Ask HN: What technology is “cutting edge” in 2022?
I feel like I'm still hearing about the same ML and AI advancements that were purported in 2016. What's some technology that is actually cutting edge and unknown to most laymen?
DT is a hot topic in the PL community recently. It massively enhances the capability of a type system by turning it into a comprehensive logic system, so you can encode whatever properties you'd like to enforce into a type signature. Theorem provers have been taking advantage of the Curry-Howard correspondence for some time, but the implication of DT on real-world programming is still not well understood (we need more real-world projects written in DT languages). There are also ambitious projects that want to bring DT into the mainstream.
If you are interested, you can take a look at Lean [1], Idris [2], and a few others [3,4]. Often these languages have esoteric syntax, but there are projects using a more conventional syntax, too, e.g. Cicada [5]. "The Little Typer" [6] is a pretty good introduction to this topic.
[1] https://leanprover.github.io [2] https://www.idris-lang.org [3] https://github.com/agda/agda [4] https://coq.inria.fr [5] https://cicada-lang.org [6] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/little-typer
[1] http://github.com/leanprover/lean4
[2] https://leanprover.github.io/papers/lean4.pdf
[3] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/leo-LT2...
[4] https://leanprover-community.github.io/lt2021/slides/sebasti...
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0OQb1DBko "A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS" (2017)
type Foo<T extends Record<any, any>> = {
[K in keyof T]: T[K]
}[1] https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-01/Geospatia...
[2] https://www.cgfi.ac.uk/spatial-finance-initiative/
[3] https://www.oxfordeo.com/post/near-real-time-water-stress
Why is this a thing? Sounds like something that limits the investor in his investment choices.
Thinking about it the other way: By not investing is such non-sustainable companies, only the people who don't care will do. And they will actually get the companies are a discount.
But the companies who actually do good stuff need money and I'd rather give it to them than the others. I also think that investing in these companies will rather change you than you will change them.
Or you just get entangled in the political battles already happening in that company, which will take more effort and time to untangle to enable you to actually steer the ship into some kind of sustainable business.
So not only you'll be fighting the lack of a sustainability mindset/processes but all the entrenched political powers that made this mindset be realised. Throwing good money at bad stuff is not really a good prospect for investing, better to invest in places that aren't dirty from the get-go.
Carbon markets are booming, for one, and there aren't enough effective projects to accept the money.
Well, almost everyone are looking from a branding angle but if good things comes out of it, so be it.
We kinda invented a variation of super resolution for satellite imagery. We are still at that early stage of ML but I’m amazed by what my co-founder does in AI/ML.
Still early, lots of interesting things and finding it really hard to pick just the tiny few to focus on.
Asking because our research team (social sciences, but interdisciplinary) is developing middleware and tooling for working with publicly accessible remote sensing data in Julia.
For instances;
1. Govt-Private billion dollar construction mega-projects needs regular tracking of discrepencies on area of construction, excess or the lack of areas covered, etc.
2. Planning of train tracks, especially in developing countries, and the eventual tracking of it with proof of work done, etc. Drones cannot fly all the time (weather), costly area of coverage.
Commercially available data, not just from optical but SAR[a] is the other thing. SAR may in-fact be more appropriate to track, count trees etc (if the cost becomes more economical). East Asian regions uses mostly SAR to look at Palm Trees and the likes.
- Demakes of computer games into 16bit titles, weird and useless but there is something here interesting going on with it, https://youtu.be/qtNytQXVnx8
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/308434-star-trek-voyager...
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gancraft-turning-gamers-in...
The amount of real data we're going to overwrite accidentally or even just mentally forget about is insane. I prefer looking at the real life rather than the guesses of what a computer thought may have been within the cracks.
Something being naturally ugly is better than being sometimes beautifully fake and uglier and fake.
The FF7 video in that post is absolutely terrible and shows how much worse it can get when upscaling. It just completely fails on the creative art decision to dither lighting, and thinks it was a texture on the original object.
Nah.
So far real-world applications have been mostly in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space (privacy/anonymity for Zcash and Tornado/AZTEC, Ethereum L2s, Bulletproofs in Monero, etc) but there’s so much untapped potential for other domains still.
