Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER4> 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- rad...](https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace- radiologists.1210227/)

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.

<comment><USER5> 20 years ago I did some software to analyze satellite images of the Amazon to monitor deforestation. We got a result that matched the quality of human experts. The problem has always been political and economical, not technological.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if there was more to your story that you missed. Was your software successful? Is it in use today? Is automation widespread in the study of Amazonian deforestation?

<comment><USER7> Software not being used all over the place does not mean the software is bad, generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 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-...](https://ashleynolan.co.uk/blog/frontend-tooling- survey-2016-results#js-testing)) 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.

<comment><USER9> There's a market imo for a full solution that includes front end and entire backend including deployment, seemless scaling, seemless upgrading, seemless backups, seemless local dev, seemless staging, etc.

99% of web apps need the same features but most of this is still up to manually rolling your own.

I should be able to clone some repo, enter some DO/AWS/GOOG keys and push.

<comment><USER10> I've been using and loving Zappa[1] lately. Basically it lets you seamlessly deploy a flask app to AWS Lambda -- that solves your deployment, scaling, upgrading, staging, backups, etc. And local dev is just running the flask app locally.

[1] [https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa](https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER11> We mainly use Docker because it finally allows us to eradicate all the "Worked in dev" issues we had in the past. From an application perspective, Dev, Accept and Prod are identical.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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...](http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik- group/torrey.handbook09.pdf)

Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial- net...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets)

<comment><USER14> All these are definitely cool, but I think we're still a long way from leaving the "look at this cool toy" status and stepping into the "I can add value to society" status.

Furthermore, if we consider that most of these DL paper completely ignore the fact that the nets must run for days on a GPU to get decent results, then everything appears way less impressive. But that's just my opinion. I love working in deep learning, but we still have __LOTS __of work to do.

<comment><USER15> Could you elaborate? After running for days / weeks/ months the output is a net that can do inference in seconds, or with some now-common techniques milliseconds with only small reductions in accuracy. These nets can then be deployed to phones to solve a rapidly increasing number of identification tasks, everything from plants to cancer.

The time from theoretical paper to widely deployed app is smaller in DL than in any other field _I_ have experience with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 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/)

<comment><USER17> Interesting. Do you know anything about agent modelling? Any ideas how if/it ties to it?

<comment><USER16> 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.

<comment><USER18> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _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.

<comment><USER20> I work in CPU design. So I'd add that the tools for formally verifying CPUs have come a very long way in the last two years, and the next two years look like they will be very exciting indeed.

<comment><USER21> wow ! what tools are you guys using ?, do you have the same for microcode ? this is really interesting !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER23> fancy words, exciting claims, and absolutely no detail whatsoever.

with all due respect, said politely, it is my opinion that you are a charlatan.

<comment><USER22> Thank you for expressing your opinion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER24> I'm not GP but I'll give it a try:

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

Honest question: how not?

> who would you not be if you weren't you?

Depending on how you parse the sentence, either "someone else" or "that's just a paradox". Essentially the concept of "me" as an entity is fundamentally flawed.

Playing with the meanings of "me" and "not me" in a subjunctive form doesn't make the question very interesting (as in non-trite), to be honest. I guess the intent is not to be fresh but to be thought-provoking or similar, or setting the listener in a certain mindset? Still, sets my mind in the "meh" state.

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

I'm not my problems. I'm also not not-my-problems. Actually I _am_ not (I _isn 't_?). I don't see how this helps with anything, though.

Either way, your questions pose (to me) more philosophical thinking (which I already do, anyways) than mindbending or whatever. Maybe my mind is already bent... and I have to say it didn't go very well ;)

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that these questions are merely shortcomings in how language and cognition works. Metaphysics, ontology (and even epistemology) are just fun puzzles with no solution, which I'm ultimately obliged to answer with "who the f--- cares".

Kant was right.

