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

Self-driving cars. Now that the hype is over and the fake-it-til-you-make-it crowd has tanked, there's progress. Slowly, the LIDARs get cheaper, the radars get more resolution, and the software improves.

UE5's rendering approach. They finally figured out how to use the GPU to do level of detail. Games can now climb out of the Uncanny Valley.

The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those.

C++ getting serious about safety. Buffer overflows and bad pointers should have been eliminated decades ago. We've known how for a long time.

Electric cars taking over. The Ford F-150 and the Jeep Wrangler are coming out in all-electric forms. That covers much of the macho market. And the electrics will out-accelerate the gas cars without even trying hard.

Utility scale battery storage. It works and is getting cheaper. Wind plus storage plus megavolt DC transmission, and you can generate power in the US's wind belt (the Texas panhandle north to Canada) and transmit it to the entire US west of the Mississippi.

Web Assembly

It's interesting in a bunch of ways, and I think it might end up having a wider impact than anyone has really realized yet.

It's an ISA that looks set to be adopted in a pretty wide range of applications, web browsers, sandboxed and cross platform applications, embedded (into other programs) scripting, cryptocurrencies, and so on.

It looks like it's going to enable a wider variety of languages on the web, many more performant than the current ones. That's interesting on it's own, but not the main reason why I think the technology is interesting.

Both mobile devices, and crypto currencies, are places where hardware acceleration is a thing. If this is going to be a popular ISA in both of those, might we get chips whose native ISA is web assembly? Once we have hardware acceleration, do we see wasm chips running as CPUs someday in the not too distant future (CPU with an emphasis on Central)?

A lot of people seem excited about the potential for risc-v, and arm is gaining momentum against x86 to some extent, but to me wasm actually seems best placed to takeover as the dominant ISA.

Anyways, I doubt that thinking about this is going to have much direct impact on my life... this isn't something I feel any need to help along (or a change I feel the need to try and resist). It's just a technology that I think will be interesting to watch as the future unfolds.

Materialize https://materialize.io/ Incremental update/materialization of database views with joins and aggregates is super interesting. It enables listening to data changes, not just on a row level, but on a view level. It's an approach that may completely solve the problem of cache invalidation of relational data. Imagine a memcache server, except it now also guaranties consistency. In addition, being able to listen to changes could make live-data applications trivial to make, even with filters, joins, whatever.

Similarly, someone is developing a patch for postgres that implements incrementally updating/materializing views[1]. I haven't tried it so I can't speak of its performance or the state of the project, but according to the postgres wiki page on the subject [2] it seems to support some joins and aggregates, but probably not something that would be recommended for production use.

[1] https://www.postgresql-archive.org/Implementing-Incremental-... [2] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenanc...

Oxide Computer Company

https://oxide.computer/

“True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.”

Corey Quinn interviewed the founders on his podcast "Screaming in the Cloud", where they explain the need for innovation in that space.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud...

Basically, on-premises hardware is years behind what companies like Facebook and Google have in-house, it may be time to close that gap.

They also have a podcast, "On The Metal", which is such a joy to listen to. Their last episode with Jonathan Blow was really a treat.

https://oxide.computer/podcast/

It's mostly anecdotes about programming for the hardware-software interface, if that's your thing ;).

Rust lang - Memory safety through zero cost abstraction as a way to eliminate a large class of errors in systems languages is interesting. Especially if it allows more people to write systems programs.

WASM - Mostly as a compile target for Rust, but I think this changes the way software might be deployed. No longer as a website, but as a binary distributed across CDNs.

ZK-SNARKS - Zero knowledge proofs are still nascent, but being able to prove you know something while not revealing what it is has specific applicability for outsourcing computation. It's a dream to replace cloud computing as we know it today.

Lightning Network - A way to do micropayments, if it works, will be pretty interesting.

BERT - Newer models for NLP are always interesting because the internet is full of text.

RoamResearch - The technology for this has been around for a while, but it got put together in a interesting way.

Oculus Quest - Been selling out during COVID. I sense a behavioral change.

Datomic - Datalog seems to be having a resurgence. I wonder if it can fight against the tide of editing in-place.

