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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?

#331

Post by bitshaker »

charlieflowers wrote: post #315
bitshaker wrote: post #177

My field is hypnosis, or more generally, "changework" which is jargon, but essentially hacking the psychology of clients to get desired outcomes. There's been a renaissance of study in placebo effects, meditation, and general frameworks for how people change belief for therapeutic purposes or otherwise, but to me, that's been going on for a long time and is more about acceptance than being a new development. One of t…

fancy words, exciting claims, and absolutely no detail whatsoever. with all due respect, said politely, it is my opinion that you are a charlatan.

Thank you for expressing your opinion.

I wasn't interested in long citations or garnering proof of my work in particular with training a machine to do this work. I simply wished to add to this thread and did so, in order to show someone out there, maybe even you, what else is going on that is exciting in my little corner of the world.

I'm not that good of a programmer, so it's not in a state that it does work yet. I hope my original comment didn't suggest otherwise, but let me be perfectly clear here: I have no working machine implementation that can do what I want yet. It can work with simple canned responses like Eliza, but it's not enough. I am working on employing all of the techniques and tools mentioned, but progress is slow.

However, this is work and change I employ daily with my clients professionally and I can assure you that it does work.

You don't even have to take my word for it.

Consider....seriously consider: who would you not be if you weren't you?

If you thought about that one for a sec and felt a little spaced out for a second, you did very well.

If you came up with something quickly like "me" and didn't really actually consider the question, allow me to pose another to you. Again, seriously consider this. Read it a few times. Imagine emphasis on different words each time.

Who are you not without that problem you are interested in solving?

This work can be made more difficult by text only and seriously asynchronous communication, which is why I mentioned it being easier within conversation.

If you are interested in more, google "mind bending language" or "attention shifting coaching" and find Igor Ledochowski and John Overdurf. Their work has helped me change the lives of thousands.

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

#332

Post by bitshaker »

sindoc wrote: post #255
bitshaker wrote: post #177

My field is hypnosis, or more generally, "changework" which is jargon, but essentially hacking the psychology of clients to get desired outcomes. There's been a renaissance of study in placebo effects, meditation, and general frameworks for how people change belief for therapeutic purposes or otherwise, but to me, that's been going on for a long time and is more about acceptance than being a new development. One of t…

Sounds interesting. Would you care to share any references?

Most certainly. This current work I am doing builds upon the mountaintops of huge amounts of work built by two men who base their work on yet more huge foundations.

Igor Ledochowski - http://hypnosistrainingacademy.com

John Overdurf - http://JohnOverdurf.com

As far as context-free therapy goes, that's a bit of an advanced subject, but can be learned and mastered through some of their programs.

The key tenets are simple though. As a model, consider that human language builds around 5 concepts: Space, Time, Energy, Matter, and Identity. These 5 also map cleanly to questions (5Ws and H) and language predicates in human language. Space is Where, Time is When, Energy is How, Matter is What, and Identity carries two with Why and Who.

Every problem you've ever had is built up of some combination of the 5 in a specific way, unique to you.

The pattern of all change is this:

1) Associate to a problem, or in other words, bring it to mind.

2) Dissociate from the problem, or basically get enough distance from it so that you can think rationally and calmly. Similar to a monkey not reaching for a banana when a tiger is running after it, your brain does not do change under danger and stress well. It can, but that usually leads to problems in the first place.

3) Associate (think about, experience) a resource state. Another thought or experience that will help with this one, for example if someone were afraid of clowns, I'd ask a question like, "What clowns fear you?" It usually knocks them out of the fear loop for a second.

4) While thinking about the resource, recall the problem and see how it has changed. Notice I said has changed. It always changes. You can never do your problem the same again. Will this solve things on the first go? Maybe. Maybe not, but it's enough to get a foothold and a new direction and loop until it's done.

Which is what makes this fun and exciting to do in person and fun and exciting to help teach a machine to mimic it to.

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

#333

Post by rryan »

ktta wrote: post #107
petra wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) Does this only apply to artistic content, or also to engineering content ? Say PCB layouts, architectural plans, mechanical designs, etc ?

