Ask HN: What has progressed in your field in 2010? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What has progressed in your field in 2010?

19 pointsghotli8 comments

I want to hear about the new libraries that you've found that you can't live without. The technologies that have matured the point of being accessible. The languages you feel hit a critical mass of community support, libraries, and documentation.

Were any new breakthrough algorithms discovered? Did any one thing change how you program? Some tool that you think will change your life for the better going forward?

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For me, it's Node.JS. Most useful new tool since jQuery. I wrote a domain name generator with it a couple months ago:

http://impossibility.org/

It handled simultaneous Reddit and HN front page traffic without any problem. I'm pretty sure server load never passed 10%. The script ran for more than a month straight and performed 120k+ searches without crashing.

Considering the first Node.JS release was only 18 months old, it's amazingly stable and scalable.

Thanks for posting this.

I've heard of Node.js before, but had no clue what it was about. Your comment made me curious enough to go and look it up.

Ended up watching this video[0], and now it's all starting to make sense.

[0] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/05/20/video-dahl/

Well, suppose I'll start, though not sure this quite fits. I work for a university, and this year we completed a move of a very sizable portion of our business processes from proprietary software to open source software. The biggest breakthrough was moving some stuff to Drupal (http://drupal.org). Drupal was basically a snowball that picked up steam as it rolled downhill and is now being deployed across campus. 2011 will see it (along with other open source software) taking over the vast majority of our university's apps. The best part has been that most of the effort has come from the ground up with a strong community emphasis.

(With the caveat that Oracle seems to have bought the administration's souls, so it will still be used as the database of choice for many apps for years to come, but eh they own MySQL now too).

I'm working on a big project for Emory. Would love to hear your feedback if you're up for it. No email in bio so please check mine. thanks!

For me, this year, it was using GPUs for numerical computing. I know that has been growing for years, but it seems like this is the year when it finally exploded: I work for in geophysics and the AGU (American Geophysical Union) conference last month had dozens of papers on using GPUs.

It's easier than it looks to get started - go to AMD or Nvidia and download their software, which includes demonstration code. Then hack the demos.

I wrote a summary of the basic ideas used in OpenCL at http://acooke.org/cute/APractical0.html (but there are also many more online).

Automotive infotainment underwent a major shift to Linux from WinCE. There is even GENIVI alliance (http://www.genivi.org/) to speed up the adoption.

for me it's javascript. many awesome libraries are being created (backbone, CoffeeScript, knockoutjs). I'm also excited about few new game engines for js (craftyjs - component based approach). I also like the approach behind couchdb/couchapp (2 layers apps).

I ended up writing a fair bit of screen scraping this year. By far the best way I have found so far is using http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/. I have tried yahoo pipes but scraping HTML with regex is a bad idea. I've also tried dapper but didn't find it reliable enough.

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