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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?

#51

Post by dredmorbius »

Railroads. Specifically freight rail.

There is stunningly little literature on any R&D in conventional freight rail transport, something I discovered when looking for any published research some months back.

High-speed rail, yes. Regular old freight, no.

Contrast this with autonomous and electrified trucking as alternatives, with which rail could offer considerable synergies.

I'd suspect that break-bulk, trainset assembly and disassembly, and routing might all offer opportunities.

But ... nada.

I suspect other modalities within the transport sector might be similar, notably ocean shipping.

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

#52

Post by systemvoltage »

Industrial automation and manufacturing:

- Need a dedicated degree (2 year as well as 4 year) in Manufacturing

- Trade schools and apprenticeship programs that do not sound like scam

- Automated material movement and handling

- Machine vision, automation of quality assurance

- Automated mold making and plastic injection molding optimization (still done by humans and takes 4 months)

- Factory software (ERP, MRP, MES, SPC, etc.)

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

#53

Post by jollyllama »

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…

There are hundred million dollar manufacturing companies out there tracking whole processes with pen and paper. Just sayin'.

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

#55

Post by samwillis »

Traditional draftsmanship (not really tech is it?), as in with a pen/pencil on a draftsman table, has completely disappeared.

My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art.

There are now almost two generations of working architects, those that learnt 2D CAD in the 90s and early 00s who still think in 3d and translate it themselves to 2d in cad (a little like traditional draftsmanship). And those since who have only ever worked in 3d and used the tooling to “project” 2d elevations and sections.

I trained at university in the early 2000s in Industrial Design, we did some traditional drafting lesions (maybe three or four weeks). But then jumped straight to 3d CAD and never looked back. I suspect they don’t even do those lessons now, and in fact most kids have probably done some 3D cad at school, maybe only 10% had when I started.

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

#56

Post by Invictus0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #39
georgeburdell wrote: post #24

Not tech but I think millenials, gen Z, and younger have lost the know-how to make a dollar independently of mega corps. I never see kids going door to door mowing lawns anymore, for example.

Non-tech DIY in general is becoming lost. There is so much knowledge available on YouTube but so many of my younger friends just pay people $hundreds to do very simple, quick things. I’m not talking about transmission replacement, but ridiculously simple things like fixing a leaking toilet and changing motor oil.

Changing motor oil always comes up but it is really worth paying someone a few bucks to do it for you.

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

#57

Post by jobs_throwaway »

mrtksn wrote: post #50
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 don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.

PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire a desire to learn something more deeply through games.

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

#58

Post by conductr »

freeqaz wrote: post #21
whiteboardr wrote: post #14

Construction

I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to). The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make t…

I hired a carpenter a few years ago and we became friends / stay in touch. He had just started his own company in 2018 and the work he did for me he did with a “helper”. By 2020, he ran 5 crews and jumped in where needed to help keep deadlines and whatnot. In 2022, he said he hasn’t picked up a hammer in over a year other than training his crews of which he now has 12. All the growth has been entirely word of mouth, they all drive plain white construction vehicles without his company branding on them and he has never marketed his company at all.

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

#59

Post by boringg »

neutronicus wrote: post #38
boringg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree with knowledge organization. It's either you have to root through academic texts or try and navigate the spammy internet with no really happy medium. It's almost like there's a complete lack of quality middle ground information. It's either total SEO garbage or very low quality entry level information or incredibly specific/dense academic content and the middle ground is missing.

Back when I was in grad school, PhD theses were indispensable for actually learning my way around a topic. The academic literature itself (even review papers) was way too terse and (I believe, semi-intentionally) obfuscatory.

I would assume that it hasn't changed much since you were in grad school.
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