Artistic only. You'd need an exact verifier in case of engineering designs, and something built with neural networks is not one. To get a better understanding (other than reading a paper) read this excellent blog post https://openai.com/blog/generative-models/

GANs are a general tool -- they just happen to get a lot of attention for generating images of stuff. Here's an example for generating sequences [1]. The example is language oriented, but ultimately GANs are interesting because you can use them to build a generator for an arbitrary data distribution. This can have many applications in engineering (to take a random example -- generating plausible looking chemical structures under a certain set of constraints). As with any ML application, you need to quantify your tolerance for "inaccuracy" (in a generative setting, how well the generated distribution matches the true data distribution). This is simply an engineering trade-off and will vary based on the application.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05473

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

#334

Post by patrics123 »

aggie wrote: post #179
patrics123 wrote: post #90

That would be an interesting question to ask within other specialized communities and collect the answers in One big Post. Aint nobody got time for that? In UX an interesting trend is a flood of Software Tools which help during Design, evaluation, Research, etc. Also adaptive UI which is changed due to user attributes and past behaviour seems to be trendy now (supported by the online marketing field with auto-optimiz…

Any examples you can point to of adaptive UIs?

In my initial comment I mixed up two things into one. Let me clarify.

Adaptive content: What you see is based on your previous usage of the app/site and not generalized what everyone is looking at. Pretty common... - Amazon suggestions, Google results, Facebook stream or even your auto-correct suggestions of your phone keyboard.

Adaptive Interfaces: Where the actual controls, tools, menus change in favor of your usage behaviour, or desired behaviour of "users like you".

(Its not quite clear if this actually helps or harms the UX because the UI could change without the user understanding why an menu item is not available anymore where it used to be)

- I am blank on real-world example "software" here - But web/landingpage optimization tools like optimizely use predefined rules to change anything on the UI, (like showing a CTA button or a video, hiding a menu, etc.) where others like dynamicyield move into the direction of AI-automating that test-generation and decision making in favor of a single metric (CTR / Conversion / etc.)

In the end you could argue that every real-world application is only using "adaptive content" and not actual "adaptive UI".

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

#335

Post by gnur »

Ig0rK wrote: post #37
gnur wrote: 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 agree on kube + rancher + deis + traefik etc.. Can you elaborate on why and how you use DC/OS though?

We use DC/OS for all our stateless services, when we started looking at container orchestrators the bootstrap for DC/OS was very easy (automatic via cloudformation) and it was quite complicated for kubernetes.

We mainly use DC/OS to run more services on less instances.

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

#336

Post by tomsmeding »

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?

Software not being used all over the place does not mean the software is bad, generally.

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

#337

Post by gnur »

stkrzysiak wrote: post #136
gnur wrote: 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've been researching container orchestration recently and I personally don't see the incentive to jump into containers from an infrastructure perspective. I think using packer/vagrant/ansible is pretty easy and meets my needs. The orchestration overhead for containers seems like overhead I don't need just yet. So the big question I've been asking myself is at what point will a AWS AMI be less versatile than a docker…

We mainly use Docker because it finally allows us to eradicate all the "Worked in dev" issues we had in the past. From an application perspective, Dev, Accept and Prod are identical.

Also, we deploy to production at least 4 times a day, the time from commit to deployable to production is about 30 minutes. And because it is a container it will start with a clean, documented setup (Dockerfile) every time. There is no possibility of manual additions, fixes or handholding.

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

#338

Post by hvidgaard »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #309
ThePhysicist wrote: post #29

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…

>can be spawned on demand in sub-millisecond time But the reality is that they don't, with cold-start times upward of 30 seconds. If you use them enough to avoid the cold-start penalties, then you're better of with reserved instances because lambdas are 10x the price. If you can't handle the 30 second penalty then you're better off with reserved instances because they're always on. If you have rare and highly latency…

To add, you don't really need that many lambda call for it to be the same price to just have a small always running instance. You can still use it lambda style if you wish, with automatic deployment.

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

#339

Post by hvidgaard »

dbattaglia wrote: post #77

For a C# developer into microservices, there's a lot to be excited about. .Net Core: Finally, cross platform .Net. Deploying .Net services to Linux is a dream come true. Can't wait for the platform to stabilize. Windows Server 2016: For "legacy" applications forced to stay on Windows, containers and Docker on Windows is a game changer. One step closer to hopefully making Windows servers somewhat manageable.

I've toyed with it on and off ever since the first beta. It's still not good enough unfortunately. I need a very simple way to configure an instance, version it, and deploy it in minutes. When that works frictionless I'm all over getting it pushed in my org, and once the tooling in VS supports it, it will be easier to get other developers to do it.

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

#340

Post by foota »

taneq wrote: post #313
jackyinger wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more about who gets sued. If you make software to fully automate interpretation you would be the party sued. If there is still a human in the loop, you are not liable for their errors.

I don't understand how that works - if you're an employee of a company, generally the company is liable for mistakes you make (unless you're also a director of the company). So for the company, whether they choose to provide their services based on the output of some software or based on the judgement of a human employee, the result should be the same. I can see an argument that if the company was sued then it could…

The person operating the machinery is not working for the company that makes it though.
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