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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.
( 40 comments | 50 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by pizza on Saturday December 25, 2021 @09:48AM (#29683722)
Software-defined radios - you can do absolutely insane things with these. Listen to multiple radio stations as once, listen to ham radio, capture live images of the earth from geostationary satellites, watch live airplane traffic, listen to maritime radio, ...try to listen to signals using the moon as a reflector.., detect GPS jammers..., sync 5 of them to the same clock source and use them as a passive radar array to track objects' movements through walls..... use them for backyard radio astronomy to detect the ion trails due to the hydrogen emission line of blazing meteorites.... this shit is cheap too the most common basic model is like only 20 bucks.

Haskell

Jax / Awkward Array

Topological Data Analysis

Cocalc

CLIP

gitpod / vscodeweb / github codespaces

CodeQL

DDSP

mathlib

neovim

language-server-protocol

adafruit feather m0

rr

linear logic

tmux

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by relbeek2 on Saturday December 25, 2021 @12:49PM (#29685201)
I’ve been looking to get into SDRs. Do you have any recommendations on what to buy?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by mikewarot on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:11PM (#29685411)
The cheap RTL2832 software dongles do a surprisingly good job, and can be had with antennas for $30-40. There are many different packages which can drive them, including SDRsharp and HDSDR.

--

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

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

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by pizza on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:00PM (#29685315)
I only have an rtl-sdr, it can only receive but is good enough for what I need. Also heard good things about hackRF (can tx as well as rx).

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by popotamonga on Saturday December 25, 2021 @03:28AM (#29681488)
I run a site that gives sports betting tips. I use the text generation to automatically builds narratives for thousands of games a day. I use affiliate programs with online betting sites and pull 80k/yr just with AI text ( started 4k been doubling each year)

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by ffwacom on Saturday December 25, 2021 @06:30PM (#29688055)
Well done, more scam garbage for the internet.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by ewuhic on Saturday December 25, 2021 @05:11AM (#29681967)
And the tech stack includes?..
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by sidcool on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:17PM (#29686088)
Definitely Python.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by zscore on Saturday December 25, 2021 @08:14AM (#29683058)
This is fascinating! Can you give more details about "building the narrative"? I'm guessing you scrape a bunch of articles about the game and use something to summarize them?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by IshKebab on Saturday December 25, 2021 @05:42PM (#29687706)
Sounds like spam to me.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by binarynate on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:06PM (#29685986)
Microsoft Hololens 2: I use one for work, and it's absolutely incredible. It's an augmented reality headset with built-in hand tracking, so you interact with the holograms by touching them with your hands. You mentioned "Tony Stark" technology, and it really is like the hologram computer he uses. When you look down at your hands, you see a Windows logo appears on your wrist (it follows your wrist due to the hand tracking). When you tap on the Windows icon on your wrist, a start menu appears in front of you, and you can choose an AR app to launch by tapping it with your finger. These apps can be full 3D experiences (like ones created with Unity) or they can be 2D apps where you can place 2D windows around you (like the built-in Edge browser app). These headsets are over $3K, so they're currently used for high-end niche use cases that justify that investment. For example, some of my customers use them to show 3D instructions to technicians for aerospace manufacturing. However, from using the Hololens 2, it's clear to me that AR will inevitably become a major computing platform once the price is reduced. My guess is that we will start to see that in 6 - 10 years.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by vkkhare on Saturday December 25, 2021 @12:27PM (#29684992)
Edge computing for machine learning. Instead of running ML models on the cloud, I train them on user's device, ask these devices to offload computation between each other and give me the best performance out there. One good example is recommendations that work offline for you. Imagine you are listening to spotify in offline mode (with you downloaded playlist) and recommendations adapt accordingly even without internet!

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by derbOac on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:37PM (#29685714)
Nice!

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by vkkhare on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:40PM (#29685740)
you can find many such people in our discord server https://nimbleedge.ai/discord

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by rhn_mk1 on Saturday December 25, 2021 @08:16AM (#29683073)
Fully controllable pocket computers.

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

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by sargstuff on Sunday December 26, 2021 @12:58PM (#29694639)
What's your borg control preference?

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

* eye controlable via smart glasses?

