Ask HN: Whats the most interesting and exciting field in computer science? - ericthegoodking
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whitef0x
Pentesting and security fields that surround it can be pretty interesting.
Also working in startups can be exciting with the right company culture and
team.

However for the most part, the most 'interesting and exciting field' is very
subjective and varies from person to person. I think you won't be able to get
a definate answer on this because everyone thinks their field is the most
interesting (and for good reason too - otherwise they shouldn't be in it!).

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solomatov
I think, the most interesting field now is dependent types. Researches have
achieved substantial progress in the last 10 years:

* Large mathematical theorems were proved in Coq (Feit Thompson Theorem)

* An optimizing C compiler with correctness proof was created ([http://compcert.inria.fr/](http://compcert.inria.fr/))

If this stuff gets to mainstream and I think, it will get there in 5-10 years,
we will have unprecedently reliable and secure systems.

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primaryobjects
Artificial intelligence, currently popular by machine learning. Lots of
potential and undiscovered applications. Everyone will have their own opinion
on this, however.

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sharmi
It certainly seems to be the case, though the interests seem to be too skewed
towards it.

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sytelus
Deep Learning.

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kjs3
There's a _lot_ of work to do in parallelism, especially figuring out methods
to automatically optimized problems for parallel architectures.

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rotskoff
I agree, but very little of this work seems exciting. While advances like
hardware support for transactional memory and, hopefully, some unified memory
support for CPU/GPU operations will have a tremendous impact on the ease with
which programmers compute in parallel, I tend to hear fewer new ideas about
what can be done with parallel computing.

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kjs3
Exciting is subjective. :-)

I don't disagree that there are fewer ideas, but that's because we need new
ideas, including new architectures. Having spent quality time on a number of
novel supercomputer architectures that seem to have been forgotten in the rush
to turn GPUs into short vector SIMD-ish successors to Cray XMP/YMPs, I don't
think we've looked at all the viable alternatives, at least not in a long
time. For example, I'm clear on why memory-based vectors like the Cyber-205
faded at the time, but it's not clear the same limitations fundamentally still
exist (especially with L2/L3 caches bigger than the 205 main store now). I
think that's interesting...YMMV.

