoSQL, which they had been using to make the Presto lineage clear). (not affiliated in any way). https://trino.io/ https://trino.io/
  • giantg2 5y ago
    I don't think these are really under the radar. We have Hue. We also have other apps that act as data hubs, but are slightly more constrained.
  • ajcp 5y ago
    I'm not too deep into the data side of things, but this is interesting to think about. Aren't stuff like data lakes and warehouses supposed to address the need for a centralized datastore? Outside of perhaps an easy-to-apply interface, what benefit would a data hub provide over just streaming duplicates from all of your databases into a single data lake like Snowflake?
    • 5y ago
• mam2 5y ago
  defi
• MAXPOOL 5y ago
  Advances in computational chemistry and computational materials science. Specially using ML to speed up computation. Computational chemistry is already patchwork of different heuristic approaches. Graph neural networks and even some language models seem very promising addition. If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately, it would completely change the biology, medicine and materials science.
  • asdff 5y ago
    >If we could simulate and observe what happens with complex chemistry accurately There is the rub. Biological simulations have been written for 40 years now. It's an extremely difficult problem considering how many latent variables are at play, and people have been working on it for a very long time now.
    • MAXPOOL 5y ago
      I suspect that the recent breakthrough in protein structure prediction is just a start. ML techniques will be used to cut that latent variable space in both quantum chemistry and molecular mechanics based methods.
    • disabled 5y ago
      A lot of my work revolves around human physiology. I think a lot of that will be improved with very accurate, high resolution, and continuous sensors. When that happens (with BioMEMS of course for most cases), AI will be able to fill in a gap, in a lot of various applications. In the early 2010s, I was an undergraduate electrical engineering student with type 1 diabetes playing around with such models by reprogramming stuff that had been presented in peer-reviewed journal articles. I eventually programmed a closed loop control system (also known as "Artificial Pancreas System") as a spring break project to inform my insulin dosages. Mostly, it was a soul-searching project as engineering school was physically enduring for me, as I have serious health problems. I had found a paper about a sliding mode control with respect to type 1 diabetes that looked solvable to me, but I did not know if it was actually solvable. I decided to see what I could do with it, and I was successful, in 2011 and barely old enough to legally drink! Anyways, I can assure you that while research on control systems is drying up, including for physiological systems, that the excitement is just about to begin for what you mention, starting in about 5 years.
• michelpp 5y ago
  The GraphBLAS[1] is an amazing API and mathematical framework for building parallel graph algorithms using sparse matrix multiplication in the language of Linear Algebra. There are Python and and MATLAB bindings, in fact MATLAB 2021a now uses SuiteSparse:GraphBLAS for sparse matrix multiplication (A*B) built-in. [1] https://graphblas.github.io/ https://graphblas.github.io/
  • cunidev 5y ago
    I am working on GraphBLAS-based implementations right now. While the API itself is great, using it full-time I notice documentation is still quite behind and still not too many features. Also there is almost no community outside academia. Crazy efficient though, and very solid overall
• bitcoinmonger 5y ago
  I think Bitcoin is genuinely exciting. I know it's not exactly "under-the-radar", but a lot of the discussion on HN is unfortunately only related to the price. It's a bit of a shame, but I can understand it's hard to see through the noise sometimes. The fact that there isn't more discussion around the cryptography, networking, etc. suggests to me that many are still unfamiliar with the power of the underlying technology.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • babuloseo 5y ago
    yeah I am doing more research on p2p and things like merkle trees. https://www.codementor.io/blog/merkle-trees-5h9arzd3n8 https://www.codementor.io/blog/merkle-trees-5h9arzd3n8 I am pretty excited about Ethereum and related ecosystem.
    • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Don't get too distracted by the shiny. The ethereum ecosystem is a train wreck. What we see today is the reinvention of the same of scum tricks that Wall Street has played on the people for decades. More printing of funny money, tricks on yield, relending and rehypothication. Its is unscalable, and PoS is a insecure trick. I don't think the value proposition of ether can exist in a PoS world. I also think some elements are interesting, but I am far more excited about bitcoin! Bitcoin cannot be inflated, takes mass energy to create it (this is good thing!), censorship resistant and not under any kind of central control. As long as we are careful, this technology can be scaled responsibly.
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  blockchain internet addresses?
• awb 5y ago
  Training AI on CPUs faster than on GPUs (SLIDE): https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-rice-intel-optimize-ai-commodity.html https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-rice-intel-optimize-ai-c...
  • johan_felisaz 5y ago
    How is it working exactly ? Since it is a change in the algorithm, could it be put on a GPU to go even faster afterwards, or is it too sequential for that ?
    • freemint 5y ago
      The same algorithm can put on GPU, it works by approximating non-linear activation of a layer by storing which neuron get activated for a certain activation and then only calculate those neurons for similar input. This costs a lot of memory. This involves traversing a hash table but that is possible efficiently on GPU. This entire paper is entire publication is a red herring for the reason you gave. If you (or anybody else) happens to be a graphics programmer with experience of implementing the bounding-box tree traversal common in CUDA implementations of ray tracing please get in touch with me as there as a good chance an rusty old 1080 can defeat most expensive xeon on the market since it has more memory bandwidth than Intels part. If you ever wanted to piss on Intels leg with a multiple week-end project please get in touch. email in profile. There is a slim chance that this will actually help deep learning.
• rhindi 5y ago
  Homomorphic encryption, which enables you to process data without decrypting it. Would solve privacy / data security issues around sending data to be processed in the cloud
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Zero knowledge proofs for the win! This is one of the things I need to see in a cryptocurrency before I believe it will succeed at scale. 1 Zero-knowledge proofs, 2 shielded ledgers, 3 democratized and energy efficiency mining, 4 inflationary control, and 5 wallet recovery. No one has all of these yet, but ZKP is a big part of it.
    • gautamcgoel 5y ago
      Can you explain what you mean by shielded ledgers?
      • b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
        I am also curious what you mean.
        • SavantIdiot 5y ago
          See my peer comment.
      • SavantIdiot 5y ago
        The fact that wallet IDs are visible in the blockchain breaks it completely for me. I do NOT want an immortal record of every penny I spent and to whom I gave it. Fuuuuuuuck that. Today I have a choice, but with many cryptocurrencices (ETH, BTC) that is a "feature" not a "bug". Monero and Ravencoin have transparent and shielded entries. I believe the node is encrypted with an ECDH shared secret, so the payer and the payee know each other's wallets, but no one else does.
        • 5y ago
• jayd16 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is exactly under the radar but I'm excited about wearable AR. No it doesn't look real but once you get past that we have some amazing tech on the horizon. Microsoft and Oculus have hands free controls that actually work. Inside out tracking is progressing quickly. New UX patterns are getting forged. I'm exited to see what we'll have in a few years time. In my mind its far more exciting than something like crypto but gets much less press.
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    Inside out tracking is crazy good. I have a Quest 1, and this technology is seriously impressive. Quest 2 is significantly better and cheaper.