Oxford nanopore sequencing. If a few problems can be figured out (mainly around machine learning and protein design), then it will beat every other biological detection, diagnosis, and sequencing method by a massive amount (no 10x, but more like 100x-1000x)

It's hard to explain how big nanopore sequencing is if a few (hard) kinks can be figured out. Basically, it has the potential to completely democratize DNA sequencing.

Here is an explanation of the technology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWZvHIi3i0

Libresilicon [1]. Extremely important to our freedoms from corporate and state tyranny to make chip manufacturing libre.

> We develop a free (as in freedom, not as in free of charge) and open source semiconductor manufacturing process standard, including a full mixed signal PDK, and provide a quick, easy and inexpensive way for manufacturing. No NDAs will be required anywhere to get started, making it possible to build the designs in your basement if you wish so. We are aiming to revolutionize the market by breaking through the monopoly of proprietary closed source manufacturers!

[1] https://libresilicon.com/

1. Cloudflare Workers, I don't have the bandwidth to experiment with it right now but it interests me greatly.

https://workers.cloudflare.com/

2. Rust - definitely will be the next language I learn. Sadly the coronavirus cancelled a series of meetings in Michigan promising to give a gentle introduction to Rust.

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

Geometric algebra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo

It makes a lot of hard physics problems (Maxwell's equations, relativity theory, quantum mechanics) much more understandable and (I'm told) unifies them in a common framework. I think it will help your average developer become comfortable with these areas of physics.

1. https://www.starlink.com/ Finally, truly global and low latency satellite internet.

2. Generative models for video games - https://aidungeon.io/ is barely scratching the surface. Story, art, animation, music, gameplay, it will all be generated by models in the future.

3. New direct drive robotics actuators such as https://www.google.com/search?q=peano-hasel+actuators I think actuators are holding robotics back more than software now. Breakthroughs are needed. No general purpose robot will ever be practical with electric motors and gearboxes.

4. Self-driving cars are still happening, despite delays. I think discounting Tesla's approach is a mistake, but Waymo is still in the lead.

5. NLP is finally starting to work. The potential for automation is huge. Code generation is very exciting as well.

6. I was excited for Rust but I now believe it's too complex. I'm looking for a much simpler language that can still achieve the holy grail of memory safety without GC pauses or refcounting. But I'm not holding my breath. If ML models start writing a large part of our code then the human ergonomics of programming language design will matter less.

Sidewalk delivery robots.

The problem is a lot easier that driverless cars (everything is slower and a remote human can take over in hard places) and huge potential to shake up the short-to-medium distance delivery business. It's the sort of tech that could quickly explode into 100s of cities worldwide like escooters did a couple of years ago.

Starship Technologies is the best known company in the area and furthest advanced. https://www.starship.xyz/

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) occupies a intermediate position in accuracy / skin depth for soft tissue between ultrasound and MRI

Optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) approaches SQUID level accuracy without need for supercooled device, can be worn or used as a contact sensor like ultrasound.

LoRA long range (10km +) low power sub-gigahertz radio frequency protocol useful for battery powered IoT devices transmitting small amounts of data.

Heat cabinet for infectious diseases, an old technology used to fight polio and other diseases that went out of favor with introduction of antibiotics. May find utility against novel viral infections.

UV light treatment of blood. Another old technology that may find use against novel infectious agents. Stimulates immune system to fight viral infections.

GPGPU. GPU performance is still increasing along Moore's Law, single-core performance has plateaued. The implication is that at some point, the differential will become so great that we'll be stupid to continue running anything other than simple housekeeping tasks on the CPU. There's a lot of capital investment that'd need to happen for that transition - we basically need to throw out much of what we've learned about algorithm design over the past 50 years and learn new parallel algorithms - but that's part of what makes it exciting.

Velomobiles! A velomobile is a recumbent bike with fairing which enables them to be more convenient and much faster than a regular bike. A fit rider can easily overtake the peloton in Tour de France (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBb7YIRcBe0). The velomobile in the clip is a standard model and there are racing models that are faster still!

Just like with regular bikes, you can add electric assist to them to extend their range and make the job of the rider easier. In this clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCo4cRQMBlo) the rider gets an average speed on 37.5 km/h (top speed 84 km/h) over a distance of 73 km with over half the battery remaining. And that is without wearing the racing hoodie which significantly reduces drag.

