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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?

#151

Post by a_square_peg »

Oarch wrote: post #137
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.

Ex architect in Europe here. It definitely is and has been part of standard curriculums for at least the last 20 years.

Thanks for the info and I stand corrected. I had based my information talking to a few graduates from MIT/Penn State university.

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

#152

Post by nathanvanfleet »

georgeburdell wrote: post #24

Not tech but I think millenials, gen Z, and younger have lost the know-how to make a dollar independently of mega corps. I never see kids going door to door mowing lawns anymore, for example.

No post body was provided.

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

#153

Post by rufius »

bravetraveler wrote: post #74

Systems tuning, but it's an area that really got me to learn what I have over the years. I realize I'm a bit biased. It's amazing the number of production issues I've fixed with simple sysctl parameters. The Linux kernel defaults don't fit very well in this huge-cluster/scaling out world

In general, our industry lacks a sense of "mechanical sympathy"[0]. Whether it's understanding what knobs are tunable in an operating system or using streams for reading data to keep a consistent memory profile, we often don't dig deep. Ditto for folks understanding database systems.

I think in very big systems, you see folks dig deep, but it's not encouraged with smaller systems. I think there's a lot of inefficiently run services - not from a price perspective but from a "what could I really get out of 3 compute nodes and a well designed database schema."

[0]: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/

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

#154

Post by sofixa »

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.

HVACs are very rare outside of industrial and some office buildings across most of Europe. Buildings with innovative designs(like opening up during the night to cool itself and using that cool air to refresh during the day) exist. Thermal efficiency is taken very seriously and is a serious part of building codes.

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

#155

Post by jamiek88 »

qsort wrote: post #141
nescioquid wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool! If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of a…

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.

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

#156

Post by Induane »

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…

At least smalltalks legacy lives on in the _hyperscript project!

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

#157

Post by bee_rider »

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…

Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something you've repaired. I'm not very handy, but every time I open the door that doesn't squeak anymore it cheers me up a little.

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

#158

Post by dazc »

whiteboardr wrote: post #126
sbuk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with construction is the Autodesk monopoly. They are kings of EEE.

There’s a whole lot more to it then what Autodesk offers…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latham_Report

Latham identified industry inefficiencies, condemning existing industry practices as 'adversarial', 'ineffective', 'fragmented', 'incapable of delivering for its clients' and 'lacking respect for its employees'.

From 1994, almost two decades later and not much has changed.

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

#159

Post by jakub_g »

onion2k wrote: post #92
CSMastermind wrote: post #65

There are shockingly few people maintaining the video encoding packages that most people rely on. https://xkcd.com/2347/ makes me think the same is true of image software as well. I'm pretty sure there's a timezone database that's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right. When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word wo…

, When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word worked. I'm sure they've fixed it by now but back then if you wanted to touch the tables code in Word you had to talk to the tables guy to make sure you wouldn't break everything.* Every business I've worked in over the past twenty years have two things in common - one person who knows a key piece of thetechnology,…

> it doesn't tell you why the code exists in the first place, or what the code should do

This is one of the worst things in most codebases I see. Today I was told to use function X to solve my problem. Checked: 0 docs on what it does and why/how; although used extensively in the codebase. Read existing code and try to infer it, every damned time.

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

#160

Post by chaps »

amenod wrote: post #98
chaps wrote: post #82

Extracting deeply useful information from tens/hundreds/thousands of thousands of scanned PDFs in a way that dumps its information, regardless of structure (eg, tables, text), into a relational database that's (mostly) trivially queryable and repeatable. Preferably open source. This is such a hard problem right now.

That sounds doable, but... why opensource? Does this mean that people / companies are not prepared to pay for the product or service?

I have around 2 million pages from FOIA requests that need information systematically extracted and I'm not alone in this problem. The costs for the systematization of many pages will be prohibitive.

The public good of having a resource like this available to the public for free is beyond unimaginable as far as I'm concerned.

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