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Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?
63 points by mholt on Jan 22, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 77 comments
I'm bored/disappointed with all the major tech companies, including Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Intel, Twitter, Zoom, Slack, Amazon, Microsoft, pretty much all the unicorns that come out of Silicon Slopes, and several more.

Innovation largely seems to have stopped. Products and services shut down. Walls put up. Costs inflated. Privacy deflated. Overall lower user experience and satisfaction.

It's pretty discouraging. So tell me, what companies are you excited about and why? Who's actually making a positive difference and changing the world for good these days?

* Non-profits count too.

* Yes there are some exceptions (e.g. Apple's M1 chip; Google's Go language continues to get better) but on the whole these advances seem minor considering the companies' nearly infinite size and resources.



1) Personal favourite: Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)


> Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value

> https://brave.com

Do you trust Brave after they did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027?

> Signal (https://signal.org)

Signal is essentially s closed source walled garden now, because they do not publish their server code anymore.


The question was: "What companies are you excited about?"

I won't argue these organisatoins are perfect. Is that your criterion? I'm excited because I feel they are going in the right direction. That's why I'm using their services. I use Brave, but don't have the time to dive into things they are doing well or doing wrong. That's what we have investigative journalism for. I'm very happy to pay for that. By the way, I also use Signal. I also have a Fairphone. etc etc.

The next step after excitement is of course to convert excitement into action, and to actually support these organisations, through buying their stuff or making donations. Not because they are doing everything well, but because I personally believe they are helping to improve society.


About Brave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25839277


The source to their server seems open source licensed and available: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Wikipedia also says their server is open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)


So where is the source for the latest patch fixing this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803010 ?


"Open source" does not mean "all patches immediately published."


I'm curious how long you need to wait before you declare it non-open-source.


> I'm curious how long you need to wait before you declare it non-open-source.

I'm not sure there is a practical upper limit. Ghostscript for example for years only released as open source the version prior to the current one, and no one claimed that the existence of a proprietary fork invalidated the status of the open source version, no matter how long the delay between releases.

Admittedly there are differences, in Signal's case the deployed version is not currently released at all, but the worst case would be "open source version is no longer maintained", at which point I suspect that several forks would spring up, causing some confusion until one gained traction and dominance.

Right now, the latest release is 9 months old. This is certainly annoying and even concerning, but not yet cause for outright alarm, which can probably wait until March has gone by with no announced release schedule.


/e/ OS (e-foundation) is great, I love the privacy I get by cutting off Google from my life and still using Android apps. /e/ + FP3+ works great.


Most companies while started on technical innovations, gradually move to “MBA” driven organisations that usually try to secure their revenue, instead of taking risk. In that regard, open source itself is the biggest innovation of the 21st century. And I’m hopeful that open source will move to other technical area of innovation also.


SiFive [1] "SiFive is the first company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA"

I think they have a bright future ahead. If there was a way to buy their stock / invest in them, I would.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive


Excited about them too. I preordered their new ITX dev board, but it keeps getting pushed back.

Current date says end of March, so I hope it won’t be much longer than this summer.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWTvXbQHwWs is an interview with SiFive's Chris Lattner. RISC-V & SiFive looks like the next step once Moore's Law ends and we need another option to increase perf/watt and perf/$. Creating device-specific chips that drop the unwanted general purpose silicon seems like the way forward.


Great team there :) They should do a kickstarter for general purpose RISC-V CPU + Board I bet they would raise 200-300 mil.


> Great team there :) They should do a kickstarter for general purpose RISC-V CPU + Board I bet they would raise 200-300 mil.

That's 10x the largest Kickstarter to date, so might be a bit unrealistic, especially considering that what you are proposing isn't an end-user product.

How many boards+chips do you think such a Kickstarter campaign would sell, and at what price point?


SpaceX.

Watching Falcons land is one of the few things that still give me warn and reassuring feeling about the future.


