[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
In the 2020s most old generation people are retiring and not only
the replacement generations smaller but there is gap in
generational knowledge transfer. What do you think is important
tech out there in which are we are losing our collective knowledge
and hard won wisdom?
Author : sremani
Score : 182 points
Date : 2022-08-26 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
| bravetraveler wrote:
| 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
| rufius wrote:
| 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/
| bombcar wrote:
| One thing we're strongly missing is the kernel being able to
| notify that a sysctl parameter may help.
|
| Sometimes it does things like "clock changed, is all hell
| breaking loose" but it could do much more when queues back up,
| etc.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Mentioned before by an ex-librarian in this thread as information
| loss, I'd go further and say we're loosing control of our
| _language_ in the digital sphere. That 's why I'm holding on to
| markup technologies (SGML/XML) as our best bet for evolving the
| web and other communication standards - because the alternative
| are memes, TikTok, and other, worse corporate attention grabs.
| tester756 wrote:
| Maybe IBM's Mainframe? I mean reliable hardware, etc.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Data transfer over the internet without servers, like radio and
| telephone.
| kkfx wrote:
| 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-applications flexible
| systems where anything is a function, easy to combine, change and
| extend as the user wish. Simple and powerful enough end users can
| use and change.
|
| Domestic food production is another, far simpler, not that
| exiting, but still important: these days some children do not
| even know where came from something they eat. Without any
| catastrophic scenario any society need to know at least
| superficially anything essential to survive. This include for
| instance basic knowledge about tools for instance to grind and
| pack meat to make salami, tools to sterilize and store vacuumed
| foods etc new tools to modernize and made such process a pleasure
| to do.
|
| Last but not least generic knowledge, generic tools. We have
| gazillions of hyper-specialist in any fields and veeeeery few
| able to see the big picture. We have gazillion of tools for doing
| a thing and only one. We need generic stuff. Standards not made
| like https://xkcd.com/927/ but made and updated to be useful and
| spread. This is the essence of most tech, including the generic
| desktops cited above, including solar panels with maaaany cells
| one after another, including bricks, simple thing we can use to
| made a wall, a house, a bridge, ... it's very hard to made
| anything in such domain, but it's tremendously useful once done.
| In the past we have seen some examples here and there, nowadays
| nobody care.
| Induane wrote:
| At least smalltalks legacy lives on in the _hyperscript
| project!
| Temasik wrote:
| dragostudor wrote:
| 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
| documents and extracting failure reasons / equipment names /
| spare parts / processes involved and making associations between
| them for pareto analysis, better search or process improvement
| recommendations
|
| - Recommending the next steps to fix something / remote
| intervention / do something etc. Lowering the expertise threshold
| required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability
| engineers to be effective.
|
| - Enabling operators to become data scientists by enabling to
| train AI models via their day to day activities / analysis.
| Building better UX in general and providing simple tools that
| even a toddler could use.
|
| - Autonomous factory use-cases / supply chain automation.
|
| Would love to discuss with people who find these things exciting
| chaosbutters314 wrote:
| xerox PARC is working on this
| bobfromhuddle wrote:
| I'm starting a new job doing exactly these things in order to
| reduce the carbon intensiveness of heavy industry, specifically
| cement production. I'm hyped because I think the technical
| challenges aren't too daunting, and the prize is huge.
| dragostudor wrote:
| I've started looking into CO2e reduction techniques as well.
| Would be great to discuss. Working with a client in the food
| space who is doing this just to learn more
| jollyllama wrote:
| There are hundred million dollar manufacturing companies out
| there tracking whole processes with pen and paper. Just sayin'.
| dragostudor wrote:
| *hundred billion dollar companies with a manufacturing
| component :)
| petra wrote:
| //Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians,
| electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be
| effective.
|
| Why is that important? Must every job be automated?
| dragostudor wrote:
| Fewer and fewer people are interested in manufacturing jobs,
| especially the less glamorous ones. Large manufacturers are
| having a hard time using analytics and more advanced systems
| because of qualified labour shortages. I've spoken to
| manufacturers whose technicians can't even write or follow
| instructions correctly. Sometimes, sending 10 technicians to
| inspect an asset would results in 10 different opinions about
| possible issues / failures. All of these could lead to lower
| quality product and increased unscheduled downtimes, lower
| revenues etc etc. But, it is definitely important to still
| allow people to use their brains and come up with better
| options
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If it produces a better quality product/service with less
| volatility relative to cost, then yes.
| vavooom wrote:
| _Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians,
| electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be
| effective._
|
| This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered
| before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members
| of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off
| that workforce.
| [deleted]
| dragostudor wrote:
| Would love to find out more about the lessons that you've
| learned in the process
| mediaman wrote:
| I'm a partner in a factory and I believe this is an incredibly
| important area, and the requirements are fairly different than
| normal "just put it on Confluence" workplaces, in a way that
| most tech people don't understand and usually completely miss
| the mark when they're doing product dev.
|
| - Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on
| them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it
| with a glove on it, or your hands are dirty, and it's hard to
| get grease off tablets. But they need the info out on the
| floor. Also, it can be noisy on the floor.
|
| - The team tends to be very visual. They don't like tapping on
| computers a lot. Literacy ranges from pretty good to kinda OK.
| Sometimes they refuse to get (or wear) reading glasses for
| whatever personal reason.
|
| - They're working on proprietary hardware, but technicians with
| the right knowledge are not nearby to come in and look at it.
| You really need to be able to see the issues visually.
| Sometimes even hear them. AR might be interesting here. (I
| spend $10k to fly a tech out for a few days to look at a
| machine. The bigger issue is that I lose $10k a day from one
| machine being down, and a tech might not be available to fly
| out for a week.)
|
| - Predictive maintenance. The fancy sensors and whatnot mostly
| don't work. Tech people try it in a clean, quiet office and it
| works, and they can raise money on it from clueless VCs, so
| money keeps getting set on fire with smart AI machine learning
| magic motor sensor companies.
|
| - Preventative maintenance. How to schedule, how to verify it
| was done, how to check whether it revealed an issue that needs
| a follow-up. Getting people to do it, and verify it was done,
| can be a challenge, but there are huge returns to preventative
| maintenance (for example: checking gearbox oil levels,
| verifying lubrication line function, checking valve
| temperatures.)
|
| - Diagnosing machine problems. Using prior problem
| documentation helps team members see most likely issues. But
| many of these people don't really want to sort through a
| database of prior similar issues because they "know" what the
| problem is. How do you provide this information to them in a
| way that feels more approachable to them?
|
| I could go on forever. Manufacturing is an interesting
| environment because downtime is usually hundreds to tens of
| thousands of dollars of hard cost per hour, depending on the
| operation, and they will spend quite a bit of money to stop it
| from going down, but culturally there's a vast gulf between the
| white collar SF tech bros and what actually happens in
| manufacturing plants, so innovation tends to be more limited.
| eldavido wrote:
| Predictive/preventive maintenance is actually a big thrust
| behind my current company, Dials.
|
| HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet
| expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics,
| planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common
| area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a)
| estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining),
| (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to
| spread paying for it out over however many years before it's
| needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and
| collecting the funds, month after month.
|
| People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for
| maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too
| damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very
| accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of
| this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so
| that either internal staff or external vendors (more common)
| can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track
| status and work in a fine-grained way.
|
| Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically
| using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-
| driving) and having enough data around that we can price and
| estimate everything accurately.
|
| Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we
| just decided to build a payment collection product (for
| monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going
| pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's
| in my profile in case you want to chat
| unixfg wrote:
| This is really compelling!
|
| How will you protect from incorrect estimates, insurance?
| dragostudor wrote:
| Tracking stuff is hard. I wonder why QR codes won't work in
| this case, or something similar, or super basic otherwise /
| stickers or codes at first. Might be more annoying to
| generate and maintain them initially. CV could work really
| well to keep track of inspection steps as well, or to
| recommend what you should do next, and how to do it
| eldavido wrote:
| We considered this, but it's another step. What I'm
| talking about is going to be hard and take a while, but
| feels like the "endgame" for how this is going to be done
| --automated, done with phones, no extra work.
| dragostudor wrote:
| Spot on, many of these challenges are common across the board
| - from my father's plant to Pfizer and others I got the
| chance to work with. There is however a massive talent gap
| when it comes to high quality software / ML people in these
| industries as well. It's tough to get experts to generate
| quality data and 'recipes' for others to follow when their
| KPIs are not aligned. Maintenance and reliability don't seem
| to be sexy enough areas for management to invest in,
| especially if the value proposition is anecdotal at best.
