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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?

#291

Post by tuatoru »

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

Lots of sibling comments have talked about games to learn logic, maths, etc.

To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people.

Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.)

Life skills, in short.

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

#292

Post by Balgair »

Bit of an entire category: Older scientific equipment.

Typically, you have one graybeard down in the basement that knows how those old centrifuges/distilizers/ionificators/etc work. Things that an entire building is really dependent on. Not only that, but they typically know the limits and how to get good science out of them.

It's more of a $$$ issue though. Loads of these old machines are dying off with the people that know them. This then opens up the market for the new people to come in and reinvent the wheel, sometimes literally so. It costs more, sure, but it keeps things moving along too.

If you get the chance, talk to these old graybeards and hear their stories. Most of it is mumbo jumbo, but man, they are great stories.

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

#293

Post by bravetraveler »

bombcar wrote: post #90
bravetraveler wrote: post #74

Systems tuning, but it's an area that really got me to learn what I have over the years. I realize I'm a bit biased. It's amazing the number of production issues I've fixed with simple sysctl parameters. The Linux kernel defaults don't fit very well in this huge-cluster/scaling out world

One thing we're strongly missing is the kernel being able to notify that a sysctl parameter may help. Sometimes it does things like "clock changed, is all hell breaking loose" but it could do much more when queues back up, etc.

Absolutely! So much of my 'bag of tricks' is having been around the block so many times that I can sniff these things out. It's a bad way for things to be!

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

#294

Post by bravetraveler »

rufius wrote: post #153
bravetraveler wrote: post #74

Systems tuning, but it's an area that really got me to learn what I have over the years. I realize I'm a bit biased. It's amazing the number of production issues I've fixed with simple sysctl parameters. The Linux kernel defaults don't fit very well in this huge-cluster/scaling out world

In general, our industry lacks a sense of "mechanical sympathy"[0]. Whether it's understanding what knobs are tunable in an operating system or using streams for reading data to keep a consistent memory profile, we often don't dig deep. Ditto for folks understanding database systems. I think in very big systems, you see folks dig deep, but it's not encouraged with smaller systems. I think there's a lot of inefficient…

I appreciate you introducing me to this concept -- it's something I've thought a lot about, but could never verbalize

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

#295

Post by quesera »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #240
quesera wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 1 requirements: - Equipment: wrenches, oil collection pan, oil container for transport to disposal, funnel? - Knowledge: Quality of oils, filters, Oil weights (5W20? 10W30?) - Willingness: To get dirty, to stain the driveway - Time: 30min if all goes well, then time to take waste oil to disposal - Trust: In self - Funds: $20 for oil and filter, assuming disposal is free Option 2 requirements: - Time: 15min, pl…

> I change my own oil also, but I have no rational explanation for this choice. Of course you do. All the items you listed are a small, one time cost. Watch a YouTube video, buy the wrench, pan, and funnel ($50?). The “knowledge” of which oil to use takes 20 seconds to look up in the manual in the glove box of the car. And the disposal is pretty easy, you take the empty oil bottles, fill them back up with old oil, an…

I've probably paid for 5 oil changes in my life. Many dozens done myself.

In those 5 (always while traveling cross country, and purposely done at a Sears or Firestone for national guarantees), I've had the following negative experiences:

  - 1 overtightened and stripped plug bolt, requiring three extra days in a hotel while the replacement pan (which they charged me for) was shipped
  - 1 case of badly greased up door, floor mats, and steering wheel
  - 2 improperly seated crush washers (or inadequately tightened) plug bolts, causing leaks in parking lots
In the latter two cases, I was hundreds of miles away before noticing, but the nearest franchise honored the guarantee.

So, I'm with you on the "trust" premium.

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

#296

Post by mdtusz »

systemvoltage wrote: post #52

Industrial automation and manufacturing: - Need a dedicated degree (2 year as well as 4 year) in Manufacturing - Trade schools and apprenticeship programs that do not sound like scam - Automated material movement and handling - Machine vision, automation of quality assurance - Automated mold making and plastic injection molding optimization (still done by humans and takes 4 months) - Factory software (ERP, MRP, MES,…

Something I've noticed in this space is that there exist "standards" which are intended to make systems compatible and useful and modern, but all of these standards are extremely poorly written and cling to outdated paradigms and weird non-standard protocols that aren't used anywhere except small subsets of the manufacturing world. Often you'll have to implement interfaces yourself because there's only one reference C library available that hasn't had any maintenance for years and won't even compile.

At risk of someone posting the xkcd on standards, I would love to see an full industry wide consortium to establish _modern and well designed_ standards, led by people with experience making modern networked services and systems. Specifically around industrial machine controls and data/telemetry collection. A few standards exist that are roughly xml-rpc-ish, but they don't even follow that much as a standard. OPC-UA is the latest "standard" to be making the rounds and is (IMO) doomed to fail due to its layers of complexity and unclear specifications.

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

#297

Post by Fizzz »

chaps wrote: post #160
amenod wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds doable, but... why opensource? Does this mean that people / companies are not prepared to pay for the product or service?

I have around 2 million pages from FOIA requests that need information systematically extracted and I'm not alone in this problem. The costs for the systematization of many pages will be prohibitive. The public good of having a resource like this available to the public for free is beyond unimaginable as far as I'm concerned.

How do you currently extract info from the FOIA request pages? What kind of info do you look for? Just thinking how you could standardise this

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

#298

Post by tylerlh »

blown_gasket wrote: post #248
tylerlh wrote: post #67

Supply chain/logistics. I've been simultaneously surprised and unsurprised by the relatively minuscule number of people interested in driving technology and change for this space forward compared to other spaces.

Maybe for driving technology specifically the space is small. But for supply chain management there are a number of players: SAP, Oracle, and Kinaxis to name three. There are more than a dozen though.

There are plenty SCM solutions and TMS products, agreed, however that isn't the change I'm describing. OTM, SAP S4/HANA, etc are heavily used and have been around for ages, yes -- even better systems exist. Problem is: the quality of data going into those systems has not improved much, the flow of that data is pretty poor, and the barriers to entry for basic visibility are high unless you're moving a lot of boxes.

Despite best efforts, even among the largest lines (Maersk + others via DCSA), EDI still reigns supreme in this space. Nothing inherently wrong with EDI itself but there are plenty problems with access. Port & terminal level visibility are in an even worse place.

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

#299

Post by tylerlh »

HorizonXP wrote: post #80
tylerlh wrote: post #67

Supply chain/logistics. I've been simultaneously surprised and unsurprised by the relatively minuscule number of people interested in driving technology and change for this space forward compared to other spaces.

I'm actively working in this space right now. Working with a Fortune 100 to replatform their entire supply chain software. Currently handles all $15B of their US revenue.

Very cool! Feel free to reach out!

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

#300

Post by sanderjd »

krapp wrote: post #261
sanderjd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Prin…

I think a decent rule of thumb might be to have three people with really deep holistic expertise. If there's so much context that it's hard for people to have and maintain that depth, then the organization is successful enough that it can afford to pay a premium for a few of them. And when one of them moves up or out, you have two more to pass on the knowledge to a new third. Maybe two or four or five would be fine too, but three seems to me like it might be about the optimum. But it's very risky to have either zero or one person who knows a system from top to bottom.
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