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Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
326 points by alienlid on Dec 26, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 248 comments
For me a couple of interesting technology products that help me in my day-to-day job

1. Hasura 2. Strapi 3. Forest Admin (super interesting although I cannot ever get it to connect to a hasura backend on Heroku ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 4. Integromat 5. Appgyver

There are many others that I have my eye on such as NodeRed[6], but have yet to use. I do realise that these are all low-code related, however, I would be super interested in being made aware of cool other cool & upcoming tech that is making waves.

What's on your 'to watch' list?

[1]https://hasura.io/

[2]https://strapi.io/

[3]https://www.forestadmin.com/

[4]https://www.appgyver.com/

[5]https://www.integromat.com/en

[6]https://nodered.org/




Terahertz technology. Has big potential in communications and sensing, particularly in the medical field.

Starship, $50 per kg absolutely changes a lot of assumptions and has definite 2nd order effects around transport, satellite orchestration, communication monopolies, network latency. A big "holy st" moment I had lately was pack a starship with autonomous drones, combine it with the Adama Maneuver from Battlestar Galactica. If you can drop a squadron, anywhere in the world for X $M within 2 hours, why would the US military ever need super-carriers any more? Or Island carrier theory if you stretch out that logic. Which then why would the US need as close relationship regional allies to contain neighboring countries? How does that affect the US-Israeli relationship with the middle east? Or the US-British with Europe one? Or the US-Japanese one with China?

Pure fusion weapons. It's a true pandora's box for nuclear proliferation if nuclear weapons no longer need enrichment facilities.

Atom Interferometry. Potentially, GPS level location tracking without the satellite / radio component.


I'm not sure the price point changes that much for the US military. The same tactic would have been achievable for a long time by strapping drones + heat shield to a bunch of ICBMs. It just doesn't give you a sustained presence in the target location. A carrier is more of a logistical presence, not just a bunch of planes with a single load of fuel and munitions.


> Pure fusion weapons. It's a true pandora's box for nuclear proliferation if nuclear weapons no longer need enrichment facilities.

Is this actually a thing? My understanding is that the fusion stage of a nuclear weapon is purely to generate neutrons to trigger the 3rd, fission based stage. The destructive power of the bomb comes from the fission reactions.


An almost pure fusion bomb is technically possible and has been done multiple times. Usually it is not done for weapons designs since you got all those neutrons and can just double the yield by adding some 238U outer layer.

But e.g. the US Castle Bravo test or the soviet Tsar Bomba tests were almost pure fusion. For the Tsar Bomba they left out the 3rd fission stage. It was the cleanest bomb ever detonated in terms of radiation per yield.


America could also be at the receiving end of said weapons. So, you’d need soft power in the region to monitor and control production. Back at square one.


https://www.unisonweb.org/

Functional programming language where the canonical representation is a content-addressed directed acyclic graph.

Solves all kinds of problems from dependencies to deployment and moving code between nodes in a principled way.

The language itself is inspired by haskell, but has a principled and clean solution to the coloured function problem of async programming, and a simpler way to compose effects than monad stacks.


Interesting! Deno's official module registry stores immutable tagged versions of open-source projects, but there's a project called Nest.land[1] that takes the immutability one step further by putting modules on the arweave[2] blockchain.

I'm not sure where the JS standardization process is at with import integrity checks for non-script-tag imports, but Deno has lock files and integrity checking built in.[3]

I like the idea of a language that's built with content addressing from the ground up. I dream of being able to import IPFS urls (or something like that) directly within JS. Although that wouldn't be as good as a language that forced usage of content-addressed imports, since that way you don't have to scour the code for any sneaky dynamic imports (especially since in JavaScript there's `eval` and the like, and they can be obscured).

I guess this is partially solved by Deno's ability to limit the network requests to specific domains like:

    deno run foo.js --allow-net=deno.land,foo.com
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this project - thanks for sharing!

[0] https://deno.land/x

[1] https://nest.land/

[2] https://www.arweave.org/

[3] https://deno.land/manual/linking_to_external_code/integrity_...


Snowflake's `Snowpark` product that they recently announced, which is to bring Spark-like APIs to Snowflake.

Having a DS background, I love what SQL-orchestration tool dbt (and peers) have enabled: data consumers to rapidly create our own safe data pipelines. There's easily a 10x productivity improvement for most of my transformation pipelines vs. when I write them in Python or PySpark.

But batch ML and SQL are not that friendly (even BigQuery ML is too limiting). I end up butchering dbt's value (simplicity and iteration speed), splitting the DAG into pieces and orchestrating them with Airflow so that I can wedge in other non-dbt parts (like feature engineering, inference, logging, detecting stale models, ...). This isn't what the future looks like.

I've tried switching to Databricks, but do not see this as the path forward for unioning the warehouse + batch ML.

Hopefully Snowpark is a step forward :)

-------------------

Separately, https://materialize.com/ is something I'm paying attention to! Being able to implement all of my SQL-based pipelines as materialized views would be immensely valuable. They recently raised capital and they could become huge.


Love that you brought up Snowflake. I've been wanting to get my hands on it to play around and learn more about a Salesforce integration with it.


And not something like Spark on EMR?


Well no, unfortunately.

Remember that "data is a team sport". Together, we try and make better decisions (in manual or automated ways). A DE can produce great data but it's only useful if it helps the DA/DS. There's a lot of friction there.

Most of that friction disappears with SQL-based orchestration tools (I mean specifically dbt here, but there are others). Suddenly the analyst can create the data they need! With minimal guidance from a DE.

That can be with Spark SQL (+ DeltaLake / Iceberg), or some warehouse. That's not the issue.

The issue is around keeping orchestration simple when you're not just doing simple stuff anymore. Keeping that DAG logical, clear, and smooth is difficult once you include non-SQL items.

This isn't solved by Spark UDFs unfortunately :)


https://hotwire.dev/ - alternative approach to building modern web applications by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire.

https://temporal.io/ - is the new kid on the block of state-dependent service-orchestrated application development platforms.

https://workos.com/ - is building enterprise-readiness as a service, enabling new companies to start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.

https://www.around.co/ - provides an AI-based camera framing designed for high-impact video calls. It helps users take video meetings less intrusive and less clunky.

Age of Empires IV (https://www.ageofempires.com/games/age-of-empires-iv/) - The next chapter in the Age of Empires series that will take us back to the Middle Ages


> https://hotwire.dev/ - alternative approach to building modern web applications by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire.

I find it funny that it's now considered a promising alternative approach; conceptually this is very similar to AJAX, which was the standard way to make pages dynamic ten years ago.


It's a standard way to make pages dynamic now. AJAX just means making http requests from javascript instead of reloading the full page.


I meant using AJAX to transfer XML that gets inserted directly into the DOM. Of course that was never the only use of AJAX, but it used to be much more popular than it is now, and it's what Hotwire is trying to make popular again.


It's not quite the same though, there's a light framework involved for defining how the html is inserted, it's over websockets, new request types, etc.

But point taken, I recall using similar techniques a long time ago. I think the pendulum is swinging because front-end development has gone down such a rabbit hole with state management that people are wondering if they can remove all the overhead of redux, translating JSON, client side routing, etc. In most cases, they probably can I reckon.


Haven't seen an update for the release of AoE 4, really hoping they release a demo soon. Been dying to get back to a high quality RTS. I thought the AoE 2 games took a little too long, so hoping these ones are shorter on average.


> Been dying to get back to a high quality RTS.

Check out Paradox Interactive's games, they have one for most interesting time periods and are pretty entertaining.


They released a tragically short gameplay trailer [1] that revealed two fractions: England and Mongols. The r/aoe4 has quite active community and the following thread [2] summarizes all known information about the game.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFlVNtGJVDU

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/hf1da1/1st_attempt_at...