  • justinlilly 5y ago
    Any specific devices? Or just generally the brands of oculus & microsoft?
    • jayd16 5y ago
      The Quest2 packs a ton of power into a very comfortable headset. While not designed for passthrough, its still quite functional. The Hololens opens up an entirely new UX flow with accurate enough hand tracking and the ability to keep your hands free to operate a keyboard or any other kind of device.
• andy99 5y ago
  Uncertainty quantification and OOD detection in machine learning. It's on some people's radar, but has the potential to get ML adopted much more widely as people understand what it is actually really good at, and stop giving it things to do that it's bad at. For a great recent example that get at some of this, see "Does Your Dermatology Classifier Know What It Doesn't Know? Detecting the Long-Tail of Unseen Conditions" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03829 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03829 I'm not affiliated with this work but I am building a company in this area (because I'm excited). Company is in my profile.
• shostack 5y ago
  Developments in the AR/VR space. The haptics stuff coming out is really cool and may be consumer friendly in the near future. Meanwhile headset tech is seeing major investment and light field technology is going to do amazing things for this space.
  • crocsarecool 5y ago
    I have a Valve Index. It is the most mind blowing thing to me. I’m really excited for AR to get going. I’ve only seen it for shopping (see what item x would look like in your house). I think it might be cool for collaboration.
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    The Oculus Quest 2 is so cheap for a very high quality and high resolution experience. And even more importantly, it’s extremely simple to setup. Wireless VR really is a necessity for it to become more than just a tiny niche. Not yet mainstream, but it’s actually a joy to use and I think we’ll have significant marginal improvements over time which will keep making it more and more worthwhile. I think the real thing will be commercial applications of VR, where companies use it because it’s the best way to get certain kinds of work done. And NOT desk work, either. We’re maybe a decade or two from that being mainstream, but it’s going to be a significant improvement.
    • variable11 5y ago
      Not spending money on hardware that Facebook can brick whenever it feels more evil than normal.
  • nomel 5y ago
    I work full time in VR, using virtual screens (ImmersedVR). I was never really all that excited about AR/VR outside of entertainment until the first time I accidentally spent 8 hours of focused work.
• Jamieee 5y ago
  https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ seems pretty cool. I've been meaning to check it out, but not seen any uptake yet.
  • beauzero 5y ago
    Same here. IPFS seems to have been lumped into the whole "crypto" scene because of filecoin. In my opinion, IPFS is much more interesting and potentially beneficial to individual freedom than crypto. The problem is the only people really talking about it are people focused on crypto, also forcing dapp conversations to focus on quick money vs. long term usability/functionality. I don't hold the money conversations against anyone...just not interested in that side of it. More interested in the preservation of knowledge long term and how/if that gets built. IPFS seems to be an interesting potential step towards those goals.
    • rPlayer6554 5y ago
      I find it really cool that Brave implemented IPFS.
    • imglorp 5y ago
      There's still a bunch of questions around filecoin, but if you set aside the token and speculative nature, the it's the first realistic proof of storage system and represents (1) a departure from proof of work that's sucking up the power output of several countries for no good reason, (2) a useful base for IPFS to store its bits persistently and (3) perhaps funding Protocol Labs so they can continue to advance this state of art.
  • mariksolo 5y ago
    Libgen added a feature to download files with ipfs. It is ridiculously faster than a normal download.
  • godelski 5y ago
    I keep seeing this pop up, but honestly I still don't get it. I'm also weirded out by the filecoin aspect of it. Could you maybe explain it better for the dumb folks like me?
• 3arn0wl 5y ago
  I'm really excited, to the point of distraction by the RISC-V ISA. Some people say that there's nothing new in it, but to my mind, they're missing the point : the Berkeley Four took what couldn't be appropriated for profit, and built a statement about what computing is... They revealed the Wizard of Oz to everyone, so that anyone with some computing background can build a processor, freely. And now this freed wizard is working his magic, and will change the computing landscape irrevocably.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    You do realize that RISC-V processors aren't free right? Making an open source ISA is no small feat, but all they really did was help save some megacorporations a little extra money. Perhaps it will lead to a processor startup, but follow that to its logical conclusion: it takes a huge, profitable company to sustain processor delivery for years. There's a very good reason why only a handful of companies make the top 6 CPU architectures. There's still Synopsys ARC, Renesas, Atmel, PIC just to name a few of RISC-V competitors. In reality, the Berkeley Four just made a handful of semi companies richer. WDC, NXP, NVIDIA, Microchip, etc. don't have to pay Arm for IP if they use RISC-V. Did that really help anything? Meh.
    • 3arn0wl 5y ago
      Sure, RISC-V designs can be open or not... And of course there's always the cost of fabbing. There're already designs freely available to use though, either as they are, or to build upon. And there are also now many other companies designing using the ISA; decentralising the production of chips. But - over and above the revolutionary economics of it - it's being recognised as a good ISA, and RISC-V cores are already being incorporated into consumer electronics.
    • 3arn0wl 5y ago
      Actually... What they did, ten years ago, was build a much better Computer Engineering course!
    • CyberRabbi 5y ago
      You could argue that the availability of Linux saved countless megacorporations from having to pay Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. Yet the availability of Linux has been a boon to people across the board. While I agree there is something not right about cutting into ARM’s profits for the benefit of megacorporations, I think that a royalty-free ISA might genuinely be good for civilization despite that in the same way Linux is. It’s tough though, I’m still not fully sold on that opinion.
• dchuk 5y ago
  This new crypto project just launched its mainnet a few weeks ago: https://chia.net https://chia.net It's a novel "Proof of" algorithm (Proof of Space and Time) that front loads the resource needs into a Plotting phase, with a very efficient Farming phase after that to process blocks with transactions. Seems like a much more fair, sustainable model for having a secure digital currency. It also has an interesting, Lisp based programming language on it. But what excites me is that it's lead by Bram Cohen, the dude who invented BitTorrent, one of the best pieces of tech I've used nearly my whole tech life.
  • Murrawhip 5y ago
    I think you mean https://www.chia.net https://www.chia.net
    • dchuk 5y ago
      yep, you're right. I'll fix.
    • SeriousM 5y ago
      Thank you very much! The idea to have all the computations already in place and just play bingo/lotto is awesome. This is the true spirit of defi
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Graffur 5y ago
    The people who have the most hard drive space will mine the most Chia. How is that any different to just paying with USD to get more? In terms of it being a "much more" fair model.