The main problem with velomobiles is that they are expensive. The frame is made from carbon fiber and needs to be handcrafted. So the price ranges from about €5000 - €10000 which is too expensive to most. If some Chinese giant or billionaire investor set out to mass produce velomobiles I'm sure they could totally revolutionize transportation.

I wrote a guide on connecting Hasura + Forest admin for no-code SaaS apps + admin backends:

"14. Connect Forest Admin to Hasura & Postgres"

http://hasura-forest-admin.surge.sh/#/?id=_14-connect-forest...

For Heroku specifically you need to make sure that the client attempting to connect does it over SSL, so set SSL mode if possible (many clients will do this by-default).

To get the connection string for pasting into Forest Admin config, run this:

    heroku config | grep HEROKU_POSTGRESQL

That should give you a connection string you can copy + paste to access externally from Heroku:

    HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_YELLOW_URL: postgres://user3123:passkja83kd8@ec2-117-21-174-214.compute-1.amazonaws.com:6212/db982398

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#exte...

Zig. There's a Why Zig When There is Already CPP, D, and Rust? writeup at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...

1. Starship - https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

Completely reusable rocket that can carry 100 tons into low Earth orbit, refuel, and then continue on to places like Mars. Launches are estimated to cost SpaceX about $2M, compared to the SLS $1B (estimated, similar lift capability) and space shuttle $1B (27 tons). The engines are real, test vehicles are flying (another test launch is likely to happen in the next week or two). Follow the SpaceX subreddit for progress updates

2. Commonwealth Fusion Systems - http://cfs.energy

Lots of reactors have struggled with scale and plasma instability. CFS has adopted a design using new REBCO high temperature superconductor magnets that are stronger and smaller, which can be used to build smaller reactors and better stabilize the plasma. They are building a prototype called SPARC, expected to produce net energy gain by 2025.

I’m a little surprised that there aren’t any mentions of Obsidian, while there are at least two mentions of Roam. To all Roam lovers, and to all intellectuals in general, I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist.

It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor.

I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format).

Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features are implemented as plugins and can be turned off.

And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience with Obsidian).

(Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user. I copied most of this comment from another comment of mine)

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

- Far UVC lights (200 to ~222nm) such as Ushio's Care222 tech. This light destroys pathogens quickly while not seeming to damage human skin or eyes.

- FPGAs. I'm no computer engineer, but it seems like this tech is going to soon drastically increase our compute.

- Augur, among other prediction platforms. Beliefs will pay rent.

- Web Assembly, as noted elsewhere. One use case I haven't read yet here is distributed computing. BOINC via WASM could facilitate dozens more users to join the network.

- Decision-making software, particularly that which leverages random variable inputs and uses Monte Carlo methods, and helps elicit the most accurate predictions and preferences of the user.

Subvocal recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition Imagine how much more people would use voice input if they could do it silently.

Also neural interfaces like CTRL-labs was building before being acquired. Imagine if you could navigate and type at full speed while standing on the subway.

I think that rich, high fidelity inputs like those are going to be key to ambient computing really taking off.

https://luna-lang.org - a dual-representation (visual & textual) programming language

RISC-V

Zig programming language

Nim programming language

(also some stuff mentioned by others, like WASM, Rust, Nix/NixOS)

Optogenetics [0]. Light changes electrical behavior in cells. AKA, point laser, neurons fire, I know kung-fu

Memristors [1] Rebuilding the entire computer from EE basics. New 'color' added to EE spectrum, now computers process huge datasets on a watch battery

CRISPR-CaS9 [2] Tricks bacteria used to keeps viruses out are pretty slick. Crtl-C, Ctrl-V for gene editing. $100B technology, easily.

Strangely (encouragingly?) all these words are 'misspelled'

NOTE: I am massively oversimplifying things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics

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

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

VR. It seems just about ready, but still a little too expensive.

While good games are obviously already there, I'm more curious about work. Would an infinite desktop with an appropriate interface beat the reliable old 2x24" screen setup I have? I think it could.

Nix—It takes buy-in, but very worth it for us. Builds are reliable, reproducible, can exist alongside one another. Plug an S3 powered CloudFront cache into it, and you’re never building the same thing more than once.

Deno—Sandboxed by default seems a powerful way to offer our customers to run custom code. Native TypeScript, build single bins. I have still to play around with it but those all seem like compelling advantages over Node.js

Zig Programming language.

