Ask HN: What new technology / software are you waiting for? - andrewstuart
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K0SM0S
I would say (profitable) fusion power (other than the Sun's...), but that may
be 20 or 2,000 or 2,000,000 years from now so...

I'll go with mind-controlling machines. I know the US military is already
quite advanced in that regard (trained pilots can control helicopters, jets
too iirc), we've all seen the monkey using a third mechanical arm after a few
minutes of training, there's this game with the ball in a magnetic field...
mind-controlling stuff is going to be immensely powerful. And so swell.

The human-machine interface (how fast we can transfer information into the
machine, how fast we can intake what it outputs) is the weakest link in the
chain. Improve that, and you massively improve our capabilities, our power to
do "everything else". Imho. And it would be so cool to feel like Jedis or Q's
hehe. And robotics, a "smart"-world IoT-enabled at every corner, and you get
an idea of a totally surreal world for us.

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code_code
This has me believing in nuclear energy again: .. www.moltexenergy.com ..
Molten salt in tubes. Walk-away safe. Economics estimated cheaper than coal.
Can burn existing wastes. Uses existing materials.

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ramtatatam
I'm waiting for feature-full postgres schema diff tool :) there are a few out
there, some written in C (so difficult to contribute to) but none is feature-
full.

~~~
karmakaze
Why is this hard? Can you just pg_dump the schema then diff?

Seems like this isn't something you have to wait for, you can start making one
in a language other than C (like Rust jk).

~~~
ramtatatam
It's very hard, merging schemas manually is painful and leads to errors. I'm
writing this from experience..

Such tool is on my list since long ago, but unfortunately there is only 24
hours in the day :)

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jolmg
Some years ago, I wrote a tool to merge databases. There were a few
differences in schema that it handled through configuration, but the tool was
mostly about changing primary and foreign keys as it transferred the data so
the merges wouldn't clash.

What's your use-case on "merging schemas"? Does it not merge data? Is it like
you have a database with a table with columns "foo", and "bar", and then
another database with a table with columns "bar", and "baz" and you want one
of the database to end up with columns "foo", "bar", and "baz" without moving
any of the actual data?

~~~
ramtatatam
I'm using all sort of building blocks, I recall functions, views, custom
types, triggers, publications on per-table basis. In most cases I don't allow
for my schemas to divert, but there had been situations like developing next
generation of the system where for reasons out of my memory I had to wait till
job was done and then merge schemas. Probably this could have been avoided but
in the same time I was not there when decisions was made :)

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Jack000
current generation "VR" is pretty underwhelming imo - it's literally a 3d
movie attached to your face, providing parallax but not depth of field. There
are things like magic leap that have 2 focal planes, but I don't know how well
they work in practice.

I'm waiting for real light field displays to come to market, which should have
a much more compelling experience. Maybe in 10 years...

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cjbprime
Would be nice to do more in VR -- waiting for high enough res for programming
and photorealistic avatars for video chat.

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karmakaze
Actually good videoconferencing. This means low-latency and high-resolution so
that you can see micro-expressions on the participants' faces in real-time not
lag-time.

This is more valuable than remote AR/VR.

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gradschool
a development tool chain to embed a Zig language application into an seL4
based unikernel image deployable interchangeably on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc.

an Intel-supported multi-platform open source ME disabler

an up-to-date untethered iOS jailbreak

peer to peer encrypted DNS

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Blakestr
I will take one Neural Lace, please.

