
Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list? - iameoghan
For me a couple of interesting technology products that help me in my day-to-day job<p>1. Hasura
2. Strapi
3. Forest Admin (super interesting although I cannot ever get it to connect to a hasura backend on Heroku ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯
4. Integromat
5. Appgyver<p>There are many others that I have my eye on such as NodeRed[6], but have yet to use. I do realise that these are all low-code related, however, I would be super interested in being made aware of cool other cool &amp; upcoming tech that is making waves.<p>What&#x27;s on your &#x27;to watch&#x27; list?<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hasura.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hasura.io&#x2F;</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strapi.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strapi.io&#x2F;</a><p>[3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forestadmin.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forestadmin.com&#x2F;</a><p>[4]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appgyver.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appgyver.com&#x2F;</a><p>[5]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.integromat.com&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.integromat.com&#x2F;en</a><p>[6]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodered.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodered.org&#x2F;</a>
======
Animats
Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it
crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars
get more resolution, and the software improves.

UE5's rendering approach. They finally figured out how to use the GPU to do
level of detail. Games can now climb out of the Uncanny Valley.

The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU,
and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody
will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those.

C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should
have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time.

Electric cars taking over. The Ford F-150 and the Jeep Wrangler are coming out
in all-electric forms. That covers much of the macho market. And the electrics
will out-accelerate the gas cars without even trying hard.

Utility scale battery storage. It works and is getting cheaper. Wind plus
storage plus megavolt DC transmission, and you can generate power in the US's
wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) and transmit it to the entire
US west of the Mississippi.

~~~
fergie
> Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it
> crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the
> radars get more resolution, and the software improves.

Still don't see fully (fully automated) self driving cars happening any time
soon:

1) Heavy steel boxes running at high speed in built up areas will be the very
last thing that we trust to robots. There are so many other things that will
be automated first. Its reasonable to assume that we will see fully automated
trains before fully automated cars.

2) Although a lot is being made of the incremental improvements to self-
driving software, there is a lot of research about the danger of part-time
autopilot. Autopilot in aircraft generally works well until it encounters an
emergency, in which case a pilot has to go from daydreaming/eating/doing-
something-else to dealing with catastrophy in a matter of microseconds. Full
automation or no automation is often safer.

3) The unresolved/unresolvable issue of liability in an accident: is it the
owner or the AI who is at fault.

4) The various "easy" problems that remain somewhat hard for driving AI to
solve in a consistent way. Large stationary objects on motorways, small kids
running into the road, cyclists, etc.

5) The legislative issues: at some point legislators have to say "self driving
cars are now allowed", and create good governance around this. The general
non-car-buying public has to get on board. These are non-trivial issues.

~~~
peteforde
You could be right.

My alternative possible timeline interpretation is that two forces collide and
make self-driving inevitable.

The first force is the insurance industry. It's really hard to argue that
humans are more fallible than even today's self-driving setups, and at some
point the underwriters will take note and start premium-blasting human drivers
into the history books.

The second force is the power of numbers; as more and more self-driving cars
come online, it becomes more and more practical to connect them together into
a giant mesh network that can cooperate to share the roads and alert each
other to dangers. Today's self-driving cars are cowboy loners that don't play
well with others. This will evolve, especially with the 5G rollout.

~~~
dahfizz
This reminds me that Tesla itself is starting to offer insurance, and it can
do so at a much lower rate. I assume this is because:

1) Teslas crash much less often, mostly due to autopilot.

2) Tesla can harvest an incredible amount of data from one of their cars and
so they can calculate risk better

~~~
mxschumacher
how much does a Tesla know about the state of its driver, e.g. to detect
distraction, tiredness or intoxication?

Does Tesla see when you speed and increase your premiums?

------
gpm
Web Assembly

It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a
wider impact than anyone has really realized yet.

It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of
applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications,
embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, and so on.

It looks like it's going to enable a wider variety of languages on the web,
many more performant than the current ones. That's interesting on it's own,
but not the main reason why I think the technology is interesting.

Both mobile devices, and crypto currencies, are places where hardware
acceleration is a thing. If this is going to be a popular ISA in both of
those, might we get chips whose native ISA is web assembly? Once we have
hardware acceleration, do we see wasm chips running as CPUs someday in the not
too distant future (CPU with an emphasis on Central)?

A lot of people seem excited about the potential for risc-v, and arm is
gaining momentum against x86 to some extent, but to me wasm actually seems
best placed to takeover as the dominant ISA.

Anyways, I doubt that thinking about this is going to have much direct impact
on my life... this isn't something I feel any need to help along (or a change
I feel the need to try and resist). It's just a technology that I think will
be interesting to watch as the future unfolds.

~~~
duckfruit
I want to believe... I always thought WebAssembly had a lot of potential,
however, in practice it doesn't seem to have turned out that way.

I remember the first Unity demos appearing on these orange pages at least 4 or
5 years ago, and promptly blowing me away. But, after an eternity in
JavaScript years, I still dont know what the killer app is, technically or
business wise. (Side note - I encourage people to prove me wrong, in fact I'd
love to be! Thats whats so engaging about discussions here. I'd love to see
examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it.)

~~~
julianeon
I think there might be killer apps that companies aren't publicizing, because
it's part of their competitive advantage.

Example of WASM being used in a major product:

[https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-
time-...](https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/)

You can infer from this that it's making them 3x faster than anything a
competitor can make, and probably inspired a lot of those 'Why is Figma so
much more awesome than any comparable tool?' comments I remember reading on
Twitter months back.

~~~
duckfruit
Agreed - Figma is a very good example. I stand corrected.

------
autosage
Materialize [https://materialize.io/](https://materialize.io/) Incremental
update/materialization of database views with joins and aggregates is super
interesting. It enables listening to data changes, not just on a row level,
but on a view level. It's an approach that may completely solve the problem of
cache invalidation of relational data. Imagine a memcache server, except it
now also guaranties consistency. In addition, being able to listen to changes
could make live-data applications trivial to make, even with filters, joins,
whatever.

Similarly, someone is developing a patch for postgres that implements
incrementally updating/materializing views[1]. I haven't tried it so I can't
speak of its performance or the state of the project, but according to the
postgres wiki page on the subject [2] it seems to support some joins and
aggregates, but probably not something that would be recommended for
production use.

[1] [https://www.postgresql-archive.org/Implementing-
Incremental-...](https://www.postgresql-archive.org/Implementing-Incremental-
View-Maintenance-td6064280.html) [2]
[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenanc...](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenance)

~~~
nojito
Very similiar to

[https://www.datomic.com/](https://www.datomic.com/)

~~~
estebarb
Materialize is based on differential dataflow, that is based on timelly
dataflow. The abstraction works like magic: distributed computation, ordering,
consistency, storage, recalculation, invalidations... All those hard to since
problems are handled naturally by the computing paradigm. Maybe the product is
similar, but not the principles behind

~~~
nojito
Principles only matter to hackers, but the end result for end users is
identical.

It’s just very unfortunate that materialize has a much much bigger marketing
team than the datomic people.

~~~
dustingetz
Materialized is streaming, Datomic is poll.

------
prrls
Oxide Computer Company

[https://oxide.computer/](https://oxide.computer/)

“True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density,
efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running
on-premises compute infrastructure.”

Corey Quinn interviewed the founders on his podcast "Screaming in the Cloud",
where they explain the need for innovation in that space.

[https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-
cloud...](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-
cloud/hyperscaler-infrastructure-for-the-masses-with-jessie-frazelle-steve-
tuck-and-bryan-cantrill-of-oxide-computing/)

Basically, on-premises hardware is years behind what companies like Facebook
and Google have in-house, it may be time to close that gap.

They also have a podcast, "On The Metal", which is such a joy to listen to.
Their last episode with Jonathan Blow was really a treat.

[https://oxide.computer/podcast/](https://oxide.computer/podcast/)

It's mostly anecdotes about programming for the hardware-software interface,
if that's your thing ;).

~~~
prrls
And for people wondering why caring about on-premises hosting when you have
the cloud, a few weeks ago there was a thread about why would you do the
former in favor of the latter. It puts on display that actually a lot of
people are still on-premises, and for good reasons, which makes a good case
for a company like Oxide to exist.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089999)

~~~
input_sh
Also see this meta comment which summed up other top-level comments by their
arguments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23098654)

8/10 is cost related.

------
iamwil
Rust lang - Memory safety through zero cost abstraction as a way to eliminate
a large class of errors in systems languages is interesting. Especially if it
allows more people to write systems programs.

WASM - Mostly as a compile target for Rust, but I think this changes the way
software might be deployed. No longer as a website, but as a binary
distributed across CDNs.

ZK-SNARKS - Zero knowledge proofs are still nascent, but being able to prove
you know something while not revealing what it is has specific applicability
for outsourcing computation. It's a dream to replace cloud computing as we
know it today.

Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, will be pretty
interesting.

BERT - Newer models for NLP are always interesting because the internet is
full of text.

RoamResearch - The technology for this has been around for a while, but it got
put together in a interesting way.

Oculus Quest - Been selling out during COVID. I sense a behavioral change.

Datomic - Datalog seems to be having a resurgence. I wonder if it can fight
against the tide of editing in-place.

~~~
chx
> Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works,

You can stop the tape right there. You know it doesn't and it can't.

~~~
sosodev
Genuinely curious, what’s wrong with the lightning network?

~~~
dane-pgp
I don't know why the parent comment talked in such absolute terms, but these
recent problems may be relevant:

[https://news.bitcoin.com/hidden-lightning-network-bug-
allowe...](https://news.bitcoin.com/hidden-lightning-network-bug-allowed-
spending-of-fake-bitcoins/)

[https://news.bitcoin.com/mishap-sees-user-lose-30000-btc-
on-...](https://news.bitcoin.com/mishap-sees-user-lose-30000-btc-on-lightning-
network/)

~~~
CraigRood
Bitcoin.com isn't a neutral source on LN related material. The parent company
(St Bitts LLC) directly invest in Bitcoin Cash startups that compete directly
with Bitcoin itself.

The bug has already been patched, and had a limited userbase. The user who
supposedly lost all his Bitcoin ended up not being true, vast majority was
recovered. It's also worth noting that the user also deliberately went against
various UI warnings that funds may be lost.

[https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/2468](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/2468)

~~~
companyhen
Linking to a Bitcoin.com article about anything BTC is like linking to a Fox
News opinion article on Obama.

------
koeng
Oxford nanopore sequencing. If a few problems can be figured out (mainly
around machine learning and protein design), then it will beat every other
biological detection, diagnosis, and sequencing method by a massive amount (no
10x, but more like 100x-1000x)

It's hard to explain how big nanopore sequencing is if a few (hard) kinks can
be figured out. Basically, it has the potential to completely democratize DNA
sequencing.

Here is an explanation of the technology -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWZvHIi3i0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWZvHIi3i0)

~~~
thewarrior
Can this be used to make faster corona virus tests ? If so maybe this is the
time to Manhattan project this technology.

