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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?

#301

Post by defterGoose »

analog31 wrote: post #201
aappleby wrote: post #30

No single thing, but in general the gradually declining fraction of people capable of understanding complex systems "from top to bottom" concerns me. I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic understanding over time.

Physicist here. Hire more of us. Grokking complex systems, testing, and communicating our knowledge, are what we do.

Seriously. Did a physics bachelor's and taking a network science course in my master's right now. Also currently looking for a job, and it feels impossible to get people to take me, a generalist who can move up and down the problem stack with ease, seriously. I truly believe what Heinlein said; that specialization is for insects.

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

#302

Post by bawolff »

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.

I think the key is, nobody wants to be preached to. You need the game to naturally involve the skills you are trying to teach.

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

#303

Post by dysoco »

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…

I feel like this is largely a product of USA's society and maybe Europe; but here in Argentina I think it's absolutely the norm to try and fix things multiple times before giving up and buying something new; and many things are now not that expensive anymore, it's just in the culture.

Just to be clear you don't always fix them yourself; it's more common to pay someone who knows what they're doing.

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

#304

Post by egypturnash »

Hextinium wrote: post #227
adeelk93 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subtly different how?

Internet English has different "regional variety" than real life, for example I have litterally never heard "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.

"Grok" is not seen very much on the Internet outside of hacker/sci-fi fan circles. And it feels like using it in SF circles is very much marking you as An Old - it comes from Heinlein's "Stranger In A Strange Land", which is not a book that has aged well.

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

#305

Post by fffobar »

chaps wrote: post #82

Extracting deeply useful information from tens/hundreds/thousands of thousands of scanned PDFs in a way that dumps its information, regardless of structure (eg, tables, text), into a relational database that's (mostly) trivially queryable and repeatable. Preferably open source. This is such a hard problem right now.

> Extracting deeply useful information

This right there is the difficult part - what do you mean exactly? I cannot come up with anything better than search, as in like Google search. And they did it for books already, it's seriously good.

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

#306

Post by tylerlh »

ripper1138 wrote: post #233
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 you’d be surprised at how many people at Amazon work on logistics.

The work they do behind the scenes is very impressive. An "AWS, but for supply chain" would be huge in my (biased) opinion, though I'm curious whether they would be motivated enough to share their progress with the rest of the world since it's been quite a competitive advantage.

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

#307

Post by askvictor »

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 in principle, though taking the human (i.e. teacher) out of the loop is a very dangerous proposition (consider the current wave of book-banning in Texas).

At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges.

At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).

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

#308

Post by marginalia_nu »

acchow wrote: post #277
marginalia_nu wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, and realistically, you're just as likely to benefit from investigating lock and I/O contention. I wish my work was mostly optimizing single threaded CPU bottlenecks. Would make things a lot easier.

If you're dealing with disk access, sequential access is often so much faster than random I/O even in SSDs (especially in writes) that Big-O can be very misleading to look at.

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

#309

Post by jldugger »

manquer wrote: post #161
jldugger wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but also its kinda concerning that some CS faculty member does this as a hobby[1]. [1]: https://samueli.ucla.edu/time-zone-king-how-one-ucla-compute...

Still is better than some big corp distinguished engineer equivalent doing it in his free time. The CS prof probably has tenure , a lot of freedom on what he works on, never ending supply of TAs and students and can choose when he retires .

afaict, they're a "senior lecturer" not a tenure track faculty member.

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

#310

Post by analog31 »

defterGoose wrote: post #301
analog31 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physicist here. Hire more of us. Grokking complex systems, testing, and communicating our knowledge, are what we do.

Seriously. Did a physics bachelor's and taking a network science course in my master's right now. Also currently looking for a job, and it feels impossible to get people to take me, a generalist who can move up and down the problem stack with ease, seriously. I truly believe what Heinlein said; that specialization is for insects.

This is a puzzle to me, even late in my career. I think one thing is that as a company grows and matures, it gets more organized, and more formal about hiring. This makes it harder to hire misfits such as myself. HR has a hard time passing a misfit's resume along to a hiring manager. But also harder to get rid of us. ;-)

If bigger, more successful companies hire with an eye towards specialization, then the flip side is that there's a reward for workers who specialize. Also, many people like what they're doing, want to get good at it, and do more of it.

This is why, much as I love physics and don't regret studying it, I also won't tell anybody that it's a surefire career path.

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