28 ms·

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

• ThePhysicist 10y ago
  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 such as Amazon DynamoDB. I've heard many impressive things about this way of designing your architecture, and it seems to be able to dramatically reduce cost in some cases, sometimes by more than 10 times. The drawback is that currently there is a lot of vendor lock-in, as Amazon is (to my knowledge) the only cloud service that offers lambda functions with a really tight and well-working integration with their other services (this is important because on their own lambdas are not very useful).
  • develogue 10y ago
    Azure has Functions too: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/functions/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/functions/ Auth0 has Web Tasks: https://webtask.io/ https://webtask.io/ Am sure there are many more implementations out there. Agree that vendor lock-in is always a concern.
    • nul_byte 10y ago
      To avoid vendor lock in there is Fission that runs on Kubernetes: http://fission.io/ http://fission.io/
  • falcolas 10y ago
    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.
    • nstj 10y ago
      I'm bearish on it right now, though conceptually it's a fantastic idea which just has quite a way to go before it's ready for prime time. I definitely think a lot of people have jumped the gun by pushing serverless before it's really ready for the outside world.
  • intrasight 10y ago
    I am pretty bullish on "serverless". I really do think it's the future. It fulfills the vision of Cloud Computing. But it's early days and I wouldn't yet bet the ranch on it. I am doing a new project with Azure Functions and so far am quite happy with the offering.
    • AsyncAwait 10y ago
      I don't know, to me it looks like serverless benefits, (ie theoretical lower cost) are not worth the downsides, (essentially complete vendor lockdown), but would love to hear why am wrong :-)
  • hoodoof 10y ago
    If you go serverless - specifically AWS Lambda, then you must be comfortable with using old and out of date programming environments, as these are what AWS Lambda supports. There is no cutting edge with serverless on AWS.
  • atrilumen 10y ago
    I'm really digging https://github.com/zeit/micro https://github.com/zeit/micro on https://zeit.co/now https://zeit.co/now.
  • lowbloodsugar 10y ago
    >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-tolerable events, then use lambda.
    • hvidgaard 10y ago
      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.
• dotancohen 10y ago
  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.
  • tomjen3 10y ago
    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?).
    • r1chard5mith 10y ago
      Lots of people, apparently. http://newatlas.com/david-mayman-vtol-flying-car-jpa-interview/47700/ http://newatlas.com/david-mayman-vtol-flying-car-jpa-intervi...
    • rdnetto 10y ago
      That's not a bad answer though - it demonstrates you understand the value of those things we should have had years ago, and might include things which aren't being worked on yet (even though they should be).
    • bhaak 10y ago
      > (what company is even working on flying cars?) For example http://www.aeromobil.com/ http://www.aeromobil.com/ or http://lilium-aviation.com/ http://lilium-aviation.com/ I'm personally are rather disappointed that we still don't have a moon colony. Making that happen is unfortunately not part of my field.
    • dotancohen 10y ago
      Worded properly, that would actually be a rather good answer to the hypothetical interview question.
    • a3n 10y ago
      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.
• genieyclo 10y ago
  Amazon Polly wrt text-to-speech (much cheaper than Ivona and maybe better over the long-term)
  • hiddencost 10y ago
    Amazon Polly is ivona. Amazon bought them years ago and they do all of Amazon's TTS.
    • genieyclo 10y ago
      Yes I knnow, again see the qualifiers...
• babayega2 10y ago
  Unicef open sourcing RapidPro ( https://community.rapidpro.io/about-rapidpro/ https://community.rapidpro.io/about-rapidpro/ )
  • secfirstmd 10y ago
    Interesting project. Wonder will it include features in future which allow for higher security transfer of information. e.g not SMS
    • babayega2 10y ago
      Of course. You can easily use Twitter, Telegram, Messenger ... http://rapidpro.github.io/rapidpro/ http://rapidpro.github.io/rapidpro/
• lngnmn 10y ago
  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.
  • siddboots 10y ago
    This seems incredibly cynical in light of the current breakthroughs in machine learning, and probabilistic modelling. It really feels to me as though the AI revolution isn't something to dream about anymore, because we're living in it. I find it difficult to deny the achievement of tangible progress that is implied by, for example, the self-driving car.
    • pdimitar 10y ago
      UNINFORMED OPINION by a side-watcher: I don't feel there's any AI revolution at all. We simply have slightly more efficient deep learning networks due to better hardware. Most of the time it feels like the people who are somewhat successful in those branches simply got lucky by randomly mixing elements A, B and C in an unexpected manner and boom -- magic. In other words, things progress painfully slow and almost always it's due to intuitive shower/sleep revelations than anything else.
      • kpil 10y ago
        The algorithms are improved, and there are more network types, and better understanding of real neurons, but I think you are mostly correct. I built a program that played tic-tac-toe in -94, using a combination of traversing a problem tree while evaluating the positions using a neural network. To my understanding, this is basically the same approach used to develop a Go player, only that it took a month training a minimal network to do something useful at all at the time on my small Amiga 500...
    • lngnmn 10y ago
      Modeling is a new form of pseudo-scientific speculation. ML is closer to reality as long as the training sets are not a dogmatically interpreted noise, like it usually is in finance and other pseudo-sciences. You could read about a fundamental difference between a properly controlled, replicable scientific experiment and computer simulation according to some abstract/unverified model and why results of such simulations cannot be substituted for experimental results or any form of evidence in my older comments.
• simooooo 10y ago
  .net core cross platform, open source, very fast
• samlewis 10y ago
  In the embedded/IoT world, I'm fairly excited about two upcoming RTOS's: mynewt (http://mynewt.apache.org/ http://mynewt.apache.org/) and Zephyr (https://www.zephyrproject.org/ https://www.zephyrproject.org/).
  • petra 10y ago
    What's the big benefit over the mbed OS, besides a bit more portability ?
• joelthelion 10y ago
  Deep learning is a game changer for image processing (that should be fairly obvious to anyone reading HN). It still requires a lot of expertise to use, but it's enabling people to do things that were previously extremely difficult or even impossible to achieve.
  • pdimitar 10y ago
    Would you be up to pointing us at open-source tools with which people can do these things? And a few examples?
    • popcorncolonel 10y ago
      Tensorflow. And the artistic style transfer NN, image sharpening NNs, colorizers, etc.
      • pdimitar 10y ago
        Wasn't Tensorflow only usable online, on Google's servers? I am looking for something that is fully independent and 100% runnable on my machines only.
        • mikecb 10y ago
          No. Google has a hosted version of tensorflow, called CloudML, but tensorflow is an open source project that can be run anywhere.
          • homarp 10y ago
            > that can be run anywhere. as long as you have a Nvidia GPU
            • mikecb 10y ago
              GPU just speeds up training, it isn't required.
• hacksOfSumit 10y ago
  autonomous cars & swarm control
  • nojvek 10y ago
    Not my field but 3D reconstruction and vision to scene graph is amazing. From a single camera, being able to create a video game version of it opens a ton of possibilities. I predict a video game version of all the roads, lakes, buildings of our real world. This will change real estate websites as well. I can just query for houses with X visual features
• mafribe 10y ago
  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. Foundation of mathematics: - Homotopy type theory. - Increasing mainstreamisation of interactive theorem provers, e.g. Isabelle/HOL, Coq, Agda. Program verification: - Increasing ability to have program logics for most programming language constructs. - Increasingly usable automatic theorem provers (SAT and SMT solvers) that just about everything in automated program verification 'compiles' down to.
