[HN Gopher] Slow
___________________________________________________________________
Slow
Author : calvinfo
Score : 372 points
Date : 2025-07-31 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (michaelnotebook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (michaelnotebook.com)
| ananddtyagi wrote:
| Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in
| Slow Productivity.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Next should be a series of posts on the Slow movement.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
|
| Post them slowly, i.e. not all on the same day. We need time to
| read them - slowly.
| rglover wrote:
| Kudos to the OP for writing this.
|
| That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive
| examples of _going fast_ but because it felt slightly demeaning
| to teams /projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that
| purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes
| boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The
| only pejorative text in the PC post is this:
|
| >San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It
| opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600
| days. "The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet
| weather since the project started," said Paul Rose, a San
| Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The
| project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska
| Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra,
| cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
| cma wrote:
| At least 30 deaths in the construction of the Alaska highway
| and obviously much lower eminent domain costs for remote
| tundra vs downtown SF after the second tech boom.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-.
| ..
| tombert wrote:
| In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz
| conjecture.
|
| People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this
| quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not
| really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually
| prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work
| _towards_ proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything
| else, the result of generations building upon previous
| generations work. It 's never "done", always growing and refining
| and figuring out new things to look at.
|
| I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen
| done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's
| a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
|
| One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to
| have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing
| humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took
| hundreds of years.
|
| [1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not
| very fleshed out.
| cubefox wrote:
| A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on
| which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most
| of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years
| or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later,
| but from a different author.
|
| The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world
| leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that
| many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and
| the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
|
| It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where
| only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely
| never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by
| all that come later.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics
| on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for
| most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from
| years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years
| later, but from a different author._
|
| Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
| snarf21 wrote:
| Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and
| other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
|
| Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview
| that I think is quite profound for our mental health. "....
| being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I
| know."
| saulpw wrote:
| Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is
| quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.
| wwweston wrote:
| And it's not only never done, it's always on the verge of dying
| off. Like Bill Thurston said, mathematical understanding
| basically lives in communities of mathematicians, every one of
| them a cell in the superorganism that is the field. You're part
| of the distributed filesystem providing persistence as well as
| the possibility of new understanding.
|
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Interesting new contender for simplest to state unsolved
| problem: The Antihydra
|
| Does this program halt? a = 8 b = 0
| while b != -1: if a % 2 == 0: b += 2
| else: b -= 1 a += a//2
|
| (// being integer division, equivalently a binary shift one to
| the right: >> 1)
|
| https://www.sligocki.com/2024/07/06/bb-6-2-is-hard.html
|
| https://bbchallenge.org/antihydra
| tombert wrote:
| Interesting, I hadn't heard this one.
|
| I should see if I can model this in Isabelle or something and
| see what happens.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| for reference, the statement has been formalized in Lean in
| Deepmind's open problem database:
| https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-
| conjectures/blob/e...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page
| considering "Fast" was there yesterday
| fuzztester wrote:
| Next?
|
| Medium.
|
| Posted on Medium, ofc.
| WJW wrote:
| You know why they call it Medium, of course? Because it's
| definitely not Rare and usually also not Well Done.
| frutiger wrote:
| I imagine the two events are correlated.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Just to add to that, it does link to
|
| https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from
| 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 )
|
| which is different than yesterday's link to
| https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time,
| and which could have been greatly accelerated?
|
| Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-
| term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.
|
| From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada
| Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly
| accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the
| vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 -- actual
| construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s,
| then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from
| 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of
| bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The
| Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over
| the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
| mrbananagrabber wrote:
| I love the story of the Framingham Heart Study, it's one I've
| referenced a lot when I talk to people and organizations about
| how they might not have the data they need and how important data
| collection is.
| conradev wrote:
| For open source, SQLite has pledged long term support through
| 2050: https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html
|
| I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!
| brudgers wrote:
| _The Art of Computer Programming_ has been a work in progress
| since 1962.
|
| That's longer than some of the list items.
| cubefox wrote:
| Thanks. I was going to ask about long book (or film etc)
| projects like that. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias took
| decades to finish. The "Deutsches Worterbuch" by the Brothers
| Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961,
| long after their death.
| brudgers wrote:
| Unlike most of the list items or a dictionary, Knuth's work
| is an ongoing personal creative process rather than an
| independent mechanism or a collection of data.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good,
| in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and
| parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive
| for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than
| 4 or 5 years.
|
| China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term
| projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the
| leadership.
| vik0 wrote:
| Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-
| level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many
| plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless
| because of black swans
|
| Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is
| fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government
| starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they
| should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict
| the future, and we all know how well that always works out,
| because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be
| constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should
| remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
|
| So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or
| bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put
| forward a better argument, but this one is not it
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (variously
| attributed)
|
| Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or
| bigger election cycles" BTW.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with preparatory
| construction beginning in 1942. First phase opened in
| 2017.