Agreed and also Starlink from SpaceX. We moved about 2 hours outside of a major city center in anticipation of smart cars. Mainly for quality of life. Covid and starlink are making that more accessible to others. Solar development too maybe I haven't kept up with it like I should. Real estate is going through a huge shake up right now. Rural land prices are higher than I have seen in my lifetime.


As you’re talking about Apple, I find System76’s Linux computers, especially their notebooks [1] and their Ubuntu-based Pop! OS [2] a breeze of fresh air. This hardware/software combination gives me an Apple-like experience while committing to free software. The OS’s UX is very developer friendly as windows can be moved around and tiled using keyboard shortcuts. Then there’s a launcher bar similar to CMD+space on macOS. Pop! OS comes with their own app store (pop shop) which makes discovering and installing more apps dead simple. And the notebook’s build quality and performance is really good.

[1] https://system76.com/laptops

[2] https://pop.system76.com/


I really want to like system76 laptops, but I can't help but feel they are literally straight out of a prefab China warehouse, same old crummy quality plastic crap.


Build quality is surprisingly good to my experience (just received a Lemur Pro), as also confirmed by a couple of reviewers of that model.


How is the audio quality on that lemur pro. I have tinnitus and headphones make it worse. So far I have not been able to find a linux laptop with good speakers.


The built-in speakers are the weak point of the hardware config. They are at most of mediocre quality. Maybe they are replaceable with little effort? You could send an email to System76, they have excellent customer support.


I switched from being a long time mac user (macbook pro) to System76 and you'll never get Apple's build quality. I find the build quality disappointing compared to apple, but otherwise decent. Personally I'm happy with the purchase as, performance wise, it's really good and I <3 Linux (but I use Arch not PopOS). Something they really have got right is that everything is just super well supported and compatible. I never have any weird hardware issues.


They're Clevo systems, a reputable Taiwanese ODM that supplies many brands. Made in China but to good standards.

https://clevo-computer.com/en/


I'm on Apple M1 and doing Go, both of which were in the original post, but I have to say running Pop! on my trusty old (a decade?) ThinkPad T420 is very nice indeed. Lovely UI coupled with one of the greatest keyboards ever.


Not sure one should be excited about companies themselves, when I was more of a technophile (which I now certainly am not anymore) I used to be excited (for lack of a better word) about some particular people's concrete actions and deeds, most of them programmers or IT people (because I'm a programmer myself), but I'm sure that viewpoint can be extended to other domains, too.


Pine64 and especially the PinePhone with Convergence Kit.

I realise that this is pretty niche and still somewhat rough and unpolished - but the idea of being able to plug a dongle to your phone, connect monitor+mouse+keyboard to that dongle and have full, regular desktop operating system seems very intriguing to me.


UPMEM

They're etching a small CPU in each block of 4GB of RAM. This means a vast compute power at low electrical power. An Intel CPU spends 650 pJ transporting data from RAM, and then 3 pJ doing an addition. Data IO bandwidth and latency are most of the latency.

Programming paradigms with map-like processing are already structured to take advantage of it. Say you hava a Big Data Spark job. Chunk your partitions to be 2GB input, 2GB output; and your mapPartitions operation would be almost free.

I don't know how far they are in the deployment/market aspect though. But if I could invest in them, I would.

https://www.upmem.com/


Have a look at companies seeking the "Respects Your Freedom" certification by Free Software Foundation: https://ryf.fsf.org/products.


Why downvotes? I really think this is how we change the world for the better: by giving the users their rights.


NanoVMs (https://nanovms.com / https://nanos.org), a Linux-compatible unikernel for virtualized environments. You don't need to deploy a whole Linux distro, no binaries but your application, only the libraries that you need. No multi-user, no multi-process, nothing like that - just the unikernel, the required libraries and your application. This improves security (far fewer points of attack), startup time, memory consumption and it may also improve performance a bit.


Thanks for sharing this. Looks promising!


1) reMarkable Tablet (https://reMarkable.com/) - closest tablet experience to pen and paper.

2) Xolo (https://xolo.io/) - a SaaS-like way to run a company in Europe.


https://puri.sm/products, Social Purpose Corporation. They make security and privacy focused phones and computers designed for GNU/Linux.

