[HN Gopher] Slow
___________________________________________________________________
Slow
Author : calvinfo
Score : 930 points
Date : 2025-07-31 19:00 UTC (1 days 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".
| Davidzheng wrote:
| I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely
| explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it
| quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else
| still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of
| math sometimes helps in this regard
| 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.
| snarf21 wrote:
| In the full quote, he is talking about fitness and being
| able to lift things and being proud of your abilities to do
| so. I'm not saying it works for everyone but it is nice to
| have a "thing" that you can hang your hat on. The whole
| interview is quite interesting and worth a read.
| saulpw wrote:
| That's all fine and good. But nothing lasts. And then
| when you can no longer lift things, the humiliation you
| suffer is proportional to the pride you take in it.
|
| Saying "it is nice to have a thing to hang your hat on"
| sounds like a very pleasant form of personal pride that
| is easy to let go of. But Hubris is a mortal sin for a
| valid spiritual reason, and pride is a slippery slope.
| The advice I gave--pride for your accomplishments, not
| for yourself--is similar to the advice to how to praise a
| child: for their efforts, not for their talents.
| 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...
| fragmede wrote:
| Fwiw, ChatGPT is able to say that it doesn't. I wonder what
| other classes of programs it's able to state if it halts?
| schoen wrote:
| The math community surely expects a proof of that, and
| ChatGPT surely doesn't (yet) have one. (Maybe some day it
| will, as Kevin Buzzard and others are experimenting with
| asking language models to produce formal proofs.)
|
| You could get LLMs to opine on many unresolved math
| conjectures, but I doubt much credence should be given to
| their responses, when not accompanied by a proof.
| SirChud wrote:
| What ChatGPT says has no relevance to whether it halts.
| IshKebab wrote:
| ChatGPT is able to say anything it wants. Surely you know
| this by now ...
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Most LLMs I've tried come up with invalid reasoning, many
| confuse empirical evidence (of simulating it for a few
| steps and it 'most probably not halting') with definite
| proof that it never does, some create invalid probabilistic
| mathematical arguments to the same effect
|
| Others I've tried are caught in a loop of trying to prove
| the same, insufficient approach over and over again,
| lacking explorative and "creative" behavior
|
| Generally it seems that LLMs lack the 'motivation' to
| actually try to solve unsolved problems especially if they
| _know_ that they are unsolved or difficult
| yifanl wrote:
| Tom from the pub says that it does.
| gowld wrote:
| Is that also the simplest unsolved state problem?
| ygritte wrote:
| How does overflow behave?
| IshKebab wrote:
| It doesn't overflow.
| ygritte wrote:
| Too bad, that makes it harder.
| 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.
| schappim wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
| 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 )
| temp0826 wrote:
| Pretty bad title that should've been editorialized imo...kind
| of clickbait
| 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.
| dfex wrote:
| I think the way that democratic governments can achieve these
| long-term plans is by establishing (or using existing)
| entities to complete these goals on their behalf.
|
| An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK
| announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961
| and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies
| (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later -
| with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Yes, but this sort of thing seems increasingly unlikely in
| an ever more partisan world. Especially when would-be
| autocrats are wrecking as many institutions as they can.
| 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.
| bichiliad wrote:
| I was really sad that we lost Andy Byford. As far as
| benevolent transit dictators go, I can't imagine doing much
| better.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _It 's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being
| against things is so the spirit._
|
| Yeah, being French sucks.
|
| ... what?
| 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.
| wwweston wrote:
| no more turgid than the much of the boner for building
| boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing
| if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be
| inflated.
|
| before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go
| beyond articulating "here's a series of public institutions
| that took a long time to do things" and perhaps even into
| "here's our theory of the incentives and other motivations
| that underlie the sociology of this behavior"? or mostly
| the former?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Put down the thesaurus, my dude. And yes.
| km144 wrote:
| Theories are hard because the world is complex. I guess that
| sounds trivial but it really should be said more often. There
| is no silver bullet with these things, because the systems
| are so complicated that it is hard to reason about how one
| thing is the _true_ root cause without implicating another
| cause. That 's also why economics is so difficult I suppose.
| 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.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary
| would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible
| description for each word.
|
| "day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth"
| even though that's not technically correct.
|
| "sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have
| took a chair"
|
| "moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so
| on.
| 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.