Because it's basically C-+, It's extremely easy to use, and also extremely easy to parse, so (and maybe this is self-serving because I did it) I see a lot of automated code-generation tools to hook Zig into other PLs.

C's age is starting to show (and it's becoming a problem), and I think it has the opportunity to be sort of a place for old C heads like me to go to stay relevant, modern, safe, and productive.

All the new products around WireGuard. I'm so tired of running VPNs. NAT traversal with protocols like STUN, TURN and ICE are going to allow point-to-point networks for all the clients.

https://tailscale.com/

https://portal.cloud/app/subspace

https://www.sens.org : Solving the problem of aging and diseases of aging. Watch a few interviews of Aubrey de Grey to get a better idea of the possibilities of their research. Though this would come under the "to watch" not for the immediate future but for the next decade or two.

So many interesting links. This post should be a regular on HN.

A friend of mine is working on coscout. It's in beta right now, but he showed me some pretty insane machine learning based insights for companies, investors and founders.

Things like

- When will this company raise the next round? - What is the net worth of ? - What is the probability that this investor will invest in you? (given your sector, founder age, pedigree, gender, market conditions, do you have an MVP or not etc.) - A bunch of other complicated stuff I didn't really understand

Definitely worth keeping an eye on if you're into this kinda stuff: https://coscout.com/

I guess I'm much more conservative than other folks, but I think we've scratched only 10% of the surface of the benefits that things like Kubernetes, Consul, Vault and Terraform should/will provide.

So they're on the list. I feel like at my job I'm pushing at the edges (as far as running large scale, stable production) and we've still got miles left.

Also Bazel.

I guess this is a boring answer.

Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/

A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me.

I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.

Ubuntu, ParrotOS, Kali

Julia Lang is fun

For devops, Pulumi/CDK

I watch graph dbs but they all suck or are too expensive or have insane licenses (Neo4j, RedisGraph)

Differentiable programming, Zygote, Jax, PyTorch, TF/Keras

Optimal transport (sliced fused gromov-wasserstein)

AGI, levin, solomonoff, hutter, schmidhuber, friston

Ramda is amazing

George Church’s publications

im also super interested in molecular programming

DEAP is fun for tree GP a la Koza

Judea Pearl’s work will change the world once folks grok it

Secure multiparty computation

Caddy, specifically v2 (https://caddyserver.com/v2)

I've been using Caddy v2 all through beta/RC and glad it's finally stable with a proper release. I moved away from using nginx for serving static content for my side projects and prototypes. I'm also starting to replace reverse proxying from HAProxy as well. The lightweight config and the automated TLS with Let's Encrypt makes everything a breeze. Definitely has become part of my day-to-day.

Solar energy, carbon dioxide and water directly to butanol. In other words, store solar energy directly as fuel. There are other versions that generate hydrogen, but that has a much lower energy density than liquid fuel.

Just modify your existing ICE to run on butanol and you're good to go.

See https://www.intelligentliving.co/biofuel-solar-energy-co2-wa... for where we were a year ago.

Robotics + Deep Learning - I think we just quietly passed a milestone where robots using deep learning can perform useful real world tasks (selecting items, packing boxes etc)

If true we could be at a watershed for robotics adoption and progress as large scale deployments generate the data to train on more complex tasks, leading to more deployments and so snowballing onwards

This seems like a much more likely process that will lead to a type of “general AI” than researchers pushing us all the way there

Covariant AI (and their partnerships) is what got me thinking: https://covariant.ai/

Self hosting - https://cloudron.io

Combining statistics-based AI with GOFAI to create systems that can both recognize objects in a sea of data and reason about what they saw.

The MiSTer FPGA-based hardware platform.

RISC-V is gonna change everything. Yeah, RISC-V is good.

I am particularly interested in food products that will replace animal-based foods. There will be a major consumer shift in the upcoming decades as consumers shift to more sustainable alternatives. This will changes industries, towns and regions.

Darklang: https://darklang.com/

I've tried out an early version of their product, and I really like where they're headed.

Cloudflare workers. It was on my watch list at the beginning of the year and I’m just about to out a 20k page “static” (with tons of interactivity) site into production them.

Using it is an API gateway and Kv store for truly static assets is amazing.