  • dorian-graph 10y ago
    For someone wanting to begin involving program verification in a practical way to their day-to-day work, do you have any suggestions, resources, or anything?
    • mafribe 10y ago
      That depends on your background and your goals. How much do you know about modern testing, abstract interpretation, SAT/SMT solving? In any case, as of Feb 2017, a lot of this technology is not yet economical for non-safety critical mainstream programming. Peter O'Hearn's talk at the Turing Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcVx3g3SmmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcVx3g3SmmY might be of interest.
      • dorian-graph 10y ago
        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?
        • munin 10y ago
          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 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 generating solutions to formula. An SMT solver is filled with tons of "strategies" and "tactics" which are also known has "heuristics" and "hacks" to everyone else. It applies those heuristics, and a few core algorithms, to formula to automatically come up with a solution. 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 sucks when that's in your type system, because then your compilation speeds become variable. Additionally, it's difficult to debug why compiling something would be slow (and by slow, I mean sometimes it will "time out" because otherwise it would run forever) because you have to trace through your programming language's variables into the solvers variables. If a solver can say "no, this definitely isn't safe" most tools are smart enough to pull the reasoning for "definitively not safe" out into a path through the program that the programmer can study. On the other end of the spectrum are tools like coq and why3. They do very little automatically and require you, the programmer, to specify in painstaking detail why your program is okay. For an example of what I mean by "painstaking" the theorem prover coq could say to you "okay, I know that x = y, and that x and y are natural numbers, but what I don't know is if y = x." You have to tell coq what axiom, from already established axioms, will show that x = y implies y = x. Surely there's room for some compromise, right? Well, this is an active area of research. I am working on projects that try to strike a balance between these two design points, as are many others, but unlike the GP I don't think there's anything to be that excited about yet. There's a lot of problems with existing work and applying it to the real world. Tools that reason about C programs in coq have a very mature set of libraries/theorems to reason about memory and integer arithmetic but the libraries they use to turn C code into coq data structures can't deal with C code constructs like "switch." Tools that do verification at the SMT level are frequently totally new languages, with limited/no interoperability with existing libraries, and selling those in the real world is hard. It's unlikely that any of this will change in the near term because the community of people that care enough about their software reliability is very small and modestly funded. Additionally, making usable developer tools is an orthogonal skill from doing original research, and as a researcher, I both am not rewarded for making usable developer tools, and think that making usable developer tools is much, much harder than doing original research.
• sarthakjain 10y ago
  Deep learning architectures built by machines (so we no longer have to design architecture to solve problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578 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.handbook09.pdf 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-nets https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-net...
  • petra 10y ago
    >> 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 ?
    • ktta 10y ago
      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/ https://openai.com/blog/generative-models/
      • rryan 10y ago
        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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05473
• siddboots 10y ago
  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/ http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/
  • abhishivsaxena 10y ago
    Interesting. Do you know anything about agent modelling? Any ideas how if/it ties to it?
    • siddboots 10y ago
      The agent modelling that I'm aware of is in simulation. I have a feeling that there would be a lot of interesting duality between the fields of agent based simulation and monte-carlo based probabilistic modelling, but I don't know enough about the former to say off hand.
      • mikhailfranco 10y ago
        ABM is an MC method, because different individual agents randomize their behavior based on distributions associated with possible courses of action defined by their agent type.
    • ced 10y ago
      What's agent modelling?
      • rch 10y ago
        Here's an agent modeling framework I remember from the early 2000s: http://jade.tilab.com/ http://jade.tilab.com/ I'm curious to know if it's related to the current discussion.
  • OJFord 10y ago
• Seanny123 10y ago
  I'm honestly just super-pumped about any artificial intelligence system that's starting to get an intuition of physics. Google's Deep Mind put out some kind of cool stuff recentely [1], but I'm mostly just excited for anything that Ilker Yildirim [2] is doing with Joshua Tanenbaum, because it seems to triangulate more with how humans think about physics. When I was at CogSci 2016, Joshua mentioned combining this with analogical reasoning and that also sounded super cool, even though I'm not sure how to the two fit together. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00222 https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00222 [2] http://www.mit.edu/~ilkery/ http://www.mit.edu/~ilkery/
• onion2k 10y ago
  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-results#js-testing https://ashleynolan.co.uk/blog/frontend-tooling-survey-2016-...) put the number of developers who don't use any test tools at almost 50%. In the same survey about 80% of people stated their level of JS knowledge was Intermediate, Advanced or Expert.
  • Illniyar 10y ago
    To me as a web developer, the most exciting new development is react native (not react itself) - it's redefining the border between web and native apps in a way that cordova and xamarin never did.
    • subpixel 10y ago
      As a web dev, the most exciting development I see is the rise of progressive web apps and a shift away from native apps in situations where web-like experince is more appropriate. That said, I'll be thrilled if React Native gives rise to higher quality apps in situations where a native app is unavoidable (e.g. my bank's app).
      • pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
        uh... why is a native bank app unavoidable? you're all idiots.
      • swyman 10y ago
        What kinds of situations do you think are more appropriate for web or web-like apps?
        • subpixel 10y ago
          I'm actually hard-pressed to think of any non-gaming interface that is better suited by a native app than a web app in 2017. Five years ago native apps made a level of UX possible that was unheard of on the web, to say nothing of mobile. But today not only has HTML/js closed the gap, but whiz-bang native animations aren't impressive just on account of being novel anymore.
• Existenceblinks 10y ago
  Embedded systems - Wireless Sensors Networks, I know it has been there for long time but IoT would encourage it more. It could enable development of different kinds of devices as well. Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Quadcopter/Drone/AI etc. In my view, there are still a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined, and we already have web/native platforms. This is so exciting development!
  • petra 10y ago
    >> a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined Can you please expand on this ?
    • Existenceblinks 10y ago
      I was thinking of a group or cluster of quadcopter flying together. There are some nice protocols and topologies in Wireless Sensor Network topic. While devices' sensors collecting environment data they can communicate with each other in several ways (e.g. ad-hoc, hierarchy) and command each one to behave in different ways (e.g. quadcopters maneuver in whatever beneficial pattern) Some more ideas on that flying object example, it could calculate overall battery usage and balance it all over cluster by wireless charging on the fly. Underwater devices or robots would be more interesting.
    • Existenceblinks 10y ago
      Well, one obvious example is the space probe(rosetta) that use sensor to detect comet's surface and sent data back to earth: http://kdvr.com/2016/09/30/rosetta-landing-comet-chasing-probe-makes-final-touchdown/ http://kdvr.com/2016/09/30/rosetta-landing-comet-chasing-pro...
  • terragon 10y ago
    >> Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Could you please elaborate on this. I don't understand how the camera industry could go beyond image sensors. They wouldn't be the camera industry anymore if they did that.
• DanBC 10y ago
  1) Infused ketamine as a treatment for major depression and suicidal thinking 2) More understanding of the "bio psycho social" model of mental illness, with better coordination across different agencies to prevent suicide.
• pnut 10y ago
  Perl6
  • vgy7ujm 10y ago
    Perl in general. Lots of innovation going on.
