431–440 of 464 posts
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On the topic of chokepoints and tradeoffs, the question of upgrading freight lines around Chicago is pretty fascinating.
Chicago (or more accurately, Lake Michegan) is a pretty massive transportation disruptor generally. Highway trucking as I-90, I-94, and I-80 converge is hellacious.
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.
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...
1. https://lifeinmind.org.au/news/high-rates-of-farmer-suicides...
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.
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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…
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I would +1 this I think the long term best thing we can be doing is documenting the how and why of building, designing, fixing, working with etc... everything
Many companies store huge amounts of documents, but every team does it in its own way. One template can quickly result in thousands of variations. If robust documentation principles are not used from the very beginning (checklists / reduction in free text, visual indications, etc), it will be a nightmare to make sense of that data afterwards. Also, there is no value in generating large amounts of text data unless you…
Better and more granular documentation in a form that can be interpreted by humans and also machine readable would be a desirable outcome for any system. Especially true for systems in which the builders and operators are being replaced or EOLed
Better?
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…
This is the big one for me. This will be very alien to a big portion of HN users, but I am NOT a hardware hacker. Browse the DIY subreddits and for every single impressive thing someone has done, you can read the comments about how they have somehow stumbled into building a death trap for themselves and their family.
I guess professionals are probably no better, but what else can you do.
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.
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The average age of a farmer in Canada is 56 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220...
Here in Japan, average 67.9yo. Industry is going to die.
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…