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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?

#341

Post by tmaly »

ccooffee wrote: post #252
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…

This seems like something Prolog could be good for.

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

#342

Post by dredmorbius »

zip1234 wrote: post #335
dredmorbius wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently ran across a mention that this was a deliberate decision made in the 1950s to help further break the power of railroad monopolies.

The decision had merits at the time. Side-effects may be overwhelming those now, though I'll note that with only five US majors, centralisation within rail remains a concern.

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

#343

Post by dublinben »

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.

There's no secret how to build efficient buildings. There's standards like passive solar, zero energy building design and passive house that have been in practice for decades. These just aren't as widely known in the US as they are in Europe.

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

#344

Post by srkirk »

Efficient extraction of metals (and materials that can be broken down to useful precursors) from landfills and 'e-waste'. My PhD supervisor worked for years before he retired, on, among other things, magnetic separation using inhomogeneous magnetic fields. It would be a great pity if such work were forgotten.

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

#345

Post by halffaday »

7952 wrote: post #147
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.

I agree. The purpose of plans is to transfer information about design intent for specific construction outcomes. Years ago, this was done by paper because there was not another efficient option. For the last few decades, this hasn’t been necessary, but we still produce paper products. Now roadway and earthwork folks tend to lean on digital models, but that’s after bidding and only for a handful of items. There’s “BIM” but nobody can actually tell you in concrete terms what that is.

I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.

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

#346

Post by osigurdson »

It’s obvious that knowledge relating to oil and gas extraction is going to disappear in 20-50 years.

Engineering knowledge relating to ICE engines will also disappear (though it seems gas turbines will be with us for a little longer).

I’m not sure it matters that much however. If we ever need these things again in the future it seems that we could re-learn it in a decade or two.

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

#347

Post by what-imright »

My startup is working on solutions to crop failure scenarios such as from a nuclear war. Unfortunately we calculate there are probable outcomes where the only reasonable course of action is for one selected group to actually consume parts of the population in order to survive a nuclear winter. And so we’re building an automated system to take a newly deceased human being and create as many wholesome and nutritious meals from the remains as possible, in a dignified manner. We’re also trying to figure out how the consumption could play out in an orderly fashion where the old and those with non communicable diseases (but are never the less dependent at a time where the burden is too great for society), can be respectfully consumed first, and then in order of value to a future society, with those scoring least being respectfully consumed first, and so on.

We are envisioning a type of sleeping capsule with a cover that seals the user from the elements and fallout materials, providing clean air, heat and water. These could be deployed quickly. As the starvation continues the capsules would, every other night, fairly, amongst those of an equal social value, reduce the oxygen during sleep for a painless and stress free passing, and then alert others in the prospect to convert the remains into new rations.

It’s out there, but we’re serious. Based on reasonable logic in a bad situation. Important, but nobody seems to care. When 5 billion people have nothing left to eat then they’ll care.

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

#348

Post by havercosine »

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

Shameless plug. I'm building this, a fun but curricular platform for games focused on mathematics grades 8 onwards. Please check https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter (no login needed). The game levels are designed to gradually expose you to one concept at a time. Currently live with 3 games on Trigonometry, Vectors, co-ordinate geometry. I am all ears for feedback!

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

#349

Post by carapace »

Rare plants, and cultivating (not a pun) biological diversity.

For example, there are hundreds of varieties of tomato. There are wild tomatoes from the Andes Mountains to the Everglades. There are thousands of varieties of brassica (a huge genus of plants that includes bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, cabbage, rutabaga, and turnip, etc.)

I was just hearing from the proprietor of a seed company that many of the old guard are retiring and some are having trouble finding people to carry the torch.

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

#350

Post by chaps »

rudyj03 wrote: post #195
chaps wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't know what it would look like, but being able to query would be deeply important. But what I can say is that a lot of the PDFs I work with are auto-generated as PDF forms using queries, after the information was likely inserted into a relational database during some esoteric transcription step. Meaning, the information that formed the PDFs very likely come from a relational database and an inversion…

If querying is the main goal, ingesting the pdf directly into something like elasticsearch or splunk would be much simpler. This of course doesn't meet the checkbox of being open source though.

This is a very... engineer... approach. Not something that I would want to ever do with the intent of exploratory analysis and eventual sharing.
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