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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?

#261

Post by krapp »

sanderjd wrote: post #83
Flankk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with you when you leave.

That's why you don't want one person with top-to-bottom knowledge, but not why you don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge.

You don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge because those people command higher salaries, and because most jobs don't require top-to-bottom knowledge, meaning those higher salaries wouldn't translate into commensurate value being returned to the company.

Also people with top-to-bottom knowledge will tend to want to be promoted, and most won't (because employment is a pyramid, and also see the Gervais Principle) so you'll be left with a pool of frustrated, overpaid employees.

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

#262

Post by ccooffee »

dangets wrote: post #15

Joe Armstrong gave a good talk on forgotten ideas in Computer Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ

Can't watch the video right now, but the slides (available at [0]) list these four "forgotten ideas":

1. Linda Tuple Spaces [1]

2. Flow based programming [2]

3. Xanadu [3]

4. Unix pipes [4]

[0] https://codesync.global/uploads/media/default/0001/01/de7dfa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)

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

#263

Post by l33tbro »

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…

In my experience it just comes down to time and competing priorities.

Would I love to deep dive into my fuse box and learn how to rewire it? Very much so. But the limited free time I have needs to go into side projects and life goals.

I say this having just come out the other side of a long period of learning how stuff in my house works. While it has certainly been satisfying, I'm looking forward to just paying people to do things in future so I can focus more on what compels me.

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

#264

Post by buscoquadnary »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #230
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

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 the…

> 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.

This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers.

So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%.

Sorry, had to get this off my chest.

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

#266

Post by krapp »

Buttons840 wrote: post #221

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.

I think a big part of the problem is we seem to have decided, as an industry, that Electron solved application development and in particularly GUIs, and left everything else to rot.

And a lot of the alternatives seem more focused on leveraging specific languages than making the development process easier, which is really the problem that Electron (specifically the HTML/CSS/JS) model solves. Like, I would kill to be able to write a C GUI application with a layout as easy as HTML and style it with CSS, but just not have a web browser or anything be involved.

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

#267

Post by marginalia_nu »

amelius wrote: post #253

Computer science. We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation. Now we just talk in terms of how fast it runs on the newest Nvidia cards. Also, most discussions here are about how you can glue existing stuff together and turn it into a profit. I hardly see any real CS anymore these days on online forums, let alone progress. Closest thing I remember is an article that discussed whether CSS stylesheets a…

> We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation.

This is something CS majors often have to un-learn as they enter the world of practical programming. Big-O is just not incredibly useful in reasoning about algorithms as n is always bounded.

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

#268

Post by Diris »

Buttons840 wrote: post #221

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.

There's lots of movement in that space in rust[0][1]. Also in that space are raphlinus' posts about GUI toolkits[2][3]. There was a post about a zig toolkit a while ago too[4]. Another post about a new c GUI toolkit[5]. There might be more cf. [6]

[0]Iced: A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326125

[1]Slint: Native GUI Toolkit for Rust, C++ or JavaScript https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810533

[2]Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846

[3]Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297550

[4]Build a PinePhone App with Zig and Zgt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

[5]Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30813000

[6]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

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

#269

Post by philwelch »

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.

> 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.

This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.

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

#270

Post by eastbound »

TheCapn wrote: post #168
bee_rider wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, micr…

I’m frightened to repair things because I own a house, and I’m afraid of wreaking havoc, dirtying a wall, having to repaid a whole room… I hope it will pass as I learn to do things here.
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