Wrote a blog post on the technologies I believe are going to change industries

1. No-Code Tools 2. GraphQL 3. Oculus Quest 4. FPGA 5. Netflix for Gamers 6. Windows for Linux 7. Notion 8. Animation Engines

https://jay.kanakiya.in/blog/what-i-am-excited-about-in-2020...

https://immersedvr.com/

Virtual monitors in an Oculus Quest that actually works. What’s coming up that will be amazing is hand controls (including a virtual keyboard) and conferencing and collaboration tools.

Solid state batteries.

The tech is tantalizingly close, although not perfected yet. If and when they become available, these batteries will have a far higher energy density and degrade at a far lower rate than existing batteries.

Tailscale - riding on the wireguard wave - https://tailscale.com/

Also Wireguard - https://www.wireguard.com/

The general trend toward returning computing to the edge, which is just starting and has been accelerated due to COVID forcing BeyondCorp type practices on us.

Cognitive radio, ultra wide spread spectrum, and other radio tech that promises great range and license free or minimal licensing operation due to lack of interference with other stuff.

Rust is the first serious C/C++ replacement contender IMHO.

RISC-V and other commodity open source silicon.

Cheaper faster ASIC production making custom silicon with 100X+ performance gains feasible for more problems.

Zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic crypto, etc.

Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.

Redpanda https://vectorized.io/

zksnarks https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/

Essentially let’s you verify computation is accurate without doing the computation yourself, and even treating the computation as a black box so you don’t know what is computed. Many applications in privacy, but also for outsourced computation.

Rainway: https://rainway.com/ Google Stadia: https://stadia.google.com/

It's not even about gaming. Fuck gaming. It's about the underlying streaming technology.

Imagine this same tech being used by a surgeon to perform surgery remotely. That's the type of use case I'm thinking about!

Not sure if this counts, but I look forward to seeing the future of meat alternatives - impossiblefoods.com, beyondmeat.com, eatnuggs.com, etc.

Arm and RISC-V are both getting scalable vector compute support. Could lead to GPU-like compute capabilities without all the goofiness of GPUs.

The H.266 / VVC video compression standard will be finalized in a few months. Ignoring licensing issues (yes patents blah blah blah) industry-wide efficiency wins like that are always nice.

Generative machine learning (think GANs for images or GPT-2 for text) can be applied to video games. Truly unique narrative experiences!

Everything remote work-related. I previously thought my career would miss the WFH revolution and most knowledge workers would still go to the office until at least 2050, but now it seems clear that is going to get dramatically accelerated.

Wasmer is a project I'm watching closely for many reasons. I feel as WASM becomes more commonplace the role Wasmer plays will become clearer.

NextDNS (nextdns.io) is a genius idea that I very much wish I had thought of. I am a paying customer as of this past week and am integrating it in all the places I always meant to put a pihole ...

Low-level stuff & Linux: RISC-V, Vulkan, Wayland, Sway WM, Wireguard, Zig.

Web or high-level stuff: deno, Svelte, Vue, Webassembly, WebGPU, Flutter.

Uizard - Using machine learning to get from a drawing to ui and code. As a programmer, I’m looking forward to getting a head start on my personal projects, before I need to involve a designer

https://uizard.io/

Differential Dataflow is going to change the way apps are built: https://materialize.io/

I'd say my project Super Graph it's a GraphQL to SQL compiler in GO. It saves developers thousands of man-hours and 10x their productivity. 80% of web backend coding is struggling with ORMs, SQL and writing APIs. Super Graph does away with all that. A simple GraphQL queries get you the data you need.

https://github.com/dosco/super-graph

Hasura + React Admin.

Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours.

This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql

NVME over Fabric.

Only started to become available last year in AWS' more expensive instance types. But hoping it will become more widespread.

Benchmarks with Spark result in real world performance improvements of 2-3x and SSDs will be much faster with PCIe4.0.

Further EV improvements. Companies like Lucid and Lightyear are doing interesting things on the EV efficiency side, though their cars are not aimed at the mass market. Lightyear is looking to commercialize their solar panels for other automakers as well:

https://lucidmotors.com/

https://lightyear.one/

Volkswagen and Hyundai are doing interesting things on the mass market side of EVs. Volkswagen is now the number 1 BEV maker in Europe and will probably become number 1 in China in a year or two:

https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/april-2020-european-elec...

