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Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

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Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#31

Post by nayuki »

pseudolus wrote: post #11

A number of cities have "open house" weekends where public and private buildings and infrastructure that is generally closed off is temporarily made open to the public. I've always hoped that these weekends would be expanded to include both manufacturing facilities and many of the utilities that are essential to our lives. I've been fortunate enough to have visited some of these facilities (as an adult) and have both…

Yeah, I love Doors Open Toronto (end of every May), https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/festivals-events/doors-... . Many of the sites are related to arts or churches, but some are infrastructure like a water treatment plant, public transit maintenance garages (TTC bus, streetcar, subway), natural gas power plant. I would love to see an expansion to more industrial sites in the open house.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#33

Post by madengr »

Look up Engineering Explorer Post for high schools students. Each month the attend a presentation on an engineering discipline, and the a site tour. My kid got to visit a nuclear reactor, food packaging manufacturer, biomedical device development, aircraft maintenance depot, etc.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#34

Post by jzwinck »

H8crilA wrote: post #18
solardev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When ya think about it, what is a body but a pile of unmaintained code made by two drunken people a few decades ago, using a framework with a few million years of tech debt? Everyone wants to do the upfront coding, but nobody likes maintaining it afterward...

Commented out code, self modifying code, overlapping code, copy pasted code, code integrated from other species, even code integrated from malware. Execution of fragments requires solving quantum mechanics for large particles and in practice is done by random changes followed up by measurement of the result. Execution of the entire thing past a few initial bootloader steps has never been achieved in vitro, let alone…

Lack of a debugger should not be a problem, as we all know printf is the best debugger. Unfortunately this system's printf implementation has numerous known and unknown output bugs, so what it tells you requires many years of training to interpret with 70% accuracy.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#37

Post by helghardt »

ddhhyy wrote: post #7

I have visited wastewater treatment plants in two of the cities I have lived in and I honestly think such a visit should be required for everyone--young and old--who lives in a house or apartment serviced by a municipal sewer. It is eye opening to see what happens to every drop of water you flush or wash down the drain, and especially to see what kinds of things make it into the wastewater stream and to the treatment…

This is interesting. Not only giving you exposure to how things work, but also encouraging awareness of things easily taken for granted.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#38

Post by helghardt »

piva00 wrote: post #2

I absolutely loved all of my school's trips to industrial sites. We went to: - A Coke bottling facility (when the bottles were still mostly returnable glass ones), it was mesmerising. - A chocolate and confectionery factory (as you may have guessed, kids were ecstatic about this one). - A recycling plant processing paper and plastics. - A nuclear power plant. All of those between the ages of 10-13 as well, mentioning…

In hindsight, it takes a special kind of teacher to go through the effort of organizing these trip. Only later I heard that this head master funded it out of pocket since he could not take everyone on the excursions.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#39

Post by helghardt »

anfractuosity wrote: post #29

There's an interesting looking Japanese website encouraging industrial tourism. https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/eccj/ind_tourism/foods.html is the link for food, but there's a lot more categories such as life sciences and heavy industry. (I found that link from HN a little while ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680460 is the HN submission, which might have other interesting info on it)

Thanks for sharing the link! Will check it out. I am curious about digging into how this type of site visits could be more streamlined for teachers that don’t have the time or resources to organize it.

Re: Ask HN: In person industry tours and site visits?

#40

Post by helghardt »

tomatocracy wrote: post #30
vinay_ys wrote: post #22

As a kid growing up in pre-computer/internet era, we did a bunch of things to engage our curiosity and learn and have fun. But in today's world with access such rich content at your fingertips, it's all very different. These days I spend hours watching interesting stuff on Youtube in the comforts of my bedroom. But I do miss the learnings I would have had through engagement with fellow students in an actual physical…

Depending on who's giving the tour, having the opportunity to interact with people actually working at a place (especially eg shift supervisors/foremen/etc - ie not senior management but experienced people who are still close enough to the "sharp end") and ask them questions is incredibly valuable in gaining an insight into how a business or industry works - site visits are a very important part of many investment de…

Yes, I think the in-person experience helps you process the context of the work environment better. What type of people work there, what a typical day may look like, sheer scale required to do certain stuff. I remember vividly how enormous the wind terminal seemed up close. And realizing someone had to get the thing on the pole - and asking how they did that.
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