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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?

#331

Post by pcthrowaway »

lkrubner wrote: post #313

Secretaries. The corporation of the mid-20th Century was run by an army of secretaries. They allowed for an important kind of flexibility. They've been replaced by software, which is more rigid, and which does harm because of its lack of flexibility. Software engineers tend to over-estimate the productivity gains that come from software, while underestimating how much we lose to the rigidness of software (which is of…

I think your story is off topic, but really touching nonetheless (plenty of people are working on hospital software, even if it's largely pretty bad)

Glad that the worst that happened to your mom is that a nurse was confused about her food, rather than amputating the wrong leg or something (I wonder if faulty software has ever been the cause of this)

I wonder if the situation with hospital software will ever improve

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

#332

Post by jrmg »

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

I'm pretty sure that's also because the number of households that get newspaper delivery now is so low, and so the density so low, that it's necessary to have a car to do it.

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

#333

Post by dubcee349 »

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 think graphic text books is also a super interesting field that is starting to be more heavily explored.

I did play many MS DOS learning games as a kid and i think they were helpful. (math blaster would be one that i remember the most)

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

#334

Post by austinjp »

Making-do and mending (repairing your own clothing, furniture, utensils etc).

Composting, and gardening for food. Pickling. Fermenting.

Cooking large, healthy meals together in intergenerational groups, and communally with strangers.

I could go on, but basically anything and everything our grandparents did, and is now only done in "the West" in dwindling rural communities.

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

#335

Post by zip1234 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #288
sofixa wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optimisation…

There's a argument to be made for this. As of about 30 years ago, I had the opportunity to observe a freight yard at which the tech was 1920s -- 1930s vintage (electromechanical relays controlling switches). I suspect there are many such instances still in operation. To an extent, what works, works, but there are also limitations and sheer maintenance. But at a bigger-picture view, as I read what's being discussed fo…

Trucking is also highly subsidized via highway money, with gas/usage taxes covering less than half of roads..= Take that away or make trucks pay for wear and tear and maybe we would see more investment in rail. Long haul trucking almost shouldn't exist given how much cheaper and more efficient rail is.

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

#336

Post by ccorcos »

sowbug wrote: post #138

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 re…

I feel like there's a city vs suburbs correlation here too.

If you live in a city, (nevermind the fact that you're probably renting and paying way to much in rent consider fixing anything yourself) you probably don't have the space and the tools to enjoy taking apart and fixing things.

In the suburbs, you probably have a garage and a side yard where you have the space to entertain these kinds of hobbies.

Just recollecting: the last thing I fixed was a bolt that broke off inside a nut that was welded to a pipe. Luckily I have a workshop table, a vice, and a drill with various attachments. All of this takes space.

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

#337

Post by danielmarkbruce »

HorizonXP wrote: post #80
tylerlh wrote: post #67

Supply chain/logistics. I've been simultaneously surprised and unsurprised by the relatively minuscule number of people interested in driving technology and change for this space forward compared to other spaces.

I'm actively working in this space right now. Working with a Fortune 100 to replatform their entire supply chain software. Currently handles all $15B of their US revenue.

Would you mind pinging me? Might have something interesting. username @ very common google email service.

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

#338

Post by tmaly »

vgel wrote: post #224
kjellsbells wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former librarian here, now at a tech co. This is exactly the domain of information science, and its a salutary tale in two industries talking past one another. Librarians have deep training in the science, philosophy and psychology of information storage and retrieval. Most of the time you think of things like Dewey numbers on library books buts its much more than that. At the dawn of the second internet age (circa 1…

Do you have any pointers to things worth reading? I've always sworn if I started a tech company one of the first 10 employees would be a librarian because it needs to be someone's job to organize the information, and you're right the automatic systems for doing it are horrible. Search isn't enough because search doesn't help you if the philosophy behind how the information is organized doesn't make sense -- if what y…

Organizing Knowledge by Patrick Lambe is what I started with.

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

#339

Post by tmaly »

kjellsbells wrote: post #37
tmaly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not just knowledge transfer, but knowledge organization. We have so many different ways to represent knowledge, but it is very hard to access it or know where to look. I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.

Former librarian here, now at a tech co. This is exactly the domain of information science, and its a salutary tale in two industries talking past one another. Librarians have deep training in the science, philosophy and psychology of information storage and retrieval. Most of the time you think of things like Dewey numbers on library books buts its much more than that. At the dawn of the second internet age (circa 1…

I understand why html is the way it is. I can recall looking at it very early on in its development.

But I think we need more structure to how we represent knowledge get to something like a semantic web.

If the knowledge was easier to parse, it would be easier to break out of the megasites.

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

#340

Post by tmaly »

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 think everything could be a game, but we could definitely teach with newer technologies. Think of how Scratch programming can be used to teach problem solving or even math concepts.

I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.

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