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Ask HN: What technology is “cutting edge” in 2022?

104 points by MathCodeLove 5y ago

I feel like I'm still hearing about the same ML and AI advancements that were purported in 2016. What's some technology that is actually cutting edge and unknown to most laymen?

bserge 5y ago
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Oscillatory computing. Csaba, G., & Porod, W. (2020). Coupled oscillators for computing: A review and perspective. Applied Physics Reviews, 7(1), 011302.
BerislavLopac 5y ago
For client-server APIs, I'd say it's using OpenAPI as specification, as opposed to just for documentation and testing. It feels like it shouldn't be "cutting edge", but it's still not used as much as it should be.
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  OpenAPI must die. It allows to describe REST in a quite limiting manner. There's only one way to implement callbacks. There is no Websocket support nor any hint at async communication protocols. OpenAPI is OK for prototyping, but production-grade performance-tuned software will likely break out of what OpenAPI allows to spec.
  - BerislavLopac 5y ago
    > There is no Websocket support nor any hint at async communication protocols. Both of these things are out of scope for OpenAPI. It's a separate discussion whether they should be or not, but they are currently not. For async protocols, there is AsyncAPI [0], FWIW. Do you know of an alternative spec format that would cover what you're missing with OpenAPI?
    - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
      Anything that stands between the programmer and the code is doomed to be abused by those who can't. The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised. OTOH, I am all for literate programming that combines the art of writing prose and code like in Jupiter Notebook. Among competitors to OpenAPI I keep an eye on API Blueprint. While it leans more towards prose than code, it is a valuable tool to document APIs.
      - BerislavLopac 5y ago
        > Anything that stands between the programmer and the code is doomed to be abused by those who can't. Those who can't what? If you mean the ability to code, I don't understand how is that related to API specifications. > The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised. Why exactly?
- JoBrad 5y ago
  I really like the idea of OpenAPI: use your input and output data models to document your API, and maybe even stub out the framework for your actual code or a language-specific SDK. But the reality is that deviations in auth, data types, etc., end up complicating your OpenAPI specs way more than expected. And the tooling that is supposed to stub out doc sites using your OpenAPI specs is all over the place in terms of what is and isn’t supported, and even how the same supported features are implemented. My team ended up making a custom redoc implementation for our docs site (to include better narrative), but the specs are just for documentation, and don’t inform the application or SDKs at all. Reality is so close to the dream, but in my experience, still so far away.
rektide 5y ago
Non industrial tech. These huge massive excesses of computation arent really relevant, compared to the frontiers of computing being a personally possible revolutionary potentiality. Progress is dispirate & not well proven. But big computing is both cutting edge but increasingly irrelevant & botique, not broadly impactful. We will leave our impactlessness shortly, start to explore & find edges that bring us somewhere good, expand our lands.
- unixhero 5y ago
  You're saying some without saying much. Willing to expand on this, or provide a link?
  - rektide 5y ago
    Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines is still on point. It's not much more specific than I am, still mostly vague. But I dont think we're at a stage where focusing on specifics would do anything but mislead, would winnow down an idea, would have us thinking about a tree when the plot is about the forrest.
- sulam 5y ago
  It’s funny to think that my pet, without having the ability to vocalize a human language or think abstractly, still manages to communicate more effectively than this pile of words arranged into a simulation of ‘deep thought.’
shp0ngle 5y ago
Dark blockchain
- Bromeo 5y ago
  From their about page: > "Whether it’s your drug sales, IRS fraud earnings, or stacks of gold bars you purchased with stolen credit cards; money matters to us all. Rather than relying on straight edge normie crypto - with their fees, delays, and anti-fraud risk - we stand for blockchain without limits. That’s why we support DarkBlockchain, a global digital cloud currency that only you can control on the dark web. Find out more..." Maybe it is high tech, I don't know, but all I was thinking is wtf
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    no it was a joke Dark Blockchain is a rift on hypes like “dark web” and “blockchain”
    - sshine 5y ago
      It might be a joke, but SNARKs / STARKs really do provide the foundation for a fully anonymous, fully decentralized blockchain. Calling it “dark” appears like one kind of brand value.
  - adlpz 5y ago
    Apparently it's a meme: https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/984103182656851974 https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/984103182656851974
ahevia 5y ago
I was pleasantly surprised by some of the examples in Google Research themes list from this past year: http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from-2021-and.html http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from... E-Graphs from Julia are another cool space being explored
- hobofan 5y ago
  Thanks for bringing up E-Graphs! I haven't heard of them before and the field looks quite intriguing. At first I thought that it mostly looks like a re-hash of what database query engines do internally, but reading a bit into it, it looks like there might be some more merit to it, though the literature around it seems sparse.
lolive 5y ago
Probably off-topic, but the notion or a second brain (not Elon Musk stuff) is, to me, emerging as a problem to solve. For years there has been discussions about GTD, bullet journal, mind maps, etc. To help us deal with the information deluge. Whereas the (primitive) tools available were notebooks, calendar and post-its. The current battle among PKM (Personal Knowledge Management)solution providers sounds, to me, that we are slowly starting to investigate the proper UX for a second brain (I.e a place to store transient and persistent data that you meet in real life and that you want to manage OUTSIDE of your brain).
- Bromeo 5y ago
  What about this is high tech? These things are nice, but all systems I know are basically just text files with links between them, no? I'm thinking of roam, org-roam, etc
  - lolive 5y ago
