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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?

#191

Post by tyingq »

phkahler wrote: post #73

Field: embedded software. To me RISC-V is the most exciting thing for the next few years. The performance appears to be awesome, and free CPU IP will allow more varieties of specialized low-cost chips for specific use cases. It should also have a positive effect on development environments by encouraging wider use of free toolchains.

The "minion cores"[1] idea in the LowRISC RISC-V project is a promising idea.

It looks a lot like the PRUs in the Beaglebone black, where you could have normal, non-real time OS (linux) run on the main cores, but delegate real time tasks to the minion cores...and they share memory directly with the main cores.

Basically, you end up with the capabilities of both a Raspberry PI and an Arduino, on a single chip.

[1]http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-...

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

#192

Post by aabajian »

epmatsw wrote: post #166
aabajian wrote: post #110

I'm entering radiology residency, and I'm very pro-automation / machine learning. There's a contentious debate in the field about whether radiologists will be replaced: https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace-rad... HackerNews is very developer-focused. If you guys saw what a radiologist does on a 9-5 basis you'd be amazed it hasn't already been automated. Sitting behind a computer, looking at images…

When I looked at HL7 a few years back, it was standardized on in the most technical sense and was basically a big bag of hurt. Epic made a big chunk of their money just charging people to build interfaces over various PACS (and other) systems. Has that changed recently?

Yes and no. I spoke with an Epic engineer recently and he confirmed that Epic is still a front-end to HL7 databases. With that said, many PACS are adopting the WADO standard (https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/software/wado/), which provides a REST interface to radiology images. It makes it a lot easier to retrieve images for analysis, albeit you'd still have to implement DICOM/HL7 if you want to make a usable product.

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

#193

Post by intrasight »

nxc18 wrote: post #89
intrasight wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we assume that developers are trained professionals, presumably with a CS or software engineering (or both) degrees, and that they've been properly trained in software development - which puts testing front and center.

Computer Science has absolutely nothing to do with software testing. Your software engineering classes will teach students about unit tests, but not much more. If by 'testing' you really mean 'unit testing', as I suspect most junior engineers who claim testing experience do, then hope is already lost. The one saving grace is that there is enough churn in webdev that nothing lasts long enough to reveal how fragile it…

Not if they take a good class in Test-driven development (TDD) - which I would recommend to students. The "science" behind it will outlive the practice churn.

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

#194

Post by grzm »

uranian wrote: post #187

Most annoying is the need to write in ES6/Babel today, and all these js hipsters that really believe this is the future of web development. I totally hate Babel with it's dozens of Webpack patches/plugins to make it work. Oh, and don't forget your (Airbnb style) linter if you want to be politically correct. No one needs Babel to write stellar code IMHO. Unfortunately it is not about the quality of the code you write,…

I think you make some very good points. Focusing on a particular toolchain because it's popular rather than the benefits it provides in development and the result is misguided. When developers first start out there are a lot of choices to make, and they may not have the foundation or experience to make the decision they would likely make a few years down the road. Often you're happy when you get something working and repeatedly so.

In the JavaScript community there's been an explosion of tools, tool chains, libraries, module systems; without a lot of experience, it's very easy to be overwhelmed. Criteria for choice can include the availability of easy-to-understand tutorials as much as understanding the motivations and design decisions and limitations of the tools themselves. Some people are very good at writing blog posts describing what they've done, better than conveying the underlying concepts. I don't want to necessarily fault them for that, as I think there's often a sincere desire to show people a way that works for them.

Rather than focussing solely on what's wrong, it's very important to also include options you think are better, and why. Looking down your nose at others, describing them as js hipsters using politically correct tools does no one any good, and makes it even less likely people will listen to what you have to say. And on HN, expressing the expectation of down votes is a guaranteed method of receiving them; it's against the guidelines and adds nothing to your comment.

There are a lot of choices in the web development space today. The desire to standardize on something (such as the push for Babel and Webpack) is laudable in that they recognize that so much choice is not necessarily good: it makes it more difficult to decide what to use (sometimes good enough is just that), and splits resources that may otherwise be used to improve a more limited number of options. That's not to say Babel and Webpack are the best options: just that I understand the motivation for standardization and push to popularize a few (rather than all) options.