    • peteretep 10y ago
      Is p5-mop core yet?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• gnur 10y ago
  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 underlying infrastructure can be changed without anyone ever noticing it. This also brings me to Traefik, one of the coolest projects I have come across in the last months. Traefik + DC/OS + CI/CD is what allows developers to create value for the business in hours and not in days or weeks.
  • Ig0rK 10y ago
    I agree on kube + rancher + deis + traefik etc.. Can you elaborate on why and how you use DC/OS though?
    • gnur 10y ago
      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.
  • jz10 10y ago
    I had no idea most of these amazing projects existed. Thanks for this
  • stkrzysiak 10y ago
    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 container, assuming it originated w/ Packer and I can build images to other clouds with packer. From a developer perspective I am very excited about containers and believe local dev w/ docker is warranted.
• tluyben2 10y ago
  The size of embedded electronics we have now. Makes me very excited about the near future. As a hobby I am excited by the advances in programming language development; most seemingly tiny and incremental but a lot of long term research is getting working implementations and that is brilliant. Another hobby is the robust push for timer perfect emulators of more and more older systems. But more than anything VR excites me; it is not 'my field' per se (I plod around clumsily with little demos) but it will be in the future. And it will never end. Edit: there is a lot to be excited about these days
• nadaviv 10y ago
  In the Bitcoin space, I'm most excited about the Lightning Network [0][1] and MimbleWimble [2][3], which are in my view the two most groundbreaking technologies that really push the limits of what blockchains are capable of. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network [1] https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ [2] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mimblewimble.txt https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mimblewimbl... [3] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimblewimble-how-a-stripped-down-version-of-bitcoin-could-improve-privacy-fungibility-and-scalability-all-at-once-1471038001/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimblewimble-how-a-stri...
  • jbpetersen 10y ago
    To add to that, the escalating hashrate war within Bitcoin between Unlimited and Core is popcorn worthy. And within the wider space of blockchains, improving access to strong anonymization techniques appears to be moving forward quickly: https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcash-ethereum/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcas...
    • mrfusion 10y ago
      What's the unlimited thing?
      • Crespyl 10y ago
        It has to do with the need for increased block sizes. Right now, each block (chunk of validated transactions) can only be 1MB in size. This restricts the total throughput of the network, but keeps the total size of the blockchain down and the growth rate low. The original expectation was to gradually increase the block size to increase capacity as more users joined the network, eventually transitioning most users to "thin" clients that don't store the (eventually enormous) complete blockchain. The Core devs right now feel that the current situation (every node a full peer with the complete chain, but maxed out capacity and limited throughput) is preferable for a number of reasons including decentralization, while the Unlimited devs feel that it's time to increase the block size in order to increase capacity and get more users on the network, among other things. Decisions like this are usually decided by the miner network reaching consensus, with votes counted through hashing power/mined blocks. I'm not sure where things stand at the moment, but it's been interesting to observe. I understand it's become a rather contentious topic in the community.
• tyingq 10y ago
  I think web assembly is the piece most likely to change front end development in a meaningful way. A little hard to see now, as the WASM component has no direct access to the DOM, no GC, and no polymorphic inline cache. So, dynamic languages are hard to do with WASM. Once those gaps are closed, however, it should be interesting to see if javascript remains the lingua franca or not.
• jackgolding 10y ago
  Web Analytics I feel is years behind data science - but tools like http://snowplowanalytics.com/ http://snowplowanalytics.com/ are becoming much more widespread and are taking market share away from Google and Adobe which is good for everyone. Free GA is still the best tool for small sites.
  • michaelmior 10y ago
    Cool! I've heard of Snowplow from a long way back but I haven't heard anything about in the past couple years. Good to know they're still doing well.
• Curious42 10y ago
  As an Android developer, I'm most excited about instant apps. If it works as marketed, you won't have to hold on to the apps which you use maybe once or twice a week. Instead, you'll be able to download the required feature/activity/view or whatever else on the fly. I'm not sure I did justice to instant apps, because there's a language barrier playing in. But here's an example: I use the Amazon app maybe once every 2 weeks, and yet it's one of the apps consuming most amount of memory on my phone due to background services. After Amazon integrates instant apps, I'll be able to delete the app, and just google search for the product through my phone. The Google search will then download the required page as an app, giving me the experience of an app, whilst not even having it on the phone.
  • rrrhys 10y ago
    This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?
    • Curious42 10y ago
      Here's a really good overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cosqlfqrpFA 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.
      • hyperpallium 10y ago
        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.
        • 10y ago
• dorait 10y ago
  Chatbots with Intelligence. A variety of skill bots that can teach people at all levels. Made possible by AI engines like api.ai, luis.ai and others.
• AshleysBrain 10y ago
  I think consumer software has so much to gain by moving to front-end web tech, we bet our next product on it: https://www.scirra.com/blog/184/a-first-look-at-construct-3 https://www.scirra.com/blog/184/a-first-look-at-construct-3
• andrey_utkin 10y ago
  Hardware manufacturers caring about their drivers in mainline Linux.
  • gue5t 10y ago
    omg who
    • andrey_utkin 10y ago
      Nvidia, Broadcom, ARM, Mediatek, Samsung... I don't imply they all do perfect job or open-source everything they sell, but there are noticeable amounts of code they put into mainline kernel.
• coinidons 10y ago
  In Bioinformatics/DNA sequencing I'm probably most excited by Illumina's push toward a 100USD genome. Their current scale-up of instruments I think means that they're looking to aggressively push into diagnostic applications. The lack of competition is unfortunate however.
  • lowglow 10y ago
    Sub 1K full-genome sequencing is what I'm in love with. I'm eagerly awaiting any breakthroughs there.
  • roye 10y ago
    Long reads from PacBio, Oxford Nanopore, and 10x are also exciting. This new tech coupled with HiC for scaffolding and single cell sequecing brings up the possibility of complete knowledge of your genome, the collection of strains in a metagenome, or all the types of cells in a tissue/cancer sample.
• pipio21 10y ago
  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 years or so imho.
  • dcgoss 10y ago
    What company are you referring to?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• themihai 10y ago
  WASM looks like the most exciting development for the web.
• FLGMwt 10y ago
  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.
  • 3minus1 10y ago
    mind linking to the blog?
    • FLGMwt 10y ago
      It'll be on http://engineering.rallyhealth.com/ 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 : )
  • irontoby 10y ago
    Couldn't agree more. If .NET Core had been around 5 years ago, I never would have bothered to learn Rails. That's not a knock against Rails (ASP.NET still can't touch their "it just works" asset pipeline), but I've been a C# developer for much longer, and a Linux fan for even longer. So it's awesome that I can finally have my cake and eat it too. C# has become such a joy for me to work with. The language itself has been progressing at an impressive pace without adding too much superfluous stuff or making it unwieldy. I feel like it's gotten to the point that most of the pain of strong typing is gone without sacrificing any of the benefits.
• RileyKyeden 10y ago
  I do electronic music. The rise of platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon, and the abundance of high quality free/inexpensive tools and guides is raising the bar for quality in independent music, and making it easier for more people to get paid in whatever niches they prefer (vs. going for a mass audience).