    • dchuk 5y ago
      I think the big part is that farming with hard drives is a much more approachable thing to do than to try and mine BTC/ETH, considering both of those at a minimum require crazy GPU hardware, if not full blown custom chips, that no normal people will buy. Also, insane energy usage too, which Chia doesn't really have. That being said, yes, with the right amount of investment, someone could try and take over the network. That being said, look how many Full Nodes are already in the network... https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/nodes https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/nodes
• pmdulaney 5y ago
  Electric cars and planes are going to be huge, of course. Increasingly batteries will be replaced by fuel cells, and the hydrogen that powers them will be produced by means of hydrolysis produced by sunlight. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-hydrogen-fuel-machine-ultimate-self-improvement.html https://phys.org/news/2021-04-hydrogen-fuel-machine-ultimate... https://newatlas.com/energy/osu-turro-solar-spectrum-hydrogen-catalyst/ https://newatlas.com/energy/osu-turro-solar-spectrum-hydroge... https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/April/05152017Ren-Water-Catalyst.php https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2017/April/05152017Ren-Wa...
  • Graffur 5y ago
    Is this under the radar?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      For electric planes, it is. Up until a year or two ago, I still had fairly intelligent people still saying electric flight is “essentially impossible.”
      • semi-extrinsic 5y ago
        AFAICT intelligent people are still saying that apart from short-hop 10 seater planes, electric flight is impossible.
        • Robotbeat 5y ago
          Yeah, that’s what they say if you press them on it today. They’ll keep moving the goalposts as soon as it becomes too obviously wrong, and then never admit to having been wrong in the first place. ;)
          • semi-extrinsic 5y ago
• AntonioL 5y ago
  Automated green farms - https://www.optimal.ag https://www.optimal.ag
• nojito 5y ago
  Hydrogen cars and autonomous delivery.
• ratsforhorses 5y ago
  DNA digital data storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage
  • mariodiana 5y ago
    > DNA digital data storage is the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA. If each "bit" of DNA can be either A, C, G, or T, why call that binary?
    • dinero_rojo 5y ago
      I think it’s kinda like modern SSDs which also have more states than just on or off per storage cell, but it’s still holding data that can be written/interpreted in binary.
    • segfaultbuserr 5y ago
      The data is binary, the encoding doesn't have to be. Most modulation schemes in high-speed digital communication uses more than 2 states, but it doesn't make it less "digital" (in the end, everything is analog). Gigabit Ethernet's PAM-5 uses 5 different voltage levels, but one would not call it "quinary computing". Similarly, Wi-Fi's QAM-64 uses 64 possible combinations of phases and amplitudes, Base64 uses 64-symbol alphabet, but the data represented by all of them is still binary.
• rolivercoffee 5y ago
  Any grid energy storage technology. Whether it's small home units (smart batteries, vehicle to grid, hydrogen packs...) or huge grid scale (liquid air, gravity, liquid metal batteries...)
• kroltan 5y ago
  Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-relatedly things like Prolog? I recently decided to fiddle with Wikidata, and it is fascinating to be able to query for any part of a statement, not just the value! In SPARQL you write statements in the form <thing> <relation> <thing> But the cool part is that any of those three parts can be extracted, so you can ask things like "what are the cities in <country>", or "what country harbors the city <city>", but most importantly, "how does <city> relate to <country>". For example, if you wanted to find out all the historical monuments in state capitals of a country (using my home country as an example, also pseudocode for your time's sake): fetch ?monumentName, ?cityName given ?monument "is called" ?monumentName. ?monument "is located within" ?city. ?city "is capital of" ?state. ?city "is called" ?cityName. ?city "is located within" "Brazil".
  • poletopole 5y ago
    I've been considering writing a graph database on top of SPARQL and RDF. Beyond the official docs (which are pretty good), can you recommend any other resources for easily getting the hang of SPARQL?
    • keefe 5y ago
      I worked in a semweb company ~10 years ago - https://jena.apache.org/ https://jena.apache.org/ as a general starting point is a useful library. I remember distinctly OWLIM https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Owlim https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Owlim as a great triple store.
    • kroltan 5y ago
      I cannot! I have just recently learned about it and am doing so for leisure, not for skill. I'm sorry I couldn't be of much use. In fact I would love to know if someone else does have any other resources too :)
    • mindcrime 5y ago
      can you recommend any other resources for easily getting the hang of SPARQL? I'll second the recommendation of Jena (and associated sub-project Fuseki). If you know Java (or any JVM language) you can use the Jena API directly for manipulating the triplestore, and submitting SPARQL queries. If you don't want to do that, Fuseki exposes an HTTP based API that you can interact with from any environment you prefer.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• krylon299 5y ago
  for me, its https://qloppi.com https://qloppi.com
  • atom-morgan 5y ago
    What am I looking at?
    • em-bee 5y ago
      seems to be a parody of those newfangled non-fungible-token markets.
• pmurt7 5y ago
  IPFS
• anthonyskipper 5y ago
  IPFS and WASM - Combined they let you build apps that don't need a cloud provider, and can effectively be immortal.
  • TranquilMarmot 5y ago
    Huh, I've looked at IPFS and WASM a lot but never really considered them together as a way to distribute apps in a decentralized way. That is a really exciting possibility. I wonder if IPFS will ever gain enough momentum to make it usable by enough "normal" people (not just devs who have it installed)
    • astlouis44 5y ago
      This x 1000...the metaverse will be built on WASM, WebGPU, WebXR, and IPFS. Also an ingenius way to disrupt Apple's walled garden and empower developers and consumers to a new era of seamless, universal application distribution and discovery on the web. My team is working on this btw :D
• mperreux 5y ago
  The GET (Guaranteed Entrance Token) Protocol https://get-protocol.io/ https://get-protocol.io/ The protocol offers blockchain-based smart ticketing which eliminates fraud and prevents scalping. This has the potential to get huge when events start coming back post-covid.
• m_j_g 5y ago
  Dependent types and homotopy type theory for general purpose programming. I am definitely excited about it, but not really sure if those hopes will ever materialize as some useful (even in the limited scope) technology.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I'm bullish on Fusion energy.
• sahaskatta 5y ago
  https://tryfinch.com https://tryfinch.com It's an API for Payroll. The number of use cases is pretty amazing!
• csbartus 5y ago
  Javascript and Typescript replacements. Started learning Clojure / ClojureScript and keeping an eye on ML languages like ReScript and ReasonML. I wish soon I'll be able to never write JS/TS code again.
  • haxiomic 5y ago
    Take a look at haxe[0] for a compile-to-js ML inspired language. It's relatively mature these days and integrates with existing typescript definitions via dts2hx[1] I talk about this more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26084187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26084187 [0] https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/ [1] https://github.com/haxiomic/dts2hx https://github.com/haxiomic/dts2hx
    • mdm12 5y ago
      In a similar vein, Fable (an F#-to-JS compiler) is gaining a lot of momentum in the F# community. https://fable.io/ https://fable.io/
• fsflover 5y ago
  Qubes OS, the desktop OS providing strong security through isolation: https://qubes-os.org https://qubes-os.org.
• tubularhells 5y ago
  IoT smart spoons.
  • buescher 5y ago
    Put a chip in it!
