5 ms·
Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use?
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.
- popotamonga 5y agoI 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.
- zscore 5y agoThis 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?
- IshKebab 5y agoSounds like spam to me.
- ewuhic 5y agoAnd the tech stack includes?..
- sidcool 5y agoDefinitely Python.
- ffwacom 5y agoWell done, more scam garbage for the internet.
- taffronaut 5y agoD2 steel
- pandemicsyn 5y agoCPM Magnacut ftw. (as an aside the storry of how Magnacut came to be is pretty cool - https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/ https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/03/25/cpm-magnacut/)
- mckirk 5y agoThat 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?
- longitudinal93 5y agoSome available from Dawson Knives: https://www.dawsonknives.com/collections/home-page https://www.dawsonknives.com/collections/home-page
- fuzzfactor 5y agoWell you can't get much more "cutting edge" than this.
- brudgers 5y agoA Leatherman Kick.
- pizza 5y agoSoftware-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 rr linear logic tmux
- relbeek2 5y agoI’ve been looking to get into SDRs. Do you have any recommendations on what to buy?
- pizza 5y agoI 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/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
- mikewarot 5y agoThe 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.
- mvh 5y agoI use program synthesis - cutting edge technology from, I think, the 70s?
- quantisan 5y agoChanging 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-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.
- sargstuff 5y agoSo, a flock mismatch or not enough different 'birds of a feather'?
- manx 5y agoScala 3
- Lunrtick 5y agoMay 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?
- manx 5y agoI'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html 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 https://tpolecat.github.io/doobie) and Quill (https://getquill.io 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 https://scalablytyped.org).
- sidcool 5y agoHow has your experience been vis-a-vis Scala 2.x?
- manx 5y agoI'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.
- noud 5y ago> 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.
- sargstuff 5y agono 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-language-communication/ 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.
- rhn_mk1 5y agoFully 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.
- sargstuff 5y agoWhat's your borg control preference? * sleeve ( https://newatlas.com/wearables/team-hart-vibrating-sleeve-language-communication/ 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?
- rgrmrts 5y agoWhich one are you using?
- reacharavindh 5y agoNot 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 https://youtu.be/Jlt8_z86F-o 2. Well, for the goodness of planet earth - Nuclear Fusion reactor to generate power.
- vkkhare 5y agoEdge 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 https://github.com/NimbleEdge/RecoEdge
- derbOac 5y agoNice! I've often wondered about decentralized recommendation systems and ML. Good to see something going in this area.
- vkkhare 5y agoyou can find many such people in our discord server https://nimbleedge.ai/discord https://nimbleedge.ai/discord We all care about how our data is used and processed.
- binarynate 5y agoMicrosoft 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.
- meesterdude 5y agofor me it's a spatial web browser.
- mcgooiggy 5y agoElectronic 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.
- iamphilrae 5y agoThe 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.