~~~
koeng
Generally, yes absolutely. I’ve been doing a project called “NanoSavSeq”
(Nanopore Saliva Sequencing) in my free time. It’s published on dat right now
since the raw files for Nanopore are really big (got too big for hashbase).
There is one company doing it as well, but my version is completely open
source and I’ve optimized it for affordable automation.

To give you a sense, you can buy one for 1k and do as much detection as a 64k
device, and it’s small enough to fit in a backpack. One device should be able
to do 500-1000 tests per 24hrs at a cost of about $10 per test, not including
labor.

~~~
Gatsky
Is this with multiplexing? Or are you extending the flowcell life?

~~~
koeng
Multiplexing. I use barcoded primers to amplify the sample, then pool and
sequence

------
abdullahkhalids
Libresilicon [1]. Extremely important to our freedoms from corporate and state
tyranny to make chip manufacturing libre.

> We develop a free (as in freedom, not as in free of charge) and open source
> semiconductor manufacturing process standard, including a full mixed signal
> PDK, and provide a quick, easy and inexpensive way for manufacturing. No
> NDAs will be required anywhere to get started, making it possible to build
> the designs in your basement if you wish so. We are aiming to revolutionize
> the market by breaking through the monopoly of proprietary closed source
> manufacturers!

[1] [https://libresilicon.com/](https://libresilicon.com/)

~~~
Vinceo
This is really really exciting. Thanks

~~~
abdullahkhalids
It is. They are down to 1 um, so they need to make a bit more than an order of
magnitude improvement to become performance competitive - 100 nm is early
2000s technology, Raspberry Pi is 40 nm size.

------
rmason
1\. Cloudflare Workers, I don't have the bandwidth to experiment with it right
now but it interests me greatly.

[https://workers.cloudflare.com/](https://workers.cloudflare.com/)

2\. Rust - definitely will be the next language I learn. Sadly the coronavirus
cancelled a series of meetings in Michigan promising to give a gentle
introduction to Rust.

[https://www.rust-lang.org/learn](https://www.rust-lang.org/learn)

~~~
stickfigure
I've done a couple neat (IMO) things with CF workers.

\- I use imgix to manipulate images in my app, but some of my users don't want
anyone to be able to discover (and steal) the source images. Imgix can't do
this natively; all image manipulation instructions are in the URL. So I put a
CF worker in front of imgix; my app encrypts the url, the worker decrypts it
and proxies.

\- A year ago, intercom.io didn't support permissions on their KB articles
system. I like intercom's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them
to actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a
cookie set by my app.

These are both trivial, stateless 5-line scripts. I like that I can use CF
workers to fundamentally change the behavior of hosted services I rely on.
It's almost like being able to edit their code.

Of course, this only works for hosted services that work with custom domains.

~~~
ignoramous
> _I like intercom 's articles but (at the time) wanted to restrict them to
> actual customers. So I put a CF worker in front that gates based on a cookie
> set by my app._

Might be against their terms? I rem someone asked if they could treat Workers
as a http reverse-proxy to essentially bypass restrictions, and the answer was
"no".

~~~
stickfigure
Seems unlikely. But if they really want to lose paying customers, that would
be one way of doing it.

------
aabajian
Geometric algebra:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo)

It makes a lot of hard physics problems (Maxwell's equations, relativity
theory, quantum mechanics) much more _understandable_ and (I'm told) unifies
them in a common framework. I think it will help your average developer become
comfortable with these areas of physics.

~~~
elevenoh
Is all math/logic most fundamentally geometry?

~~~
avmich
Don't think so. Geometry requires space, which has certain features which
constrain its properties (sorry for a tautology). If you avoid such
constraints, you can still have math, but it doesn't make sense to call it
geometry.

Looks a bit surprising math definition include concept of space. Geometry
looks underappreciated, yes, but to replace the whole math...

~~~
carapace
Ah, but you can't encode math except for in some necessarily geometric form.

~~~
mkl
Are you referring to written notation? Calling that geometry is a bit of a
stretch. There's also nothing geometric about maths encoded in computer code,
or many types of mathematical thoughts, so I think you are just incorrect.

~~~
carapace
> Are you referring to written notation? Calling that geometry is a bit of a
> stretch.

Can you write without shape?

> There's also nothing geometric about maths encoded in computer code

Look at a computer chip under a microscope: nothing but geometry.

> or many types of mathematical thoughts

In re: math itself, perhaps there is such a thing as a mathematics of the
_formless_ (I doubt it but cannot rule it out) but to communicate it you are
again reduced to some symbolic _form_.

> so I think you are just incorrect.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm still not 101%
convinced, but I think it's true: you can't have information without form.

Check out "The Markable Mark" and "My Stroke of Insight". The act of
_distinction_ is the foundation of the whole of symbolic thought, and it is
intrinsically a geometric act.

[http://www.markability.net](http://www.markability.net)

> ... what is to be found in these pages is a reworking of material from the
> book _Laws of Form_.

> Think of these pages, if you like, as a study in origination; where I am
> thinking of 'origin' not in the historical sense but as something more like
> the timeless grounding of one idea on or in another.

Distinction is a physiological thing the brain does. It can e.g. be "turned
off" by physical damage to the brain:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_ins...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_my_stroke_of_insight)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Stroke_of_Insight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Stroke_of_Insight)

> Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor ... tells of her experience in 1996 of having a stroke
> in her left hemisphere and how the human brain creates our perception of
> reality and includes tips about how Dr. Taylor rebuilt her own brain from
> the inside out.

So whether you come at it from the mystical realm of pure thought or the gooey
realm of living brains all math is geometric. (As far as I can tell with my
gooey brain.)

Cheers!

~~~
avmich
> and it is intrinsically a geometric act.

Why? Can't you have distinction without geometry? It's not only position which
can be distinct, you can have other properties.

Two digits in different position on paper can be both different - 0 and 1 -
and the same - 5 and 5. You can encode them not by shape, but, say, by kind of
particle?

And in general, our physical world has space - but how would you prove a world
without space as we understand it can't have math?

~~~
carapace
> Why? Can't you have distinction without geometry?

Maybe but I don't see how.

> It's not only position which can be distinct, you can have other properties.

Properties like what? Color, sound, temperature, etc., all of these are
geometric, no? Can you think of a concrete physical property that _doesn 't_
reduce to some kind of geometry?

> You can encode them not by shape, but, say, by kind of particle?

Sure, but then that particle must have some _distinction_ from every other
particle, either intrinsic or extrinsic (in relation to other particles), no?

Any sort of real-world distinction-making device has to have form, so that
eliminates real non-geometric distinctions.

It may be possible to imagine a formless symbol but I've tried and I can't do
it.

The experience of Dr. Taylor indicates to me that the brain constructs the
subjective experience of symbolic distinction. (Watching her talk from an
epistemological POV is really fascinating!)

So that only leaves some kind of mystic realm of formless, uh, "things". My
experience has convinced me that "the formless" is both real and non-symbolic,
however by the very nature of the thing _I can 't symbolize this knowledge._

    
    
        In the Beginning was the Void
        And the Void was without Form
    

If you can come up with a counter-example I would stand amazed. Cheers!

~~~
avmich
> Can you think of a concrete physical property that doesn't reduce to some
> kind of geometry?

How would you reduce charge to geometry? Or spin?

Can we differentiate by space the electrons in an atom of helium?

But we sort of digress. The question was if a concept of space is required to
a concept of math, and specifically, if we can have distinction without space.
Surely we can at least think of distinction without space, even if we'd fail
to present that in our physical world?

------
modeless
1\. [https://www.starlink.com/](https://www.starlink.com/) Finally, truly
global and low latency satellite internet.

2\. Generative models for video games -
[https://aidungeon.io/](https://aidungeon.io/) is barely scratching the
surface. Story, art, animation, music, gameplay, it will all be generated by
models in the future.

3\. New direct drive robotics actuators such as
[https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-
hasel+actuators](https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-hasel+actuators) I
think actuators are holding robotics back more than software now.
Breakthroughs are needed. No general purpose robot will ever be practical with
electric motors and gearboxes.

4\. Self-driving cars are still happening, despite delays. I think discounting
Tesla's approach is a mistake, but Waymo is still in the lead.

5\. NLP is finally starting to work. The potential for automation is huge.
Code generation is very exciting as well.

6\. I was excited for Rust but I now believe it's too complex. I'm looking for
a much simpler language that can still achieve the holy grail of memory safety
without GC pauses or refcounting. But I'm not holding my breath. If ML models
start writing a large part of our code then the human ergonomics of
programming language design will matter less.

~~~
losthobbies
Jai? Jonathan Blow’s new programming language might be an option for you.

[https://inductive.no/jai/](https://inductive.no/jai/)

~~~
AsyncAwait
Jai doesn't do very much in terms of memory safety, Zig [1] might be a better
alternative + it actually exists.

1 - [https://github.com/ziglang/zig](https://github.com/ziglang/zig)

~~~
littlestymaar
What does Zig offers regarding memory safety? Isn't pointer manipulation as
unsafe as C in Zig?

~~~
AsyncAwait
For example [1] & [2], with more being worked on. Now, Rust is king when it
comes to memory safety, especially compile-time, and is miles ahead of anyone
else, (not counting research languages), but Jai isn't really being designed
to have much emphasis on memory safety, so am not sure it's fair to propose it
as a Rust alternative if you're looking at memory safety.

1 - [https://andrewkelley.me/post/unsafe-zig-safer-than-unsafe-
ru...](https://andrewkelley.me/post/unsafe-zig-safer-than-unsafe-rust.html)

2 - [https://ziglang.org/#Performance-and-Safety-Choose-
Two](https://ziglang.org/#Performance-and-Safety-Choose-Two)

------
slyall
Sidewalk delivery robots.

The problem is a lot easier that driverless cars (everything is slower and a
remote human can take over in hard places) and huge potential to shake up the
short-to-medium distance delivery business. It's the sort of tech that could
quickly explode into 100s of cities worldwide like escooters did a couple of
years ago.

Starship Technologies is the best known company in the area and furthest
advanced. [https://www.starship.xyz/](https://www.starship.xyz/)

~~~
therealcamino
It seems like if they get popular they're going to run into problems with
sidewalk availability. We're already using them for walking. You can add a few
robots and not have any blowback, but once the novelty wears off, having to
navigate around slowpoke robots on your walk is going to get old.

~~~
Eridrus
Cities are not immutable objects. It's going to be extremely contentious,
because all local politics is, but it's not infeasible to alter our cities.

------
skmurphy
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) occupies a intermediate position in
accuracy / skin depth for soft tissue between ultrasound and MRI

Optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) approaches SQUID level accuracy without
need for supercooled device, can be worn or used as a contact sensor like
ultrasound.

LoRA long range (10km +) low power sub-gigahertz radio frequency protocol
useful for battery powered IoT devices transmitting small amounts of data.

Heat cabinet for infectious diseases, an old technology used to fight polio
and other diseases that went out of favor with introduction of antibiotics.
May find utility against novel viral infections.

UV light treatment of blood. Another old technology that may find use against
novel infectious agents. Stimulates immune system to fight viral infections.