• KerryJones 5y ago
  Graphene -- generally has a bunch of uses that are not fully explored and I think it has a lot of potential. Example company creating anti-COVID solutions with it: https://www.zengraphene.com/ https://www.zengraphene.com/
• southerntofu 5y ago
  1. GNU Name System to replace the DNS in a backwards-compatible manner, with delegation to cryptographic public keys (instead of IP addresses) and with strong guarantees against known attacks against the DNS (DNSSEC doesn't solve everything). https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html https://gnunet.org/en/gns.html 2. Semantic sysadmin to declare your intent in regards to your infrastructure no matter how it is implemented (i.e. with a standard specification, interoperability/migration becomes possible) https://ttm.sh/dVy.md https://ttm.sh/dVy.md 3. GUI/WebUI CMS for contributing to a shared versioned repository. Sort of what netlify is doing, but using a standard so you can use the client of your choice and we tech folks can hold onto our CLI while our less-techie friends can enjoy a great UI/UX for publishing articles to collective websites. 4. Structured shell for the masses. Powershell isn't the worst, but in my view nushell has a bright future ahead. For the people who don't need portability, it may well entirely replace bash, Python and perl for writing more maintainable and user-friendly shell scripts. https://nushell.sh/ https://nushell.sh/ 5. A desktop environment toolkit that focuses on empowering to build more opinionated desktops while mutualizing the burden of maintenance of core components. Most desktop environments should have a common base/library (freedesktop?) where features/bugs can be dealt with once and for all and we don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time. Last week i learnt some DE folks want to fork the whole of GTK because it's becoming too opinionated for their usage, and GNOME is nowadays really bloated and buggy thanks to javascript hell. Can't we have a user-friendly desktop with solid foundations and customizability?
  • joeyaiello 5y ago
    PM lead for PowerShell here, thanks for the callout! I'll take "isn't the worst". ;) I'd love to get more of your thoughts around how PowerShell might be more useful for the kinds of scenarios you're thinking about. We see a lot of folks writing portable CI/CD build/test/deploy scripts for cross-platform apps (or to support cross-platform development), but we're always looking to lower the barrier of entry to get into PowerShell, as it can be quite jarring to someone who's used Bash their whole life (myself included). Structured shells have so much potential outside of that, though. I find myself using PowerShell to "explore" REST APIs, and then it's easy to translate that into something scripted and portable. But I'd love to get to a place one day where we could treat arbitrary datasets like that, sort of like a generalized SQL/JSON/whatever REPL. Plus, PS enables me to Google regex less :D
• jl6 5y ago
  Old tech. New software development is 99% aimless churn. We don’t need more new tech. We need better applications of old tech. There is so much software that works perfectly fine already. What’s missing is connecting it to real world problems.
  • StreamBright 5y ago
    Amen. We need to walk back from convoluded and bloated software to the era when every software was simple. https://collapseos.org https://collapseos.org
  • mey 5y ago
    Do you mean a better SMTP server or making a better* e-mail in general? (As an example) * Better in this case would be a fundamental design to prevent spoofing, provide S2S encryption maybe E2E encryption, fixing MIME typing issues, fixing Rich Text/HTML display, etc. Basically an actually good faith replacement of e-mail instead of a vendor co-opting.
    • networkimprov 5y ago
      There's TMTP, "a sane network protocol for email, to end attacks and promote productivity." https://mnmnotmail.org/ https://mnmnotmail.org/ https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail
      • everybodyknows 5y ago
        Serious money may be required. Support for MNM by way of Patreon is requested on the home page. There's also JMAP, with credible standards people involved: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/photos/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/photos/ Serious industry involvement however appears limited to FastMail.
        • networkimprov 5y ago
          JMAP is an extension of the email protocol stack; it only replaces IMAP. TMTP is an alternative to the entire email protocol stack. It will be standardized after it's been proven in a range of real-world scenarios. The mnm client & server, which implement TMTP, work well today, and have nearly all the features most users need. See docs menu in the online demo. https://mnmnotmail.org/demo.html https://mnmnotmail.org/demo.html Re "serious money", could you elaborate?
• pkrotich 5y ago
  Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) - I think future societies will benefit a lot from such organization.
• Dowwie 5y ago
  United Therapeutics is trying to "3D print" human kidneys. I pray that they succeed at this venture. It will be yet another world-changing endeavor for Rothblatt. If you aren't familiar with Martine Rothblatt, listen to this interview with Tim Ferriss: https://tim.blog/2020/12/16/martine-rothblatt/ https://tim.blog/2020/12/16/martine-rothblatt/
• corebuffer 5y ago
  Yosys and open source FPGA toolchains. I think FPGA are vastly underrated and hard to use because of tooling and this is promising in changing it.
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    Indeed. It seems like we're finally seeing a smidgeon of movement in this direction lately as well. Lattice have been at least semi-friendly to people building OSS support for some of their FPGA's and now QuickLogic have come out with some explicit support[1] for OSS as well. And I have to admit, given that AMD have been at least a nugget more friendly to the OSS world over the years, I'm harboring a faint kernel of hope that Xilinx may move in this direction a bit as well, under their stewardship[2]. [1]: https://www.quicklogic.com/qorc/ https://www.quicklogic.com/qorc/ [2]: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/xilinx-acquisition https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/xilinx-acquisition
  • jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    I work on FPGAs professionally and it is hard for me to come up with many commercial applications for them outside of what they're currently used for.
    • mikewarot 5y ago
      What if FPGAs were $1 each, would that change it for you?
      • jeffreyrogers 5y ago
        The problem is getting data to/from the FPGA, which imposes unavoidable latency. If you want to do this fast it can't be done cheaply because it requires too much silicon. Aside from simulation type tasks, the tasks best suited for FPGAs are streaming tasks for this reason since once you've started streaming data through the FPGA you don't need to worry about latency too much.
• timdaub 5y ago
  - Native File System support coming to the browser: https://web.dev/file-system-access/ https://web.dev/file-system-access/ - jamstack.wtf - federation-based networks - CRDTs: https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/ https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/ - data-oriented programming paradigm (https://rugpullindex.com/ https://rugpullindex.com/ shameless plug) - web components: https://docs.ficusjs.org/index.html https://docs.ficusjs.org/index.html
  • timdaub 5y ago
    > federation-based networks e.g. lemmy.ml
• JProthero 5y ago
  Muon-Catalyzed Fusion [1]. Briefly it's a genuine, and scientifically uncontroversial, form of 'cold' fusion enabled by muons — a more massive relative of the electron that was in the news recently thanks to the potentially interesting results coming out of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab [2]. Like conventional 'hot' plasma fusion, in all experiments to date the energy input needed to sustain the process has exceeded the output, but it may be possible to use it to generate power. Unlike conventional fusion though, it receives relatively little attention, and there is no well-funded international effort to tackle the associated technical challenges. As with conventional fusion the technical challenges seem formidable, but it could be an interesting technology if a way could be found to make it work. Listeners of Lex Fridman's podcast may recall that it was briefly mentioned in the episode he made last year with his father, Alexander Fridman, who is a plasma physicist [3]. As someone who has been interested in the idea for years and barely hears any mention of it, I was pleasantly surprised it came up. It was also covered on the MinutePhysics YouTube channel in 2018 [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_catalyzed_fusion [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNCz-8QIWuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNCz-8QIWuI [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDfB3gnxRhc Bonus fact: Muon-Catalyzed fusion was first demonstrated by the Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, who, with his geologist son Walter Alvarez, later proposed the 'Alvarez hypothesis' for the extinction of the dinosaurs by asteroid impact.
