Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 183 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#91

Post by trampypizza »

niklasd wrote: post #88
terminalcommand wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off-topic but I wanted to ask why and when did you start studying CS after law. I recently graduated from law school and now am an intern at a law firm. I have a strong interest for CS, and it bothered me for a long time that I went to law school instead of CS. I'v overcome those feelings over the years and dedicated myself to become a lawyer. But your post caught my interest. I'd be glad if you could share…

After my law degree I worked for a year in a big international law firm (I didn't yet had my license, so I was a kind of trainee – similar to you position right now). I realised that there is a huge interest in technical solutions to make the work more efficient (often labeled as "Legal Tech"). But there was very little actual understanding of technologie, which I think is one of the reasons why there aren't yet many…

If you don't mind me asking - whereabouts (geographically) are you based? I'm hoping to get into law after a couple of years working in technology but I haven't been able to find that much information online about the meeting point of law and technology and my searches haven't found me any communities for law similar to HN for technology.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#92

Post by xamuel »

adrianN wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust looks like a step towards practical formal verification just because of its design philosophy. I think what we're doing is making engineering languages more and more verifiable as research languages become more and more expressive. Eventually they'll meet in the middle and we'll have formal verification in "real life."

No progress in language theory can fix the fundamental problem of software verification: you need a formal specification to have anything to verify. Who wants to write not only a detailed spec for their code, but a spec that has well defined semantics in some kind of logic? Nobody, that's who. There are very few properties that you care about that are both sufficiently easy to encode in a formal specification and not…

One example of something you'd always like to verify is, "this code does not have undefined behavior". This could be the key to obtaining C speed without C's lack of safety. In fact, in some possibly-formalizable sense, it's probably the ONLY way to do that.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#93

Post by xtreme »

numbsafari wrote: post #72
dbatten wrote: post #70

Secure Multi-party Computation. The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another. The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is. Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the…

This is a big deal. If we can find ways to perform secure, multi-party computation, we could develop fully distributed computational, networking, and power delivery systems. Your solar roof tiles could be, basically, CPUs or GPUs with embedded wireless networking.

Can you elaborate why solar roof tiles need such intelligence, especially the secure part? I don't see what data they would need to hide.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#94

Post by neilwilson »

nailer wrote: post #37
dalbasal wrote: post #30

Just as an angle to answering the question (I don't have answers of my own).... What was the most interesting CS field(s) in 2008, 98, 88, etc?

88 (taking a stab here as I was pretty young): DTP OO RISC CPUs 'graphics' (as in render farms) 98: Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OSS in general Perceptual audio compression : MP3 (layer3.org, MP3 vs TwinVQ, codecs created during the period before Fraunhofer announced the source code it uploaded to ISO without a license and that people had been working on for free, in fact had a license and everyone owed them 10 grand). 20…

88

OSI network stacks. They were going to replace the 'old' Internet protocols.

Relational Databases, SQL and two phase commit.

Formal methods and verification.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#95

Post by dbatten »

harias wrote: post #77
dbatten wrote: post #70

Secure Multi-party Computation. The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another. The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is. Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the…

Has zero-knowledge proofs at its core as far as I know. Only a handful of universities teach it even. This was helpful when I was grazing the surface of MPC : https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc This video course too : https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~mp/crypto/mpc2017/

This is an awesome resource, thank you.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#96

Post by ArtWomb »

Within a year or two, we will see grad-level courses at top CS programs in Chaos Engineering and SRE. Just as we've seen the addition of Distributed Systems classes in the past few years with introductions to Zookeeper, Paxos, BigTable, Raft and Spanner. There will be an explosion in academic work on the science of "failure-injection" methods ;)

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#97

Post by _flow »

niklasd wrote: post #50
resiros wrote: post #14

I think most interesting computer science fields are actually application of CS in other domains. Science changed a lot in the last decades, moving from a genius in a room looking at the data and coming up with grand theory to have vast amounts of data that no single human can make sense of. The work of the computer scientist is to quickly understand problems from various fields then solve it using tailor-made algori…

Yes! I studied law before CS and now I learn all these algorithms which deal with questions about how to do something efficiently – and these algorithms are unkown by all these people thinking about important questions in this field. And I think this also applies to other fields. I gave the book "Algorithms To Live By" (which is basically an overview of CS algorithms) to a medicine student and he was immediately insp…

I also did law at University instead of CS as I had originally planned. Completed a conversion MSc into computing last year and now work as a developer.

I'm intrigued at what you are referring to by the important questions in law, as they relate to CS algorithms?

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#98

Post by pmarreck »

dbatten wrote: post #70

Secure Multi-party Computation. The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another. The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is. Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the…

Isn't secure MPC also called "homomorphic encryption"?

Agreed, it is a very interesting area!

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#99

Post by IpV8 »

xtreme wrote: post #93
numbsafari wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big deal. If we can find ways to perform secure, multi-party computation, we could develop fully distributed computational, networking, and power delivery systems. Your solar roof tiles could be, basically, CPUs or GPUs with embedded wireless networking.

Can you elaborate why solar roof tiles need such intelligence, especially the secure part? I don't see what data they would need to hide.

Distributed power electronics are inherently dangerous. If you have a surplus of power and your neighbor has a deficit, it is desirable for the two systems to communicate to send power from you to the neighbor. If a bad actor can leverage this system to tell everyone to send all of their power to the grid, they could easily damage the infrastructure in a very costly way.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#100

Post by resiros »

denzil_correa wrote: post #44
resiros wrote: post #14

I think most interesting computer science fields are actually application of CS in other domains. Science changed a lot in the last decades, moving from a genius in a room looking at the data and coming up with grand theory to have vast amounts of data that no single human can make sense of. The work of the computer scientist is to quickly understand problems from various fields then solve it using tailor-made algori…

> We're working on leveraging sparse experimental data for protein structure prediction. To do that, we end up using algorithms and ideas from different various CS fields, from machine learning, to robotics, to distributed systems. Other people are working on exciting fields like computation protein design, studying drug protein interaction in silico.. Are there particular methods you use to deal with little and spar…

We're basically merging the sparse experimental data we get with other priors we have (the energy landscape, residue-residue contacts predicted from evolutionary data) in a Expectation Maximization kind of algorithm, where each step you get better predictions (in the sense of they satisfy the experimental data while agreeing with the priors from the problem (low energy, nice fold..).
Post reply on HN