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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?

#271

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.

You should check out Death Stranding! It has a unique asynchronous multiplayer model that rewards collaboration.

Players can place items and structures as they walk from place to place and you can see stuff placed by other players as you bring each in-game area "online". These items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle, or even entire roads/highways stretching across a landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can give them likes. Note that you never see another player's character.

It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's not much combat in the game because it's generally easier to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.

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

#272

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…

As far as I know, computer science is still taught in CS degrees though. I think the signal to noise online is much lower because programming is much more accessible to those without a theoretical background, but I'd guess that in terms of raw numbers there are more people graduating with CS degrees who have learned the theory than ever before.

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

#273
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

If there’s anyone from Meta who works on Oculus here:

I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where would it go in the store?

There’s no educational section in the store. So can I get any sales for an educational app?

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educational games are not the same as "gamification" as an incentive structure, and I also think you're being very prescriptive of your own research style. I knew several academics in my PhD that thrived off being able to publish papers in better conferences, faster, etc than their peers. Also there's a pretty strong niche of puzzle game solvers (think the MIT Puzzle Hunts) that love thinking through problems in gami…

This comment reminds me of Status as a Service by Eugene Wei. "Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being publ…

The selection of which status games to play is itself a status game.

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

#276
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 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…

Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?

The sequels have this too.

(And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).

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

#277

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.

Big-O is also not so great in the real world where you should be more concerned about cache misses/alignment

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

#278

Machining. No child left without a 5-axis milling machine!

I've just noticed FlexCNC machines for the first time. It's a bridge CNC with a long bed, they start at $209,000, so I'm not getting one... but the idea of a CNC bed sufficiently long that you don't need pallet swapping, you just load jobs wherever the bridge isn't, seems like it could be quite productive.

They use a helical rack instead of a ball screw, which makes sense in 50 foot long machines. It's welded construction, so no huge castings, quite interesting.

We're going to need a lot of machining here in the US as the world deglobalizes.

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

#279
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

Recently I got the game "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" for my kids to play on steam since I got young kids and I remember loving that game when I was younger. The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it. It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's…

I loved this as a kid! And also played it for a couple days as an adult recently ha. Even though I don't play much games anymore.

Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky. Was very impressed.

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

#280
post #266

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 a…

> 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.

You can link to different libraries that are part of WebKit, or Firefox?

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