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

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201–210 of 436 posts

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

#201

I'm really pumped about this open source tool project I've started which promises to join Lean Startup/Hypothesis-Driven Development and DevOps. Enter everything only once, have it available wherever it's needed. Analysis has always been an area that the tech community has lacked, ever since it was overdone back in the days of structured programming. It's really cool to bring back a bit of structured analysis as just…

> which promises to join Lean Startup/Hypothesis-Driven Development and DevOps

Finding this tricky to parse, got a link or repo?

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

#202
SideFX Houdini 16 is coming out [1], the new version of the most awesome software for 3D VFX and animation. Super excited about this, it's gonna be awesome!

Also, I'm really looking forward to the ActivityPub [2] implementation, that'll do a lot of interesting things for decentralized web.

[1] https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-16-launch-streaming...

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

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

#203
post #130

The way we educate our kids hasn't changed a lot in centuries. MOOCs are great but completion rate is a real and yet unsolved problem. I believe the biggest advancement in the field of education is going to come with VR. With VR, we can dramatically reduce the cost of "learning while doing", which should be the only way of learning. With AI, we can provide highly personalised paths for learners. VR and AI technologie…

What about the kids who won't put on the VR headset because they prefer to snap-chat, chat, youtube, waste time, do social posturing?

I think, for middle school, it's easy to underestimate how much of education is not actual content. How do you deliver education that targets the teenage anger / passivity / disappointment / and emotional roller coaster?

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

#204

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? :)

Reaper: http://www.reaper.fm/ (good tutorials: http://reaperblog.net/)

Good synths: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/firebird-by-tone2-audiosoft...

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/synth1-by-ichiro-toda

Good all-purpose instrument: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/orion-sound-module-by-sampl...

Good orchestral instruments: http://vis.versilstudios.net/vsco-community.html

A helpful article I wrote with links and basic advice for new musicians: https://blog.rileyreverb.com/how-to-be-a-musician-58511c4e18...

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

#205
My field's VR, so... all of it.

In particular, wireless transmitters for roomscale are really exciting - seriously, I cannot wait to get rid of the wire-to-head era - as is roomscale for mobile devices.

The Vive getting additional trackers is also super-cool, as that will enable some much better forms of locomotion through foot-tracking. It'll take a little while to take off but I expect the Lighthouse tracking ecosystem to produce all kinds of cool things.

(Not all in VR, either. Drones plus Lighthouse, for example...)

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

#206

My field is hypnosis, or more generally, "changework" which is jargon, but essentially hacking the psychology of clients to get desired outcomes. There's been a renaissance of study in placebo effects, meditation, and general frameworks for how people change belief for therapeutic purposes or otherwise, but to me, that's been going on for a long time and is more about acceptance than being a new development. One of t…

Is there a useful introduction reference to 'context-free conversational change'? The Google results did not appear promising.

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

#207
I don't have just one field.

In programming in companies: realization that internal customers not having choice of internal IT providers hurts IT because it reduces IT's need to deliver valuable solutions effectively.

In leadership: management structure is a framework to enforce standardization and generally doesn't adapt well to change, even with the latest management silver bullets (lean, Agile, flat-orgs, etc)

Also in leadership: profound changes are occuring in society and geographies no longer define cultures.

In commercial writing: it's still early, and this takes time, but the concept of the "book" and how it's created is changing. Technologies that allow writers, editors, and beta readers to work on the manuscript simultaneously are increasing the velocity of change.

In art in general: someone else here mentioned music creation and payment is enabling entrants to sustain themselves in niche markets. This is happening in nearly all art forms, not just music. As electronic transfer fidelity increases, more art can be digitized, monetized. Look for more politicized, more global-reach art.

All these things stem from a greater understanding of the world and of human beings, starting with ourselves. It's important to realize each human being is a highly complex system and that generalizations about groups of humans are increasingly being challenged as scientifically unsound.

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

#208
post #13

Compilation: - 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…

> Homotopy type theory. Can you talk more about this? I even got THE book on this (haven't really read it yet though) and like I think I get the rough ideas but I'd be curious to hear what HTT means to you (lol).

Not the OP, but the cool thing about HoTT to a user of proof assistants is that it makes working with "quotients" easier. I put quotients in parentheses because really HoTT is about generalizing the idea of a quotient type. Quotients of sets/algebras are one of the core tools of mathematics and old school type theory doesn't have them so you have to manually keep around equivalence relations and prove over and over again that you respect the relations.

In HoTT, there is an extension of inductive types that allows you to, not just have constructors, but also to impose "equalities" so these generalized "quotients" really have first-class status in the language.

As far as "exciting developments" in HoTT, the big one right now is Cubical Type Theory [1], which is the first implementation of the new ideas of HoTT where Higher inductive types and the univalence axiom "compute" which means that the proof assistant can do more work for you when you use those features. I just saw a talk about it and from talking to people about it, this means that it won't be too long (Finally, I just want to say to people that are scared off or annoyed by all of the abstract talk about "homotopies" and "cubes", you have to understand that this is very new research and we don't yet know the best ways to use and explain these concepts. I certainly think that people will be able to use this stuff without having to learn anything about homotopy theory, though the intuition will probably help.

[1] https://github.com/mortberg/cubicaltt

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

#209

I don't have just one field. In programming in companies: realization that internal customers not having choice of internal IT providers hurts IT because it reduces IT's need to deliver valuable solutions effectively. In leadership: management structure is a framework to enforce standardization and generally doesn't adapt well to change, even with the latest management silver bullets (lean, Agile, flat-orgs, etc) Als…

As a writer, tech and the globalization of English are enabling the hiterto impossible. Still not clearly seen but glimpsed as shadows behind screens, they either scare the timid or thrill the brave. They are coming.

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

#210

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…

> The challenges to full-automation are gaining access to data, [...]

It looks like everybody sitting on their data is hindering progress. Is there anything that can be done about that politically? I mean, in many cases the data belongs to the public anyway, unless people signed a waiver, but what is the legality of that?

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