Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

14 pointschistev6 comments

A repost of an old thread 11 years ago -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9731111

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No particular order but;

1. Transformers

I think they need to be looked into more. They just work too well.

I feel like they have a secret within that is yet to be known.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

2. The 2016 Noble Prize in Medicine

Autophagy has such interesting properties. It can probably do alot more for us now than any new pill or gene editing tool

[2] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/press-releas...

3. zk-STARKS

I can prove to you than X * Y = Z, without ever revealing what, X, Y or Z are. And I can do this for any function, or math operator.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/189

4. TLock

I can encrypt my will, in a way such that. It can only be read after X years.

And I do not need a trusted third party to do it.

[4] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf

[4] https://youtu.be/Xh849Ij3lhU

Biggest discovery is that humans are much worse than expected, and are always rushing to the next big thing forgetting to enjoy the present.

Seriously shouldn’t the whole world slow a bit down and enjoy our lives a bit?

* mRNA vaccines

* LLM

I think both are older, but got their prime time recently.

mRNA gene therapy is a great invention, but it definitely needed more testing, and better collection of side effects data from the unsanctioned experiment a few years ago.

I lucked out as an unwitting guinea pig, many weren't so lucky.

I think that informed consent could have worked at the time, instead of the BS we were all fed. Now that trust is broken, I'm not sure there is a path forward. This may have set their acceptance back a generation.

We need an adult conversation about covid-19. I was hopping to get it in 2030, but I guess we have to wait until 2035, at least.

I'm from Argentina. We had a 6 month total lock down and in spite of that we got more death per million than Sweden, so I may have different bias.

Anyway, I'm not worry about mRNA vaccines in general. Each one will have a different target molecule and will have a different level of efficacy and security. Each one vaccine candidate will need a separate testing to ensure them.

The problem is that people is blaming everything bad that happened in 2020-2022 to covid-19. One side blames the vaccine and the other blames long-covid. I blame bad statistics. A popular 30 years old actresses died here in Argentina in 2015 for some unusual heart problem. Had she died in 2021, one side would have blamed the vaccine and the other blamed long-covid.

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I'm optimistic about mRNA vaccines for localized illness. We have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun%C3%ADn_virus that is like Ebola but without the human to human transmission, so outbreak are easy to contain. It has mouse to human transmission. It's a problem in some farm areas, not in big cities.

It had a huge death rate, but there are a few recent improvement in treatment and more recently a vaccine. It's very hard and expensive to make vaccine for this kind of illness, because the number of patients is low and affect mostly poor areas that where the government can't pay for it.

Perhaps I'm too optimistic, but I hope a streamlined method to make mRNA vaccines for this kind of illness in other places. Anyway, once there is a vaccine candidate for each of them, each one needs a thoughtful testing to ensure it's safe and effective.

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