In the open source community, there's certainly a bunch. The FFMPEG h.264 decoder consists of big chunks of assembly. WebM will require more to be written as i

In the open source community, there's certainly a bunch. The FFMPEG h.264 decoder consists of big chunks of assembly. WebM will require more to be written as it becomes production-quality in various decoders. JIT for Javascript is causing the browser developers to be working on low-level code, but of course that's very contained. LLVM is another project that gets a lot of attention that involves assembly programming. I just spent some time writing ARM assembly for some operating-system type things. The rise of ARM is causing some work to has to happen here, as a lot of legacy x86-only stuff will need to be replaced. All the low-level stuff still has to happen, but there's very little happening in the startup-type crowd that tends to be around HackerNews. The only startup that I can think of offhand that would require that low-level type code is inPulse, http://getinpulse.com/ http://getinpulse.com/ but I'm sure there's more around.