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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?

#31

Post by tluyben2 »

lngnmn wrote: 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.

Not sure where you are from, many (I am from NL and not many believers in the first category anymore; I live in the south of Spain and there not many either, but from what I read in the US there are plenty left, to my dismay but who cares about that) are still deceiving themselves with theology. But yeah mean that both are beliefs and there it does not matter? Or?

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

#33

Post by tyingq »

I think web assembly is the piece most likely to change front end development in a meaningful way. A little hard to see now, as the WASM component has no direct access to the DOM, no GC, and no polymorphic inline cache. So, dynamic languages are hard to do with WASM. Once those gaps are closed, however, it should be interesting to see if javascript remains the lingua franca or not.

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

#34

Post by OJFord »

siddboots wrote: post #17

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/

Sounds like in many applications of machine learning (I'm thinking mainly of the swathes that name-drop it on a landing page, and probably usually mean 'linear regression') this could replace the brunt of the work.

e.g. store customer orders in the DB, and query `P(c buys x | c bought y)` in order to make recommendations - where `c buys x` is unknown, but `c bought y` occurred, and we know about 'other cs' x and y.

Is that sort of how it works?

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

#35

Post by scrrr »

lngnmn wrote: 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.

Nassim Taleb reader/Twitter follower? In my (limited and mostly anecdotal) experience this sort of categorical seems to lead to more, perhaps different kinds of superstition. People read "The Black Swan" and start talking like statistics, probabilities etc. were suddenly completely meaningless. Humans seem to always have to live in extremes.. ;)

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

#36

Post by jackgolding »

Web Analytics I feel is years behind data science - but tools like http://snowplowanalytics.com/ are becoming much more widespread and are taking market share away from Google and Adobe which is good for everyone. Free GA is still the best tool for small sites.

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

#37

Post by Ig0rK »

gnur wrote: post #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…

I agree on kube + rancher + deis + traefik etc.. Can you elaborate on why and how you use DC/OS though?

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

#38

Post by siddboots »

abhishivsaxena wrote: post #21
siddboots wrote: post #17

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?

The agent modelling that I'm aware of is in simulation. I have a feeling that there would be a lot of interesting duality between the fields of agent based simulation and monte-carlo based probabilistic modelling, but I don't know enough about the former to say off hand.

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

#39

Post by dotancohen »

tomjen3 wrote: post #6
dotancohen wrote: post #2

In 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?).

Worded properly, that would actually be a rather good answer to the hypothetical interview question.

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

#40

Post by Curious42 »

As an Android developer, I'm most excited about instant apps. If it works as marketed, you won't have to hold on to the apps which you use maybe once or twice a week. Instead, you'll be able to download the required feature/activity/view or whatever else on the fly.

I'm not sure I did justice to instant apps, because there's a language barrier playing in. But here's an example: I use the Amazon app maybe once every 2 weeks, and yet it's one of the apps consuming most amount of memory on my phone due to background services. After Amazon integrates instant apps, I'll be able to delete the app, and just google search for the product through my phone. The Google search will then download the required page as an app, giving me the experience of an app, whilst not even having it on the phone.

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