5 ms·
Ask YC: What new technologies are you exploring?
What are you tinkering with? What are you exploring? What are the technologies that really interest you?
- ptn 19y agoParsers (they are new to me).
- joeguilmette 19y agohas anyone started hacking away at OpenSocial?
- DanielBMarkham 19y agoNot me, but one of the bloggers I follow has been hacking away at it http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FractalsOfChange/~3/179825426/opensocial-deve.html http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FractalsOfChange/~3/179825426...
- joeguilmette 19y agogreat article! forgive me for submitting it :)
- DanielBMarkham 19y agoE-gads! Karma slut! :)
- joeguilmette 19y agoi've been called worse
- omouse 19y agoI'm going to be looking into the Android platform. Would be neat to combine the two.
- tx 19y agoAfter having explored "new technologies" since my graduation in 99, I paused myself and has started moving back in time, discovering things like Lisp, Smalltalk, vim and bash. I picked up Python and rediscovered a beauty of a simple text file without XML garbage. All of that feels very "fresh" to me after years with COM-ActiveX/Win32/XML/XSLT/XPath/.NET and other "ex-new" tech. Besides, what is "new"? MVC has been something of revelation to most web "engineers". In fact (or maybe it comes with age) I started to dislike new stuff, like Flash/Flex/Air. I see a great danger of "web runtime" being controlled by a company. If they won't stop, Adobe will soon become "Microsoft of the Web" because they'll be controlling "Web OS". This is why I want AIR to fail and I hope that more web applications stick to HTML/CSS/JavaScript as opposed to moving to Adobe world. For same reasons I always stayed away from Java. Same applies to Silverlight. I do like D though (the language). But the author made two crucial mistakes that will inevitably hurt this beautiful systems programming language: he picked a name that does not work with search engines at all, and he decided to control too much - won't even let other people to distribute binaries of his compilers.
- jey 19y ago"I do like D though (the language). But the author made two crucial mistakes that will inevitably hurt this beautiful systems programming language: he picked a name that does not work with search engines at all, and he decided to control too much - won't even let other people to distribute binaries of his compilers." As a recovering C++ zealot, I totally agree that D is a cool language. "D language" or "Digital Mars D" does turn up the right hits on google. :) There are free implementations of the D language, e.g. there's a front-end for GCC. And the source code to the Digital Mars front-end for D is available under a GPL and Artistic License dual-licensing scheme.
- tx 19y agoI know, but his draconian attitude towards binaries is hurting D. For example (AFAIK) there isn't a single msi-installer for Windows novices. You may suggest that D isn't for them because "real programmers" use Linux, but I'd argue that "hotness" of a language largely depends on its popularity among youngest and most curious and enthusiastic users. If a kid who's got a Dell/Vista laptop for Christmas decides to "become a programmer", he won't be doing it in D after visiting digital mars site - I guarantee you that. He's got two weird zip files up there and it took even me a while to figure out what goes where.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- pius 19y agoErlang and D.
- robmnl 19y agoNot really new at all, but the approach is: I started using just javascript to develop web apps - no server - the apps just interface with a server to get and post data. That's fun, especially with jQuery, which I highly recommend.
- SwellJoe 19y agoWe're doing a lot of this, too. Not to say there isn't a vast swath of on-server work being done, but a lot of new features we're developing are using the server just to serve up the JavaScript and collect some data from disparate sources.
- davidw 19y agoWhat kinds of applications do you do like that, if you can talk about them?