Not that anything you said is directly contradicted by Kant. In fact I'd say it fits very well within the idea that "human mind creates the structure of human experience". It's just never been really useful to me in any way. I really, really, want to know more of (and even believe in) your changework but, often being presented with vague ideas, no one has ever made a solid case on how it isn't, as GP said, charlatanry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 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).

<comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER27> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 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/mimblewimbl...](https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/mimblewimble.txt)

[3] [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimblewimble-how-a- stri...](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/mimblewimble-how-a-stripped- down-version-of-bitcoin-could-improve-privacy-fungibility-and-scalability-all- at-once-1471038001/)

<comment><USER29> 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- zcas...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/01/19/update-integrating-zcash- ethereum/)

<comment><USER30> What's the unlimited thing?

<comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the great explanation! So where does segwit come into this?

<comment><USER31> I'm not the best person to ask, and I don't fully understand segwit, but I think it's the Core devs (partial) solution to the problem of scaling up the network without increasing block size.

IIUC, segwit makes certain kinds of complicated transactions easier to handle (ones with lots of inputs/outputs), possibly allowing more transactions to fit in less space, and lays useful groundwork for overlay networks like Lightning. I think the thinking is that overlay networks can be fast, and eventualy reconcile against the slower bitcoin network.

Unlimited would rather just scale up the bitcoin network in place, instead of relying on an overlay network.

You'd probably get better information from bitcoincore.org and bitcoinunlimited.info, or the subreddits /r/bitcoin and /r/btc (for core and unlimited, respectively, they split after moderator shenanigans in /r/bitcoin).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 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)

<comment><USER33> 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?

<comment><USER34> A fad? Don't you see a problem with many of today's websites? Both from a developer's and a user's perspective.

<comment><USER35> Sure, many "modern" sites have terrible UX, but that doesn't mean that minimalist or "brutalist" designs are intrinsically any better.

<comment><USER34> At least they load quickly. They don't hog you CPU. And they don't mess what you can Ctrl+F.

All a great boon for UX, while being easier to design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 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-...](https://blogs.rockwellcollins.com/2017/01/17/worth-the-wait-faas- new-efvs-rule-far-91-176/)

<comment><USER37> 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?

<comment><USER36> 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/Atmosphe...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Atmospheric.transmittance.IR.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> 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/)]

</comment><comment><USER39> 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=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyY...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyYfk3-Try_ftJJ)

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)

<comment><USER40> So many good links here. Most interested in Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model.

What are you working on?

<comment><USER39> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> This is going to sound really naive... Isn't that just a website?

<comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER43> I watched the video and honestly, this is terrible.

If I'm clicking on a link I want to open it with my browser, not with some app. I find this extremely annoying with facebook and even the news carousel already.

I can't open new tabs, copy the url, switch to other tabs like I would in the normal browser. This is extremely confusing and I don't how this benefits me in any way.

<comment><USER44> I couldn't agree more. I'm excited about the idea of streaming apps, but the execution here is terrible. How do you control which url opens which app? If somebody sends you a reddit or hn link, which app does it run? There are dozens out there for both! The whole point of the app is not to have to manage these things, but the only way I can see this working is if you have yet another area in settings to manage which apps open for which links.

A better implementation would have been to have a popup with a list of compatible apps to run, including an option to run it in a browser like any normal link.

I really hope the NFC bit is opt-in by default. I don't want to have to manually disable it every time I get a new phone. In fact, even if I've opted into having the SF Park app run when I'm near a parking meter, I want the option to "reject" it just like I do when I get an incoming phone call.

<comment><USER45> > How do you control which url opens which app?

The website itself specifies which app should be used by publishing a Digital Asset Links file. ([https://developer.android.com/training/app- links/index.html](https://developer.android.com/training/app- links/index.html))

<comment><USER44> I like that even less. If you haven't manually added an app association, it defaults to opening the app specified in the digital assets file without any notification to the user. This is the opposite of a sane default. The first time an app wants to run, it should always let the user decide whether they want to run the app or continue using the browser. Otherwise, this is a recipe for malware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> 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).

