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Ask HN: Which piece of tech is underutilized?
It could be anything - tool, algorithm, process, …
- psadri 5y agoI think constraint solvers are underutilized. Probsbly because people are not aware of them or don’t think in terms of solving problmes based on specifying constraints.
- PaulHoule 5y agoProduction rules engines.
- psadri 5y agoCould you give an example of how these are used? Do you mean things like "IF there's been [4] login attempts in the past [10] mins THEN deny this login attempt"?
- PaulHoule 5y agoYep, but production rules engines also work in asynchronous cases because they can keep a database of partially matched rules that get updated as new facts come in. In your case the rules engine would keep track of the login attempts and automatically expire the records once they are old enough that they won’t trigger any rules. It boggles my mind that nobody has tried making a JavaScript framework based on them; they would be particularly good for the cases where people get burned in React, such as when there are several pieces of information which go into a computation that updates the UI. Rather than having to implement updates for all the cases the compiler figures out all the ways in which a change could force a UI update and makes it happen.
- tantalor 5y agoI have seen this is used in logistics and operations research, but not much else.
- 7373737373 5y agoI think the interfaces aren't high level enough for the average programmer to adopt it. It needs what https://autokeras.com https://autokeras.com is for neural nets.
- gtvwill 5y agoNFTs and crypto ledgers. Deadset someone gimme a web browser where the pages are just ledger entries of assets that are NFTs. Gimme dat decentralised multi hosting of said website assets and decentralised hosting of the ledger I can check them with. Legit. Art for NFTs. Meh. Securing data transfers w peer hosted ledgers and code as unchangeable nft assets. Yes pls.
- muzani 5y agoI'm surprised NFT is being used for abstract art rather than verification of physical assets.
- bidirectional 5y agoWhat happens when someone hacks your wallet for the NFT but you still hold the physical asset (with your right to do so supported by the US legal system)?
- high_byte 5y agosame thing for any other NFT: nothing.
- sizediterable 5y agoNon-template-based code generation. So many tools depend on interpolation and concatenating strings together resulting in terrible-looking and error-prone code. What you want is an API for building and manipulating a concrete syntax tree-like structure. Bonus points if the nodes have type information, which would make things like codemods even more powerful. HHAST and LibCST are notable examples in the right direction.
- psadri 5y agoI like SQL query builders for the same reason.
- manx 5y agoSqlite for data science. You can do so much with a few lines of SQL, where people usually write error prone, slow python scripts. Importing CSV or TSV data is trivial.
- psadri 5y agoI can imagine a notebook like environment where the results of each step are put into a temp table to use in subsequent steps. Why do you think people are not using it enough? Because they don’t know SQL? Or because of tooling?
- kingkongjaffa 5y agoWell because usually you pull some data from a service API as csv or Json and you’re not directly pulling from a SQL connection since that isn’t exposed. Even internally across different teams. With all the other technologies falling back to json, modern web dev only thinks about SQL as a store for CRUD operations, and not as an integral part of the stack. At least that’s how it seems to me.
- jstx1 5y agoIt makes only if you're doing a few operations and all of them are on tables. As soon as people need to mix up table operations and other code (custom functions and calculations, REST API calls, linear algebra etc) in the same script, it makes a lot more sense to use a dataframe and have all of your code in the same language. If there's a way in which sqlite is underrated by data scientists, it's as a storage format - it's a lot more reliable than passing around csv files.
- manx 5y agoAt least for preprocessong csv files it makes a lot of sense. You can pipe data into it, run a query and output the result in many formats.
- PaulHoule 5y agoWebGL
- psadri 5y agoCould you elaborate? What should it be used for? Graphics or other non obvious uses? Why do you think people are not using it?
- PaulHoule 5y agoPersonally I'm interested in bringing videogame-like interfaces to the web so GFX. Not so interested in GPGPU, which is something I have more experience with. If you aren't guaranteed to have the latest and greatest hardware, GPGPU isn't always worth the trouble. Barriers are: • skills (software, artistic, ...) • Android, Intel GPU and other bad hardware My third side project in the queue might involved WebGL but I gotta finish one and make progress on #2 before I start on #3.
- theaussiestew 5y agoDo you mean the video game UI (e.g. Scaleform) or are you referring to the actual 3D rendering of video games but used for UI?
- PaulHoule 5y agoSeems to me that video game characters (3d humanoids) should find uses outside of video games. At the uni where I work there is a lot of work on social robots, many of these could be prototyped with no moving parts, only sensors.
- psadri 5y agoYears ago I wanted to use video game worlds to make TV shows… where you could script the characters and focus on the dialog instead of animating each frame.
- kingkongjaffa 5y agoRed vs Blue and machinima is exactly this https://youtu.be/XnsRdaZTMas https://youtu.be/XnsRdaZTMas
- PaulHoule 5y agoHave you seen "Alter Ego?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wmsyPsny3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wmsyPsny3s