~~~
Balgair
Oh man, I used to research in OCT for deep brain stimulation! It's pretty cool
tech, that is for sure. It's got a huge market for bio applications and
certain industrials.

That said, optics is a _super_ finicky field. You can come in and get a Nobel
for 5 hours work, or you can spend 50 years in a dark room trying to get
things together. Alignment is crazy difficult, thought it seems it shouldn't
be.

Anyone that wants to dive into optics: Just do it for 2 years, no more.

~~~
jl2718
Alignment should be done system-wide by orders of magnitude. If you are on a
breadboard, get everything to within a cm of final location, then everything
within a mm, etc. Don’t ever spend more than 1 minute at a time on any
component. This stuff was not in the textbooks.

~~~
Balgair
It's especially hard with OCT as it's in the IR spectrum. You just have to go
on your meters alone. It takes forever.

------
nostrademons
GPGPU. GPU performance is still increasing along Moore's Law, single-core
performance has plateaued. The implication is that at some point, the
differential will become so great that we'll be stupid to continue running
anything other than simple housekeeping tasks on the CPU. There's a lot of
capital investment that'd need to happen for that transition - we basically
need to throw out much of what we've learned about algorithm design over the
past 50 years and learn new parallel algorithms - but that's part of what
makes it exciting.

~~~
nabusman
Sounds interesting, what language is best positioned for GPGPU's?

~~~
kekeblom
C++ through CUDA is by far the most popular option. There is some support in
other languages but the support and ecosystem is far from what exists for CUDA
and c++.

------
bjourne
Velomobiles! A velomobile is a recumbent bike with fairing which enables them
to be more convenient and much faster than a regular bike. A fit rider can
easily overtake the peloton in Tour de France
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBb7YIRcBe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBb7YIRcBe0)).
The velomobile in the clip is a standard model and there are racing models
that are faster still!

Just like with regular bikes, you can add electric assist to them to extend
their range and make the job of the rider easier. In this clip
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCo4cRQMBlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCo4cRQMBlo))
the rider gets an average speed on 37.5 km/h (top speed 84 km/h) over a
distance of 73 km with over half the battery remaining. And that is without
wearing the racing hoodie which significantly reduces drag.

The main problem with velomobiles is that they are expensive. The frame is
made from carbon fiber and needs to be handcrafted. So the price ranges from
about €5000 - €10000 which is too expensive to most. If some Chinese giant or
billionaire investor set out to mass produce velomobiles I'm sure they could
totally revolutionize transportation.

------
gavinray
I wrote a guide on connecting Hasura + Forest admin for no-code SaaS apps +
admin backends:

"14\. Connect Forest Admin to Hasura & Postgres"

[http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-
forest...](http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-forest-admin-
to-hasura-amp-postgres)

For Heroku specifically you need to make sure that the client attempting to
connect does it over SSL, so set SSL mode if possible (many clients will do
this by-default).

To get the connection string for pasting into Forest Admin config, run this:

    
    
        heroku config | grep HEROKU_POSTGRESQL
    

That should give you a connection string you can copy + paste to access
externally from Heroku:

    
    
        HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_YELLOW_URL: postgres://user3123:passkja83kd8@ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6212/db982398
    

[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-
postgresql#exte...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-
postgresql#external-connections-ingress)

~~~
seyz
Thank you very much for this article, that's awesome!

~~~
gavinray
Oh snap, the founder of Forest Admin!

Glad you liked the post, I've been using Forest on both realworld SaaS
platforms and small side-startups since early 2017. Really cool to watch how
much you've evolved since then.

Also, Louis S. is amazing! I've sent two emails to you guys over the years,
Louis answered both of them within a day.

Throwback to 2017 UI ;)

[https://i.imgur.com/KT9Wtlx.png](https://i.imgur.com/KT9Wtlx.png)

~~~
seyz
This comment is epic, thank you very much :-) I'm sure Louis will be super
happy to read this as well.

See you soon!

------
chx
Zig. There's a Why Zig When There is Already CPP, D, and Rust? writeup at
[https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-
Al...](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-
CPP,-D,-and-Rust%3F)

~~~
jorangreef
I came here to say the same thing: Zig. The design decisions are spot on.

For example, Modeling Data Concurrency w/ Asynchronous I/O in Zig by Andrew
Kelley: [https://t.co/VYNqNcrkH1?amp=1](https://t.co/VYNqNcrkH1?amp=1)

~~~
carapace
Direct link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLToGnjIUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeLToGnjIUM)

------
Eugeleo
I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there
are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all
intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the
makers of Dynalist.

It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by
default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor.

I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general
HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the
portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online
only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format).

Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class
citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features
are implemented as plugins and can be turned off.

And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are
very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features
so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience
with Obsidian).

(Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user. I copied most of this comment
from another comment of mine)

[1]: [https://obsidian.md/](https://obsidian.md/)

~~~
sho

      I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist.
    
      It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten
    

Just so you know, I consider myself probably a fairly typical HN user. Got my
own little daily tech concerns, but keep a toe in the water of the larger
zeitgeist. I have _no idea_ what anything you just said means. You could be
talking about brands of car or my little ponies for all I know. Googling it -
seems it's something to do with notes?

Just remember that not everyone is in your little concern-bubble, and one or
two explanatory sentences would be very welcome.

~~~
anotheryou
the other thing is [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)

It's a text based wiki or outliner (collapsible text) thought a step further,
with auto backlinks etc.

Feels to me like a weaker org-mode, online with better cross-links/embeds
(something that is indeed uncool in org. things can't live in two places at
once)

~~~
skosch
There is org-roam, and it's getting better by the day:
[https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam)

~~~
anotheryou
Yea, have to try that some time.

I'll need to switch from one biiiig file to multiple than though. I think my
biggest hindrance is setting up the refile targeting :)

------
maccam94
1\. Starship -
[https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/](https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/)

Completely reusable rocket that can carry 100 tons into low Earth orbit,
refuel, and then continue on to places like Mars. Launches are estimated to
cost SpaceX about $2M, compared to the SLS $1B (estimated, similar lift
capability) and space shuttle $1B (27 tons). The engines are real, test
vehicles are flying (another test launch is likely to happen in the next week
or two). Follow the SpaceX subreddit for progress updates

2\. Commonwealth Fusion Systems - [http://cfs.energy](http://cfs.energy)

Lots of reactors have struggled with scale and plasma instability. CFS has
adopted a design using new REBCO high temperature superconductor magnets that
are stronger and smaller, which can be used to build smaller reactors and
better stabilize the plasma. They are building a prototype called SPARC,
expected to produce net energy gain by 2025.

------
EvanWard97
\- Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm) such as Ushio's Care222 tech. This light
destroys pathogens quickly while not seeming to damage human skin or eyes.

\- FPGAs. I'm no computer engineer, but it seems like this tech is going to
soon drastically increase our compute.

\- Augur, among other prediction platforms. Beliefs will pay rent.

\- Web Assembly, as noted elsewhere. One use case I haven't read yet here is
distributed computing. BOINC via WASM could facilitate dozens more users to
join the network.

\- Decision-making software, particularly that which leverages random variable
inputs and uses Monte Carlo methods, and helps elicit the most accurate
predictions and preferences of the user.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I'm an FPGA engineer and I doubt they will go mainstream. They work great for
prototyping, low-volume production, or products that need flexibility in
features, but they are hard to use (unlikely to get better in my opinion) and
it's hard to see where they would fit into a compute pipeline given that you
need to transfer the data to the FPGA, perform your computation/processing,
and then transfer the data back.

That said, they are very cool! And learning to create FPGA designs teaches you
a lot about how processors and other low level stuff works.

~~~
cinquemb
>it's hard to see where they would fit into a compute pipeline given that you
need to transfer the data to the FPGA, perform your computation/processing,
and then transfer the data back.

I see them going mainstream when brain computer interfaces go mainstream (prob
a long way away) since a lot of it (in my experience working in a couple of
labs and some related hardware) depends on processing a lot of the data from
the sensors, of which most is thrown away due to the sheer volume, and
transferring it back and being able to update the filtration matrices easily
tailored to sampled data.

~~~
ironman1478
Fpgas are too expensive, power hungry, and large. We use them for many tasks
at my workplace and we are spinning up an ASIC team because using fpgas just
doesn't meet our power and size requirements. Also, building asics can be
cheaper in the long run if the future of what needs to be done is relatively
stable.

~~~
cinquemb
> Also, building asics can be cheaper in the long run if the future of what
> needs to be done is relatively stable.

I don't doubt it, yet I found hard to describe the human brain over time,
especially across people, as that; at least from a DSP and beamforimg of
impedance measurements from the scalp to gauge the relative output of power at
variable regions in the brain perspective.

------
mindvirus
Subvocal recognition:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition)
Imagine how much more people would use voice input if they could do it
silently.

Also neural interfaces like CTRL-labs was building before being acquired.
Imagine if you could navigate and type at full speed while standing on the
subway.

I think that rich, high fidelity inputs like those are going to be key to
ambient computing really taking off.

~~~
mNovak
Been wanting subvocalization since reading the Ender series

------
akavel
[https://luna-lang.org](https://luna-lang.org) \- a dual-representation
(visual & textual) programming language

RISC-V

Zig programming language

Nim programming language

(also some stuff mentioned by others, like WASM, Rust, Nix/NixOS)

~~~
canada_dry
> luna-lang

Whoa... had to do a double take there.

Great to see luna seems to be alive yet again - now "enso lang" per github
[i]. A git commit just days ago... so here's hoping! It is such a great
concept.

[i] [https://github.com/luna/ide](https://github.com/luna/ide)

------
Balgair
Optogenetics [0]. Light changes electrical behavior in cells. AKA, point
laser, neurons fire, I know kung-fu

Memristors [1] Rebuilding the entire computer from EE basics. New 'color'
added to EE spectrum, now computers process huge datasets on a watch battery

CRISPR-CaS9 [2] Tricks bacteria used to keeps viruses out are pretty slick.
Crtl-C, Ctrl-V for gene editing. $100B technology, easily.

Strangely (encouragingly?) all these words are 'misspelled'

NOTE: I am _massively_ oversimplifying things.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR)

~~~
freehunter
I was excited for memristors in 2008 when HP announced they were right around
the corner. They even built a new computer and a new OS to take advantage of
memristors [1]. And then it never happened and no one has ever built one and
it’s pretty much vaporware. I would be hesitant to trust anyone who says
they’re anywhere close. It’s just not a technology that actually exists.

[1] [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-
mach...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-
repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies)

~~~
hanniabu
> They even built a new computer and a new OS to take advantage of memristors

I could be wrong but I think I remember reading somewhere they ran into patent
infringement issues that they couldn't get around or something like that.

------
hnick
VR. It seems just about ready, but still a little too expensive.

