24 ms·

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

• simonjgreen 4y ago
  Copper based telephony systems. So much knowledge in peoples heads, not just technical how-to but system and network knowledge. These things were built by people with quirks understood by people and are mission critical still. They will be replaced by IP and fibre, but not yet.
• JJMcJ 4y ago
  A lot of manufacturing operations are having trouble getting the skilled workers they need, like precision machinists, because the older generation is retiring and there aren't enough people learning those occupations. When you read discussions of "going into the trades" instead of going to college, there is almost never a mention of the skilled trades. It all seems to be construction, and I think that's a mistake.
• kwyrick 4y ago
  I think legacy technology experience is important when comparing the efficiency of current technology. The web provides access to legacy technology and it depends on industry requirements and practices when it comes to utilizing the various technology options.
• guywithahat 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What kinds of acquisitions? Like what product categories from your knowledge?
  • Centigonal 4y ago
    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.
    • jrockway 4y ago
      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.)
    • FourthProtocol 4y ago
      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 https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Work/Protection_System.aspx
    • ska 4y ago
      > 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.
• dragostudor 4y ago
  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
  • ismailmo1 4y ago
    I used to work in manufacturing as a process engineer (now a dev) and this is fascinating to learn about. Do you have any articles on your work or any use cases where I can learn more?
  • AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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
• bvanderveen 4y ago
  Machining. No child left without a 5-axis milling machine!
  • birdman3131 4y ago
    Titan's of CNC and Haas both have great youtube channels addressing training because of exactly this.
    • ramesh31 4y ago
      >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?
      • EddySchauHai 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          >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.
      • JonChesterfield 4y ago
        aerospace -> code monkey seems to be the more common route to me but that might be sample bias
  • 4y ago
• jeffreygoesto 4y ago
  (Civil) Nuclear technology.
  • it_citizen 4y ago
    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.
  • acidburnNSA 4y ago
    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.
• jzellis 4y ago
  The ability for a single person to create a technology, digital or otherwise.
  • rytill 4y ago
    This is an interesting answer. What in your opinion are the main blockers to this ability?
• api 4y ago
  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.
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    > 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.
  • sanderjd 4y ago
    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!
  • motohagiography 4y ago
• whiteboardr 4y ago
  Construction
  • freeqaz 4y ago
    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.
    • conductr 4y ago
      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.
    • whiteboardr 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        The trouble with construction is the Autodesk monopoly. They are kings of EEE.
• dangets 4y ago
  Joe Armstrong gave a good talk on forgotten ideas in Computer Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
  • ccooffee 4y ago
    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/de7dfa6889612b31caf9ffa5b3377ee57be54cfd.pdf https://codesync.global/uploads/media/default/0001/01/de7dfa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(Unix)
    • astrange 4y ago
      Almost everyone who wants to fundamentally reinvent programming seems to come up with visual dataflow programming, which is strange to me because aren't those just function calls?
      • mikewarot 4y ago
        No... it's plumbing. Function calls are nested to-do lists. It's a different thing all together. Flows all have queues.
        • astrange 4y ago
          Function calls (called messages) can go in a queue in the actor model. I do think dataflow programming might be interesting for low-level if it compiled to hardware as well as C. There's an old project for that here but the actual webpage and docs are gone: https://github.com/orcc/orcc https://github.com/orcc/orcc
• bovermyer 4y ago
  If I had to guess, I'd say food distribution and preservation. But that's just a guess.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Could you expand on that?
• tester756 4y ago
  Maybe IBM's Mainframe? I mean reliable hardware, etc.
• kkfx 4y ago
  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/ 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 4y ago
    At least smalltalks legacy lives on in the _hyperscript project!
  • Temasik 4y ago
• georgeburdell 4y ago
  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.
  • toldyouso2022 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
    • antifa 4y ago
      And almost all of these videos are scams, lies, MLMs, or too obvious to be helpful.