    To me, sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours organzing your data deluge is NOT an option. The basic question of any new UX is now: can i use it while driving, can i use without a screen, can i use it while cooking, can i talk to it, can it talk to me, can it filter things out for me depending on the context. But UX aside, the PKM is all about interlinking "stuff" in your own way. To me it is as important for data consumers (i.e us), as the Web has been at interlinking things for data publishers. And it has severe implication in term of data publication, data identification, tools interaction and general usability. To take a basic example, I still have to do manual actions when I see the poster of a concert in the real life. I should be able to just take a picture of the poster, or QR-code it, and get everything that is relevant (Spotify links, musicbrainz links, appointment ready to be validated in my calendar, payment ready, etc).
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  Wendell from Level1Techs has been talking about some aspects of this recently: https://youtu.be/gVKpMb7IZo0 https://youtu.be/gVKpMb7IZo0
juxtapose 5y ago
For programming languages, dependent types. DT is a hot topic in the PL community recently. It massively enhances the capability of a type system by turning it into a comprehensive logic system, so you can encode whatever properties you'd like to enforce into a type signature. Theorem provers have been taking advantage of the Curry-Howard correspondence for some time, but the implication of DT on real-world programming is still not well understood (we need more real-world projects written in DT languages). There are also ambitious projects that want to bring DT into the mainstream. If you are interested, you can take a look at Lean [1], Idris [2], and a few others [3,4]. Often these languages have esoteric syntax, but there are projects using a more conventional syntax, too, e.g. Cicada [5]. "The Little Typer" [6] is a pretty good introduction to this topic. [1] https://leanprover.github.io https://leanprover.github.io [2] https://www.idris-lang.org https://www.idris-lang.org [3] https://github.com/agda/agda https://github.com/agda/agda [4] https://coq.inria.fr https://coq.inria.fr [5] https://cicada-lang.org https://cicada-lang.org [6] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer
- xvilka 5y ago
  Regarding Lean I would recommend to check Lean4[1] instead. They rewrote it in Lean itself and now it has much cleaner design[2][3][4]. [1] http://github.com/leanprover/lean4 http://github.com/leanprover/lean4 [2] https://leanprover.github.io/papers/lean4.pdf https://leanprover.github.io/papers/lean4.pdf [3] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/leo-LT2021.pdf https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/leo-LT2... [4] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/sebastian-lean4-parsers-macros.pdf https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/sebasti...
- iod 5y ago
  ATS Language¹ is another language I would add to this list. First released in 2013, it tries to follow closer to performance and minimalism of C which can make it a good candidate for systems programming². ¹ http://www.ats-lang.org http://www.ats-lang.org ² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko "A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS" (2017)
sealeck 5y ago
WebAssembly
unixhero 5y ago
- Retro game GAN upscaling, although it appeared in 2019 (ESRGAN). I think this will explode this year. Enhanced Super Resolution Generative adversarial neural networks https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-algorithms-video-games-mods-modding-esrgan-gigapixel https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg... - Demakes of computer games into 16bit titles, weird and useless but there is something here interesting going on with it, https://youtu.be/qtNytQXVnx8 https://youtu.be/qtNytQXVnx8
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  Similarly, I'm a big fan of AI video upscaling: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/308434-star-trek-voyager-gets-4k-upscale-remaster-via-ai https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/308434-star-trek-voyager...
- ArtWomb 5y ago
  GANs are impacting all stages of the game pipeline ;) https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gancraft-turning-gamers-into-3d-artists/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gancraft-turning-gamers-in...
- pornel 5y ago
  DLSS has been a huge step forward for anti-aliasing and gaming in high resolution (and I'd argue it's still cutting-edge, because AMD hasn't managed to copy it to the same quality level).
- seoulmetro 5y ago
  Man I hope upscaling loses fashion soon, or eventually. The amount of real data we're going to overwrite accidentally or even just mentally forget about is insane. I prefer looking at the real life rather than the guesses of what a computer thought may have been within the cracks. Something being naturally ugly is better than being sometimes beautifully fake and uglier and fake. The FF7 video in that post is absolutely terrible and shows how much worse it can get when upscaling. It just completely fails on the creative art decision to dither lighting, and thinks it was a texture on the original object.
helltone 5y ago
WebGPU, particularly as a portable way to do compute
- astlouis44 5y ago
  100%, was just about to comment this. Combined with WebAssembly, we're going to see a brand new distribution channel emerge to distributing compute intensive apps (especially real-time 3D ones!) in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. Look out Steam, because traditional desktop apps like games and even VR applications will start migrating to the web, because that's where users are. My startup Wonder Interactive is working on exactly this. https://theimmersiveweb.com/ https://theimmersiveweb.com/ The metaverse will be born from the open web and emerge as a 3D, immersive internet.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    My only gripe is the “open web” part, which is really far from open. We have at most 3 implementations with very unhealthy balance between them. Especially with the basically impossible to implement from scratch “standard” the web is
  - asdff 5y ago
    The thing with games is the networking costs are currently to high to stream in a practical sense. I've tried google stadia and xbox cloud play and they are both OK for single player if you can tolerate less than stellar graphics and lag spikes, but completely unusable for any multiplayer. Rubberbanding galore and I am on gigabit fiber. This technology requires telecom infrastructure overhaul to be successful and you can imagine how much inertia will be in place in that industry.
    - rewq4321 5y ago
      That's not at all my experience, or that of my friends. We play multiplayer games together via streaming (Geforce Now) even though we're in different continents, and it works perfectly fine.
tester756 5y ago
I'd say High-NA EUV
- sveme 5y ago
  If only I could buy Zeiss shares.
- kubami 5y ago
  For anyone wondering what the hell is this: EUV = extreme ultraviolet lithography NA = numerical aperture the NA part makes the EUV part better :) These next-generation lithography systems will be key to advance Moore’s Law towards the logic 2nm technology generation and beyond.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
protontypes 5y ago
