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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?

#441

Post by kwere »

what-imright wrote: post #347

My startup is working on solutions to crop failure scenarios such as from a nuclear war. Unfortunately we calculate there are probable outcomes where the only reasonable course of action is for one selected group to actually consume parts of the population in order to survive a nuclear winter. And so we’re building an automated system to take a newly deceased human being and create as many wholesome and nutritious me…

a cool thing about late business cycle "speculation" (VC in this case probably) is that really pie in the sky projects get cash, creating sometimes successes

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

#442

Post by tnorthcutt »

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

You might find https://www.synthesis.com/ interesting. They develop games in-house that teach kids problem-solving, collaboration skills, dealing with unknowns/dynamic conditions, etc. etc.

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

#443

Post by simonjgreen »

Copper based telephony systems. So much knowledge in peoples heads, not just technical how-to but system and network knowledge. These things were built by people with quirks understood by people and are mission critical still.

They will be replaced by IP and fibre, but not yet.

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

#444

Post by fomine3 »

kwere wrote: post #439
fomine3 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Japan, average 67.9yo. Industry is going to die.

how much is the average farmer net income? in italy, as a son of farmers i see the biggest problem being the average size of holdings, too small to live on with the peace of mind, and the really absymal ROE of the sector, below 2%, making it impossible to expanding with debt in the industry. like, i would need 1.8 M euros of capital in farming (cereals + meat calfs) to give a family a BARELY MIDDLE class lifestyle.

Average net profit is very low ($10K) but it's because majority of farmers are old small family, They also receive pension, may work on another part time job, eat their own veges, and do barter exchange. Average net profit for full-timer (under 65yo) is also lower ($30K) but to be fair local jobs salary is also tend to low,

Here, problem is that there are few newcomer to be a farmer. It's unpopular to live rural area. People in rural area are generally considered to treat newcomers unkindly. Local people grown by farmer also don't want to choose farming as a first career (but may choose after retiring, or help father's farming). Farming lands have been tend to be divided for small lands (partially thanks to WW2 lose), and generally Japan lands aren't so flat, so productivity isn't great thus income isn't great.

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

#445

Post by jollyllama »

chestervonwinch wrote: post #411
dragostudor wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds awesome, have been working on several such project as well. would be great to share experiences

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek because "digital transformation" has become an overused marketing term. But I think the core of it is valid -- a company has an inefficient process due to lack of technical expertise or whatever and you help them fix it. There's multiple parts to this field of work: networking to find leads, doing discovery to understand a potential client's problem, formulating a technical solution,…

Sometimes they have in-house teams that are slowly switching things over. Are there any good blogs/articles/books on starting or running such a consultancy?

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

#446

Post by groby_b »

astrange wrote: post #328
groby_b wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. L…

I mean, I know the Bay Area fails to understand that, but you scale up housing by building more multi-level housing, not faster building of single homes.

And what multi-level housing there is being built is absolutely devoid of any creativity already, it can't really get more factory-like.

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

#447

Post by JJMcJ »

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 software change but one reason you get asked a dozen times "Are you having your the nails on your left big toe clipped" (joke procedure in a hospital of course) is to help avoid exactly these errors.

Is the patient who you think it is.

Does the patient agree with what your procedure says to do.

Often the area to be worked on (like the left big toe in my joke) is marked and the patient agreed with that marking.

There are a number of other such safeguards, similar to pre-flight checklists in aviation.

Institution these processes have greatly reduced treatment errors.

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

#448

Post by JJMcJ »

A lot of manufacturing operations are having trouble getting the skilled workers they need, like precision machinists, because the older generation is retiring and there aren't enough people learning those occupations.

When you read discussions of "going into the trades" instead of going to college, there is almost never a mention of the skilled trades. It all seems to be construction, and I think that's a mistake.

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

#449

Post by ethbr0 »

jtsnow wrote: post #150
chrisweekly wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.

SimCopter and Crazy Taxi are older titles that come to mind.

>> less focused on violence

> Crazy Taxi

You must have been a much better Crazy Taxi driver than my friends and I...

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

#450

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]
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