How long were your games taking? From what I saw, pro games took less than half an hour because they knew how to press their advantage but amateurs would play it safe and build up a lead before their final attack. I have seen this pattern in other games too.


Depends on the map but since you mentioned half an hour I'll assume you're talking about arabia 1v1. Didn't really notice a difference between pro/amateur game lengths except in the instance where someone really new just took forever to get going. Game average was around 30-40 min., but lots of variation.


Similar to hotwire, LiveView is also "server-side-rendered reactive webapp", written in Elixir and Typescript


I tried to get my team using Around.co as I love it, but we're too entrenched in Slack, installing the app isn't catching on. It's a hard problem to beat 'good enough' with 'better'.


Just installed it, I'm in awe because of the clean UI an aesthetic of it, and having your head floating around, just makes sense. At least I hope they inspire others in this line of superior UI/UX


https://fauna.com/ - FaunaDB: Evan Weaver and Chris Anderson were involved in created a distributed relational datastore. You can use it as an API and never have to think about provisioning or managing a server. It's proprietary, but the prices are insanely low for all the features and convenience you're getting.

Zinc Gluconate 15mg + Selenium + Quercetin 200mg (zinc ionosphere): For years I ignored the advice of knowledgeofhealth.com when it came to zinc and quercetin. I finally used it this year and it got rid of my cold in less than 48 hours with no side-effects. This has never happened to me before. Zinc-based supplements get rave reviews on Amazon and they seem legit. Google: selenium virus mutations. (I also took a new Vitamin C formula, Formula 216).

https://aureon.ca/ - Safire Project. Some claim it's a fraud, but I'm hoping something good will come out of it. They are using a different model of stars/suns to generate energy and other benefits. There's always molten salt reactors in case this one doesn't pan out.


For fun, this is the ShowHN for FaunaDB back in March 2017, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13879475


Elixir's/Phoenix' LiveView (and clones/similar approaches). It's been discussed plenty on HN, so I don't think I need to elaborate too much. But I'll just say that as I'm using it in more and more new projects and adding it piecemeal to existing ones, I'm constantly amazed by how much complexity just disappears, and how pleasant it all is to work with.

I do feel that it'll take another year or two for all of it to 'mature', though.

For one, I'm not a big fan of how it still relies on 'old-fashioned' templating, but I've been looking into Surface [1] as a solution to that (it uses a more React-like component-based approach).

I also find that there's often confusion about best practices. About what goes where exactly, asking myself whether to keep state in the top-level LiveView is best, or perhaps too much based on the old client-side React/Redux paradigm and less necessary now that fetching data is a server-side-only DB call away (and using PubSub for any inter-LiveView communication).

But even with some of these 'issues', it's probably the most fun I've had building interactive web apps!

[1]: http://surface-demo.msaraiva.io/getting_started


React itself is now approaching the Live View server-rendering space: https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react...


Can you name a few of Phoenix LiveView clones/similar approaches in other languages that are actively developed and worth looking into?


Here's a Github repository listing Phoenix LiveView workalikes for different languages and frameworks: https://github.com/dbohdan/liveviews

ps: The BEAM is what makes LiveView so great, do not expect the same in the other environments.


Is the last sentence in your comment about developer experience, functionality, performance/scalability or something else?


Functionality, performance & scalability.


I hear LiveWire for Laravel is pretty decent, even if it's not quite the same. I quite liked this Elixir podcast episode where they interview the creator of LiveWire (and Alpine.js): https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/020-liveview-v-l...


Hotwire, with Ruby on rails


I've got my eye on that. Hopefully it works with AnyCable.


https://laravel-livewire.com/ Implementation in PHP


As an ethical vegetarian for the past five years, I've very interested in cultured (lab-grown) meat technology[1]. FWIW, I'm very happy with my diet and probably wouldn't switch back even if this does become affordable, but I'm 100% supportive of the concept of cruelty-free meat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat


30 year pescetarian here. I mean, mainly vegetarian but some fish every so often.

I gave up meat at 17 on the basis of no reason whatsoever, I was just a contrary teen who liked giving things up.

Down the line a few years I find so many compelling reasons to not eat meat. Each individually may be argued out of the room but collectively it's pretty compelling.

Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.

Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.

Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc

Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.

I totally support anyone making whatever decision they like about eating meat, but I'm completely unable to agree that it's a good idea.

Cultured meat in this context is a difficult one to parse. For people like me there's literally no point. I'm just not interested in eating steak, whether it's killed or grown. For your hardcore fleshy, a bloody slab of meat is all that's going to satiate them, so it misses that market too. I guess there's maybe a middle ground of people who could be convinced to stop eating killed meat if they see an alternative?

It'll be interesting to see where this one goes and how it is marketed...


I agree with a lot of the points you made, though:

> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.

Ultimately every animal is going to die. If the moral hangup for you is the certainty of death, then wouldn't you consider any form of reproduction immoral? 'However good and rewarding their life may be, children are still going to die eventually, ergo noone should reproduce'.

Unless it's the act of killing with the intention to consume that's the issue?


I think there's a reductionist angle to your point which just doesn't chime with me. It's a bit like people arguing for anti-natalism. It's interesting, but morally redundant, somehow?

The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death ("relax, you're going to die" is a credo I try hard to live by - even though I fail much of the time and worry about death as much as the next person...). It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.

There is also something in there about the distance and hypocrisy of many meat eaters when it comes to facing up to what they are putting in their mouths. The thing you see at a supermarket is a million miles away from a hanging carcass; I know a whole bunch of people who don't even tell their young children that the thing they have on their plate is that thing walking around in the field over there - and that seems to me to also be quite disingenuous.

I'm failing to make a good point. But the broader thing for me is as I said - I'm genuinely not a rabid vegetarian (I used to get drunk at uni and sometimes end the night eating kebab along with everyone else...) - is that I'm interested in the combination of reasons which for me have built up into a fairly compelling case over the years. I should say as well - I actually do quite like the taste of meat even though it's been a long, long time - but I have no intention of going back, which is what interests me.


> The hangup for me isn't the certainty of death... It's just something about breeding a thing to kill it.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily fully agree with that specific argument but I can certainly understand where you're coming from. It's one of those head vs heart things: the cold hard logic that all other things being equal, a life followed by death is equivalent to any other, vs the vague moral sense that life should have purpose, and the discomfort when that purpose is 'to be foodstuff'.

That said, I wasn't really arguing for meat consumption generally, I was more just pointing out -- nitpicking might be another word -- a flaw in OPs justification.

I'm in the process of reducing my meat consumption considerably (to 'a couple of times a week') and restricting it to be local and free range. Maybe in a year I'll be full vego, who knows.

Interesting point you raise about a willing blindness of some carnivores. I'm not sure I've really encountered the level of denial that you mention myself, possibly because of the semi-rural area I grew up in, but I don't doubt that it exists. Humans are highly skilled at avoiding the uncomfortable and maintaining delusions.


If you could grow and kill with a small fraction of the suffering that farmed animals endure today, then eating meat would be mostly fine (other than environmental issues, perhaps). Unfortunately that's impossible for all but a very small minority of people - those who can raise and kill animals themselves or have someone they trust very well to do it for them.[0][1]

Well over 95% of meat is factory farmed[2], and animals that are raised in factory farms do not live pleasant lives, to put it lightly.[3] This is coming from someone who grew up on a farm, and whose parents are still farmers.

[0] People think that buying from their local butcher or local farm must make their meat ethical. In fact, small abbatoirs often have very shoddy killing protocols compared to the large ones. You end up with farmers clubbing animals to death, or putting 5 bullets into a pig's head before it dies: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-14/tasmanian-abattoir-ac...

