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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?

#401

Post by culopatin »

dysoco wrote: post #303
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 this is largely a product of USA's society and maybe Europe; but here in Argentina I think it's absolutely the norm to try and fix things multiple times before giving up and buying something new; and many things are now not that expensive anymore, it's just in the culture. Just to be clear you don't always fix them yourself; it's more common to pay someone who knows what they're doing.

Can confirm. Now in the US I’m frustrated at how hard it is to find parts locally

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

#402

Post by mikedelago »

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…

I had an opportunity to work at a company that developed one of the more prominent software suites for railways in America.

Unfortunately, the pay was too low and the company was having people come into the office in June of 2020.

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

#403

Post by kimburgess »

halffaday wrote: post #345
7952 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To add to the agreement chain: completely concur that models > printed projections of these. Dropping to a paper based form will always result in information loss. The challenge is paper / pdf's are ubiquitous. Tools in the CAD space are built around vendor lock-in with non-trivial license costs. As a result there still needs to be a way to distribute that detail to all the people involved in delivery.

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

#404

Post by kimburgess »

wwkeyboard wrote: post #183
lettergram wrote: post #165

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.

There's a difference between AgTech and actual agriculture. Farms don't need drones, apps or tractors with DRM. They need people with knowledge of biological systems and logistics.

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

#405

Post by python273 »

havercosine wrote: post #348
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!

The controls are quite inconvenient. A common type of controls for top-down games is WASD movement relative to camera + mouse to rotate and shoot. If you spam shooting button, it starts showing the same "not enough power" warning many times. For shooting it would be better to simultaneously play the animation and spawn the bullet, not waiting for the animation. The tutorial windows can be replaced with text on screen to not block movement (controls, level objective; power warning replaced with animation maybe)

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

#406

Post by nescioquid »

lukaszkups wrote: post #370
CapricornNoble wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying something similar with Japanese via Ghost of Tsushima (finally started playing it this month). I've lived in Japan 10+ years, only speak conversational Japanese....so far I don't think I've absorbed any linguistic improvements from using the game. I might just need more time with this style of immersion.

Totally this. I was never stressed out in terms of English language (I'm from Poland) because I've rarely (never) switched game languages to any other language than English. When I was ~10 years old I've played through whole Final Fantasy 8 which I was obsessed at the time thanks to my older brother with a PAPER dictionary on the desk (I was translating stuff that I didn't understand) and I think that was the most ef…

That's a neat story! I've read that there is a developmental change that happens in the brain around age 11 that has the effect of "switching off" a child's ability to simply absorb a new language. To the extent that this is true, it is so great that -- from your experience -- videos games could provide enough of an immersive experience for you to rapidly and enduringly acquire a new language. Hope your kids take to it as well!

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

#408

Post by ttyprintk »

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?

I volunteer for rural development organizations providing the kinds of services that suburbs would call dept of water or forestry. This point is very important to reliably onboard volunteers.

If we need excavation, our worst-case scenario is that that we need excavation by someone who also knows

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

#410

Post by euroderf »

dredmorbius wrote: post #319
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rail already has a tremendous labour advantage over trucking. The principle limitations seem to be net transit speed (freight moves on average at or below 30 mph net, and peaks at 79 mph in the US) and the sheer delay and confusion in arranging shipments. Freight's worked well for high-volume bulk commodities (coal, grain, tanker cars). Intermodal ("piggyback" or containerised cargo) works quite well, but still sees…

On the topic of chokepoints and tradeoffs, the question of upgrading freight lines around Chicago is pretty fascinating.
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