Spatial Finance aka Geospatial ESG: Measuring the environmental impact of companies from space to assess how green a company is. Sustainable investors need this information to overcome the problem of greenwashing. Here is some more information on this topic: [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatial_ESG_Report.pdf https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatia... [2] https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/ https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/ [3] https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  > Sustainable investors Why is this a thing? Sounds like something that limits the investor in his investment choices.
  - hobofan 5y ago
    Because the market (= retail investors and "green" companies) demands it.
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    Some people think long term profits can only happen in a non-apocalyptic world, so they try to let humanity stay alive, I guess.
    - seppel 5y ago
      This seems to be build on the (IMHO wrong) premise that non-investing it will somehow change the minds of these non-sustainable businesses, where in reality, by investing into a business, you get voting rights to actually influence in which direction a business is heading. Thinking about it the other way: By not investing is such non-sustainable companies, only the people who don't care will do. And they will actually get the companies are a discount.
      - turbinerneiter 5y ago
fergie 5y ago
AR (augmented reality). Considering how good AR is _right now_, we have very few practical applications for it. It has been quite good for at least a couple of decades (I studied AR in the 90s and we had some pretty amazing demos even back then). Snapchat is doing some amazing, if silly, AR stuff, and hardware capabilities around graphics are improving all the time (especially with the use of graphic cards for crypto mining), in fact graphics are getting to the stage where its genuinely difficult to see at a glance what is real and what isn't. Basically this is what Facebook is going for with the Metaverse, but history tells us that it will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products. There will be some cool/scary stuff coming.
- IceWreck 5y ago
  > will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products. Unfortunately I think an incumbent will buy the company that develops the best products
  - zapataband1 5y ago
    Yeah I mean the story is already 'Facebook is the leader in augmented reality' not Facebook bought oculus and several leaders in augmented reality. So odd to me how companies, CEOs get credit/reverence from people for things they had no hand in.
- eerikkivistik 5y ago
  I am personally waiting for the first viable consumer device by a major player like Apple/Samsung, with hand gesture support (without additional peripherals like gloves). To me, that is the missing component for the entire sector to do a double-take, with of course at least a few hours of battery life.
  - GeneralMayhem 5y ago
    Have you seen the gesture-tracking in the Oculus Quest 2? It's incredibly impressive, and it's in a $300 consumer device [^1] that can almost do AR via passthrough video, and easily has hours of battery life. But it does run into a fundamental problem of gesture tracking without gloves, which is that the camera needs to be able to see all of your fingers (unless you get to the point of inferring finger position by looking at the hand muscles, which I don't think we're quite at yet). Often you need the fingers to be away from yourself for operations like twiddling buttons or pointing at things, so if the camera is attached to you you've got an issue. [^1] Granted, economics of video game consoles aren't quite the same as things that might be industrial tools, mostly because they can be sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up in software licenses.
dbavaria 5y ago
DeFi - Decentralized financial instruments that are implemented via Smart Contracts on a Blockchain.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  HFT and currency speculation hasn't been cutting edge since... I don't know 90s? 80s?
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    It's "cutting edge" in the sense that people are just now getting around to implementing most of the traditional centralized financial systems back again onto popular blockchain technologies. It's worth calling out specifically because it will not likely last very long in its current state; large, intuitional actors will either jump on it, or it will die an unceremonious death, gobbling up billions of dollars in its wake.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  > Decentralized financial instruments that are implemented via Smart Contracts on a Blockchain. I know its _now_ fashionable to dunk on crypto, but I really wish the whole "smart contracts" thing would be seen for what it is; neither smart nor a contract. Contracts only work because there is a higher power to appeal to when something goes wrong. (the law courts) That means that when someone does something wrong, the other side can attempt to get justice. If a smart contract is wrong, you're fucked. Not only do you have to speak lawyer, you also have to understand obfuscated code. Which means getting it right is expensive as the combined skills are exceptionally rare. I get the aspiration, but its at best misguided. The common refrain is that actual contracts are not scaleable, and can't be done in real time. This isn't true. HFTs are basically creating millions of contracts a day. When you buy something from amazon, thats a contract. When you use your credit card, thats a contract as well. Law needs to be reformed, dont get me wrong, but the blockchain aint the thing to do it.
  - zapataband1 5y ago
3np 5y ago
Zero-knowledge proofs. Several major cryptographic achievements have been unlocked only in recent years, facilitating both privacy and efficiency for certain setups that were only theorized before. There’s still a lot to be done for developer tooling and libraries. The foundation is solid but the ecosystem is nascent. So far real-world applications have been mostly in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space (privacy/anonymity for Zcash and Tornado/AZTEC, Ethereum L2s, Bulletproofs in Monero, etc) but there’s so much untapped potential for other domains still.
- cloogshicer 5y ago
  Anybody have a good resource to read up on the basics of how this works and what use cases there are?
  - Stevvo 5y ago
    vitalik.ca
  - tata71 5y ago
    Wireguard.com
  - ceasesurthinko 5y ago
    https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
  - JoBrad 5y ago
    I thought this video was pretty good at explaining the basics, actually. https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c
- radicalbyte 5y ago
  ZKP are used in the covid vaccination passport systems for both The Netherlands and New Zealand. Ours (I'm part of the NL team) is open source: https://github.com/minvws https://github.com/minvws
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Text to image generation, like GLIDE or DALL-E.
- Yenrabbit 5y ago
  Seconded - the past year or so has been a bit of a step-change in terms of what is possible in this space. See also: GauGAN2, the many CLIP-guided [diffusion/VQGAN/other] image synthesis pipelines in the AI art community.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Cell reprogramming
- dsign 5y ago
  This. It will fall like a hammer, and nobody is really seeing it coming. It may seem like I'm trolling, but I think this has the potential to result in global riots in a few decades.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