[1] Hunting isn't an ethical source of meat. Even professional hunters (e.g. those who kill kangaroos for farmers in AU) will let ~1 in 20 get away with a bullet in them. That could mean suffering for hours or even days if it clots but then dies due to internal bleeding or infection. I used to hunt and I would go to sleep thinking about the animals that got away wounded that day. Still, it took me far too long to realise that there is no need to eat animals.

[2] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko


>Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc

It took me 5 minutes of Googling to find articles that refute this from all kinds of credible sources.

Going vegetarian might be a step up from the average Americans diet, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find any research that demonstrates plant-based diets are any better than a balanced diet that includes meat protein.


I dunno what Google you're using but it took me half a minute to get to multiple sources suggesting vegetarians are on average healthier, have lower BMI, lower incidents of common cancers and more. Obviously balance probably trumps everything as it always does but there's imo fairly compelling evidence in the non meat direction, on average, for most people.

But once again may I stress that for me it's a whole range of factors that make this compelling, not just one.


The fact that you can find studies that say that is a long way away from your claim that all research says that.


Typical American/prominent meat diet population: Obese, cardiovascular issues, cancers, highly dependent on meds, health outcomes determined by income

Most Asian/plant based diet population: quite healthy, live longer, less pill popping and more homeopathic traditional meds.

Forget googling studies. Read about the China Study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

Even without studies, ask yourself why you most likely have a relative or know someone who's died from heart disease or a cancer and that likelihood plummets when looking at those that eat less or no meat? Then look at populations where meat consumption has gone up in the past few decades and certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases have gone up in tandem?

Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!


>Typical American

I'm not American, so who cares. But some of the highest life expectancy in the world are European countries. I certainly don't see "Asia" (lol) as a standout.

>Even without studies, ask yourself...

Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.

>Buuuuuut can't let anyone stand in between you and your Whopper®, right?!

See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.


You missed the most cringe part of that comment:

> homeopathic traditional meds

That said, if you think that lower meat consumption isn't correlated with increased life expectancy, then you should read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Longevity

You can control for a bunch of lifestyle factors like smoking and exercise level, and the correlation still exists. It uncontroversial at this point - which is why every major national dietetics association (don't confuse them with "nutritionists") has a position statement on plant-based diets saying that they're as healthy or healthier than regular diets.

And with UFC fighters[0], NBA planers, national weightlifting champtions[1], world-record-holding powerlifters[2], and so on eating plant-based diets, it's getting harder to make the "okay, sure you live longer, but you probably sacrifice strength/vigor/etc throughout your life" claim.

[0] https://www.mensjournal.com/sports/nate-diaz-and-other-vegan...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendrick_Farris

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian


Cringe? Please consult your dictionary.

My comment re: homeopathy/traditional meds was an attempt to contrast the wild wild west dumpster fire that is Big Pharma with traditional meds. Pill popping countries have an opioid crisis whilst less meat eating populations aren't heavily reliant on the pharmaceutical industry because they have far less diet related health issues. In hindsight, I could have phrased that better. Then again, you could have parsed what I was trying to get across.

The rest of this must be directed at OP because I too know and believe a plant based diet carries longer life expectancy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Didn't say you were. Never assumed you were American.

Of the provided links [1], [2] and [3], two of them show Honk Kong, Japan, Macau, Singapore and South Korea in the top 10. Europe gets 3 with Israel and Australia rounding out the 10. You're not incorrect by saying * some * but with Asian countries outnumbering European, lol at how wrong I am.

Your condescending tone is merely a eurocentric insecurity of the decline in your population. With birth rates plummeting, centuries, if not decades, from now, Europe won't be as white, as homogenous as it is (or was) so I understand your response of lashing out instead of accepting Asian countries might lead in anything of consequence.

I'll concede that what I meant by continent, I was actually referring to (specific) Asian countries, not the continent as a whole. Due to lifestyle and diet, Asian countries are more homogenous than other continents hence my lumping them together.

> Not interested in anecdata or hocus pocus.

Meat loving countries have higher obesity rates thus poorer health outcomes. No hocus pocus re: this observation. For someone not interested in anecdata, you miserably failed to do a simple query: https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=life+expectancy+by+continent

> See, the difference between you and me is that I don't care what you choose to eat. Meanwhile, you feel the need to shame and lie and impose your preferences on others. It's why "annoying vegetarian" is a meme.

Neither do I. I'm shaming Americans and any person who thinks it's okay to eat meat without acknowledging the consequences it has on our environment. Basically what I take issue with is how your diet affects climate change which affects all of us!

PS: I eat meat regularly. I could quit given the need to but don't see myself consuming 'meat' grown artificially.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270861/life-expectancy-b...

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...


I'm plant-based, and your comment is embarassing.

> homeopathic traditional meds

Jesus. Really?

The is no evidence that homeopathy is effective at treating anything. On the other hand there's a mountain of evidence that people who eat no meat, or less than once per week live significantly longer. See citations on this[0] wiki page. The studies control for a bunch of different lifestyle factors including smoking, exercise level, and so on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Longevity


See my response to OP. Also, shut up!


Hardcore fleshy here. I have no ethical concern in killing an animal for food. But if someone can lab grow meat that tastes like meat sign me up. My only concerns would be taste, cost and food safety.


Out of interest, which would you choose on balance in a scenario in which the lab meat tasted the same, cost the same and came with the same food safety aspects?


I'd have absolutely no preference.

I like the idea of lab grown as it is a promising way to increase our food production. If it costs the same that indicates it's no more efficient than growing animals for food.


"For your hardcore fleshy, a bloody slab of meat is all that's going to satiate them, so it misses that market too."

I think you're really painting people who don't follow your thinking with a pretty aggressively negative stereotype here.

I love a good steak. The fact that it came from a cow is irrelevant to me - I like it for taste/texture/etc. If you can give me the exact same product from a lab, I'll 100% buy it (especially if it's cheaper). This is how most people are (and not just about meat) - they care about the end product they're consuming, not its origins or how it got to them (otherwise, y'know, we'd be thinking about where our iPhones came from and whatnot). Give them the identical product they have now that's better along some line that matters to them (like cost) and they'll happily switch.


I would contest every point.

Ethical: cruelty is bad, so responsible production of meat is preferred but there’s no reason why killing animal for food should be bad, such that same argument can’t be applied to veggie production.

Environmental: grass fed meat is very much preferred to monoculturing the crap out of our planet. Animas are part of life cycle of the environment.

Health: crappy grains have done way more health damage than crappy meats. Also focusing on meat exclusively, skipping organs is unhealthy. Saturated fats aren’t as bad as you’re told (only in combination with sugars). Red meat doesn’t cause cancer (smoked foods do). Lots of myths around nutrition.

Taste: highly subjective.


As I said, I'm not even vaguely tense about arguing the point - for me these have all emerged long after I made the decision to be vegetarian. I just don't think you're right :-)


I think this is a very privileged view.

Most of the world does not have the culture of offering vegetarian/vegan meals. And if they did, living that lifestyle can be prohibitively expensive.


Weird, in my experience a vegetable based diet is way cheaper than one which involves meat...


Ever wonder why only the well off people can afford the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle?


The evidence for this is where?


I think there are problems with your arguments.

> Ethically: there's no arguing meat eating is better. None. However well you treat animals you're still ultimately going to kill them.

No, there are a lot of arguing about this. There is no ethical consensus on "killing animals" being the "wrong" thing. Hell there is not even consensus on whether an objective ethics is possible.

Organisms consume other organisms. This is part of the cycle of life. Declaring this objectively wrong without exceptions just because you feel bad for the poor animals is a weak argument at its best.

