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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?

#161

Post by manquer »

jldugger wrote: post #103
mtoner23 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Still is better than some big corp distinguished engineer equivalent doing it in his free time.

The CS prof probably has tenure , a lot of freedom on what he works on, never ending supply of TAs and students and can choose when he retires .

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

#162

Post by jakub_g »

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…

There are some bugs in browsers that are decades old and they do not get fixed, precisely because of this IMO - no one knows part X of codebase anymore, learning it would take weeks, as it's probably written in idiomatic C++ from 2003 :) and there are other priorities (mostly shipping new stuff).

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

#164

Post by bashmelek »

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 would like to see a fun game to help me with differential equations. People still want to learn more advanced topics and I feel that not enough edtech exists for learning beyond the formative years, and even less for beyond high school. As an example, Khan Academy has received much praise, but I was less impressed to be honest.

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

#165

Post by lettergram »

Everything agriculture, most farmers had their children go off to school and then the cities. Now it’s only really people in their 50s in the fields.

As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on.

It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old diesel motor. Some people on HN might know that, I know some of that now. However, generally they are all older and their kids moved on. In terms of a generational knowledge gap I can think of no greater one.

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

#166

Post by elihu »

georgeburdell wrote: post #24

Not tech but I think millenials, gen Z, and younger have lost the know-how to make a dollar independently of mega corps. I never see kids going door to door mowing lawns anymore, for example.

I wonder if that's partly due to people (both young people and the older people that would hire them) being uncertain if they can get away with it these days? There were a bunch of scandals about ten years or so ago about politicians running for office who had housekeepers and didn't pay social security. And kids sometimes get in trouble for running a lemonade stand without a food handler's card or business license or whatever.

There might also be a disconnect between what people think they should pay and what the cost of living is. In other words: maybe people don't do that sort of thing because they'd still be losing money even if they did it full time.

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

#167

Post by adamredwoods »

Health insurance navigation and transparency (US):

People who go through dealing with health insurance: a lot of this knowledge is difficult to transfer, but is very valuable, and usually transferred through word-of-mouth. People who suddenly have a need for a treatment or surgery, don't always know what their options are and how to deal with insurance claims in the best manner, or to maximize coverage and deal with extra circumstances.

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

#168

Post by TheCapn »

bee_rider wrote: post #157
sowbug wrote: post #138

Less a specific technology and more a mindset. Repairing things around the house. Today, it's almost always rational to throw out the broken thing and buy a new one. There are a bunch of reasons why that's true: cost of one's own labor, lack of discrete replacement parts, lack of repair documentation, improvements in technology since original purchase, risk of further breakage, risk of injury to self, etc. But the re…

Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something you've repaired. I'm not very handy, but every time I open the door that doesn't squeak anymore it cheers me up a little.

>Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something you've repaired.

I feel it's my personality, but as soon as I fix anything I am overcome with anxiety every time I'm near it for fear the issue will return or that my repair was faulty and inevitably prone to cause further damage.

I don't know why I get this way. In spite of all my worries I've yet to truly fuck up an appliance I've repaired (furnace, microwave, dish washer, workout equipment, countless car repairs, electrical, plumbing, carpentry...the works).

As far as I've ever bothered to explore the feeling, I think I have an inherent trust that products are manufactured with care and attention while my repairs are often ad-hoc suitable replacements with salvaged parts, or even just duct tape and glue. Experience should tell me that things are often built to minimal passing standards so this idea that a manufacturing line that spits out dozens(?)/hundreds(?) of these products in a day are any better than my attempts. Lack of documentation is often a big one. If my repair seems to make more sense why wasn't it done like this before? Am I missing something that should be considered? What caused it to break that I haven't addressed? etc.

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

#169

Post by version_five »

After reading the comments here, I think a key issue isn't so much humanity losing knowledge, as it is "locals" for some definition losing it. Manufacturing is alive and well in many places, somebody knows how to build or fix your lawnmower, it's just that the middle class has lost that knowledge, etc. I believe there continues to be more "repatriation" of knowledge - look at semiconductor manufacturing, but it's less a question of it ever being lost.

I'd also say that "preparedness" is generally something nobody is working on. Despite all the shit that happened with Covid, I don't feel like we're even slightly better prepared for an actual lethal pandemic, like with double digit death rates for example. It's not clear we've changed anything other than some political jockeying.

Another example is earthquake/ tsunami preparedness. Everyone knows the west coast is going to be destroyed, we just ignore it because its "boring" and nobody wants to think about it

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

#170

Post by eldavido »

mediaman wrote: post #61
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…

I'm a partner in a factory and I believe this is an incredibly important area, and the requirements are fairly different than normal "just put it on Confluence" workplaces, in a way that most tech people don't understand and usually completely miss the mark when they're doing product dev. - Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it with a…

Predictive/preventive maintenance is actually a big thrust behind my current company, Dials.

HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics, planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a) estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining), (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to spread paying for it out over however many years before it's needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and collecting the funds, month after month.

People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so that either internal staff or external vendors (more common) can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track status and work in a fine-grained way.

Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-driving) and having enough data around that we can price and estimate everything accurately.

Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we just decided to build a payment collection product (for monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's in my profile in case you want to chat

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