defanor 5y ago
It seems that many of the answers point a general CS area or a trending topic in it, but I'm pretty sure that progress happens in all the areas (see arXiv's CS page [1], for instance), as well as in topics outside of hyped ones, and each area or topic has its "cutting edge" bits (new research). [1] https://arxiv.org/archive/cs https://arxiv.org/archive/cs
beckman466 5y ago
http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws by http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org and collaborators.
lewisjoe 5y ago
Here's a list I maintain and keep an eye on: - WebAssembly / WASI on the server (for serverless tech, cost efficient containers, plugin environment for systems, etc) https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026?s=21 https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026?s=21 - CRDT and its implications on local-first sofwares (for me this is a better bet as a technology to architect your solution, much better than what blockchain provides) - Provably correct programs (all the latest compilers like rust, kotlin and swift are shipping with a flavour of this idea for example it's possible to write null-error free programs in all those languages)
- cma 5y ago
  Why would WASM be more cost efficient than native code (~20% more perf efficient than WASM)?
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    I think that GP is referring to WASM being more cost efficient than Kubernetes.
simula67 5y ago
Following projects seem promising: * OpenCompute[1]: A Facebook lead initiative to build and design open source hardware, mainly for data centers but also for enterprise. * RISC-V[2]: An open source ISA and alternative to x86 and ARM. * Cloud Native Computing Project[3]: An industry collaboration for building cloud infrastructure. * Teleoperations[4]: Remotely operating machines where humans take over in situations where AI is not sure of the correct action to take. For example, before humans get self-driving vehicles, we may get vehicles that are operated remotely. The vehicle will have cameras that stream the data to operators who could be sitting at an office who in turn send control signals wirelessly to the vehicles. This model could also be applied to drones, humanoid robots etc. More jobs could be sent to low wage economies and workers there could perform work that previously required physical presence in high wage economies. [1] https://www.opencompute.org/ https://www.opencompute.org/ [2] https://riscv.org/ https://riscv.org/ [3] https://www.cncf.io/ https://www.cncf.io/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperation
sAbakumoff 5y ago
Neuralink to implant chips in human brains in 2022. what could more edge-cutting?
monkeydust 5y ago
I recently tried a telepresence software from a start-up that allowed me to control a robot factory arm almost a thousand miles away through Oculus quest. It definitely had that 'wow' moment for me although the product was not production grade quality yet. It did open my mind to possibilities I had not considered before around the future of work - mixed feelings - I mean think person in <low cost country> operating a robot arm making a food dish in <higher cost country>. Some ways it can be considered a bit depressing but in others it opens up opportunities that have never existed before. Its a sort of half way stop between no automation and full automation for certain tasks where real intelligence is needed or cheaper.
- agent008t 5y ago
  Was the latency noticeable annoying? Or was the robot arm not entirely 'real-time' anyway, so it was not an issue?
  - monkeydust 5y ago
    No it wasnt - strong internet connectivity on both ends was a must - real time operations.
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  Was labour cost arbitrage the best use case they came up with for this amazing technology?
aricz 5y ago
VR - Check out Oculus Quest 2 for a cheap wireless standalone consumer device. If it had better resolution I think it could hit the mainstream. Or maybe it's already happening.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  It definitely is already happening. Especially with the PS5/Xbox shortages, lots of kids got the Quest 2 as their Christmas present this past year. A report back in November has it marked at 10 million units sold, which is pretty significant considering the history of VR adoption.
- apatheticonion 5y ago
  It's already happening, the issue is the lack of content. I've been buying headsets compulsively for the last few years only to replay Half Life: Alyx or Boneworks for the 400th time. I just got Hitman 3 and it's sad. Borderlands was watered down and not a great experience. There are nearly no multiplayer games. Minecraft is pretty fun but Microsoft Minecraft doesn't have mods. I am waiting with baited breath for Unity and Unreal to treat VR like first class citizens so it's easy for people to make games.
- dbbk 5y ago
  The lack of market demand for VR isn't down to a lack of resolution. It's because people don't want to put a box on their head. There's too much friction for that experience. Most people just want to sit on front of a television to be entertained, where they can get up and move around, and divert their attention to their phone or something else. It's for this reason we couldn't even get people to put on 3D glasses.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    Any kid about 13 yr old+ atm is mad for VR. they all love it. When FB/Meta figure out a way to make it MUST HAVE instead of WANT TO HAVE, they will dominate and the oculus tech will along with it.
staticelf 5y ago
For web dev, I would say stuff like Liveview / Hotwire. It makes you faster on developing complex web applications that would otherwise take much longer time with a traditional SPA-framework. You don't have to worry about handling server communications, how to send data and in what format etc, all updates will be handled in a consistent manner and it's scary easy to make live updates to all connected clients. Of course, these things are getting more popular now and a lot of people on HN may already know about it but I would assume most laymen still have no clue that this is a thing.
harpratap 5y ago
On Networking side - eBPF
senordelicioso 5y ago
We can now make 20 Tesla magnets. https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesla-magnet-a-bright-sparc-towards-fusions-future/ https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesl... Nuclear fusion cometh, and it will change absolutely everything.
vroomik 5y ago
Photonic processor is coming out this year, claiming to be up to 10x faster than nvidia A100 in BERT and using 90% less energy - https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/ https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/
aditzup 5y ago
I think typing biometrics made a lot of significant advancements in the last year. I know that it is something that was in the making for a while but there are some companies out there that are offering some very interesting solutions such as continuous authentication.
Hendrikto 5y ago
In the NLP community, an example of cutting edge research currently happening is token-free transfer Transformers.