  • kekimchi 10y ago
    I wwould love to get started, I've been looking for a new hobby and thought that is perfect. How should I start? :)
    • RileyKyeden 10y ago
      Reaper: http://www.reaper.fm/ http://www.reaper.fm/ (good tutorials: http://reaperblog.net/ http://reaperblog.net/) Good synths: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/firebird-by-tone2-audiosoftware https://www.kvraudio.com/product/firebird-by-tone2-audiosoft... https://www.kvraudio.com/product/synth1-by-ichiro-toda https://www.kvraudio.com/product/synth1-by-ichiro-toda Good all-purpose instrument: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/orion-sound-module-by-samplescience https://www.kvraudio.com/product/orion-sound-module-by-sampl... Good orchestral instruments: http://vis.versilstudios.net/vsco-community.html http://vis.versilstudios.net/vsco-community.html A helpful article I wrote with links and basic advice for new musicians: https://blog.rileyreverb.com/how-to-be-a-musician-58511c4e18a7 https://blog.rileyreverb.com/how-to-be-a-musician-58511c4e18...
      • UweSchmidt 10y ago
        You're describing the DAW and plugins, but wouldn't you need a midi keyboard, a groovebox or a drum computer, to actually make those beats? https://www.thomann.de/gb/roland_tr_8.htm https://www.thomann.de/gb/roland_tr_8.htm
        • RileyKyeden 10y ago
          Nope. I have a MIDI keyboard, but it doesn't work half the time, so I rarely bother with it. You can do everything inside the DAW with the MIDI roll or notation editor.
• suhith 10y ago
  Docker, containers are crazy powerful and cool too! Lots of cool stuff in the space like Kubernetes, Swarm, CoreOS, rkt!!
• phkahler 10y ago
  Field: embedded software. To me RISC-V is the most exciting thing for the next few years. The performance appears to be awesome, and free CPU IP will allow more varieties of specialized low-cost chips for specific use cases. It should also have a positive effect on development environments by encouraging wider use of free toolchains.
  • JoachimSchipper 10y ago
    I'm also doing embedded work, but I don't really see - or expect - performance from the RISC-V cores above similar CPU designs that consume about the same area/gate-equivalents; did I miss some recent results? Of course, freely-available and well-supported CPU IP can be very cool!
    • joezydeco 10y ago
      Embedded designer here. Came to say RISC-V as well, but not because of performance. It will be because of price. A significant hunk of a Cortex-M die is the ARM licensing fee. If we can drop that? That would be an order of magnitude of savings on my BOM.
      • petra 10y ago
        >> A significant hunk of a Cortex-M die is the ARM licensing fee. Can you give a few numbers/guesetimates for common mcu's ?
        • phkahler 10y ago
          >> Can you give a few numbers/guesetimates for common mcu's ? I suspect part of the ARM deal is an agreement not to disclose price info.
    • phkahler 10y ago
      Here, see slides 24, 43, 44 in particular. RISC-V cores run about half the area and power of the competition. https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wed1345-RISCV-Workshop-3-BOOM.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wed1345-RISCV-W... The SiFive chip is >300MHz on a 180nm process, but the higher end rise-v chips while having competitive perf/clock still have lower clock speeds than the big guys. That is probably just a matter of time though.
• dbattaglia 10y ago
  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.
  • hvidgaard 10y ago
    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.
• ivanceras 10y ago
  Rust, webassembly and the ability to compile rust code to wasm.
• jchassoul 10y ago
  finally been able to play starcraft brood war again! now as trainers of predictive models and coach of machines.
• ainiriand 10y ago
  Another javascript framework. No, seriously, my field is starting to unravel the secrets of artificial intelligence. A lot of ethic conundrums are going to be started by those advancements.
• reasonattlm 10y ago
  Safe selective destruction of cells via their internal chemistry, not surface markers, via uptake of lipid-encapsulated programmable suicide gene arrangements. With the right program and a distinctive chemistry to target in the unwanted cell population, this flexible technology has next to no side-effects, and enables rapid development of therapies such as: 1) senescent cell clearance with resorting to chemotherapeutics, something shown to extend life in mice, reduce age-related inflammation, reverse measures of aging in various tissues, and slow the progression of vascular disease. 2) killing cancer cells without chemotherapeutics or immunotherapies. 3) destroying all mature immune cells without chemotherapeutics, an approach that should cure all common forms of autoimmunity (or it would be surprising to find one where it doesn't), and also could be used to reverse a sizable fraction of age-related immune decline, that part of it caused by malfunctioning and incorrectly specialized immune cells. And so forth. It turns out that low-impact selective cell destruction has a great many profoundly important uses in medicine.
  • petra 10y ago
    How does the targeting work , and is it only inside the cell or also outside of it ?
    • reasonattlm 10y ago
      From one of the companies working with an implementation: ---------- "Our approach is quite different from most other attempts to clear these cells. We have two components to our potential therapy. First, there is a gene sequence consisting of a promoter that is active in the cells we want to kill and a suicide gene that encodes a protein that triggers apoptosis. This gene sequence can be simple, like the one that kills p16-expressing cells, or more complicated, for example, incorporating logic to make it more cell type specific. The second component is a unique liposomal vector that is capable of transporting our gene sequence into virtually any cell in the body. This vector is unique in that it both very efficient, and appears to be very safe even at extremely high doses." "There's a subtle but profound distinction between our approach and others. The targeting of the cells is done with the gene sequence, not the vector. The liposomal vector doesn't have any preference for the target cells. It delivers the gene sequence to both healthy and targeted cells. We don't target based on surface markers or other external phenotypic features. We like to say "we kill cells based on what they are thinking, not based on surface markers." So if the promoter used in our gene sequence (say, p16) is active in any given cell at the time of treatment, the next part of our gene sequence - the suicide gene - will be transcribed and drive the cell to apoptosis. However, if p16 isn't active in a given cell, then nothing happens, and shortly afterwards the gene sequence we delivered would simply be degraded by the body. This behavior allows our therapy to be highly specific and importantly, transient. Since we don't use a virus to deliver our gene sequence, and our liposomal vector isn't immunogenic, our hope is that we should be able to use it multiple times in the same patient."
• aniijbod 10y ago
  The progress towards indistinguishable-from-reality realism in graphics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo5ztSsA_zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo5ztSsA_zk
  • nojvek 10y ago
    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
    • SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
      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.
    • SerLava 10y ago
      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.
  • a3n 10y ago
    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.
• patrics123 10y ago
  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-optimizing Interfaces which optimize for conversion autonomously, etc.)
  • aggie 10y ago
    Any examples you can point to of adaptive UIs?
    • patrics123 10y ago
      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".
• wolfram74 10y ago
  The era of gravity wave astronomy is starting to begin in earnest with LIGO's new run on data collection. It'd be offline getting upgraded from 2016/02 to 2016/11 and is now even more sensitive [http://www.ligo.org/news/ http://www.ligo.org/news/]
• gtycomb 10y ago
  Enterprise Architecture. What is often an unmanageable bundle of "models", pictures, documentation (UML etc, or tools or “repositories”) giving way to concise and precise schema for architecture decision making – a pleasant outcome of the informal global teamwork surrounding meta-models in DoDAF, simplifying EA activity to a level that has not been anticipated ...
  • Donald 10y ago
    Do you have any examples of what you're talking about?