- SwellJoe 19y agoOur software is an installable web application for web hosting systems management...so we have a lot of opportunities to do neat stuff--there are so many useful UI elements that could be added that would make the product more useful without requiring any additional information than what we already collect or create. We're currently building a "desktop" with ExtJS that'll have a dozen or so widgets for presenting various bits of information about the running system. The data already exists and is currently, mostly, presented in simple HTML and CSS graphs...but with a little tweaking we can make the backend spit out simple data structures in JSON and then display them in various dynamic ways. The first one that is almost wholly free of server-side code is a "news" module that pulls a feed from our forums News category on our company website. ExtJS makes this kind of thing trivial (one of their example apps is an RSS feed reader that uses Google Gears). Other short-term bits will be converting all of our graphs to dynamic versions that change every minute or so. Bigger plans include a terminal emulator to replace the Java applet SSH client we currently include. Interactive terminals are trickier, and I'm not sure if we'll end up implementing the actual full terminal emulator in JavaScript or do most of the work server-side and just pass things down to the server (probably the latter at first). But, very short-term (like being released sometime this week) it's all just conversions of existing widgets to present nothing but JSON--it actually makes the server-side code remarkably simpler to not have any UI elements.
- programnature 19y agogetting up to speed on web technologies. jquery, css, javascript. facebook apps. learning about business process modeling languages.
- falsestprophet 19y agotagclouds
- nside 19y agoFlex/AS3 AS3 is interesting because it's client-side and quite fast compared to Javascript.
- iamwil 19y agozoomable interfaces, erlang and functional programming, adaptive resonance theory, android, javascript, basic GIS, meta programming in ruby.
- Readmore 19y agoDitto to the zoomable interfaces. There is a lot of potential there.
- nickb 19y agoCare to share some links/references on zoomable interfaces?
- euccastro 19y agoI first heard of the concept in Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. Here's a bit of a survey: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000858.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000858.html
- fuelfive 19y agoThe ZUI was the worst idea in Raskin's book. You can't use muscle memory for the system because the target x,y positions and sizes change based on how zoomed in you are. Worse, the ZUI doesn't solve the biggest bottleneck in the existing GUI canon - asking the user to arrange and keep track of his own crap. His ZUI concept is like the mac or windows desktop, except now you get a magnifying glass. The better method is search, or more accurately, comprehension, but this is a grail quest, and my solution isn't done yet.
- apgwoz 19y agoI'm interested in your unfinished solution; you have any thing about it online?
- jsjenkins168 19y agoGWT, Android, Ericsson JSF MobileFaces, Metro web services using Glassfish, JPA (mapping to MySQL DBs), and Flash Lite are what I'm dabbling in right now. With the exception of Flash Lite, all of that is Java based... Meh.
- bkmrkr 19y agohey it would be great to talk about coding on android, email me bkmrkr at yahoo.com
- mynameishere 19y agoWell, perl is pretty new. In geological terms. Plus, I'm finding that 1000+ line java applications can be replaced with 15 lines of perl.
- Tichy 19y agoWhich ones? I suppose then there are also 1000 line Perl applications that can be replaced with 15 lines of Java. There are enough bad programmers out there...
- vikram 19y agoDoesn't it take 10 lines to say "Hello World" in Java.
- Tichy 19y agoDepends on the formatting - you can write it in one line without any problems whatsoever.
- tlrobinson 19y agoYou were probably exaggerating, but for reference: public class hello { public static void main(String args[]) { System.out.println("Hello World"); } } Also, I interviewed with a large company that shall remain nameless (probably not who you would expect), and one of the interviewers mentioned that their build system was a MILLION lines of Perl...
- vikram 19y agoYes, I am exaggerating. I would call this three lines. As there are 3 constructs here. A million lines of Perl, was maintaining that part of the job description?
- tlrobinson 19y agoYes, the position was for the build team, so I assume maintaining that beast was part of the job.
- hhm 19y agoAfter working almost exclusively in game development for a big while; now I'm exploring all computer vision related technologies.
- jsnx 19y agoBourne shell, sed, awk, sort, uniq -- the UNIX utilities are worth your time to get to know well. Filesystems -- how to write them, and what's out there already.
- davidw 19y agoAndroid looks like a lot of fun, and I get a good feeling about it. So I decided to port Hecl to it. I want to do a web thing in Erlang + javascript, but haven't quite figured out what... although <horn tooting> I actually started using Erlang a number of years ago.
- henning 19y agoHaskell, compilers, interpreters.