104 points by MathCodeLove 5y ago

I feel like I'm still hearing about the same ML and AI advancements that were purported in 2016. What's some technology that is actually cutting edge and unknown to most laymen?

bserge 5y ago

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Oscillatory computing. Csaba, G., & Porod, W. (2020). Coupled oscillators for computing: A review and perspective. Applied Physics Reviews, 7(1), 011302.

BerislavLopac 5y ago

For client-server APIs, I'd say it's using OpenAPI as specification, as opposed to just for documentation and testing. It feels like it shouldn't be "cutting edge", but it's still not used as much as it should be.

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
OpenAPI must die. It allows to describe REST in a quite limiting manner. There's only one way to implement callbacks. There is no Websocket support nor any hint at async communication protocols. OpenAPI is OK for prototyping, but production-grade performance-tuned software will likely break out of what OpenAPI allows to spec.
- BerislavLopac 5y ago
  > There is no Websocket support nor any hint at async communication protocols. Both of these things are out of scope for OpenAPI. It's a separate discussion whether they should be or not, but they are currently not. For async protocols, there is AsyncAPI [0], FWIW. Do you know of an alternative spec format that would cover what you're missing with OpenAPI?
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    Anything that stands between the programmer and the code is doomed to be abused by those who can't. The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised. OTOH, I am all for literate programming that combines the art of writing prose and code like in Jupiter Notebook. Among competitors to OpenAPI I keep an eye on API Blueprint. While it leans more towards prose than code, it is a valuable tool to document APIs.
    - BerislavLopac 5y ago
      > Anything that stands between the programmer and the code is doomed to be abused by those who can't. Those who can't what? If you mean the ability to code, I don't understand how is that related to API specifications. > The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised. Why exactly?
JoBrad 5y ago
I really like the idea of OpenAPI: use your input and output data models to document your API, and maybe even stub out the framework for your actual code or a language-specific SDK. But the reality is that deviations in auth, data types, etc., end up complicating your OpenAPI specs way more than expected. And the tooling that is supposed to stub out doc sites using your OpenAPI specs is all over the place in terms of what is and isn’t supported, and even how the same supported features are implemented. My team ended up making a custom redoc implementation for our docs site (to include better narrative), but the specs are just for documentation, and don’t inform the application or SDKs at all. Reality is so close to the dream, but in my experience, still so far away.

rektide 5y ago

Non industrial tech. These huge massive excesses of computation arent really relevant, compared to the frontiers of computing being a personally possible revolutionary potentiality. Progress is dispirate & not well proven. But big computing is both cutting edge but increasingly irrelevant & botique, not broadly impactful. We will leave our impactlessness shortly, start to explore & find edges that bring us somewhere good, expand our lands.

unixhero 5y ago
You're saying some without saying much. Willing to expand on this, or provide a link?
- rektide 5y ago
  Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines is still on point. It's not much more specific than I am, still mostly vague. But I dont think we're at a stage where focusing on specifics would do anything but mislead, would winnow down an idea, would have us thinking about a tree when the plot is about the forrest.
sulam 5y ago
It’s funny to think that my pet, without having the ability to vocalize a human language or think abstractly, still manages to communicate more effectively than this pile of words arranged into a simulation of ‘deep thought.’

shp0ngle 5y ago

Dark blockchain

Bromeo 5y ago
From their about page: > "Whether it’s your drug sales, IRS fraud earnings, or stacks of gold bars you purchased with stolen credit cards; money matters to us all. Rather than relying on straight edge normie crypto - with their fees, delays, and anti-fraud risk - we stand for blockchain without limits. That’s why we support DarkBlockchain, a global digital cloud currency that only you can control on the dark web. Find out more..." Maybe it is high tech, I don't know, but all I was thinking is wtf
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  no it was a joke Dark Blockchain is a rift on hypes like “dark web” and “blockchain”
  - sshine 5y ago
    It might be a joke, but SNARKs / STARKs really do provide the foundation for a fully anonymous, fully decentralized blockchain. Calling it “dark” appears like one kind of brand value.
- adlpz 5y ago
  Apparently it's a meme: https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/984103182656851974 https://twitter.com/gossithedog/status/984103182656851974

ahevia 5y ago

I was pleasantly surprised by some of the examples in Google Research themes list from this past year: http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from-2021-and.html http://ai.googleblog.com/2022/01/google-research-themes-from... E-Graphs from Julia are another cool space being explored

hobofan 5y ago
Thanks for bringing up E-Graphs! I haven't heard of them before and the field looks quite intriguing. At first I thought that it mostly looks like a re-hash of what database query engines do internally, but reading a bit into it, it looks like there might be some more merit to it, though the literature around it seems sparse.

lolive 5y ago

Probably off-topic, but the notion or a second brain (not Elon Musk stuff) is, to me, emerging as a problem to solve. For years there has been discussions about GTD, bullet journal, mind maps, etc. To help us deal with the information deluge. Whereas the (primitive) tools available were notebooks, calendar and post-its. The current battle among PKM (Personal Knowledge Management)solution providers sounds, to me, that we are slowly starting to investigate the proper UX for a second brain (I.e a place to store transient and persistent data that you meet in real life and that you want to manage OUTSIDE of your brain).