  • contingencies 10y ago
    UML - I know next to nothing about UML - but what I do know is the language was invented first and then people came around and tried to give semantics to the language. Well, in other words what that means is that the language was invented first and it really didn't mean anything. And then, later on, people came around to try to figure out what it meant. Well, that's not the way to design a specification language. The importance of a specification language is to specify something precisely, and therefore what you write - the specification you write - has to have a precise, rigorous meaning. - Leslie Lamport
    • gtycomb 10y ago
      UML as a specification language is the right tool in software architecture. I find it to be very flexible tool, helping software projects or process models. However _Enterprise_ architecture need to work with the "Business" (consider COSO, COBIT, ITIL, and why they emerged when UML foundations were already so strong).
• aabajian 10y ago
  I'm entering radiology residency, and I'm very pro-automation / machine learning. There's a contentious debate in the field about whether radiologists will be replaced: https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace-radiologists.1210227/ https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace-rad... HackerNews is very developer-focused. If you guys saw what a radiologist does on a 9-5 basis you'd be amazed it hasn't already been automated. Sitting behind a computer, looking at images and writing a note takes up 90% of a radiologist's time. There are innumerable tools to help radiologists read more images in less time: Dictation software, pre-filled templates, IDE-like editors with hotkeys for navigating reports, etc. There are even programs that automate the order in which images are presented so a radiologist can read high-complexity cases early, and burn through low-complexity ones later on. What's even more striking is that the field of radiology is standardized, in stark contrast to the EMR world. All images are stored on PACS which communicate using DICOM and HL7. The challenges to full-automation are gaining access to data, training effective models, and, most importantly, driving user adoption. If case volumes continue to rise, radiologists will be more than happy to automate additional steps of their workflow. Edit: A lot of push back from radiologist is in regards to the feasibility of automated reads, as these have been preached for years with few coming to fruition. I like to point out that the deep learning renaissance in computer vision started in 2012 with AlexNet; this stuff is very new, more effective, and quite different than previous models.
  • patothon 10y ago
    Have you heard about http://www.heartflow.com/ http://www.heartflow.com/ ?
    • aabajian 10y ago
      Yes! Stanford has started (at least) two radiology imaging companies. Heartflow and iSchemView (formerly RAPID): http://www.ischemaview.com/ http://www.ischemaview.com/ These are examples of next-generation radiology companies. The current generation of products are focused on image storage and display. These new companies offer automated image analysis before the radiologist even looks at the image. iSchemaView does hemorrhage maps as soon as new head CT or head MRI is acquired.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• moron4hire 10y ago
  I've noticed that the quality of conversation on VR has gotten a lot better. Used to be you'd go to a meetup and all you could get out of anyone was either parroting some urban myths about the porn industry driving technological change or looking for tech support on getting Unity set up. People are now asking themselves some really hard questions, like how do we design applications that adapt to both VR and non-VR use (there is an argument to be made that you can't meaningfully do so, but there is another argument to be made that you shouldn't stop your users from trying, as they tend to surprise you), or maybe the game development industry isn't the best model to emulate.
• hemezh 10y ago
  The way we educate our kids hasn't changed a lot in centuries. MOOCs are great but completion rate is a real and yet unsolved problem. I believe the biggest advancement in the field of education is going to come with VR. With VR, we can dramatically reduce the cost of "learning while doing", which should be the only way of learning. With AI, we can provide highly personalised paths for learners. VR and AI technologies are finally coming to a point where together they can provide a breakthrough in industries which are mostly untouched since decades.
  • arisAlexis 10y ago
    I am one of those statistical points that mess with completion percentages just because I use lessons as podcasts while I am driving.
  • alphydan 10y ago
    What about the kids who won't put on the VR headset because they prefer to snap-chat, chat, youtube, waste time, do social posturing? I think, for middle school, it's easy to underestimate how much of education is not actual content. How do you deliver education that targets the teenage anger / passivity / disappointment / and emotional roller coaster?
    • andai 10y ago
      This is probably my resentment speaking, but I resonate with this Paul Graham essay about school years being miserable primarily due to school, not puberty. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
  • fspear 10y ago
    >I believe the biggest advancement in the field of education is going to come with VR I'm 100% with you on this. I've been saying this since VR became mainstream, I'm dying to start something in the e-learning space that takes advantage of VR/Augmented Reality but have no idea where to start.
    • 10y ago
• signa11 10y ago
  for networking, imho, it would be a combination of sdn+dpdk making it feasible to use vanilla x86 boxes for a wide variety of tasks, where you would have earlier required 'purpose built' silicon etc.
• DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  I'm really pumped about this open source tool project I've started which promises to join Lean Startup/Hypothesis-Driven Development and DevOps. Enter everything only once, have it available wherever it's needed. Analysis has always been an area that the tech community has lacked, ever since it was overdone back in the days of structured programming. It's really cool to bring back a bit of structured analysis as just another tool in the DevOps pipeline and join up the information with all the folks that need it.
  • dualogy 10y ago
    > which promises to join Lean Startup/Hypothesis-Driven Development and DevOps Finding this tricky to parse, got a link or repo?
    • DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      Still working on the elevator pitch. Unfortunately it's not as obvious as something like "Facebook for cats!" (Although I think it will be much more useful) The general idea is to be able to have informal, unstructured business conversations, take those conversations and type extremely brief, semi-structured (tagged) notes, and have those notes "compile" out to various places throughout the organization where they might be needed. One way to think of it is Requirements/Use Cases/User Stories without the rigor. (Or rather without the rigor and onerous BS folks constantly seem to be always adding around them) Here's the repo. There's also a PDF with details of the tagging language I can send if you're interested. Ping me. https://github.com/DanielBMarkham/easyam https://github.com/DanielBMarkham/easyam
• planteen 10y ago
  CubeSats and small satellites are changing the game for spacecraft. Now scientists can get experiments launched for a few million dollars instead of campaigning much of their career for a mission costing hundreds of millions.
• SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
  NewHope and NewHope-Simple Ring-LWE key exchange systems. Post-quantum secure key exchange with performance (speed/key size) that's actually practical! There's not much point to having a secure cryptosystem if it's so expensive you can't use it.
• iLoch 10y ago
  I'm a web developer. We've picked up Microsoft Orleans for a large scale data analysis platform we're building. Realizing the power of an actor model on a mature platform like .NET has been a real treat. So many nasty problems go away: threading, messaging queues, job queues, caching, general scaling.
• csbartus 10y ago
  New aesthetics in web design. With the brutalist movement something new started. People went back to code editors to create websites by hand skipping third-party, non-web-native user interface design tools prefilled with common knowledge making websites looking uniform. The idea of design silos and brand-specific design thinking is dropped: no more bootstrap, flat design, material design, etc. It's like back to the nineties and reinventing web design. You start from scratch, on your own, and build bottom up without external influence and or help. It's about creativity vs. the bandwagon, about crafting your own instead of putting together from popular pieces. http://brutalistwebsites.com http://brutalistwebsites.com
  • dandare 10y ago
    Isn't it just a fad? How usable and readable is the brutalist design? Or what are you trying to maximise other than being different?
    • jstimpfle 10y ago
      A fad? Don't you see a problem with many of today's websites? Both from a developer's and a user's perspective.
      • dandare 10y ago
        B specific. Answer the question above, name the problem you have on mind and tell us how is brutalism solving that problem.
        • jstimpfle 10y ago
          Did not downvote. Let's take twitter as a well known and particularly bad example. For a brutalist example, let's take HN. It works. Plus, I'm sure the code is quite simple.
