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Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#21

It'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. [1] http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/

Interesting. Do you know anything about agent modelling? Any ideas how if/it ties to it?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#23
post #19

My 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…

To me as a web developer, the most exciting new development is react native (not react itself) - it's redefining the border between web and native apps in a way that cordova and xamarin never did.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#26
Container orchestrators becoming mainstream is something I'm very excited about. Tools like DC/OS, Nomad, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm Mode, Triton, Rancher make it so much easier to have fast development cycles. Last week I went from idea, to concept, to deployed in production in a single day. And it is automatically kept available, restarted if it fails, traffic is routed correctly, other services can discover it, the underlying infrastructure can be changed without anyone ever noticing it.

This also brings me to Traefik, one of the coolest projects I have come across in the last months.

Traefik + DC/OS + CI/CD is what allows developers to create value for the business in hours and not in days or weeks.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#27
The size of embedded electronics we have now. Makes me very excited about the near future. As a hobby I am excited by the advances in programming language development; most seemingly tiny and incremental but a lot of long term research is getting working implementations and that is brilliant. Another hobby is the robust push for timer perfect emulators of more and more older systems. But more than anything VR excites me; it is not 'my field' per se (I plod around clumsily with little demos) but it will be in the future. And it will never end.

Edit: there is a lot to be excited about these days

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#28
post #5

That 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.

This seems incredibly cynical in light of the current breakthroughs in machine learning, and probabilistic modelling. It really feels to me as though the AI revolution isn't something to dream about anymore, because we're living in it.

I find it difficult to deny the achievement of tangible progress that is implied by, for example, the self-driving car.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#29
Not really my main field, but in web technology it seems that severless architectures such as Amazon Lambda will be a pretty big game changer in the near future:

Lambdas are lightweight function calls that can be spawned on demand in sub-millisecond time and don't need a server that's constantly running. They can replace most server code in many settings, e.g. when building REST APIs that are backed by cloud services such as Amazon DynamoDB.

I've heard many impressive things about this way of designing your architecture, and it seems to be able to dramatically reduce cost in some cases, sometimes by more than 10 times.

The drawback is that currently there is a lot of vendor lock-in, as Amazon is (to my knowledge) the only cloud service that offers lambda functions with a really tight and well-working integration with their other services (this is important because on their own lambdas are not very useful).

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#30
In the Bitcoin space, I'm most excited about the Lightning Network [0][1] and MimbleWimble [2][3], which are in my view the two most groundbreaking technologies that really push the limits of what blockchains are capable of.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network

[1] https://lightning.network/

[2] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mimblewimbl...

[3] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimblewimble-how-a-stri...

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