Ask HN: What companies are you excited about?
I'm bored/disappointed with all the major tech companies, including Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Intel, Twitter, Zoom, Slack, Amazon, Microsoft, pretty much all the unicorns that come out of Silicon Slopes, and several more.
Innovation largely seems to have stopped. Products and services shut down. Walls put up. Costs inflated. Privacy deflated. Overall lower user experience and satisfaction.
It's pretty discouraging. So tell me, what companies are you excited about and why? Who's actually making a positive difference and changing the world for good these days?
* Non-profits count too.
* Yes there are some exceptions (e.g. Apple's M1 chip; Google's Go language continues to get better) but on the whole these advances seem minor considering the companies' nearly infinite size and resources.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread[1] https://system76.com/laptops
[2] https://pop.system76.com/
https://clevo-computer.com/en/
That said, I don’t know anything about the company. I’m excited about the product and where it’s headed.
AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.
Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.
I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.
Biotech is where it’s at.
The chairman is giving a cracker of a talk on it this weekend: https://www.fmgl.com.au/docs/default-source/announcements/dr...
I think they have a bright future ahead. If there was a way to buy their stock / invest in them, I would.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive
Current date says end of March, so I hope it won’t be much longer than this summer.
That's 10x the largest Kickstarter to date, so might be a bit unrealistic, especially considering that what you are proposing isn't an end-user product.
How many boards+chips do you think such a Kickstarter campaign would sell, and at what price point?
Not much use to normal plebs. The recent changes to the accredited investor definition are nice, but I do wish there was a reasonable way for normal people to get accredited. Especially for a non us person like me, it's not really reasonable to go do the professional exams they require. And ofc I haven't got the money to qualify by wealth. It does seem supremely unfair to cut off the most lucrative investments on the planet to people who aren't already the richest people.on the planet.
2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)
3) https://tutanota.com/
4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors
5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)
6) Signal (https://signal.org)
7) https://brave.com
8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)
9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)
10) https://Plausible.io
11) https://small-tech.org/
12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/
Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.
Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)
> https://brave.com
Do you trust Brave after they did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027?
> Signal (https://signal.org)
Signal is essentially s closed source walled garden now, because they do not publish their server code anymore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25839277
I won't argue these organisatoins are perfect. Is that your criterion? I'm excited because I feel they are going in the right direction. That's why I'm using their services. I use Brave, but don't have the time to dive into things they are doing well or doing wrong. That's what we have investigative journalism for. I'm very happy to pay for that. By the way, I also use Signal. I also have a Fairphone. etc etc.
The next step after excitement is of course to convert excitement into action, and to actually support these organisations, through buying their stuff or making donations. Not because they are doing everything well, but because I personally believe they are helping to improve society.
Wikipedia also says their server is open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
I'm not sure there is a practical upper limit. Ghostscript for example for years only released as open source the version prior to the current one, and no one claimed that the existence of a proprietary fork invalidated the status of the open source version, no matter how long the delay between releases.
Admittedly there are differences, in Signal's case the deployed version is not currently released at all, but the worst case would be "open source version is no longer maintained", at which point I suspect that several forks would spring up, causing some confusion until one gained traction and dominance.
Right now, the latest release is 9 months old. This is certainly annoying and even concerning, but not yet cause for outright alarm, which can probably wait until March has gone by with no announced release schedule.
Watching Falcons land is one of the few things that still give me warn and reassuring feeling about the future.
Thoughtful approaches are, IMHO, the best indicator of whether a company is going the right way.
So Cognitect seems like an interesting place, for instance.
>We are building a new kind of server.
>True rack-scale design, bringing cloud hyperscale innovations around density, efficiency, cost, reliability, manageability, and security to everyone running on-premises compute infrastructure.
They actually care about changing the industry for the better: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/
OnlineTown - Well executed spatial chat with a playful videogame interface. I think they've been posted about on here before. (https://theonline.town)
Neosensory (ok, it's a company I co-founded) - we do consumer sensory augmentation. Our first product, Buzz, is a haptic sensory substitution wristband that translates sound to touch in real-time. Also has a developer API. (https://neosensory.com)
2) Xolo (https://xolo.io/) - a SaaS-like way to run a company in Europe.
The best chatting experience. SO much better that Watsapp
Software: self driving capabilities (i.e. autopilot), FSD (Full Self Driving) beta, shadow-mode neural net testing, OTA (Over The Air) updates, games and entertaiment, Autobidder energy trading platform, etc. Battery: tabless design, dry electrode, new 4680 form-factor, nickel instead of cobalt, manufacturing and cost improvements, etc. Electronics: efficient motors and inverters, custom ASIC chip for FSD computer, Dojo supercomputer, etc. Mechanical engineering: "octovalve" thermal management, structural battery pack without modules, "mega casting" aluminium body design, etc.
Edit: forgot to mention supercharger network.
2. https://umami.is - A web analytics alternative to Google Analytics, allows self-hosting and much more.