Ours (I'm part of the NL team) is open source: https://github.com/minvws
https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-coronacheck-idemix
We use IDEMIX to create a unique proof per display of the QR code. So you cannot track a person as they use their QR code (if you have control of a network of scanner apps).
For instance, most vaccine QR codes are not considered valid by themselves, as I could simply share my QR code with my friend. So I need to present valid photo ID alongside the QR code.
Here's the spec: https://nzcp.covid19.health.nz/ and our implementation https://github.com/vaxxnz/nzcp-js
- WebAssembly / WASI on the server (for serverless tech, cost efficient containers, plugin environment for systems, etc) https://twitter.com/vettijoe/status/1484507483788161026?s=21
- CRDT and its implications on local-first sofwares (for me this is a better bet as a technology to architect your solution, much better than what blockchain provides)
- Provably correct programs (all the latest compilers like rust, kotlin and swift are shipping with a flavour of this idea for example it's possible to write null-error free programs in all those languages)
Considering how good AR is _right now_, we have very few practical applications for it. It has been quite good for at least a couple of decades (I studied AR in the 90s and we had some pretty amazing demos even back then).
Snapchat is doing some amazing, if silly, AR stuff, and hardware capabilities around graphics are improving all the time (especially with the use of graphic cards for crypto mining), in fact graphics are getting to the stage where its genuinely difficult to see at a glance what is real and what isn't.
Basically this is what Facebook is going for with the Metaverse, but history tells us that it will probably not be an incumbent that develops the best products.
There will be some cool/scary stuff coming.
Unfortunately I think an incumbent will buy the company that develops the best products
[^1] Granted, economics of video game consoles aren't quite the same as things that might be industrial tools, mostly because they can be sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up in software licenses.
Yes.
For AR to work properly, it requires precise location. Apple, Lyft, FB et al are all using visual mapping. Where pictures are processed, rebuilt in 3d and key points extracted.
Those key points can be compared to key points found in a sample image, using some trigonometry you can position that image in 3d (lat, lon, height and angle, so left right relative to north, plus up down and rotation) This mapping is accurate to about 20cm now (in real time)
This means that (future) AR headsets know exactly where you are at all times. Combined with the tech to find where you left your keys (object recognition on steroids) you can find out who owns what pretty quickly, through the use of a dodgy app.
Then there it the stalking. Facial recognition might be built in, so you can remember peoples names better (I suspect there will be at least a cursory attempt at permissions) but if a third party app has access to both position and the raw camera, you know the position of 80% of people within range of the glasses.
AR glasses means that open source will have to confront ethics properly for the first time. You can have an open platform, but it will be the cause of oppression(because some prick will make a woman stalking app, its almost a certainty now.).
It definitely had that 'wow' moment for me although the product was not production grade quality yet.
It did open my mind to possibilities I had not considered before around the future of work - mixed feelings - I mean think person in <low cost country> operating a robot arm making a food dish in <higher cost country>. Some ways it can be considered a bit depressing but in others it opens up opportunities that have never existed before.
Its a sort of half way stop between no automation and full automation for certain tasks where real intelligence is needed or cheaper.
* OpenCompute[1]: A Facebook lead initiative to build and design open source hardware, mainly for data centers but also for enterprise.
* RISC-V[2]: An open source ISA and alternative to x86 and ARM.
* Cloud Native Computing Project[3]: An industry collaboration for building cloud infrastructure.
* Teleoperations[4]: Remotely operating machines where humans take over in situations where AI is not sure of the correct action to take. For example, before humans get self-driving vehicles, we may get vehicles that are operated remotely. The vehicle will have cameras that stream the data to operators who could be sitting at an office who in turn send control signals wirelessly to the vehicles. This model could also be applied to drones, humanoid robots etc. More jobs could be sent to low wage economies and workers there could perform work that previously required physical presence in high wage economies.
E-Graphs from Julia are another cool space being explored
Look out Steam, because traditional desktop apps like games and even VR applications will start migrating to the web, because that's where users are. My startup Wonder Interactive is working on exactly this.
The metaverse will be born from the open web and emerge as a 3D, immersive internet.
Especially with the basically impossible to implement from scratch “standard” the web is
But UX aside, the PKM is all about interlinking "stuff" in your own way.