While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work.
Would an infinite desktop with an appropriate interface beat the reliable old
2x24" screen setup I have? I think it could.

~~~
dvt
> While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work.

Good games are most definitely _not_ there. The consensus is that Alyx is
really the only worthwhile VR title. Just about everything else is gimmicky
and trite. VR still has a long way to go.

~~~
XCSme
I play Eleven Table Tennis (as the table tennis clubs were closed due covid).
That game is the best simulation game you can play today. The physics are very
close to reality, so close that in-game and IRL skills are immediately
transferable. The biggest issues of the game that I encounter are not with the
game itself, but with the tracking limitations of the Rift S inside-out
tracking.

------
kvz
Nix—It takes buy-in, but very worth it for us. Builds are reliable,
reproducible, can exist alongside one another. Plug an S3 powered CloudFront
cache into it, and you’re never building the same thing more than once.

Deno—Sandboxed by default seems a powerful way to offer our customers to run
custom code. Native TypeScript, build single bins. I have still to play around
with it but those all seem like compelling advantages over Node.js

~~~
ianai
Crazy idea time. Is anyone piping randomly generated code into nix and
selecting for AI in the output? (I’m pretty far out of my realm here so sorry
in advance)

~~~
mkl
The search space of possible code is unfathomably enormous. I think you'd have
better luck generating amazing art with random colours for each pixel (i.e.
still none).

People have done more limited genetic programming for a long time now
(essentially randomly mutating formulas, keeping ones that do better), but
neural networks are doing the arbitrary function-fitting better at the moment.

What does it have to do with Nix, though?

~~~
ianai
Bleary eyed me thought nix sounded well defined enough to make searching the
input space more tractable.

------
dnautics
Zig Programming language.

Because it's basically C-+, It's extremely easy to use, and also extremely
easy to parse, so (and maybe this is self-serving because I did it) I see a
lot of automated code-generation tools to hook Zig into other PLs.

C's age is starting to show (and it's becoming a problem), and I think it has
the opportunity to be sort of a place for old C heads like me to go to stay
relevant, modern, safe, and productive.

------
quack01
All the new products around WireGuard. I'm so tired of running VPNs. NAT
traversal with protocols like STUN, TURN and ICE are going to allow point-to-
point networks for all the clients.

[https://tailscale.com/](https://tailscale.com/)

[https://portal.cloud/app/subspace](https://portal.cloud/app/subspace)

~~~
api
Zerotier.com did this years ago and it works great.

~~~
aidanhs
I'm kinda sad for you - I've been using and advocating zerotier for a while
(it's amazing and indispensable)...but in my circles the word 'wireguard' has
got people excited, which (anecdotally) is benefitting tailscale and
generating more hype around them than zerotier ever got. Hopefully a rising
tide will lift all ships and you find a way to capitalise on it :)

(I prefer device-based zerotier-style access rather than login-based
tailscale-style so that does sway me to zerotier...but I have to admit
tailscale looks more polished, e.g. the screenshot of seeing other devices on
the network. I get it's not a fundamental feature! But I can't help but
appreciate it)

~~~
api
We are doing fine and V2 is coming soon with a ton of improvements. I just
have to occasionally point out our existence again.

The pulldown showing other devices on a network does look spiffy but that wont
scale. We have users with thousands of devices on a virtual LAN and the
protocol will scale far larger. Not only will that not fit in a menu but any
system that relies on a master list will fall down. That list and refreshing
it will get huge.

We are doing the tech first, spiff second.

~~~
chanux
Some feedback. I think I stumbled upon Zerotier a while back and didn't really
get what it is. IIRC it felt like something that is only useful for big
companies, exactly what I felt today.

I think the website could do a better job showcasing how it's used.

Hope my feedback is helpful and wish all the best!

~~~
api
Our web site kind of sucks. We're going to be working with a design/marketing
firm to re-do it soon.

It's kind of hard to explain ZeroTier sometimes. Its so simple (to the user)
people have a hard time getting it.

"You just make a network and connect stuff." Huh?

People have been conditioned to think networking is hard because 90% of
networking software is crap.

~~~
ramzis
Thanks for ZeroTier! Managed to convert a few friends from using Hamachi for
LAN games, which was always a pain to setup previously. It simply just works
for my needs.

~~~
chanux
ooh! so it could replace Hamachi. I think this is one use case (without using
the product name) that can be listed in a uses-cases page. Hope other Zerotier
users would chime in with more use cases.

~~~
api
ZeroTier emulates a L2 Ethernet switch over any network, so anything you can
do with Ethernet basically.

You make networks, add stuff to them, and any protocol you want just works:
games, ssh, sftp, http, drive mounts (though they can be slow over the
Internet), video chat, VoIP, even stuff like BGP or old protocols like IPX
work.

------
northern-lights
[https://www.sens.org](https://www.sens.org) : Solving the problem of aging
and diseases of aging. Watch a few interviews of Aubrey de Grey to get a
better idea of the possibilities of their research. Though this would come
under the "to watch" not for the immediate future but for the next decade or
two.

~~~
mindfulplay
One thing that's not clear to me is the advantage of living longer. Why do
some people feel the need to live longer?

When I hear of blood transfusion and such, it also feels like a lot of these
technologies are being developed by snakeoil salespeople to other nongullible
but strictly egocentric humans.

~~~
mindvirus
One thing with aging research is it's also about healthier living - for
example, letting people be healthier well into old age, even if the number of
years is the same. In terms of why people want to live longer, I think it's
just human nature at the end of the day - more time to do the things you enjoy
and help the people you care about.

Practically speaking, there are a lot of advantages to longer lives:

\- Generally, it means people will be healthier, which means reduced societal
burden.

\- A deeper family structure can mean better education and childcare. You have
more time to be with your friends and family, more time to pursue hobbies,
more time to explore the world.

\- Scientists, engineers and researchers can spend more time building and
leveraging their expertise. If people live 20% longer for example, I suspect
there's more than a 20% increase in advancement because in so many fields
breakthroughs happen near the end of your career.

Of course, there will be consequences that need to be addressed.

\- Does this only lead to increased inequity, where the wealthy are able to
accumulate wealth and knowledge even more easily due to access to anti aging.
Already there's a 14 year difference in life expectancy between the richest
and poorest 1%, imagine if that was 50 years.

\- How do we adjust our social safety nets when people are living to 100
instead of 80?

\- How does this change over-population and over-consumption?

~~~
mindfulplay
I see your point. I think there is an angle there. However, still feels like a
rich person's game here: not sure if the average or below average conditions
will improve (childhood mortality, adult mortality) in developing countries
because of this.

That's really where the "average" advantage seems to be: if life becomes
better for everyone then they live longer.

------
mrleinad
So many interesting links. This post should be a regular on HN.

~~~
kpierce
Especially now. Ive been using HN for years and before covid I could see all
the posts from the day before in 20 mins. Now it will take 2-3 hours. Everyone
is sharing.

------
askjdlkasdjsd
A friend of mine is working on coscout. It's in beta right now, but he showed
me some pretty insane machine learning based insights for companies, investors
and founders.

Things like

\- When will this company raise the next round? \- What is the net worth of
<literally anyone>? \- What is the probability that this investor will invest
in you? (given your sector, founder age, pedigree, gender, market conditions,
do you have an MVP or not etc.) \- A bunch of other complicated stuff I didn't
really understand

Definitely worth keeping an eye on if you're into this kinda stuff:
[https://coscout.com/](https://coscout.com/)

~~~
mindvirus
Feedback loops in this sort of thing always scare me. For example - say people
of one demographic are less likely to fund raise, so the model says they're
less likely to succeed, so investors using the model don't invest in them and
they are put at an even further disadvantage. And so something that is
inherently data driven can end up moving further away from the meritocratic
ideal it's likely trying for.

And the thing is, it's hard to get this bias out of models - almost everything
ends up correlating to age, race, gender and so on - zip codes, income,
schools, past employers, etc.

~~~
askjdlkasdjsd
Agreed. It's definitely up to the user to make smart decisions.

However, it's not so cut and dry either. In my last company (B2C mobile app
based), we were pretty much getting beat by several competitors. And it showed
across all metrics, ratings/reviews/downloads/web traffic/retention/engagement
- what have you.

And later on we found out that the founders had been fudging up the metrics
and presenting to investors which is why they actually were never able to
raise the round, but came very close. By straight up lying.

If some form of business/product intelligence is used to identify such red
flags, it can save a lot of bad decisions and heartache from ever happening
for everyone involved.

In that regard, I welcome more empirical evidence based decision making (aka
statistics/machine learning etc.) where it's appropriate.

------
busterarm
I guess I'm much more conservative than other folks, but I think we've
scratched only 10% of the surface of the benefits that things like Kubernetes,
Consul, Vault and Terraform should/will provide.

So they're on the list. I feel like at my job I'm pushing at the edges (as far
as running large scale, stable production) and we've still got miles left.

Also Bazel.

I guess this is a boring answer.

~~~
kortex
Is there anything like "terraform provider for bare metal"? Would be soo
convenient to just go from full nuke and pave to functional dev machine with a
single config repo.

~~~
busterarm
[https://github.com/Roblox/terraform-provider-
maas](https://github.com/Roblox/terraform-provider-maas)

------
juvoni
Roam Research [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)

A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me.

I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking
of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure
my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas
over time.

~~~
typon
How's this different from hypertext? (I genuinely don't know)

~~~
Eugeleo
Not sure about the specific features of hypertext, but in general: bi-
directional linking, block references (Roam is an outliner like Dynalist or
Workflowy), block transclusion, graph view of your page network...

Of course, you could throw a bunch of scripts together to approximate these
features — but you don’t have to, since Roam (and Obsidian and others) exists.

------
bionhoward
Ubuntu, ParrotOS, Kali

Julia Lang is fun

For devops, Pulumi/CDK

I watch graph dbs but they all suck or are too expensive or have insane
licenses (Neo4j, RedisGraph)

Differentiable programming, Zygote, Jax, PyTorch, TF/Keras

Optimal transport (sliced fused gromov-wasserstein)

AGI, levin, solomonoff, hutter, schmidhuber, friston

Ramda is amazing

George Church’s publications

im also super interested in molecular programming

DEAP is fun for tree GP a la Koza

Judea Pearl’s work will change the world once folks grok it

Secure multiparty computation

~~~
maccam94
I looked into pulumi last week, and it seems cool but I think they need to
rework their library design to avoid fracturing their ecosystem for each
language (or just standardize on one language).

------
Blammar
Solar energy, carbon dioxide and water directly to butanol. In other words,
store solar energy directly as fuel. There are other versions that generate
hydrogen, but that has a much lower energy density than liquid fuel.

Just modify your existing ICE to run on butanol and you're good to go. <a bit
of hand waving there.>

See [https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-
co2-wa...](https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-co2-water-
microorganisms/) for where we were a year ago.

------
cxam
Caddy, specifically v2
([https://caddyserver.com/v2](https://caddyserver.com/v2))

I've been using Caddy v2 all through beta/RC and glad it's finally stable with
a proper release. I moved away from using nginx for serving static content for
my side projects and prototypes. I'm also starting to replace reverse proxying
from HAProxy as well. The lightweight config and the automated TLS with Let's
Encrypt makes everything a breeze. Definitely has become part of my day-to-
day.

