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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?

#141

Post by qsort »

nescioquid wrote: post #128
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

Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool! If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of a…

The only reason why I speak English is because I spent my teen years flaming strangers on Slashdot, you insensitive clod.

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

#142

Post by lotsofpulp »

petra wrote: post #132
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?

If it produces a better quality product/service with less volatility relative to cost, then yes.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

vavooom wrote: post #27
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. This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off that workforce.

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by slowhand09 »

phaedrus wrote: post #35
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.

As a millennial here's my childhood experience with that: I knocked on the door of an older lady (Silent Gen, or Greatest Gen) in my small town and negotiated to mow her lawn and the price. An unemployed older Baby Boomer who lived halfway between us saw me and/or overheard our conversation. As I was walking back to get my dad's push-mower & prepare it to run, this neighbor jumped on his riding lawnmower and quickly…

Did you give up mowing lawns forever based on that one experience? My stepson related a similar story once. He left out the part about he didn't return to mow until the next day. And the person who mowed was long gone when he arrived. Not implying you didn't make doing the job a priority. That, however, has been a common them for my stepson.

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

#146

Post by sofixa »

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…

Isn't that because rail freight is pretty much a solved problem with little left to research? Each one of those you mentioned have been discussed, optimised and reorganised hundreds if not thousands of times across hundreds of countries during the last more than a century of rail history. The answers are there, just not everyone bothers to look and apply them. Autonomous electric trains exist. Scheduling optimisations to the second are well developed.

However there's R&D into cheap electrifying with battery railcars - which is IMHO a dumb idea outside of niche railroads, electrification pays for itself in the medium to long term, a battery bandaid doesn't get you far.

Ans there's also a kind of innovation from India - dedicated rail freight corridors.

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

#147

Post by 7952 »

samwillis wrote: post #55

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 tw…

My complaint about cad is the exact opposite. That those traditional techniques have too much influence on how people use cad and how cad software was designed. People use low level abstractions that leave far too much to interpretation.

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

#148

Post by lotsofpulp »

Invictus0 wrote: post #56
ryandrake wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Especially if you have an SUV or higher car you can easily crawl under. Just unscrew the original plug, screw in a Fumoto valve, and an entire oil change is done in under 20 min, and then you just drop off the old oil at Autozone or whatever. While the oil is draining, you can change the air filters too.

Buy the Kirkland brand oil at Costco, and you do not have to trust whoever the mechanic shop hires to bust your car up or use low quality oil.

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

#149

Post by dazc »

alexchantavy wrote: post #45
phaedrus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a millennial here's my childhood experience with that: I knocked on the door of an older lady (Silent Gen, or Greatest Gen) in my small town and negotiated to mow her lawn and the price. An unemployed older Baby Boomer who lived halfway between us saw me and/or overheard our conversation. As I was walking back to get my dad's push-mower & prepare it to run, this neighbor jumped on his riding lawnmower and quickly…

Reminds me of when I started noticing adults in cars delivering newspaper instead of kids in bicycles around the time of the last recession

We get this in the UK too but often it's someone driving the car and a kid that gets out and actually delivers the paper?

We also have car washes that are either 100% automated or have 6 guys all cleaning one car. You can guess which is the most popular option.

I hear we have a productivity problem, no kidding.

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

#150

Post by jtsnow »

chrisweekly wrote: post #117
commoddity wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.

SimCopter and Crazy Taxi are older titles that come to mind.
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