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

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.

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.

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.

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://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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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

- 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 :)

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 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/

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

https://puri.sm

https://pine64.org

https://inkplate.io/

https://www.protondb.com/

https://www.proxmox.com/

https://www.qubes-os.org/

https://pop.system76.com/

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.

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

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)

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.

Anyone used appgyver? This one looks solid

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.

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.

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.

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

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

https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery

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?

So forest admin is commercial for rails_admin or active_admin right?

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.

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.