|
| Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the
| added costs that brings certainly should not be.
| While every project is unique, it is not immediately
| clear why digging a subway on the Upper East Side is
| twenty times more expensive than in Seoul or ten
| times more expensive than in Paris.
|
| https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/blog/costly-lessons-from-the...
|
| here's a even more damning look:
| https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...
|
| edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week.
| https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline.
| https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame
| https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c
|
| It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being
| against things is so the spirit.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I was really disappointed when David Roberts stopped writing
| due to persistent hand pain, but the podcast series he's
| turned Volts into as a result has been eye opening for me. I
| haven't listened to this episode yet. thanks for highlighting
| it!
| persolb wrote:
| Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my
| "but somebody is wrong in the internet." I've been on several
| of the projects he talks about. He's right about the macro
| numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts
| talking about he details.
|
| The main issues are, in general: 1) increased regulation,
| which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that
| are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of
| overhead to follow. 2) large projects are treated like a
| Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent
| hobby horse to be addressed by the project... so scope keeps
| growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has
| a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that
| the project never actually finishes. 3) lack of decision
| making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of
| making the wrong call. It's often cheaper to just move ahead
| and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being
| incurred anyway.
|
| As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large
| project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has
| enough political capital internal to the org, and who
| strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
| wwweston wrote:
| The "it is not immediately clear" part should be taken to heart
| a lot more than it is. Right now I'd bet you could elect Ezra
| Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as
| most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the
| factors than your average internet commentator.
|
| Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really
| isn't articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into
| the shallow strawmanification of "regulation" that doesn't
| merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into
| conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice
| or insight.
|
| There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to
| grasp the problem.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I recommend checking out the Vital City NYC link i shared. It
| articulates some of the "specific dynamics" you're
| thoughtfully, if turgidly requesting.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Thank you for using "turgidly" as such. You've given me a
| new appreciation for the term.
| smartmic wrote:
| This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the
| examples given in the article are a testament to it.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts
| running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or
| 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
| treetalker wrote:
| I'd forecast that most of the remaining ones would end up
| making their way to Southern Florida but they're already
| there.
| calebm wrote:
| I assume this is a response to:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Fast_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July
| 2025 (417 comments)
| listeria wrote:
| From TFA
|
| > _This page is a riff on Patrick Collison 's list of /fast
| projects._
|
| Maybe as a HN post, but the blog is in response to
| https://patrickcollison.com/fast
| jmkr wrote:
| I think in the western world, Art, and music are both long term
| projects. So much so that we seem to have "reinvented" music at
| least twice. Once after the Greeks into classical western music,
| then again when jazz went into tonal harmony.
|
| At least parts of it are "scientific" and "directed," see the
| Lydian Chromatic concept for example
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...
| alnwlsn wrote:
| A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the
| (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other
| one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one
| letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was
| finished in 2017, 26 years later.
|
| It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but
| I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd
| probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a
| worthwhile strategy.
|
| [1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
| autoexec wrote:
| I question how well many of the words that come to mind could
| be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds
| like a fun project.
| mateo411 wrote:
| I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.
| thom wrote:
| Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable
| words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory
| search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably
| slightly below the average for an elite player.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that
| fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment,
| from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because
| they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes
| a long time to build a big church because you need to find all
| the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that's the universe
| taking a long time to tell us something.
|
| (I'm being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is
| pretty impressive too).
| peterkos wrote:
| I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and
| "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor
| where things take as much time as you give them.
|
| Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard),
| where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal
| is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but
| along the way achieve results with much wider implications that
| would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how
| inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
|
| (rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer,
| slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem,
| or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the
| cases of misused funds?
| tgv wrote:
| When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't
| going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when
| the construction started. He kept working at it until his
| death.
| WJW wrote:
| I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several
| generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took
| 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's
| great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If
| you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my
| grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working
| on it and my children will work on it too", that's a building
| that is "larger" than any one person.
|
| Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing
| larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such
| efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon
| but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House
| (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
| internet_points wrote:
| If we look beyond problems that humans solve, well, evolution of
| diverse and specialized species seems to require time (and be
| undone by humans going fast)
| lubujackson wrote:
| I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in
| a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
|
| The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford
| administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went
| around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was
| 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs
| were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff
| begin to look at major renovations to the building's
| architecture.
|
| Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have
| a replacement beam," he said.
|
| The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the
| grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
|
| "But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?"
| the admins asked.
|
| "The day they replaced the previous beam."
| piker wrote:
| Fantastic!
| mathattack wrote:
| I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| We should all strive to make it so.
| wazoox wrote:
| As said in Italian "si non e vero, e ben trovato".
| burkaman wrote:
| Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-
| college-ox...
| urquhartfe wrote:
| What is a "growth tree"?