Bromeo 5y ago
What about this is high tech? These things are nice, but all systems I know are basically just text files with links between them, no? I'm thinking of roam, org-roam, etc
- lolive 5y ago
  To me, sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours organzing your data deluge is NOT an option. The basic question of any new UX is now: can i use it while driving, can i use without a screen, can i use it while cooking, can i talk to it, can it talk to me, can it filter things out for me depending on the context. But UX aside, the PKM is all about interlinking "stuff" in your own way. To me it is as important for data consumers (i.e us), as the Web has been at interlinking things for data publishers. And it has severe implication in term of data publication, data identification, tools interaction and general usability. To take a basic example, I still have to do manual actions when I see the poster of a concert in the real life. I should be able to just take a picture of the poster, or QR-code it, and get everything that is relevant (Spotify links, musicbrainz links, appointment ready to be validated in my calendar, payment ready, etc).
bick_nyers 5y ago
Wendell from Level1Techs has been talking about some aspects of this recently: https://youtu.be/gVKpMb7IZo0 https://youtu.be/gVKpMb7IZo0

juxtapose 5y ago

For programming languages, dependent types. DT is a hot topic in the PL community recently. It massively enhances the capability of a type system by turning it into a comprehensive logic system, so you can encode whatever properties you'd like to enforce into a type signature. Theorem provers have been taking advantage of the Curry-Howard correspondence for some time, but the implication of DT on real-world programming is still not well understood (we need more real-world projects written in DT languages). There are also ambitious projects that want to bring DT into the mainstream. If you are interested, you can take a look at Lean [1], Idris [2], and a few others [3,4]. Often these languages have esoteric syntax, but there are projects using a more conventional syntax, too, e.g. Cicada [5]. "The Little Typer" [6] is a pretty good introduction to this topic. [1] https://leanprover.github.io https://leanprover.github.io [2] https://www.idris-lang.org https://www.idris-lang.org [3] https://github.com/agda/agda https://github.com/agda/agda [4] https://coq.inria.fr https://coq.inria.fr [5] https://cicada-lang.org https://cicada-lang.org [6] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer

xvilka 5y ago
Regarding Lean I would recommend to check Lean4[1] instead. They rewrote it in Lean itself and now it has much cleaner design[2][3][4]. [1] http://github.com/leanprover/lean4 http://github.com/leanprover/lean4 [2] https://leanprover.github.io/papers/lean4.pdf https://leanprover.github.io/papers/lean4.pdf [3] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/leo-LT2021.pdf https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/leo-LT2... [4] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/sebastian-lean4-parsers-macros.pdf https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/sebasti...
iod 5y ago
ATS Language¹ is another language I would add to this list. First released in 2013, it tries to follow closer to performance and minimalism of C which can make it a good candidate for systems programming². ¹ http://www.ats-lang.org http://www.ats-lang.org ² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko "A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS" (2017)

sealeck 5y ago

WebAssembly

unixhero 5y ago

- Retro game GAN upscaling, although it appeared in 2019 (ESRGAN). I think this will explode this year. Enhanced Super Resolution Generative adversarial neural networks https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-algorithms-video-games-mods-modding-esrgan-gigapixel https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg... - Demakes of computer games into 16bit titles, weird and useless but there is something here interesting going on with it, https://youtu.be/qtNytQXVnx8 https://youtu.be/qtNytQXVnx8

bick_nyers 5y ago
Similarly, I'm a big fan of AI video upscaling: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/308434-star-trek-voyager-gets-4k-upscale-remaster-via-ai https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/308434-star-trek-voyager...
ArtWomb 5y ago
GANs are impacting all stages of the game pipeline ;) https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gancraft-turning-gamers-into-3d-artists/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gancraft-turning-gamers-in...
pornel 5y ago
DLSS has been a huge step forward for anti-aliasing and gaming in high resolution (and I'd argue it's still cutting-edge, because AMD hasn't managed to copy it to the same quality level).
seoulmetro 5y ago
Man I hope upscaling loses fashion soon, or eventually. The amount of real data we're going to overwrite accidentally or even just mentally forget about is insane. I prefer looking at the real life rather than the guesses of what a computer thought may have been within the cracks. Something being naturally ugly is better than being sometimes beautifully fake and uglier and fake. The FF7 video in that post is absolutely terrible and shows how much worse it can get when upscaling. It just completely fails on the creative art decision to dither lighting, and thinks it was a texture on the original object.

helltone 5y ago

WebGPU, particularly as a portable way to do compute

astlouis44 5y ago
100%, was just about to comment this. Combined with WebAssembly, we're going to see a brand new distribution channel emerge to distributing compute intensive apps (especially real-time 3D ones!) in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. Look out Steam, because traditional desktop apps like games and even VR applications will start migrating to the web, because that's where users are. My startup Wonder Interactive is working on exactly this. https://theimmersiveweb.com/ https://theimmersiveweb.com/ The metaverse will be born from the open web and emerge as a 3D, immersive internet.
- kaba0 5y ago
  My only gripe is the “open web” part, which is really far from open. We have at most 3 implementations with very unhealthy balance between them. Especially with the basically impossible to implement from scratch “standard” the web is
- asdff 5y ago
  The thing with games is the networking costs are currently to high to stream in a practical sense. I've tried google stadia and xbox cloud play and they are both OK for single player if you can tolerate less than stellar graphics and lag spikes, but completely unusable for any multiplayer. Rubberbanding galore and I am on gigabit fiber. This technology requires telecom infrastructure overhaul to be successful and you can imagine how much inertia will be in place in that industry.
  - rewq4321 5y ago
    That's not at all my experience, or that of my friends. We play multiplayer games together via streaming (Geforce Now) even though we're in different continents, and it works perfectly fine.