  • phaedrus 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Reminds me of when I started noticing adults in cars delivering newspaper instead of kids in bicycles around the time of the last recession
• ledgerdev 4y ago
  This is a good video on the transfer of knowledge and fragility of technology. https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko
• barbarbar 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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…
  • thedougd 4y ago
    I directly worked on the planning of a replacement deposits system for a major financial institution. The existing system was written in COBOL and the vendor did not want to continue any business, including maintenance support, on this old software. We were already able to extend the software ourselves without their help to add integrations or features. Consultants came in and offered the following suggestions: 1) Write new software to replace. Estimate $3-400 million dollars. 2) Use a product that would transpile the COBOL to Java. We chose option 3: offer a lump sump to license the software in perpetuity and maintain ourselves. Built a layer around it to better enable the systems of engagement use cases. The problem with #1 and #2 is documenting all the use cases and validating them after changes are made. Can you even imagine the resulting Java code for #2? There are many edge case behaviors that were either purposeful or accidental, but now relied upon by downstream software. To summarize, there's a huge price tag to replace these systems, it's an extremely high risk exercise, and the benefits to the business are at best incremental. It's easy to see why the financial sector won't bother until either regulators force them or they acquire another institution with a better system.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• aappleby 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
        • sanderjd 4y ago
          I think a decent rule of thumb might be to have three people with really deep holistic expertise. If there's so much context that it's hard for people to have and maintain that depth, then the organization is successful enough that it can afford to pay a premium for a few of them. And when one of them moves up or out, you have two more to pass on the knowledge to a new third. Maybe two or four or five would be fine too, but three seems to me like it might be about the optimum. But it's very risky to have either zero or one person who knows a system from top to bottom.
• iambateman 4y ago
  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.
• iammjm 4y ago
  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
  • tnorthcutt 4y ago
    You might find https://www.synthesis.com/ https://www.synthesis.com/ interesting. They develop games in-house that teach kids problem-solving, collaboration skills, dealing with unknowns/dynamic conditions, etc. etc.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • spikyman 4y ago
    I'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge? The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.
    • fizzpack 4y ago
      This seems key to me. We need to teach people how to learn autonomously. And provide them with quality tools to learn from.
  • acidburnNSA 4y ago
    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
    • 4y ago
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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-intelligence.html https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/safety/artificial-i... How much of it is fluff I don't know.
  • dogman144 4y ago
    Check out Shift5
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Care to unpack that / explain what element(s) are addressed?
      • dogman144 4y ago
        Shift5 is a company doing the R&D and documentation on tech concepts around railroads, specifically fleet monitoring and security.
  • tylerlh 4y ago
    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!
• systemvoltage 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    If you're working on any of these, it would be great to chat
  • mdtusz 4y ago
    Something I've noticed in this space is that there exist "standards" which are intended to make systems compatible and useful and modern, but all of these standards are extremely poorly written and cling to outdated paradigms and weird non-standard protocols that aren't used anywhere except small subsets of the manufacturing world. Often you'll have to implement interfaces yourself because there's only one reference C library available that hasn't had any maintenance for years and won't even compile. At risk of someone posting the xkcd on standards, I would love to see an full industry wide consortium to establish _modern and well designed_ standards, led by people with experience making modern networked services and systems. Specifically around industrial machine controls and data/telemetry collection. A few standards exist that are roughly xml-rpc-ish, but they don't even follow that much as a standard. OPC-UA is the latest "standard" to be making the rounds and is (IMO) doomed to fail due to its layers of complexity and unclear specifications.
• samwillis 4y ago
  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.
  • carabiner 4y ago
    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.
    • samwillis 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
• benevol 4y ago
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  There are shockingly few people maintaining the video encoding packages that most people rely on. https://xkcd.com/2347/ 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.
  • mtoner23 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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-computer-scientist-keeps-digital-clocks-ticking/ https://samueli.ucla.edu/time-zone-king-how-one-ucla-compute...
      • manquer 4y ago
• tylerlh 4y ago
  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.
  • HorizonXP 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Fascinating, would be great to chat about your thoughts on the future of the space
    • tylerlh 4y ago
      Very cool! Feel free to reach out!
    • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      Would you mind pinging me? Might have something interesting. username @ very common google email service.
  • JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    I was going to say fulfillment technology, which is a subset of supply chain / logistics.
  • ripper1138 4y ago
    Maybe you’d be surprised at how many people at Amazon work on logistics.
    • tylerlh 4y ago
      The work they do behind the scenes is very impressive. An "AWS, but for supply chain" would be huge in my (biased) opinion, though I'm curious whether they would be motivated enough to share their progress with the rest of the world since it's been quite a competitive advantage.
• bravetraveler 4y ago
  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
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    • bravetraveler 4y ago
      Absolutely! So much of my 'bag of tricks' is having been around the block so many times that I can sniff these things out. It's a bad way for things to be!