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| ((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)).
|
| Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old
| and not recently cultures.
| Timwi wrote:
| That should have been hyphenated then.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
| adamhartenz wrote:
| Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a
| tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
| Avicebron wrote:
| "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade
| they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton
| Trueblood
| ljlolel wrote:
| Literally what they do for Norte dame?
| tim333 wrote:
| >Rebuilding Notre-Dame's "forest" also meant selecting 1,300
| oak trees from across France that were "as close as possible
| to those of the 13th century", that is, "very straight and
| very slender", according to Desmonts, with "no defects".
| Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers
| Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn
| so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from
| "dozens of truckloads" before the end of 2022.
| veqq wrote:
| This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....
|
| > In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed
| repairing, which was true.
|
| > In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on
| `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which
| goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests
| in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the
| College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down
| and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
|
| > It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express
| purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland
| management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks,
| interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced
| approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks,
| however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or
| more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such
| as beams, knees etc.
| yegle wrote:
| This reminds me of the US Navy's Oak forest for ship building:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Live_Oaks_Reservation
| K-Wall wrote:
| Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker /
| seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning
| for success.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Cool list, but to be a party pooper:
|
| _> Will Unix Time or TCP /IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure._
|
| UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead
| of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC
| over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects
| to Google.
|
| I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the
| same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily
| considered a different protocol.
| mzajc wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > Modified: sure.
|
| Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of
| their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way
| from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
| Timwi wrote:
| But then you could argue that UNIX time is just a
| modification of other forms of date/time reckoning. It
| becomes a semantic debate over what counts as a separate
| thing, and that's not a fantastically interesting question
| anymore.
| nottorp wrote:
| > QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it
| connects to Google.
|
| You don't have to adopt everything Google tells you to adopt,
| you know...
| mikestorrent wrote:
| > TCP/IP has already been replaced
|
| Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady"
| ?
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people's
| expectations about science that went like:
|
| Protester: What do we want??
|
| Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year
| longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
|
| Protester: When do we want it??
|
| Crowd: Now!!!
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Figuring out a good reason to colonize the solar system
|
| An optimal manufacturing and logistics network for the solar
| system
|
| Inventing replicators and dispensing with capitalism
| Timwi wrote:
| Replicators won't dispense with capitalism, at least not
| automatically. Replicators need tremendous energy which can be
| privately controlled, plus capitalism can maintain minority
| control over a technology like this via trade secrets etc. and
| keep selling the technology for high prices. If you're thinking
| that you can just use a replicator to make more replicators,
| that's kinda like asking a 3D printer to 3D print another 3D
| printer, or asking an LLM to just program another LLM.
|
| No, we need to dispense with capitalism ourselves instead of
| hoping for a magical technology to do it for us.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm reminded of the quote: "Never give up on a dream just because
| of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass
| anyway."
| baby wrote:
| How to game HN: always write rebuttals
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| A few other proposed entries:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program (the twin
| spacecraft that have since left the heliopause)
| MinimalAction wrote:
| As an academic, I fairly resonate with this message. Also notice
| that most examples he noticed are from academia/science
| endeavors. I see academia as probably the only place where slow
| projects are expected and even encouraged; think of PhD students
| working on basic science problems, often supported for 5-7 years
| at end (of course close to minimum wage).
|
| This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or
| anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic
| hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the
| observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical
| modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes
| to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
| jenthoven wrote:
| Some are projects that have a changing variable over a long
| period of time (Framingham Heart Study, E. coli long-term
| evolution experiment) or strive to exist a long time (Clock of
| the Long Now). I would argue that these projects -- their
| process, data collection methods, and goals -- may have been
| developed quickly, in a short amount of time. Their longevity is
| proof that the original project was well established. But the
| same could be said of the invention of the wheel, shoe, sliced
| bread, etc
| dang wrote:
| Related by content (OP says "This page is a riff on Patrick
| Collison's list of /fast projects"):
|
| _Fast_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July
| 2023 (298 comments)
|
| _Fast (2019)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 -
| March 2022 (97 comments)
|
| _Fast_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec
| 2019 (291 comments)
|
| _Fast * Patrick Collison_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (5
| comments)
|
| --
|
| Also related, if only by title, this from yesterday:
|
| _Fast_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July
| 2025 (418 comments)
| wwarner wrote:
| Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as
| shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne
| explaining how it's achieved.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s
|
| This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of
| lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project.
| They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address
| https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
| neilk wrote:
| I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are
| processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.