          • Crespyl 10y ago
            From skimming the thumbnails in the linked site, I don't know that I'd call HN or reddit brutalist designs, maybe "classic" or "skeletal". The emphasis is on dense content with simple links, and there's not a lot of "live" interactive content on the page. I don't find either site to be particularly ugly or visually offensive, contrary to many of the linked "brutalist" sites. I'd love to see more sites in the HN/reddit model (here's hoping reddit's coming desktop redesign doesn't lose that), but I wouldn't want to actually use more brutalist sites (outside of individual creative expression, anyway).
• zump 10y ago
  Why hasn't there been any innovation in the area of sleep?
  • yellow_viper 10y ago
    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.
• deepnotderp 10y ago
  Generative adversarial networks in Deep learning. Basically, it pits two networks in a "duel" and one of them is a generator network that learns to make images.
• bitshaker 10y ago
  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 the most exciting developments that's been coming out recently is playing with language to do what's called context-free conversational change. Essentially, you can help someone solve an issue without actually knowing the details or even generally what they need help with. It's like homomorphic encryption for therapy. A therapist can do work, a client can report results, but the problem itself can be a black box along with a bit of the solution as well since much of the change is unconscious. It works better with feedback (a conversation) of course, but often can be utilized in a more canned manner if you know the type of problem well enough. I'm working on putting together an automated solution that's based on some loose grammar rules, NLP, Markov chains, and anything else I can use to help a machine be creative in language to help people solve their own problems, but as a first step as a useful tool for beginner therapists to help them get used to the ideas and frameworks with language to use. So essentially, I'm getting a good chunk of the way toward hacking on a machine that can reliably work on people's problems without having to train a full AI or anything remotely resembling real intelligence, just mimicking it. Before you go thinking, "Didn't they do that with Eliza?" Well yes, in a way, but my implementation is using an entirely different approach.
  • sandbags 10y ago
    Is there a useful introduction reference to 'context-free conversational change'? The Google results did not appear promising.
    • bitshaker 10y ago
      The place I learned it was hypnosistrainingacademy.com and where he derived his teachings from was a man named John Overdurf who had a program called beyond words. I'd start with Igor's material first. He calls his version (which is based upon, but wholly distinct from beyond words) mind bending language. There are even card decks and training programs to consume. Or free articles if you wish to check it out.
• uranian 10y ago
  Most annoying is the need to write in ES6/Babel today, and all these js hipsters that really believe this is the future of web development. I totally hate Babel with it's dozens of Webpack patches/plugins to make it work. Oh, and don't forget your (Airbnb style) linter if you want to be politically correct. No one needs Babel to write stellar code IMHO. Unfortunately it is not about the quality of the code you write, it is about being politically correct. This whole ES6/ES7 thing is much based on what Coffeescript, Livescript, etc.. already did much better more than 5 years ago. And I dare to guess that most of the Babel proponents don't even realise it's just a transpiler that they will need till the end of the projects live. note: I expect serious down votes as opposing Babel is almost a serious crime nowadays and proves my unlimited stupidity. No, web development is not really exiting nowadays, it is more terrifying, where the hype goes tomorrow? Maybe soon I will be forced to write in MS Typescript if I want to be taken seriously. Same counts for Redux because Flux is so 2014.. you must be very brave not using Redux! I can go on and on, way too many examples.. Finding a web developer job now is particularly about complying to made up standards that become more complex every day. And I've seen quit some horrible code bases that perfectly comply! It's a very sad reality.
  • grzm 10y ago
    I think you make some very good points. Focusing on a particular toolchain because it's popular rather than the benefits it provides in development and the result is misguided. When developers first start out there are a lot of choices to make, and they may not have the foundation or experience to make the decision they would likely make a few years down the road. Often you're happy when you get something working and repeatedly so. In the JavaScript community there's been an explosion of tools, tool chains, libraries, module systems; without a lot of experience, it's very easy to be overwhelmed. Criteria for choice can include the availability of easy-to-understand tutorials as much as understanding the motivations and design decisions and limitations of the tools themselves. Some people are very good at writing blog posts describing what they've done, better than conveying the underlying concepts. I don't want to necessarily fault them for that, as I think there's often a sincere desire to show people a way that works for them. Rather than focussing solely on what's wrong, it's very important to also include options you think are better, and why. Looking down your nose at others, describing them as js hipsters using politically correct tools does no one any good, and makes it even less likely people will listen to what you have to say. And on HN, expressing the expectation of down votes is a guaranteed method of receiving them; it's against the guidelines and adds nothing to your comment. There are a lot of choices in the web development space today. The desire to standardize on something (such as the push for Babel and Webpack) is laudable in that they recognize that so much choice is not necessarily good: it makes it more difficult to decide what to use (sometimes good enough is just that), and splits resources that may otherwise be used to improve a more limited number of options. That's not to say Babel and Webpack are the best options: just that I understand the motivation for standardization and push to popularize a few (rather than all) options.
• iagooar 10y ago
  On the web development part of my job, I'm excited about Elixir / Phoenix getting more and more mindshare. People I talk to are actively trying Elixir out and evaluating it as the tool of choice for their next projects. On the networking side of things, I'm excited about network virtualization and the potential that tools like Docker and Kubernetes give to virtualizing large and complex network topologies. And as an employee of an IT-heavy enterprise, seeing DevOps becoming a thing makes me happy, even if adoption is slow and expectations are high. It's still better than waiting 6 months to get a couple of VMs to deploy my projects to...
• pyvpx 10y ago
  P4 language. Truly defining networks via software is currently and will continue to be amazing.
  • virtuallynathan 10y ago
    I was going to jump on here and say that. P4 combined with P4 target ASICs (like Barefoot Networks) will be a really awesome change to networking. For some details, see: https://vimeo.com/200192012 https://vimeo.com/200192012 or https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/10154890393507200/ https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/1015489039350720...
• rayalez 10y ago
  SideFX Houdini 16 is coming out [1], the new version of the most awesome software for 3D VFX and animation. Super excited about this, it's gonna be awesome! Also, I'm really looking forward to the ActivityPub [2] implementation, that'll do a lot of interesting things for decentralized web. [1] https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-16-launch-streaming-on-february-6/ https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-16-launch-streaming... [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
  • robeastham 10y ago
    Looking forward to this too. I'm going to the launch party for Houdini 16 here in East London tonight. Make sure to check out Fabric Engine too, especially if you're doing any realtime VR/AR stuff. Overall, I'm most excited about VR/AR/MR in relation to storytelling and education and how the two can be combined. Houdini and Houdini Engine for UE4 are definitely are worth a considering as part of your VR/AR development stack.
• thenomad 10y ago
  My field's VR, so... all of it. In particular, wireless transmitters for roomscale are really exciting - seriously, I cannot wait to get rid of the wire-to-head era - as is roomscale for mobile devices. The Vive getting additional trackers is also super-cool, as that will enable some much better forms of locomotion through foot-tracking. It'll take a little while to take off but I expect the Lighthouse tracking ecosystem to produce all kinds of cool things. (Not all in VR, either. Drones plus Lighthouse, for example...)
