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Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

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Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#101

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kjellsbells wrote: post #37
tmaly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not just knowledge transfer, but knowledge organization. We have so many different ways to represent knowledge, but it is very hard to access it or know where to look. I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.

Former librarian here, now at a tech co. This is exactly the domain of information science, and its a salutary tale in two industries talking past one another. Librarians have deep training in the science, philosophy and psychology of information storage and retrieval. Most of the time you think of things like Dewey numbers on library books buts its much more than that. At the dawn of the second internet age (circa 1…

I'm curious what your thoughts about Cory Doctorow's Metacrap [1] essay which I think summarized a lot of the problems with the semantic, informational organization approaches of the early-mid web. Are you also familiar with research in informational sciences these days?

[1]: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#102

Post by mrtksn »

rmdoss wrote: post #77
mrtksn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.

Duolingo is doing it amazingly to learn a new language.

I speak 3 languages, attempted to learn the 4th one (German) on Duolingo and I find it very ineffective.

I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms etc.

IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I think edge case exploration is way to go but the gamification usually revolves around memorising.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#103

Post by jldugger »

mtoner23 wrote: post #81
CSMastermind wrote: post #65

There are shockingly few people maintaining the video encoding packages that most people rely on. https://xkcd.com/2347/ makes me think the same is true of image software as well. I'm pretty sure there's a timezone database that's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right. When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word wo…

I wonder if this is actually a more efficient way to run things than every company implementing timezones/tables/curl themselves for each of their needs. current situation isnt ideal but not horrible.

It is, but also its kinda concerning that some CS faculty member does this as a hobby[1].

[1]: https://samueli.ucla.edu/time-zone-king-how-one-ucla-compute...

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#104

Post by WhiteOwlEd »

iammjm wrote: post #36

Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta

Working on it. As a first iteration, I am thinking video games meets data visualization. Details at https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-visualization....

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#105

Post by m463 »

mrtksn wrote: post #50
iammjm wrote: post #36

Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta

I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.

come on, nobody is a polymath.[1]

There is some really boring stuff to slog through on the journey of a formal education.

In school, people tend to choose subjects they are fascinated with, to the detriment of the other subjects.

I think some subjects like history either benefit from actual life experience, or need some additional storytelling to appreciante.

we really don't need the "wooden straightback chairs in schoolrooms" mentality

gamification might smack of spoonfeeding, but it also might allow a much richer learning experience too.

[1] statistically speaking

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#106

Post by kradeelav »

samwillis wrote: post #55

Traditional draftsmanship (not really tech is it?), as in with a pen/pencil on a draftsman table, has completely disappeared. My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art. There are now almost tw…

My father has a background that's eerily similar to yours, right down to running a firm the same size, and he feels the same way you and yours does (so do I).

It truly is a lost art and there's a lot more hidden knowledge and reward that comes with knowing traditional drafting than it may appear on the surface. Patience, precision, a sense of intuitive aesthetics, and how to arrange a composition on paper to tell a story effectively ... thank you for sharing this comment, I'll have to tell him somebody else agrees. :)

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#107

Post by tylerlh »

dredmorbius wrote: post #51

Railroads. Specifically freight rail. There is stunningly little literature on any R&D in conventional freight rail transport, something I discovered when looking for any published research some months back. High-speed rail, yes. Regular old freight, no. Contrast this with autonomous and electrified trucking as alternatives, with which rail could offer considerable synergies. I'd suspect that break-bulk, trainset ass…

I think this has much to do with certain parties controlling most of the dataflow for NA rail freight moves. Definitely a problem on the ocean and in the port terminals as well. We should chat!

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#108

Post by thewebcount »

I would say learning about any form of computing not related to Unix. Many of us old-timers grew up using systems (both home and corporate) that weren't variations of Unix, and I feel like CS education is turning into a Unix mono-culture these days. User interfaces from things like VAX, Apple ][, IBM Mainframes, etc. The file system on macOS 8/9 which didn't use paths and has always allowed spaces in names because it isn't interacted with via command line, for example. The VAX file system that automatically versioned documents without the user needing to worry about it. (I think the Apple Lisa did something like this, too.)

Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of bad ideas in those systems, too. (Like why do I have to use "RUN" vs. "BRUN" on the Apple ][ depending on what type of program it is?) But finding and promoting the better ideas and teaching young people about them is, I think , important and risks being lost otherwise.

Learning about failures from older systems is always interesting, too. Why couldn't Atari and Amiga compete against Apple and Microsoft, for example? I think things like that are important to understand going forward, too.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#109

Post by version_five »

dragostudor wrote: post #6

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

These things are all on the radar of "innovation" types. I don't mean to say they're not interesting, but in the area of applied ML all this stuff is basically as mainstream as it comes (despite being unsupported by any actual research advances).
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