| saltcured wrote:
| yeah, "quizzed" (35) is the highest I found
| yunwal wrote:
| Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth
| less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10
| points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.
|
| Of course most good players will create more than 1 word
| per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
|
| You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable
| words, although at a certain level not being able to get a
| lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
| ronjakoi wrote:
| Single-syllable words can still be pretty long, like
| "squished" or "scrambled"
| schoen wrote:
| I just ran some code over the CMU pronouncing dictionary
| and the longest words identified as single-syllable that
| are English-origin and not proper names or possessives
| were 9 SCRATCHED 9 SCREECHED
| 9 SCROUNGED 9 SCRUNCHED 9 SQUELCHED 9
| STRAIGHTS 9 STRENGTHS 9 STRETCHED
|
| For eight letters, it found dozens of examples!
|
| The CMU dictionary thinks that "scrambled" is two
| syllables as a vowel ends up between the "b" and the "l"
| in pronunciation. Wiktionary thinks this is a syllabic l
| (/l/), which should probably be counted as a separate
| syllable even if it isn't considered a vowel.
|
| Wikipedia says
|
| > Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in
| words such as even ['i:vn], awful ['o:fl] and rhythm
| ['rIdm], which English dictionaries' respelling systems
| usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of
| schwa and a consonant (for example, /'i:v@n/).
|
| That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing,
| perhaps treating /l/ as /@l/.
| hidroto wrote:
| that seems to be in the same vain as this presentation by guy
| steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 .
| 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.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| When people complained about the time scale, Gaudi famously
| replied that his client was in no hurry.
| 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).
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple
| generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute
| greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or
| intentionally scoped the project too big.
|
| Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't
| possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more.
| But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
| WJW wrote:
| Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct
| several smaller churches. The US congress could also just
| rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The
| Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of
| rail track, or maybe a small boat.
|
| But building something extravagantly big has a signaling
| value all of its own: "see the glory of <whatever it is we
| constructed this for> and how much resources they command".
| You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical
| than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you
| build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and
| impress it on others.
| 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
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Tangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth)
| tree)?
| saltcured wrote:
| In English, we're making a compound adjective so it would
| be very-old-growth tree.
|
| It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we
| make it easier to find the fragments...
| ronjakoi wrote:
| English is the only language I know of that allows spaces
| in compound words at all. It's a very peculiar feature of
| English orthography.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| ancient-growth tree
| gowld wrote:
| This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended
| hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.
| JdeBP wrote:
| It does not have to be. The English language has a
| process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which
| then become single words. It's permissible to be partway
| along that path, and for people to disagree where
| something is on that path.
|
| Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's
| going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single
| word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a
| state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
| pmontra wrote:
| And "nowadays" is an example of that process https://book
| s.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20no...
| CalRobert wrote:
| Have a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my
| youth as a teen-ager.
|
| Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form.
| And diaeresis.
| halper wrote:
| Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-
| metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of
| metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in
| something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four
| days; they are not necessarily four in number).
| CalRobert wrote:
| I like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been
| trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference
| between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there",
| or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coop, and
| they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation
| dies out and the phrase remains.
| adamhartenz wrote:
| Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a
| tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Typically it also means one left to grow naturally, without
| forcing the rate by various methods (as is done in many
| modern tree farms).
| abdulmuhaimin wrote:
| is there any difference to just saying "old tree"?
| jaggederest wrote:
| Old trees are not necessarily old-growth trees. A fallow
| tree farm left to age has zero old-growth trees,
| regardless of how old they are.
| spauldo wrote:
| It means a mature tree in an old-growth forest. Trees that
| grow in the dense shade of other trees grow slower, and
| their growth rings are much closer together. The result is
| that a tree takes a lot longer to grow but it's stronger
| and harder than the same species grown in the sunlight.
|
| The reason for the distinction is that most of the old
| growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available
| today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at
| Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see
| that the wood itself is very different even though the
| species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from
| was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came
| from was probably centuries old.
| aaronharnly wrote:
| You have the real answer, but I suppose it is contrasted with
| a "value tree."
| Avicebron wrote:
| "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade
| they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton
| Trueblood
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late.
| Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer
| population looking at their last hoorah and declining
| relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a
| state of denial about soon not being here.
| neumann wrote:
| Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are
| building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as
| they are knowingly destroying the future instead of
| spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in
| the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll
| never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if
| everything goes as planned.
|
| But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about
| a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only
| hear about them when they're long dead and their
| transgressions forgiven and their strengths raised to a
| pedestal unattainable by real live human beings.
