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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?

#341

Post by foota »

computerex wrote: post #310
mod wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, one of the consequences of React is that the front-end can largely be unit-tested. You can at least get a pretty good idea that the page will render what you expect if it gets the data you expect. And whether or not it gets that data is a unit test in another place. I'm not a huge fan of React, or javascript, but having been forced to work in it, this is one of the wins.

You could test the front-end before react though? Also, one can still have a God component. I don't think React changed anything from a testability point of view. Well written modular code is well written modular code.

I would argue that the case that React makes for testability is abstracting DOM manipulation in a way that is highly testable.

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

#342

Post by asher_ »

jackyinger wrote: post #293
taneq wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that objection disappear once automation is more reliable than a human operator, since the human operator would be less likely to be sued when taking responsibility for an automated system's results than they would for simply trying to make the call themselves?

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.

This seems absurd. Are there any examples you can point to, or legal principle you are referencing here?

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

#343

Post by hyperpallium »

Curious42 wrote: post #61
hyperpallium wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW You can do this kind of thing now, with classloading. I'm doing developmemt on my phone, and it's far faster to load new class versions than install a new app version. Google will have a framework around this. Full OS access could mean permissions per page - could be awkward or ok. Much of the app vs. webpage debate here is the same as always - though offline advantage is gome.

Never looked into Classloader until now. Very interesting. Can a loaded class also be an extension of a view or an activity?

I'm loading a GLSurfaceView, which extends SurfaceView, which extends View. So, yeah.

There shouldn't be any problem classloading an Activity, use reflection to instantiate, and treat as you would a runtime Activity (as opposed to being declared in AndroidManifest.xml). But I haven't actually done this; could be some gotchas in incorporating runtime a Activity into the GUI.

IIRC google had a few hits on classloading Activities.

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

#344

Post by yellow_viper »

zump wrote: post #172

Why hasn't there been any innovation in the area of sleep?

The only thing I can think of is those sleep timer apps, I think the main reason they've not took off is because they require you to put your phone under your sheet every night which you can forget to do and is a bit of a pain. They're also completely thrown off if someone else is in bed with you.

There have been a few quickstarters which claim to reduce the amount of sleep you need but they've all turned out to be nonsense AFAIK.

I agree it's weird that we have nothing when we spend 1/3rd of our lives asleep.

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

#345

Post by neoncontrails »

cookiecaper wrote: post #183
donaltroddyn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is one area where webdev is way behind other fields, and i think we're going to see lots of new tooling in this area soon. We're currently working on a way to help devs test web app functionality and complete user journeys without having to actually write tests in Selenium or whatever. The idea to is let devs write down what they want to test in English ("load the page", "search for a flight", "fill the fo…

>wants to reduce complexity >tries to do so by using an imprecise, context-dependent language designed for person-to-person communication to instruct a machine ??? Selenium is its own can of worms, but it absolutely sounds like you're using the wrong tool for the job here. The problem stopping people from writing browser-based tests is not that people can't understand specific syntaxes or DSLs, it's actually the oppo…

Your post gave me deja vu to an automation workflow I cobbled together a few months ago, which I found wonderfully productive for steering a bot: Vimperator keybindings. Selenium can use most of them right out of the box. It's a terrific navigation layer. For instance, pressing "f" enumerates all the visible links on the page and assigns to each one a keybinding. The keybindings are displayed in tooltips and can be trivially extracted with CSS. You can keep sending keys to the browser, and only links that contain the anchor text remain in the set of candidates. Of course the "hashing" of links to keybindings is completely relative to the viewport, so this won't satisfy you completely. But it was an idea I had randomly one day, as an alternative to the trapeze act of navigating through the boughs of the DOM tree, and lo and behold it worked nicely.

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

#346

Post by pinouchon »

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…

I read the infoGAN paper yesterday. It blew my mind. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.03657v1.pdf. This is a way to do disentangled feature representation learning without supervision.

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

#347

Post by mafribe »

bem94 wrote: post #58
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…

I work in CPU design. So I'd add that the tools for formally verifying CPUs have come a very long way in the last two years, and the next two years look like they will be very exciting indeed.

There is a big overlap in prover theory. HOL Light comes from Intelite John Harrison.

I don't know much about CPUs, but I suspect that one of the core problems of software verification, the absence of a useful specification, isn't much of an issue with hardware.

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

#348

Post by pinouchon »

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/

For more details, check out this talk by Mansinghka, one of the main contributors of bayesDB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8QMqSWU76Q.

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

#349

Post by mafribe »

ecesena wrote: post #154
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

I recommend to look at Cedric Fournet's group [1]. They have (or are close to having) a performant networking stack that's fully verified, e.g. [2].

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/fournet

[2] K. Bhargavan et al, Implementing TLS with Verified Cryptographic Security. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/fournet/papers...

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

#350

Post by mafribe »

adamnemecek wrote: post #160
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).

HoTT means a lot to me (lol)

HoTT brought dependent types and interactive theorem proving to the masses. Before HoTT, the number of researchers working seriously on dependent type theory was probably < 20. This has now changed, and the field is developing at a much more rapid pace than before.

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