3 ms·

>The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. Great advice, my SO works outdoors do

>The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. Great advice, my SO works outdoors doing field studies and the amount of shit they talk about doing manually is astounding. They pay people (or sometimes unpaid interns) to go through hours of videos documenting everything they see! Almost all cataloging and measurements are done with little to no technology. Another example; I volunteer for a program that does some human intake and processing, before I got there everyone used a series of paper forms that got updated by work of mouth. Now? Google Spreadsheets. There's hundreds of industries, organizations, and groups that do extremely manual labor intensive work because it hasn't even occurred to them it can be automated or turned in to a service, but you'll never meet them if you hang around tech people all the time because the solution is always on their mind.

kaybe 8y ago
I still remember this guy: > I work at NASA creating procedures for spacewalks (EVAs). > Currently we write these procedures in Microsoft Word. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 (2013) Hm, I wonder if they changed the system by now? edit: Seems like there was still work to be done 3 years ago at least.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 (2016)
- jamesmontalvo3 8y ago
  Nope, we're still using the same system. Wow...the first time I mentioned that here was 2013. Ouch. It's something I've wanted to work on all this time but just haven't been able to fit it in. Some students used it as a group project [1] last semester, though, and another group of students may pick it up this semester...so I'm hopeful. [1] https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk
thirdsun 8y ago
Yes, that's my experience as well. Once you step out of tech bubble you'll encounter countless small and even mid-sized businesses that could greatly benefit from rather simple CRUD apps and solutions that might seem very obvious to you. Or in other, more specific words (and I have no affiliation with the product): Showing them how to use something like Airtable and setting up a simple template for them could change their world.
mping 8y ago
Ha! I did a webapp just for tagging observation videos. This is for my SO college students, they were doing it in excel. It's a big headache for maintenance, but it probably saved her students alot of time There are niche apps that do it but they charge a high fee to the college. Case you are wondering: https://observideo.com https://observideo.com

kaybe 8y ago

I still remember this guy: > I work at NASA creating procedures for spacewalks (EVAs). > Currently we write these procedures in Microsoft Word. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 (2013) Hm, I wonder if they changed the system by now? edit: Seems like there was still work to be done 3 years ago at least.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 (2016)

jamesmontalvo3 8y ago
Nope, we're still using the same system. Wow...the first time I mentioned that here was 2013. Ouch. It's something I've wanted to work on all this time but just haven't been able to fit it in. Some students used it as a group project [1] last semester, though, and another group of students may pick it up this semester...so I'm hopeful. [1] https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk

thirdsun 8y ago

Yes, that's my experience as well. Once you step out of tech bubble you'll encounter countless small and even mid-sized businesses that could greatly benefit from rather simple CRUD apps and solutions that might seem very obvious to you. Or in other, more specific words (and I have no affiliation with the product): Showing them how to use something like Airtable and setting up a simple template for them could change their world.

mping 8y ago

Ha! I did a webapp just for tagging observation videos. This is for my SO college students, they were doing it in excel. It's a big headache for maintenance, but it probably saved her students alot of time There are niche apps that do it but they charge a high fee to the college. Case you are wondering: https://observideo.com https://observideo.com