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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?

#231

Post by AsyncAwait »

intrasight wrote: post #167
ThePhysicist wrote: post #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…

I am pretty bullish on "serverless". I really do think it's the future. It fulfills the vision of Cloud Computing. But it's early days and I wouldn't yet bet the ranch on it. I am doing a new project with Azure Functions and so far am quite happy with the offering.

I don't know, to me it looks like serverless benefits, (ie theoretical lower cost) are not worth the downsides, (essentially complete vendor lockdown), but would love to hear why am wrong :-)

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

#232

Post by jdormit »

amelius wrote: post #184
Illniyar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm feeling that React Native is just another artificial constraint we developers have to deal with. I would have preferred it if Facebook (and/or Apple, Google) would have pushed WebApps more instead. A web browser, with the right amount of love, would be more than capable of doing the stuff that React Native can do.

Google still is! Progressive web apps now have the ability to be installed "natively" on Android devices [0], meaning they show up in the app drawer like any other app rather than being limited to a home screen icon.

I think these are the future. Once they catch on with mainstream consumers, native apps won't stand a chance against the convenience of simply visiting a website to install/use. Plus, on the developer end, we finally have a true "write once, run anywhere" situation that doesn't involve any complex toolchains or hacky wrappers.

[0] http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/02/02/progressive-web-apps...

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

#233

Post by michaelmior »

jamesrcole wrote: post #103
michaelmior wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all a matter of perspective. One could also claim that those who don't acknowledge God are deluding themselves with a lack of theology. I'm not trying to start a debate, but dismissing the beliefs of billions as simply delusion/deception is painting with broad strokes.

Which god? The argument you make could also be made for all people following all the religions aside from the one whose god actually exists. The religions can't all be right, if in fact even one is right. So sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point.

Fair point although I wasn't intending to argue that number of believers is any sort of proof. In any case, at least Christianity and Islam each have over one billion believers globally.

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

#234

Post by michaelmior »

macns wrote: post #216
jamesrcole wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which god? The argument you make could also be made for all people following all the religions aside from the one whose god actually exists. The religions can't all be right, if in fact even one is right. So sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point.

I have used an argument like this and the answer I got(which left me dumbfounded) was like "Everyone believes in some sort of divine power or entity or whatever and the other religions just got their wrong." They're basically saying that sheer quantity of believers in anything proves that their God exists!

The statement as quoted does not make the argument you claim it does. Perhaps the person who were speaking with elaborated in order to make that point though.

Coming from a Christian perspective however, I would agree in general people have evidence to believe in God. I don't intend the quote from the Bible below to serve as an sort of evidence. This would not be a logical line of reasoning for someone who does not believe in the truth of the Bible. However, it may serve to further clarify my position.

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." -- Romans 1:20

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

#235

Post by michaelmior »

ap46 wrote: post #159
michaelmior wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all a matter of perspective. One could also claim that those who don't acknowledge God are deluding themselves with a lack of theology. I'm not trying to start a debate, but dismissing the beliefs of billions as simply delusion/deception is painting with broad strokes.

This is where I interject & mention this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost People don't want to feel like they wasted time & resources over something that doesn't exist. Religion can just be relegated to a construct for social activities. There's so many of them which sprung up independently. People should really ponder whether they have accounted some belief for interplanetary travel.

If you bring up opportunity cost, I think it's also worth mentioning Pascal's wager[0]. I don't believe in this argument, but it's an interesting point to consider.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

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

#236

Post by kixiQu »

onion2k wrote: post #139
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.

I expect that junior developer in software field should be able to program only. That is very often the case. It needs to change. Testing is a part of software development, and anyone who writes software should be aware of it. I feel the same way about documentation. And requirements. You can't write good software without knowledge of the processes that surround development. It isn't enough just to be able to write g…

I think there's somewhat of a gap between "junior" and "junior/intermediate", but given my understanding of university / bootcamp curricula, it's probably both the case that it's unrealistic to expect junior devs to have meaningful testing experience and that it's essential to make sure that potential hires have some awareness / positive attitude toward testing as part of software development.

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

#237

Post by kaeluka »

VestingAxis wrote: post #220

As someone who works in the semiconductor industry, one of the most exciting things happening right now is the development and emergence of persistent/storage class memory (PCM/RRAM/3DXP/NVDIMMs). The implications of a persistent alternative to DRAM is immense and besides fundamentally changing compute/memory/networking/storage architectures it will also change programming models and SW stacks as we know them today.…

I like to watch presentations of technical talks while I'm doing cooking/housework. Do you have any link, perhaps on youtube, that gives me an intro?

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

#238

Post by espeed »

The convergence of 3 big ideas in graph computing:

1. D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model

http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/D4M/ GraphBLAS: http://graphblas.org

Achieving 100M database inserts per second using Apache Accumulo and D4M https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465141

MIT D4M: Signal Processing on Databases [video] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyY...

2. Topological / Metric Space Model

Fast and Scalable Analysis of Massive Social Graphs http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/temp/rigel.pdf

Quantum Processes in Graph Computing - Marko Rodriguez [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRoAInXxgtc

3. Propagator Model

Revised Report on the Propagator Model https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/

Constraints and Hallucinations: Filling in the Details - Gerry Sussman [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxknB4SgvM

We Really Don't Know How to Compute - Gerry Sussman [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU

Propagators - Edward Kmett - Boston Haskell [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyPzPeOPgUE

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

#239

Post by iandanforth »

_fh5n wrote: post #120
sarthakjain wrote: post #15

Deep learning architectures built by machines (so we no longer have to design architecture to solve problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578 Transfer Learning (so we need less data to build models) http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik-group/torrey... Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-n…

All these are definitely cool, but I think we're still a long way from leaving the "look at this cool toy" status and stepping into the "I can add value to society" status. Furthermore, if we consider that most of these DL paper completely ignore the fact that the nets must run for days on a GPU to get decent results, then everything appears way less impressive. But that's just my opinion. I love working in deep lear…

Could you elaborate? After running for days / weeks/ months the output is a net that can do inference in seconds, or with some now-common techniques milliseconds with only small reductions in accuracy. These nets can then be deployed to phones to solve a rapidly increasing number of identification tasks, everything from plants to cancer.

The time from theoretical paper to widely deployed app is smaller in DL than in any other field I have experience with.

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

#240

Post by neves »

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…

20 years ago I did some software to analyze satellite images of the Amazon to monitor deforestation. We got a result that matched the quality of human experts. The problem has always been political and economical, not technological.
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