- hollerith 19y agomachine learning
- vikram 19y agoErlang, Ocaml and Jocaml.
- nailer 19y agoNow that I realize there's something called Jocaml, I want to learn it too.
- nostrademons 19y agoJocaml is fascinating. It's a concurrent distributed-programming language & runtime based on the join calculus (which if I had to describe it would be "pattern matching over processes", a pretty nifty idea in itself). I looked at it fairly briefly in college and it seemed really interesting, but wasn't mature enough to really do much with. Given how it's popping up now, that may have changed...
- injesus 19y agoSilverlight w/C# clientside. I'm excited by the idea of replacing javascript. I'm still happy to use java backend, I love tomcat.
- Zak 19y agoPlease explain why you're excited about being able to use C# instead of Javascript. Personally, if I had to use C# for anything, I'd be very excited by the prospect of replacing it with Javascript.
- hello_moto 19y agoDesktop UI, Enterprise Systems, Large-scale software. Would you rather write your web-app using Javascript that (hopefully) able to connect to a DB?
- Tichy 19y agoJavascript doesn't imply that it has to be client side.
- injesus 19y agoI would rather work with a more robust and defined language. Certainly having hacked dHtml for so long, javascript has grown a place in our hearts. I have not used it yet, so maybe I won't be impressed with how it works clientside. It's still new to me.
- Zak 19y ago"Robust" seems to me to be a bit of a weasel word - a term that can mean whatever you want it to. What do you mean by "robust"? Defined is a more meaningful word. I believe both languages have specs that clearly define how the language should behave. I suspect what you mean here is that when doing client-side programming, you'd prefer to only have to worry about one implementation instead of the 4-5 Javascript interpreters we currently need to worry about.
- lsb 19y agoLarge-scale text mining (Google/Wikipedia). There's boatloads of patterns and data latent in an enormous popular text corpus. For instance, if you have two terms, and you want to see how similar they are, that's P(A|B). So do a search query for A&B and for B, and P(A|B)=P(A&B)/P(B), and that's a first approximation, a Google Distance, for arbitrary terms. The information silos are only a couple years old, and already they're so valuable. I can't wait until the Internet's a century old.
- pixcavator 19y agoP(A|B) != P(B|A), so not really a distance...
- lsb 19y agoIt's from Cilibrasi and Vitanyi. They have shimming factors, so you take the min of A|B and B|A, then you throw in some logs to not penalize low probabilities.
- aswanson 19y agoHe's onto something here. What tools/languages are you using for this.
- lsb 19y agoWhen I'd stopped independent work on it, and brought it to Songkick, it was coded entirely in Javascript, with a reimplementation in Ruby (to check work). Email me (leebutterman/gmail) if you're interested.
- samb 19y agolua
- Goladus 19y agoI'm writing a compiler in C. It's exactly the kind of practice I needed to make up for years of slacking.
- jey 19y agoFor what language?
- Goladus 19y agoC->MIPS. It's for a class, but it's consuming most of my free time. The classroom instruction is good but we're largely on our own as far as implementation goes (though it has to be written in C or C++). We only have to finish a subset of C, and I'm not planning to take it any further.
- jey 19y agoNeat! You should write your compiler in the same subset of C, so it can be self-hosting. ;-)
- spiralhead 19y agoI'll admit what everyone else here is apparently afraid to: Flex/ActionScript 3. I don't really see a future for MXML in it's current form but the rest of the stack--mainly ActionScript 3 / the SVG drawing API, Video/Audio APIs are definitely worth looking at. Some of the highest paying web development gigs are in Flash programming, and it's a lot less painful than browser programming (which isn't saying much).
- sohail 19y agoCan you talk about it here please: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81768 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81768
- michaelneale 19y agoYeha I will also shamefully confess. the audio/video is impressive. if you need a FOSS back end for the media storage, red5 works a treat.