Hyundai is also starting a big EV push. Their future 800-volt cars should be interesting:

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/hyundai/109135/new-hyundai-pro...

1. Fishtown Analytics - makes dbt, a sql data modeling tool that has really caught on in the analytics world over the last year or two

2. Bubble - no-code!

3. Stripe - already big but has the potential to be the next Google/FB/MSFT etc

Rocket propulsion tech. Not just because of SpaceX, but I really hope we develop newer and more efficient propulsion techniques.

1. Functional strictly typed programming patterns. It's hard to say if functional languages themselves will get adoption, but we definitely see functional patterns being used more and more in languages like Javascript, and being pushed in things like React/Redux.

2. Graphql/service-based architectures

I am very interested in new energy solutions as a way to de-carbonize and provide consistent supply of low cost energy.

1. Green hydrogen production and fuel cells. We are just scratching the surface of green hydrogen production. Hydrogen can be the energy carrier we need in the various use cases where batteries are not viable.

2. Nuclear SMRs. Definitely something that is more of a "something to watch".

3. Pumped hydro. The longest lasting, highest capacity, lowest cost, 0 carbon, grid-scale energy storage solution. I have been closely follow a company I found on HN call Terrament. https://www.terramenthq.com

It's definitely Elixir/Phoenix/Phoenix-LiveView. I'm even planning on using that tech stack in an upcoming project.

If you have time this long weekend, the team behind Autocode (Standard Library) [0] is looking for feedback. We launched a couple months ago here on HN and have been eating up community responses. :)

tl;dr is: we provide the entire development stack for API integration on rails. If you've ever wanted to ship some quick webhook or API integration logic but have found Zapier too limiting but spinning up an entire dev stack overkill, Autocode fits cleanly in between both. In-browser IDE, API autocomplete, a drag-and-drop UI that generates code for you, version control, revision history, cloud hosting for your APIs. Takes a minute or two to ship a webhook from scratch.

Disclaimer: Am founder. Am also happy to hear questions, thoughts, anything!

[0] https://stdlib.com/

Deep Learning driven NLP. We've seen massive advancements in research, but from personal experience working with a few startups, these new forms of NLP are just beginning to hit the market now (most companies are still using Classical NLP techniques like part of speech tagging etc). It's a huge space and I can't wait to see its use cases expand.

Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Augmented Reality. As someone in this thread mentioned for self-driving cars, I think the hype cycle for AR is in the right spot for us to begin seeing real advancements in the next couple years, especially with Apple's recent announcement.

Svelte

Flutter

Zig, Nim & Crystal programming languages

Please.build (bazel clone in Go)

GraalVM's native image and CoreRT for .NET (though not much is heard about progress on CoreRT)

https://terminusdb.com

https://www.categoricaldata.net

- - - -

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

Honeycomb will hopefully (continue to) upend the "logs, metrics, and traces" world.

https://honeycomb.io/

Programming languages count as technology, right?

I'm really excited for what Julia is doing - making a really nice ecosystem of modern, dynamic, high performance code.

I think 3d printing still had enormous potential.

They are printing jet engine parts with it these days.

Was bitcoin or blockchain mentioned on HN back when it wasn't on many radars?

AI assisted code completion.

Brain computer interfaces and related research papers/techniques

I'd like StarLink (or something else like it!) to succeed increase internet adoption massively around the planet.

Synthetic biology. Microalgae (food, biofuel, Co2 sequestration).

Rust. It's an extremely interesting language for me, I'm trying to learn bits of it every few years and while I still don't have any real tasks, I just love its development. May be it'll be the last and only programming language that everyone will use for the foreseeable future.

Dot Net Core (C#/Winforms) compiling to native code.

ReactOS/Wine. Lately I'm getting worried about where the Windows OS seems to be headed. ReacOS slowly catching up, but recent developments seem to be promising. There's still many things I need that are not multi/cross-platform.

If anyone is particularly brave, we are a new platform which is like Firebase, except it's built with Postgres:

https://app.supabase.io

We are are essentially rebuilding [DabbleDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB) for the UI, and you get a bunch of middleware which is auto-generated: REST APIs, Realtime (CDC), auto-updating documentation. Also we will tackle some of the more difficult tasks for Postgres like replicating your database close to your users.