<comment><USER47> I wwould love to get started, I've been looking for a new hobby and thought that is perfect. How should I start? :)

<comment><USER46> 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-audiosoft...](https://www.kvraudio.com/product/firebird-by- tone2-audiosoftware)

[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-sampl...](https://www.kvraudio.com/product/orion-sound-module-by- samplescience)

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-58511c4e18...](https://blog.rileyreverb.com/how-to-be-a- musician-58511c4e18a7)

<comment><USER48> 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)

<comment><USER46> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> For 3) does destroying all mature immune cells also get rid of all immunities that the patient has gained throughout life from vaccines, previous illness, etc? Would it make the patient very fragile, not to have gone through gaining those immunities at a young age?

<comment><USER49> Revaccination, yes, definitely necessary in the idealized case of a complete wipe of immune cells. But that's a small problem in comparison to having a broken immune system. Just get all the vaccinations done following immune repopulation.

Part of the problem in old people is that they have too much memory in the immune system, especially of pervasive herpesviruses like cytomegalovirus. Those memory cells take up immunological space that should for preference be occupied by aggressive cells capable of action.

Another point: in old people, as a treatment for immunosenescence, immune destruction would probably need to be paired with some form of cell therapy to repopulate the immune system. In young people, not needed, but in the old there is a reduced rate of cell creation - loss of stem cell function, thymic involution, etc. That again, isn't a big challenge at this time, and is something that can already be done.

At present sweeping immune destruction is only used for people with fatal autoimmunities like multiple sclerosis because the clearance via chemotherapy isn't something you'd do if you had any better options - it's pretty unpleasant, and produces lasting harm to some degree. Those people who are now five or more years into sustained remission of the disease have functional immunity and are definitely much better off for the procedure, even with its present downsides, given where they were before. If the condition is rhematoid arthritis, however, it becomes much less of an obvious cost-benefit equation, which is why there needs to be a safe, side-effect free method of cell destruction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> 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.

</comment><comment><USER52> 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.

<comment><USER53> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> 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.

</comment><comment><USER55> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER56> 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...

</comment><comment><USER57> 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.

<comment><USER58> What company are you referring to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> 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).

</comment><comment><USER60> 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.

<comment><USER61> mind linking to the blog?

<comment><USER60> 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 : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> 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.

<comment><USER63> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> 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.

<comment><USER65> I'm also doing embedded work, but I don't really see - or expect - <USER2> 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!

<comment><USER66> 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.

<comment><USER67> >> A significant hunk of a Cortex-M die is the ARM licensing fee.

Can you give a few numbers/guesetimates for common mcu's ?

<comment><USER64> >> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> 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.)

<comment><USER69> Any examples you can point to of adaptive UIs?

<comment><USER68> 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".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Unicef open sourcing RapidPro ( [https://community.rapidpro.io/about- rapidpro/](https://community.rapidpro.io/about-rapidpro/) )

<comment><USER71> Interesting project. Wonder will it include features in future which allow for higher security transfer of information. e.g not SMS

<comment><USER70> Of course. You can easily use Twitter, Telegram, Messenger ... [http://rapidpro.github.io/rapidpro/](http://rapidpro.github.io/rapidpro/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> 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/)).

<comment><USER67> What's the big benefit over the mbed OS, besides a bit more portability ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> 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.

<comment><USER74> 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?

<comment><USER75> 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)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> 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.

</comment><comment><USER77> 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)

<comment><USER78> 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

<comment><USER79> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> 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.

</comment><comment><USER81> 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.

<comment><USER63> It's all a matter of perspective. One could also claim that those who don't acknowledge God are deluding themselves with a lack of theology. I'm not trying to start a debate, but dismissing the beliefs of billions as simply delusion/deception is painting with broad strokes.

<comment><USER82> Which god? The argument you make could also be made for all people following all the religions aside from the one whose god actually exists. The religions can't all be right, if in fact even one is right.

So sheer quantity of believers doesn't work for making a point.

