Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 464 posts

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

#131

Post by debunn »

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 work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game ( https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at school or at home. While I don't think this is a good substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in this space for sure!

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

#132

Post by petra »

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…

//Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.

Why is that important? Must every job be automated?

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

#133

Post by happymellon »

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

Typing of the Dead did more for my touch typing than anything else.

I remember loads of educational games from my youth.

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

#134

Post by a_square_peg »

How to design thermally efficient buildings - especially everything that's going on with climate crisis. The thermal comfort solution to everything in the last 70 years has been to put an HVAC on it, whereas if the buildings were designed properly, the need to actively maintain internal temperature is minimized.

After talking to architects, I'm dismayed that basic heat transfer is not a part of their curriculum.

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

#135

Post by JonChesterfield »

ramesh31 wrote: post #40
birdman3131 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Titan's of CNC and Haas both have great youtube channels addressing training because of exactly this.

>Titan's of CNC and Haas both have great youtube channels addressing training because of exactly this. I would love to get into aerospace manufacturing. Any chance a code monkey can make the switch? What is the entry level pathway like?

aerospace -> code monkey seems to be the more common route to me but that might be sample bias

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

#136

Post by tareqak »

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…

It was released as a free update to the base game, but it is also available as a standalone title at a price lower than the base game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/775430/Discovery_Tour_by_...

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

#137

Post by Oarch »

a_square_peg wrote: post #134

How to design thermally efficient buildings - especially everything that's going on with climate crisis. The thermal comfort solution to everything in the last 70 years has been to put an HVAC on it, whereas if the buildings were designed properly, the need to actively maintain internal temperature is minimized. After talking to architects, I'm dismayed that basic heat transfer is not a part of their curriculum.

Ex architect in Europe here. It definitely is and has been part of standard curriculums for at least the last 20 years.

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

#138

Post by sowbug »

Less a specific technology and more a mindset. Repairing things around the house. Today, it's almost always rational to throw out the broken thing and buy a new one. There are a bunch of reasons why that's true: cost of one's own labor, lack of discrete replacement parts, lack of repair documentation, improvements in technology since original purchase, risk of further breakage, risk of injury to self, etc.

But the real cost is that people generally don't know how things work anymore. They're just black boxes, even simple things like a coffee maker or a clothes dryer. Which further reduces the demand for repairability, which seems like a downward spiral toward everything being disposable.

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

#139

Post by landonxjames »

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 saw a talk by an engineer from Parallel Systems [0] and they seem to be doing some very cool stuff for the future of rail. Autonomous Electric rail cars and some other interesting things

[0] https://moveparallel.com/

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

#140

Post by cpitman »

barbarbar wrote: post #26

All things related to mainframe, cics, cobol etc. It seems like it has been tried to replace it for decades. But it also seems like that replacement is not getting anywhere.

This is the most real answer so far. Knowledge is being lost in the field, very few want to learn the field, and it is needed in just about every company. Companies that existed in the 80s and have managed to migrate off of the mainframe are the very very small minority.

Pay is part of this, but I'd posit that most programmers would need to be paid a hefty premium over standard rates to be will to work on what they consider legacy or dying technology.

Post reply on HN