They actually care about changing the industry for the better: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/


1) Chip makers (AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Apple etc). Chips are still improving. Theres always new applications to more compute eg: 3D work can be done on laptop now, realistic renders can be ray traced with consumer graphics cards, phones can do voice recognition and so on locally. I mentioned graphics a lot but video games look amazing and some will be photo-realistic in ~10 years.

2) Tesla and other car companies. Battery costs have reduced 10x in a few decades, cars now have OTA updates and increasingly sophisticated self driving abilities (already pretty good on the highway). Whole car industry is going to electrify in the next few decades.

3) Space X is making space transport way cheaper, and Starlink seems to be a great internet solution for remote areas.

3) Open source or donation based projects. Apps such as Blender, VLC, Signal continue to improve. Sites such as Our World in Data and Wikipedia provide amazing value. Open standards such as RISC-V, AV1 continue to push forward.

4) Wind and solar. Costs have reduced 10x in a few decades. The tech is being pushed to their efficiency limits, solar can still improve a lot. Of course, the intermittency of renewables remains an issue.


5) Companies in the rest of the world bringing 'boring' stuff to the masses there. A low cost airline growing in South Asia or a concrete plant opening in Nigeria or modern tractors replacing human labor in India all help raise the living standards. I feel that the level of tech that people in the West have is already pretty good, and there's diminishing returns to your dishwasher or TV improving. Having a global economy that gives everyone on earth a $50,000 living standard though will be a huge improvement.


I would also add Apple's health organization as an exception, for example they're rumored to have non-invasive glucose monitoring in the works for Apple Watch.


I hate those innovations at Apple, because if I want to help my relatives with their health and buy the watch, I also must buy the Apple phone and put them into the inescapable walled garden.


It's become somewhat more independent with family setup, where only the person setting it up needs an iPhone.


I’ve been using Notion as a personal knowledge base for a couple of years now, and I still feel a sense of joy every time I fire it up (countless times a day). It’s simple, yet elegant.

That said, I don’t know anything about the company. I’m excited about the product and where it’s headed.


I on the other hand passionately hate Notion because of the terrible UX.


I think 3D Hubs(https://www.3dhubs.com/) is pretty exciting!


I am excited about Project Vesta [1], which looks to me like one of the most feasible solutions to large-scale carbon capture.

[1] https://www.projectvesta.org


There was an MIT Tech Review article on mineral weathering that had quite a bit about this project.


TBH, I’d rather be excited about specific teams/groups of people regardless of where they work. The trouble these days is filtering out the “influencers” and the marketing image, since we seldom get good insights as to how they work together and what their intent is when building a product or part of a technology stack.

Thoughtful approaches are, IMHO, the best indicator of whether a company is going the right way.

So Cognitect seems like an interesting place, for instance.


I still kinda excited about OpenAI. Even though they did a massive bait and switch with the name, their offerings still none the less never fail to amaze me.

When GPT-3 first came out the results were jaw dropping for me. Now with Dall-e. Draw an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog.. who wouldn't find that amazing? So I'm just waiting what their next demo will be.


The GPT-3 result were jaw-dropping, until you realize that they have mostly been cherry picked out of multiple series of generated garbage.

But even if GPT-3 is good at text generation, what are practical applications of it except generating blog spam?

For a more hype-free review of GPT-3 I suggest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24907318


I've discovered some very cool uses of GPT-3 apart from spam (there is always good with bad i guess). Here are a few ways people are using it:

https://gpt3examples.com/


DeepMind software into Boston Dynamics hardware = singularity!?


Looking forward to some real world impact of Deepmind in material discovery and biology even more.


Telegram, I've been using this app for >6 years (I think).

The best chatting experience. SO much better that Watsapp


There’s massive innovation in biotech right now. RNA vaccines are winning the COVID battle, based on extremely cool technology (pseudouridine to evade innate immunity, two prolines to lock the spike in prefusion conformation, lipid nanovesicles for delivery,...). RNA drugs are also being developed to treat cancer (by vaccinating against patient-specific neoantigens), MS (by inducing immune tolerance to suppress autoimmunity), etc.

AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.

Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.

I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.

Biotech is where it’s at.


Anything beyond CRISPR & mRNA to look out for ? Was expecting cures for baldness, artifical tooth and a lot of other things by 2020. Have not heard of a step change but may be i am not aware.


purism. In fact I just got a computer from them. They make modern computers with Coreboot instead of proprietary bios. They need all our support!


System76 also use coreboot on their machines (I have a Lemur Pro).


thanks! I didn't know about them.


Jolla - one of the first companies trying to keep the dream of a full linux phone alive after Nokia buried it.

ReMarkable - very good hardware e-paper note taking tablet. It needs better software and I hope they'll grow enough to build it.


Edge Impulse - embedded (Tiny) ML GitHub-like platform. Just incredible. (https://edgeimpulse.com)

OnlineTown - Well executed spatial chat with a playful videogame interface. I think they've been posted about on here before. (https://theonline.town)

Neosensory (ok, it's a company I co-founded) - we do consumer sensory augmentation. Our first product, Buzz, is a haptic sensory substitution wristband that translates sound to touch in real-time. Also has a developer API. (https://neosensory.com)


The work at ILM for virtual production of films is pretty incredible, you can google how The Mandalorian was made and read a bit about stagecraft (their software) online


FFI (Fortescue Future Industries)

The chairman is giving a cracker of a talk on it this weekend: https://www.fmgl.com.au/docs/default-source/announcements/dr...


1. https://futureland.tv - A social network around daily journaling.

2. https://umami.is - A web analytics alternative to Google Analytics, allows self-hosting and much more.


I am waiting for the time when every "normal" website is so censored and shitty that the average joe is using tor. Then we can create a truly free internet and the cycle starts again. Seems like I have to wait just a few more years.


I'm volunteering at a super exciting non-profit where we are adding autonomous aerial vehicles to the arsenal of tools needed to fight the wildfires in CA.

If anyone wants to help in any way, please contact me by emailing my handle here at gmail.


Tesla. Far ahead of the competition in software, electronics and battery technology.


ive had this discussion with a couple of my friends- what exactly are the innovations in those three fields that put them so far ahead? do they make more efficient cells? their cars dont have anything particularly novel as far as i know, just well designed and made, as well as marketed. what is the software that tesla makes that is so good?


Tesla made electric cars cool and desirable (starting in the 2000's when most people associated electric with the prius). They've introduced or improved a lot of tech: better battery chemistry in new form factors, more efficient motors, over the air updates, nationwide fast charging network, increasingly sophisticated self driving features etc. Tesla is exiting because they paved the way for other car companies to electrify their products.


There is so much to tell, I will mention only a few key points for the each field.

Software: self driving capabilities (i.e. autopilot), FSD (Full Self Driving) beta, shadow-mode neural net testing, OTA (Over The Air) updates, games and entertaiment, Autobidder energy trading platform, etc. Battery: tabless design, dry electrode, new 4680 form-factor, nickel instead of cobalt, manufacturing and cost improvements, etc. Electronics: efficient motors and inverters, custom ASIC chip for FSD computer, Dojo supercomputer, etc. Mechanical engineering: "octovalve" thermal management, structural battery pack without modules, "mega casting" aluminium body design, etc.

Edit: forgot to mention supercharger network.


Doesn't exist yet but something/handbook to consistently create a reliable backend for X amount of usage & customise other aspects of a SaaS without worrying about the stuff under the hood.


Can you expand on this? Not sure I understand.


So a PaaS + app framework?


List of companies selling DRM-free media: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide.


https://oxide.computer/ Finally some serious innovation on Server Hardware side


What is the innovation? Their website is devoid of content about what they are building other than a string of buzzwords?

>We are building a new kind of server.

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


Basecamp and Hey, because I use their products and the byproducts of their products - Rails and Hotwire.


Probably Microsoft as they're the most dynamic and happening company out there. They also love Linux.


The one I just founded!




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