- redsymbol 19y agoDistributed version control systems. Especially Git, ATM. Also seeking a deeper understanding of language design and compilers. Some inspirations for why: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food... http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/ http://martinfowler.com/dslwip/ Next on my list after all that: Machine learning.
- danw 19y agoMobile, mobile, mobile...
- zyroth 19y agoMachine Learning, especially Reinforcement Learning
- greg 19y agome too... have you read Sutton and Barto's book? http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html
- euccastro 19y agoWhat I'm currently looking into, none of which is too new, is: Scheme (Gambit C), Lisp macros (On Lisp), concurrent-like programming with continuations and epoll, raw X Window protocol (i.e., not using Xlib after initialization), OpenGL/GLX, unconventional text editors (the editor part of Jef Raskin's THE/Archy). In a short term, I'm just scratching an own itch, but some of these technologies I want to learn for longer term projects.
- jey 19y agoI missed coding, so I've been tinkering with the LLVM compiler infrastructure lately.
- sohail 19y agoWhat really interests me is Common Lisp. I am planning on using it for a real web application (omg). If you are interested: http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-frameworks.html http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-programming-framewor... http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-web-programming-frameworks.html http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-web-programming-f... http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/lisp-web-framework-designer.html http://uint32t.blogspot.com/2007/11/lisp-web-framework-desig... So far it is fucking amazing. I love it.
- auferstehung 19y agoI find the following technologies interesting: 1. SERS 2. MEMS 3. Taggants 4. Ground source heat pumps 5. OLPC 6. NMR/MRI 7. ERP Except for 5 maybe 7, not common topics of interest here.
- ALee 19y agoTV set top boxes, exploring haven't figured out how they'll work though.
- hello_moto 19y agoThe whole .NET 3.0/C#/ASP.NET3.5 and SQL Server 2005.
- n3m6 19y agoMost people on this post are talking about languages. There could be other things more important, like AJAX (which isn't totally new), Amazon AWS, Google Android, but mostly it would depend on what you are trying to accomplish I guess ?
- icky 19y agoCurrently playing with (separate of each other): - Android SDK (though it was kind of surreal to realize that I was coding Python for work and Java for play... @_@) - Cairo vector graphics (it's not that hard to get Cairo-rendered buffers into OpenGL textures (though you do have to un-premultiply the alpha values :P)) - Working on a lightweight embeddable lisp compiler (currently hosted in Python). Stealing good ideas from Arc, so get coding, Paul! ;-) - Working on an interesting, erm, "lifestyle-enhancing" webapp in Django [one that already provides value to me just by having it for my own use!] - Pyglet (python multimedia and windowing lib) For work: - Coding web apps in Pylons. (SQLAlchemy is a manly ORM that makes other ORMs look like babies' toys ;-) - Further investigating haXe and OpenLaszlo (did this for fun on my own a while back, but didn't have time to do much with either of them) As you can see, I love to code lots and lots :D
- nikolaj 19y agohah, reading #1 made me laugh out loud, as I spent last night hacking android, and then come to work to slog away in python! How did this happen!
- nostrademons 19y agoLots of JavaScript, mostly with JQuery. Some Flash. Compilers, interpreters, & language design (which have always been a hobby of mine). I'll also second what everyone else said about learning Lisp, Smalltalk, early windowing systems, UNIX fundamentals, and other forgotten areas of the history of computing. There're lots of good ideas in there.
- cellis 19y agoThe people working on the hottest stuff will not tell you what "new" technologies they are working on. Very little of it is ever "new", just new ways of putting it together.
- pg 19y agoNews aggregators.
- Kaizyn 19y agoWhat are you trying to do with them?
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- brlewis 19y agoPhoto sharing
- kajecounterhack 19y agoSpeakers that cost under $1 http://www.householdhacker.com/ http://www.householdhacker.com/ (Its a troll, in case you don't know.)
- huherto 19y agoI think GWT is very cool. I wouldn't attempt to write a big application in Javascript but I would do it in Java. Not only I am more familiar with Java, but I also appreciate having strong typing as a safenet.