| Would be great to chat about your approach for solving some
| of the above
| dcow wrote:
| It sounds really interesting to work in a manufacturing plant
| for a year or two in order to empathize with the industry and
| learn how to blend in software in a way that actually solves
| problems like you describe. Or, generally, to penetrate areas
| where technology solutions don't apply obviously. I wonder
| how you'd set that kind of arrangement up. If you could
| design a company around displacing a few cofounders for a few
| years where the product research is hands on, on the ground,
| doing the job, I bet there are many people who would be
| interested in this type of setup. I agree the software
| industry does way too much "solve for ourselves first" type
| of product development and it's really discouraging.
| dragostudor wrote:
| On-site visits, or contract work on the shop floor should
| be a good way in. Alternatively pro-bono work, part time or
| longer.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I would +1 this
|
| I think the long term best thing we can be doing is documenting
| the how and why of building, designing, fixing, working with
| etc... everything
| dragostudor wrote:
| Many companies store huge amounts of documents, but every
| team does it in its own way. One template can quickly result
| in thousands of variations. If robust documentation
| principles are not used from the very beginning (checklists /
| reduction in free text, visual indications, etc), it will be
| a nightmare to make sense of that data afterwards. Also,
| there is no value in generating large amounts of text data
| unless you can easily scan it and retrieve the information of
| interest
| version_five wrote:
| These things are all on the radar of "innovation" types. I
| don't mean to say they're not interesting, but in the area of
| applied ML all this stuff is basically as mainstream as it
| comes (despite being unsupported by any actual research
| advances).
| tmaly wrote:
| 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.
| dragostudor wrote:
| Definitely, transfer can only happen when knowledge is
| organised and understandable by a variety of stakeholders,
| with different backgrounds (education, languages spoken,
| years of expertise)
| boringg wrote:
| I'd agree with knowledge organization. It's either you have
| to root through academic texts or try and navigate the spammy
| internet with no really happy medium. It's almost like
| there's a complete lack of quality middle ground information.
| It's either total SEO garbage or very low quality entry level
| information or incredibly specific/dense academic content and
| the middle ground is missing.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Back when I was in grad school, PhD theses were
| indispensable for actually learning my way around a topic.
|
| The academic literature itself (even review papers) was
| _way_ too terse and (I believe, semi-intentionally)
| obfuscatory.
| boringg wrote:
| I would assume that it hasn't changed much since you were
| in grad school.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| 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
| 1991, think gopher, WAIS, Archie and a nascent thing called
| the web) there was a boatload of discussion around what this
| Internet thing would mean for information.
|
| Then, the tech bros arrived and after a few abortive attempts
| to catalog things for themselves (webrings, portals, yahoo)
| the industry collectively shrugged and decided to ignore the
| problem, assuming that a search engine would always be able
| to pluck your favorite needle out of the haystack.
|
| Except that, today, it cant. Intranets are essentially
| corporate graveyards of content. The public web is a webring
| of 7 or 8 megasites that vacuum up all searches and make it
| all but impossible to break out of their domain. That article
| you read in 2005 about XYZ? Forget it, you're never finding
| that with Google.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Yes, please tell us your recommendations for informational
| retrieval / taxonomy systems - what are the current best
| practices for the different mediums?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm curious what your thoughts about Cory Doctorow's
| Metacrap [1] essay which I think summarized a lot of the
| problems with the semantic, informational organization
| approaches of the early-mid web. Are you also familiar with
| research in informational sciences these days?
|
| [1]: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm
| vgel wrote:
| 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 you need is spread around between
| 100 slack messages, emails, and unconnected unmaintained
| wiki pages. You need someone (or ideally a team) whose job
| it is to one one hand organize that information themselves,
| and on the other hand create a framework so it's easy for
| the non-librarians to put things in the right place.
|
| But right now the majority of tech companies are like
| libraries without librarians, the patrons are just
| wandering around sticking the books on random shelves and
| wondering why nobody can ever find anything.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Non-tech DIY in general is becoming lost. There is so much
| knowledge available on YouTube but so many of my younger
| friends just pay people $hundreds to do very simple, quick
| things. I'm not talking about transmission replacement, but
| ridiculously simple things like fixing a leaking toilet and
| changing motor oil.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Changing motor oil always comes up but it is really worth
| paying someone a few bucks to do it for you.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why? Especially if you have an SUV or higher car you can
| easily crawl under. Just unscrew the original plug, screw
| in a Fumoto valve, and an entire oil change is done in
| under 20 min, and then you just drop off the old oil at
| Autozone or whatever. While the oil is draining, you can
| change the air filters too.
|
| Buy the Kirkland brand oil at Costco, and you do not have
| to trust whoever the mechanic shop hires to bust your car
| up or use low quality oil.
| quesera wrote:
| Option 1 requirements: - Equipment:
| wrenches, oil collection pan, oil container for transport
| to disposal, funnel? - Knowledge: Quality of oils,
| filters, Oil weights (5W20? 10W30?) - Willingness:
| To get dirty, to stain the driveway - Time: 30min
| if all goes well, then time to take waste oil to disposal
| - Trust: In self - Funds: $20 for oil and filter,
| assuming disposal is free
|
| Option 2 requirements: - Time: 15min,
| plus a few minutes to drive to the shop - Trust: In
| "professionals", misplaced or not - Funds: $29.95
|
| I change my own oil also, but I have no rational
| explanation for this choice.
|
| I have the equipment, knowledge, and willingness to take
| the minor risk of mistake and deal with the consequences.
| $10 is not a fair wage for those prerequisites!
|
| Of course I use better oil and filters than the shop
| would. Does this matter? Am I kidding myself? And someday
| I'll take my plastic milk jugs full of waste oil to a
| disposal place.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I change my own oil also, but I have no rational
| explanation for this choice.
|
| Of course you do. All the items you listed are a small,
| one time cost. Watch a YouTube video, buy the wrench,
| pan, and funnel ($50?). The "knowledge" of which oil to
| use takes 20 seconds to look up in the manual in the
| glove box of the car. And the disposal is pretty easy,
| you take the empty oil bottles, fill them back up with
| old oil, and dump it at Autozone.
|
| And for this initial, let's say 1 hour of work for
| procurement, you get to guarantee that the oil change on
| your car (which represents a significant portion of the
| average American's wealth) is done properly, with zero
| risk of it going wrong.
|
| Now, there is nothing objectively wrong with NOT wanting
| to do this and just preferring to pay someone else. But
| for a household with 2 ICE cars that they own for 10+
| years, this is very little work for a lot of gain, and
| watching 1 less Netflix show is probably not going to
| hurt. The tools for for all of this also take a small
| space to store.
|
| Which is why I do not consider it a "no brainer" to
| outsource oil changes.
|
| > Of course I use better oil and filters than the shop
| would. Does this matter?
|
| Why would it not if you intend on driving the car for
| 200k miles? My main concern is some minimum wage mechanic
| not doing the oil change properly. I know they are not
| getting paid enough to care, and if I have to stop and
| check to see if it was done properly, I might as well do
| it myself.
| projektfu wrote:
| This can be simplified depending on your car. GM, for
| example, requires Dexos oil from any manufacturer. Pair
| that with an OEM filter and you have a 10,000 mile oil
| change.
|
| The hard part is having the crush washer on hand and
| remembering to put it on. In my experience, shops have
| forgotten it too, used the old one, or have over torqued
| the plug screw. I think this is why many shops aspirate
| the oil instead.
| krapht wrote:
| I don't change my own oil for the same reason I don't mow
| my own lawn or haul my own garbage to the municipal dump.
| mfashby wrote:
| Re. Changing motor oil example: I gave up doing this when my
| cars started having non-standard nuts on the oil sump. I had
| to pay the garage to fit a _headlight_ recently because the
| bulb was practically inaccessible without either specialist
| tools or 3 elbows :(
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| elihu wrote:
| I wonder if that's partly due to people (both young people and
| the older people that would hire them) being uncertain if they
| can get away with it these days? There were a bunch of scandals
| about ten years or so ago about politicians running for office
| who had housekeepers and didn't pay social security. And kids
| sometimes get in trouble for running a lemonade stand without a
| food handler's card or business license or whatever.
|
| There might also be a disconnect between what people think they
| should pay and what the cost of living is. In other words:
| maybe people don't do that sort of thing because they'd still
| be losing money even if they did it full time.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I mean we're in our 30's, even those millenials who do want to
| do yardwork as a career have hopefully moved beyond the
| "knocking on doors to mow lawns" stage.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| You need a peaceful society for that. Also the State will fine
| you for not having a license to mow lawns. Something like that.
| Western world is a post-liberty world.