Also we're opensource! https://github.com/supabase/

Circle.so (https://circle.so/)

With a rapidly growing creator economy, the tooling around building custom communities is very far behind. The cutting edge is a Facebook group, Slack channel, or a Discord server.

Deno.land

More IPFS applications, integrations and services build on it.

As for "competition" like scuttlebut. I would love sneaker-mesh -net type mobile killer app that would actually work.

Hell I would even mind if facebook implemented something that would work when centrilized infrastructure fails.

www.CloudNC.com

Basically, 1) bringing down the cost of CNC machined parts down to their marginal cost through automation, 2) reducing that marginal cost through higher machine utilisation rates, and 3) reducing turn around times and accuracy of parts to clients.

Tailscale.

Quantified self tech and personalized medicine tech. Stem cell stuff. Genetic therapy stuff. We're moving from an age where a doctor was a static map of symptoms => treatments to an age where far more personalized data and processes are considered. The paradigm is also slowly shifting on being able to reverse rather than just avoid or prevent certain conditions and situations.

The level of sophistication is already making some doctors feel obsolete, by their own admission to me. If we don't get to live in exciting times, our children and grandchildren surely will.

Anything to do with Genomics - DNA sequencing costs less than $200 nowadays. Info-tech doesnt have much more to offer with humans being as faulty as they are. Biotech is the next frontier

Next generation autonomous evtols:

https://www.jobyaviation.com/

https://kittyhawk.aero/

https://lilium.com/

https://www.volocopter.com/

https://www.daedalean.ai/

3D Bioprinting : corneas.

Light-field technology. I believe its time has come. Actually I'm working on creating a cheap light-field camera and the pipeline from the video processing to the video player.

https://www.letsdeel.com - super easy payroll for remote teams. Onboarding / payments is awesome.

[1] https://www.yokogawa.com/yjp/solutions/solutions/minimal-fab...

[2] https://www.searchforthenext.com/

[3] https://www.efinixinc.com/products-trion.html

Sysdig [1] great monitoring platform for containers on K8S

https://sysdig.com/

1. Wing - Drone Delivery (https://wing.com/)

2. Nanorobitics for dentistry (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3723292/)

zk-S[NT]ARKs and related zero knowledge tech along with scalability improvements to Ethereum is poised to revolutionize financial tech. It will take decades to play out much like consumer PC and internet and we are still in very early stages.

But when it really picks up the impact will be as big as when Dutch invented modern finance in early 1600s.

Cadence https://cadenceworkflow.io/

Heliogen https://heliogen.com/

Prometheus Fuels https://www.prometheusfuels.com/

C2CNT https://www.c2cnt.com/

No/low code platforms such as bubble.io

Ginkgo bioworks, Oxidize, WASM (& Deno), Serverless via Isolates (e.g. Cloudflare workers), Neurolink, OpenAI

Life extension interventions.

We're just beginning to see the dam break on funding life extension R&D.

I wasn't impressed with the engineering and JS client-side bundles on Integromat.

My list would be:

1. Swift - you can mix functional and object oriented code in a way I've not seen anywhere else. It's also going to be multi platform including windows in the next version and it's making inroads with Swift-Tensorflow. I can see a lot of really cool things coming from this once it's multi platform.

2. Jai Language by Jonathan Blow. I'm not sure when it will come out but what's been shown looks promising, a game specific language could cause other innovations that could later carry over to other languages.

3. Next Gen Consoles. X-box Series X and PS5 are both doing some cool things with memory management, SSD's and GPU's. Many of these innovations will make it to PC's later.

4. New Email features (superhuman and HEY - by DHH) It seems like innovation is finally actually happening in this space.

5. Game Engine Innovations. Hammer 2 has some really cool UI for level design, Unreal 5 has some great lighting and handling of 3D, ID tech is using 3D decals to cool effect while not being expensive. A lot of the technology happening in games will spill over into other areas, Unity is doing stuff with the automative industry, Unreal with Architecture.

6. AI in use of Making Art. A good example is Unity's new artengine (artomatix). https://artomatix.com/

7. Generative Design for engineering.

8. Dreams on ps4 - How quickly people can make something in this is amazing, if it ended up on PC or VR it could change everything.

