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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?

#81

Post by mtoner23 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #65

There are shockingly few people maintaining the video encoding packages that most people rely on. https://xkcd.com/2347/ makes me think the same is true of image software as well. I'm pretty sure there's a timezone database that's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right. When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word wo…

I wonder if this is actually a more efficient way to run things than every company implementing timezones/tables/curl themselves for each of their needs. current situation isnt ideal but not horrible.

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

#82

Post by chaps »

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.

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

#83

Post by sanderjd »

Flankk wrote: post #42
aappleby wrote: post #30

No single thing, but in general the gradually declining fraction of people capable of understanding complex systems "from top to bottom" concerns me. I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic understanding over time.

That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with you when you leave.

That's why you don't want one person with top-to-bottom knowledge, but not why you don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge.

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

#84

Post by reb »

commoddity wrote: post #79
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 agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins? It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egypt…

First time hearing about this! Not a big AC fan, but this is more than enough reason to snag it; is that a platform-specific mode?

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

#85

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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.

Educational games are not the same as "gamification" as an incentive structure, and I also think you're being very prescriptive of your own research style. I knew several academics in my PhD that thrived off being able to publish papers in better conferences, faster, etc than their peers. Also there's a pretty strong niche of puzzle game solvers (think the MIT Puzzle Hunts) that love thinking through problems in gamified ways.

Educational games are just games that also teach fun things along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly broad topic and not something you research, but rather focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side. Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings or works of literature. Games with some light math-based puzzling.

I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with low level concepts, something that games can bring across better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of schools.

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

#86

Post by sanderjd »

api wrote: post #12

Improving 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…

Lots of people are working on this problem in different ways. But you're still right that it's a good answer to the question posed here!

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

#87

Post by bombcar »

dredmorbius wrote: post #51

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 ass…

I know that BNSF did wonders with modernizing how they dispatch trains (the old way is build a train until it's as long as it can be and then send it off, which meant you never could really predict when something would arrive) and they also are doing monitoring, etc:

https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/safety/artificial-i...

How much of it is fluff I don't know.

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

#88

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]

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

#89

Post by na85 »

cauthon wrote: post #71
mrtksn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the domain. Mavis Beacon absolutely outclassed any of the "classwork" on typing I had in school. edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe only if you were already inclined towards math

For me it was flirting with girls on ICQ, and getting owned at StarCraft 1 before voip was a thing.

Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.

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

#90

Post by bombcar »

bravetraveler wrote: post #74

Systems tuning, but it's an area that really got me to learn what I have over the years. I realize I'm a bit biased. It's amazing the number of production issues I've fixed with simple sysctl parameters. The Linux kernel defaults don't fit very well in this huge-cluster/scaling out world

One thing we're strongly missing is the kernel being able to notify that a sysctl parameter may help.

Sometimes it does things like "clock changed, is all hell breaking loose" but it could do much more when queues back up, etc.

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