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Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#121

Post by jacques_chester »

juliangregorian wrote: post #120
jacques_chester wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, now I see why you were pejorative about my being a Pivotal Labs employee. I actually think Mesos is the best of the current generation orchestrators, for the same reason that Diego (Cloud Foundry's new execution system) is going to be the best foundation for PaaSes. They both push intelligence out to the edges. Mesos pushes it to the requestor, Diego pushes it to the executor, but both represent a huge step forwa…

> Ah, now I see why you were pejorative about my being a Pivotal Labs employee. Not sure I see the connection? I probably should have been nicer, you came off very shill-like though. Pivotal does kind of cultivate that attitude though, of "whatever we're working on is a disruptive, game-changing twitter-killer", but I guess it works for them since they managed to get a bunch of smart people working for early-stage co…

Oh, we're full of beans. And teaching client developers how we work is literally what Pivotal Labs aims to do. It's probably the first place I've worked that has a high rate of reverse-churn: people leaving to work at startups for the glamour or equity, then deciding they miss Labs and coming back.

As for Diego, start with Onsi Fakhouri's keynote at the Cloud Foundry Summit this year[1], then read Amit Gupta's blog post on app placement as an optimisation problem[2], then you might like the Diego Design Notes repo[3].

My main pet peeve with Diego is the confusing, punny names, so it will be confusing at first.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OkmVTFhfLY

[2] http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry-pivotal/products/app-pl...

[3] https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-design-notes

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#122

Post by ajdecon »

olavgg wrote: post #75
sshillo wrote: post #14

If you don't know python and you're interested in analytics you should solve that. IMHO you'll become a far better developer if you devote the majority of your time to learning advanced algorithms, ml, and ai as opposed to the new hot framework.

I've already started, there is a bigger challenge though. That is, how do you sell this? I can think of plenty of scenarios for the oil and gas industry, which is the biggest industry where I live. For example drilling for oil in sea is quite expensive, could easily cost over 100 million USD. With machine learning we can predict the seismic ground pattern by predicting the amount of clay, lime etc in different locati…

Oil and gas already does a hell of a lot of computing, and invests heavily in supercomputing facilities. [0] I'm not too familiar with the domain, but looking at abstracts of conferences like the Oil & Gas HPC Workshop [1] might give you some idea of the work already being done in those fields.

It's entirely possible that machine learning techniques could be used as well as modeling and simulation for these problems. (They may be already! But my limited expose suggests they're mostly doing traditional HPC.) But you'd probably need to be a petroleum expert already, not just someone with machine learning expertise living in an O&G hub.[2]

[0] Just an example: http://www.aiche.org/chenected/2012/12/bp-building-new-houst...

[1] http://rice2014.og-hpc.org/

[2] Apologies, btw, if you are a petroleum expert who's just frustrated by a lack of machine learning in the industry. :)

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#123

Post by juliangregorian »

jacques_chester wrote: post #121
juliangregorian wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, now I see why you were pejorative about my being a Pivotal Labs employee. Not sure I see the connection? I probably should have been nicer, you came off very shill-like though. Pivotal does kind of cultivate that attitude though, of "whatever we're working on is a disruptive, game-changing twitter-killer", but I guess it works for them since they managed to get a bunch of smart people working for early-stage co…

Oh, we're full of beans. And teaching client developers how we work is literally what Pivotal Labs aims to do. It's probably the first place I've worked that has a high rate of reverse-churn: people leaving to work at startups for the glamour or equity, then deciding they miss Labs and coming back. As for Diego, start with Onsi Fakhouri's keynote at the Cloud Foundry Summit this year[1], then read Amit Gupta's blog p…

Seems interesting and that it occupies the same space as Marathon. Are you familiar with that and if so how do they compare?

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#124

Post by idlewan »

I recommend Nim http://nim-lang.org/ (the website docs don't look too good at the moment, but this has been fixed for the next version that will be out in a few days).

Nim is an incredibly good language that compiles to C, is fast, and has very easy bindings creation to any C library you want. For me, it's the best of both worlds between a Python look (indented, clean) and a fast typed compiled language that helps you instead of hindering you.

You might be interested in checking it out.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#125

Post by juliangregorian »

skrebbel wrote: post #31

Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…

I know what you're saying with respect to Elixir's distributed programming features (it seriously is great) but it's not that hard to use CPUs in Node: http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html#cluster_cluster

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#126

Post by jacques_chester »

juliangregorian wrote: post #123
jacques_chester wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, we're full of beans. And teaching client developers how we work is literally what Pivotal Labs aims to do. It's probably the first place I've worked that has a high rate of reverse-churn: people leaving to work at startups for the glamour or equity, then deciding they miss Labs and coming back. As for Diego, start with Onsi Fakhouri's keynote at the Cloud Foundry Summit this year[1], then read Amit Gupta's blog p…

Seems interesting and that it occupies the same space as Marathon. Are you familiar with that and if so how do they compare?

I'm not familiar with Marathon, but I will read up on it. Thanks.

I find it interesting how everyone is sprinting toward PaaSes from their own positions. For example, Docker is racing up the stack, Hashicorp and Mesosphere are growing sideways, Cloud Foundry is growing in about 5 directions at once. Red Hat is trying to reboot OpenShift with Docker and Kubernetes, but I am not sure how well that will turn out for them.

There's also a thriving cottage industry of people reinventing central controllers that won't scale in the face of the network fallacies, something that Mesos and Diego have accepted and moved on from.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#127

Post by Artemis2 »

bjoe_lewis wrote: post #23
eps wrote: post #2

C is a pretty nice language, have a look ;)

+1. Learning C is not about learning a language. It's more about how to think like a computer.

When you program even a little bit, you already think like a computer. C is more about thinking a lot closer to the hardware, to the very low-level components of the computer. That's really an amazing universe.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#128

Post by srgpqt »

pmoriarty wrote: post #101
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, learning to code and learning to design languages are different tasks. Those writing 'new' languages would be well-served to study the history and progression of languages. Those learning to code have enough on their plate, learning a mental model of computation and how to construct software for given tasks. History lessons are a case of 'too much information'

Developers can benefit from learning classic languages. By learning the classics, especially those that are radically different from what you already know, you expand your mind and your sense of what is possible. It helps you get a different perspective on any given problem you may run in to, having seen radically different approaches to similar problems in the past. It puts another tool in your toolset and lets you…

Some classics are relevant today, like C. Others not so much, and won't help "expand" anyone's mind. COBOL for example.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#129

Post by srgpqt »

striking wrote: post #107
marktangotango wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've read this sentiment, Lua is purported to have one of the leanest, fastest interpreters around (not talking about luajit of course). Can you talk about your experience?

The Grit Engine [1] and Love2D [2] are fun, useful engines that make making games easier, in Lua. Except they're slow as all get out; the only cap on the framerate is literally Lua. If you don't use spritesheeting to its maximum degree, you can't even squeeze out 60fps for a moderate size game. [1]: http://www.gritengine.com/ [2]: https://love2d.org/

Sounds like a design fault in gritengine and love2d, not lua.

Re: Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?

#130

Post by wildmXranat »

skrebbel wrote: post #31

Elixir. While Rust and Go get way more exposure lately, they're mostly designed for systems programming. Many more of us do web development, and it's really amazing how fast Elixir has become a very cool and mature environment for developing great web apps. Elixir is a really cool language, and also a great way to learn functional programming. But more than that, it gets all the non-languagy stuff right. The build sy…

I guess a lot of the benefits listed are a result of erlang vm.
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