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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?

#451

Post by ismailmo1 »

dragostudor wrote: post #6

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

I used to work in manufacturing as a process engineer (now a dev) and this is fascinating to learn about. Do you have any articles on your work or any use cases where I can learn more?

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

#452

Post by mejutoco »

mrtksn wrote: post #102
rmdoss wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo is doing it amazingly to learn a new language.

I speak 3 languages, attempted to learn the 4th one (German) on Duolingo and I find it very ineffective. I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My En…

I agree. One skill is recognizing the meaning from a sentence already formed (what Duolingo puzzles consist of). A very different skill is coming up with the sentence in the target language without hints.

There is the company called Assimil that has small books based on this concept, where first you are filling in the blanks (not choose from preexisting options) and as the book progresses you have to fill in more and more of the sentence.

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

#453

Post by julianeon »

kjellsbells wrote: post #37
tmaly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not just knowledge transfer, but knowledge organization. We have so many different ways to represent knowledge, but it is very hard to access it or know where to look. I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.

Former librarian here, now at a tech co. This is exactly the domain of information science, and its a salutary tale in two industries talking past one another. Librarians have deep training in the science, philosophy and psychology of information storage and retrieval. Most of the time you think of things like Dewey numbers on library books buts its much more than that. At the dawn of the second internet age (circa 1…

Have you considered going into SEO? Combining SEO expertise w information science sounds like market dynamite. There is probably a 5k/month blog in simply applying information science concepts to SEO in practice, to say nothing of the consulting gigs, etc.

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

#454

Post by julianeon »

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…

If you are serious about your business, you should think more about the PR aspect of it. Without any planning or preparation you have an absolutely guaranteed PR disaster on your hands. Your product needs careful messaging and some kind of strategy for what to do about the inevitable “can’t believe this is real” news stories.

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

#456

Post by chestervonwinch »

jollyllama wrote: post #445
chestervonwinch wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yea, that's where the difference between contractor vs. consultant becomes a little blurry. No idea on books though, sorry.

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

#457

Post by spikyman »

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'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge?

The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.

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

#458

Post by fizzpack »

spikyman wrote: post #457
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'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge? The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.

This seems key to me. We need to teach people how to learn autonomously. And provide them with quality tools to learn from.

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

#459

Post by rewq4321 »

Balgair wrote: post #284
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving train seems like a no brainer. I suspect that even with the tech 10 years ago it could have been solved. Where are they and why isn't someone working on it? I suspect when something is this obvious, yet we don't see a product, it has to do with someone in the industry fighting change and making sure it does not happen.

Unions?

Yep, unions are fighting against even allow moving to 1 crew member per train, let alone zero.

https://smart-union.org/our-priorities/legislative-issues/

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2022-15540.pdf

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

#460

Post by dogman144 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #218
dogman144 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Shift5

Care to unpack that / explain what element(s) are addressed?

Shift5 is a company doing the R&D and documentation on tech concepts around railroads, specifically fleet monitoring and security.
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