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    Yay, something that wasn't software related! -A Software Engineer
  • nynx 5y ago
    It's disappointing that MCF doesn't get more attention.
  • sroussey 5y ago
    Could muons generated from this work? https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/24852.html https://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/24852.ht...
• siruva07 5y ago
  Atmospheric Water Generators
• elihu 5y ago
  ReBCO tape is interesting stuff. It's a high-temperature superconductor (high-temperature meaning still really cold, but you don't need liquid helium to get there) that can carry a lot of current before it stops being superconducting. It's being used in new tokomak fusion reactor designs, like SPARC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    An excellent video on this from one of the best Youtube channels in existence (IMHO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpDGKH9_SE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpDGKH9_SE
    • elihu 5y ago
      You're right, that's a great video.
• silasb 5y ago
  dapr.io
• sebslomski 5y ago
  NativeScript ;-)
• momentmaker 5y ago
  - oracles for blockchain - Blockchains are secure systems because they're isolated systems. But smart contracts aren't very exciting without data from the real world. Oracles are the bridges to supply data from the real world to the blockchain world. However, a system is only as strong as its weakest link. You'd want the same security guarantees as what blockchain can provide. So the blockchain needs to "trust" oracles to deliver the correct data that's immune to manipulations. With the rise of smart contracts and full automations, I think oracles will play a huge role in all of this. The leading project that's working on this is Chainlink.
  • codethief 5y ago
    > oracles Oh no, not another term the "crypto" people have taken from the "cryptography" people and re-interpreted in a completely different way. :(
• johnx123-up 5y ago
  IMHO, it is Restya Core. (Disclosure: I'm on their private beta.) It can eat the market of Jira, Slack and Asana.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Balgair 5y ago
  1) Dr. Rafael G. González-Acuña's analytical solution on the Wasserman-Wolf problem TLDR: We can now make lenses in any shape we please, not just with parabolas and circles (kinda). Should have implications for anything that has to do with light: Telescopes, lasers, com-sats, AR/VR, etc. https://gizmodo.com/a-mexican-physicist-solved-a-2-000-year-old-problem-tha-1837031984 https://gizmodo.com/a-mexican-physicist-solved-a-2-000-year-... 2) Memristors. We've not found a cheap and stable little component yet like the rest of the 2-lead elements, but it seems to be on the way (says every futurist) TLDR: We'll be forced to re-do a lot of computer HW as the memristive ones will be (likely) much faster and cheaper on power. Think coin-cell batteries powering very good image recognition systems cheap as a dollar-store watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
• fasteddie31003 5y ago
  Heat pumps and better insulation. It's magic how heat pumps pull heat out of thin air. I honestly think part of the reason they are not adopted as much is people can't understand them and don't trust them because of their ignorance. Insulation seems pretty boring until you start to realize how much energy can be saved by modern insulation.
  • martythemaniak 5y ago
    Me too. I've been obsessing over geothermal systems for a while and I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I wrote this essay to clear up my thinking: https://www.greennewdealio.com/heating/robot-mole/ https://www.greennewdealio.com/heating/robot-mole/
    • 2rsf 5y ago
      Geothermal is not uncommon here in Sweden, I think that some goes deep instead of wide maybe because we have a lot of rocky ground which is easier to drill into. But like your article says the installation is too expensive for the expected savings. There is another problem you didn't bring up and is scalability, geothermal works fine for detached houses but not so great in a city where most of the energy goes to. District heating is a great solution for denser population areas, here we burn trash and solve two problems, and in theory it can be combined with Geothermal heating
  • screaminghawk 5y ago
    It's cost for me. Electricity isn't cheap where I live and when your house is poorly insulated you require even more energy for a heat pump.
  • 35mm 5y ago
    For new homes absolutely. In the UK gas boilers are the norm and every new home should have a heat pump instead. But retrofitting requires a lot of work - replacing radiators with much larger ones, maybe ripping out pipes, and for ground source digging up the garden / street.
• aqme28 5y ago
  Fusion power. I think traditional tokamaks are 5-10 years from positive power due to better superconductor tech. There is finally private investment in the space and it has been growing at an absolutely crazy pace. I think in about 5 years there is going to be a fusion power gold rush.
  • lambdatronics 5y ago
    Not exactly under the radar. Also, you have to keep in mind that demonstrating positive power isn't sufficient. SPARC is aiming for Q>2, ITER for Q>10, but Q>20 or 30 is needed for a powerplant. Also, once sufficient gain has been demonstrated, there are many serious nuclear engineering challenges that need to be solved.
• thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
  3D Printing. I believe 3D printing will change the world in less than twenty years. We currently in the hobby-est stage–think home computers in the later 70's early eighties. It took a company to see the potential and package it up for anyone to use. I think there will be a breakthrough home 3D printer that will start whole new industries. You will be able to buy physical products direct from anyone. Anyone can design and sell a vase or a bowl or a boomerang because manufacturing and distribution are no longer barriers to market. Think of when music and video moved from mostly only possible with studios to being able to record at a studio to home recording. Anyways... I'm super excited.
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    Can I say "I agree" but also add that there may be more to the story than 3D printing? That is, I'd call out "personal fabrication" in an even more general sense, to include both 3D printing and things like inexpensive, personal CNC milling machines and other "personal scale" fabricating devices. Even going as far as more highly specialized devices, like at-home reflow ovens for SMD soldering, and laser cutters. Heck, even items as exotic as plasma cutters are getting cheap enough that almost anybody can own one. See, for example, https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Portable-Digital-Frequency-Inverter/dp/B0811VB27H/ https://www.amazon.com/Reboot-Portable-Digital-Frequency-Inv... Edit: I should also add something about the 3rd party fabrication / assembly services that are bringing a lot of capabilities to bear, for the average person, who would not have been able to afford them a few years ago. Look at OSH Park, OSH Cut, JLCPCB and the like. Need PCB's? Done. Need later cut metal parts? Done. There are similar services for injection molding, etc., etc., etc. I'm pretty excited about this space. I just bought my first desktop mill (so new I haven't even unboxed it yet) and my first 3D printer. And picked up a cheap Black and Decker convection oven to convert into a reflow oven about the same time. Definitely excited to start exploring the intersection of all of these tools for "building things" without needing a full fledged machine shop, wood shop, yadda, yadda, yadda.
• joelg 5y ago
  Database applications of category theory!
