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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?

#211

Post by fzzzy »

chrisweekly wrote: post #117
commoddity wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins? It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egypt…

Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.

GTA 5 roleplaying servers are getting pretty popular now and do what you want. I haven't tried them yet but I've wanted what you describe and it might be fun to check them out.

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

#212

Post by qsort »

adeelk93 wrote: post #188
jamiek88 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like reading about, and comments from, ESL people who learned basically Internet English. Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.

Subtly different how?

I'm pretty sure even a casual observer could tell I'm not a native speaker given a sufficiently large sample of my writings. GP is right, the correct thing to do is to just embrace that I'll never be as fluent, as natural in English as I am in Italian.

Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise.

I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.

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

#213

Post by krapht »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #148
Invictus0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing motor oil always comes up but it is really worth paying someone a few bucks to do it for you.

Why? Especially if you have an SUV or higher car you can easily crawl under. Just unscrew the original plug, screw in a Fumoto valve, and an entire oil change is done in under 20 min, and then you just drop off the old oil at Autozone or whatever. While the oil is draining, you can change the air filters too. Buy the Kirkland brand oil at Costco, and you do not have to trust whoever the mechanic shop hires to bust yo…

I don't change my own oil for the same reason I don't mow my own lawn or haul my own garbage to the municipal dump.

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

#214

Post by dragostudor »

petra wrote: post #132
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…

//Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective. Why is that important? Must every job be automated?

Fewer and fewer people are interested in manufacturing jobs, especially the less glamorous ones. Large manufacturers are having a hard time using analytics and more advanced systems because of qualified labour shortages. I've spoken to manufacturers whose technicians can't even write or follow instructions correctly. Sometimes, sending 10 technicians to inspect an asset would results in 10 different opinions about possible issues / failures. All of these could lead to lower quality product and increased unscheduled downtimes, lower revenues etc etc. But, it is definitely important to still allow people to use their brains and come up with better options

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

#215

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by mcphail »

lettergram wrote: post #165

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…

Shameless plug for what we're building at HitchPin.com

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

#217

Post by slater »

qsort wrote: post #141
nescioquid wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool! If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of a…

The only reason why I speak English is because I spent my teen years flaming strangers on Slashdot, you insensitive clod.

A beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans eating some hot grits, you say?

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

#218

Post by dredmorbius »

dogman144 wrote: post #100
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…

Check out Shift5

Care to unpack that / explain what element(s) are addressed?

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

#219

Post by dredmorbius »

Bakary wrote: post #125
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 wonder if that is the case outside of the English-language world.

If anywhere, I'd suspect China.

That literature would be pretty opaque to me.

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

#220

Post by whiteboardr »

jventura wrote: post #127
whiteboardr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i mean is that construction as a whole is a completely overlooked market. Working in that space since almost 5 years after product development in and for several industries for 20+ years. It’s highly complex but the user group is an overlooked and diverse set of people that have to put up with less than crappy solutions for getting their jobs done - for the chaos that is construction. So many opportunities and s…

> Working in that space since almost 5 years after product development Doing construction work, or software development for construction companies?

The latter.
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