<comment><USER83> I have used an argument like this and the answer I got(which left me dumbfounded) was like "Everyone believes in some sort of divine power or entity or whatever and the other religions just got their wrong."

They're basically saying that sheer quantity of believers in anything proves that _their_ God exists!

<comment><USER63> The statement as quoted does not make the argument you claim it does. Perhaps the person who were speaking with elaborated in order to make that point though.

Coming from a Christian perspective however, I would agree in general people have evidence to believe in God. I don't intend the quote from the Bible below to serve as an sort of evidence. This would not be a logical line of reasoning for someone who does not believe in the truth of the Bible. However, it may serve to further clarify my position.

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." \-- Romans 1:20

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> 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.

<comment><USER84> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> 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...)

</comment><comment><USER86> 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/)

<comment><USER87> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> 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.

</comment><comment><USER89> 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.

<comment><USER90> Where can you get satellite derived building footprints for free?

<comment><USER89> 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-8f...](https://www.data.gv.at/katalog/dataset/ac74b38e-57cd-4c8c-8fea-c397da185fcf) 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> 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 ...

<comment><USER92> _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 - <USER3> specification you write - has to have a precise, rigorous meaning._ \- Leslie Lamport

<comment><USER91> 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).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> 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.

<comment><USER94> Could you share pictures of the arrangements? I assume you gutted it out and did some clever interior decorating.

<comment><USER93> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Hardware manufacturers caring about their drivers in mainline Linux.

<comment><USER96> omg who

<comment><USER95> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> 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...](https://www.sidefx.com/community/houdini-16-launch-streaming-on- february-6/)

[2] [https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/)

<comment><USER98> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> 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.

<comment><USER100> 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?).

<comment><USER101> > (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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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

</comment><comment><USER103> 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.

</comment><comment><USER104> 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.

</comment><comment><USER105> 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.

<comment><USER106> > which promises to join Lean Startup/Hypothesis-Driven Development and DevOps

Finding this tricky to parse, got a link or repo?

<comment><USER105> 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)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> 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.

<comment><USER108> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> "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.

</comment><comment><USER110> 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.

</comment><comment><USER111> 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.

</comment><comment><USER112> 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.

<comment><USER113> Would you be up to pointing us at open-source tools with which people can do these things? And a few examples?

<comment><USER114> Tensorflow. And the artistic style transfer NN, image sharpening NNs, colorizers, etc.

<comment><USER113> 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.

<comment><USER115> No. Google has a hosted version of tensorflow, called CloudML, but tensorflow is an open source project that can be run anywhere.

<comment><USER116> > that can be run anywhere.

as long as you have a Nvidia GPU

<comment><USER115> GPU just speeds up training, it isn't required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> 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.

</comment><comment><USER118> 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.

<comment><USER119> 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?

<comment><USER118> 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)

<comment><USER119> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> Rust, webassembly and the ability to compile rust code to wasm.

</comment><comment><USER121> Docker, containers are crazy powerful and cool too!

Lots of cool stuff in the space like Kubernetes, Swarm, CoreOS, rkt!!

</comment><comment><USER122> 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!

<comment><USER67> >> a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined

Can you please expand on this ?

<comment><USER122> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Amazon Polly wrt text-to-speech (much cheaper than Ivona and maybe better over the long-term)

<comment><USER124> Amazon Polly is ivona. Amazon bought them years ago and they do all of Amazon's TTS.

<comment><USER123> Yes I knnow, again see the qualifiers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> 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 :-)

<comment><USER126> What about synthetic biology projects such as Yeast 2.0, aiming "to build the world's first synthetic eukaryotic genome".

<comment><USER125> 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 ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> 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.

</comment><comment><USER128> 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)

</comment><comment><USER129> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER130> WASM looks like the most exciting development for the web.

</comment><comment><USER131> P4 language. Truly defining networks via software is currently and will continue to be amazing.