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  Digital vaccine passports, as in the HealthIT that revolves around that space
• DougN7 5y ago
  Better cryptocurrency Chia
• kickout 5y ago
  Autonomous vehicles...for agriculture... https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hiding-in-plain-sight/ https://thinkingagriculture.io/the-agriculture-unicorn-hidin...
• oftenwrong 5y ago
  https://darklang.com/ https://darklang.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20394166 I think it's inevitable that darklang's vision will be achieved eventually, at least in part, whether by darklang or by other projects. We are already at the stage where you can define your infrastructure in code, and execute functions on managed "serverless" runtimes. It's not too much further to the point that cloud providers will build tightly integrated developer experiences that allow a developer to "just code" while handling all of the complexity that comes after. Within some large software companies, there is something close to this experience, but it hasn't yet been wrapped up and sold to the public.
• abetusk 5y ago
  * FPGAs, and their associated FOSS stack to use them. I haven't been able to really get into FPGAs but I'm optimistic about them. They're pretty clunky right now but I'm hoping they'll just get easier and more accessible. If we want computation that we're able to verify as being secure, FPGAs are the closest I see us getting to it. There's also applications in terms of parallel computation that they can do over more traditional approaches. This might go by the way of Transmeta or always remain niche but it seems like they have a lot of potential. * Open Source Hardware, specifically relating to robotics Electronics production is becoming cheaper and easier. Open source hardware has the potential to become as ubiquitous as open source software. Electronics hardware is still way harder than it needs to be, so the progress is slow, but if we get within range of having an iteration cycle in electronics that's as fast as software development, we'll see spectacular innovation. Robotics especially, as that's a kind of straight forward physical manifestation of electronics that has a potentially large market. There's a $5k fiber laser that can ablate copper. This could potentially fuel the next round of cottage industry board fab houses (in the US and other non-Chinese countries) and enable rapid turn around time. I wish I could justify the $5k to play around with it but it's just outside of my price range. * Solar I'm not really sure if this is 'under-the-radar' but for the first time, solar has become cheaper than coal. This means besides giving a moral incentive for people to use solar, there's now an economic one, which means the transition will most likely be broad. Coupled with battery technology advances, this could have drastic impacts on the ubiquity and cost of power. I wonder if we'll see a kind of "energy internet" where people will create their own distributed electrified infrastructure.
  • kscottz 5y ago
    OSHWA board member [1] here and developer advocate at Open Robotics (the people who maintain ROS) here. May I suggest you take a look at microROS[3]? I am also super excited about OSHWA certified open hardware [4]. [1] https://certification.oshwa.org/ https://certification.oshwa.org/ [2] https://www.openrobotics.org/ https://www.openrobotics.org/ [3] https://micro.ros.org/ https://micro.ros.org/ [4] https://certification.oshwa.org/ https://certification.oshwa.org/
    • abetusk 5y ago
• JimmyRuska 5y ago
  RDFox, a semantic/graph database with incremental reasoning.
• ahstilde 5y ago
  Allergy immunotherapy. I started a company on the backs of this treatment. The way we treat allergies today, with Zyrtec and Claritin, is medieval medicine. It doesn't solve the underlying problem; it just tries to cover it up. Allergy immunotherapy is the future. Most people don't realize that allergies are now a curable disease. In the future, taking Claritin for allergies is going to seem like taking Tylenol for an ear infection. Why would you treat the symptoms when you could just cure the disease? I started Wyndly (https://www.wyndly.com https://www.wyndly.com) to bring immunotherapy for pollen, pets, and dust across the USA. But we'll expand into food allergies soon, too.
  • hwatkins 5y ago
    This look interesting, it took some digging to get to what the actual treatment is, so it gets your body use to the allergen to build up tolerance. What happens when you have multiple pollen allergies, how does it track all of them. Also seems like many pollens will be region specific, different trees, etc.
    • ahstilde 5y ago
      We use an allergy test to diagnose your allergy profile, then we treat you for exactly what you're allergic to!
  • jalada 5y ago
    Here in the UK it's incredible how little immunotherapy is prescribed despite the fact that it's been available for ages and known to work. Anecdotally I have heard one problem is that allergy medicine is just not something that GPs are kept well informed about. My GP told me that it was 'unwise to mess with the immune system like this'. Uhh...vaccines? (source: I have had immunotherapy)
  • cpitman 5y ago
    Surprised to hear this is uncommon, I received allergy shots >20 years ago and it was the only allergy treatment (after many attempted medications) that had a sizable impact. Besides the delivery vehicle, what are the differences between allergy shots and these droplets?
• ratsforhorses 5y ago
  Smartphone ad hoc networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• leeuw01 5y ago
  Materialize (https://materialize.com/ https://materialize.com/). Although a bit known here, my coworkers never heard about it. I think it's going to be a game changer.
  • posnet 5y ago
    Materialize is so cool. I think these to blogs have great wow factor for anyone who's worked with streaming data before. https://materialize.com/lateral-joins-and-demand-driven-queries/ https://materialize.com/lateral-joins-and-demand-driven-quer... https://materialize.com/temporal-filters/ https://materialize.com/temporal-filters/
    • yamrzou 5y ago
      Any idea how Materialize compares to Apache Flink?
• mindcrime 5y ago
  OK, to add my own answer, instead of just commnenting. Ummm... to start with "what everybody else has already said." If I have anything to add it might be (and somebody might have said this already as well, and I just missed it) Synthetic Biology - this entire field fascinates me, and I expect big things to come in the future when we can customize DNA and grow items we need, that are tailor made to various parameters. This is also the beginning plot-line to many horror novels and movies though, so "everything isn't rainbows and sunshine" as they say. Nanotech - related to above, but as with synthetic biology, it fascinates me to think what we can do when we have atomic scale self-assembling machines. AR/VR - maybe not "under the radar" anymore, but I think there's a ton of untapped potential in this space. Semantic Web - Yes, I'm still a believer in the idea of RDF / SPARQL / etc. I've said enough about this in the past, so I'm not going to drill any deeper here. AI - maybe more "AGI" than the ML stuff we have today that gets labeled "AI". And saying that is not an attempt to denigrate ML or any of the radical stuff going today. It's just that for as much as contemporary "AI" can do, I think there's a lot it still can't do, and I like to daydream about the potential of AI's that get closer and closer to (and exceed?) human abilities. See above about horror movie plots though. :-( Fusion: this has definitely been mentioned already, but add me to the list of people who are hopeful/excited about the prospects. Time Travel: Actually no. I kinda hope this is impossible. I have a feeling that if unrestricted "Doctor Who" like time travel was possible, causality would collapse and all of reality would just become a big, jumbled mess, incapable of supporting life.