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| He is not doing that.
| simianparrot wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_
| pro...
| coldtea wrote:
| Parent didn't say he doesn't pay lip service to it, or
| doesn't make bullshit timelines and promises.
| vntok wrote:
| One can be both "working toward" a goal and "making
| bullshit timelines and promises" at the same time, those
| things are completely orthogonal.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I'm surprised this kind of garbage is allowed on
| Wikipedia. The whole article reads like a PR statement,
| constantly stating what is "possible" or "planned", but
| never any actual progress in terms of missions.
|
| Basically lots of forward-looking hot air like a
| financials press release for shareholders.
|
| Utter nonsense.
| blackoil wrote:
| Goals and means. No matter what end goal is, if it
| requires eugenics (hyperbolic example) to reach there,
| people will resist.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars_
|
| Sure
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are places on earth where life is unhabitable and
| on mars its absolutely nonsense really.
|
| But maybe its a dunning kruger effect, I asked an actual
| aerospace engineer and he said its doable but he's a bit
| of an elon fan too, and I did read on HN an article on
| how life on mars is impossible..
|
| Still, it would be most likely be very bad life on mars
| compared to earth but nope, we all are ready to burn our
| earth so damn quickly... and listen Elon has a band
| around him and you could say that he was a salesman in
| the sense that he had a lot of hype around him which
| inadvertedly helped tesla
|
| But one shouldn't live life on rocks floating in water
| [hype] since that might just be a dream or you are
| crashing down.
|
| And he's a little pathetic in the sense that maybe when I
| think of all, that could actually be done to help people
| and with all the influence he had, he fulfilled his
| agenda really but the agenda was never to better us
| humans but to get him more power..
|
| So lets call spade a spade shall we?
| xwolfi wrote:
| Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over
| slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society.
|
| The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
| eru wrote:
| > [...] 400 years ago, there was no american society.
|
| Well, there were people living in that part of the
| world..
| eru wrote:
| Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you.
| Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and
| they'll do it for you.
| blackoil wrote:
| No amount of money allows the gardener to plant it in the
| past. You can pay money now to plant tree now whose
| benefit will be reaped 100 years down the line. Also,
| tree is symbolic so no point in going in details of tree
| growth.
| jon-wood wrote:
| The best to plant that tree is 50 years ago. The second
| best time is now. Just go plant it.
| coldtea wrote:
| Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's
| solved with money. Especially when short-term profit
| trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be
| alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
|
| Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the
| mindset that fucked up everything.
|
| (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone
| to do X, to begin with).
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Greatness seems to come from long term vision, and with
| success that vision collapses to short term gains. It's
| cultural. Why does that happen and how do you prevent it?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I don't know (not a philosopher or politician or
| whatnot), but I think great steps were taken when
| countries introduced a constitution; the US was one of
| the first modern countries 250 years ago. I think a
| constitution is that long-term vision, setting a
| country's morals and values in writing, spanning multiple
| generations and administrations.
|
| Of course, it can never be set in stone because morals
| and values evolve; things like equal rights for PoC and
| women were only added later on, and they seem unsteady at
| best right now.
|
| The other candidates for long-term vision (but not
| necessarily success) is organized religion (e.g. Holy
| Roman Empire) and generational authoritarianism (e.g.
| kingdoms/empires, North Korea). There's also an in-
| between with China's 5-year plans, where they make plans
| (or, feel like they do, I don't even know lol) instead of
| trying to make big changes one legislation or one budget
| term at a time.
| okr wrote:
| What a heinous posting. Judging about others shows true
| evil.
| resource_waste wrote:
| What is the bad part? Still number 1 GDP.
|
| When was the glory days? Pre 1900s with slavery? The war
| and interwar years?
|
| The cold war?
|
| Pessimistic.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Still number 1 GDP.
|
| China will overtake them in 10, 15 years; possibly sooner
| depending on the economic damage of the Trump admin's
| trade policies, possibly later if another US company does
| well abroad.
| tristor wrote:
| Unfortunately, while they bridle at the truth, Boomers are
| the most selfish generation in American history. Every
| single political and economic action of their generation
| has been done explicitly at the expense of future
| generations to enrich themselves. They are the first and
| only generation in American history to leave their children
| worse off than themselves. Unfortunately, they are also one
| of the longest living generations in American history also,
| and still control the reins of power long after most other
| generations had passed along. I think we're far from
| reaching the pinnacle of the damage they will do to our
| society and to the world. Depending on how long the US
| lasts as an entity, they might well go down in history as
| the worst generational cohort ever.