<comment><USER132> 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/1015489039350720...](https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/10154890393507200/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> 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...](https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/01/making-youtube-better-in- mobile-cross.html)

<comment><USER134> 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.

<comment><USER133> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> finally been able to play starcraft brood war again! now as trainers of predictive models and coach of machines.

</comment><comment><USER136> As a web developer, I'm probably most excited about Phoenix.

</comment><comment><USER137> Perl6

<comment><USER138> Perl in general. Lots of innovation going on.

<comment><USER139> Is p5-mop core yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> 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.

</comment><comment><USER141> 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.

</comment><comment><USER142> Google publishing the SRE book.

</comment><comment><USER143> autonomous cars & swarm control

<comment><USER78> 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

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> [https://crystal-lang.org](https://crystal-lang.org)

A fast compiled ruby-like programming language.

<comment><USER145> I'm curious why this has been voted down.

<comment><USER144> Probably because it's not VC-fueled hyper hyped. And doesn't fit the current mainstream pattern of "world changing technologies", etc.

<comment><USER145> 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).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER146> 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.

</comment><comment><USER147> 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.

</comment><comment><USER148> 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.

</comment><comment><USER149> 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.

<comment><USER35> Let's establish a couple things right off the start:

1\. You can write great applications without the latest language features 2\. The latest language features do make development easier

Babel is necessary for #2 if you don't have control over the browser which your users use to access your site. If you don't want to transpile, don't. It's as simple as that. However, the future of JS is the future of web development, that is indisputable. Using Babel allows you to stay closer to the future and/or use these great new language features.

You also brought up TypeScript.

3\. Types make development much easier

TypeScript is a combination of types and a transpiler for the ability to use the latest ES features. Types are great, providing:

\- Better self-documenting code \- More safety \- IDE interop to provide completion, as seen in VS Code

> note: I expect serious down votes as opposing Babel is almost a serious > crime nowadays and proves my unlimited stupidity.

From the HN Guidelines: "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted."

> Maybe soon I will be forced to write in MS Typescript if I want to be taken > seriously.

Many would say that someone should be forced to write in a typed language _in general_ in order to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER149> typical.. I'm very glad you're not the person 'establishing things' in our team.

> If you don't want to transpile, don't. It's as simple as that.

Are you kidding? Please tell me your estimation of how many developers write in ES6/ES7 without using Babel or other transpiler???

You don't really need to tell me what Types are about, I have a long standing C/C++ background. And I really don't need Typescript. I use dynamic type checking based on ES3, does the job flawlessly already for years. Very rare for me to have a type related bug. I'm always wary of people that preach Typescript; what code do they write to get in so much trouble with types?

> Many would say that someone should be forced to write in a typed language in > general in order to be taken seriously.

omg.. 'forced', this is bad.

I'm only looking forward to webassembly, that will be the real game changer and the end of JS as we know it.

<comment><USER35> > > If you don't want to transpile, don't. It's as simple as that.

> Are you kidding? Please tell me your estimation of how many developers write > in ES6/ES7 without using Babel or other transpiler???

I was implying that you simply don't use ES6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> Rise of Elixir and Rust.

</comment><comment><USER151> Why hasn't there been any innovation in the area of sleep?

<comment><AUTHOR> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER152> .net core

cross platform, open source, very fast</comment>


Google JavaScript Style Guide - <AUTHOR> https://google.github.io/styleguide/jsguide.html <comment> n-gauge My goodness! Looks like we are changing JavaScript into Java.

It looks like I need to relearn the language that has paid my bills for so long....</comment>


Rethinking the App Model - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/10/the-app-model-deserves-to-die.html

<comment><USER2> I think the real "customer pain" is that having a ton of apps leads to more difficult visual search. You want hipstamatic, but you have no idea which screen it's on.

I already use iOS's app search as my default method of finding most apps, but going to the left to find the search is irritating. Maybe it would be better if apple just allowed you one page of apps, and an integrated search box on that page.

Android may already have solved this problem.

<comment><USER3> This is why I love that Siri can now open apps.

