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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?

#311

Post by elihu »

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…

I suppose full automation may be a long way off, but maybe in the mean time we can do both? Have the radiologist evaluate the images, and then look at the report the AI generated and see if they agree. Use the radiologist to help train the AI, and use the AI to double-check the radiologist.

Maybe if MRI scans get cheap enough (due to advances in cheap superconductors or whatever) that it's economically feasible to scan people regularly as a precautionary measure (rather than in response to some symptom), then the bulk of the cost might then be in having the radiologist look at the scans. In those "there's nothing wrong but lets check anyways" cases, it might be better to just have the AI do it all even if its accuracy is lower, if it represents a better health-care-dollar-spent to probability-of-detecting-a-serious-problem ratio. (If the alternative is to just not do the scan because the radiologist's fees are too expensive, then it's better to have the cheap scan than nothing at all.)

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

#312

Post by sufyanadam »

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…

I wrote a really simple ruby gem to parse HL7 into ruby. It's super easy to extend, all you have to do is define a new class containing a function-to-column map. The key is the name of the function to call against a HL7 segment and the value is the position of the element in HL7 segment that you want the function to return. Check it out here: https://github.com/sufyanadam/simple_hl7_parser

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

#313

Post by taneq »

jackyinger wrote: post #293
taneq wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that objection disappear once automation is more reliable than a human operator, since the human operator would be less likely to be sued when taking responsibility for an automated system's results than they would for simply trying to make the call themselves?

It's more about who gets sued. If you make software to fully automate interpretation you would be the party sued. If there is still a human in the loop, you are not liable for their errors.

I don't understand how that works - if you're an employee of a company, generally the company is liable for mistakes you make (unless you're also a director of the company). So for the company, whether they choose to provide their services based on the output of some software or based on the judgement of a human employee, the result should be the same.

I can see an argument that if the company was sued then it could try to push the blame onto the software vendor, but surely that would be decided based on the contract between company and software vendor, which is usually defined by the software license.

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

#314

Post by sufyanadam »

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?

Ruby makes working with things like HL7 super easy. Check out the super extensible HL7 ruby parser I wrote here: https://github.com/sufyanadam/simple_hl7_parser. It currently focuses on parsing ORU messages but can be easily extended to support any HL7 segment. Feel free to submit a PR :)

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

#315

Post by charlieflowers »

bitshaker wrote: post #177

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…

fancy words, exciting claims, and absolutely no detail whatsoever.

with all due respect, said politely, it is my opinion that you are a charlatan.

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

#316

Post by espeed »

lowglow wrote: post #263
espeed wrote: post #238

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…

So many good links here. Most interested in Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model. What are you working on?

PUFR http://pufr.io (IoT security startup), and for the last few years I've been doing R&D on the design of a graph computing model that unifies some of the ideas above.

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

#317

Post by Donald »

gtycomb wrote: post #106

Enterprise Architecture. What is often an unmanageable bundle of "models", pictures, documentation (UML etc, or tools or “repositories”) giving way to concise and precise schema for architecture decision making – a pleasant outcome of the informal global teamwork surrounding meta-models in DoDAF, simplifying EA activity to a level that has not been anticipated ...

Do you have any examples of what you're talking about?

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

#318

Post by bigger_cheese »

I'm a materials engineer these are two interesting developments in my field at the moment

Metamaterials: Essentially a material engineered to have a unique property. By precisely controlling a materials structure you can influence how it interacts with electromagnetic waves, sound etc. You can create materials with unique properties such as a negative refractive index over certain wavelengths. It's kind of a novelty but people are building "cloaking devices" using metamaterials i.e. bending electromagnetic waves around a material in certain ways to make it appear invisible to certain frequencies.

Graphene (and other 2D materials): These materials are a relatively recent discovery, graphene was confirmed in 2004 and it has a number of interesting properties. In particular its electrical and thermal properties make it promising for a number of applications. I think it could possibly find applications in batteries, transistors and capacitors. At the moment it is a very expensive material to manufacture which makes it (currently) unsuited for commercial applications. There is a heap of active research involving graphene at the moment.

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

#319

Post by mrfusion »

jbpetersen wrote: post #215
nadaviv wrote: post #30

In the Bitcoin space, I'm most excited about the Lightning Network [0][1] and MimbleWimble [2][3], which are in my view the two most groundbreaking technologies that really push the limits of what blockchains are capable of. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network [1] https://lightning.network/ [2] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mimblewimbl... [3] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimble…

To add to that, the escalating hashrate war within Bitcoin between Unlimited and Core is popcorn worthy. And within the wider space of blockchains, improving access to strong anonymization techniques appears to be moving forward quickly: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcas...

What's the unlimited thing?

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

#320

Post by swyman »

pault wrote: post #286
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…

I think the most exciting trend in web development is the rise in popularity of functional programming styles in front-end frameworks. This makes the complexity problem much easier to solve, as the code is (should be) less likely to cause an unanticipated mutated state which can't be easily tested for.

Would you mind sharing an example or pointing me to a good guide that explains this concept? How does functional programming make a problem less complex than OO or imperative? I've heard this a couple of times, but the intuition has never quite clicked for me.
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