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it
| created?
| saltcured wrote:
| Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.
| lamuswawir wrote:
| Thank you.
| eru wrote:
| Remember it's "Town and Gown". Oxford is a city, even
| officially recognised so by the Crown.
| rfrey wrote:
| Ah yes, "exacting young man debunks charming tale with
| touching moral, to the benefit of nobody". A tale as old as
| time.
| dxdm wrote:
| It is good to be able to recognize charming tales and other
| biases and influences in a narrative. Having them pointed
| out counteracts the readiness of people to take things at
| face value. Knowing that something is a tale does not have
| to take away from it.
|
| I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I
| think there's a positive side to it.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take
| away from it._
|
| Oh, but it does.
|
| Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale"
| means whatever message is approached very differently.
| vntok wrote:
| "You know the great story you've been telling others for
| years as truth? It was in fact a lie" is much much worse.
|
| Better to know up front that a tale is only a parable.
| dxdm wrote:
| > Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale"
| means whatever message is approached very differently.
|
| I agree. I meant to point out that tales can be
| entertaining and/or instructional, too, even while we're
| aware of what they are. ("Knowing that a story is
| fictional does not take away from it", maybe I should've
| written that.)
|
| My point still stands, though: knowing a tale from a
| "thing that happened" is important, and what you said
| underscores why.
| pxc wrote:
| I think it still works fine as a parable, and it doesn't
| hurt to know a little bit more about how the trees are
| Oxford are really kept.
| gowld wrote:
| > It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the
| express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
|
| > 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.
|
| Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain
| a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over
| the long term of 400 years.
| coldtea wrote:
| > the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. >
| 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.
|
| So seems like the "legend" is true after all, the trees were
| 150+ old and let to grow, and the "takedown" is just not
| wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully, which
| is beside the point pedantic hair splitting...
| swah wrote:
| I would only "complain" about this urban legend if there was
| no way someone would be so future-thinker as to plant trees
| that are going to be used one or two centuries later.
|
| But since I'm sure we have done things like that in the past,
| for me, the urban legend is "valid" and I don't feel like
| that specific case being true or false is that important,
| just the pattern...
| 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.
| neumann wrote:
| The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss
| the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the
| institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have
| a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term
| and listens to them. And gives them time to write good
| documentation for future-proofing.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| It's wild that they managed to retain this knowledge
| without a Confluence by Atlassian subscription (tm).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's a better version of this sort of story that I first
| heard also set at Oxford.
|
| The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have
| been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The
| college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone
| used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds
| of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to
| this sort of rock.
|
| Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the
| only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a
| fortune to ship the stone from there.
|
| A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just
| extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge".
| Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to
| carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
|
| It was at that point they discovered this had already been
| done.
| mathattack wrote:
| Although this story was debunked, many Universities own
| Timberland in their portfolios. They're a good inflation hedge
| for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper
| investments were historically very correlated to university
| costs)
|
| https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
| reginald78 wrote:
| There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched
| in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also
| spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and
| clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked
| about how before and even after saw mills could process and
| produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead
| by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches.
| There was even a still living example in some English village
| that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was
| completely stopped.
|
| This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order
| to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the
| temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild
| it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation
| has experience.
| 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. Def C.
| pklausler wrote:
| Fortran has multiple incompatible implementations and a
| standard that's supported completely by none of them, and that
| hasn't maintained 100% forward compatibility across revisions.
| It'll still be around in the sense that English will be --
| there will be a thing by that name -- but it's impossible to
| say now exactly what it will be, or to write Fortran now that
| will still work identically without change for the next
| century. I think C'89 uniprocessor code would stand a better
| chance.
| 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).
| wwarner wrote:
| solid! thank you!