I agree that visual search of apps on an iPhone is a "pain point" especially when you have a ton of apps and are looking to open one you use less often that's buried in some folder on screen 7. Could Apple do better restructuring this? Sure. But I think they've solved the problem of opening the app you want to use splendidly with Siri.

Like you, I used to use Spotlight for this frequently, but was also slightly annoyed by the effort — however slight — needed to get a solution. With Siri, though, I find it hard to fault visual or text search on iPhone because I don't think there's any way either can compete with just asking Siri to open what you want.

I don't like talking on the phone — to say nothing of talking to it — but it doesn't get any more frictionless to open a buried app than asking Siri to do it for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Agree with 'hard to get rid off'. But then again - given the vast amount of storage (incl. Apple's Cloud) - is it really a priority to provide app with a shelf-life for auto-deletion? Or a 'nice to have' feature, to keep screens free from clutter?

<comment><USER2> I think it's really about the cost of visual search, which simply doesn't scale to 76 icons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a bit iOS centric. Not to bash on Apple, but on a stock Android ICS device there is a clear distinction between "all the apps" and the launcher, which is more like a desktop. Metro seems to take a similar approach.</comment>


Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence. Interesting? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/08/curiosity-is-as-important-as-intelligence/

<comment><USER2> Quote: "IQ: As most people know, IQ stands for intellectual quotient and refers to mental ability."

Not really -- the acronym means "intelligence quotient". Intellectual != intelligence.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient)</comment>


Ask YC: Recent *nix history.. - <AUTHOR>

This seems to be a meme going around. run this and paste what you get:
history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
It'll be interesting to see what most people spend their time with.
this is what I get for my user:
83 ssh
51 ls
44 ec2-describe-instances
44 cd
40 sudo
20 ec2-run-instances
17 ec2-terminate-instances
15 ping
15 ifconfig
15 ec2-describe-images <comment><USER2> most people seem to use cd and ls very frequently. Very often they are used one after another. This reminds me of a trick I heard in a talk by Damian Conway:

        alias cdd='cd $l; ls'

I can't find the original slides, here is a writeup by cromatic:

[http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/07/oscon_2003_day...](http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/07/oscon_2003_day_one.html)

<comment><USER3> I did that with this:

function z () { if [ $# = 0 ]; then ls -lFGh else cd "$*" && ls -lFGh fi }

That way if you don't specify a directory it just does an ls.

Edit: and apparently it took away my line breaks there, but it still makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      195 vi
      193 python
      163 ls
      100 cd
      54 svn
      37 ssh
      36 ps
      29 paster
      29 kill
      24 ./rollprod

Not surprised at all to see ls so high... most of the times I type it I'm not actually looking for its output, I'm just clearing my mind or trying to remember what I was doing. I think I should alias ls to print out a ToDo list.

<comment><USER4> annnndd...

      alias ls='cat ~/TODO'

Let's see what this does for productivity :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh... these values are heavily influenced by the Android contest:

        89 svn
        67 ant
        55 ./reload.sh
        53 java
        43 /opt/android-sdk_m5-rc15_linux-x86/tools/adb
        36 ./build.sh
        28 cd
        25 ./script/server
        16 ls
        11 /opt/android-sdk_m5-rc15_linux-x86/tools/emulator

</comment><comment><USER6> 218 ssh

187 git

61 telnet (was troubleshooting random connectivity issues)

57 script/server

45 ls

45 cd (notice the same #'s as ls, should merge it into one command?)