------
treelovinhippie
Svelte is my go-to for personal projects. My speculative hunch is it will
begin to rival React within the next 5 years for its simplicity and thus cost
reductions.

There are a lot of advantages, but this 5min video comparing React hooks to
Svelte should be enough to trigger interest:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtD2mWDQnxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtD2mWDQnxM)

~~~
Aeolun
I’m really curious how my 100kloc enterprise app would work in Svelte, but my
hunch is it just wouldn’t be possible to build.

Svelte always seems really cool in these toy examples, but I want to see a
significant app built with it instead.

~~~
treelovinhippie
Yeah that's a common myth. Svelte isn't some fringe alternative JS framework.
It performs exactly the same functions and same structure as any React/Vue
app, but does so with far less code and runs far faster since it's a compiler.

You're not going to find many brand-name companies using it because the PM
decision-makers at large enterprises are always going to be many years behind
and going with the "safe" JS framework leader at the time.

Well-known companies currently using Svelte: Apple [1], New York Times [2],
Spotify [3] and GoDaddy [4]

1:
[https://twitter.com/mansur_ashraf/status/1204542852581273600](https://twitter.com/mansur_ashraf/status/1204542852581273600)
2: Svelte creator Rich Harris works for them 3:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/f18n33/companies_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/f18n33/companies_using_svelte_in_production/fh2jpxw/)
4: [https://svelte.dev](https://svelte.dev)

~~~
XCSme
"as any React/Vue app" From my experience, and what I heard from others, a lot
of devs prefer React over Vue even though Vue syntax is cleaner and allows for
shorter code. React just feels more robust when the app grows large enough
compared to Vue. Note that we're not talking only about the library itself and
its syntax, but also the ecosystem and support around it.

That being said, I think Svelte -> Vue comparison might be even more
imbalanced than Vue -> React.

------
jah242
Robotics + Deep Learning - I think we just quietly passed a milestone where
robots using deep learning can perform useful real world tasks (selecting
items, packing boxes etc)

If true we could be at a watershed for robotics adoption and progress as large
scale deployments generate the data to train on more complex tasks, leading to
more deployments and so snowballing onwards

This seems like a much more likely process that will lead to a type of
“general AI” than researchers pushing us all the way there

Covariant AI (and their partnerships) is what got me thinking:
[https://covariant.ai/](https://covariant.ai/)

------
newsat13
Self hosting - [https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io)

~~~
umaar
A while back I installed ServerPilot which automatically sets up
Nginx/Apache/PHP/MySQL for you. It also handles security updates. This made
those $5 VPS' so much more appealing [1] as I could install lots of small
Node.js apps on a single server, and avoid managed hosting providers who seem
to prefer charging per app instance.

Anyway ServerPilot then scrapped their free plan so I've been looking for an
alternative. cloudron looks cool, I don't see anything specific to
Node.js/Express, but it does have a LAMP stack which includes Apache, so I
might try that. Otherwise I'll probably use something like CapRover [2], a
self-hosted platform as a service.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/umaar/status/1256155563748139009](https://twitter.com/umaar/status/1256155563748139009)

[2] [https://caprover.com/](https://caprover.com/)

~~~
jedieaston
Dokku is an excellent option for this sort of thing, and manages subdomains
for you.

[http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/](http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/)

~~~
paulgb
And SSL is a cinch! I have been very happy with Dokku, I'm surprised I don't
see it mentioned around here more often.

------
bitwize
Combining statistics-based AI with GOFAI to create systems that can both
recognize objects in a sea of data _and_ reason about what they saw.

The MiSTer FPGA-based hardware platform.

RISC-V is gonna change everything. Yeah, RISC-V is good.

~~~
bionhoward
How do you combine statistics-based AI with GOFAI?

~~~
sqrt17
GOFAI basically consists of inference and reasoning techniques, some of which
cease to work well when you scale them up too much (computational complexity)
or when there is uncertainty involved. There have been some efforts to scale
reasoning towards greater scale (description logics) as well as problems with
uncertainty (ILP, Markov Logic), but they've been de-emphasized or forgotten
in recent times because you get a lot of mileage out of end-to-end deep
learning - where essentially hidden state within the network deals with the
uncertainty on its own, and where the additional compute overhead + rule
engineering effort doesn't seem warranted.

------
javiramos
I am particularly interested in food products that will replace animal-based
foods. There will be a major consumer shift in the upcoming decades as
consumers shift to more sustainable alternatives. This will changes
industries, towns and regions.

------
wpietri
Darklang: [https://darklang.com/](https://darklang.com/)

I've tried out an early version of their product, and I really like where
they're headed.

~~~
freehunter
I’d love to try it if they didn’t tie the language to their hosting service. I
understand the necessity of the coupling but until someone can start a
competing hosting company with the same language, it’s not something I’m
interested in.

~~~
Gollapalli
Huh, Dark looks pretty similar to what I'm doing, albeit significantly more
work since they went and developed a whole language and editor. If you're not
averse to Clojure, give this a look:
[https://github.com/acgollapalli/dataworks](https://github.com/acgollapalli/dataworks)

------
nickreese
Cloudflare workers. It was on my watch list at the beginning of the year and
I’m just about to out a 20k page “static” (with tons of interactivity) site
into production them.

Using it is an API gateway and Kv store for truly static assets is amazing.

------
kanakiyajay
Wrote a blog post on the technologies I believe are going to change industries

1\. No-Code Tools 2\. GraphQL 3\. Oculus Quest 4\. FPGA 5\. Netflix for Gamers
6\. Windows for Linux 7\. Notion 8\. Animation Engines

[https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-
in-2020...](https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-
in-2020-and-2021/)

~~~
jmiskovic
FPGA is still too cumbersome to make it big. It's too expensive for general
appliances, talent is hard to find, and development process is still stuck
where software was 20 years ago. FPGA vendors are still trying roll out their
own everything-included non-standard solutions. Those solutions don't scale
well. I've seen engineers struggling to trace where some signal ends up, it's
complete insanity.

I find GPUs conceptually similar to FPGAs for most soft applications (video
processing and similar number crunching). They also provide huge number of re-
purposable blocks for programmable parallel computing. GPUs have won out
because they became mainstream through gaming and they more readily opened up
to general software practices and methodologies. It's no surprise machine
learning community is avoiding FPGAs for most part.

~~~
kanakiyajay
Agreed, FPGA is too expensive currently with a non-standard toolset present
across the industry. But if someone is able to create an industry coalition
(think Wi-Fi Alliance or Bluetooth SIG) it can definitely make a large impact
for everyone involved with several companies reaping the benefits

------
fergie
Solid state batteries.

The tech is tantalizingly close, although not perfected yet. If and when they
become available, these batteries will have a far higher energy density and
degrade at a far lower rate than existing batteries.

~~~
ianai
I agree. Is there any chance this is what Tesla’s battery day could include?

------
hackerbabz
[https://immersedvr.com/](https://immersedvr.com/)

Virtual monitors in an Oculus Quest that actually works. What’s coming up that
will be amazing is hand controls (including a virtual keyboard) and
conferencing and collaboration tools.

~~~
dkarp
I'm going to try this out. I assumed the resolution of the Quest wasn't quite
there to make coding in a virtual desktop comfortable. How has your experience
been?

~~~
hackerbabz
I use it every day. With wifi-direct there is zero lag.

I work with 3 1440x900 virtual screens. It’s more than enough for coding and
the convenience of multiple screens for free offsets the low resolution.

~~~
jmiskovic
Did you try increasing internal texture resolution? It makes text crispier.
The framerate will drop, but it's tolerable for this use case. I find it very
useful. There are various resolutions supported, this is the highest where
increase in quality should be most noticeable:

$ adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 2048 && adb shell setprop
debug.oculus.textureHeight 2048

You have to start application after this is executed. To go back to original,
you can reboot device or run this:

$ adb shell setprop debug.oculus.textureWidth 1280 && adb shell setprop
debug.oculus.textureHeight 720

~~~
hackerbabz
I don't even know where to type that in. Do you somehow access a terminal on
the oculus or does that send a command from my computer to the oculus?

------
BIackSwan
Tailscale - riding on the wireguard wave -
[https://tailscale.com/](https://tailscale.com/)

Also Wireguard - [https://www.wireguard.com/](https://www.wireguard.com/)

~~~
canada_dry
> Tailscale

I'd recommend this alternative that _doesn 't require a 3rd party_ \- which is
one of the reasons to implement wireguard over a traditional VPN:

[https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace](https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace)

------
api
The general trend toward returning computing to the edge, which is just
starting and has been accelerated due to COVID forcing BeyondCorp type
practices on us.

Cognitive radio, ultra wide spread spectrum, and other radio tech that
promises great range and license free or minimal licensing operation due to
lack of interference with other stuff.

Rust is the first serious C/C++ replacement contender IMHO.

RISC-V and other commodity open source silicon.

Cheaper faster ASIC production making custom silicon with 100X+ performance
gains feasible for more problems.

Zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic crypto, etc.

~~~
mwcampbell
> The general trend toward returning computing to the edge

By "the edge", do you mean users' devices, or just more local data centers a
la Cloudflare?

~~~
api
I mean users' devices and to a lesser extent things like federated
infrastructure that's "closer to the user" socially speaking.

It's a trend in the earliest stages, sort of like cloud was in the early
2000s.

------
tootie
Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and
it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of
touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.

~~~
luckylion
How accurate are those sensors? I've often thought how nice it would be to get
rid of the mouse and use sensors to figure out where exactly on my screen I'm
looking.

~~~
tootie
Mouse-level accuracy requires a well-calibrated setup and the correct size
monitor and sitting posture. If you want to do something like a Square POS
checkout and need to distinguish a random visitor looking at 4 buttons, it
would be pretty forgiving.

~~~
luckylion
Thank you, so not yet an option for me; I doubt my posture and sitting
position is regular enough that calibration would work for me.

Might, at some point, be a welcome addition to a touch pad though. If you
touch the pad and your pointer is far away to where you're looking, jump to
the area and do the fine tuning with the fingers.

~~~
mokanfar
I already do that without the need of a touch pad, just use your numpad keys
as a mouse if you're on windows look into mouse.ahk. Tobii will snap mouse to
where you're looking at and senses mouse is moving. Works great when you want
to stay on home row, selecting text with it though, not as good.

------
followtherhythm
Redpanda [https://vectorized.io/](https://vectorized.io/)

~~~
threeseed
Looks like the ScyllaDB playbook i.e. rewrite a popular Java app in C++ and
sell it as a much faster product.

Going to be interesting to see if they survive as the pace of JVM improvements
has been rapidly increasing in the last year or so.