You can talk about the perils of the modern day animal farming which involves treating animals like vegetables and "growing" them in conditions indistinguishable from torture; but that doesn't have to mean "killing animals" is bad per se.

> Environmentally: a hundred reasons to choose a plant based diet, all of which have been cycled here a million times so won't go back through it but we all know it's true.

Yes, but there is research supporting that grain and vegetable farming has a lot of problems as well. Farming in scale in general is a problematic thing. Some even go as far as to state that animal farming can be even less harmful environmentally, when done right. What I'm trying to say is that, this claim hasn't been proven yet. If you want to see counter arguments and relevant research, try following a couple of carnivore diet advocates on social media. I don't have any links to share off the top of my head at the moment and I'm sorry about it. But there is no real consensus here, not so easy.

> Health: again, see pretty much all the research ever. Eating a plant based diet is so much better for weight, health, BMI, etc etc etc

Yes, there are a lot past research about this. But as we can see today there are a lot of problems with those researches as well. A lot of them are being challenged today. Ketogenic and carnivore diets are on the rise and for good reason. USDA's food pyramid is reversed. Fat, eggs and animal protein are no longer the enemy according to many new researches. I suggest you to keep up with the new research as well.

> Taste: this is the kicker imo. If you'd asked me 15 years ago when the vegetarian alternative was a crappy pasta with tomato sauce, I'd have been more tempted to chomp my way into a steak. Nowadays? There is SO much good vegetarian food. Loads of choice, huge range of flavours and in many places it's the vegetarian food that gets the chef's attention, rather than falling back on the Default Meat.

Yes, this may be the kicker for you. For many, animal based foods are still irreplaceable. Not much point talking about this as it's fairly subjective.


If ethics are a priority, then how can you be a vegetarian as opposed to a vegan? If as a vegetarian you acknowledge consuming animal products, which ethics are you compromising (just curious).


I'm interested in cultured meat as well, but also in cultured dairy. I follow an ovolactovegetarian diet, and I exercise heavily six days a week. I find it really difficult to take even the minimum 50 grams of complete (which is crucial) protein just from eggs, dairy, and plant-based foods. Having the chance of eating cruelty-free meat would save me from thinking so much about coming up with ways of fulfilling my nutritional requirements.


I am an ethical meat eater. I would rather eat grass fed beef and lamb than see the additional suffering of hundreds/thousands of rodents (let alone the tens of millions of insects) that me adopting a vegetarian diet would induce. Being poisoned or shredded in a harvester is not a cruelty-free way to die.

On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed. Given very few cattle and sheep would be born if it wasn’t for meat/dairy production then a case can be made that meat eating is the more ethical option. I do admit that this view is incompatible with my first opinion as there would be many more animals born if I adopted a vegetarian diet.


Massive amounts of grain are fed to livestock, and vast acreage is cleared for grazing livestock. If everyone went vegetarian, I'm fairly certain the amount of crops grown and land we use for agriculture would be significantly less. Turning grain into meat is highly inefficient.


I see you missed my point about grass fed.


Why does everyone have to become vegetarian?

When everyone stops eating meat and turns to "healthy" meals like corn based vegetarian burgers I think we are all worse off.

Variety, locally grown produce, locally raised animals is the best way to keep diversity and quality. The vegetarian food available now is good because it's not as mass produced.


The point of ethical vegetarianism is not keeping diversity and quality of foods, it's preventing bad life of animals.

It's also not the point of ecological vegetarianism: it's preserving the diversity of natural ecosystems, as opposed to food farms.


Grass fed cattle and sheep have a pretty good life. What you are arguing against is intensive feedlots.


There's a third aspect to that. Or maybe it's another ecology problem.

While I don't have the numbers, I strongly suspect there's not enough grass to feed all the humans the amount of meat they would like to eat right now. At least based on observing the prices of intensive vs grass fed, or watching the numbers for intensive production alone.

So if we want grass fed as the new normal, we're either going to have to intensify it back again, or we'll end up eating respectively less meat. That's near-vegetarianism or bust.


Yes this is true - there is not enough grasslands to feed the current demand for meat - actually there is not enough feedlots to feed the demand for meat on a global scale. Many poor people around the world would eat more meat if it was cheaper.

The solutions to let the market solve the problem - if there was only grass fed meat available the cost would be very high and meat would become a luxury again.


What do you think happens to all the animals no longer used as a food source in a capitalistic society?


Assuming this is an honest question and not a lame attempt at a gotcha: as more people switch to a vegan diet we will gradually stop breeding them in the first place, so there are no animals for something to "happen to."


Sort of both: OOH, mankind once again causes mass extinction for a few dozen species. OTOH, the oceans will be teeming with life.

The gotcha is mainly that one can support the welfare of animals but also be ok with their systematic extinction. I don't know which outcome is worse.


I like meat too and won’t give it up unless decent lab grown meat comes around but this comment is the most dissembling nonsense I have heard in a while.


It is no more nonsense that the OP’s argument. If you do an analysis on animals killed per calorie, grains kill many more animals than say grass fed cattle. I think many people are unaware how many rodents are killed every year growing and harvesting grains.

I don’t think this is a very good reason to eat or not eat meat.


Citation?



This PDF is a flyer on pest control, presumably targeted at growers of grain. Nowhere does it contain anything resembling the "analysis on animals killed per calorie" you referred to.


You're allowed to just say you like eating meat mate, haha


I certainly do like eating meat and I don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat. The problem with trying to use ethics to justify a position is there is little agreement on what is ethical or not.


Some people are not comfortable killing an animal to eat it. To them it's not an ethical choice. I have no problem killing an animal for food. I also have no problem with someone else finding it unethical.

Each person has their own beliefs that govern their ethics. As long as we all find a way to live peacefully together there is nothing wrong with that.


I am in 100% agreement with this sentiment, what I am not in agreement with is that vegetarians are somehow more ethical than meat eaters.


Cattle eat more plant calories than the resultant meat. All those plant calories include the “vegetarian suffering.” Purely grass fed meats with no farming will be too inefficient to provide meat to everyone.


Sure meat might become more of a luxury than it is now, but in a calorie to calorie trade off grains have a higher animal kill rate than grass fed meat. I don’t many people are aware how many rodents are killed harvesting and storing grain.


> On a more philosophical note, I think it is better to have lived and died than to not have ever existed.

Would that not lead to a desire to create as many "lives" as possible? I don't think I've met many people optimising for that, although I won't rule it out.


I would not be surprised if there was some religion out there that espoused such a doctrine, likely one that believed in reincarnation.


This is a new and surprising take.


This incredibly stupid take is actually pretty common on HN whenever vegetarianism comes up. I don't know whether they're simply mocking the serious thought many people have put into the ethics of eating animals or what, but it's manifestly false and patently ridiculous to claim that eating plants kills more animals than eating animals.


Some people have a hard time engaging with ideas that might cast them in a negative, ethical light. I’ve had people abruptly stop me from explaining ethical vegetarianism, even though they initiated the conversation haha


On a side note, I never followed the project very closely but I was really hopeful for soylent. What happened? Is the technology just not there? Do we not know enough about human physiology? What is missing to take the soylent idea — which I understood as automate most (boring) meals — and make it a reality?

I saw a quora answer which says we simply don’t know enough about the science behind food but to me it implies that maybe some day our knowledge will get there?

People laugh but the idea of “bachelor chow” from futurama makes sense to me.

I don’t know enough about the topic of ethical vegetarianism to criticize it. I eat meat. In fact, I had fish for dinner last night. I just don’t think about the ethics of it.

Now I may sound hypocritical when I say this because I’m against policy action through taxation (make taxes as simple as possible by eliminating all income tax credits and deductions). However, I know I’ll continue to eat meat (including milk, eggs, chicken, pork) unless it is either too impractical or too expensive.

