HACKER Q&A
📣 stagas

Novelty ideas or concepts worth exploring?


It feels lately that everywhere I look seems to be a recyclement of the same ideas and same concepts, repeating over and over again, lacking novelty.

In an attempt to escape this bubble, my question to you, HN, is this:

- What did you learn recently that was surprisingly fresh and different? What concept or idea has been the last to grab your attention and is driving you to explore more deeply? Links are welcome, articles, book suggestions, videos, or maybe (and perhaps even better) software projects?

  👤 non-entity Accepted Answer ✓
Not sure if it counts as novelty or not and its not purely software at all, but I've been learning about and experimenting with VLC (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_light_communication)

Hopefully when I have a semi useful prototype done I'll be able to write more about it. I'm particularly interested in the upcoming 802.11bb standard and it would be cool to design something that can take advantage of or at least build upon existing 802.11 stacks.

This was a pretty easy to understand paper introducing VLC concepts https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8257800. Sadly it does cost money to read and unfortunately I'm not aware of any way to access ieee documents without paying. Although since it's a research paper and not a standard, you may be able to find it on sci-hub or something similar.