GUI toolkits? Maybe?
I wonder how much of the "everything is a service, access this calculator for a small monthly fee" problem is due to how poor GUI toolkits are.
Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
221–230 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a whole lot more to it then what Autodesk offers…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latham_Report Latham identified industry inefficiencies, condemning existing industry practices as 'adversarial', 'ineffective', 'fragmented', 'incapable of delivering for its clients' and 'lacking respect for its employees'. From 1994, almost two decades later and not much has changed.
Thank you.
And yes - not much to almost nothing has changed.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#223Possibly industrial automation and control systems
I heard once from a recruiter that a lot of the air traffic communications in the defense industry are losing old timers and there's not enough young blood to replace them. That could've just been him trying to sell me the job though
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#224Earlier 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…
Do you have any pointers to things worth reading? I've always sworn if I started a tech company one of the first 10 employees would be a librarian because it needs to be someone's job to organize the information, and you're right the automatic systems for doing it are horrible.
Search isn't enough because search doesn't help you if the philosophy behind how the information is organized doesn't make sense -- if what you need is spread around between 100 slack messages, emails, and unconnected unmaintained wiki pages. You need someone (or ideally a team) whose job it is to one one hand organize that information themselves, and on the other hand create a framework so it's easy for the non-librarians to put things in the right place.
But right now the majority of tech companies are like libraries without librarians, the patrons are just wandering around sticking the books on random shelves and wondering why nobody can ever find anything.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#225My 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. This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off that workforce.
Would love to find out more about the lessons that you've learned in the process
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#226Educational 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 was watching a Pixar movie and wondered, "what if these resources were spent in creating, say, scientifically accurate animations of biological processes for people who are learning chemistry, anatomy, genetics, etc." We all have seen small animations of processes, but some are inaccurate or simplified due to time and money constraints. I've dreamed about this since I was a kid.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#227Earlier 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?
Internet English has different "regional variety" than real life, for example I have litterally never heard "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#228Construction
I'm currently working in this space and agree - very underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more served because more money is involved, residential is underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time without some real movement.
There’s process and digital tools on the one end and on the other the ugly truth that almost everyone building spaces - be it commercial or residential - will be fed up with the low wages they get for the treciourous work they have to do in most cases since the number of people in “western countries” willing to work in construction is rapidly falling.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#229Railroads. 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 saw a talk by an engineer from Parallel Systems [0] and they seem to be doing some very cool stuff for the future of rail. Autonomous Electric rail cars and some other interesting things [0] https://moveparallel.com/
Very strange product. The benefit of traditional rail freight is scale and cost over long distance. The benefit of truck freight is last mile delivery (no need for warehouse storage, can make multiple stops, etc). Their product seems worse than either except that it’s electric. Fortunately, electric trucks are well within reach.
Cool that they are building the tech though, maybe it will get bought out by an actual logistics/freight company that can find a use for it.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#230Educational 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
Agree, education via a game makes lots of sense. Math is one of those that is perfectly suited since repetition helps to learn it.
There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone.
I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.