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| I disagree with this, I'm (unfortunately) swamped with short
| videos on how to 'make side hustles' doing just these sorts of
| things due to the cost of living crisis.
| phaedrus wrote:
| 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 mowed the lady's lawn.
|
| I arrived with my push mower in time to see the neighbor with
| the riding lawnmower accepting payment from the lady for my
| job.
|
| This is not a metaphor; it's a true story. Make of it what you
| will...
| alexchantavy wrote:
| Reminds me of when I started noticing adults in cars
| delivering newspaper instead of kids in bicycles around the
| time of the last recession
| projektfu wrote:
| 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.
| dazc wrote:
| We get this in the UK too but often it's someone driving
| the car and a kid that gets out and actually delivers the
| paper?
|
| We also have car washes that are either 100% automated or
| have 6 guys all cleaning one car. You can guess which is
| the most popular option.
|
| I hear we have a productivity problem, no kidding.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| Did you give up mowing lawns forever based on that one
| experience? My stepson related a similar story once. He left
| out the part about he didn't return to mow until the next
| day. And the person who mowed was long gone when he arrived.
| Not implying you didn't make doing the job a priority. That,
| however, has been a common them for my stepson.
| bvanderveen wrote:
| Machining.
|
| No child left without a 5-axis milling machine!
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Titan's of CNC and Haas both have great youtube channels
| addressing training because of exactly this.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Titan's of CNC and Haas both have great youtube channels
| addressing training because of exactly this.
|
| I would love to get into aerospace manufacturing. Any chance
| a code monkey can make the switch? What is the entry level
| pathway like?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| aerospace -> code monkey seems to be the more common route
| to me but that might be sample bias
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| Sort of related but I, a 28 year old tech guy, am going
| back to school part-time to get a BEng so I can get into
| more aerospace-heavy roles. It'll take 6 years but I'm
| currently happy with my work so am not in a rush. Currently
| I work in networking/search for a defense startup so it's
| tangentially related.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Sort of related but I, a 28 year old tech guy, am going
| back to school part-time to get a BEng so I can get into
| more aerospace-heavy roles.
|
| Best of luck to you friend. Absolutely worth it if you
| can hack it. I tried at 26 after a few years in the
| industry, and failed miserably. Protip: pay for a good
| math tutor.
|
| It's the technician life for me, unfortunately.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I've just noticed FlexCNC machines for the first time. It's a
| bridge CNC with a long bed, they start at $209,000, so I'm not
| getting one... but the idea of a CNC bed sufficiently long that
| you don't need pallet swapping, you just load jobs wherever the
| bridge isn't, seems like it could be quite productive.
|
| They use a helical rack instead of a ball screw, which makes
| sense in 50 foot long machines. It's welded construction, so no
| huge castings, quite interesting.
|
| We're going to need a lot of machining here in the US as the
| world deglobalizes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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 assembly and disassembly,
| and routing might all offer opportunities.
|
| But ... nada.
|
| I suspect other modalities within the transport sector might be
| similar, notably ocean shipping.
| Bakary wrote:
| I wonder if that is the case outside of the English-language
| world.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If anywhere, I'd suspect China.
|
| That literature would be pretty opaque to me.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| 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.
| Balgair wrote:
| Unions?
| dogcomplex wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I think there's a number of little regional rail companies
| popping up now that the bigs have gotten to big to care about
| those customers; I bet they're reinventing where they have to
| and would possibly even be willing to fund some knowledge
| collection and sharing efforts.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| I know that BNSF did wonders with modernizing how they dispatch
| trains (the old way is build a train until it's as long as it
| can be and then send it off, which meant you never could really
| predict when something would arrive) and they also are doing
| monitoring, etc:
|
| https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/safety/artificial-i...
|
| How much of it is fluff I don't know.
| landonxjames wrote:
| I saw a talk by an engineer from Parallel Systems [0] and they
| seem to be doing some very cool stuff for the future of rail.
| Autonomous Electric rail cars and some other interesting things
|
| [0] https://moveparallel.com/
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Very strange product. The benefit of traditional rail freight
| is scale and cost over long distance. The benefit of truck
| freight is last mile delivery (no need for warehouse storage,
| can make multiple stops, etc). Their product seems worse than
| either except that it's electric. Fortunately, electric
| trucks are well within reach.
|
| Cool that they are building the tech though, maybe it will
| get bought out by an actual logistics/freight company that
| can find a use for it.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Check out Shift5
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Care to unpack that / explain what element(s) are addressed?
| tylerlh wrote:
| I think this has much to do with certain parties controlling
| most of the dataflow for NA rail freight moves. Definitely a
| problem on the ocean and in the port terminals as well. We
| should chat!
| sofixa wrote:
| 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 optimisations to the second
| are well developed.
|
| However there's R&D into cheap electrifying with battery
| railcars - which is IMHO a dumb idea outside of niche
| railroads, electrification pays for itself in the medium to
| long term, a battery bandaid doesn't get you far.
|
| Ans there's also a kind of innovation from India - dedicated
| rail freight corridors.
| ccooffee wrote:
| 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.
| skadamat wrote:
| Bunch of suggestions in this list!
|
| http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Industrial automation and manufacturing:
|
| - Need a dedicated degree (2 year as well as 4 year) in
| Manufacturing
|
| - Trade schools and apprenticeship programs that do not sound
| like scam
|
| - Automated material movement and handling
|
| - Machine vision, automation of quality assurance
|
| - Automated mold making and plastic injection molding
| optimization (still done by humans and takes 4 months)
|
| - Factory software (ERP, MRP, MES, SPC, etc.)
| dragostudor wrote:
| If you're working on any of these, it would be great to chat
| chaps wrote:
| 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.
| amenod wrote:
| That sounds doable, but... why opensource? Does this mean that
| people / companies are not prepared to pay for the product or
| service?
| chaps wrote:
| 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.
| IceMetalPunk wrote:
| When you say "regardless of structure" -- if it's a relational
| database, that inherently implies a set structure. Or did you
| mean the information is consistent enough to be represented in
| one relational structure, but is presented in the PDFs in
| different formats?
| chaps wrote:
| 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 back to its
| original relational form is probably the convenient form.
| Whether that means it turns to 40 tables, that's fine, so
| long as it's relational and a query can be written.
| rudyj03 wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| 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 two generations of working architects, those
| that learnt 2D CAD in the 90s and early 00s who still think in 3d
| and translate it themselves to 2d in cad (a little like
| traditional draftsmanship). And those since who have only ever
| worked in 3d and used the tooling to "project" 2d elevations and
| sections.
|
| I trained at university in the early 2000s in Industrial Design,
| we did some traditional drafting lesions (maybe three or four
| weeks). But then jumped straight to 3d CAD and never looked back.
| I suspect they don't even do those lessons now, and in fact most
| kids have probably done some 3D cad at school, maybe only 10% had
| when I started.
| gen220 wrote:
| I think this craft is well-documented in books, even if it's
| disappearing from common practice, no [1]?
|
| In general, I've found books are an underrated source of
| technical information like this. The library of congress is
| probably doing a pretty good job of preserving the knowledge
| needed to bootstrap civilization.
|
| For example, I have a few books on country wood-crafting that
| have enabled me to become pretty self-sufficient on a rural
| property. Even though there's no woodworking knowledge in my
| circle of friends or family.
|
| YMMV depending on the craft, but the scope of knowledge
| documented in dead-tree mediums is both vast and deep.
|
| [1]: For example, I found this with 40 seconds of effort. I
| know it's old, but that might contribute to it being more
| interesting:
| https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.easystepsinarch0...
| panzagl wrote:
| Tell your Dad to start making youtube videos- that seems like
| the best way to preserve that kind of knowledge.
| samwillis wrote:
| Ha! Not sure that would happen, he's practically a luddite.
| xpe wrote:
| Try Shapr3D on macOS and iOS and I think you'll be pleasantly
| surprised -- maybe even shocked -- at how amazing CAD software
| can be. Should be. The UX quality is exceptional and inspiring.
|
| P.S. I have no connection to the product or company (based in
| Budapest I think).
| samwillis wrote:
| Oh now that looks interesting, I haven't come across that.
| Being based on Parasolid should make it a rock solid cad
| tool. Will have to give it a go!
| kradeelav wrote:
| My father has a background that's eerily similar to yours,
| right down to running a firm the same size, and he feels the
| same way you and yours does (so do I).
