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Comment by EvanWard97 | Hacker News Reader

- 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.

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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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

> Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm)

OK, these are not safe wavelengths, and whatever you're reading is not right. This is absolutely ionizing radiation. The rate of formation of thymine dimers in this regime is similar to that around 260 nm. That is, it causes DNA damage. Please see Figure 8 below:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-1097....

The logic of the claim that you can destroy a pathogen with UV but not cause damage to human tissues is incongruous. If it kills the pathogen, it also causes radiation damage to human tissues as well. One cannot dissociate these because they are caused by the same photoionization mechanism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5552051/

> We have previously shown that 207-nm ultraviolet (UV) light has similar antimicrobial properties as typical germicidal UV light (254 nm), but without inducing mammalian skin damage. The biophysical rationale is based on the limited penetration distance of 207-nm light in biological samples (e.g. stratum corneum) compared with that of 254-nm light. Here we extended our previous studies to 222-nm light and tested the hypothesis that there exists a narrow wavelength window in the far-UVC region, from around 200–222 nm, which is significantly harmful to bacteria, but without damaging cells in tissues.

> As predicted by biophysical considerations and in agreement with our previous findings, far-UVC light in the range of 200–222 nm kills bacteria efficiently regardless of their drug-resistant proficiency, but without the skin damaging effects associated with conventional germicidal UV exposure.

So if I'm reading correctly, the 207-nm ultraviolet light simply doesn't make it past the outer (dead) layer of skin.

That's not relevant, and the paper itself doesn't really measure anything pertinent either. Ionizing radiation does not cause molecular ionization that stays in one place. It generates free radicals that propagate in reaction chains. Reducing the penetration depth only increases the volumetric dose.

Correct, but I’d still like to see their data as to what the impact is to eye tissue.

FPGAs have been around for quite awhile. Is something changing?

Non-stupid open toolchains are slowly happening. Vendor toolchains are the biggest thing holding back FPGAs. Everyone hates them, they're slow, huge, and annoying to use.

One thing that is changing quickly: deep learning, particularly inference on the edge. FPGAs are more versatile than ASICs.

Everyone making ML ASICs would disagree.

This just provides a cost advantage though right? I mean that’s great, love me some margin, but it’s not really a new frontier. Unless I’m wrong?

Dozens!

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