Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use?

50 pointshaensi40 comments

What technology do you use today that is far from mainstream? Think Tony Stark technology. Examples are mobile phones / internet in the 80s, metal 3D printers, quantum ML, night vision device, large language models (GPT-3) for personal communication, CRISPR, manned drones.

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Software-defined radios - you can do absolutely insane things with these. Listen to multiple radio stations as once, listen to ham radio, capture live images of the earth from geostationary satellites, watch live airplane traffic, listen to maritime radio, ...try to listen to signals using the moon as a reflector.., detect GPS jammers..., sync 5 of them to the same clock source and use them as a passive radar array to track objects' movements through walls..... use them for backyard radio astronomy to detect the ion trails due to the hydrogen emission line of blazing meteorites.... this shit is cheap too the most common basic model is like only 20 bucks.

Haskell

Jax / Awkward Array

Topological Data Analysis

Cocalc

CLIP

gitpod / vscodeweb / github codespaces

CodeQL

DDSP

mathlib

neovim

language-server-protocol

adafruit feather m0

linear logic

tmux

I’ve been looking to get into SDRs. Do you have any recommendations on what to buy?

I only have an rtl-sdr, it can only receive but is good enough for what I need. Also heard good things about hackRF (can tx as well as rx).

rtl-sdr.com has a buying guide: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

The cheap RTL2832 software dongles do a surprisingly good job, and can be had with antennas for $30-40. There are many different packages which can drive them, including SDRsharp and HDSDR.

GNU Radio lets you build flowcharts, and compiles them (via python) into real-time data flows. I've built all sorts of things in it, including one that tells me the direction to a VOR aircraft navigation beacon near me.

It also does audio frequencies, so can work with your speaker and microphone.

It's not the slickest package around, but it gets the job done, and it's open source.

I run a site that gives sports betting tips. I use the text generation to automatically builds narratives for thousands of games a day. I use affiliate programs with online betting sites and pull 80k/yr just with AI text ( started 4k been doubling each year)

Or maybe this is mainstream already and i don't know.

And the tech stack includes?..

Definitely Python.

This is fascinating! Can you give more details about "building the narrative"? I'm guessing you scrape a bunch of articles about the game and use something to summarize them?

Sounds like spam to me.

Well done, more scam garbage for the internet.

Microsoft Hololens 2: I use one for work, and it's absolutely incredible. It's an augmented reality headset with built-in hand tracking, so you interact with the holograms by touching them with your hands. You mentioned "Tony Stark" technology, and it really is like the hologram computer he uses. When you look down at your hands, you see a Windows logo appears on your wrist (it follows your wrist due to the hand tracking). When you tap on the Windows icon on your wrist, a start menu appears in front of you, and you can choose an AR app to launch by tapping it with your finger. These apps can be full 3D experiences (like ones created with Unity) or they can be 2D apps where you can place 2D windows around you (like the built-in Edge browser app). These headsets are over $3K, so they're currently used for high-end niche use cases that justify that investment. For example, some of my customers use them to show 3D instructions to technicians for aerospace manufacturing. However, from using the Hololens 2, it's clear to me that AR will inevitably become a major computing platform once the price is reduced. My guess is that we will start to see that in 6 - 10 years.

Edge computing for machine learning. Instead of running ML models on the cloud, I train them on user's device, ask these devices to offload computation between each other and give me the best performance out there. One good example is recommendations that work offline for you. Imagine you are listening to spotify in offline mode (with you downloaded playlist) and recommendations adapt accordingly even without internet!

I built out the library for these myself, checkout https://github.com/NimbleEdge/RecoEdge

Nice!

I've often wondered about decentralized recommendation systems and ML. Good to see something going in this area.

you can find many such people in our discord server https://nimbleedge.ai/discord

We all care about how our data is used and processed.

Fully controllable pocket computers.

Surprisingly, the tech has been there since the '90s, but never really caught up. Then it went into a weird walled garden direction with mobile phones that often work against you.

Pocket computers are still sometimes janky, like Linux phones are, but having access to all the software and permissions is an unparalleled power.

Which one are you using?

Not the original poster, but I'm using a GPD Micro PC. A "laptop" that fits in your pocket like a smartphone does really is a quiet revolution in personal computing.

The Librem 5. It's the closest to controllable you can get now.

What's your borg control preference?

* sleeve ( https://newatlas.com/wearables/team-hart-vibrating-sleeve-la... )

* eye controlable via smart glasses?