|
| It truly is a lost art and there's a lot more hidden knowledge
| and reward that comes with knowing traditional drafting than it
| may appear on the surface. Patience, precision, a sense of
| intuitive aesthetics, and how to arrange a composition on paper
| to tell a story effectively ... thank you for sharing this
| comment, I'll have to tell him somebody else agrees. :)
| carabiner wrote:
| Do you want to bring this back? CAD is a productivity
| multiplier. It's like composing a document in MS Word vs hand
| writing it.
| sbuk wrote:
| A beautifully draughty schematic or plan is something to
| behold - with carefully considered weight of line, and
| perfectly executed detailing. This can absolutely achieved
| with 2D CAD draughting, and is indeed quicker than hand
| draughting, but with that productivity gain, thinking time is
| reduced. The knock on effect is timescales for project
| completion are lost, then everything becomes a kt of parts
| and looks the same. This has been worsened, IMHO especially
| in architecture, by BIM tools like Revit and ArchiCAD. There
| are an awful lot of "Revity" buildings going up...
| samwillis wrote:
| Yes, architecture and design is an art form, the medium in
| which you work influences the design process and the output
| you create. I'm not saying all architects and designers
| should return to the drafting table, but it is a shame that
| the knowledge of how to work like that is disappearing from
| the workplace.
|
| Also, not everything always needs to be "efficient", what's
| wrong with working slowly if you can then create an even
| better result.
| jckahn wrote:
| How does the slower process lead to a superior result,
| exactly? Are there designs that modern CAD systems can't
| achieve that the older process could? If so, perhaps it
| would be more practical to focus on closing that gap by
| improving our modern tooling.
| groby_b wrote:
| Modern CAD systems tend to produce reproducible, very
| similar systems. Drafting produces individualized
| solutions. "Superior" depends on what you want.
|
| (For housing, I want individualized so badly. If I see
| one more SillyValley SWE storehouse - excuse me, "luxury
| housing" - I'm going to vomit. They're all exactly the
| same. I'm fairly certain the firms involved have traded
| macros or something)
|
| I'm not sure you can close that gap. I've done both
| drafting and CAD design (amateur level), and... you
| approach the space differently. Drafting almost forces
| you to have a plan, while CAD very much is "as you go".
| 7952 wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| I would love to hear more of your thoughts on that.
|
| I could see that being the case with 2d focussed cad tools
| such as AutoCad, however "3d first" tools like Revit for
| architecture or SolidWorks for product design are so far
| removed form traditional drafting I don't realy see any
| alignment.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| (Civil) Nuclear technology.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| The 'advanced' nuclear industry has dozens of big players and
| is raising money like crazy. Everyone wants to mess around with
| exotic fuel and coolants. But no one cares about the real
| workhorse reactors anymore like ABWRs, APR-1400, etc. We should
| be more focused on those imho.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Came here to say that. From what I understand, a lot of nuclear
| welders retired and because very few projects happened in the
| past couple of decades, their expertise was not transfered. It
| is a shame.
| lettergram wrote:
| 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
| diesel motor. Some people on HN might know that, I know some of
| that now. However, generally they are all older and their kids
| moved on. In terms of a generational knowledge gap I can think of
| no greater one.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, I grew up in the Midwest and
| there was no shortage of young people going into Ag.
| mcphail wrote:
| Shameless plug for what we're building at HitchPin.com
| wwkeyboard wrote:
| 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.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Health insurance navigation and transparency (US):
|
| People who go through dealing with health insurance: a lot of
| this knowledge is difficult to transfer, but is very valuable,
| and usually transferred through word-of-mouth. People who
| suddenly have a need for a treatment or surgery, don't always
| know what their options are and how to deal with insurance claims
| in the best manner, or to maximize coverage and deal with extra
| circumstances.
| groby_b wrote:
| Or we could fix the health insurance system. Other nations are
| doing significantly better in this area.
| version_five wrote:
| After reading the comments here, I think a key issue isn't so
| much humanity losing knowledge, as it is "locals" for some
| definition losing it. Manufacturing is alive and well in many
| places, somebody knows how to build or fix your lawnmower, it's
| just that the middle class has lost that knowledge, etc. I
| believe there continues to be more "repatriation" of knowledge -
| look at semiconductor manufacturing, but it's less a question of
| it ever being lost.
|
| I'd also say that "preparedness" is generally something nobody is
| working on. Despite all the shit that happened with Covid, I
| don't feel like we're even slightly better prepared for an actual
| lethal pandemic, like with double digit death rates for example.
| It's not clear we've changed anything other than some political
| jockeying.
|
| Another example is earthquake/ tsunami preparedness. Everyone
| knows the west coast is going to be destroyed, we just ignore it
| because its "boring" and nobody wants to think about it
| barbarbar wrote:
| 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.
| cpitman wrote:
| 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 consider legacy or dying technology.
| gaoshancha wrote:
| 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...
| jzellis wrote:
| The ability for a single person to create a technology, digital
| or otherwise.
| rytill wrote:
| This is an interesting answer. What in your opinion are the
| main blockers to this ability?
| benevol wrote:
| a_square_peg wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| 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.
| anamexis wrote:
| HVAC includes normal heating systems.
| Oarch wrote:
| Ex architect in Europe here. It definitely is and has been part
| of standard curriculums for at least the last 20 years.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| Thanks for the info and I stand corrected. I had based my
| information talking to a few graduates from MIT/Penn State
| university.
| [deleted]
| kradeelav wrote:
| Online safety education for the younger generations. There's of
| course outliers, but as a rule I've seen some scary amounts of
| zoomers who have zero idea of why giving out a photo of their
| government ID card (unredacted) to total strangers for age
| verification is a very bad idea.
|
| It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and
| name)" that I got.
| lappet wrote:
| On the other side of the spectrum, I often joke with my dad
| that I want to setup a "TechNanny" service for him. Someone who
| can come home and help with random computer/mobile issues.
| There are of course challenges in reliability, safety and
| staffing.
| TheCapn wrote:
| Good one!
|
| I ranted on reddit about this topic a while ago but the gist of
| it is that the stakes of online harm are just _so much higher_
| now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I feel like I learned
| about safety online in the hard way: failing, but I went
| through the stages of everything back when the cost of mistakes
| was needing to wipe a drive and start over, the upcoming youth
| today won 't have that luxury.
|
| The other complicating problem is just how few people are
| actually good at it. Who is suitable to be the teachers in this
| space? I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, I've just
| been burned enough times to be skeptical by default and trust
| virtually nothing anymore. I guess that's a good start, but how
| does that get passed onto the next generation in a productive
| way?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| GUI toolkits? Maybe?
|
| I wonder how much of the "everything is a service, access this
| calculator for a small monthly fee" problem is due to how poor
| GUI toolkits are.
| krapp wrote:
| I think a big part of the problem is we seem to have decided,
| as an industry, that Electron solved application development
| and in particularly GUIs, and left everything else to rot.
|
| And a lot of the alternatives seem more focused on leveraging
| specific languages than making the development process easier,
| which is really the problem that Electron (specifically the
| HTML/CSS/JS) model solves. Like, I would _kill_ to be able to
| write a C GUI application with a layout as easy as HTML and
| style it with CSS, but just not have a web browser or anything
| be involved.
| amelius wrote:
| > Like, I would kill to be able to write a C GUI application
| with a layout as easy as HTML and style it with CSS, but just
| not have a web browser or anything be involved.
|
| You can link to different libraries that are part of WebKit,
| or Firefox?
| Diris wrote:
| Maybe QML with DOtherSide[0]?
|
| [0]https://github.com/filcuc/DOtherSide
| Diris wrote:
| There's lots of movement in that space in rust[0][1]. Also in
| that space are raphlinus' posts about GUI toolkits[2][3]. There
| was a post about a zig toolkit a while ago too[4]. Another post
| about a new c GUI toolkit[5]. There might be more cf. [6]
|
| [0]Iced: A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326125
|
| [1]Slint: Native GUI Toolkit for Rust, C++ or JavaScript
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810533
|
| [2]Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846
|
| [3]Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297550
|
| [4]Build a PinePhone App with Zig and Zgt
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=
|
| [5]Raygui - A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30813000
|
| [6]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru
| ...
| [deleted]
| sowbug wrote:
| 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 real cost is that people generally don't know how things
| work anymore. They're just black boxes, even simple things like a
| coffee maker or a clothes dryer. Which further reduces the demand
| for repairability, which seems like a downward spiral toward
| everything being disposable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| desmondw wrote:
| FYI if your doors make other noises when they open it could
| be the paint on the inside edge sticking against the frame.
| In that case, apply paraffin wax to prevent a seal.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I agree. I just got hearing aids, and I've had to oil the
| hinges on several doors in my house.
