391–400 of 436 posts
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.
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.
I suspect the reality is a small subset of programmers think functional programming is amazing and everyone else hates it. You might think it reduces complexity, but a lot of people feel it reduces comprehensibility.
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 bas…
Where can you get satellite derived building footprints for free?
The same thing is also done on an international level, e.g. the European Union provides platforms and also the environmental agencies in the US.
# edit:
Clarification: These footprints are not satellite-derived (that is the goal, but it doesn't work well enough for many applications, but we probably will get there ...), but are hand-crafted by people working in city planning. The point is you can use the data as training data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The original expectation was to gradually increase the block size to increase capacity as more users joined the network, eventually transitioning most users to "thin" clients that don't store the (eventually enormous) complete blockchain.
The Core devs right now feel that the current situation (every node a full peer with the complete chain, but maxed out capacity and limited throughput) is preferable for a number of reasons including decentralization, while the Unlimited devs feel that it's time to increase the block size in order to increase capacity and get more users on the network, among other things.
Decisions like this are usually decided by the miner network reaching consensus, with votes counted through hashing power/mined blocks. I'm not sure where things stand at the moment, but it's been interesting to observe.
I understand it's become a rather contentious topic in the community.
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…
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 ...
UML - I know next to nothing about UML - but what I do know is the language was invented first and then people came around and tried to give semantics to the language. Well, in other words what that means is that the language was invented first and it really didn't mean anything. And then, later on, people came around to try to figure out what it meant. Well, that's not the way to design a specification language. The…
I am a physicist in biology (so take these with a grain of salt) and CRISPR is arguably the most exciting development there. This technique allows to edit DNA based on guiding RNAs which can be readily synthesized in contrast to DNA binding proteins required for targeted editing before. What's more the same technology can be used to adjust gene regulation too. These techniques are not only giving basic research a big…
What about synthetic biology projects such as Yeast 2.0, aiming "to build the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome".
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…
So I decided to observe an radiologist at an hospital for a day (back in 2011), and I noticed that most if not all of it was already automated.
Radiologists were there to rubber-stamp the machine's work (and to ensure compliance, laws and what not).
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?
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.