tester756 5y ago

I'd say High-NA EUV

sveme 5y ago
If only I could buy Zeiss shares.
kubami 5y ago
For anyone wondering what the hell is this: EUV = extreme ultraviolet lithography NA = numerical aperture the NA part makes the EUV part better :) These next-generation lithography systems will be key to advance Moore’s Law towards the logic 2nm technology generation and beyond.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

protontypes 5y ago

Spatial Finance aka Geospatial ESG: Measuring the environmental impact of companies from space to assess how green a company is. Sustainable investors need this information to overcome the problem of greenwashing. Here is some more information on this topic: [1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatial_ESG_Report.pdf https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatia... [2] https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/ https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/ [3] https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
> Sustainable investors Why is this a thing? Sounds like something that limits the investor in his investment choices.
- hobofan 5y ago
  Because the market (= retail investors and "green" companies) demands it.
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Some people think long term profits can only happen in a non-apocalyptic world, so they try to let humanity stay alive, I guess.
  - seppel 5y ago
    This seems to be build on the (IMHO wrong) premise that non-investing it will somehow change the minds of these non-sustainable businesses, where in reality, by investing into a business, you get voting rights to actually influence in which direction a business is heading. Thinking about it the other way: By not investing is such non-sustainable companies, only the people who don't care will do. And they will actually get the companies are a discount.
    - turbinerneiter 5y ago

fergie 5y ago

AR (augmented reality). Considering how good AR is _right now_, we have very few practical applications for it. It has been quite good for at least a couple of decades (I studied AR in the 90s and we had some pretty amazing demos even back then). Snapchat is doing some amazing, if silly, AR stuff, and hardware capabilities around graphics are improving all the time (especially with the use of graphic cards for crypto mining), in fact graphics are getting to the stage where its genuinely difficult to see at a glance what is real and what isn't. Basically this is what Facebook is going for with the Metaverse, but history tells us that it will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products. There will be some cool/scary stuff coming.

IceWreck 5y ago
> will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products. Unfortunately I think an incumbent will buy the company that develops the best products
- zapataband1 5y ago
  Yeah I mean the story is already 'Facebook is the leader in augmented reality' not Facebook bought oculus and several leaders in augmented reality. So odd to me how companies, CEOs get credit/reverence from people for things they had no hand in.
eerikkivistik 5y ago
I am personally waiting for the first viable consumer device by a major player like Apple/Samsung, with hand gesture support (without additional peripherals like gloves). To me, that is the missing component for the entire sector to do a double-take, with of course at least a few hours of battery life.
- GeneralMayhem 5y ago
  Have you seen the gesture-tracking in the Oculus Quest 2? It's incredibly impressive, and it's in a $300 consumer device [^1] that can almost do AR via passthrough video, and easily has hours of battery life. But it does run into a fundamental problem of gesture tracking without gloves, which is that the camera needs to be able to see all of your fingers (unless you get to the point of inferring finger position by looking at the hand muscles, which I don't think we're quite at yet). Often you need the fingers to be away from yourself for operations like twiddling buttons or pointing at things, so if the camera is attached to you you've got an issue. [^1] Granted, economics of video game consoles aren't quite the same as things that might be industrial tools, mostly because they can be sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up in software licenses.

dbavaria 5y ago

DeFi - Decentralized financial instruments that are implemented via Smart Contracts on a Blockchain.

dmitriid 5y ago
HFT and currency speculation hasn't been cutting edge since... I don't know 90s? 80s?
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  It's "cutting edge" in the sense that people are just now getting around to implementing most of the traditional centralized financial systems back again onto popular blockchain technologies. It's worth calling out specifically because it will not likely last very long in its current state; large, intuitional actors will either jump on it, or it will die an unceremonious death, gobbling up billions of dollars in its wake.
KaiserPro 5y ago
> Decentralized financial instruments that are implemented via Smart Contracts on a Blockchain. I know its _now_ fashionable to dunk on crypto, but I really wish the whole "smart contracts" thing would be seen for what it is; neither smart nor a contract. Contracts only work because there is a higher power to appeal to when something goes wrong. (the law courts) That means that when someone does something wrong, the other side can attempt to get justice. If a smart contract is wrong, you're fucked. Not only do you have to speak lawyer, you also have to understand obfuscated code. Which means getting it right is expensive as the combined skills are exceptionally rare. I get the aspiration, but its at best misguided. The common refrain is that actual contracts are not scaleable, and can't be done in real time. This isn't true. HFTs are basically creating millions of contracts a day. When you buy something from amazon, thats a contract. When you use your credit card, thats a contract as well. Law needs to be reformed, dont get me wrong, but the blockchain aint the thing to do it.
- zapataband1 5y ago

3np 5y ago

Zero-knowledge proofs. Several major cryptographic achievements have been unlocked only in recent years, facilitating both privacy and efficiency for certain setups that were only theorized before. There’s still a lot to be done for developer tooling and libraries. The foundation is solid but the ecosystem is nascent. So far real-world applications have been mostly in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space (privacy/anonymity for Zcash and Tornado/AZTEC, Ethereum L2s, Bulletproofs in Monero, etc) but there’s so much untapped potential for other domains still.

cloogshicer 5y ago
Anybody have a good resource to read up on the basics of how this works and what use cases there are?
- Stevvo 5y ago
  vitalik.ca
- tata71 5y ago
  Wireguard.com
- ceasesurthinko 5y ago
  https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
- JoBrad 5y ago
  I thought this video was pretty good at explaining the basics, actually. https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c
radicalbyte 5y ago
ZKP are used in the covid vaccination passport systems for both The Netherlands and New Zealand. Ours (I'm part of the NL team) is open source: https://github.com/minvws https://github.com/minvws

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Text to image generation, like GLIDE or DALL-E.