| TheCapn wrote:
| >Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something
| you've repaired.
|
| I feel it's my personality, but as soon as I fix anything I
| am overcome with anxiety every time I'm near it for fear the
| issue will return or that my repair was faulty and inevitably
| prone to cause further damage.
|
| I don't know why I get this way. In spite of all my worries
| I've yet to truly fuck up an appliance I've repaired
| (furnace, microwave, dish washer, workout equipment,
| countless car repairs, electrical, plumbing, carpentry...the
| works).
|
| As far as I've ever bothered to explore the feeling, I think
| I have an inherent trust that products are manufactured with
| care and attention while my repairs are often ad-hoc suitable
| replacements with salvaged parts, or even just duct tape and
| glue. Experience should tell me that things are often built
| to minimal passing standards so this idea that a
| manufacturing line that spits out dozens(?)/hundreds(?) of
| these products in a day are any better than my attempts. Lack
| of documentation is often a big one. If my repair seems to
| make more sense why wasn't it done like this before? Am I
| missing something that should be considered? What caused it
| to break that I haven't addressed? etc.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is not totally unreasonable. Like I said, I'm
| not super handy, so when I do amateur fixes I stick to
| things incapable of catching fire mostly.
| eastbound wrote:
| I'm frightened to repair things because I own a house, and
| I'm afraid of wreaking havoc, dirtying a wall, having to
| repaid a whole room... I hope it will pass as I learn to do
| things here.
| Delk wrote:
| I'm totally guessing here, but apart from just being able
| to trust professional design and manufacturing more, could
| there be some kind of a "nobody ever got fired for buying
| IBM" effect there?
|
| If it were socially normal and expected to try and repair
| things, and you did happen to blunder, that would be a
| normal blunder that everybody makes. But if you go against
| the grain and try to fix things yourself when it's becoming
| less and less expected to do that, that could make a
| mistake feel worse.
|
| Of course one might quite naturally just feel more
| responsible for a possible mistake when doing things
| oneself hands-on rather than when delegating things to
| someone else in any case. Not saying you should, but it'd
| be quite natural to.
| TheCapn wrote:
| I think your last point is more close to it.
|
| If it broke and I replaced it with a broken appliance
| then the manufacturer/distributor is to blame. If it
| broke, and I broke it worse (made it unrepairable) then
| it's my fault. Sure, I was trying to be frugal and save
| money doing it myself, but having to admit fault to a
| professional could be embarrassing.
|
| Easier to displace blame instead of facing truths I
| guess? Despite repairing this much stuff, I still
| consider myself a pretty bad mechanic, maybe I'm just too
| hard on myself.
| l33tbro wrote:
| In my experience it just comes down to time and competing
| priorities.
|
| Would I love to deep dive into my fuse box and learn how to
| rewire it? Very much so. But the limited free time I have needs
| to go into side projects and life goals.
|
| I say this having just come out the other side of a long period
| of learning how stuff in my house works. While it has certainly
| been satisfying, I'm looking forward to just paying people to
| do things in future so I can focus more on what compels me.
| xpe wrote:
| I support public policy that finds ways to internalize full-
| lifecycle externalities.
|
| See also: "cradle to grave" manufacturing.
| aappleby wrote:
| No single thing, but in general the gradually declining fraction
| of people capable of understanding complex systems "from top to
| bottom" concerns me.
|
| I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but
| globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic
| understanding over time.
| Flankk wrote:
| That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a
| liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal
| disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with
| you when you leave.
| sanderjd wrote:
| That's why you don't want _one_ person with top-to-bottom
| knowledge, but not why you don 't want _many_ people with
| top-to-bottom knowledge.
| krapp wrote:
| You don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge
| because those people command higher salaries, and because
| most jobs don't require top-to-bottom knowledge, meaning
| those higher salaries wouldn't translate into commensurate
| value being returned to the company.
|
| Also people with top-to-bottom knowledge will tend to want
| to be promoted, and most won't (because employment is a
| pyramid, and also see the Gervais Principle) so you'll be
| left with a pool of frustrated, overpaid employees.
| analog31 wrote:
| Physicist here. Hire more of us. Grokking complex systems,
| testing, and communicating our knowledge, are what we do.
| api wrote:
| Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-
| doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives
| EVs, and also making the grid more maintainable, more robust, and
| easier to fix if damaged by anything from mundane causes to EMPs.
|
| Some thoughts:
|
| * Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher
| voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side
| with existing equipment and grid voltages. That way existing
| rights of way can carry far more power over existing wires.
|
| * Smaller more modular cheaper substation equipment that can be
| slotted in and rapidly replaced, eventually to replace the mega-
| transformers and stuff that are very hard to physically ship
| places. Today there are substations with equipment so unwieldy
| that it would be physically challenging to ship replacement
| equipment.
|
| * Lower cost methods of stringing new high power transmission
| lines to bring distant renewable energy to cities.
|
| * Make undersea power lines as cheap (or nearly so) as undersea
| fiber allowing "global supergrid" systems to share renewable
| energy.
|
| * Protection equipment or techniques to reduce damage from solar
| storms or EMP.
|
| The power grid is becoming more and more central and essential to
| human life, and we are about to drop tons more demand on it via
| electrification of transport and HVAC (heat pumps). Yet it seems
| like there's not much innovation there. Right now if everyone
| comes home and plugs in their car it crashes the grid in many
| places, and this won't do.
|
| Batteries are hot, but they're still too expensive to back up
| whole cities or regions. The need for batteries can be greatly
| reduced if the grid can be made bigger, wider, and at least an
| order of magnitude more reliable.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Related question: this issue of power bill costs skyrocketing
| in europe and elsewhere, to where there is real risk of mass
| non-payment. Do we know what percentage of households being
| shut off would cause grid instability because of having to dump
| load from nuclear and other plants that can't easily be shut
| down?
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I guess the simple way would be to cut off non-payers in
| smaller batches than would make problems for the grid.
|
| But I guess there would also be industry willing to buy the
| excess immediately anyway.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Lots of people are working on this problem in different ways.
| But you're still right that it's a good answer to the question
| posed here!
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-
| doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives
| EVs,
|
| The British National Grid says that already planned increases
| in capacity will cope with plenty to spare.
|
| Your assertion is a very common one not backed by those in the
| industry.
| iambateman wrote:
| I think there is some truth to the generational knowledge
| transfer because the tech industry is still young. That said, we
| should not expect the generation gap to play an outsized role in
| tech compared to manufacturing, engineering, etc.
|
| Where the technology is mission critical, healthcare companies
| have worked for decades to train new developers on 1980's tech.
|
| In the same way that all cultural understanding can become
| extinct, we probably are losing some bits of wisdom as older
| generations age out. The problem is it's not obvious what bits of
| wisdom are being lost, even to the aged.
|
| Finally, given Moore's law, many of the constraints which drove
| early decisions no longer apply. As long as we are on a hyper-
| growth curve in technology cost and adoption rates, we will
| suffer from a lack of wisdom, and need lots of extra energy to be
| spent on bad ideas in order to make progress.
|
| Eventually, when growth rates slow down, we will have a more
| developed sense of what technological wisdom looks like in the
| long term. The good news is, that will happen on its own. The bad
| news is It's a long way off.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| If I remember correctly there's a lot of low level networking
| code that's basically in this state. I think ntp is maintained by
| a single person. Curl was written by a single person, not sure
| who maintains it.
|
| Tons of stuff in the geospatial world is owned and maintained by
| surprisingly few people like proj and gdal. I'm almost certain I
| saw something about all GPS code in the world relying on a
| package maintained by a single person.
| jakub_g wrote:
| There are some bugs in browsers that are decades old and they
| do not get fixed, precisely because of this IMO - no one knows
| part X of codebase anymore, learning it would take weeks, as
| it's probably written in idiomatic C++ from 2003 :) and there
| are other priorities (mostly shipping new stuff).
| mtoner23 wrote:
| I wonder if this is actually a more efficient way to run things
| than every company implementing timezones/tables/curl
| themselves for each of their needs. current situation isnt
| ideal but not horrible.
| bombcar wrote:
| It often _is_ the better way, because you have ONE
| implementation that everyone uses (even if it might be wrong
| at some point) vs multiple implementations that are all
| subtly different and never align.
| jldugger wrote:
| It is, but also its kinda concerning that some CS faculty
| member does this as a hobby[1].
|
| [1]: https://samueli.ucla.edu/time-zone-king-how-one-ucla-
| compute...
| manquer wrote:
| Still is better than some big corp distinguished engineer
| equivalent doing it in his free time.
