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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?

#321

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.

As a web dev, the most exciting development I see is the rise of progressive web apps and a shift away from native apps in situations where web-like experince is more appropriate. That said, I'll be thrilled if React Native gives rise to higher quality apps in situations where a native app is unavoidable (e.g. my bank's app).

What kinds of situations do you think are more appropriate for web or web-like apps?

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

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From reading the web page, I think an Unravel user won't need to specific, pre-defined language, in which case it's very deliberately not a DSL like Gherkin/Cucumber.

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

#323
post #320
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its state. Functional programs tend to have less state as their output is the same for some given input. With things like jquery you quickly introduce state, say is some dropdown open, which your next function will have to check is true or false before proceeding. And so on.

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

#324
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any recommendations for good TDD classes?

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

#325
post #258

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…

Your interesting comment made me think of Oblique Strategies cards, which "can help someone solve an issue without actually knowing the details". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

Thank you. Those are great and I should look at incorporating more of those ideas into the work I'm doing.

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

#326

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.

The place I learned it was hypnosistrainingacademy.com and where he derived his teachings from was a man named John Overdurf who had a program called beyond words. I'd start with Igor's material first. He calls his version (which is based upon, but wholly distinct from beyond words) mind bending language. There are even card decks and training programs to consume. Or free articles if you wish to check it out.

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

That sounds absolutely fabulous! But do you think that Apple would embrace this technology, given that e.g. their app-store is generating lots of revenue?

Not at first. But if the tide turns enough, Apple with have to jump on board to avoid losing market share.

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

#328

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'm curious, how hard do you think it is to integrate new tech with the systems currently being used in radiology? Are the file formats and standards largely proprietary/closed?

It's not too difficult to make your own PACS, there's even open-source software for this. However, you need to be compliant and this usually means obtaining FDA approval of any device you want to install on the hospital network.

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

#329
post #320
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll give it a shot; functional programming style--some languages enforce it, some languages merely have features that allow for it if the author is disciplined enough to do so (JavaScript is in the latter camp)--generally eschews mutable state and side effects, i.e. a variable `foo` that is declared outside of the function cannot be altered by the function. Some "pure" functional languages restrict all functions to a single argument. This may feel like an unnecessary constraint (and opinions vary), but one thing that can't be denied is that it keeps your methods small and simple; in any case, it can be worked around by applying a technique called "Currying"[1], which is named after the mathematician & logician Haskell Curry, not the dish (also the namesake of the eponymous functional programming language [the mathematician, not the dish]).

Because nothing outside of the function can be changed, and dependencies are always provided as function arguments, the resulting code is extremely predictable and easy to test, and in some cases your program can be mathematically proven correct (albeit with a lot of extra work). Dependency injection, mocks, etc are trivial to implement since they are passed directly to the function, instead of requiring long and convoluted "helper" classes to change the environment to test a function with many side effects and global dependencies. This can lead to functions with an excessively long list of parameters, but it's still a net win in my opinion (this can also be mitigated by Currying).

A side-effect (hah) of this ruleset is that your code will tend to have many small, simple, and easy to test methods with a single responsibility; contrast this with long and monolithic methods with many responsibilities, lots of unpredictable side effects that change the behavior of the function depending on the state of the program in its entirety, and which span dozens or hundreds of lines. Which would you rather debug and write tests for? Tangentially, this is why I hate Wordpress; the entire codebase is structured around the use of side-effects and global variables that are impossible to predict ahead of runtime.

There is much, much more to functional programming (see Monads[2] and Combinators[3]), but if you don't take away anything else, at least try to enforce the no-side-effects rule. A function without side-effects is deterministic; i.e. it will always give you the same output for any given set of inputs (idempotence comes for free). Because everything is a function, functions are first-class citizens, and there are only a few simple data structures, it becomes easy to chain transformations and combine them by applying some of the arguments ahead of time. Generally you will end up with many generalized functions which can be composed to do anything you require without writing a new function for a specific task, thus keeping your codebase small and efficient. It's possible to write ugly functional code, and it's possible to write beautiful and efficient object-oriented code, but the stricter rules of functional style theoretically make the codebase less likely to devolve into incomprehensible spaghetti.

Manning Publications has a book[4] on functional programming in javascript, which I own but haven't gotten around to reading yet, so I can't vouch for it. However, it does seem highly applicable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic [4] https://www.manning.com/books/functional-programming-in-java...

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

#330
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the targeting work , and is it only inside the cell or also outside of it ?

From one of the companies working with an implementation: ---------- "Our approach is quite different from most other attempts to clear these cells. We have two components to our potential therapy. First, there is a gene sequence consisting of a promoter that is active in the cells we want to kill and a suicide gene that encodes a protein that triggers apoptosis. This gene sequence can be simple, like the one that ki…

How do you propose to infect cells deep inside solid tumors?How do you target cells that have lost cell surface markers? Your example, p16, is used in many cells intermittently, or only in certain microenvironments . How do you deliver? IV, topical, tumor injection (if so, what about needle tract seeding)?
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