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Beat me to it. Indeed, from that video I learned that astronomy
| work requires large and/or longitudinal datasets.
|
| I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe
| because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Johannes Kepler was in there somewhere I recall. It was
| Brahe's data on the motions of Mars that lead Kepler to the
| idea of elliptical orbits.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Oops, I may have confused Kepler for Galileo
| skyyr wrote:
| Looking forward to Tao's book on the subject. This is worthy of
| its own post, thanks for sharing.
| lamuswawir wrote:
| Thank you.
| 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).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think that pretty much everything we work on (as tecchies) is
| the endpoint of a _very_ long timeline.
|
| Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came
| before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect
| figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-
| active area.
|
| If you watch James Burke's _Connections_ [0], you get a feel for
| it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really
| enjoyed it).
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
| schappim wrote:
| Making the argument for "Medium" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
| arkmm wrote:
| Missing the California high-speed rail on their list of examples.
| fazkan wrote:
| I will post this in defence of speed.
|
| https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
| pentagrama wrote:
| You can watch the Pitch drop experiment [1] live here
| http://thetenthwatch.com/feed/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
| morkalork wrote:
| There is/was an experiment to domesticate foxes that began in the
| early 1950s; something that can only be done slowly generation
| after generation.
| kylecazar wrote:
| I like this list (and Collison's)!
|
| One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't
| have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example
| of something that could _only_ be done over the long term. Gaudi
| didn 't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.
|
| It is, however, an example of something beautiful that _did_ take
| a long period of time.
| hbarka wrote:
| The Sagrada Familia has been criticized as a symbol of
| bureaucratic inertia, some critics insinuating that the delays
| are deliberate for financial interests.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Language itself is an interesting problem. We have texts that are
| ancient and some are unreadable and others are readable. I
| personally can't understand old variants of English while
| (American) English is the only language I speak.
|
| There is so much assumed in our use of language that it can be
| largely unintelligible without detailed historical context. The
| first time I heard the term "in the car park" I chuckled at the
| thought of an amusement park for cars... "parking lot" only came
| a few thoughts later. We drive on parkways. We play in the park.
| We park in the lot. Lots are reading this sentence twice. Give
| this paragraph to a school-kid in just 100 years and it will seem
| like gibberish. Word.
| analog31 wrote:
| Quadratic equations took something like from the ancient Greeks
| to the middle ages, afaik.
| gowld wrote:
| nitpick:
|
| > That's an accuracy comparable to measuring the distance to the
| Sun to an accuracy of one atom.
|
| This does not exist, because "the location of the Sun" cannot be
| defined to the precision of one atom, as the Sun is constantly
| changing shape and size on a much, much larger scale (easily half
| the orders of magnitude of the distance to be measured).
| presentation wrote:
| The 2nd av subway is a bad example... that's just a masterclass
| in political incompetence.
| m463 wrote:
| I think of The Art of Computer Programming...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
| blahedo wrote:
| Definitely belongs on the list; notable not just because it's a
| slow/long project spanning 60 years and counting, but because
| part of it included the side trip to write TeX and METAFONT in
| order to be able to write and typeset the rest of TAOCP
| properly.
| hatmanstack wrote:
| Made me think of https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/as-slow-
| as-possible/
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Well, in 1980 when I got my hands on the first "powerful"
| benchtop computer that I had complete control of, I started a
| project to do a little machine learning so that I would one day
| have some of the foundation I needed to handle the data more
| intelligently in the future.
|
| That's what I always wanted to have a computer for and why I took
| Fortran in college to begin with.
|
| I knew I wasn't going to reach the "intelligence" part within a
| short number of years, for one thing I had figured out it would
| be much faster on a more specialized chip than a CPU, plus it
| would require megabytes of memory when I only had kilobytes, and
| way more storage space too.
|
| I couldn't be spending years concentrating on this while waiting
| for hardware technology to progress, and for survival otherwise I
| gravitated to a niche within a natural science career that would
| not be replaced by the AI which I expected to be rapidly
| approaching from those who had a much better head start both
| financially as well as in computer science.
|
| Now by the time the late 90's rolled around, I already had my own
| company for a number of years (knew that was going to take
| decades too so I had started in that direction as a teenager) and
| by then had _more than one computer_. Woo hoo!
|
| And megabytes! Oh Yeah!
|
| Plus Office '97 which put the "paperless office" within reach
| even though paperwork was my primary deliverable product.