I want to believe that if push comes to shove I’ll be able to adjust my eating habits and that my current eating habits are not a part of my identity.

I don’t really have a point to make here except that something like soylent would go a long way toward making me vegetarian at least for the meals I eat alone.


I really liked it as an occasional meal replacement, for much of the reasons above. But then they switched from rice to soy or pea protein. I have a peanut allergy. While I can eat soy/peas by themselves, the hydrolyzed proteins give me hives. Otherwise I'd still be eating it.

The taste/quality/mouthfeel definitely went up since v1.


The soylent thing always struck me as a bizarre Silicon Valley fad with very limited appeal. I haven’t done a study but I would be very confident that most people simply enjoy eating food.


I’m actually in the middle of a bad GI flare-up, and soylent is a god send. I forget to eat, solid foods are hard to digest, I oversleep and miss meal times, etc. A bottled soylent helps me get back on track quickly.


Some people don’t think there is any ethical problem with eating meat and rather than get into an argument with a vegetarian prefer to end the conversation. I am not one of these people.


Do you know how many animals die growing grains and other vegetables? Or do you consider the the life of a rodent ethically less than that of a cow?


Take that number and at minimum ADD the cows to it. It's not like they feed of thin air while they live.

In addition to that, every step up the food chain requires 10x the amount of energy so for every kg of beef produced you need equivalent of 10kg plants just to raise the cows. It's not like the cows feed freely in the grass and carefully avoid stomping on insects all the time, this is often also harvested with machines killing rodents exactly the same way, just multiplied by 10x.

Meat eater myself here, occasionally and in moderation, but at least i'm not making up nonsense about rodents to feel better for myself.

Edit: To add some data into the discussion, see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/i2vx78/the... for example. It shows more than 10x land usage for cattle and even more for water and energy, sources and their bias discussed in the comments over there. There is also some interesting links stating that purely grass fed beef can only provide half the cattle on same unit of land.


Yes grass fed cattle are less efficient than feedlot cattle, but this is not an ethical issue, but an economic one.

Not many insects are killed by cattle stomping on them out on some grassland compared to how many are killed by insecticides sprayed on crop land.


What is an ethical vegetarian and how is it different from veganism? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.


Vegans don't consume any animal products, whereas vegetarians typically eat no meat but may eat dairy.

Ethical vegetarians are vegetarians for primarily ethical reasons. For example, they may think meat-eating causes excessive suffering (I fall into this category). Most Western vegetarians are ethical vegetarians, but some people are vegetarian for medical or religious reasons.


People are vegan or vegetarian for various reasons, health, environmental or ethical. An ethical ovo-lacto vegetarian doesn't make much sense to me since the dairy industry is pretty cruel, egg production isn't great either.


I wouldn't call myself an "ethical ovo-lacto vegetarian" because it sounds pompous, but it's basically what I am. My position is that raising and killing animals for meat is unjustifiable by any reasonable ethical or environmental standard. However, it is possible for dairy and egg production to be ethical, even though it often isn't in practice. So, I try to source eggs and milk from producers who minimize suffering. For example, I could get eggs from a local smallholding where I can see for myself that the chickens live fairly good lives.


I had a similar mindset and was vegetarian for around 7 years. My girlfriend 3 years ago challenged me on some of my thoughts and I bit the bullet and stopped eating all animal products. The transition is a lot easier if you’re already vegetarian and the amount of options around now make it really easy.


> I wouldn't call myself an "ethical ovo-lacto vegetarian" because

I wouldn't call myself an "pesca-pescatarian" but it sure sounds fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC-ZBJ-Kw2E


Perhaps it's someone who doesn't think in absolutes: sees the value of the ethical argument, but allows that other factors may dominate depending on the circumstances.


[flagged]


Could you please stop posting flamebait and ideological battle-style comments to HN? You've done it a lot, and it's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Mycoworks: which makes leather from mycelium. Will see products 2021.

Brightseed: uncovering the medicine that’s in our food. Uses AI to identify bioactive molecules found in common food crops that can regulate genetics associated with health. Imagine safe drugs that only take 24 months to get to market.

Atomo Coffee: Makes molecular without the coffee bean; made from sustainable agriculture side streams. Best coffee I’ve ever had.

Disclosure: These companies are in our portfolio so obviously on our watch list.


Are you able to comment at all about Indigo's products? Is it something people should keep an eye on? I've interviewed there before and it was difficult for me to understand if what they were doing was actually beneficial to farmers.


It took some time to figure out what Atomo was offering based on an unclear landing page. Alt-coffee is an important category and worth the investment.


Did you click on the "To the Lab" link? I think that it would be a more informative homepage.

But to explain the product, the current homepage just needs to add "Plant-based" before "Coffee without beans? It's molecular!" above the "To the Lab" link. Otherwise you might wonder what "Coffee without beans" must be made of.


> Mycoworks

How did they trademark "reishi," a mushroom variety, for what's essentially mushroom leather?


Good question, and hadn’t asked them this but I assume it’s like Apple, but in this case ReiShi is the name of a material.


I also use some more mainstream things like Heroku, so these are my more-indie/alternative services I'm watching/playing with:

• Backblaze B2 https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html: super-cheap and straightforward data management. I made a Node.js library around it: https://www.npmjs.com/package/backblaze

• Bunny CDN https://bunnycdn.com/: it looks like a great indie CDN solution. The normal CDN is dead cheap, and the very wide CDN has great coverage. Self reported metrics are amazing as well. The company is based in EU, which is a plus on my book.

• Gandi https://www.gandi.net/: they have a lot of types of domains so you can search across many at a glance. They do show some unrelated panels and push for their own services but less than other registrars. Based in France (EU).


Would recommend Bunny CDN to anyone. It's super fast and super cheap.


Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

1006 points|iameoghan|7 months ago|669 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23276456


The market for self diagnostic medical technology is going to boom at some point. It will be a long time before we have an AutoDoc, but until then, diagnostic equipment and diagnosis automation are something to keep an eye on and possibly invest in. Very few doctors will see it coming, because they don't want to believe that they can be partially automated.


Except this is already heavily regulated and/or the AMA will lobby to regulate it, making it impossible/expensive in many cases, slowing innovation, and keeping doctor’s salaries and health care costs high


If so, the United States will be left as island with tech adopted by developed countries with socialized systems and developing countries with fewer regulations.


The taxi industry was highly regulated worldwide. It didn’t stop Uber.


I find it odd that forestadmin boasts security, but requires you to setup your project over HTTP, although there is a HTTPS version available.

https://app.forestadmin.com/new-project redirects (via JS, if https is detected) to: http://app.forestadmin.com/new-project


I can understand your concern. But don't worry, there's no problem here.

HTTP is used when you create a localhost project. On a local server, API requests transit directly from the browser to the local server without going through an external network.

On a remote server, HTTPs is enforced to avoid security issues.


https://www.lifebiosciences.com/our-research

Research on epigenetic reprogramming of existing cells to restore them to youthful states, including the ability to regenerate.


This truly fascinates me... it's the potential for immense extension of human life that no one's talking about. If you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair.


- Rust + WASM

- WASM accessing DOM directly (and the subsequent explosion of front end frameworks completely bypassing JS)

I'm a simple person with mundane wants :)


I want this so bad. I have compiled C code to WASM before but without knowing JavaScript of course there is little that can be done.

Unfortunately for us, I think that most people come from the other camp, and want parts of their JavaScript to be more efficient, thus turning to WASM.


WASM is definitely one to look out for.


Technology - Multilevel Security, which if widely deployed would solve almost all pedestrian IT security issues

There are systems that work on mainframes, but the only realistic (in my opinion) option coming down the pike for the rest of us is from

http://genode.org


I have been following genode since ~4 years and am surprised this hasn't caught on more.

