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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?

#251

Post by dogcomplex »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #236
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…

Self driving train seems like a no brainer. I suspect that even with the tech 10 years ago it could have been solved. Where are they and why isn't someone working on it? I suspect when something is this obvious, yet we don't see a product, it has to do with someone in the industry fighting change and making sure it does not happen.

Probably little savings in just outsourcing that one (small team of) humans to AIs, and you lose your custodian for negotiating out-of-the-box situations. Seems easy enough though.

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

#252

Post by ccooffee »

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…

An old college friend went to work for CSX (I think), and we caught up after he'd worked there for a few years. He said that most of his job consisted of digging into old COBOL code to explain why a train was routed a certain way (e.g. Reno -> Phoenix -> LA -> SF instead of Reno -> SF), and that he rarely ever changed the code. They just made summary documents saying "there was rail congestion on the normal route".

I've always hoped that he was just yanking my chain and that they did...well, anything really.

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

#253

Post by amelius »

Computer science. We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation. Now we just talk in terms of how fast it runs on the newest Nvidia cards. Also, most discussions here are about how you can glue existing stuff together and turn it into a profit. I hardly see any real CS anymore these days on online forums, let alone progress. Closest thing I remember is an article that discussed whether CSS stylesheets are Turing complete.

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

#254

Post by Temasik »

kkfx wrote: post #22

Lisp, Smalltalk are the first family of important tech fading to oblivion due to time passing and corporate interest. Most people do not think them in such terms but they represent The Real Desktop tech, the user programmable flexible environment to live in to free the power of computing. Without it, like today, our civilization lost an immense opportunity. We need people that work to push desktop systems, single-app…

No post body was provided.

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

#255

Post by darepublic »

charleshan wrote: post #239
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gami…

This comment reminds me of Status as a Service by Eugene Wei. "Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being publ…

Some status games are better than others. ie when the game requires some common good to be performed, or the mastery of a useful skill. Some status games reward things that only drag us down

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

#256

Post by buscoquadnary »

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

Recently I got the game "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" for my kids to play on steam since I got young kids and I remember loving that game when I was younger.

The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it.

It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.

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

#257

Post by projektfu »

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

Paper routes were pretty exploitative. The children, often around 12 years old, were/are treated as independent contractors who buy the papers and have to collect the money themselves. Deadbeats could avoid paying for some time, usually until a parent chewed them out. When you went on vacation you were responsible for finding your replacement and paying them.

Throw stranger danger into the mix and it's obvious why kids aren't doing paper routes anymore.

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

#258

Post by darepublic »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #44
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've been exploring Encarta 96 on a Windows 95 VM I've been curating for active nostalgia and I gotta say it's pretty awesome. I feel like we are missing out on some magic from those days. Even the intro screen still gives me goosebumps

I remember Encarta 9x as well

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

#259

Post by gaoshancha »

cpitman wrote: post #140
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 c…

I found this to be an area that really doesn’t want motivated people, just entry level blank slate newcomers.

I tried to get into this field for four years and gave up. I’ve got 10+ years as a UNIX guy mind you. I participated in IBM master the mainframe every year to get real hands-on experience and practice. I did IBMs courses on Coursera for more practice. I read the red books to learn even more! I also took classes at an community college on IBM midranges too as a potential alternative to mainframes; I interned at a factory and worked with RPG-IV and AS/400 way back. Yet I didn’t get a single reply to a resume I sent out, not even a follow up email.

If you really look into this, IBM and their network of partner companies that do mainframes are really only looking for entry level folks out of college or 2 year schools. My guess is that companies have slashed their mainframe budgets so much they can’t afford non-entry level folks, and assumed experienced techs won’t take the pay cuts. It won’t be until the mass retirements that organizations will really panic I suppose…

It was at least fun learning the tech though, would love to had the opportunity to learn even more. Or even just have access to a system z to continue learning on…

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

#260

Post by thenerdhead »

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

Why does education have to be entertaining? Interactive, sure. But not entertaining due to attention spans dwindling.
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