* human jestures

* mind-computer interface

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by rgrmrts on Saturday December 25, 2021 @09:20AM (#29683514)
Which one are you using?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by dTal on Sunday December 26, 2021 @08:39PM (#29698144)
Not the original poster, but I'm using a GPD Micro PC. A "laptop" that fits in your pocket like a smartphone does really is a quiet revolution in personal computing.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by rhn_mk1 on Monday December 27, 2021 @06:35AM (#29701614)
The Librem 5. It's the closest to controllable you can get now.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by reacharavindh on Saturday December 25, 2021 @09:28AM (#29683567)
Not ones I use, but would like to use…..

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

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by noud on Saturday December 25, 2021 @07:40AM (#29682801)
> 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.

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by sargstuff on Sunday December 26, 2021 @12:41PM (#29694442)
no weight to paper specified. onion & poster board aren't cutting edge material.

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

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

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

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by quantisan on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:38AM (#29681272)
Changing the perspective a little... A few years ago, we applied client-side applications and edge computing for chicken farmers in Mozambique. https://www.quantisan.com/facebook-loving-farmers-of-mozambi...

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by sargstuff on Sunday December 26, 2021 @12:47PM (#29694505)
So, a flock mismatch or not enough different 'birds of a feather'?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by iamphilrae on Monday December 27, 2021 @12:28PM (#29704518)
The company I work for have built a form of indoor positioning system using the Earth’s magnetic field. We are currently deploying it to Frankfurt Airport to aid connecting passengers in travelling from gate to gate for certain airlines.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by mcgooiggy on Sunday December 26, 2021 @11:54AM (#29694013)
Electronic shifters on my bike. Absolutely love them, the gears never go out of true. Every shift is exactly the same, no variation at all. I ride most days 10km-30km and I charge once a month

Gave me a lot more confidence in my drivetrain.

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by mvh on Saturday December 25, 2021 @01:03PM (#29685339)
I use program synthesis - cutting edge technology from, I think, the 70s?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by pizza on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:33PM (#29686231)
What kinds? What’s the best process to do program synthesis? The more I write programs by hand the more I think it should probably be a first-class design consideration for new programming languages
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by manx on Saturday December 25, 2021 @05:30AM (#29682049)
Scala 3
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by Lunrtick on Saturday December 25, 2021 @11:21AM (#29684458)
May I ask what context you use it in? It looks like it strikes the right balance between simplicity and descriptive power - kinda like a statically typed python.

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by manx on Saturday December 25, 2021 @03:07PM (#29686498)
I'm using it mostly for full-stack web development with ScalaJS (https://www.scala-js.org) in the frontend (https://outwatch.github.io/docs/readme.html) and in the backend with AWS lambdas.

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

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

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by sidcool on Saturday December 25, 2021 @02:19PM (#29686101)
How has your experience been vis-a-vis Scala 2.x?
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by manx on Saturday December 25, 2021 @03:12PM (#29686538)
I'm in the Scala world for ~10 years and love the language. The language got so many design decisions right and slowly teaches you functional programming (which is not a must). The standard library with its collections is better than anything I have seen so far. I easily prefer it over Java, Typescript, Python, Ruby, Dart or Kotlin. Scala 3 just cleans up the language and brings type-level programming and macros to the next level.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by brudgers on Saturday December 25, 2021 @08:31AM (#29683198)
A Leatherman Kick.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by meesterdude on Saturday December 25, 2021 @10:57PM (#29689526)
for me it's a spatial web browser.
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by taffronaut on Saturday December 25, 2021 @04:52AM (#29681895)
D2 steel
Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by pandemicsyn on Saturday December 25, 2021 @11:32AM (#29684547)
CPM Magnacut ftw.

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by mckirk on Sunday December 26, 2021 @08:46AM (#29692308)
That was a fascinating deep dive into an area I had no idea about, thanks!

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by longitudinal93 on Sunday December 26, 2021 @09:54PM (#29698611)
Some available from Dawson Knives:

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

Re:Ask HN: What cutting-edge technology do you use? by fuzzfactor on Monday December 27, 2021 @05:25AM (#29701235)
Well you can't get much more "cutting edge" than this.