Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

14 points by chistev ↗ HN
A repost of an old thread 11 years ago -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9731111

7 comments

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No particular order but;

1. Transformers

I think they need to be looked into more. They just work too well.

I feel like they have a secret within that is yet to be known.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

2. The 2016 Noble Prize in Medicine

Autophagy has such interesting properties. It can probably do alot more for us now than any new pill or gene editing tool

[2] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/press-releas...

3. zk-STARKS

I can prove to you than X * Y = Z, without ever revealing what, X, Y or Z are. And I can do this for any function, or math operator.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/189

4. TLock

I can encrypt my will, in a way such that. It can only be read after X years.

And I do not need a trusted third party to do it.

[4] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf

[4] https://youtu.be/Xh849Ij3lhU

Biggest discovery is that humans are much worse than expected, and are always rushing to the next big thing forgetting to enjoy the present.

Seriously shouldn’t the whole world slow a bit down and enjoy our lives a bit?

* mRNA vaccines

* LLM

I think both are older, but got their prime time recently.

mRNA gene therapy is a great invention, but it definitely needed more testing, and better collection of side effects data from the unsanctioned experiment a few years ago.

I lucked out as an unwitting guinea pig, many weren't so lucky.

I think that informed consent could have worked at the time, instead of the BS we were all fed. Now that trust is broken, I'm not sure there is a path forward. This may have set their acceptance back a generation.