(from https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index)

== Mastering complexity through application-specific trusted computing bases

> Because software complexity correlates with the likelihood for bugs, having security-sensitive functionality depending on high-complexity software is risky. The term trusted_computing_base (TCB) was coined to describe the amount of code that must not be compromised to uphold security. In addition to the code of the sensitive application, the TCB comprises each system component that has direct or indirect control over the execution of the application (affecting availability and integrity) or that can access the processed information (affecting confidentiality and integrity). On monolithic OSes, the TCB complexity can be regarded as a global system property because it is dominated by the complexity of the kernel and the privileged processes, which are essentially the same for each concurrently executed application. On Genode, the amount of security-critical code can largely differ for each application depending on the position of the application within Genode's process tree and the used services. To illustrate the difference, an email-signing application executed on Linux has to rely on a TCB complexity of millions of lines of code (LOC). Most of the code, however, does not provide functionality required to perform the actual cryptographic function of the signing application. Still, the credentials of the user are exposed to an overly complex TCB including the network stack, device drivers, and file systems. In contrast, Genode allows the cryptographic function to be executed with a specific TCB that consists only of components that are needed to perform the signing function. For the signing application, the TCB would contain the microkernel (20 KLOC), the Genode OS framework (10 KLOC), a minimally-complex GUI (2 KLOC), and the signing application (15 KLOC). These components stack up to a complexity of less than 50,000 LOC.

> Genode tailors the trusted computing base for each application individually. The figure on the right illustrates the TCB of the yellow marked process. Naturally, it contains the hierarchy of parents and those processes that provide services used by the application (the left component at the third level).


How is Genode better/easier for the common user than Qubes-Os ?


>How is Genode better/easier for the common user than Qubes-Os ?

Qubes-OS is a tool for letting you run your digital life in a series of boxes which are separate from each other. So, if one gets infected, the others aren't. It is similar to the trend of using Virtual Machines to separate areas of concern to try to limit the damage of a rogue process.

Genode takes a different approach entirely. Instead of dividing your computer into a few boxes, each of which is subject to any rogue process, it gives each and every process NO access to anything else, except for those things explicitly provided.

The analogy I like to use is that of a wallet.

The Windows, MacOS, Unix, Linux, etc.. approach is to hand over the users wallet to any program that is running, and hope the program doesn't misuse it. Anything in the wallet (your system) is at risk.

The Qubes-OS approach is to do the above, but to have the ability to have more than one wallet, to divide up the risk a tiny bit.

The Genode approach is much like a human uses a wallet, you decide what resources are required, and ONLY those resources are at risk.

The ease of use is that it is effectively impossible to limit the resources a process can access in other systems, whereas in Genode, it is almost drag and drop.


I am really looking forward to this product and the subsequent evolution of the tech: https://lookingglassfactory.com/

I would love a large screen version of it with an array of cameras that would allow people to communicate in some sort of futuristic FaceTime experience.


Serverside ARM. So much power is used just keeping data centers up.

Gonna be a long time for legacy stuff to get ported, but some places are still running mainframes.


Materialize [1]. I am a big fan of Frank McSherry’s work on Naiad, timely and differential data flow.

[1] https://materialize.com/


Do you mind sharing details how do you use materialize especially if you already have Spark/Flink and Hive warehouse setup?


I haven’t used it yet, but read through the papers.


Was honestly looking for something revolutionary but did not find any here; Just some service/app to replace another service.

Where is my electric driverless car? Space travel or actual tech that prevents polarization and prevent narrow targeting of people that feel drawn to conspiracy theory rabbit holes? We should be aiming much higher.


1. Flutter - Cross platform development of user interfaces is now a solved problem.

2. RISC-V - It may make it easier for guys to get into chip design.

3. Scilla Lang - The clear logic of formal Mathematics applied to finance.

[1]: https://flutter.dev

[2]: https://riscv.org/

[3]: https://scilla-lang.org/


Matrix.

I also think we'll see much more fun ARM based SBC going forward. The raspberry pi 4 was already powerful enough to be useful & it's only going to get better.


I heard that Matrix have already made some design errors that significantly impacts its scalability


Could you please elaborate.


Yeah it's shit for scaling


https://www.xaynet.dev/ - open source federated learning backend in Rust

https://flower.dev/ - A Friendly Federated Learning Framework in Python

https://jina.ai/ - Neural search engine


I’m still bullish on AR once Apple launch Glass in early ‘22.

Having a real-life videogame HUD with a blue marker showing my next destination sounds fantastic.


Hard to wrap my head around the idea that civilians run around with these on their heads recording everything in their path including others who haven't consented.

I hope it stays an assistive niche technology for people with disabilities and gamers. People wearing this in a pub or on the streets hopefully continue to get ridiculed (e.g. they were called "glassholes" for good reason).

When they say that if a person loses one of their senses then the other senses become heightened, it's interesting to note that this does the opposite by attempting to heighten (augment) several senses. The net benefit is not just poor but negative since it just is one more way to overload our cognitive abilities. In other words who cares about the additional things (data points) we see when it makes us miss others (since it's still a distortion)


I think AR won't break through in the mainstream until the devices are indistinguishable from regular glasses. Of course people will know that it exists, but it gets over the important hurdle of "looks different and weird"

Personally I'm not interested. I have no need to be connected all the time.


Once Facebook and Google get their hooks in it'll be real life but "augmented" with ads and DRM.


You mean cost-reduced/subsidized :)


Me too! I think it will truly be the next big thing. I just recently got my first VR headset and it's very cool, but AR by Apple will be way bigger.


Do the VR glasses in any way affect your eyes other than a regular display? I want to get into VR but I already tear up from a long work day of staring at a screen and my eyes get dry.


I notice I have less strain when I wear my glasses which have blue light blocking.


Differential Dataflow and McSherry’s commercial SQL Driver implementation at Materialize:

- https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ - https://materialize.com/


Could you expand and explain why you think so (I do understand it’s a novel idea).


Optimistic rollups to scale Ethereum pre-ETH2 and after in a generic way https://optimism.io/


[Serverless] Graph databases

[Scripting Language] Infrastructure as code tools

Genetic Programming

Functional Programming

Neural Networks / Differentiable Programming

Cognitive Architecture

Reinforcement Learning

Causal Statistics

Array databases

Bitemporal data

PostgreSQL schema migration tools

Functional GraphQL directives

CRDT/ORDT frameworks

WASI/WASM as a replacement for Docker


excellent collection, what's the closest to functional graphql directives you've come across so far? i think directives are really going to unlock the power of graphql, and replace a lot of code with something more declarative


https://prisma.io

I love their Prisma 2 product.

And it lives up to the hype, it is indeed a next generation ORM. Very useful when you're rushing to iterate.


I shied away from it because it didn’t seem to handle schema migrations well, but that was v1. Do you know if things have improved in v2?



I need to look at this. If it supports json_agg for postgres instead of doing joins that'd be a winner in my book.


All these automation tools for APIs miss the fundamental reason why we need an API in the first place.


Could you please expand a bit on this thought? I personally haven't used almost any API automation tools yet, although I do keep on looking in that direction from time to time.

It would be great to hear another perspective.


I think I can answer part of this. I worked on building GraphQL APIs dynamically from Rails models as sort of a pet-project at Shopify a few years ago.

It’s not a difficult task, but when discussing viability with the APIs team, the general consensus was that you don’t want your API coupled to your data. Most of the time, you don’t want to expose everything.

Of course, you can start describing what to omit, but now you’re just writing an API design by omission.

Building good APIs is hard, so you want to build the right abstraction - which is not always the easiest one.