  • rufius 4y ago
    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/ https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
    • bravetraveler 4y ago
      I appreciate you introducing me to this concept -- it's something I've thought a lot about, but could never verbalize
      • 4y ago
• chaps 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    That sounds doable, but... why opensource? Does this mean that people / companies are not prepared to pay for the product or service?
    • chaps 4y ago
      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.
      • Fizzz 4y ago
        How do you currently extract info from the FOIA request pages? What kind of info do you look for? Just thinking how you could standardise this
        • chaps 4y ago
          Mostly tesseract, or uploading it through documentcloud and running manual searches. I do a combination of data analysis and spend many hours reading through documents. Sometimes I use unix tools like grep/awk/etc, sometimes I use SQL. If the PDF isn't scanned, I use tabula for csv extraction, but if it's scanned it becomes a silly ordeal. Mind you, I'm not exactly looking for advice here. It's a supremely difficult problem and gut-ideas more often than not don't pan out.
  • IceMetalPunk 4y ago
    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?
• kradeelav 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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?
• thewebcount 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Nitpick: VAX was the hardware, VMS was the operating system. (having worked on VAXen with BSD Unix)
• ramboldio 4y ago
  Government Software.
  • motohagiography 4y ago
    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.
    • ramboldio 4y ago
      then maybe more 'municipal software'
• tannhaeuser 4y ago
  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.
• a_square_peg 4y ago
  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.
  • Oarch 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Thanks for the info and I stand corrected. I had based my information talking to a few graduates from MIT/Penn State university.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      HVAC includes normal heating systems.
  • dublinben 4y ago
    There's no secret how to build efficient buildings. There's standards like passive solar, zero energy building design and passive house that have been in practice for decades. These just aren't as widely known in the US as they are in Europe.
• sowbug 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • TheCapn 4y ago
      >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.
      • 4y ago
• vyrotek 4y ago
  The mainframe code running the IRS, airline, banking, and credit card systems.
• skadamat 4y ago
  Bunch of suggestions in this list! http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
• lettergram 4y ago
  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.
  • wwkeyboard 4y ago
    AgTech is big enough to have it's own tag on TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/tag/agtech/ 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.
    • kimburgess 4y ago
      There's a difference between AgTech and actual agriculture. Farms don't need drones, apps or tractors with DRM. They need people with knowledge of biological systems and logistics.
  • mcphail 4y ago
    Shameless plug for what we're building at HitchPin.com
  • ripper1138 4y ago
    If it makes you feel any better, I grew up in the Midwest and there was no shortage of young people going into Ag.
  • acover 4y ago
    The average age of a farmer in Canada is 56 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220511a-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220511/dq220...
• adamredwoods 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Or we could fix the health insurance system. Other nations are doing significantly better in this area.
• version_five 4y ago
  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
• Buttons840 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
      Maybe QML with DOtherSide[0]? [0]https://github.com/filcuc/DOtherSide https://github.com/filcuc/DOtherSide
  • Diris 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326125 [1]Slint: Native GUI Toolkit for Rust, C++ or JavaScript https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810533 [2]Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112846 [3]Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297550 [4]Build a PinePhone App with Zig and Zgt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30813000 [6]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=GUI%20&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
• totemandtoken 4y ago
  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
• amelius 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      Big-O is also not so great in the real world where you should be more concerned about cache misses/alignment
      • marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Yes, and realistically, you're just as likely to benefit from investigating lock and I/O contention. I wish my work was mostly optimizing single threaded CPU bottlenecks. Would make things a lot easier. If you're dealing with disk access, sequential access is often so much faster than random I/O even in SSDs (especially in writes) that Big-O can be very misleading to look at.
  • version_five 4y ago
    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.
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  Data transfer over the internet without servers, like radio and telephone.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway9870 4y ago
  EDI gateways and conversion. Super important to large companies and the existing companies that can convert and manage the stream of it are incompetent at best. Small companies that interface with large companies use 3rd party gateways for conversion and compliance purposes. Great MRR business if you don't mind boring and no how to build reliable systems.
• Balgair 4y ago
  Bit of an entire category: Older scientific equipment. Typically, you have one graybeard down in the basement that knows how those old centrifuges/distilizers/ionificators/etc work. Things that an entire building is really dependent on. Not only that, but they typically know the limits and how to get good science out of them. It's more of a $$$ issue though. Loads of these old machines are dying off with the people that know them. This then opens up the market for the new people to come in and reinvent the wheel, sometimes literally so. It costs more, sure, but it keeps things moving along too. If you get the chance, talk to these old graybeards and hear their stories. Most of it is mumbo jumbo, but man, they are great stories.