* human jestures

* mind-computer interface

* requires an advance degree in coreography & contortionist flexibility to use?

Not ones I use, but would like to use…..

1. Solid state Lithium battery - safer, and denser power than the li-ion batteries of today. https://youtu.be/Jlt8_z86F-o

2. Well, for the goodness of planet earth - Nuclear Fusion reactor to generate power.

> What technology do you use today that is far from mainstream?

Pen and paper. ;)

Also, I have been using an agenda with on the left side the week, and on the right side notes for the last 10 years. It has a special holder for a pen, contains some information on units, UTC differences, a world map, holidays, year overview, and much more. This is very useful. At work I only have to carry around my agenda. It contains all information that you need directly in meetings. And I can take notes on the right side that I can process (digitally) when I'm back at my desk.

no weight to paper specified. onion & poster board aren't cutting edge material.

Certainly 3d printed thimbles/finger protectors not needed for aforementionied paper materials. 3d printed ceramic ginsu knife(s) bit more on page with a chance of getting a DMCA notice though.

diy eink doesn't quite allow the pen to roll. No need for Xerox contracts, but the internet connectivity might cost just as much. Although, something like https://newatlas.com/wearables/team-hart-vibrating-sleeve-la... means able to get a better feel for the meeting conversation in addition to things being immediately presentable whe make it back to desk.

Social norms not withstanding, eyeclass displays means being able to processing things on the way back to the desk.

Desk time now "free time. Although if carrying a the new desktop, aka electronic phone, guess that would be more appropriately taged as free time while the desk is charging.

Changing the perspective a little... A few years ago, we applied client-side applications and edge computing for chicken farmers in Mozambique. https://www.quantisan.com/facebook-loving-farmers-of-mozambi...

That was a fun side project but I got ahead of myself in the tech and failed on finding a product-market fit.

So, a flock mismatch or not enough different 'birds of a feather'?

The company I work for have built a form of indoor positioning system using the Earth’s magnetic field. We are currently deploying it to Frankfurt Airport to aid connecting passengers in travelling from gate to gate for certain airlines.

Electronic shifters on my bike. Absolutely love them, the gears never go out of true. Every shift is exactly the same, no variation at all. I ride most days 10km-30km and I charge once a month

Gave me a lot more confidence in my drivetrain.

I use program synthesis - cutting edge technology from, I think, the 70s?

What kinds? What’s the best process to do program synthesis? The more I write programs by hand the more I think it should probably be a first-class design consideration for new programming languages

Scala 3

May I ask what context you use it in? It looks like it strikes the right balance between simplicity and descriptive power - kinda like a statically typed python.

The web side of it seems rather different from a Flask or FastAPI setup, and it obviously doesn't have SQLAlchemy (which I really like). Do you have any recommendations on that front?

I'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html) and in the backend with AWS lambdas.

The ecosystem is currently in the process of porting all the libraries to Scala 3. So if you're new to Scala, I'd recommend to start with Scala 2, which is rock-solid and already very powerful.

I never worked with SQLAlchemy. But on the scala database side, popular libraries are Doobie (https://tpolecat.github.io/doobie) and Quill (https://getquill.io). Keep in mind that these are for Scala on the JVM. On the ScalaJS side I'm using the javascript library pg. But I'd like to try if it works well with Prisma soon.

The nice thing about ScalaJS is, that you can use Javascript libraries. And if there are typescript facades, then you can transpile these to Scala and use them in a type safe way (https://scalablytyped.org).

How has your experience been vis-a-vis Scala 2.x?

I'm in the Scala world for ~10 years and love the language. The language got so many design decisions right and slowly teaches you functional programming (which is not a must). The standard library with its collections is better than anything I have seen so far. I easily prefer it over Java, Typescript, Python, Ruby, Dart or Kotlin. Scala 3 just cleans up the language and brings type-level programming and macros to the next level.

A Leatherman Kick.

for me it's a spatial web browser.

D2 steel

CPM Magnacut ftw.

(as an aside the storry of how Magnacut came to be is pretty cool - https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/)

That was a fascinating deep dive into an area I had no idea about, thanks!

Of course I immediately tried to find a MagnaCut knife to maybe gift myself for Christmas... But it seems they aren't really available yet, if I'm not mistaken?

Some available from Dawson Knives:

https://www.dawsonknives.com/collections/home-page

Well you can't get much more "cutting edge" than this.

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