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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?

#181
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

When I read this I can't help but think of the meme that goes: Why don't we just like, put nicotine in salad so everyone can get addicted to salad?

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

#182

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.

Tens of millions buys and plays truck simulators, so these games already exists. You have many other kinds, but the truck simulator one is the most popular. This type of game is much more popular in Europe than in USA though.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/227300/Euro_Truck_Simulat...

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

#183

Everything agriculture, most farmers had their children go off to school and then the cities. Now it’s only really people in their 50s in the fields. As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on. It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old…

AgTech is big enough to have it's own tag on TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/tag/agtech/ It might not be interesting on the coasts, but there are a bunch of agriculture startups in midwestern places like Urbana-Champaign.

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

#184

Online safety education for the younger generations. There's of course outliers, but as a rule I've seen some scary amounts of zoomers who have zero idea of why giving out a photo of their government ID card (unredacted) to total strangers for age verification is a very bad idea. It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and name)" that I got.

Good one!

I ranted on reddit about this topic a while ago but the gist of it is that the stakes of online harm are just so much higher now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I feel like I learned about safety online in the hard way: failing, but I went through the stages of everything back when the cost of mistakes was needing to wipe a drive and start over, the upcoming youth today won't have that luxury.

The other complicating problem is just how few people are actually good at it. Who is suitable to be the teachers in this space? I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, I've just been burned enough times to be skeptical by default and trust virtually nothing anymore. I guess that's a good start, but how does that get passed onto the next generation in a productive way?

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

#185

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…

Try Shapr3D on macOS and iOS and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised -- maybe even shocked -- at how amazing CAD software can be. Should be. The UX quality is exceptional and inspiring.

P.S. I have no connection to the product or company (based in Budapest I think).

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

#186

Health insurance navigation and transparency (US): People who go through dealing with health insurance: a lot of this knowledge is difficult to transfer, but is very valuable, and usually transferred through word-of-mouth. People who suddenly have a need for a treatment or surgery, don't always know what their options are and how to deal with insurance claims in the best manner, or to maximize coverage and deal with…

Or we could fix the health insurance system. Other nations are doing significantly better in this area.

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

#187
post #147

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.

I would love to hear more of your thoughts on that.

I could see that being the case with 2d focussed cad tools such as AutoCad, however “3d first” tools like Revit for architecture or SolidWorks for product design are so far removed form traditional drafting I don’t realy see any alignment.

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

#188
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I always like reading about, and comments from, ESL people who learned basically Internet English. Subtly different to UK and USA English but comprehensible by all.

Subtly different how?

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

#189

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…

Tell your Dad to start making youtube videos- that seems like the best way to preserve that kind of knowledge.

Ha! Not sure that would happen, he’s practically a luddite.

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

#190

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…

I'm a partner in a factory and I believe this is an incredibly important area, and the requirements are fairly different than normal "just put it on Confluence" workplaces, in a way that most tech people don't understand and usually completely miss the mark when they're doing product dev. - Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it with a…

It sounds really interesting to work in a manufacturing plant for a year or two in order to empathize with the industry and learn how to blend in software in a way that actually solves problems like you describe. Or, generally, to penetrate areas where technology solutions don't apply obviously. I wonder how you'd set that kind of arrangement up. If you could design a company around displacing a few cofounders for a few years where the product research is hands on, on the ground, doing the job, I bet there are many people who would be interested in this type of setup. I agree the software industry does way too much "solve for ourselves first" type of product development and it's really discouraging.
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