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

#195

Post by _greim_ »

uranian wrote: post #187

Most annoying is the need to write in ES6/Babel today, and all these js hipsters that really believe this is the future of web development. I totally hate Babel with it's dozens of Webpack patches/plugins to make it work. Oh, and don't forget your (Airbnb style) linter if you want to be politically correct. No one needs Babel to write stellar code IMHO. Unfortunately it is not about the quality of the code you write,…

I agree there's a lot of cargo-culting and bandwagon-ism nowadays. It's the result of there being lots of beginners who just want a recipe they can apply to produce a certain result. I don't blame them for wanting that or for being beginners, or for being frustrated at the obvious madness of it all. What bothers me is the apparent lack of interest these people seem to have in understanding the history and trade-offs that got us here.

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

#196

Post by sngz »

intrasight wrote: post #83
lisivka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you expect that junior developer (someone with very little or no development experience) will use a test tool or any other development technique? I expect that junior developer in software field should be able to program only.

Because we assume that developers are trained professionals, presumably with a CS or software engineering (or both) degrees, and that they've been properly trained in software development - which puts testing front and center.

you're part of the problem

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

#197

Post by kekimchi »

RileyKyeden wrote: post #69

I do electronic music. The rise of platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon, and the abundance of high quality free/inexpensive tools and guides is raising the bar for quality in independent music, and making it easier for more people to get paid in whatever niches they prefer (vs. going for a mass audience).

I wwould love to get started, I've been looking for a new hobby and thought that is perfect. How should I start? :)

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

#198

Post by kekimchi »

RileyKyeden wrote: post #69

I do electronic music. The rise of platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon, and the abundance of high quality free/inexpensive tools and guides is raising the bar for quality in independent music, and making it easier for more people to get paid in whatever niches they prefer (vs. going for a mass audience).

I wwould love to get started, I've been looking for a new hobby and thought that is perfect. How should I start? :)

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

#199

Post by jjawssd »

donaltroddyn wrote: post #66
onion2k wrote: 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…

Yeah, this is one area where webdev is way behind other fields, and i think we're going to see lots of new tooling in this area soon. We're currently working on a way to help devs test web app functionality and complete user journeys without having to actually write tests in Selenium or whatever. The idea to is let devs write down what they want to test in English ("load the page", "search for a flight", "fill the fo…

You are reinventing Gherkin. Please don't reinvent the wheel.

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

#200

Post by munin »

dorian-graph wrote: post #185
munin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google "certified programming with dependent types", "program logics for certified compilers" and "software foundations class". Also, work through the Dafny tutorials, here: http://rise4fun.com/Dafny/tutorial There are some ways in which these tools are not economical. There is currently a big gap. On one side of the gap, you have SMT solvers, which have encoded in them decades of institutional knowledge about genera…

Thanks for taking the time to write the suggestions and detail the pain points that exist at the moment. I had heard about Dafny but hadn't seen the tutorial! > Additionally, making usable developer tools is an orthogonal skill from doing original research, and as a researcher, I both am not rewarded for making usable developer tools, and think that making usable developer tools is much, much harder than doing origin…

There's more I could write about researchers and their programming skills, but to keep it brief: researchers aren't directly rewarded for being good programmers. It's possible to have a strong research career without really programming all that much. However, if you are a strong programmer, some things get easier. You aren't directly rewarded for it though. For an extreme counter-example, consider the researchers that improve the mathematics platform SAGE. Their academic departments don't care about the software contributions made and basically just want to see research output, i.e. publications.

I think that this keeps most researchers away from making usable tools. It's hard, they're not rewarded for making software artifacts, they're maybe not as good at it as they are at other things.

I think it's feasible for anyone to work on the developer tools side of things, but I think it's going to be really hard for whoever does it, whatever their background is. There are lots of developer tool development projects that encounter limited traction in the real world because the developers do what make sense for them, and it turns out only 20 other people in the world think like them. The more successful projects I've heard about have a tight coupling between language/tool developers, and active language users. The tool developers come up with ideas, bounce them off the active developers, who then try to use the tools, and give feedback.

This puts the prospective "verification tools developer" in a tight spot, because there are only a few places in the world where that is happening nowadays: Airbus/INRIA, Rockwell Collins, Microsoft Research, NICTA/GD. So if you can get a job in the tools group at one of those places, it seems very feasible! Otherwise, you need to find some community or company that is trying to use verification tools to do something real, and work with them to make their tools better.

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