~~~
agallego
thanks, though what we sell is operational simplicity. speed is nice, but not
the main benefit. a single binary that's easy to run is what CIO seem to be
interested. though we are young. fingers crossed it works :)

~~~
philipkglass
I agree that operational simplicity will sell this to more organizations than
performance will. There just aren't that many companies in the world that are
bumping up against the scaling limits of Kafka.

When I look at the landing page of vectorized.io it touts the speed repeatedly
without mentioning this simplicity pitch you find deeper in the site:

 _Redpanda is a single binary you can scp to your servers and be done. We got
rid of Zookeeper®, the JVM and garbage collection for a streamlined,
predictable system._

That does sound great! Put that information right up front.

~~~
agallego
Thank you! Will do! <3

------
seibelj
zksnarks [https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-
nutshell/](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/)

Essentially let’s you verify computation is accurate without doing the
computation yourself, and even treating the computation as a black box so you
don’t know what is computed. Many applications in privacy, but also for
outsourced computation.

~~~
CalmStorm
One important weakness of zkSnarks is that it requires a trusted setup, for
example [1]. A new alternative is called zk-STARK [2], which doesn't require
the trusted setup, and is post-quantum secure. However, it significantly
increases the size of the proof (around ~50KB). In general, hash-based post-
quantum algorithms require bigger size and it would be interesting to watch
the progress made in this regard.

[1][https://filecoin.io/blog/participate-in-our-trusted-setup-
ce...](https://filecoin.io/blog/participate-in-our-trusted-setup-ceremony/)

[2]
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf)

~~~
hanniabu
If I'm not mistaken, I believe they're found a way for a trustless setup a few
months ago. Unfortunately I don't have any more info on hand, but I remember
reading that in passing in regards to research performed by Ethereum
developers.

~~~
abecedarius
I'm not up on the math, but [https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-
proof-compositio...](https://electriccoin.co/blog/halo-recursive-proof-
composition-without-a-trusted-setup/) sounded like that sort of thing.

------
neonhat
Rainway: [https://rainway.com/](https://rainway.com/) Google Stadia:
[https://stadia.google.com/](https://stadia.google.com/)

It's not even about gaming. Fuck gaming. It's about the underlying streaming
technology.

Imagine this same tech being used by a surgeon to perform surgery remotely.
That's the type of use case I'm thinking about!

~~~
grogenaut
the reason these things work is because they use a datacenter in your city.
Thats why low latency. You'd have to have doctor in the same locality, which
is not what I think you are thinking.

------
vich
Not sure if this counts, but I look forward to seeing the future of meat
alternatives - impossiblefoods.com, beyondmeat.com, eatnuggs.com, etc.

~~~
iameoghan
BioTech definitely counts haha

------
gok
Arm and RISC-V are both getting scalable vector compute support. Could lead to
GPU-like compute capabilities without all the goofiness of GPUs.

The H.266 / VVC video compression standard will be finalized in a few months.
Ignoring licensing issues (yes patents blah blah blah) industry-wide
efficiency wins like that are always nice.

Generative machine learning (think GANs for images or GPT-2 for text) can be
applied to video games. Truly unique narrative experiences!

Everything remote work-related. I previously thought my career would miss the
WFH revolution and most knowledge workers would still go to the office until
at least 2050, but now it seems clear that is going to get dramatically
accelerated.

------
rsync
NextDNS (nextdns.io) is a genius idea that I very much wish I had thought of.
I am a paying customer as of this past week and am integrating it in all the
places I always meant to put a pihole ...

~~~
hanniabu
Is there nothing like this that's open source and can be used locally instead
of the cloud?

~~~
Yoofie
I think you are looking for Pihole. [1]

[1]: [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

------
young_unixer
Low-level stuff & Linux: RISC-V, Vulkan, Wayland, Sway WM, Wireguard, Zig.

Web or high-level stuff: deno, Svelte, Vue, Webassembly, WebGPU, Flutter.

~~~
bionhoward
I had a blast writing a graph editor in Svelte but it was hard to debug. That
was right after 3.0 came out, if it’s easier to debug now then I would love to
build with it

------
onimishra
Uizard - Using machine learning to get from a drawing to ui and code. As a
programmer, I’m looking forward to getting a head start on my personal
projects, before I need to involve a designer

[https://uizard.io/](https://uizard.io/)

------
pgt
Differential Dataflow is going to change the way apps are built:
[https://materialize.io/](https://materialize.io/)

------
gsvclass
I'd say my project Super Graph it's a GraphQL to SQL compiler in GO. It saves
developers thousands of man-hours and 10x their productivity. 80% of web
backend coding is struggling with ORMs, SQL and writing APIs. Super Graph does
away with all that. A simple GraphQL queries get you the data you need.

[https://github.com/dosco/super-graph](https://github.com/dosco/super-graph)

------
cpursley
Hasura + React Admin.

Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low
code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form
app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours.

This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: [https://github.com/Steams/ra-
data-hasura-graphql](https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql)

~~~
iameoghan
That's really handy to know. Was looking for an alternative to forest admin.

------
threeseed
NVME over Fabric.

Only started to become available last year in AWS' more expensive instance
types. But hoping it will become more widespread.

Benchmarks with Spark result in real world performance improvements of 2-3x
and SSDs will be much faster with PCIe4.0.

~~~
cperciva
The m5 instance family was announced in 2017, IIRC.

~~~
threeseed
Sure but the Elastic Fabric Adapter is only on the top tier of instance types.

Hoping it trickles down for us normal people.

~~~
cperciva
Oh, I thought you were talking about how EBS disks are presented as NVMe even
though they run over the EC2 network fabric.

------
clouddrover
Further EV improvements. Companies like Lucid and Lightyear are doing
interesting things on the EV efficiency side, though their cars are not aimed
at the mass market. Lightyear is looking to commercialize their solar panels
for other automakers as well:

[https://lucidmotors.com/](https://lucidmotors.com/)

[https://lightyear.one/](https://lightyear.one/)

Volkswagen and Hyundai are doing interesting things on the mass market side of
EVs. Volkswagen is now the number 1 BEV maker in Europe and will probably
become number 1 in China in a year or two:

[https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-
elec...](https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-electric-car-
market-top-sellers)

Hyundai is also starting a big EV push. Their future 800-volt cars should be
interesting:

[https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-
pro...](https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-prophecy-
concept-ride-review)

------
poletopole
Wasmer is a project I'm watching closely for many reasons. I feel as WASM
becomes more commonplace the role Wasmer plays will become clearer.

------
mjirv
1\. Fishtown Analytics - makes dbt, a sql data modeling tool that has really
caught on in the analytics world over the last year or two

2\. Bubble - no-code!

3\. Stripe - already big but has the potential to be the next Google/FB/MSFT
etc

------
sidcool
Rocket propulsion tech. Not just because of SpaceX, but I really hope we
develop newer and more efficient propulsion techniques.

~~~
sq_
I'm definitely excited to see how the VASIMR tech being developed by Ad Astra
pans out, and whether anybody manages to build a functional nuclear thermal
rocket. Hopefully the new super-heavy-lift capacity that's expected in the
coming decade will help to enable the groups working on those and other
designs.

------
blackrock
I recently wondered if you can take your saliva, or blood, and get a
diffraction scan of it.

Kind of like a spectrograph. You’d feed this into a machine learning system,
and it would match up your pattern against a known dataset.

This might allow for faster identification and recognition, of known viruses
and diseases.

Especially if the technology can identify the virus from just your spit.

~~~
koeng
Current methods can pretty easily identify the virus from just your spit (in
fact, that's a protocol that is pretty widely used for different
applications). The biggest problem is that normally you need to concentrate
the virus in order to get detectable range for earlier days of infection.
Seems like the range is approximately ~2 days earlier with concentrating vs
spit only, which is actually significant.

All diseases (other than prions) are just nucleic acid, so that's already
possible. Nanopore sequencing is the future and will eat most other
technologies lunch.

~~~
azureus
We're a nanopore sequencing shop. Couldn't agree with you more that nanopore
generally is the future, not just for sequencing. Can't wait for ONT's solid
state nanopore flow cells - you may get flowcells that go 2/3 times as long
then.

But then for most things .. the problem is the prep, not just because the
whole portability thing goes for a toss. Yay, great the sequencer is the size
of a USB drive, but the rest of the lab isn't :/

More worryingly the biggest and most stubborn cost is now the prep, not the
sequencing.

As you correctly pointed out - need to find a way around amplification - then
both of these problems above go away if you can do direct PCR free sequencing.

The other less mentioned problem related to the above is also the need for
parallelisation - some of those ultra low costs you read about can only be
realised when you sufficiently multiplex your samples. For instance, its about
100 USD per reaction for ligation (last step of prep before the sequencing
starts), you generally wait till you're sequencing atleast 12 samples in the
same reaction so that you're paying <10$ per sample, not 100$ per sample,
which is obviously insane.

~~~
koeng
The key is to do barcoding at the PCR amplification step. That way, you can
get away with barcoding hundreds of samples in a single tube.

Really the prep screws it any other way. Is ONT coming out with solid state?
Got a reference?

~~~
azureus
Solid state nanopores: still in research: [https://nanoporetech.com/how-it-
works/types-of-nanopores](https://nanoporetech.com/how-it-works/types-of-
nanopores)

I'm pretty sure they will come out with it. The protein nanopores were the
first wave of nanopore research - its tried tested and stable now so they
stick with it.

A few years after they launched, the first solid state nanopores were being
demonstrated in the lab. Commercialising solid state nanopores seems to be
easier if anything than protein nanopores because they slot right into silicon
fabrication.

On PCR/barcoding .. Yeah, thats right - do it right in the PCR step ..
sometimes we avoid it, if we are not yet sure about the protocol. I think what
I meant to say is that the full promise of nanopore sequencing for me is
achieved only when you can skip having to amplify/multiplex/barcode - just
extract dna, wash, add sequencing adaptors and go - for almost anything.

I think the way they are talked about people generally come in expecting that
TODAY .. they think they can literally stick a single sample with no prep and
get 1gb of sequencing done for 10$ in an hour. I've seen quite a lot of that.
(even from people with PhD's :) )

So yeah its more that the minute you go PCR, you're in for a minimum 20$ per
sample, often its the highest cost line item in your whole process.

If you're doing things like 16S metagenomics, you get sequencing at 2-3$ and
prep at 10 times that, starts to feel "wrong" after a while, if you get what I
mean.

Why're trying everything we can to make sure we're running at full capacity so
that we can always give low prices even if its single samples.

Also seeing if we can reduce prep cost with microfluidics/mems - they have
voltrax for this, but there are a few other vendors in the market. That has
the positive knock-on effect of also reducing labour cost.

------
chrischen
1\. Functional strictly typed programming patterns. It's hard to say if
functional languages themselves will get adoption, but we definitely see
functional patterns being used more and more in languages like Javascript, and
being pushed in things like React/Redux.

2\. Graphql/service-based architectures