• frankus 5y ago
  Maybe not exactly under the radar, but when I was last doing professional EE/hardware/embedded work around the turn of the millennium, the software (EDA, compilers, CAD) and hardware (instrumentation, evaluation boards, PCB fabrication) were all super expensive, to the extent that they weren't really accessible to non financially-independent bootstrappers. Sometime in the last two decades (and again, I'm probably super late to the party on this) it's become extremely affordable to dip one's toe into electronic hardware and embedded software. And not just at the "breadboarding something with an Arduino" level, but at the level of building small production runs of a product that people would actually pay money for. In a way it reminds me of the mid-2000s era of web technology, where over the course of a few years you went from "putting expensive servers in a data center" to "filling out a web form" in order to host an app in a reasonably high-availability environment. Or another way of looking at it, a lot of things that maybe you previously had to fund-raise for are now things you can bootstrap, and many things are cheap even by hobby standards. That means for a lot of projects (for technical folks) you don't need to convince anyone else that your idea has merit, you can just build it and find out.
• drojas 5y ago
  Temporal Stores/Databases like Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/ https://www.datomic.com/) and Crux (https://opencrux.com/ https://opencrux.com/). I can't stress enough how much pain they can lift from organizations building teams to "scale" in domains that by nature are tied to requirements about past knowledge like finance, healthcare, governance, audit systems, etc.
  • gnat 5y ago
    How mature is performance optimisation in Datalog? I've joined a place that uses SQL Server, and brought my open source perception of SQL Server as an expensive lumbering behemoth. I'm astonished by how fast SQL Server is, and how mature the tools around it are. We rely on them to tune queries, diagnose contention, etc. My big concern about adopting something like Datomic or Crux is that we'd lose the insight that lets us increase performance without increasing hardware spend.
    • refset 5y ago
      I work on Crux so can share a few details about our implementation of Datalog. The query is compiled into a kind of Worst-Case Optimal Join algorithm [0] which means that certain types of queries (e.g. cyclic graph-analytical queries, like counting triangles) are generally more efficient than what is possible with a non-WCOJ query execution strategy. However, the potency of this approach relies on the query planner calculating a good ordering of variables for the join order, and this is a hard problem in itself. Crux is usually quite competent at selecting a sensible variable ordering but when it makes a bad choice your query will take an unnecessary performance hit. The workaround for these situations is to break your query into smaller queries (since we don't wish to support any kind of hinting). Over the longer term we will be continuing to build more intelligent heuristics that make use of advanced population statistics. For instance we are about to merge a PR that uses HyperLogLog to inform attribute selectivity: https://github.com/juxt/crux/pull/1472 https://github.com/juxt/crux/pull/1472 EDIT: it's also worth pointing out that the workaround of splitting queries apart is only plausible because of the "database as a value" semantics that make it possible to query repeatedly against a fixed transaction-time snapshot. This is useful for composition more generally and makes it much simpler to write compile-to-Datalog query translation layers on top, such as for SQL: https://opencrux.com/blog/crux-sql.html https://opencrux.com/blog/crux-sql.html [0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/chrismre/papers/paper49.Ngo.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/people/chrismre/papers/paper49.Ngo.p...
• jrnichols 5y ago
  maybe it's been a bit more noticed, but I am enjoying the Fediverse so far, especially peer tube. I think there's a lot of potential there. now.. the race to see if we can fill it with normal stuff instead of letting conspiracy theorists and racists flood it.
• aaron695 5y ago
  Cheap, 4K, bigger than 24 inch monitors. I think a lot of people are only allocated one monitor in most industries. This will change the way they work. It will also change design.
• Darmody 5y ago
  I can't believe nobody mentioned new natural teeth growth. No more ceramic implants, no more root canals. Grow new shiny and healthy teeth.
  • unnouinceput 5y ago
    A link please? I've never heard of this before and sounds very interesting.
    • Darmody 5y ago
      https://www.news-medical.net/health/Repairing-Teeth-using-Stem-Cells.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/health/Repairing-Teeth-using-St...
• robinwa 5y ago
  Hyperspectral imaging. It reminds me of a Star Trek tricorder. Imagine having a camera where you can see easily ID greenhouse gases, quantify water/fat content in food, identify plant diseases, verify drug components, identify tumours, and measure blood oxygenation. On the machine vision side of things: it could probably outperform any conventional imaging + DNN combination, and you'd probably get pixel-wise segmentation for free while you're there. There's been a lot of academic progress going on - it shouldn't be long until hyperspectral imaging makes its way into our lives.
  • jldl805 5y ago
    It is very much a part of your life if you are a member of the military or any number of government agencies. Has been a long time.
    • robinwa 5y ago
      Yeah for sure, the current ones are disgustingly expensive and atrociously hard to use though!
  • theaussiestew 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you work in this space? Would be interested in finding out more about the state of the field.
    • robinwa 5y ago
      Yeah! Ping me anytime, email in profile.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every Consumer product. All over the place, and some of them maybe invisible. 2) Custom silicon. Open source tools & decentralization of fab tech (by countries not wanting to be subject to international trade problems... as well as Moore’s Law slowing) are gonna make this like making a PCB. 3) Electric airplanes. With wings. “Drones” as VTVL electric helicopters have been big for a decade, but there are physical limitations to that approach. if you want to see the future, look at drone delivery in Rwanda by Zipline. But also, I think we’ll see passenger electric flight start small and from underserved regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency) but much more granular and without massive infrastructure. 4) Small tunnels by The Boring Company and probably competitor companies with similar ideas. When you can build tunnels for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an urban surface lane, then why NOT put it underground? And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Gets lot of hate from the Twitter Urbanist crowd, but what TBC has done for tunneling cost (on the order of $10 million per mile) is insanely important for how we think about infrastructure in the US. 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight. 6) Geoengineering. I’m not happy about it, but it’s insanely cheap so... it’ll probably happen.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Fiducials If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything that encode information to help computers figure out what they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-readable markers on roads and posts and traffic signs. I'm still hoping someone will wake up and make use of this "cheat code".
• ludsan 5y ago
  Perovskite for cheaper/more-efficient solar cells. Liquid metal batteries (a la Ambri) for grid-scale storage.
• 23d 5y ago
  Diamond Batteries! https://ndb.technology/ https://ndb.technology/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    Why are you interested in this? If it is for anything other than very LOW power (microwatts), you're going to be disappointed. It is essentially a beta emitter hooked to a capacitor via some electronics to handle voltage conversion. The thing is the beta source is use it or lose it, and very low power. If you scaled this up to power a Tesla, it would be a nightmare, as it would need to dissipate the full power the car requires, all the time, or it would melt down (aka Fukashima) For a longer debunk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzV_uzSTCTM
• wyxuan 5y ago
  BCI - Brain Computer Interface. Sure it has received a lot of attention thanks to the work of Elon and neurallink, I still think that it hasn't received enough interest especially for how it'll affect all different parts of ours lives.
