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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?

#371
post #251

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,…

Let's establish a couple things right off the start: 1. You can write great applications without the latest language features 2. The latest language features do make development easier Babel is necessary for #2 if you don't have control over the browser which your users use to access your site. If you don't want to transpile, don't. It's as simple as that. However, the future of JS is the future of web development, t…

typical.. I'm very glad you're not the person 'establishing things' in our team.

> If you don't want to transpile, don't. It's as simple as that.

Are you kidding? Please tell me your estimation of how many developers write in ES6/ES7 without using Babel or other transpiler???

You don't really need to tell me what Types are about, I have a long standing C/C++ background. And I really don't need Typescript. I use dynamic type checking based on ES3, does the job flawlessly already for years. Very rare for me to have a type related bug. I'm always wary of people that preach Typescript; what code do they write to get in so much trouble with types?

> Many would say that someone should be forced to write in a typed language in general in order to be taken seriously.

omg.. 'forced', this is bad.

I'm only looking forward to webassembly, that will be the real game changer and the end of JS as we know it.

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

#372

New aesthetics in web design. With the brutalist movement something new started. People went back to code editors to create websites by hand skipping third-party, non-web-native user interface design tools prefilled with common knowledge making websites looking uniform. The idea of design silos and brand-specific design thinking is dropped: no more bootstrap, flat design, material design, etc. It's like back to the n…

[This] site is my favorite in this regard:

[This][https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/]

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

#374
I live full-time on a school bus with a family.

Flexible solar panels, LED lighting with open source drivers, and the new generation of DC refrigerators are all incredibly exciting and are allowing us to experiment with living without grid electricity.

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

#376
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…

There's a market imo for a full solution that includes front end and entire backend including deployment, seemless scaling, seemless upgrading, seemless backups, seemless local dev, seemless staging, etc.

99% of web apps need the same features but most of this is still up to manually rolling your own.

I should be able to clone some repo, enter some DO/AWS/GOOG keys and push.

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

#377
I work in remote sensing and we do e.g. segmentation of satellite imagery. There are two exciting developments: First, lots of vector data (think building footprints, road networks, etc.) and (satellite) raster data (e.g. Sentinel-2) is now available for free, secondly image segmentation using CNNs works just extremely well. Therefore there are many opportunities to build all kinds of software, in particular CNN based classifiers and distributed systems to handle the immense load of new data.

So I can highly recommend the field of remote sensing as there are many interesting problems to solve.

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

#378
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PACS developer here - I asked the same thing a few years ago when I started in pACS about automation. I was told it's the need to have someone to sue that holds back the automation, not so much the technology.

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?

But in many areas of medicine, solutions have existed that outperform humans for years (not related to current deep learning wave). Yet they were not implemented for regulatory/legal reasons.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd recommend selecting a DAW and learning it. Really learn it. We have countless great tools in music production available - it mostly comes down to how well you can handle them. Personally, I love and recommend Ableton Live which features an easy to use interface, workflow, lots of options for experimentation and extensions, great and large community as well. Good choice for beginners and experts alike. Plus, with…

I plan to switch to Ableton once I earn enough from music to pay for it, but that's because it's made for the kind of music I do. Everyone I know uses it, so it's easy to find advice and tutorials.

For now, Reaper and a few free VSTs will do. I find myself bumping up against the fact that Reaper was made for live music and its devs are understandably keeping the focus there, even though they do good work on the MIDI roll. They always nail down a few irritants in each release.

You'll go further and have an easier time if the community around your tools makes the same kind of music. Choosing tools mostly comes down to what you want to do. If you want to do electronic, Ableton is a good bet.

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why you expect that junior developer (someone with very little or no development experience) I don't think thats the definition of a junior developer. Test tools are apart of building software, you should be hiring devs that have created projects that use tests of some sort, if not with the technology you're using. >I expect that junior developer in software field should be able to program only. I don't know how you…

Development and programming require different skills. Developer need to know development cycle, automated testing, continuous integration, software life cycle, ticketing systems, source control systems, branching and merging, cooperating, etc. Programmer need to know programming languages, patterns, algorithms, computer internals, effectiveness, profiling, debugging, etc. Junior developer (in software filed)) has no…

I think this distinction is a bit ancient...
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