Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 464 posts

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

#421

Post by barrysteve »

rwnspace wrote: post #290
darepublic wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some status games are better than others. ie when the game requires some common good to be performed, or the mastery of a useful skill. Some status games reward things that only drag us down

As an aside, when people point out virtue signalling (I'm taking it as an analogue of status games) without adding some analysis my first assumption is that they are virtue-signalling to put others down or make others seem shallow (or themselves deep). The cornerstone of western morality is Jesus and he was quite the "virtue signaller". Point being that the observation on it's own is uninteresting without saying some…

Jesus spoke about humility and dying for your beliefs, which he did. Martyrs don't need to signal their virtue (or social status), they do the virtous thing.

Status is a public display of desireability. It doesn't have much to do with virtue, but everyone wants it anyway.

Don't blend those two concepts, they are separate. People who make a public display and performance out of their virtues, 'virtue signallers' miss the point. You do it in humility before God.

People who don't show off their status, get little benefit out of it.

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

#422

Post by ramboldio »

motohagiography wrote: post #204
ramboldio wrote: post #110

Government Software.

The question was "boring but important" not "pointless." I tease, but I've worked on a lot of government tech and their only use cases are surveillance and lying. It's why PowerBI is so popular.

then maybe more 'municipal software'

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

#423

Post by 7952 »

samwillis wrote: post #187
7952 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My complaint about cad is the exact opposite. That those traditional techniques have too much influence on how people use cad and how cad software was designed. People use low level abstractions that leave far too much to interpretation.

I would love to hear more of your thoughts on that. I could see that being the case with 2d focussed cad tools such as AutoCad, however “3d first” tools like Revit for architecture or SolidWorks for product design are so far removed form traditional drafting I don’t realy see any alignment.

I work in an infrastructure field with lots of engineering disciplines doing separate design. Designs are typically exchanged in AutoCAD even when a 3d tool are used to make them. Or AutoCAD is used to do design work in 3D. BIM exists but is just another data silo. A lot of the large engineering companies will try and push their own BIM solution which adds one more silo that no one else uses.

Everyone wants their own system and solution to be the single source of truth and that is a huge part of the problem. On a project of thousands of people there is never going to be a single source of truth. It's like expecting a globally distributed system to be in sync. Ultimately you have to chose between locking and eventual consistency and there is no other option. Having a single BIM system helps but is not a silver bullet. Because people will still get out of sync as other teams and tools are brought into play.

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

#424

Post by fhsm »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #331
lkrubner wrote: post #313

Secretaries. The corporation of the mid-20th Century was run by an army of secretaries. They allowed for an important kind of flexibility. They've been replaced by software, which is more rigid, and which does harm because of its lack of flexibility. Software engineers tend to over-estimate the productivity gains that come from software, while underestimating how much we lose to the rigidness of software (which is of…

I think your story is off topic, but really touching nonetheless (plenty of people are working on hospital software, even if it's largely pretty bad) Glad that the worst that happened to your mom is that a nurse was confused about her food, rather than amputating the wrong leg or something (I wonder if faulty software has ever been the cause of this) I wonder if the situation with hospital software will ever improve

Not a wrong side surgery but history of harm is well established, eg:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/200498

That both are older is either a sign that we are yet to recognize present harm or that things have improved. Check back in 20 years for clarity on that issue I guess.

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

#425

Post by thedougd »

barbarbar wrote: post #26

All things related to mainframe, cics, cobol etc. It seems like it has been tried to replace it for decades. But it also seems like that replacement is not getting anywhere.

I directly worked on the planning of a replacement deposits system for a major financial institution. The existing system was written in COBOL and the vendor did not want to continue any business, including maintenance support, on this old software. We were already able to extend the software ourselves without their help to add integrations or features.

Consultants came in and offered the following suggestions:

1) Write new software to replace. Estimate $3-400 million dollars.

2) Use a product that would transpile the COBOL to Java.

We chose option 3: offer a lump sump to license the software in perpetuity and maintain ourselves. Built a layer around it to better enable the systems of engagement use cases.

The problem with #1 and #2 is documenting all the use cases and validating them after changes are made. Can you even imagine the resulting Java code for #2? There are many edge case behaviors that were either purposeful or accidental, but now relied upon by downstream software.

To summarize, there's a huge price tag to replace these systems, it's an extremely high risk exercise, and the benefits to the business are at best incremental. It's easy to see why the financial sector won't bother until either regulators force them or they acquire another institution with a better system.

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

#427

Post by otoburb »

chaps wrote: post #351
pani5ue wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Tess…

Oh yes, I'm very familiar with these. All these do though is extract information, but don't immediately make them useful. So there's a massive gulf of a middle-step that's not yet done. Textract gets close...ish to that, but it's prohibitively expensive.

Even with Amazon Textract, the middle step to curate extracted information into some form of meaning is still missing. Didn't realize this is still an unsolved problem.

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

#428

Post by icco »

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…

Specifically small agriculture too. Most investment is in huge farms, very little investment in making small agriculture (think less than 10 acres) more affordable and accessible. Most of this is policy problems in the US, but globally its also a problem.

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

#429

Post by chaps »

otoburb wrote: post #427
chaps wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, I'm very familiar with these. All these do though is extract information, but don't immediately make them useful. So there's a massive gulf of a middle-step that's not yet done. Textract gets close...ish to that, but it's prohibitively expensive.

Even with Amazon Textract, the middle step to curate extracted information into some form of meaning is still missing. Didn't realize this is still an unsolved problem.

Very much so. Here's an example document I work with that has information that's difficult to extract from: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6929951/CRID-1061543....

Lots of missing context from these sheets that has to be interpreted (ie, how do you taxonomize each field of information?). Then asking questions on top of these documents is a step on top: "is the allegation about sexual violence?", "What is the name and rank of the person being accused?", "Is anything anomalous in the review process?", "Has this person's rank changed in the past 5 years?" etc etc.

Now expand this problem to hundreds of thousands of different types of document.

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

#430

Post by bloody-crow »

xylon wrote: post #372

I always wondered why cars dont give an indication when a bulb blows. Should be pretty easy to do and improve road safety.

Every car built in the last 20 years can detect when a bulb blows. Doesn't seem like it accomplishes much given how many people just straight up ignore warning lights on their dashes.
Post reply on HN