autonomous cars & swarm control
Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
11–20 of 436 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#12In general, this is a question that I would ask interviewees (for any position). And answer other than shock shows that they are keeping abreast in their field.
Then I would fail. Not because I don't follow tech news, but because I feel what is being created now is stuff we should have had decades ago (what company is even working on flying cars?).
That's not a bad answer though - it demonstrates you understand the value of those things we should have had years ago, and might include things which aren't being worked on yet (even though they should be).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#13Compilation:
- Meta-tracing, e.g. PyPy.
- End-to-end verification of compilers, e.g. CompCert and CakeML.
Programming languages:
- Mainstreamisation of the ideas of ML-like languages, e.g. Scala, Rust, Haskell, and the effect these ideas have on legacy languages, e.g. C++, Java 9, C#.
- Beginning of use of resource types outside pure research, e.g. affine types in Rust and experimental use of session types.
Foundation of mathematics:
- Homotopy type theory.
- Increasing mainstreamisation of interactive theorem provers, e.g. Isabelle/HOL, Coq, Agda.
Program verification:
- Increasing ability to have program logics for most programming language constructs.
- Increasingly usable automatic theorem provers (SAT and SMT solvers) that just about everything in automated program verification 'compiles' down to.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#14That in the past people used to deceive (delude) themselves and other fools around them with theology, speculations and metaphysics, today they do the same with statistics, probability and abstract models.
Care to elaborate?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#15Deep learning architectures built by machines (so we no longer have to design architecture to solve problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578
Transfer Learning (so we need less data to build models) http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik-group/torrey...
Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-net...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#16In general, this is a question that I would ask interviewees (for any position). And answer other than shock shows that they are keeping abreast in their field.
Then I would fail. Not because I don't follow tech news, but because I feel what is being created now is stuff we should have had decades ago (what company is even working on flying cars?).
> (what company is even working on flying cars?)
For example http://www.aeromobil.com/ or http://lilium-aviation.com/
I'm personally are rather disappointed that we still don't have a moon colony. Making that happen is unfortunately not part of my field.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#17It's all subjective, but as a data analyst I'm excited about probabilistic databases. Short version: load your sample data sets, provide a some priors, and then query the population as if you had no missing data.
Most developed implementation is BayesDB[1], but there's a lot of ideas coming out of a number of places right now.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#18I'm honestly just super-pumped about any artificial intelligence system that's starting to get an intuition of physics.
Google's Deep Mind put out some kind of cool stuff recentely [1], but I'm mostly just excited for anything that Ilker Yildirim [2] is doing with Joshua Tanenbaum, because it seems to triangulate more with how humans think about physics. When I was at CogSci 2016, Joshua mentioned combining this with analogical reasoning and that also sounded super cool, even though I'm not sure how to the two fit together.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00222 [2] http://www.mit.edu/~ilkery/
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#19My field is web development, and, to be honest, the most exciting thing going on is that more people are starting to complain about the complexity of development. Hopefully this will lead to people slowing down and learning how to write better web software.
As an example, one survey (https://ashleynolan.co.uk/blog/frontend-tooling-survey-2016-...) put the number of developers who don't use any test tools at almost 50%. In the same survey about 80% of people stated their level of JS knowledge was Intermediate, Advanced or Expert.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#20Embedded systems - Wireless Sensors Networks, I know it has been there for long time but IoT would encourage it more. It could enable development of different kinds of devices as well. Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Quadcopter/Drone/AI etc.
In my view, there are still a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined, and we already have web/native platforms. This is so exciting development!