~~~
bionhoward
The jargon of FP is crazy though! How do you learn all of that?

~~~
darksaints
There are two subcommunities in the world of functional strictly typed
programming languages. The Haskell camp is where you get the mind bending
jargon and ivory tower ideas. Luckily, there is another camp that eschews this
head-in-the-clouds thinking and sticks to practical matters first and
foremost. You'll want to look for the ML family of languages: SML, Rust,
Ocaml, F#, and Scala (my favorite of them all, but for some reason some people
are trying to turn it into Haskell on the JVM).

------
lpaone
I am very interested in new energy solutions as a way to de-carbonize and
provide consistent supply of low cost energy.

1\. Green hydrogen production and fuel cells. We are just scratching the
surface of green hydrogen production. Hydrogen can be the energy carrier we
need in the various use cases where batteries are not viable.

2\. Nuclear SMRs. Definitely something that is more of a "something to watch".

3\. Pumped hydro. The longest lasting, highest capacity, lowest cost, 0
carbon, grid-scale energy storage solution. I have been closely follow a
company I found on HN call Terrament.
[https://www.terramenthq.com](https://www.terramenthq.com)

------
stanislavb
It's definitely Elixir/Phoenix/Phoenix-LiveView. I'm even planning on using
that tech stack in an upcoming project.

------
keithwhor
If you have time this long weekend, the team behind Autocode (Standard
Library) [0] is looking for feedback. We launched a couple months ago here on
HN and have been eating up community responses. :)

tl;dr is: we provide the entire development stack for API integration on
rails. If you've ever wanted to ship some quick webhook or API integration
logic but have found Zapier too limiting but spinning up an entire dev stack
overkill, Autocode fits cleanly in between both. In-browser IDE, API
autocomplete, a drag-and-drop UI that generates code for you, version control,
revision history, cloud hosting for your APIs. Takes a minute or two to ship a
webhook from scratch.

Disclaimer: Am founder. Am also happy to hear questions, thoughts, anything!

[0] [https://stdlib.com/](https://stdlib.com/)

~~~
iameoghan
I've been using Autocode on & off for a while. Thanks for the reminder to
recheck it.

~~~
keithwhor
No problem! We just released major updates this week. :)

------
KhoomeiK
Deep Learning driven NLP. We've seen massive advancements in research, but
from personal experience working with a few startups, these new forms of NLP
are just beginning to hit the market now (most companies are still using
Classical NLP techniques like part of speech tagging etc). It's a huge space
and I can't wait to see its use cases expand.

Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Augmented Reality. As someone in this thread mentioned for self-driving cars,
I think the hype cycle for AR is in the right spot for us to begin seeing real
advancements in the next couple years, especially with Apple's recent
announcement.

------
entha_saava
Svelte

Flutter

Zig, Nim & Crystal programming languages

Please.build (bazel clone in Go)

GraalVM's native image and CoreRT for .NET (though not much is heard about
progress on CoreRT)

~~~
akudha
I've wanted to try mobile programming for a while (I am a web dev). Is Flutter
a good choice for a mobile beginner like me, who hasn't done any mobile
programming at all?

~~~
entha_saava
I'd say yes, although learning dart maybe take a week or two in worst case.
Flutter, as opposed to react native, is quite easy to set up. The declarative
UI paradigm is nice.

~~~
akudha
one two weeks is not bad at all for a new language. Thank you for answering.

I hope Google doesn't lose interest in Flutter and shutter it.

Any thoughts on using Flutter for the web?

~~~
entha_saava
Haven't used flutter for web. Apparently it uses canvas. Ok for getting shit
done in some cases.

------
carapace
[https://terminusdb.com](https://terminusdb.com)

[https://www.categoricaldata.net](https://www.categoricaldata.net)

\- - - -

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

------
jdub
Honeycomb will hopefully (continue to) upend the "logs, metrics, and traces"
world.

[https://honeycomb.io/](https://honeycomb.io/)

------
thetwentyone
Programming languages count as technology, right?

I'm really excited for what Julia is doing - making a really nice ecosystem of
modern, dynamic, high performance code.

~~~
iameoghan
Absolutely.

------
tmaly
I think 3d printing still had enormous potential.

They are printing jet engine parts with it these days.

~~~
holler
when can I print a hamburger? that’s when I’ll know we have made it to the
future!

~~~
tmaly
I think something like this is already in the works. But I think the food
replicators from Star Trek Next Generation would be better is we had the tech.

------
say_it_as_it_is
Was bitcoin or blockchain mentioned on HN back when it wasn't on many radars?

~~~
coderintherye
It was being talked about as early as 2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704924)

I remember a lot of discussion in 2011 on it.

~~~
javert
I don't remember exact dates, but I can confirm this. I heard about bitcoin
fairly early on from this site.

------
zadler
AI assisted code completion.

~~~
darksaints
We have had AI-assisted code completion for a long time now. It used an
obscure and esoteric form of Symbolic AI better known as type systems.

------
cinquemb
Brain computer interfaces and related research papers/techniques

------
codeisawesome
I'd like StarLink (or something else like it!) to succeed increase internet
adoption massively around the planet.

------
bayesian_horse
Synthetic biology. Microalgae (food, biofuel, Co2 sequestration).

------
vbezhenar
Rust. It's an extremely interesting language for me, I'm trying to learn bits
of it every few years and while I still don't have any real tasks, I just love
its development. May be it'll be the last and only programming language that
everyone will use for the foreseeable future.

------
signaru
Dot Net Core (C#/Winforms) compiling to native code.

ReactOS/Wine. Lately I'm getting worried about where the Windows OS seems to
be headed. ReacOS slowly catching up, but recent developments seem to be
promising. There's still many things I need that are not multi/cross-platform.

------
kiwicopple
If anyone is particularly brave, we are a new platform which is like Firebase,
except it's built with Postgres:

[https://app.supabase.io](https://app.supabase.io)

We are are essentially rebuilding
[DabbleDB]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB))
for the UI, and you get a bunch of middleware which is auto-generated: REST
APIs, Realtime (CDC), auto-updating documentation. Also we will tackle some of
the more difficult tasks for Postgres like replicating your database close to
your users.

Also we're opensource!
[https://github.com/supabase/](https://github.com/supabase/)

~~~
npv789
implement graphQL would be nice

------
chrdlu
Circle.so ([https://circle.so/](https://circle.so/))

With a rapidly growing creator economy, the tooling around building custom
communities is very far behind. The cutting edge is a Facebook group, Slack
channel, or a Discord server.

~~~
hanniabu
Would totally use it if they had discord login integration so it'd be easy to
migrate our community over.

------
mab122
More IPFS applications, integrations and services build on it.

As for "competition" like scuttlebut. I would love sneaker-mesh -net type
mobile killer app that would actually work.

Hell I would even mind if facebook implemented something that would work when
centrilized infrastructure fails.

------
randtrain34
Deno.land

~~~
lukevp
Have you given it a try yet? I LOVE TypeScript and think the concept is really
cool, but the compatibility story for NPM packages needs to be fleshed out
somehow. Otherwise I fear it will fall into the same fate as Python 2 to 3.

------
m101
www.CloudNC.com

Basically, 1) bringing down the cost of CNC machined parts down to their
marginal cost through automation, 2) reducing that marginal cost through
higher machine utilisation rates, and 3) reducing turn around times and
accuracy of parts to clients.

~~~
enginoor
ProtoLabs is already successful in this space. I wonder what competitive
advantage CloudNC has?

~~~
m101
They are trying to automate the g-code generation that controls the CNC
machine. At the moment a human operator uses an intermediary piece of software
to create that.

------
sammnaser
Tailscale.

~~~
reinhardt1053
I wouldn't trust such 3th party service. It's better to host everything
yourself and for free:
[https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace](https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace)

------
idoby
Quantified self tech and personalized medicine tech. Stem cell stuff. Genetic
therapy stuff. We're moving from an age where a doctor was a static map of
symptoms => treatments to an age where far more personalized data and
processes are considered. The paradigm is also slowly shifting on being able
to _reverse_ rather than just avoid or prevent certain conditions and
situations.

The level of sophistication is already making some doctors feel obsolete, by
their own admission to me. If we don't get to live in exciting times, our
children and grandchildren surely will.

------
treelovinhippie
Holochain: [https://developer.holochain.org](https://developer.holochain.org)

When you eventually grasp it, makes blockchain look like we took took a wrong
turn in 2008.

~~~
WookieRushing
I took a quick look at Holochain and its got the regular set of better than
bitcoin/ethereum claims that most alt coins say. Its saying its more efficient
and safer to use than other blockchain languages. Now these are really big
claims so let's see what its got!

Looking at [https://holochain.org/](https://holochain.org/) , most of my scam
senses are not going off tooo much. Its got some weird testimonials and then a
white paper! So far so good.

Ok, lets skip to the white paper. Now what I'm looking for here is mainly how
do you verify computations are valid amidst BFT and sybil attacks.

So its got some stuff about how every message received can be verified by the
receiver by using "validation rules". Okay... so we can use custom validation
rules that each receiver can define and run themselves. Fine, one such rule
could be Bitcoins proof of work.

So it can be as expensive as Bitcoin. Now of course there can be other rules
that are less expensive of Bitcoin, but theres a big reason Bitcoin's PoW is
so expensive... Its been battle tested and looked at by 1000s of people to
verify that its correct and can resist just about anything up to a 51% bad
node attack. Allowing any program to define its own set of validation rules in
the hopes that they will be faster doesn't make things safer. It just makes it
more likely for fails. This looks like the major contribution that Holochain
is trying to make. Let everyone write their own proof of work functions that
suits their needs and mess it up. The number of ethereum dapps that failed to
write safe contract is proof enough that this will happen in an identical
fashion.