44 firefox (crashes all the time :( )

32 rsync (backup)

23 ./xgospel (the best game ever! :)

23 alsamixer

</comment><comment><USER7> 54 cd

40 dir

33 start

29 c:\python\python.exe

21 c:\tools\php\php.exe

...

just kidding

</comment><comment><USER8>
        126 ls
        58 fink
        41 cd
        34 sudo
        33 exit;
        30 host
        22 which
        19 curl
        15 ssh
        15 python

</comment><comment><USER9>
        67 screen
        59 ping
        54 perl
        49 vi
        46 host
        44 dmesg
        39 killall
        36 ps
        30 ls
        30 ip

</comment><comment><USER10> 88 ss (alias for 'script/server')

81 rake

72 cd

34 git

23 sc (alias for 'script/console')

19 merb

18 sudo

14 ssh

13 nano

13 ls

</comment><comment><USER11> This is from 1 week of usage on my MacBook Pro:

38 ssh

33 cd

32 ll

21 scp

16 ant

10 ls

7 ping

6 mkdir

5 mv

4 file

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> and my friend's htpc

117 sudo

85 ls

45 cd

38 exit

21 yes

19 vlc

17 screen

11 ssh

10 dmesg

8 mplayer

</comment><comment><USER12> 109 sudo

48 s

42 cd

34 touch

30 apache (alias for sudo apachectl)

25 cp

24 gem

17 c

16 mate

14 irb

</comment><comment><USER13> On one machine:

291 nice

93 cvs

17 .

15 pwd

13 emacs

10 cd

9 perl

9 export

7 find

6 cp

</comment><comment><USER14> 114 python

67 cd

65 ls

45 ssh

29 ipython

21 mate

19 man

16 ifconfig

12 sudo

10 svn

</comment><comment><USER15> 94 cd 73 ls 64 sudo 30 nano 21 java 13 gawk 13 echo 11 ps 11 killall 8 clojure

java surprised me.

</comment><comment><USER16> 132 sudo

84 cd

63 ls

33 HandBrakeCLI

29 rsync

10 java

8 ssh

7 mv

7 mkdir

7 javac

</comment><comment><USER17> 134 sudo

55 csc

37 ls

34 cd

27 gcc

20 cp

19 ./guestbook.cgi

17 mzc

16 rm

14 make

</comment><comment><USER18> 106 python

76 ls

67 emacs

63 cd

28 mysql

24 sudo

17 history

10 mv

9 ssh

6 rm

<comment><USER19> I'm surprised emacs shows up so much.

<comment><USER18> I feel a hint of castigation in that small comment, and it's been bugging me for the last few days ;-) Yes, I admit it, I don't spend my day in emacs. Too many things don't work quite right inside the emacs shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 85 cd

59 ls

47 sudo

47 ssh

20 man

15 cat

14 rm

12 ping

11 ps

11 ./configure

</comment><comment><USER21> 81 git

55 ant

52 ls

48 cd

44 clj

37 svn

37 ssh

30 mplayer

29 vim

29 cp

</comment><comment><USER22> 272 git

66 ls

61 cd

26 svn

18 less

10 python

10 cp

8 man

7 vim

3 rm

</comment><comment><USER23> 178 vi

105 ls

66 cd

50 python

11 links

10 su

7 ps

7 cp

6 id

4 top

</comment><comment><USER24> 68 ls 57 cd 31 mplayer 24 make 23 less 21 whois 17 man 17 avail 15 rm 15 diff

</comment><comment><USER25> 107 ls 99 cd 43 python 33 less 22 sudo 20 port 18 make 16 screen 15 ll 13 vi

</comment><comment><USER26> 180 ruby 86 cd 40 git 31 ls 20 vim 20 script/server 16 grep 9 ri 8 ssh 6 scp

</comment><comment><USER27> b:maurycy:~% history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head 1 21:23

:-)

b:maurycy:~% echo $SHELL /bin/tcsh

</comment><comment><USER28> People still use ls? Why not just tab completion?

</comment><comment><USER29> on my MacBookPro: 74 ps 47 kill 44 ls 33 cd 27 sudo 18 pwd 16 ping 16 open 12 cp 11 scons

</comment><comment><USER30> lots of aliases. r is ruby. open is like double clicking something in the mac finder, i quite like it.

128 p4 83 r 47 p4o 27 p4ch 23 rakts 22 curl 19 cap1d 18 ssh 13 script/scrape 12 open</comment>