To me it is as important for data consumers (i.e us), as the Web has been at interlinking things for data publishers. And it has severe implication in term of data publication, data identification, tools interaction and general usability.
To take a basic example, I still have to do manual actions when I see the poster of a concert in the real life. I should be able to just take a picture of the poster, or QR-code it, and get everything that is relevant (Spotify links, musicbrainz links, appointment ready to be validated in my calendar, payment ready, etc).
https://hackaday.com/2021/09/27/commonwealth-fusions-20-tesl...
Nuclear fusion cometh, and it will change absolutely everything.
Csaba, G., & Porod, W. (2020). Coupled oscillators for computing: A review and perspective. Applied Physics Reviews, 7(1), 011302.
I've been buying headsets compulsively for the last few years only to replay Half Life: Alyx or Boneworks for the 400th time.
I just got Hitman 3 and it's sad. Borderlands was watered down and not a great experience. There are nearly no multiplayer games. Minecraft is pretty fun but Microsoft Minecraft doesn't have mods.
I am waiting with baited breath for Unity and Unreal to treat VR like first class citizens so it's easy for people to make games.
When FB/Meta figure out a way to make it MUST HAVE instead of WANT TO HAVE, they will dominate and the oculus tech will along with it.
The virtuous cycle is starting now that big AAA devs are taking notice of the platform. More games => more users => more devs => more games.
It makes you faster on developing complex web applications that would otherwise take much longer time with a traditional SPA-framework. You don't have to worry about handling server communications, how to send data and in what format etc, all updates will be handled in a consistent manner and it's scary easy to make live updates to all connected clients.
Of course, these things are getting more popular now and a lot of people on HN may already know about it but I would assume most laymen still have no clue that this is a thing.
EUV = extreme ultraviolet lithography
NA = numerical aperture
the NA part makes the EUV part better :)
These next-generation lithography systems will be key to advance Moore’s Law towards the logic 2nm technology generation and beyond.
It feels like it shouldn't be "cutting edge", but it's still not used as much as it should be.
OpenAPI is OK for prototyping, but production-grade performance-tuned software will likely break out of what OpenAPI allows to spec.
Both of these things are out of scope for OpenAPI. It's a separate discussion whether they should be or not, but they are currently not. For async protocols, there is AsyncAPI [0], FWIW.
Do you know of an alternative spec format that would cover what you're missing with OpenAPI?
The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised.
OTOH, I am all for literate programming that combines the art of writing prose and code like in Jupiter Notebook. Among competitors to OpenAPI I keep an eye on API Blueprint. While it leans more towards prose than code, it is a valuable tool to document APIs.
Those who can't what? If you mean the ability to code, I don't understand how is that related to API specifications.
> The whole concept of specifying an API in a DSL should be limited to the domain and not be standardised.
Why exactly?
> "Whether it’s your drug sales, IRS fraud earnings, or stacks of gold bars you purchased with stolen credit cards; money matters to us all. Rather than relying on straight edge normie crypto - with their fees, delays, and anti-fraud risk - we stand for blockchain without limits. That’s why we support DarkBlockchain, a global digital cloud currency that only you can control on the dark web. Find out more..."
Maybe it is high tech, I don't know, but all I was thinking is wtf
Dark Blockchain is a rift on hypes like “dark web” and “blockchain”
It's worth calling out specifically because it will not likely last very long in its current state; large, intuitional actors will either jump on it, or it will die an unceremonious death, gobbling up billions of dollars in its wake.
I know its _now_ fashionable to dunk on crypto, but I really wish the whole "smart contracts" thing would be seen for what it is; neither smart nor a contract.
Contracts only work because there is a higher power to appeal to when something goes wrong. (the law courts) That means that when someone does something wrong, the other side can attempt to get justice.
If a smart contract is wrong, you're fucked. Not only do you have to speak lawyer, you also have to understand obfuscated code. Which means getting it right is expensive as the combined skills are exceptionally rare.
I get the aspiration, but its at best misguided.
The common refrain is that actual contracts are not scaleable, and can't be done in real time. This isn't true. HFTs are basically creating millions of contracts a day. When you buy something from amazon, thats a contract. When you use your credit card, thats a contract as well.
Law needs to be reformed, dont get me wrong, but the blockchain aint the thing to do it.