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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?

#151

Post by vram22 »

onion2k wrote: 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…

>the complexity of development

Huge and seemingly often unacknowledged issue these days. And many attempted solutions seem to be adding fuel to the fire (or salt to the wound) by creating more tools (to fix problems with previous tools) ...

Red (red-lang.org) is one different sort of attempt at tackling modern software development complexity. Its like an improved version of REBOL, but aims to be a lot more - like a single language (two actually, RED/System and RED itself) for writing (close to) the full stack of development work, from low level to high level. Early days though, and they might not have anything much for web dev yet (though REBOL had/has plenty of Internet protocol and handling support).

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

#152

Post by emcq »

sarthakjain wrote: post #15

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…

What's new in transfer learning?

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

#153

Post by solidangle »

munin wrote: post #133
dorian-graph wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very little on abstract interpretation and SAT/SMT solving. I'm effectively starting from 0. I'll go through the talk, thanks! Why isn't it economical yet?

Google "certified programming with dependent types", "program logics for certified compilers" and "software foundations class". Also, work through the Dafny tutorials, here: http://rise4fun.com/Dafny/tutorial There are some ways in which these tools are not economical. There is currently a big gap. On one side of the gap, you have SMT solvers, which have encoded in them decades of institutional knowledge about genera…

> This means that the behavior is somewhat unpredictable, sometimes you can have a formula with 60,000 free variables solved in under half a second, sometimes you can have a formula with 10 that takes an hour.

It sadly also depends a lot on the solver used and the way the problem was encoded in SMT. For a class in college I once tried to solve Fillomino puzzles using SMT. I programmed two solutions, one used a SAT encoding of Warshall's algorithm and another constructed spanning trees. One some puzzles the first solver required multiple hours whereas the second only needed a few seconds, while on other puzzles it was the complete opposite. My second encoding needed on hours for a puzzle which I could solve by hand in literally a few seconds. SAT and SMT solvers are extremely cool, but way incredibly unpredictable.

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

#154

Post by ecesena »

mafribe wrote: post #13

Compilation: - Meta-tracing, e.g. PyPy. - End-to-end verification of compilers, e.g. CompCert and CakeML. Programming languages: - Mainstreamisation of the ideas of ML-like languages, e.g. Scala, Rust, Haskell, and the effect these ideas have on legacy languages, e.g. C++, Java 9, C#. - Beginning of use of resource types outside pure research, e.g. affine types in Rust and experimental use of session types. Foundatio…

There's a new project to implement TLS in python [1] with the idea to have secure and verifiable code, but so far (to my knowledge) there's no formal tool involved in the verifiability aspect -- the approach is mostly around keeping the implementation as RFC-compliant as possible.

I'd be really interested in applying any of these techniques to a full TLS implementation.

[1] https://github.com/pyca/tls

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

#155

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

nojvek wrote: post #98
aniijbod wrote: post #87

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

The facial expressions were pretty mind blowing. I sometimes think with VR and graphics getting so good, will some gamers actually spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world

Yet the teeth/tongue were obviously wrong, and the hands' motion felt... off. The Uncanny Valley effect is difficult to overcome, while we're getting closer it's not until things are perfect that the improvement really matters.

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

#156

Post by SerLava »

nojvek wrote: post #98
aniijbod wrote: post #87

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

The facial expressions were pretty mind blowing. I sometimes think with VR and graphics getting so good, will some gamers actually spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world

In 15 years maybe the bandwidth will be there, and we can have full-face VR headsets that also face track and transmit expressions to other people in virtual worlds.

The allure is there - be convincingly you, but also look however you want to look. That would get eaten up by a lot of people.

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

#157

Post by FLGMwt »

3minus1 wrote: post #146
FLGMwt wrote: post #67

As a .NET dev, .NET Core is pretty exciting. We're porting a sizable application to .Net Core so we can be on Linux and save cost and time on instance launch. I'm writing an in-depth blog post series about the process because I haven't found any significant migration stories. I'm hoping it will help a lot of people through the process.

mind linking to the blog?

It'll be on http://engineering.rallyhealth.com/ when it's done (pardon the looks, site is WIP). It was just going to be a long post, but I'm trying to be as helpful/detailed as possible. Probably won't publish anything until I have the whole thing done.

I don't have an exact date unfortunately, but it'll be on there sometime before March 2nd to coincide w/ a .NET Rocks podcast. I'll share on HN though and bump this comment when it's released : )

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

#158

Post by genieyclo »

hiddencost wrote: post #138
genieyclo wrote: post #3

Amazon Polly wrt text-to-speech (much cheaper than Ivona and maybe better over the long-term)

Amazon Polly is ivona. Amazon bought them years ago and they do all of Amazon's TTS.

Yes I knnow, again see the qualifiers...

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

#159

Post by ap46 »

michaelmior wrote: post #55
lngnmn wrote: post #5

That in the past people used to deceive (delude) themselves and other fools around them with theology, speculations and metaphysics, today they do the same with statistics, probability and abstract models.

It's all a matter of perspective. One could also claim that those who don't acknowledge God are deluding themselves with a lack of theology. I'm not trying to start a debate, but dismissing the beliefs of billions as simply delusion/deception is painting with broad strokes.

This is where I interject & mention this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost People don't want to feel like they wasted time & resources over something that doesn't exist. Religion can just be relegated to a construct for social activities. There's so many of them which sprung up independently. People should really ponder whether they have accounted some belief for interplanetary travel.

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

#160

Post by adamnemecek »

mafribe wrote: post #13

Compilation: - Meta-tracing, e.g. PyPy. - End-to-end verification of compilers, e.g. CompCert and CakeML. Programming languages: - Mainstreamisation of the ideas of ML-like languages, e.g. Scala, Rust, Haskell, and the effect these ideas have on legacy languages, e.g. C++, Java 9, C#. - Beginning of use of resource types outside pure research, e.g. affine types in Rust and experimental use of session types. Foundatio…

> Homotopy type theory.

Can you talk more about this? I even got THE book on this (haven't really read it yet though) and like I think I get the rough ideas but I'd be curious to hear what HTT means to you (lol).

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