That sounds awesome and also a huge headache. I've found its much easier to work with an ORM that is specifically designed for GraphQL, like TypeORM[1]. Otherwise you are just kind of trying to force a square peg in round hole (like Graphene[2] for Django). As for not exposing some data, just use "private" schema directives, etc.

[1] https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm [2] https://github.com/graphql-python/graphene


I am opionated about this, I am sure people can share other perspectives.

When you're operating a CNC machine, as an operator, do you need mess around with internal wiring, schematic, motor controllers? No. You just need a control panel, with DRO and a bunch of buttons, a joystick for manual override, e-stop and a keypad. You're not dealing with the exposed wiring and internals of the machine. Nor do you care (except if you're a hacker, more on this below).

APIs are all things the user needs to do and we allow them specific endpoints to do those things. A lot of modern GraphQL methods allow you to become a "hacker" and get access to what you want. But, after you're done hacking, you want a proper control panel with steel panels and a version number. You, as a user, are guaranteed that interface and you're going to build your world around it. Check out Shopify, Stripe or Dropbox APIs. See what they allow you to do and what they don't.

Here are some reasons why we want an API:

- Decoupling internal resources from the user (user can still be an internal service). We want to be able to change the database, swap it with anything else we want, completely change the schema, whatever... without affecting the user.

- We might require processing/handling of the data, sometimes with help from other microservices before serving.

- We might want to cache read access, although I am sure this is possible with these automation tools.

- We want stability over expediency (although, this is ok to forego initially).

- We want a singular point of entry, aka entrypoint and be able to control it.

- We might want to asychorniously process the request. "Hey, I got your request and I am processing, here is the processing ID" and respond with status code 202.

All these automation tools are great to get a product running quickly. Personally, I would just use straight SQL for prototyping. If you're working on UIs and don't have access to the server, you can just use https://postgrest.org/ and get an API running. However, after you're product has reached maturity, tighten up those endpoints.

The endpoint design is your control panel. Make it look tidy, checkout how others build this panel, engineer it well and your users will thank you.


Do you happen to have any resources for learning more about API design in the way you described it? I'm really interested to learn more.

Your comment was very insightful. I used to think somewhat along those lines when it came to designing an API. My thought was that and endpoint was to represent an action the user could perform, and it was none of their business how that was implemented. But I've recently been enlisted in a project to rewrite a whole API (admittedly not a good one at all) where it was decided to use GraphQL. The rationale was "some of our endpoints return enormous objects. Not all of the data is needed every time the client calls that endpoint. Let's implement a way to let the client only ask for the data it needs". It sounded great, but I'm thinking now it might not be all gold as it was presented to me.


you can solve underfetching and overfetching in a normal restful API, you can have optional entity relationship fetching on query/params, and also user defined queries.

This might be hard/tiresome when you're hand writing SQL queries but this is where query builders and ORMs really shine.

IMO I wouldn't reach for graphQL unless I have a lot of entities and a lot of nested relationships (or an actual graph), it can get either very tiresome to add or overly complex or tightly couples your DB layer when you have deeper nested relationships


Having the client able to dynamically ask for data from models sounds like a horrible idea to me (if I’m understanding correctly). I once had to work with someone who used the Open Data protocol to make an API with a similar approach and hated it because it felt like query writing was moved from him, the backend engineer at the time, to time the front end engineer. In addition to that, the way he did it could have lead to data we didn’t want exposed to be leaked easily by mistake


1. Biological-age clocks.

2. Treatments that reverse aging in tissues and organisms.

Expect major breakthroughs in these areas in a decade or two with direct implications for human health and lifespan.


Also on the topic of biology

1) Remote controlled orgasmic neural implants

2) Bangfit


1. Issue based direct democracy allowing to trade votes https://voteflux.org

2. longevity research https://www.sens.org


Flux is a wild idea. I kinda love it - everyone gets the same "vote budget" but they can spend it only on issues that matter to them. But I can also see this going sideways in so many ways. Namely I can see single issue voters setting up "chaff" minutia bills to accrue vote credits in order to strategically dominate their issue.

But it would break the deadlock we have now in the USA so that's worth experimenting with.


Yes, there are many possible issues, but most of them can't be identified without real use.

One way to create a sandbox for finding edge cases would be to create a general petition site using voteflux, or convince change.org to implement it.

I think such a site would also help with adoption, because it will gradually introduce people to the idea, and for issues with large enough support politicians will have to follow petition results, even if they were not elected on flux platform.


https://www.openwater.cc/technology In general anything Mary Lou Jepsen touches will be on my to watch list.

Dynamicland

Graph processing hardware accelerators

Content addressable web


5d glass storage. I think it will revolutionize it, specifically the backup /dr world. it can't come fast enough


What is “5d glass storage”? Do you have any links on good source of information?



Pretty cool. But this:

> Assuming a 100% efficient laser, that is one watt-hour (3.6 kJ) of energy consumption for a maximum 0.5 Mbits of data storage.

Is not good


That's 16 kWh per GB. About $2-4, or a around ten years of cloud storage. But this data lasts forever. And the energy costs will certainly drop.


Wow super cool. Doesn’t seem that far off either



Proxmox has been around for decades, they are not exactly a new player.


macrofab.com - full pcb etching and routing with component assembly for SMBs or hobbyists. Although this technology exists to an extent today, I think eventually "2 day delivery" of fully assembled customed circuits + the ability to instantly scale up will enable a lot of new hardware innovation.


having worked on a professional but very low volume product, ordering took about an afternoon. all the rest of it took months.

and there are already assembly companies in most major cities that will take your money and files and just make a thing happen. not clear how this is different enough to change anything.

getting it made just isn’t the hard part for anything interesting (and small).


Agreed on MacroFab, though I think CircuitHub takes that concept to the next level by having project cloning and forking built in.


https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ - Cockroach DB. It's a distributed SQL database that scales horizontally, supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions, and provides failover with minimal latency disruption. The founders are ex-Google employees who wanted to use Spanner[1] outside Google.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner


https://render.com/ - Winner of Disrupt startup battlefield 2019. Use it everyday for HealingGardens.co and am amazed of all the things it does smoothly. There are little attentions to detail that shine through such as auto issues https certs as soon as my domain was connected. I didn't have to lift a finger. Rock on Render!


mRNA technology, I have a hunch that the current situation could give this area a boost similar to what computers got through WW2, and we could witness a cambrian explosion. CRISPR in contrast seems overhyped to me.


AVX-512 neural net inference on inexpensive, CPU-only cloud compute instances. GPU cloud compute is almost unbelievably expensive. Even Linode charges $1000 per month, or $1.50 per hour (look at the GPU plans: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#row--compute)

An AVX-512 Skylake-X cloud compute instance costs $10 per CPU-core per month at Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/), and you can do about 18 DenseNet121 inferences per CPU-core per second (in series, not batched) using tools like https://NN-512.com

As AVX-512 becomes better supported by Intel and AMD chips, it becomes more attractive as an alternative to expensive GPU instances for workloads with small amounts of inference mixed with other computation


How could it be competitive with GPUs in terms of price-per-unit-performance? Seems like GPUs are expensive only because you can't rent a small portion of a GPU? But shouldn't that be possible with GPU virtualisation?

Or is it the case that if you virtualised a GPU up into tiny pieces, the memory-to-flops ratio would be way off what's needed for inference? Or the virtualisation overhead would be too big?

Those are all genuine questions, just to be clear - this is not my area of expertise.


Well, a GPU is a cluster of SIMD units with fast memory

A GPU thread variable is just like a SIMD lane, and a GPU warp variable is just like a SIMD vector register

Nvidia's SIMD instructions are called PTX and they are similar to AVX-512

An AVX-512 core is like a general purpose CPU with a 512-bit GPU core built in

So paying for a single AVX-512 core is like paying for part of a GPU, plus the general purpose compute you need to keep the GPU supplied with work

If you could divide the GPU up, you would lose most of the parallelism, keep all of the communication latency, and still need the drivers etc.