Did I miss something? Maybe there really is something here thats new, but I'm
not seeing it at first glance. Its doesn't look a scam though so its got that
going for it

~~~
treelovinhippie
If you're coming from the blockchain scene you really won't get it at first
glance. I first started mining Bitcoin in 2010 at $0.50 each, then went heavy
into Ethereum from 2014. It took me a few weeks of deep-diving to unlearn a
lot of the conditioning imprinted in the blockchain bubble.

Holochain has no mining, no staking, no core token, no fees, no global
consensus, no global ledger, it's not a platform, and there's no possibility
of a 51% attack.

It's more akin to a P2P protocol/framework/pattern where users store their
data and run apps locally, and where each app is its own private distributed
network. Underpinning all of that are cryptographic counter-signing events and
immutable hash chains.

In addition they have a parallel project called Holo (yeh confusing) that acts
as an _optional_ hosting bridge for Holochain apps to offer a simple UX for
normal web users. With Holo, developers can pay a distributed network of hosts
in HOT (this is the coin you see on exchanges) to serve their happ/dapp like
any regular website via Cloudflare DNS. No browser extensions required, nor
any need to buy crypto to interact with Holochain apps. HOT for now is an
ERC20 but will swap for a Holo mutual credit currency in the near future.

Sidenote: when you grasp mutual credit cryptocurrencies you'll also see all
traditional cryptocurrency tokens as nothing more than speculative gambling
chips.

This is a pretty good Holochain intro podcast if you're coming from the
blockchain scene: [https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/holo-
mixdown](https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/holo-mixdown)

Also checkout HoloREA and REA accounting (resource-event-agent). This is a
good podcast on it with some mates of mine; we all worked at ConsenSys with a
longer history in Ethereum before coming to the difficult realisation that
Ethereum was the perpetuation of everything wrong with the global economy:
[https://soundcloud.com/user-376287461/holochainpodcast-2-pos...](https://soundcloud.com/user-376287461/holochainpodcast-2-pospi-
sam-holo-rea-resource-event-agent)

------
buboard
Anything to do with Genomics - DNA sequencing costs less than $200 nowadays.
Info-tech doesnt have much more to offer with humans being as faulty as they
are. Biotech is the next frontier

------
ur-whale
Next generation autonomous evtols:

[https://www.jobyaviation.com/](https://www.jobyaviation.com/)

[https://kittyhawk.aero/](https://kittyhawk.aero/)

[https://lilium.com/](https://lilium.com/)

[https://www.volocopter.com/](https://www.volocopter.com/)

[https://www.daedalean.ai/](https://www.daedalean.ai/)

------
Findeton
Light-field technology. I believe its time has come. Actually I'm working on
creating a cheap light-field camera and the pipeline from the video processing
to the video player.

------
interestica
3D Bioprinting : corneas.

------
LargoLasskhyfv
[1] [https://www.yokogawa.com/yjp/solutions/solutions/minimal-
fab...](https://www.yokogawa.com/yjp/solutions/solutions/minimal-fab/)

[2] [https://www.searchforthenext.com/](https://www.searchforthenext.com/)

[3] [https://www.efinixinc.com/products-
trion.html](https://www.efinixinc.com/products-trion.html)

------
sidhanthp
[https://www.letsdeel.com](https://www.letsdeel.com) \- super easy payroll for
remote teams. Onboarding / payments is awesome.

------
peralp
Sysdig [1] great monitoring platform for containers on K8S

[https://sysdig.com/](https://sysdig.com/)

------
KerryJones
1\. Wing - Drone Delivery ([https://wing.com/](https://wing.com/))

2\. Nanorobitics for dentistry
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3723292/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3723292/))

------
jatinshah
zk-S[NT]ARKs and related zero knowledge tech along with scalability
improvements to Ethereum is poised to revolutionize financial tech. It will
take decades to play out much like consumer PC and internet and we are still
in very early stages.

But when it really picks up the impact will be as big as when Dutch invented
modern finance in early 1600s.

------
imsofuture
Cadence [https://cadenceworkflow.io/](https://cadenceworkflow.io/)

------
jes5199
Heliogen [https://heliogen.com/](https://heliogen.com/)

Prometheus Fuels
[https://www.prometheusfuels.com/](https://www.prometheusfuels.com/)

C2CNT [https://www.c2cnt.com/](https://www.c2cnt.com/)

------
zubairlk
No/low code platforms such as bubble.io

~~~
iameoghan
Absolutely. I enjoy Bubble - should have put it on the list.

Any other platforms that have caught your attention?

------
jppope
Ginkgo bioworks, Oxidize, WASM (& Deno), Serverless via Isolates (e.g.
Cloudflare workers), Neurolink, OpenAI

------
elevenoh
Life extension interventions.

We're just beginning to see the dam break on funding life extension R&D.

------
niftylettuce
I wasn't impressed with the engineering and JS client-side bundles on
Integromat.

~~~
statictype
What was wrong with it? And why did you need to interact with it at all, I'm
curious.

~~~
niftylettuce
A customer wanted me to help them integrate the API I built for
[https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net) with it. They have
client-side bundles that threw errors and the pages rendered blank.

------
michaelbrave
My list would be:

1\. Swift - you can mix functional and object oriented code in a way I've not
seen anywhere else. It's also going to be multi platform including windows in
the next version and it's making inroads with Swift-Tensorflow. I can see a
lot of really cool things coming from this once it's multi platform.

2\. Jai Language by Jonathan Blow. I'm not sure when it will come out but
what's been shown looks promising, a game specific language could cause other
innovations that could later carry over to other languages.

3\. Next Gen Consoles. X-box Series X and PS5 are both doing some cool things
with memory management, SSD's and GPU's. Many of these innovations will make
it to PC's later.

4\. New Email features (superhuman and HEY - by DHH) It seems like innovation
is finally actually happening in this space.

5\. Game Engine Innovations. Hammer 2 has some really cool UI for level
design, Unreal 5 has some great lighting and handling of 3D, ID tech is using
3D decals to cool effect while not being expensive. A lot of the technology
happening in games will spill over into other areas, Unity is doing stuff with
the automative industry, Unreal with Architecture.

6\. AI in use of Making Art. A good example is Unity's new artengine
(artomatix). [https://artomatix.com/](https://artomatix.com/)

7\. Generative Design for engineering.

8\. Dreams on ps4 - How quickly people can make something in this is amazing,
if it ended up on PC or VR it could change everything.

9\. AR as a tool for creators more than as a tool for consumers. 3D
interactive CAD like Iron Man is more exciting than a game that makes you
dizzy.

~~~
modeless
+1 for Dreams; it's revolutionary. Their rendering technology is black magic.
It deserves far more attention than it will ever get trapped on PS4 with a $40
price tag. Dreams on PC with a free-to-play model and real-time collaborative
editing would be the next Minecraft/Roblox.

------
alasdair_
Node Red is nice. I used it today inside of Home Assistant to automate some
stuff.

------
darksaints
SeL4, Nix/NixOS, and 1ML.

------
_____smurf_____
[https://endrainc.com/](https://endrainc.com/) This technology can have a huge
impact on people's lives (specially in the global south).

------
machinesbuddy
About [4]: The dumbest idea I've ever seen is to provide a platform to build
software without writing code.

You make the job 1000x harder to prevent a few lines of code! Just make the
coding part easier.

~~~
machinesbuddy
Take PlantUML sequence diagrams for example. Which one is easier? Drag-drop,
fix, etc or just few lines?

[https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram](https://plantuml.com/sequence-diagram)

------
ayushgp
+1 for Hasura. It's such a pleasure to use. Having a configurable backend with
so much fine grained Authorization. It's just awesome. It literally cuts your
project time in half.

------
niftylettuce
[https://lad.js.org](https://lad.js.org)

used to build [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net)

------
vaibhavthevedi
I had hopes with MagicLeap but then it's going through a roller coaster ride.
Still they are on my "to watch" list.

Things like Apple AR glass leak makes me hooked to AR and VR.

------
vijayshankarv
[https://hash.ai/](https://hash.ai/)

Hash is a platform for simulation and I think this kind of stuff will become
increasingly important.

------
nuclid
[https://resistant.ai](https://resistant.ai) looks pretty sci-fi. They
basically protect AI systems from AI-enabled attackers.

------
Awtem
Homomorphic encryption.

------
_theory_
Electric VTOL for the masses: basically flying cars.

[https://www.agilityprime.com/](https://www.agilityprime.com/)

------
mudge
Webscript:
[https://github.com/mudgen/webscript](https://github.com/mudgen/webscript)

------
peter_retief
[7][http://www.graphene-battery.net/index.htm](http://www.graphene-
battery.net/index.htm)

------
leke
The one that has me most excited on OP's list is Strapi. It's the only one
that I see myself using in the very near future.

~~~
iameoghan
I really like it.

My one criticism is that the docs are always slightly out of date. I would
love more flexibility in the queries i.e. being able to do advanced queries on
multiple collections, rather than having to resort to raw SQL. It'll get there
I'm sure.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
[https://www.pulumi.com/](https://www.pulumi.com/)

------
alasdair_
Augmented reality. With every major tech company working on it, the next fee
years will be interesting.

------
yters
Applying intelligent design theory to bioinformatics and AI. A lot of untapped
potential IMHO.

------
mister_hn
Rust programming language for its claimed safety

Stripe for payments

Kubernetes for cloud services and K8S on raspberry pi clusters

------
alphast0rm
Ethereum becoming the value settlement layer of Web 3.0 [1]. Stablecoins have
proven to be the killer dApp and there are ~$10B in circulation currently [2].

[1] [https://ethereum.org/](https://ethereum.org/)

[2] [https://stablecoinstats.com/](https://stablecoinstats.com/)

~~~
dudus
10B Distributed Monopoly dollars.

------
n_t
Unikernels - seems promising and yet ecosystem is not there. I think it's
matter of time.

------
data_ders
dbt (data built tool). Brining SWE best practices to analytics engineering.
about damn time!

------
nkg
Machine Learning. I want an Alexa that would know how to learn and extend
itself.

------
pedalpete
Soft-EEGs

inference AI (signed up for the Google Alpha, but also looking at Elastic)

Sleep research as a generality

------
diehunde
\- Anything in the NVRAM space

\- Modern database companies such as Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, MemSQL

\- Hashicorp

------
pot8n
eBPF

------
fortran77
Push-to-talk "walkie-talkie" style audio. It's very handy, bit it's a learning
curve and 20-somethings today hate talking to people. I think it could catch
on (again _) eventually.

_ see the "CB Radio" craze of the 1970s.

------
brainzap
Javascript libraries that compile instead of shipping a runtime.

------
rajaravivarma_r
Is there any technology/start up trying to cure baldness?

------
setudeora
it's deem true
[https://www.programmingoneonone.com/](https://www.programmingoneonone.com/)

------
Ken_Adler
My current favorite Shiny new thing: www.Grain.co

------
caogecym
Neuralink - reduce friction of verbal commutation

------
CareyB
Energy generation, and storage.

------
fastbmk
FreeBSD

------
mandown2308
Neuralink

------
bra-ket
Datadog

~~~
caogecym
Yep, they are great! Using them for my cloud version HTTP client -
[https://ihook.us](https://ihook.us)

------
frostcs
6

------
edoo
Jeeva wireless has been on my radar for years now. Wifi at 1/1000th of the
normal power. They were supposed to be at market by now with $0.50 transceiver
chips. Last I heard they made a cell phone that didn't require batteries.
[https://www.jeevawireless.com/](https://www.jeevawireless.com/)

------
grahamg
comma.ai - They produce the aftermarket hardware for openpilot. It's a open
source driver-assistance system that performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise
Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) for compatible vehicles. Many
car vendors already do this, but based on some footage it requires less user
intervention.

~~~
mindfulplay
The most dangerous type of technology: putting silicon valley mindset to a
critical, deadly torpedo is not just risky but callous.

Falling to these (hotz/musk) people's perceived intellect as somehow
determining the success of self-driving cars is a bit disingenuous.

------
rstorr
holochain.org & codelingo.io

------
x3haloed
Uh mine. Duh.

------
jhoechtl
Contact me in private so I can charge you my valuable advice for profitable
investment.

------
x_stealth
We are in stealth for a while. And our demos have been getting WOWs.

For early access here : [https://bit.ly/36mEU6Q](https://bit.ly/36mEU6Q)

------
choonway
What I'm watching is not on anyone's list.

~~~
iameoghan
....

~~~
choonway
If you have to know, it's the engineering equivalent of trying to divide by
zero in Math.

~~~
yters
An invention invention?