Yenrabbit 5y ago
Seconded - the past year or so has been a bit of a step-change in terms of what is possible in this space. See also: GauGAN2, the many CLIP-guided [diffusion/VQGAN/other] image synthesis pipelines in the AI art community.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Cell reprogramming

dsign 5y ago
This. It will fall like a hammer, and nobody is really seeing it coming. It may seem like I'm trolling, but I think this has the potential to result in global riots in a few decades.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

defanor 5y ago

It seems that many of the answers point a general CS area or a trending topic in it, but I'm pretty sure that progress happens in all the areas (see arXiv's CS page [1], for instance), as well as in topics outside of hyped ones, and each area or topic has its "cutting edge" bits (new research). [1] https://arxiv.org/archive/cs https://arxiv.org/archive/cs

beckman466 5y ago

http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws by http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org and collaborators.

lewisjoe 5y ago

Here's a list I maintain and keep an eye on: - WebAssembly / WASI on the server (for serverless tech, cost efficient containers, plugin environment for systems, etc) https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026?s=21 https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026?s=21 - CRDT and its implications on local-first sofwares (for me this is a better bet as a technology to architect your solution, much better than what blockchain provides) - Provably correct programs (all the latest compilers like rust, kotlin and swift are shipping with a flavour of this idea for example it's possible to write null-error free programs in all those languages)

cma 5y ago
Why would WASM be more cost efficient than native code (~20% more perf efficient than WASM)?
- Kbelicius 5y ago
  I think that GP is referring to WASM being more cost efficient than Kubernetes.

simula67 5y ago

Following projects seem promising: * OpenCompute[1]: A Facebook lead initiative to build and design open source hardware, mainly for data centers but also for enterprise. * RISC-V[2]: An open source ISA and alternative to x86 and ARM. * Cloud Native Computing Project[3]: An industry collaboration for building cloud infrastructure. * Teleoperations[4]: Remotely operating machines where humans take over in situations where AI is not sure of the correct action to take. For example, before humans get self-driving vehicles, we may get vehicles that are operated remotely. The vehicle will have cameras that stream the data to operators who could be sitting at an office who in turn send control signals wirelessly to the vehicles. This model could also be applied to drones, humanoid robots etc. More jobs could be sent to low wage economies and workers there could perform work that previously required physical presence in high wage economies. [1] https://www.opencompute.org/ https://www.opencompute.org/ [2] https://riscv.org/ https://riscv.org/ [3] https://www.cncf.io/ https://www.cncf.io/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperation

sAbakumoff 5y ago

Neuralink to implant chips in human brains in 2022. what could more edge-cutting?

monkeydust 5y ago

I recently tried a telepresence software from a start-up that allowed me to control a robot factory arm almost a thousand miles away through Oculus quest. It definitely had that 'wow' moment for me although the product was not production grade quality yet. It did open my mind to possibilities I had not considered before around the future of work - mixed feelings - I mean think person in <low cost country> operating a robot arm making a food dish in <higher cost country>. Some ways it can be considered a bit depressing but in others it opens up opportunities that have never existed before. Its a sort of half way stop between no automation and full automation for certain tasks where real intelligence is needed or cheaper.

agent008t 5y ago
Was the latency noticeable annoying? Or was the robot arm not entirely 'real-time' anyway, so it was not an issue?
- monkeydust 5y ago
  No it wasnt - strong internet connectivity on both ends was a must - real time operations.
thundergolfer 5y ago
Was labour cost arbitrage the best use case they came up with for this amazing technology?

aricz 5y ago

VR - Check out Oculus Quest 2 for a cheap wireless standalone consumer device. If it had better resolution I think it could hit the mainstream. Or maybe it's already happening.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bick_nyers 5y ago
It definitely is already happening. Especially with the PS5/Xbox shortages, lots of kids got the Quest 2 as their Christmas present this past year. A report back in November has it marked at 10 million units sold, which is pretty significant considering the history of VR adoption.
apatheticonion 5y ago
It's already happening, the issue is the lack of content. I've been buying headsets compulsively for the last few years only to replay Half Life: Alyx or Boneworks for the 400th time. I just got Hitman 3 and it's sad. Borderlands was watered down and not a great experience. There are nearly no multiplayer games. Minecraft is pretty fun but Microsoft Minecraft doesn't have mods. I am waiting with baited breath for Unity and Unreal to treat VR like first class citizens so it's easy for people to make games.
dbbk 5y ago
The lack of market demand for VR isn't down to a lack of resolution. It's because people don't want to put a box on their head. There's too much friction for that experience. Most people just want to sit on front of a television to be entertained, where they can get up and move around, and divert their attention to their phone or something else. It's for this reason we couldn't even get people to put on 3D glasses.
- senectus1 5y ago
  Any kid about 13 yr old+ atm is mad for VR. they all love it. When FB/Meta figure out a way to make it MUST HAVE instead of WANT TO HAVE, they will dominate and the oculus tech will along with it.

staticelf 5y ago

For web dev, I would say stuff like Liveview / Hotwire. It makes you faster on developing complex web applications that would otherwise take much longer time with a traditional SPA-framework. You don't have to worry about handling server communications, how to send data and in what format etc, all updates will be handled in a consistent manner and it's scary easy to make live updates to all connected clients. Of course, these things are getting more popular now and a lot of people on HN may already know about it but I would assume most laymen still have no clue that this is a thing.

harpratap 5y ago

On Networking side - eBPF

senordelicioso 5y ago

We can now make 20 Tesla magnets. https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesla-magnet-a-bright-sparc-towards-fusions-future/ https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesl... Nuclear fusion cometh, and it will change absolutely everything.

vroomik 5y ago

Photonic processor is coming out this year, claiming to be up to 10x faster than nvidia A100 in BERT and using 90% less energy - https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/ https://lightmatter.co/products/envise/

aditzup 5y ago

I think typing biometrics made a lot of significant advancements in the last year. I know that it is something that was in the making for a while but there are some companies out there that are offering some very interesting solutions such as continuous authentication.

Hendrikto 5y ago

In the NLP community, an example of cutting edge research currently happening is token-free transfer Transformers.