|
| The CS prof probably has tenure , a lot of freedom on what
| he works on, never ending supply of TAs and students and
| can choose when he retires .
| onion2k wrote:
| , 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, and there's a woeful lack of documentation
| around processes and understanding. There's often reasonably
| good code docs, but that only ever tells you what the code is
| trying to do; it doesn't tell you why the code exists in the
| first place, or what the code _should_ do. If you ever need to
| check the code is correct there 's rarely any resources apart
| from that one person. In the worst cases that person left a few
| years before.
|
| I've become quite good at technical writing because I always
| end up establishing a project to fix the docs.
| jakub_g wrote:
| > 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.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Possibly industrial automation and control systems
|
| I heard once from a recruiter that a lot of the air traffic
| communications in the defense industry are losing old timers and
| there's not enough young blood to replace them. That could've
| just been him trying to sell me the job though
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Construction
| bombcar wrote:
| Work is being done in this area, but it doesn't move as fast as
| people would think. Milwaukee is doing a lot of
| electric/battery tool development that replaces/enhances gas
| tools, and there are new construction methods that take time to
| be adopted.
|
| Two off-hand that I can think of are "cast and move" bridges
| and hollowcore.
|
| Construction moves very slowly because of the permitting
| process and the equipment investments. You also have to deal
| with the realities - if you build a standard house via the
| methods everyone around you uses, you'll have no problem
| finding people to perform maintenance on it. If you build it
| differently, people may not know how to deal with it, even if
| the method is technically better.
|
| Many "US builders" are stealing techniques from Europe and vice
| versa.
| noodle wrote:
| I'm currently working in this space and agree - very
| underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more
| served because more money is involved, residential is
| underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a
| pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time
| without some real movement.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| There's process and digital tools on the one end and on the
| other the ugly truth that almost everyone building spaces -
| be it commercial or residential - will be fed up with the low
| wages they get for the treciourous work they have to do in
| most cases since the number of people in "western countries"
| willing to work in construction is rapidly falling.
| freeqaz wrote:
| I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen
| in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's
| the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's
| dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to).
|
| The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more
| frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't
| going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make them like
| they used to" rings true.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| What i mean is that construction as a whole is a completely
| overlooked market.
|
| Working in that space since almost 5 years after product
| development in and for several industries for 20+ years.
|
| It's highly complex but the user group is an overlooked and
| diverse set of people that have to put up with less than
| crappy solutions for getting their jobs done - for the chaos
| that is construction.
|
| So many opportunities and space for innovation that is not
| another food delivery service for meteopolitan areas but
| meaningful tools for people in dire need.
|
| Love it and encourage everyone to have a look.
| sbuk wrote:
| The trouble with construction is the Autodesk monopoly.
| They are kings of EEE.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| There's a whole lot more to it then what Autodesk
| offers...
| dazc wrote:
| 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.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| And yes - not much to almost nothing has changed.
| jventura wrote:
| > Working in that space since almost 5 years after product
| development
|
| Doing construction work, or software development for
| construction companies?
| whiteboardr wrote:
| The latter.
| conductr wrote:
| I hired a carpenter a few years ago and we became friends /
| stay in touch. He had just started his own company in 2018
| and the work he did for me he did with a "helper". By 2020,
| he ran 5 crews and jumped in where needed to help keep
| deadlines and whatnot. In 2022, he said he hasn't picked up a
| hammer in over a year other than training his crews of which
| he now has 12. All the growth has been entirely word of
| mouth, they all drive plain white construction vehicles
| without his company branding on them and he has never
| marketed his company at all.
| tylerlh wrote:
| 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.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Maybe you'd be surprised at how many people at Amazon work on
| logistics.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| I was going to say fulfillment technology, which is a subset of
| supply chain / logistics.
| HorizonXP wrote:
| 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.
| dragostudor wrote:
| Fascinating, would be great to chat about your thoughts on
| the future of the space
| blown_gasket wrote:
| Maybe for driving technology specifically the space is small.
| But for supply chain management there are a number of players:
| SAP, Oracle, and Kinaxis to name three. There are more than a
| dozen though.
| ledgerdev wrote:
| This is a good video on the transfer of knowledge and fragility
| of technology. https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko
| vyrotek wrote:
| The mainframe code running the IRS, airline, banking, and credit
| card systems.
| guywithahat wrote:
| This may not be the type of answer you're looking for but near me
| insurance companies (AmFam, Sentry, etc) pay extremely well for
| the area and pay big money to purchase startups
| thinkingkong wrote:
| What kinds of acquisitions? Like what product categories from
| your knowledge?
| Centigonal wrote:
| The problem I've found in this space is the data.
|
| I and my colleagues have done consulting work for several
| insurance companies. I'd love to develop some sick claim
| processing/auditing software or data management solution for
| insurance, but it's next to impossible to get visibility into
| the data they're processing and where the improvement
| opportunities lie without working there or having an in.
| ska wrote:
| > processing and where the improvement opportunities lie
| without working there or having an in.
|
| This isn't institutionally crazy.
|
| It's an old, old, story. Lots of people feel like they can
| come in from the outside to a complex domain, apply some
| "generic" techniques etc, and make changes with huge positive
| impact. They usually wrong, usually enough that many people
| feel safe just ignoring the possibility.
|
| Chance of success is much higher by building capability
| internally for the techniques with people who already
| understand the domain well. This however runs into both
| internal politics and moribund institutions so can be a real
| challenge.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| I've done so much work in this space that I wrote up a patern
| that I modify as needed. The only data-specific issues you'll
| encounter are the underwriting rules - each insurer has their
| own secret sauce that they guard very closely.
|
| My template -
| https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Protection_System.aspx
| jrockway wrote:
| I'm guessing the cycle is; work at an insurance company,
| figure out a solution to their problem, ask your boss if you
| can work on that solution, be told no, quit and start a
| startup to do it, sell it to that company, get bought by that
| company.
|
| This sounds complicated but remember that there is little
| downside risk for the insurance company that buys you. If you
| don't make a good product, then you or your investors are out
| the cash, and they are out $0. This is probably 99% of cases.
| If you do make a good product, then they can just buy it
| later when the $ is worth less! (There is also a risk that a
| competitor buys you, I guess.)
| guywithahat wrote:
| One of the big startup purchases that happened while I was
| there was of a company that used machine learning to estimate
| the value of items in a room, ostensibly to guess how much
| your furniture and electronics are worth. Insurance companies
| are already good at actuarial sciences so they don't need you
| to estimate how likely someone is to file a claim, they need
| you to do things they're not good at
| thewebcount wrote:
| I would say learning about any form of computing not related to
| Unix. Many of us old-timers grew up using systems (both home and
| corporate) that weren't variations of Unix, and I feel like CS
| education is turning into a Unix mono-culture these days. User
| interfaces from things like VAX, Apple ][, IBM Mainframes, etc.
| The file system on macOS 8/9 which didn't use paths and has
| always allowed spaces in names because it isn't interacted with
| via command line, for example. The VAX file system that
| automatically versioned documents without the user needing to
| worry about it. (I think the Apple Lisa did something like this,
| too.)
|
| Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of bad ideas in those systems,
| too. (Like why do I have to use "RUN" vs. "BRUN" on the Apple ][
| depending on what type of program it is?) But finding and
| promoting the better ideas and teaching young people about them
| is, I think , important and risks being lost otherwise.
|
| Learning about failures from older systems is always interesting,
| too. Why couldn't Atari and Amiga compete against Apple and
| Microsoft, for example? I think things like that are important to
| understand going forward, too.
| zvr wrote:
| Nitpick: VAX was the hardware, VMS was the operating system.
| (having worked on VAXen with BSD Unix)
| dangets wrote:
| Joe Armstrong gave a good talk on forgotten ideas in Computer
| Science.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
| ccooffee wrote:
| Can't watch the video right now, but the slides (available at
| [0]) list these four "forgotten ideas":
|
| 1. Linda Tuple Spaces [1]
|
| 2. Flow based programming [2]
|
| 3. Xanadu [3]
|
| 4. Unix pipes [4]
|
| [0]
| https://codesync.global/uploads/media/default/0001/01/de7dfa...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)
| iammjm wrote:
| 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
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| 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.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| I loved this as a kid! And also played it for a couple days
| as an adult recently ha. Even though I don't play much games
| anymore.
|
| Some of the logic puzzles were actually still very tricky.
| Was very impressed.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Agree, education via a game makes lots of sense. Math is one of
| those that is perfectly suited since repetition helps to learn
| it.