• lkrubner 4y ago
  Secretaries. The corporation of the mid-20th Century was run by an army of secretaries. They allowed for an important kind of flexibility. They've been replaced by software, which is more rigid, and which does harm because of its lack of flexibility. Software engineers tend to over-estimate the productivity gains that come from software, while underestimating how much we lose to the rigidness of software (which is often the reflection of the underlying data schema). It costs money to change software. By contrast, older systems of organization depended on armies of secretaries, who knew when to bend the rules. The flexibility of having a human enforce rules, but also be able to bend them as needed, allowed an important kind of productivity benefit. We've lost that benefit as we have mostly purged secretaries out of corporations and replaced them with software. On the theme of "software sucks," if you don't mind a comical, personal story, I shared this event from last month, when my mom was in the hospital (my conclusion is that the rigidity of software systems in hospitals is making hospitals worse): http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/software-is-making-hospitals-worse http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/software-is-making-ho...
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I think your story is off topic, but really touching nonetheless (plenty of people are working on hospital software, even if it's largely pretty bad) Glad that the worst that happened to your mom is that a nurse was confused about her food, rather than amputating the wrong leg or something (I wonder if faulty software has ever been the cause of this) I wonder if the situation with hospital software will ever improve
    • JJMcJ 4y ago
      Not a software change but one reason you get asked a dozen times "Are you having your the nails on your left big toe clipped" (joke procedure in a hospital of course) is to help avoid exactly these errors. Is the patient who you think it is. Does the patient agree with what your procedure says to do. Often the area to be worked on (like the left big toe in my joke) is marked and the patient agreed with that marking. There are a number of other such safeguards, similar to pre-flight checklists in aviation. Institution these processes have greatly reduced treatment errors.
• austinjp 4y ago
  Making-do and mending (repairing your own clothing, furniture, utensils etc). Composting, and gardening for food. Pickling. Fermenting. Cooking large, healthy meals together in intergenerational groups, and communally with strangers. I could go on, but basically anything and everything our grandparents did, and is now only done in "the West" in dwindling rural communities.
• srkirk 4y ago
  Efficient extraction of metals (and materials that can be broken down to useful precursors) from landfills and 'e-waste'. My PhD supervisor worked for years before he retired, on, among other things, magnetic separation using inhomogeneous magnetic fields. It would be a great pity if such work were forgotten.
  • carapace 4y ago
    Have you got any links or search terms?
    • srkirk 4y ago
      One summary of some of the basic technologies can be found in: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-8263-6_4 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-8263-6_... and cited references therein. A more recent variation on this theme can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie020198r http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie020198r
      • srkirk 4y ago
        Disclaimer (does it really need one?): On the first link above: I shared responsibility for the menial editing, checking and manual indexing of the entire book volume.
  • dragostudor 4y ago
    What is stopping such projects from scaling? Are the economics not there yet?
    • srkirk 4y ago
      Not sure. I know that the conglomerate Outokumpu once had a pilot plant with high-Tc superconducting magnets deployed in the Amazon region somewhere ('Ice in the jungle'? Hah, hold my beer, try liquid-helium cooled superconducting magnets in the jungle). I know because a colleague joined the company, and one of his first assignments was to diagnose unexpectedly large helium losses. A quick FFT later of the recorded Dewar flask levels revealed a 24-hour periodicity, and further analysis found that for a couple of hours every day, the full heat of the tropical sun was finding its way to the tin roof of the mine shed housing the superconducting magnet systems. I haven't heard anything more about the technology or its economics/scaling since then. But I also certainly haven't heard anything more about its use with landfill-derived feedstocks, which seems like a reasonable move.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  It’s obvious that knowledge relating to oil and gas extraction is going to disappear in 20-50 years. Engineering knowledge relating to ICE engines will also disappear (though it seems gas turbines will be with us for a little longer). I’m not sure it matters that much however. If we ever need these things again in the future it seems that we could re-learn it in a decade or two.
