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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?

#112
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?

Here's a really good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cosqlfqrpFA Also, to answer your question, not it's not the same as a website because it will be a native Android app with the ability to communicate with the Android OS, like any other Android app. The possibility of things — in terms of improved UX — that you can accomplish with instant apps are infinite. It all comes down to how you want to use it.

I watched the video and honestly, this is terrible.

If I'm clicking on a link I want to open it with my browser, not with some app. I find this extremely annoying with facebook and even the news carousel already.

I can't open new tabs, copy the url, switch to other tabs like I would in the normal browser. This is extremely confusing and I don't how this benefits me in any way.

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

#113
post #26

Container orchestrators becoming mainstream is something I'm very excited about. Tools like DC/OS, Nomad, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm Mode, Triton, Rancher make it so much easier to have fast development cycles. Last week I went from idea, to concept, to deployed in production in a single day. And it is automatically kept available, restarted if it fails, traffic is routed correctly, other services can discover it, the…

I had no idea most of these amazing projects existed. Thanks for this

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

#114
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…

Then, considering that if people don't spend sufficient time/money on proper testing, how much time/money do they spend on security? Probably even less.

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

#115
post #63

In my company we work using computers for real world applications, in the physical world: Regenerative medicine: understanding DNA code and restoring cells and organs, making eternal youth possible. It will take decades of hard work. Ending cancer: We are studding virus mutations, so we could attack them without invasive techniques. Nuclear fusion: We are simulating plasma physics. This is going to be enormous in ten…

What company are you referring to?

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

#116

The progress towards indistinguishable-from-reality realism in graphics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo5ztSsA_zk

The tech is great and should be developed. But I worry about faking evidence, in court as well as in the news. It will get to the point where you can put any words in anyone's mouth, and seeing will be believing.

Perhaps it will be detectable, with technical effort, for some time to come, but as a propaganda and government corruption tool it will complete the circle started by the "telescreen/ankle bracelets" we all carry in our pockets.

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

#117

Not really my main field, but in web technology it seems that severless architectures such as Amazon Lambda will be a pretty big game changer in the near future: Lambdas are lightweight function calls that can be spawned on demand in sub-millisecond time and don't need a server that's constantly running. They can replace most server code in many settings, e.g. when building REST APIs that are backed by cloud services…

I have to admit, I'm pretty bearish when it comes to serverless. Mostly because it's an abstraction which leaks to hell and back.

Your input is tightly restricted, and with Amazon in particular, easy to break before you even get to the Lambda code (the Gateway is fragile in silly ways). Your execution schedule is tightly controlled by factors outside your control - such as the "one Lambda execution per Kinesis shard". You can be throttled arbitrarily, and when it just fails to run, you are limited to "contact tech support".

In short, I can't trust that Lambda and its ilk are really designed for my use cases, and so I can only really trust it with things that don't matter.

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

#118
post #6

In general, this is a question that I would ask interviewees (for any position). And answer other than shock shows that they are keeping abreast in their field.

Then I would fail. Not because I don't follow tech news, but because I feel what is being created now is stuff we should have had decades ago (what company is even working on flying cars?).

I am so not looking forward to flying cars, at least not for everyday use by everyday people. I've recently been having dreams of people cutting me off in traffic. Probably because a couple weeks ago someone did just that to me, trying to beat a red light by speeding up and changing lanes to occupy the space that I was in at that time; my reptilian brain and peripheral vision were the only thing that stopped a collision.

I really don't want people doing that over my apartment or favorite urban trail.

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

#119
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…

If you are counting on people slowing down, you're in the wrong business.

You're asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be "how do we get people to slow down?" It should be, "how do we make rapid software development better?"

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

#120

Deep learning architectures built by machines (so we no longer have to design architecture to solve problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578 Transfer Learning (so we need less data to build models) http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik-group/torrey... Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-n…

All these are definitely cool, but I think we're still a long way from leaving the "look at this cool toy" status and stepping into the "I can add value to society" status.

Furthermore, if we consider that most of these DL paper completely ignore the fact that the nets must run for days on a GPU to get decent results, then everything appears way less impressive. But that's just my opinion. I love working in deep learning, but we still have LOTS of work to do.

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