|
| There have been companies that specilized in educational games
| in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there
| were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software
| Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone.
|
| I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that
| education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense
| for parents to spend money on something they already have. And
| teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their
| lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > And teachers don't want to introduce something that
| threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a
| guess on my part.
|
| This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in
| elementary education and they would love something like that.
| The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the
| autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20
| copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200
| dollars. So at the budget level required to make games
| available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop
| me if this next part sounds familiar) the District
| administration is pretty far removed from the students that
| will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach.
| Because of this technology companies are incentivized to
| build their product to the wishes of the district
| administrators rather than for the students and teachers
| using the product. This process is helped by the trips,
| gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching
| to the district level decision makers.
|
| So the district goes with the product that checks off the
| most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad
| administrator, gives them more control over the students and
| classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased
| doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning
| because it turns out it is way easier to put together a
| "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former
| district administrators) assure that it will increase X
| metric by Y%.
|
| Sorry, had to get this off my chest.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| That's why you'd probably want to target the homeschool
| market if you had a startup making educational games.
| Homeschooling seems to be increasingly popular since the
| pandemic so that's a growing market and one that is probably
| not as dominated by very religious families as it used to be.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Agree except for being "boring". I don't see educational games
| in anyway as boring. If you (reader, not iammjm) see it as
| boring, you are not the right person to build it.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I pitched such a thing to a department of education grant
| program and got rejected. I called it the Meta Educational
| Environment for Simulation and Gaming (MEESG) (long before FB
| thought about turning into Meta). The pitch was to create a
| core open source platform for which subject matter experts
| could create their own specialized training packages, tied in
| with a web interface for teachers/students to track progress,
| gamifying the educational process, which was the key to
| engaging the students (feedback on progress).
|
| Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest
| benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive
| just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage
| electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would
| have a much lower risk and cost less.
| gault8121 wrote:
| That's basically what I am doing with Quill.org (I'm the
| founder / executive director). Quill is a platform for
| learning tools and games - we support six web applications
| that plug into a common, open source platform where teachers
| can assign activities to students and monitor results. At the
| moment, our applications are all focused on literacy, and
| they are more "tool-like" than "game-like". However, we use
| AI to assess writing, and the AI creates a game-like
| experience of writing different responses and getting
| different pieces of feedback (somewhat like a MUD RPG). We're
| creating the applications in-house now, and the API is not
| public, but the hope is to open it up in the future to allow
| others to launch tools and game on our platform. Quill is now
| serving more than six million students across the United
| States, about 12% of all K-12 students.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Interactive visualizations/simulations go a really far way
| towards helping students learn complex topics. Gamification is
| tough because you need a human to effectively react to a
| student's particular shortcomings and help them reframe
| problems.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| 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
| darepublic wrote:
| I remember Encarta 9x as well
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| I TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year
| old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I
| asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered
| "Skyrim".
|
| So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.
| Delk wrote:
| I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a
| teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking,
| but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number
| of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even
| though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a
| more spontaneous form of communication.
|
| I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8
| or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was
| faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple,
| I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially
| awkward in general, which didn't help.)
|
| Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more
| comfortable with spontaneous communication.
|
| I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general,
| which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side
| product of something you're interested in can be a huge
| boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people
| probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they
| were engrossed with.
| cloudymeatballs wrote:
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Why does education have to be entertaining? Interactive, sure.
| But not entertaining due to attention spans dwindling.
| Aeolun wrote:
| More like attention spans for boring stuff were always short
| for humans. Making it more entertaining means people don't
| have such a hard time remaining focused.
| nicolas_ wrote:
| Emmanuel Freund (Shadow - gaming pc in the cloud - founder) in
| France is working on PowerZ (https://powerz.tech/) and has
| raised more than $10M.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| I credit a huge portion of my current career and general math
| and reading skills to having a couple CDs of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart games early in my
| childhood. It's a pity I can't think of very many things that I
| would be comfortable pointing my own kids to and hope for the
| same effect.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick
| that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the
| gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing
| feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening
| and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a
| perverse incentive IMHO.
| switchbak wrote:
| When I'm really in flow at work, it can almost feel like a
| game. Then I go back to yak shaving and jira.
|
| There are (and could be better) environments that can isolate
| and focus on that. The combo of interface and specific
| challenge can really help communicate what's magical about
| engineering. Ideally that would help motivate people (versus
| just being a dopamine hit source).
|
| Highly visual environments with rapid feedback seem to hit
| that button for me. The old bridge building game Pontifex was
| great, as was Besiege. I'd love to see more like that (there
| probably are, I've not played many games in years)
| rmdoss wrote:
| Duolingo is doing it amazingly to learn a new language.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I speak 3 languages, attempted to learn the 4th one
| (German) on Duolingo and I find it very ineffective.
|
| I recall having trouble learning English back in high
| school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough
| was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to
| debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in
| the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise
| things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect
| but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need
| to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms
| etc.
|
| IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards
| making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I
| think edge case exploration is way to go but the
| gamification usually revolves around memorising.
| philwelch wrote:
| > The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes
| from the gratification of learning or figuring out something
| as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something
| is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases.
|
| This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one
| example of an educational game.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| 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 gamified ways.
|
| Educational games are just games that also teach fun things
| along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games
| and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to
| college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit
| of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly
| broad topic and not something you research, but rather
| focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side.
| Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings
| or works of literature. Games with some light math-based
| puzzling.
|
| I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught
| through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high
| level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with
| low level concepts, something that games can bring across
| better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of
| schools.
| charleshan wrote:
| 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 published. Parents show off photos of their children
| performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while
| assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in
| meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists
| while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme
| leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of
| status contests."
| darepublic wrote:
| 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
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The selection of which status games to play is itself a
| status game.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think
| at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire
| a desire to learn something more deeply through games.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| I agree that games intended to teach academic subjects are
| very hard to get right. Interestingly, when you take the
| arrow in the other direction, ordinary video games have
| sometimes been the arena of some very advanced "doing
| science", e.g.:
|
| "Speedrunning as a gateway to scientific endeavours"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_1lQ2KH50
|
| "The Complete History of the Super Mario 64 A Button
| Challenge" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94lfiY18
| _CgWGQzweD_a...
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning
| fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego,
| for example, has probably created generations of people with
| incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all
| been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of
| all kinds.
|
| It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for
| something to be considered education.
| ghaff wrote:
| >designing tools that make learning fun
|
| While I don't wholly disagree, there's a lot of edtech out
| there premised on the notion that all subjects, even
| sometimes challenging ones, should be like playing a game
| for all people or you're doing it wrong. I submit that
| you're always going to have some percentage of students who
| pretty much hate math however you teach it and some
| percentage who don't want to read books even with
| relatively "fun" and easy options.
|
| Can I find plenty of problems at all levels of education?
| Sure. Are there more engaging things we can do even in an
| environment that's largely not personalized? Of course. But
| everyone should have fun all the time is not really a
| realistic goal unless you just let kids do whatever they
| want.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Sure, I don't have an objection on that. In fact, anything
| up until college is actually distilled and idealised
| version of the ideas about how nature works. That's why
| people solve math, physics and other problems
| recreationally.
|
| However I don't want to call it gamification because those
| are not designed in a game format in order to make you do
| something that you normally wouldn't want to do. Those are
| simplification or analogies to bring ideas within the grasp
| of the student so they can reach it with their current
| toolset but without mischaracterising it. So when a student
| calculates the trajectory of a ball in ideal condition,
| this is still a calculation of a balls trajectory and not
| something else.
| m463 wrote:
| come on, nobody is a polymath.[1]
|
| There is some really boring stuff to slog through on the
| journey of a formal education.
|
| In school, people tend to choose subjects they are fascinated
| with, to the detriment of the other subjects.
|
| I think some subjects like history either benefit from actual
| life experience, or need some additional storytelling to
| appreciante.
|
| we really don't need the "wooden straightback chairs in
| schoolrooms" mentality
|
| gamification might smack of spoonfeeding, but it also might
| allow a much richer learning experience too.
|
| [1] statistically speaking
| cauthon wrote:
| Depends on the domain. Mavis Beacon absolutely outclassed any
| of the "classwork" on typing I had in school.
|
| edit: the 24 card games were really great too, though maybe
| only if you were already inclined towards math
| na85 wrote:
| For me it was flirting with girls on ICQ, and getting owned
| at StarCraft 1 before voip was a thing.
|
| Nothing teaches typing better, in my experience.
| commoddity wrote:
| I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins
| Creed Origins?