• chris_mahan 10y ago
  I don't have just one field. In programming in companies: realization that internal customers not having choice of internal IT providers hurts IT because it reduces IT's need to deliver valuable solutions effectively. In leadership: management structure is a framework to enforce standardization and generally doesn't adapt well to change, even with the latest management silver bullets (lean, Agile, flat-orgs, etc) Also in leadership: profound changes are occuring in society and geographies no longer define cultures. In commercial writing: it's still early, and this takes time, but the concept of the "book" and how it's created is changing. Technologies that allow writers, editors, and beta readers to work on the manuscript simultaneously are increasing the velocity of change. In art in general: someone else here mentioned music creation and payment is enabling entrants to sustain themselves in niche markets. This is happening in nearly all art forms, not just music. As electronic transfer fidelity increases, more art can be digitized, monetized. Look for more politicized, more global-reach art. All these things stem from a greater understanding of the world and of human beings, starting with ourselves. It's important to realize each human being is a highly complex system and that generalizations about groups of humans are increasingly being challenged as scientifically unsound.
  • chris_mahan 10y ago
    As a writer, tech and the globalization of English are enabling the hiterto impossible. Still not clearly seen but glimpsed as shadows behind screens, they either scare the timid or thrill the brave. They are coming.
• VestingAxis 10y ago
  As someone who works in the semiconductor industry, one of the most exciting things happening right now is the development and emergence of persistent/storage class memory (PCM/RRAM/3DXP/NVDIMMs). The implications of a persistent alternative to DRAM is immense and besides fundamentally changing compute/memory/networking/storage architectures it will also change programming models and SW stacks as we know them today. This is a topic I feel doesn't get enough visibility here, especially given that support for such technologies has already started getting baked in to Linux and Windows.
  • kaeluka 10y ago
    I like to watch presentations of technical talks while I'm doing cooking/housework. Do you have any link, perhaps on youtube, that gives me an intro?
    • VestingAxis 10y ago
      The presentations from the recently held SNIA PMEM summit would be a great start for a high level intro: http://www.snia.org/pm-summit http://www.snia.org/pm-summit https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SNIAVideo/videos
      • kaeluka 10y ago
        Thank you very much!
• kejaed 10y ago
  Aerospace Engineer - Enhanced Flight Vision Systems TLDR: Fancy fused infrared (LWIR/SWIR) and visible spectrum camera systems may 'soon' be on a passenger airliner near you. Using infrared cameras to see through fog/haze to land aircraft has been happening for a while now, but only on biz jets or on FedEx aircraft with a waiver. The FAA has gained enough confidence in the systems that they have just opened up the rules to allow these camera systems to be used to land on passenger aircraft. Combine that with the fact that airports are transitioning away from incandescent lights to LEDs (meaning a purely IR sensor system is not longer enough), and you get multi-sensor image fusion work to do and a whole new market to sell them to. Here is a blog post (from a competitor of ours) talking about the new rules. https://blogs.rockwellcollins.com/2017/01/17/worth-the-wait-faas-new-efvs-rule-far-91-176/ https://blogs.rockwellcollins.com/2017/01/17/worth-the-wait-...
  • anfractuosity 10y ago
    That sounds very interesting! Say with a car that has a heads up display for night vision, if it had an SWIR sensor and IR lights, can that cut through fog too? Or is it the LWIR that is able to do that?
    • kejaed 10y ago
      SWIR sensors are there for hot burning lights. LWIR (aka thermal) sees things that are every day temperatures. Both wavelengths have better transmittance through fog than visible light so we say those sensors can 'see through' fog. The physics comes down to the wavelength of the light vs the size of the molecules of the medium the light is trying to get through [1]. Another fun part is that fog at one airport can be different than fog at another, so while the weather conditions at both locations may say visibility is "Runway Visible Range (RVR) 1000ft", that is for a pilots eyes, and the same camera may work just fine at one location and not at all at the other. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Atmospheric.transmittance.IR.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Atmosphe...
• icco 10y ago
  Google publishing the SRE book.
• espeed 10y ago
  The convergence of 3 big ideas in graph computing: 1. D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/D4M/ http://www.mit.edu/~kepner/D4M/ GraphBLAS: http://graphblas.org http://graphblas.org Achieving 100M database inserts per second using Apache Accumulo and D4M https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465141 MIT D4M: Signal Processing on Databases [video] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyYfk3-Try_ftJJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyY... 2. Topological / Metric Space Model Fast and Scalable Analysis of Massive Social Graphs http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/temp/rigel.pdf http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/temp/rigel.pdf Quantum Processes in Graph Computing - Marko Rodriguez [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRoAInXxgtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRoAInXxgtc 3. Propagator Model Revised Report on the Propagator Model https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/ Constraints and Hallucinations: Filling in the Details - Gerry Sussman [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxknB4SgvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwxknB4SgvM We Really Don't Know How to Compute - Gerry Sussman [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU Propagators - Edward Kmett - Boston Haskell [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyPzPeOPgUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyPzPeOPgUE
  • lowglow 10y ago
    So many good links here. Most interested in Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model. What are you working on?
    • espeed 10y ago
      PUFR http://pufr.io http://pufr.io (IoT security startup), and for the last few years I've been doing R&D on the design of a graph computing model that unifies some of the ideas above.
• michakirschbaum 10y ago
  As a web developer, I'm probably most excited about Phoenix.
• samuelbrin 10y ago
  "field" would be a strong word as it's more of a diy hobby thing, but in the world of FPV drones I'm excited for flight controllers with integrated 4-in-1 ESCs (electronic speed controllers). Wouldn't say it changed the game but makes it so much easier to build these quadcopter and opens up new possibilities.
• dorianm 10y ago
  https://crystal-lang.org https://crystal-lang.org A fast compiled ruby-like programming language.
  • i336_ 10y ago
    I'm curious why this has been voted down.
    • dorianm 10y ago
      Probably because it's not VC-fueled hyper hyped. And doesn't fit the current mainstream pattern of "world changing technologies", etc.
      • i336_ 10y ago
        I see. I've seen a couple people recommend it now, I'll have to give it a look at some point. I've heard it consumes a lot of memory which may be a problem though (this laptop only has 2GB RAM).
• asafira 10y ago
  In my field of quantum information processing, the current hype is all about "Quantum Supremacy". The field currently has its sights set on the goal of producing an experiment where a quantum system performs a computation faster than any known computer can --- perhaps computes something that no current computer can compute in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike much of the work in the field up to this time, this requires a cray amount of engineering, more than a typical lab can undertake if they hope to be publishing interesting results in the meantime. My hypothesis is that this will likely happen from either a company (IBM, Google) or a government lab (if they will be allowed to publish).
• chrisguitarguy 10y ago
  Advertising. Definitely first party data for targeting. An advertiser takes some data from its CRM, sends it to the big social sites and google, and then uses the list to target those folks specifically or create look-a-likes. Actual cross device targeting (because people are logged in), extremely personalized and relevant. This is coupled with a move away from cookies[0]. 0. https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/01/making-youtube-better-in-mobile-cross.html https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/01/making-youtube-better...
  • dcw303 10y ago
    If the CRM has your purchase history, does this solve the problem of targeting products on users who have already purchased it? Because I am really sick of Google serving me ads for stuff I recently searched for and subsequently bought.
    • chrisguitarguy 10y ago
      That's advertisers themselves doing a bad job of retargeting. First-party data is probably not going to change that. In fact, it may mean you'll just get those ads across all your devices.