Would a hypothetical virtualized GPU be competitive with an AVX-512 core in terms of price/performance? I don't know, I haven't done the comparison


AppGyver looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.

FWIW, it looks similar to https://restya.com/core-jira-slack-alternative But, they promote it as Jira + Slack alternative (Disclosure: I'm on their private beta and for unknown reason they keep pushing their public release)


It's funny seeing AppGyver as the thing to watch when I was using their stuff in 2013. I guess it's probably progressed though.


“It will be launched at the beginning of 2020.” ... is still on their website today. Doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.


I really like roam research and its open source alternative obsidian for note taking and research.

But I feel there is still something lacking and there is definitely scope for a lot of improvement to make these type of software more useful. Still love the direction in which this is headed and it feels more in-sync than keeping a folder full of text files.


"open source alternative obsidian"

Can you share a link to the source? I didn't see a link on obsidian.md


Oh you're right. It's a free alternative not an OSS alternative. For some reason I thought it was OSS. Sorry.


There is Foam that is OSS. I don't know how it compares with Roam, as I have not used it.

https://github.com/foambubble/foam


What would you say is the advantage of roam research over the open source alternative of Obsidian?


I tried both and found the UI to be better in Roam. The WYSIWYG aspect of Roam is real nice, vs having unrendered markdown in one pane and the rendered version on the other side.

Also, the “daily notes” feature in Roam is really useful, it’s a small UI thing but it gives me a nudge to make a daily note when I do any thinking, rather than having to file it manually in Obsidian.

Obsidian has most of the core stuff that Roam does though.


Obsidian also has a daily note extension built in to the app.


Block Level reference is a huge advantage. Obsidian supports page based reference.


They recently added support for it, but with the caveat that it will add an id to the end of the line.


For starters roam is web based and the other one is desktop software. Also don't think there is a mobile app for later iirc. Also I was wrong that it's OSS. it's a free alternative, it's not OSS.


Anyone used appgyver? This one looks solid


It's wild because I used to intern at Applique which was purchased by Appgyver, not sure how much is still powered by or was ever powered by the Applique core.

I feel like react native is more prominent, but also it could be just the people I interact with.


Check out Draftbit (YC 18) that generates React Native (Expo) code for ya! Connect any backend. We’re launching a lot of exciting features in the next couple weeks!

https://www.draftbit.com

I’m one of the founders, would love to know what you think!


Exciting app :) . Have requested access to the private beta


Wow and it's free for less than $10MM ARR? I might just play around with it out of curiosity


Maybe check out https://pipedream.com if you are interested in exploring other low-code, automation solutions?

You can get a lot done on the free tier (full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders; please let me know if you have any questions)


https://fly.io - containers at edge https://www.xanadu.ai/ - quantum computing with photonic approach


Lean Name Search - Quickest way to find lean domain names.

https://leannamesearch.com


From a more corporate/sales perspective the Snacker looks promising. https://edensnacker.com

VR in a showcase and training environment has always been a giant pain with cables and straps and whatnot. This is solution tries to solve that and removes the middleman who often awkwardly has to put the straps over your head.


I haven't found anything promising, but my nephew plays college football (against my lobbying him and my sister) and I've been keeping my eye out for an early diagnosis CTE assay. There's been a lot of hype over various protein analysis and Alzheimer diagnosis tests but so far nothing with legs.


For some reason I thought development of strapi was stopped due to lack of funding. Glad to see it well and alive.


I've been using it as a CMS in one of my latest projects, and so far it's been great. The database structure it generates is pretty neutral, and probably the same way I would normally build it. I haven't used their API/GraphQL yet, just ran my own queries.


Thank you for recommending appgyver!! I have been looking for something like this for years. I kept starting and stopping native app development but it was too technical for me. This is seriously life-changing. I can't believe it's free to boot. I'd be willing to pay them.


Hasura, SvelteJS - the compiler is the framework, headless CMS, distributed edge functions


Materialize - https://materialize.com/

I'm very curious to try it out for incremental consistency checking (i.e. does all the data satisfy a set of predicates)


Cockpit - a self-hosted headless and api-driven CMS. https://getcockpit.com/

It's clean, fast and easy to setup.


https://blitzjs.com/

Many interesting innovations to make developing React/Node applications easier and faster.


I started off more bullish about ForestAdmin but then maybe I just couldn’t grok it but what it auto-generated wasn’t as elegant (connecting to a Postgres server) as I’d hoped.


Would you care to elaborate? Which parts of the admin API didn't you find elegant (the ORM, the express based framework?)?


Nanovms (https://nanovms.com/), a Linux-compatible unikernel for cloud deployments.


Strapi is VERY nice. It's still missing a bit and can be a pain at time but they're pretty responsive to bug reports.

Also I'd like to add meilisearch to the list.


Have a look at Typesense as well which is an OSS alternative to Algolia: https://github.com/typesense/typesense


SixtyFPS is a new GUI toolkit. It's on my watch list. https://sixtyfps.io/


You guys should check out femtovg, the rendering framework sixtyfps is using https://github.com/femtovg/femtovg that I’m coincidentally maintaining. SixtyFPS recently added WebGL support

https://tronical.github.io/femtovg/examples/index.html


https://adminbro.com - An Auto-generated Admin Panel for your Node.js Application



fly.io . Not just for their current product (which is already awesome in a space that no one else seems to be in), but because the infrastructure they're building seems to position them to address many adjacent areas very easily, including areas that need more competition.

An infrastructure built around firecracker VMs at scale is exactly what I'd like to be running on.


https://icesemulator.com A DYI kit to make EVs audible.


WASM and WebView2 in .NET Core. It can be a breakthrough for cross-platform desktop applications.


May I ask, I’m curious: why is ethereum contracts/blockchain not mentioned in any reply?


Wondering the same thing.

I learned about DeFi recently and am now curious to learn more about smart contracts, the underlying code and everything surrounding it.


So forest admin is commercial for rails_admin or active_admin right?


That's right, it provides a lot more out of the box however and its hybrid architecture (1/2 SaaS 1/2 self-hosted) lets you instantly benefit from updates by refreshing your browser.


Materialize

V lang


Wasm & kubelets


www.opendsu.com


e-ink tablets and displays


www.opendsu.com


Clickable (for folks on mobile, and whatnot):

https://hasura.io/ - Instant GraphQL with built-in authorization for your data

https://strapi.io/ - Open source Node.js Headless CMS

https://www.forestadmin.com/ - Forest Admin does all the heavy lifting of building the admin panel of your web application and provides an API-based framework to implement all your specific business processes.

https://www.appgyver.com/ - The world's first professional no-code platform, enabling you to build apps for all form factors, including mobile, desktop, browser, TV and others.

https://www.integromat.com/en - Integromat is the most advanced online automation platform

https://nodered.org/ - Low-code programming for event-driven applications

Interesting to me that I've never heard of any of these. Thanks for sharing.


Xiaomi

Not a start up, but I think to watch. They seem to be getting high end technological products to consumers at a reasonable price.

For instance I'm hoping their 34" Mi Curved Gaming Monitor will break this high priced monitor market and get large monitors mainstream.


https://Futureland.tv - a community of people learning a craft and sharing their progress along the way.


FL is great. Team and community that care about each other and are building an incredible product.


https://brilliantlightpower.com/hydrino-states-of-hydrogen/ - 12 experiments that prove hydrinos exist - this will revolutionize physics and solve climate change amongst many other things. Yes wikipedia says it's pseudoscience, but that is under skeptic lock and key.




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