• holoduke 5y ago
  1. Cost per kg for orbital payloads. Soon every company can send payload to space. In 10 years from now we will have 50 launches every day. The sky will contain at least 100 times more satelites than today. every single square cm on earth has connectivity to the great web. And not a single part is invisible or unmonitored. 2. VR and AR In 10 years from now when hardware is capable of displaying 16k per eye in a casual lightweight not bigger than regular sunglasses devices. Everyone will be wearing one making all mobilephones obsolete. Every object, animal or human you watch at will be argumented. It will be the greatest new technological impact since the rise of mobile phones. Changing the live of human being so dramatically
• pmarreck 5y ago
  Elixir. Yes, most of you have heard of it, but I think it is still very underrated. Especially interesting is the ML libraries that have come out recently and OTP24 whose new JIT compiler gives a ~2x speed improvement to Elixir code, depending on the task.
• jnsaff2 5y ago
  Passivhaus. Rust (performance == energy efficiency). EV conversions (hybrid drivetrain to replace an ICE). Electromobility in a wider sense. Heat pumps (not so much under the radar anymore tho).
• tootie 5y ago
  Gaze tracking. There are retail solutions that are easy to use and highly accurate. It's a very low-friction way to do hands free interactivity.
• crawfordcomeaux 5y ago
  The application of computer science and uncertainty logic to create general human programming frameworks, possibly through applying category theory to neuroscience, psychology, daily life. I'm the only one I know trying to do this. It's changed my life. I'm now applying my ideas in how to choose to lovingly coevolve with partner and the 2.5-year old we conceived. The results from this experiment are getting to the point that people are noticing. There exists a unifying spiritual path through my (mis?)application of category theory in my daily life. I am a noob at hacking the human and I'm saying that after having had major successes within this human body. I also recognize I'm doing way more than many people, so if I'm a noob, so are most-if-not-all people. The Buddha is an example of an elite hacker of the human. Still waiting for people willing to take the first step, which is cultivating an ideal learning environment within oneself. This means learning to abandon judgments by default.
  • desijays 5y ago
    Can you be a bit more specific? What you say seems very abstract and probably would be understandable to someone that groks the context.
• pedalpete 5y ago
  Neurotech - Sure there is all the stuff about BCI, but we're barely in control of our own brains ATM, so why are we using them to try to control a computer? We've learned to optimize our bodies through nutrition and physical fitness (even if not everyone does it, we have the know how), but our brains are the next frontier. I've seen lots of snake oil in this space so far, I was going to link to Halo Neuro, but they've been acquired by a tCDS company - from what I understand, the technology isn't ready yet. We're building a sleep headband that monitors your sleep state, and uses sound to improve your Sleep Performance -https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co Others in this space are Emotiv and Muse, Dreem
• Maven911 5y ago
  Holographic displays Alternative data especially for investment decisions
• carlsborg 5y ago
  Neuromorphic computing
• zarkov99 5y ago
  Elon Musk's Neuralink. The monkey demo is absolutely insane. The possibilities and the speed with which Neuralink progressed is breath-taking. This could be bigger than any of the other miracles Musk has performed.
• arriu 5y ago
  Alright, I'll bite. We're probably going to see a wave of disruptions from technologies like GPT3. For example, we might see something like this in the long term: A) Someone will create a model to accurately convert low level source code to higher level source code that does the same thing when compiled down. Think assembly / machine code to high level code or even English descriptions of the underlying semantics. B) At this point, why not pipe in some DNA/RNA into the model from A) to get high level insights C) Give it a couple iterations and it might be possible to create a compiler. For example... C to RNA D) Finally... solve problems by creating sequences from scratch instead of re-using bits from mother nature If we ever do get to D), I sure hope no country tries to use this in a terrible way...
• helsinki 5y ago
  helium.com
• iskander 5y ago
  High accuracy long read DNA sequencing. The new chemistry for Oxford Nanopore is getting close to where you can use it exclusively without polishing (down to ~1 in 100 base errors), and the price per gigabase has become competitive with Illumina (but with reads in the 10s or 100s of kilobases in lengths). On the other hand, PacBio HiFi reads are really reliably high accuracy and still long enough to resolve complex variants missed by Illumina, and only ~2x more expensive than ONT. Both technologies totally redefine what we mean by "sequencing a genome" and open up broad categories of mutations that are completely invisible to more common forms of genotyping or sequencing.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• de6u99er 5y ago
  Nuclear fusion energy. Green mobility concepts like: - self driving shared cars for first and last mile - self driving trains and busses for urban transportation - self driving high-speed trains and self flying airplanes for longer distances
• mikewarot 5y ago
  1) Capability Based Security - Makes it possible to have actually secure computers, and return the fun to computing by allowing experimentation without fear. 2) Reconfigurable computing - The power of the FPGA without the hassle, a homogeneous lattice of computing nodes as small as single bits allows for fault tolerance, almost unlimited scaling, and perfect security. It offers the power of custom silicon without the grief. 3) Magnetic core logic, initially realized when transistors still weren't reliable enough to build computers out of, may be making a comeback for extreme environments, such as that on Venus. 4) Reversible compilation - being able to work from source --> abstract syntax tree --> source in any language (with comments intact) will be a quite powerful way to refactor legacy codebases in relative safety. 5) Rich source / Literate Programming - embedding content in the program instead of having a ton of "resources" helps reduce the cognitive load of programming.
• sunstone 5y ago
  Starlink has the potential to revolutionize and enable a number of new technologies. Let's say urban electric planes for one.
• Kanishk_Kumar 5y ago
  Trustchain. This will replace Facebook, YouTube, Cloud, Google, Android, everything. (In a millennia or so. ) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3428662.3429744 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3428662.3429744
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  I’m more excited by a mindset shift that might happen where people take their own security and privacy seriously, reject entities like Facebook and companies that provide convenient privacy and security for reasonable fees do well. Think social networks that people pay for making a comeback like friends reunited of yore. Also anything that is multipurpose. Rope + tarp = shelter, sunshade, awning, hammock, sail, etc. One gadget cooks and chops etc. Oh and household robots. Already have vacuum mopping and pool robot. Considering a lawn robot. Clothes folding can’t be far off right? Siri is underrated in my circles, I hardly see anyone use it. Social anxiety of yelling at your phone?
• DreamScatter 5y ago
  Geometric algebra, which i implemented in software in Julia: Grassmann.jl https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl In the future, geometric algebra will likely be part of everything we do, but it is still very unknown as of now.
• villgax 5y ago
  RADAR base home security, co-ordinated cameras zooming in & stuff.
• 2snakes 5y ago
  Biotechnology like Elysium Basis and Matter. Healthy aging longer makes a big difference for things like investments and working longer while healthy.
• JSeymourATL 5y ago
  E-Waste Recycling, Biorefining precious metals > https://www.mint.bio/ https://www.mint.bio/
• TimJRobinson 5y ago
  USDC and other cryptocurrencies that track real currencies. It for the first time allows anyone to be their own bank with programmable money. You can have it on your phone for direct to merchant payments. You can use software to setup auto payment systems for any bills or rent, you could connect it to a service that gives a loans on demand against collateral. I think a lot of really cool innovation is going to come out of easily transmissible programmable money.