• what-imright 4y ago
  My startup is working on solutions to crop failure scenarios such as from a nuclear war. Unfortunately we calculate there are probable outcomes where the only reasonable course of action is for one selected group to actually consume parts of the population in order to survive a nuclear winter. And so we’re building an automated system to take a newly deceased human being and create as many wholesome and nutritious meals from the remains as possible, in a dignified manner. We’re also trying to figure out how the consumption could play out in an orderly fashion where the old and those with non communicable diseases (but are never the less dependent at a time where the burden is too great for society), can be respectfully consumed first, and then in order of value to a future society, with those scoring least being respectfully consumed first, and so on. We are envisioning a type of sleeping capsule with a cover that seals the user from the elements and fallout materials, providing clean air, heat and water. These could be deployed quickly. As the starvation continues the capsules would, every other night, fairly, amongst those of an equal social value, reduce the oxygen during sleep for a painless and stress free passing, and then alert others in the prospect to convert the remains into new rations. It’s out there, but we’re serious. Based on reasonable logic in a bad situation. Important, but nobody seems to care. When 5 billion people have nothing left to eat then they’ll care.
  • julianeon 4y ago
    If you are serious about your business, you should think more about the PR aspect of it. Without any planning or preparation you have an absolutely guaranteed PR disaster on your hands. Your product needs careful messaging and some kind of strategy for what to do about the inevitable “can’t believe this is real” news stories.
  • fan_of_yoinked 4y ago
    wut
  • hello_newman 4y ago
    that’s about as dystopian as it gets
  • moomoo11 4y ago
    At that point just load me into the Meta meta verse
• carapace 4y ago
  Rare plants, and cultivating (not a pun) biological diversity. For example, there are hundreds of varieties of tomato. There are wild tomatoes from the Andes Mountains to the Everglades. There are thousands of varieties of brassica (a huge genus of plants that includes bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, cabbage, rutabaga, and turnip, etc.) I was just hearing from the proprietor of a seed company that many of the old guard are retiring and some are having trouble finding people to carry the torch.
• xylon 4y ago
  I always wondered why cars dont give an indication when a bulb blows. Should be pretty easy to do and improve road safety.
  • bloody-crow 4y ago
    Every car built in the last 20 years can detect when a bulb blows. Doesn't seem like it accomplishes much given how many people just straight up ignore warning lights on their dashes.
    • xylon 4y ago
      My 2008 Honda doesnt. Good to know some cars are doing this now.
• aryehof 4y ago
  Lessons learned modeling complex systems, outside the domains of computing and the data sciences, into code. Over a decade was spent by enterprises designing software using Structured Analysis (data-flow modeling) - lessons lost. Functional decomposition as a design methodology lessons learned - forgotten. Data modeling lessons learned - we are all the way back to people proposing stored procedures for logic. Object-oriented modeling - deprecated, unfashionable and obscured by “its about messaging” or “code organization” in a world that supposedly should be entirely functional.
• madduci 4y ago
  Agriculture. Especially the maintenance such as watering large fields, and surveillance where electricity and internet connection might be scarce. There are a lot of challenges, especially in typical fields in South Europe, where large and automated tractors aren't an option.
  • dragostudor 4y ago
    Are you working on these? Got any links?
• _448 4y ago
  Going back to basics. The fun there is in understanding the low-levels and being able to tinker is one of the most satisfying thing. Unfortunately we have added so much abstract layers over things using technology that no one knows anymore what exactly is happening under those abstract layers. I remember my Dad use to do DIY of almost everything in the house, Radio repair, Grinder-Mixer repair, TV repair, Plumbing, Carpentry, Stove repair, Fan repair, Building his own tools for work, Electricals of the house, Sewing machine repair, Scooter repair(hell, he once even built a small moped for his boss's daughter!). And he had limited resources i.e. lack of tools. His education? A basic Diploma in electronics, in native language(not English) in a remote village and completed just few years after the country became independent from British rule? But he was not unique. Most of my neighbours use to do DIY of most things. We are losing that art.
• Avlin67 4y ago
  personnaly i used to learn a lot while developing games
• unixhero 4y ago
  Faster cd burning
• faangiq 4y ago
  Nothing worth solving is boring.
• iere 4y ago
  hydrogen fuel cell instead of long waiting li-on battery.
• jprdz 4y ago
  A search engine for court cases (every country has something of this sort) bootstrapping latest semantic search, topic modeling, summarization and other cool use cases once you have vectorized the text in each court case. (LLM)
• MarkNewman 4y ago
  It seems to me the problem is we are losing all the knowledge of the 'old generation'. This problem is wider than just in the tech industry. What we need is a tech that can capture the knowledge of Elders and individuals before it is lost. And also be able to access it in some way to answer questions and solve problems without having to analyse each person's contribution individually.