• neltnerb 10y ago
  I can't speak for everyone in my field (chemical manufacture and catalyst development), but I wrote about some of what I think are the current coolest new developments in chemistry and materials science as it relates to machine learning. [1] In summary, the use of machine learning can help us develop better representations of chemical reactions, catalyst behavior, and we can now use adaptive learning to create closed-loop systems to identify, carry out, and optimize chemical processes to reduce environmental impact, reduce energy usage, and decrease costs. The state of the art isn't quite there, but I see no major conceptual barriers left -- just a matter of implementing it. [1] http://www.brianneltner.com/machine-learning/ http://www.brianneltner.com/machine-learning/
• bigger_cheese 10y ago
  I'm a materials engineer these are two interesting developments in my field at the moment Metamaterials: Essentially a material engineered to have a unique property. By precisely controlling a materials structure you can influence how it interacts with electromagnetic waves, sound etc. You can create materials with unique properties such as a negative refractive index over certain wavelengths. It's kind of a novelty but people are building "cloaking devices" using metamaterials i.e. bending electromagnetic waves around a material in certain ways to make it appear invisible to certain frequencies. Graphene (and other 2D materials): These materials are a relatively recent discovery, graphene was confirmed in 2004 and it has a number of interesting properties. In particular its electrical and thermal properties make it promising for a number of applications. I think it could possibly find applications in batteries, transistors and capacitors. At the moment it is a very expensive material to manufacture which makes it (currently) unsuited for commercial applications. There is a heap of active research involving graphene at the moment.
• gigatexal 10y ago
  Sqlserver coming to Linux via docker containers. It's insane and exciting. We are a sole MS shop and this is exciting because I'm pushing to move us away from Windows and onto Linux if possible the kicker being we are dedicated to SQlServer so exciting times ahead. Hopefully Ms doesn't gimp SQLserver on Linux.
• profalseidol 10y ago
  The growing class consciousness is the most exciting, as well as scariest. We can build a non-profit driven world (socialism) - or - hate driven world (fascism). Reading various texts starting with Karl Marx's Das Kapital is probably the most important learning a person can have at present.
• sktrdie 10y ago
  My field of interest is censorship resistant systems. Systems like ZeroNet[1] are quite fascinating and are quickly becoming popular and used. Essentially they're decentralized via the bittorrent network. One cool thing that it brings to the table is the idea of having users modify a website (similar to how your comment modifies this page) - which is a hard problem in a decentralized system. They have come up with an interesting way for users to do this using trusted third-party certifying systems which are still totally decentralized (because users can switch to others when they see fit). 1. https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
  • shakna 10y ago
    I'd take ZeroNet with a grain of salt. I helped with it for a little while, but the main developer was resistant to: * Using a package manager or bundling dependencies into a compressed form. Dependencies had to be in the same git repo, fully extracted. (A bit of a "code smell") * Dependencies could take months to get security updates. * Documentation couldn't be in the git repo. * Python 3 was "not an option" Also: * The main developer has limited experience with the torrent protocol. It is an interesting project: but it is not a private or secure one.
• qiv 10y ago
  I am a physicist in biology (so take these with a grain of salt) and CRISPR is arguably the most exciting development there. This technique allows to edit DNA based on guiding RNAs which can be readily synthesized in contrast to DNA binding proteins required for targeted editing before. What's more the same technology can be used to adjust gene regulation too. These techniques are not only giving basic research a big boost, but also making many new treatments possible. Another hot topic are organoid bodies and organs-on-a-chip. These are experimental systems where stem cells are turned to grow into structures similar to embryos or organs that allow the study of development and facilitate drug testing etc. Thirdly, advances in sequencing made it possible to study what kind of bacteria live symbiotically within and on us. The composition of this so called microbiome seems to widely affect body and mind. Finally, in my personal field, the simulation of how "simple" cells build complex structures and solve difficult tasks, the most exciting development is GPGPU :-)
  • pdm55 10y ago
    What about synthetic biology projects such as Yeast 2.0, aiming "to build the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic genome".
    • qiv 10y ago
      I also thought about it, but I do not see people flocking to synthetic biology. I have the feeling they are further from big breakthroughs, but this might just be my environment ...
• rodolphoarruda 10y ago
  Predictive analysis done via Learning Management Systems (LMS) to identify students at risk of dropping courses at Universities. Student retention is a big topic now because it really impacts directly on school's revenue stream and financial health. The big hope is with AI to be able to track how students interact with peers, with teachers and with instructional content, and then cluster students by their evasion risk.
• insulanian 10y ago
  Rise of Elixir and Rust.
• jMyles 10y ago
  I live full-time on a school bus with a family. Flexible solar panels, LED lighting with open source drivers, and the new generation of DC refrigerators are all incredibly exciting and are allowing us to experiment with living without grid electricity.
  • chairmankaga 10y ago
    Could you share pictures of the arrangements? I assume you gutted it out and did some clever interior decorating.
    • jMyles 10y ago
      Soon. :-) Building a simple static website and instagram. We'll share pics with HN soon. We'll also have the bus at PyCon in Portland.
  • enimodas 10y ago
    whats new in DC fridges?
    • jMyles 10y ago
      We just purchased a Dometic 94 liter dual-zone fridge: https://www.dometic.com/en/se/products/food-and-beverage/cooling-boxes/powered-boxes/dometic-coolfreeze-cfx-95dz2-_-64087 https://www.dometic.com/en/se/products/food-and-beverage/coo... It is much more efficient than DC fridges of even just a few years ago. It has configurable settings to respond to battery levels and can be configured via wifi.
• zeptomu 10y ago
  I work in remote sensing and we do e.g. segmentation of satellite imagery. There are two exciting developments: First, lots of vector data (think building footprints, road networks, etc.) and (satellite) raster data (e.g. Sentinel-2) is now available for free, secondly image segmentation using CNNs works just extremely well. Therefore there are many opportunities to build all kinds of software, in particular CNN based classifiers and distributed systems to handle the immense load of new data. So I can highly recommend the field of remote sensing as there are many interesting problems to solve.
  • consultutah 10y ago
    Where can you get satellite derived building footprints for free?
    • zeptomu 10y ago
      There is currently no established hub, that aggregates them, but public agencies often offer them on some open-data initiatives on a national level, e.g. Austria has https://www.data.gv.at/ https://www.data.gv.at/ and searching for "Gebäude" (building in German) lets you find e.g. the data set https://www.data.gv.at/katalog/dataset/ac74b38e-57cd-4c8c-8fea-c397da185fcf https://www.data.gv.at/katalog/dataset/ac74b38e-57cd-4c8c-8f... where you can download building footprints for the state of Tyrol. The same thing is also done on an international level, e.g. the European Union provides platforms and also the environmental agencies in the US. # edit: Clarification: These footprints are not satellite-derived (that is the goal, but it doesn't work well enough for many applications, but we probably will get there ...), but are hand-crafted by people working in city planning. The point is you can use the data as training data.
• Kevin_S 10y ago
  I'm an accountant working on financial reporting, and I am very excited about ways to implement automation into financial reporting processes. Only just now are people using excel proficiently, I can't wait to see what the next big step is. Long story short, so many processes I work with are done completely manually, which is a colossal waste of time. When I started, the person who previously did my job had about 7 main processes they completed monthly, which took about 60 hours to complete. Those 7 processes take my about 10 hours to do after I built automated workbooks The sad thing is that these excel capabilities have been around forever, but no one understands them.
• husamia 10y ago
  I am a biomedical researcher working in field of genomics. I spend majority of my time curating literature. I think it could be automated. We need an AI algorithm for this area.