Perl6
Perl in general. Lots of innovation going on.
Is p5-mop core yet?
Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
41–50 of 436 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#42As 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…
This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#43It'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. I…
That's exactly how it works.
The way I see, the real utility comes from the fact that domain models such as those in a company's data warehouse are typically very complex, and a great deal of care often goes into mapping out that complexity via relational modelling. It's not just that c bought x and y, but also that c has an age, and a gender, and last bought z 50 days ago, and lives in Denver, and so on.
Having easy access to the probability distributions associated with those relational models gives you a lot of leverage to solve real life problems with.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#44As 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…
This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?
Here's a really good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cosqlfqrpFA
Also, to answer your question, not it's not the same as a website because it will be a native Android app with the ability to communicate with the Android OS, like any other Android app.
The possibility of things — in terms of improved UX — that you can accomplish with instant apps are infinite. It all comes down to how you want to use it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#45Chatbots with Intelligence. A variety of skill bots that can teach people at all levels. Made possible by AI engines like api.ai, luis.ai and others.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#46Compilation: - 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. Foundatio…
For someone wanting to begin involving program verification in a practical way to their day-to-day work, do you have any suggestions, resources, or anything?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#47Compilation: - 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. Foundatio…
For someone wanting to begin involving program verification in a practical way to their day-to-day work, do you have any suggestions, resources, or anything?
That depends on your background and your goals.
How much do you know about modern testing, abstract interpretation, SAT/SMT solving? In any case, as of Feb 2017, a lot of this technology is not yet economical for non-safety critical mainstream programming. Peter O'Hearn's talk at the Turing Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcVx3g3SmmY might be of interest.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#48Not 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…
Azure has Functions too: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/functions/
Auth0 has Web Tasks: https://webtask.io/
Am sure there are many more implementations out there. Agree that vendor lock-in is always a concern.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#49As 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…
This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?
I'm curious about the "just a website" bit as well. It's slow going, but new features like service workers, web workers, web sockets, webrtc, seem to be closing the gap between "website" and app.
Is there some point where websites start to significantly displace apps?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
#50I think consumer software has so much to gain by moving to front-end web tech, we bet our next product on it: https://www.scirra.com/blog/184/a-first-look-at-construct-3