|
| With Y2K looming I decided to use some of the megabytes in the
| more powerful PC to try a bit of the old ML again, with much more
| of a bent for AI this time. I had already been pitched in the
| early '90's by neural net vendors but I wasn't ready for that.
| After a few more years of consideration I had a much better idea
| of the groundwork I would need, separated the raw automation from
| the intelligent input I was making and that was a good milestone
| in efficiency right there. I was barely able to get a bit of my
| concept from 1980 put on to a "powerful" DOS/Windows platform
| when it crashed and set me back a couple months before starting
| to get hammered into eventual submission by years of stacked
| natural disasters.
|
| Growth had been halted but by this time I was pretty mature and
| charge enough per page that I personally wasn't going to be the
| one that needed any more automation than I already had. When I
| first started I could afford to type each page manually on a
| (intelligent) typewriter to begin with, and I could make even
| more at today's prices now doing that again if I had too. This
| was another marginally positive trend that was not very obvious,
| and it was so marginal that was when I accepted that I would have
| to actually outlive most of my contemporaries if I was going to
| make very much of it.
|
| Whew, that wasn't easy and it took a while too.
|
| Even if total automation doesn't make _me_ any more than total
| manual effort, it is the kind of thing that the bigger
| multinational groups could really take to the bank. So I 've
| always kept it in mind, I knew about it all along, that's where I
| got started.
|
| Anyway, there's still a blank tab on an XLS spreadsheet where the
| tabs to the left are all the "very important" data which I
| ruminate about then do a little typing accordingly before hitting
| the button. Then the tabs to the right get populated sequentially
| and filtered until the final tab spits out a file that gets
| emailed to the client. It comes straight from Excel with
| letterhead and fonts virtually indistinguishable from Word. At
| the beginning with MS-Word I was faxing with a dedicated land
| line plugged directly into the PC, now email or not when the
| client prints it there are very few ways to tell the difference
| from when I would fax them a signed page from my typewriter too.
|
| It took quite a while to reach the point today where AI might be
| getting close enough in my lifetime to where I could train it to
| fill in that blank tab for me.
|
| It would have to be about perfect though.
|
| Patience, my friend.
| srkiranraj wrote:
| Neural network was introduced in 1950s. However, the neural
| architecture, the compute and data required for them to be
| efficient has been only in last decade.
|
| From perceptron to transformers (few hidden layers to 480B
| parameters), from multicore CPUs to distributed GPUs and
| WWW/social media has all contributed to the growth of Artificial
| Intelligence.
|
| This has took almost 50+ years and so many iterations along the
| way.
| divbzero wrote:
| Two more to add to the list:
|
| - The Voyager probes were launched in 1977 and reached
| interstellar space in the 2010s.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program
|
| - The oldest bonsai have been in training for centuries.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai
| teddyh wrote:
| I had to enable third-party JavaScript and resource loading to
| see a rendering of... "1.0 x 10-21". Sometimes people use TeX
| math markup superfluously.
| fdch wrote:
| There's also John Cage's "As Slow as Possible"
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
| codethief wrote:
| > Many Cathedrals were built over more than a century. An example
| is Notre Dame, over 1163-1345.
|
| Or Cologne Cathedral, which took more than 600 years to complete.
| Though actual build times were a bit shorter (1248-1560,
| 1842-1880).
| dustingetz wrote:
| The point of https://patrickcollison.com/fast is not that
| _everything_ has to be fast, but that you can probably do it
| faster than you think. Quoting https://nat.org/: "time is the
| denominator"
| stevoski wrote:
| In case the author is here...
|
| Here's my pedant nitpicking: La Sagrada Familia is not a
| cathedral. It's just a regular church, albeit a large and
| impressive one.
| bovermyer wrote:
| There is a restaurant (or, perhaps, food purveyor is more
| accurate) in Japan that has lasted for several centuries. It's
| been owned by one family, I believe. When Covid hit and their
| clientele disappeared, they just continued to pay their staff and
| mostly closed operations until the pandemic was brought more or
| less under control. They had enough money socked away that they
| survived this period unscathed. I wish I could remember the name
| of the place.
|
| Anyway, that's my dream - to own and run a small family business
| that can support the family even in times of extended crisis. I
| have no interest in unicorns or IPOs or buyouts or any of that.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Also, all my side-projects.
|
| (No, I will NOT use LLM for side-projects. That defeats the
| purpose of side-projects for me!)
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