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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?

#171

Post by lappet »

kradeelav wrote: post #91

Online safety education for the younger generations. There's of course outliers, but as a rule I've seen some scary amounts of zoomers who have zero idea of why giving out a photo of their government ID card (unredacted) to total strangers for age verification is a very bad idea. It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and name)" that I got.

On the other side of the spectrum, I often joke with my dad that I want to setup a "TechNanny" service for him. Someone who can come home and help with random computer/mobile issues. There are of course challenges in reliability, safety and staffing.

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

#172

Post by Delk »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #46
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 TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered "Skyrim". So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.

I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking, but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a more spontaneous form of communication.

I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.)

Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.

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

#173

Post by ska »

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

It's not a crazy idea, but also not a panacea.

So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part).

I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.

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

#174

Post by chaps »

IceMetalPunk wrote: post #111
chaps wrote: post #82

Extracting deeply useful information from tens/hundreds/thousands of thousands of scanned PDFs in a way that dumps its information, regardless of structure (eg, tables, text), into a relational database that's (mostly) trivially queryable and repeatable. Preferably open source. This is such a hard problem right now.

When you say "regardless of structure" -- if it's a relational database, that inherently implies a set structure. Or did you mean the information is consistent enough to be represented in one relational structure, but is presented in the PDFs in different formats?

Honestly, I don't know what it would look like, but being able to query would be deeply important. But what I can say is that a lot of the PDFs I work with are auto-generated as PDF forms using queries, after the information was likely inserted into a relational database during some esoteric transcription step.

Meaning, the information that formed the PDFs very likely come from a relational database and an inversion back to its original relational form is probably the convenient form. Whether that means it turns to 40 tables, that's fine, so long as it's relational and a query can be written.

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

#175

Post by dragostudor »

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…

Spot on, many of these challenges are common across the board - from my father's plant to Pfizer and others I got the chance to work with. There is however a massive talent gap when it comes to high quality software / ML people in these industries as well. It's tough to get experts to generate quality data and 'recipes' for others to follow when their KPIs are not aligned. Maintenance and reliability don't seem to be sexy enough areas for management to invest in, especially if the value proposition is anecdotal at best. Would be great to chat about your approach for solving some of the above

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

#176

Post by panzagl »

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…

Tell your Dad to start making youtube videos- that seems like the best way to preserve that kind of knowledge.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by xpe »

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…

I support public policy that finds ways to internalize full-lifecycle externalities.

See also: "cradle to grave" manufacturing.

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

#179

Post by bee_rider »

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 mean we're in our 30's, even those millenials who do want to do yardwork as a career have hopefully moved beyond the "knocking on doors to mow lawns" stage.

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

#180

Post by groby_b »

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

Maybe. Maybe not. I think the questions of "who pays", "who profits", and "who controls the material" matters a lot. So does learning theory (I don't think games will be the only way to learn). It is definitely a field we should pay close attention to if we care about learning.

For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)

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