9. AR as a tool for creators more than as a tool for consumers. 3D interactive CAD like Iron Man is more exciting than a game that makes you dizzy.

Node Red is nice. I used it today inside of Home Assistant to automate some stuff.

SeL4, Nix/NixOS, and 1ML.

https://endrainc.com/ This technology can have a huge impact on people's lives (specially in the global south).

About [4]: The dumbest idea I've ever seen is to provide a platform to build software without writing code.

You make the job 1000x harder to prevent a few lines of code! Just make the coding part easier.

+1 for Hasura. It's such a pleasure to use. Having a configurable backend with so much fine grained Authorization. It's just awesome. It literally cuts your project time in half.

https://lad.js.org

used to build https://forwardemail.net

https://hash.ai/

Hash is a platform for simulation and I think this kind of stuff will become increasingly important.

I had hopes with MagicLeap but then it's going through a roller coaster ride. Still they are on my "to watch" list.

Things like Apple AR glass leak makes me hooked to AR and VR.

https://resistant.ai looks pretty sci-fi. They basically protect AI systems from AI-enabled attackers.

Homomorphic encryption.

Electric VTOL for the masses: basically flying cars.

https://www.agilityprime.com/

Webscript: https://github.com/mudgen/webscript

[7]http://www.graphene-battery.net/index.htm

The one that has me most excited on OP's list is Strapi. It's the only one that I see myself using in the very near future.

https://www.pulumi.com/

Augmented reality. With every major tech company working on it, the next fee years will be interesting.

Rust programming language for its claimed safety

Stripe for payments

Kubernetes for cloud services and K8S on raspberry pi clusters

Ethereum becoming the value settlement layer of Web 3.0 [1]. Stablecoins have proven to be the killer dApp and there are ~$10B in circulation currently [2].

[1] https://ethereum.org/

[2] https://stablecoinstats.com/

Unikernels - seems promising and yet ecosystem is not there. I think it's matter of time.

dbt (data built tool). Brining SWE best practices to analytics engineering. about damn time!

Machine Learning. I want an Alexa that would know how to learn and extend itself.

Soft-EEGs

inference AI (signed up for the Google Alpha, but also looking at Elastic)

Sleep research as a generality

- Anything in the NVRAM space

- Modern database companies such as Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, MemSQL

- Hashicorp

eBPF

Push-to-talk "walkie-talkie" style audio. It's very handy, bit it's a learning curve and 20-somethings today hate talking to people. I think it could catch on (again) eventually.

see the "CB Radio" craze of the 1970s.

Javascript libraries that compile instead of shipping a runtime.

Is there any technology/start up trying to cure baldness?

it's deem true https://www.programmingoneonone.com/

My current favorite Shiny new thing: www.Grain.co

Neuralink - reduce friction of verbal commutation

Energy generation, and storage.

FreeBSD

Neuralink

Svelte is my go-to for personal projects. My speculative hunch is it will begin to rival React within the next 5 years for its simplicity and thus cost reductions.

There are a lot of advantages, but this 5min video comparing React hooks to Svelte should be enough to trigger interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtD2mWDQnxM

I recently wondered if you can take your saliva, or blood, and get a diffraction scan of it.

Kind of like a spectrograph. You’d feed this into a machine learning system, and it would match up your pattern against a known dataset.

This might allow for faster identification and recognition, of known viruses and diseases.

Especially if the technology can identify the virus from just your spit.

Holochain: https://developer.holochain.org

When you eventually grasp it, makes blockchain look like we took took a wrong turn in 2008.

Jeeva wireless has been on my radar for years now. Wifi at 1/1000th of the normal power. They were supposed to be at market by now with $0.50 transceiver chips. Last I heard they made a cell phone that didn't require batteries. https://www.jeevawireless.com/

comma.ai - They produce the aftermarket hardware for openpilot. It's a open source driver-assistance system that performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) for compatible vehicles. Many car vendors already do this, but based on some footage it requires less user intervention.

Applying intelligent design theory to bioinformatics and AI. A lot of untapped potential IMHO.

Datadog

holochain.org & codelingo.io

Uh mine. Duh.

Contact me in private so I can charge you my valuable advice for profitable investment.

We are in stealth for a while. And our demos have been getting WOWs.

For early access here : https://bit.ly/36mEU6Q

What I'm watching is not on anyone's list.