Automobile - currently we are under the model slow and steady wins the race and kills the environment. Traffic sucks, gas sucks, texting kills people.
Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#32Education
Agreed, but that's pretty broad. Are we talking: -Learning materials? ie- textbooks -Learning software? ie- someone just kill blackboard already
Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively.
And they cost 6000 dollars to lease. And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them...
But at least it's a step towards progress.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#33Housing & Home Construction
Most house construction in the industrialised world is still done by semi-skilled hand labour. There are few radical advances in materials or methods that have gained traction with the industry. Partly this is because the building industry is held back by antiquated construction codes that specify acceptable means and materials rather than the minimum performance constraints that buildings must exceed to be considered safe. But there is a lot of cultural resistance as well, both from the building trades and from customers.
Home construction is an area where several orders of magnitude improvement in both cost and performance are possible, just by the application of basic engineering principles. Well, basic engineering principles and a willingness to circumvent the established order.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#34How about law? Obviously there are non-technical problems there as well, but it seems like there is still a lot that could be done technologically to improve transparency and (maybe more interestingly) reduce expense.
I've actually been thinking about law recently. It seems that, because it is a field that is based on rules, it would lend itself well to a more programmatic solution. Obviously not all law could be serviced programmatically, but there are certainly areas that could be.
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Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#35How about law? Obviously there are non-technical problems there as well, but it seems like there is still a lot that could be done technologically to improve transparency and (maybe more interestingly) reduce expense.
I'm a non-practicing lawyer in the tech space. There actually is a lot of technology in law. For example, eDiscovery is a really hot field right now. The basic problem: given a multi-terabyte corpus, which documents are legally relevant?
In the past one would gather a room full of lawyers and actually read through all of the documents (a task I did once). Now you can use a combination of linguists, lawyers, and search techniques to do the job.
(the discovery phase of a trial on average accounts for 50% of litigation expenses)
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but that's pretty broad. Are we talking: -Learning materials? ie- textbooks -Learning software? ie- someone just kill blackboard already
Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively. And they cost 6000 dollars to lease . And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them... But at least it's a step towards progress.
Smart boards seem like many lazy school boards' way of saying, "Here, now we can say we're up to speed in terms of technology." My high school did the same thing, and they were never used, but always brought up in school presentations.
Investing that money into getting an excellent technology administrator or computer science teacher would have made much more of a difference.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#37Electricity, the power grid... Right now I'm pretty sure power companies can't tell you if the power is on at your house or not...The system is pretty old.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The medical industry needs (good) software that helps with diagnosis. This covers mental health also. You have symptoms of problem and it helps narrow down. Need a massive database of all known diseases as well as symptoms / remedies. Chart location data for origin of specific disease, (less likely to be rabies if Australia etc) and probability from all factors. Would require huge amounts of data as well as many man…
You also need doctors to be willing to accept the software. They may not since they may feel that it makes their job look "easy" and will therefore cut into their incomes.
Thinking that doctors could be scared that their job looks easy makes me not only excited but all more hungry for this sort of software. This is the same thing labor said as it was mechanized. All sorts of other fields that changed to be technology reliant are the same. The idea that medicine could become "easy" could change this world maybe. Medicine becoming a job for more and more spread out is exciting to me. I hope we can make physicians near obsolete and direct professionals at research to better medicine.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#39Housing & Home Construction Most house construction in the industrialised world is still done by semi-skilled hand labour. There are few radical advances in materials or methods that have gained traction with the industry. Partly this is because the building industry is held back by antiquated construction codes that specify acceptable means and materials rather than the minimum performance constraints that buildings…
Alas, in construction circumventing the established order is generally known as a code violation, and frowned upon.
Re: Ask HN: What industry needs technical innovation?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The medical industry needs (good) software that helps with diagnosis. This covers mental health also. You have symptoms of problem and it helps narrow down. Need a massive database of all known diseases as well as symptoms / remedies. Chart location data for origin of specific disease, (less likely to be rabies if Australia etc) and probability from all factors. Would require huge amounts of data as well as many man…
You also need doctors to be willing to accept the software. They may not since they may feel that it makes their job look "easy" and will therefore cut into their incomes.
I work at a medical device company that does a lot of software related work. Making their work look easy is NOT an issue. The big problem is that insurance plans typically don't reimburse time spent with technology. For instance in Diabetes treatment a doc could look at your results and provide good feedback via email or phone, but there is not reimbursement code for this. So you take half a day off of work to have a 10 minute meeting with a doc.
Most docs would love more tech in their practices.