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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?

#411

Post by pitaj »

uranian wrote: post #371
pitaj wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dynam…

> > 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???

I was implying that you simply don't use ES6.

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

#412

Post by neves »

seanlinmt wrote: post #362
neves wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right that work in these areas tend not to be hampered by technology. It sometimes may even be hazardous to ones health considering the value of timber. 20 years ago is a long time ago, GIS must be still at its infancy then. These days one could pull free satellite images from NASA and probably could just diff images if not for those pesky clouds. Oh wait actually I think NASA does do earth imagery at various…

Excuse me for the delay to answer.

The best results were with backpropagation neural networks: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0888613X949...

But we also used fuzzy logic neural networks with genetic algorithms: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/712156/?reload=true

It were 24 years ago.

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

#413

Post by neves »

spuz wrote: post #276
neves wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure if there was more to your story that you missed. Was your software successful? Is it in use today? Is automation widespread in the study of Amazonian deforestation?

No. No. No. :-)

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

#414

Post by neves »

i336_ wrote: post #298
neves wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did your software work, what techniques was it using, and what was the surrounding context relating to the data that was fed in and the output the model gave? There might be some interesting things that can be learned from this kind of info and applied to the current status quo (I'm definitely not arguing that there is a sociopolitical element).

There were a bunch of papers: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0888613X949...

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

#415

Post by jstimpfle »

Crespyl wrote: post #389
jstimpfle wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did not downvote. Let's take twitter as a well known and particularly bad example. For a brutalist example, let's take HN. It works. Plus, I'm sure the code is quite simple.

From skimming the thumbnails in the linked site, I don't know that I'd call HN or reddit brutalist designs, maybe "classic" or "skeletal". The emphasis is on dense content with simple links, and there's not a lot of "live" interactive content on the page. I don't find either site to be particularly ugly or visually offensive, contrary to many of the linked "brutalist" sites. I'd love to see more sites in the HN/reddi…

I didn't coin the term and I don't like it -- but hacker news is actually listed on the linked site.

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

#416

Post by jstimpfle »

pitaj wrote: post #246
jstimpfle wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fad? Don't you see a problem with many of today's websites? Both from a developer's and a user's perspective.

Sure, many "modern" sites have terrible UX, but that doesn't mean that minimalist or "brutalist" designs are intrinsically any better.

At least they load quickly. They don't hog you CPU. And they don't mess what you can Ctrl+F.

All a great boon for UX, while being easier to design.

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

#417

Post by mafribe »

munin wrote: post #365
mafribe wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm particularly easy to make happy. Compilers, in particular optimising compilers are notoriously buggy, see John Regehr's blog. An old dream was to verify them. The great Robin Milner, who pioneered formal verification (like so much else), said in his 1972 paper Proving compiler correctness in a mechanized logic about all the proofs they left out "More than half of the complete proof has been machine checked,…

Thanks for the long reply! I don't have the time continue this. I mostly agree with what you say. I do think that making verification tools easier is something that researchers could and should be thinking about. Probably not verification and logic researchers directly, but someone should be carefully thinking about it and systematically exploring how we can look at our programs and decide they do what we want them t…

I'd be interested in your (brief if you have not time) suggestions what kind of novel interfaces you have in mind. I have spent too much time on the command line to have any creative thoughts about radically different interfaces for verification.

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

#418

Post by webmaven »

onion2k wrote: post #354
cs02rm0 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Personally, I've come to think that you need the right tool for the right job. If you spend more time writing / running tests that you would fixing the bugs they find, you may be doing it wrong. If you're writing documentation no one will read, you may be doing it wrong. They clearly do have a place though. As for maintaining a set of requirements... I appreciate there must be some environments where what is r…

I appreciate there must be some environments where what is required is well understood and relatively stable. Actually there isn't. Every project, no matter how it's managed, changes as it goes on. It has to because you learn and discover things along the way. That's why maintaining and understanding project requirements and how they've changed is incredibly important. If you don't keep on top of them then you end up…

> (My first startup was a requirements management app.)

How did that work out? In the 90's it seemed every industry was switching to Documentum for that sort of thing.

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

#419

Post by mikhailfranco »

siddboots wrote: post #17

It's all subjective, but as a data analyst I'm excited about probabilistic databases. Short version: load your sample data sets, provide a some priors, and then query the population as if you had no missing data. Most developed implementation is BayesDB[1], but there's a lot of ideas coming out of a number of places right now. [1] http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/

BayesDB is being commercialized by startup Empirical Systems:

http://empirical.com (still dark atm)

co-founded by CEO Richard Tibbetts, who was also a co-founder of StreamBase (acquired by TIBCO).

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

#420

Post by thirdsun »

RileyKyeden wrote: post #379
thirdsun wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I'm positive you know that, don't make the mistake of limiting Ableton to electronic music - it has obvious strengths in that department, but there's really no limit to the genre and style of what can be done with DAWs like Live, Logic and Co.

By the way, if Ableton remains too expensive for your taste, there's always Bitwig, which isn't quite as mature and has a much smaller, but growing community, yet it's very similar to Ableton's approach to music production.

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