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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?

#321

Post by n4bz0r »

tareqak wrote: post #136
commoddity wrote: post #79

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…

It was released as a free update to the base game, but it is also available as a standalone title at a price lower than the base game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/775430/Discovery_Tour_by_...

Also available on YouTube for free :>

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y79Jf1nXW_4 (7+ hours!)

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

#322

Post by kukx »

l33tbro wrote: post #263
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…

In my experience it just comes down to time and competing priorities. Would I love to deep dive into my fuse box and learn how to rewire it? Very much so. But the limited free time I have needs to go into side projects and life goals. I say this having just come out the other side of a long period of learning how stuff in my house works. While it has certainly been satisfying, I'm looking forward to just paying peopl…

This. Do the most valuable thing you can. If repairing provides significantly less value than your other work, do not repair. It is great that we can afford so much stuff now. Thanks to it we can spend more time on helping the environment.

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

#323

Post by jschveibinz »

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

“Legends of Learning” is looking for educational game developers for those who are interested:

https://www.legendsoflearning.com/interested-game-developer/

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

#324

Post by acover »

lettergram wrote: post #165

Everything agriculture, most farmers had their children go off to school and then the cities. Now it’s only really people in their 50s in the fields. As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on. It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old…

The average age of a farmer in Canada is 56

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220...

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

#325

Post by pani5ue »

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.

I'm doing this for a customer right now!

Using Textract from Amazon to do the OCR. I dump the raw json in a SQLite database.

Information extraction is trickier. I extract useful things like lines and pages, locations of lines, set up various columns and now can search the SQLite db either with python code or SQL queries.

There's of course cost for running textract OCR on AWS. There are open source solutions like Tesseract

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

#326

Post by master_yoda_1 »

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

Totally agree, learning geometry or linear algebra through AR/VR would be so easy and intuitive

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

#327

Post by honkdaddy »

digdugdirk wrote: post #62
mrtksn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego, for example, has probably created generations of people with incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of all kinds. It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.

Yep. Perfect example of this being the Lego Mindstorms platform. We had a "robotics club" at my private school which used the Mindstorms visual programming tools; there were 10 year olds learning about loops and variables in a way that was legitimately _fun_.

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

#328

Post by astrange »

groby_b wrote: post #193
jckahn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the slower process lead to a superior result, exactly? Are there designs that modern CAD systems can't achieve that the older process could? If so, perhaps it would be more practical to focus on closing that gap by improving our modern tooling.

Modern CAD systems tend to produce reproducible, very similar systems. Drafting produces individualized solutions. "Superior" depends on what you want. (For housing, I want individualized so badly. If I see one more SillyValley SWE storehouse - excuse me, "luxury housing" - I'm going to vomit. They're all exactly the same. I'm fairly certain the firms involved have traded macros or something) I'm not sure you can clo…

Housing is super expensive in SFBA because it's all individual. In SF any housing project needs to make it through design meetings where all your neighbors make arbitrary aesthetic complaints about how it looks and how it casts shadows on things.

To get housing back to the rates it was built (and the price you could buy it at) in the 60s it needs to be a hundred times faster and more factory manufactured, not less.

Luckily, if you wait a hundred years people will like anything. That's the only reason people like mass-produced Eichlers, SF Victorians, and NYC brownstones.

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

#329

Post by rufius »

bravetraveler wrote: post #294
rufius wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think about it a lot. A portion of my job has been either optimizing big systems or building very minimally invasive software that has to process a lot of data.

It’s akin to tuning a sports car. You can slap a big engine in a car, but the difference of a few seconds off of a lap is thousands of man-hours in optimization and tuning.

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

#330

Post by astrange »

ccooffee wrote: post #262
dangets wrote: post #15

Joe Armstrong gave a good talk on forgotten ideas in Computer Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ

Can't watch the video right now, but the slides (available at [0]) list these four "forgotten ideas": 1. Linda Tuple Spaces [1] 2. Flow based programming [2] 3. Xanadu [3] 4. Unix pipes [4] [0] https://codesync.global/uploads/media/default/0001/01/de7dfa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu [4] https:…

Almost everyone who wants to fundamentally reinvent programming seems to come up with visual dataflow programming, which is strange to me because aren't those just function calls?
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