|
| It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map
| of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with
| what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run
| around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the
| farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and
| view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.
|
| It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It
| essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that
| goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed
| it to create something educational.
|
| Would love to see more of that type of thing.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not
| explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and
| less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying
| its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and
| imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play
| the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping
| people and saving lives or something.
| fzzzy wrote:
| GTA 5 roleplaying servers are getting pretty popular now
| and do what you want. I haven't tried them yet but I've
| wanted what you describe and it might be fun to check them
| out.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| You should check out Death Stranding! It has a unique
| asynchronous multiplayer model that rewards collaboration.
|
| Players can place items and structures as they walk from
| place to place and you can see stuff placed by other
| players as you bring each in-game area "online". These
| items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up
| difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle,
| or even entire roads/highways stretching across a
| landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can
| give them likes. Note that you never see another player's
| character.
|
| It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you
| bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's
| not much combat in the game because it's generally easier
| to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is
| present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.
| Jensson wrote:
| Tens of millions buys and plays truck simulators, so these
| games already exists. You have many other kinds, but the
| truck simulator one is the most popular. This type of game
| is much more popular in Europe than in USA though.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/227300/Euro_Truck_Simula
| t...
| jtsnow wrote:
| SimCopter and Crazy Taxi are older titles that come to
| mind.
| shredprez wrote:
| First time hearing about this! Not a big AC fan, but this is
| more than enough reason to snag it; is that a platform-
| specific mode?
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| It's on PC, Xbox and PS at least, not sure about others.
| Really cool experience because it also includes pictures of
| artifacts and audio commentary from scholars. They did the
| same for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla aka Viking Simulator.
| sofixa wrote:
| It's also on Stadia, and also in the Odyssey (Ancient
| Greece) game.
| tareqak wrote:
| It was released as a free update to the base game, but it is
| also available as a standalone title at a price lower than
| the base game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/775430/Disc
| overy_Tour_by_...
| qohen wrote:
| _Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed
| Origins?_
|
| The sequels have this too.
|
| (And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are
| YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by
| some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek
| game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).
| subpixel wrote:
| I just watched this footage:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySlKKe38Pnk
|
| I can't help but think how awesome it would be to do that as
| a means of learning about WWI and WWII for example.
| rochak wrote:
| As an alternative, wouldn't it be better to invest into games
| that teach you something or sharpen your thinking? Playing fun
| games that elicited curiosity and boosted logical thinking had
| a lot to do with how I ended up doing what I do for a living
| (software engineering).
| nescioquid wrote:
| 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 all, you needn't feel
| so bad for spending all that time playing games!
| thn-gap wrote:
| Guild Wars had the feature of allowing to set a secondary
| language. This would translate all game text from the main
| language into the secondary one in real time as long as you
| hold the given key down. This meant that at any point, you
| didn't need to fetch a dictionary or translate a word,
| wasting time and immersion. I'm so sad I haven't found any
| other game with this feature.
|
| I'm trying to play games with another language, and while
| sometimes it's ok, other times you really need to know the
| language to understand how understand mechanics that are
| introduced into the game. City Skylines was a super tough
| game to play in a learning language, but it would have been a
| nice learning exercise if I had the above feature.
| qsort wrote:
| The only reason why I speak English is because I spent my
| teen years flaming strangers on Slashdot, you insensitive
| clod.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| 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.
| adeelk93 wrote:
| Subtly different how?
| qsort wrote:
| I'm pretty sure even a casual observer could tell I'm not
| a native speaker given a sufficiently large sample of my
| writings. GP is right, the correct thing to do is to just
| embrace that I'll never be as fluent, as natural in
| English as I am in Italian.
|
| Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to
| talk to people _literally across the ocean_. This very
| conversation we 're having right now would have been
| impossible otherwise.
|
| I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.
| Hextinium wrote:
| Internet English has different "regional variety" than
| real life, for example I have litterally never heard
| "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.
| slater wrote:
| A beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans eating some hot
| grits, you say?
| boredtofears wrote:
| Games already do this all the time. Hades is essentially a
| fantastic retelling of many Greek mythologies.
| theonething wrote:
| Short attention span is in large part because of computers,
| phones, etc. So putting ed games on them doesn't seem to
| address the core problem.
|
| Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is
| strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning
| and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books
| since infancy.
|
| Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that
| our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and
| if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce
| screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that
| as long as possible especially during the formative years has
| worked well for us so far.
| debunn wrote:
| I work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game (
| https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English
| adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at
| school or at home. While I don't think this is a good
| substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire
| education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what
| is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn
| outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in
| this space for sure!
| bashmelek wrote:
| I would like to see a fun game to help me with differential
| equations. People still want to learn more advanced topics and
| I feel that not enough edtech exists for learning beyond the
| formative years, and even less for beyond high school. As an
| example, Khan Academy has received much praise, but I was less
| impressed to be honest.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| If there's anyone from Meta who works on Oculus here:
|
| I want to build an educational VR app for Quest, but where
| would it go in the store?
|
| I recently stopped planning an app idea because there is no
| educational section of the store.
| happymellon wrote:
| Typing of the Dead did more for my touch typing than anything
| else.
|
| I remember loads of educational games from my youth.
| ab-dm wrote:
| Time to remaster Logical journey of the zoombinis. Such an
| amazing game.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| It's actually been remastered a couple times. Wikipedia says
| there were remakes in 2001 and 2015.
|
| (Though of course, 2015 _was_ seven years ago... old enough
| to remaster again?)
| ska wrote:
| It's not a crazy idea, but also not a panacea.
|
| So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the
| game part predates "computer game" part).
|
| I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that
| makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably
| important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have
| tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of
| open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so
| far.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| groby_b wrote:
| Maybe. Maybe not. I think the questions of "who pays", "who
| profits", and "who controls the material" matters a lot. So
| does learning theory (I don't think games will be the _only_
| way to learn). It is definitely a field we should pay close
| attention to if we care about learning.
|
| For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What
| Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James
| Paul Gee)
| Pandabob wrote:
| Off-topic but a little tangential: There's a designer named
| Zander Whitehurst[0] on TikTok/Youtube Shorts teaching Figma in
| 30 to 60 second videos and I'm in love with the format. I do
| wonder whether it's effective, but I've learned quite a bit of
| Figma from him.
|
| [0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@zander_whitehurst
| porcc wrote:
| When I read this I can't help but think of the meme that goes:
| Why don't we just like, put nicotine in salad so everyone can
| get addicted to salad?
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| As a kid, the Encarta virtual 3D tours of historical places was
| extremely fun. I used to spend hours running around and
| exploring those.
| WhiteOwlEd wrote:
| Working on it. As a first iteration, I am thinking video games
| meets data visualization. Details at
| https://www.whiteowleducation.com/courses/data-
| visualization....
| copperx wrote:
| I was watching a Pixar movie and wondered, "what if these
| resources were spent in creating, say, scientifically accurate
| animations of biological processes for people who are learning
| chemistry, anatomy, genetics, etc." We all have seen small
| animations of processes, but some are inaccurate or simplified
| due to time and money constraints. I've dreamed about this
| since I was a kid.
| Darkskynet wrote:
| On the topic of 'scientifically accurate animations of
| biological processes'. You may know of these videos, but I
| thought these might be worth sharing for others interested in
| this topic:
|
| Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable
| biology. (uploaded in 2012) https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU
|
| Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that
| also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017)
| https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A
| copperx wrote:
| I did not. That's fantastic. Thank you.
| mateo411 wrote:
| Sounds like ad-tech masquerading as ed-tech. There are a lot of
| ed-tech companies around. I don't know how many take this
| strategy, but I'm sure there is a few.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation.
|
| This is something CS majors often have to un-learn as they
| enter the world of practical programming. Big-O is just not
| incredibly useful in reasoning about algorithms as n is always
| bounded.
| acchow wrote:
| Big-O is also not so great in the real world where you should
| be more concerned about cache misses/alignment
| version_five wrote:
| As far as I know, computer science is still taught in CS
| degrees though. I think the signal to noise online is much
| lower because _programming_ is much more accessible to those
| without a theoretical background, but I 'd guess that in terms
| of raw numbers there are more people graduating with CS degrees
| who have learned the theory than ever before.
| bovermyer wrote:
| If I had to guess, I'd say food distribution and preservation.
| But that's just a guess.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Could you expand on that?
| ramboldio wrote:
| Government Software.
| motohagiography wrote:
| The question was "boring but important" not "pointless." I
| tease, but I've worked on a lot of government tech and their
| only use cases are surveillance and lying. It's why PowerBI is
| so popular.
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