(Civil) Nuclear technology.
Came here to say that. From what I understand, a lot of nuclear welders retired and because very few projects happened in the past couple of decades, their expertise was not transfered. It is a shame.
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?
#12Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives EVs, and also making the grid more maintainable, more robust, and easier to fix if damaged by anything from mundane causes to EMPs.
Some thoughts:
* Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side with existing equipment and grid voltages. That way existing rights of way can carry far more power over existing wires.
* Smaller more modular cheaper substation equipment that can be slotted in and rapidly replaced, eventually to replace the mega-transformers and stuff that are very hard to physically ship places. Today there are substations with equipment so unwieldy that it would be physically challenging to ship replacement equipment.
* Lower cost methods of stringing new high power transmission lines to bring distant renewable energy to cities.
* Make undersea power lines as cheap (or nearly so) as undersea fiber allowing "global supergrid" systems to share renewable energy.
* Protection equipment or techniques to reduce damage from solar storms or EMP.
The power grid is becoming more and more central and essential to human life, and we are about to drop tons more demand on it via electrification of transport and HVAC (heat pumps). Yet it seems like there's not much innovation there. Right now if everyone comes home and plugs in their car it crashes the grid in many places, and this won't do.
Batteries are hot, but they're still too expensive to back up whole cities or regions. The need for batteries can be greatly reduced if the grid can be made bigger, wider, and at least an order of magnitude more reliable.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#13My 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 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
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#14Construction
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#15Joe Armstrong gave a good talk on forgotten ideas in Computer Science.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#16My 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 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.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#17If I had to guess, I'd say food distribution and preservation. But that's just a guess.
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#18My 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 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.
Definitely, transfer can only happen when knowledge is organised and understandable by a variety of stakeholders, with different backgrounds (education, languages spoken, years of expertise)
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#19This may not be the type of answer you're looking for but near me insurance companies (AmFam, Sentry, etc) pay extremely well for the area and pay big money to purchase startups
The problem I've found in this space is the data. I and my colleagues have done consulting work for several insurance companies. I'd love to develop some sick claim processing/auditing software or data management solution for insurance, but it's next to impossible to get visibility into the data they're processing and where the improvement opportunities lie without working there or having an in.
I've done so much work in this space that I wrote up a patern that I modify as needed. The only data-specific issues you'll encounter are the underwriting rules - each insurer has their own secret sauce that they guard very closely.
My template - https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Protection_System.aspx
Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
#20Maybe IBM's Mainframe? I mean reliable hardware, etc.