|
| I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and
| take a long time aren't easy to identify as projects. No one
| person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end.
| Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without
| clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions
| and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can
| arrest history.
| Timwi wrote:
| Depending on how you draw the line, it could be argued that
| science -- the project of uncovering the workings of the
| universe -- is the longest-running of all. Although the word
| "science" isn't that old and is generally associated with the
| Age of Enlightenment, the desire to understand the world goes
| as far back as humans can think.
| zdw wrote:
| I'd add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light to this
| list.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I suspect many key open source systems (Linux, Wikipedia) will
| still be around in 100 years._
|
| Bet FORTRAN will still be around. Maybe PHP, as well.
| dfabulich wrote:
| Here's another good example of a series of slow experiments: the
| cosmic distance ladder.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
|
| You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius
| of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data
| gathered over years of observations.
|
| Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever
| trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a
| 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii
| away.
|
| Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size
| of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It
| takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about
| 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
|
| By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be
| approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of
| radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the
| moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half
| moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new
| moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right
| angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right
| angle with the moon.
|
| You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the
| half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon,
| giving you an angle th. The distance to the sun is equal to the
| distance to the moon divided by sin(th).
|
| To get th exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the
| Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour.
| Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of
| magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much
| larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the
| earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't
| believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the
| constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year;
| they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance
| to nearby stars.)
|
| Next, you can compute the _shape_ of the orbits of the planets,
| by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on
| which dates over the course of _centuries_. Kepler used this data
| first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to
| show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate
| measures of the distance to the sun (like the th measurement
| above) there 's not enough precision to compute exact distances
| between planets.
|
| So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus
| across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole,
| relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used
| parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an
| extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun,
| the "astronomical unit." It took _decades_ to find the right
| dates to perform this measurement.
|
| The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light
| (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of
| Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances
| based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of
| nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected
| brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their
| distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's
| law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby
| showing that the universe is expanding).
| rangestransform wrote:
| The SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually
| impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults
| everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line
| worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology
| that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more
| per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s
| technology [1]. Its cost and duration are almost entirely due to
| politics and not technical and logistical challenges, including
| the MTA political fiefdom fighting the Park Board political
| fiefdom, make-work-program labour spending, staff paid to have
| their thumbs up their asses in the tunnels [2], deep-bore
| tunneling instead of cut-and-cover to avoid political fighting,
| and MTA departments wanting their miniature fiefdom dug into the
| ground at each station [3]. The SAS is a project that should
| bring great shame to everyone in charge and everyone who stood
| around in the tunnels getting paid to do nothing.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Hudson_Tubes (tunnel
| happens to be about a mile and it cost 21 million 1905 dollars)
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
| subway-...
|
| [3] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-
| sticks...
| urvader wrote:
| The bitcoin block chain should be on this list
| earthtograndma wrote:
| The Crazy Horse Memorial has been going since the 1940s. It's
| progressing nicely.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The article conflates a few different "slow" projects, rather
| than the premise which is efforts that required decades to come
| to fruition.
|
| He mentions projects started long ago but are still ongoing, like
| the Sagrada Familia. Then there's innovations from long ago which
| are still being used, like Linux. Also, he includes ideas which
| took decades to finally be implemented, like LIGO.
|
| In my opinion, none of these examples are particularly good at
| demonstrating, "What problems can human beings only solve over a
| very long period of time?", except for Fermat's Last Theorem.
|
| All technology builds on that which came before, step by step.
| You can trace Unicode directly back to Morse Code, via various
| steps like ASCII, Telex, Baudot Code, etc. But the original goal
| of Morse wasn't to display emojis.
|
| I'd say General Relativity _might_ be a good example, starting
| with Newton 's efforts to quantify the forces of the real world,
| ending with Einstein's explanation of spacetime. But again, it's
| not as clear of a problem as Fermat's Last Theorem which was a
| single problem that required centuries to solve.
|
| AI may be a good example as well, starting with the advent of the
| digital computer. The very first scientists who worked with them
| like von Neumann immediately looked forward to the day of an
| electronic brain. It's taken nearly a century so far and is still
| underway.
| frays wrote:
| Interestingly, the post titled "Fast" made the front page
| yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
| jxf wrote:
| Long-term projects make me strangely proud to be a human (for all
| of our faults and foibles). "A society grows great when the old
| plant trees in whose shade they will never sit."
| Votrex_278 wrote:
| . My work aims to help create systems which support creativity
| and discovery. Currently, my main projects are working on
| metascience, programmable matter, and tools for thought. In the
| past I've worked on quantum computing, open science, and
| artificial intelligence, and there's a lot of crossover with my
| current interests. Bio (2020).
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