22 ms·

Slow

• urvader 1y ago
  The bitcoin block chain should be on this list
• ananddtyagi 1y ago
  Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.
  • fuzztester 1y ago
    Next should be a series of posts on the Slow movement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture) 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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-ferry/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-...
• tombert 1y ago
  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.
  • snarf21 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.
      • snarf21 1y ago
        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 1y ago
• saagarjha 1y ago
  Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page considering “Fast” was there yesterday
  • fuzztester 1y ago
    Next? Medium. Posted on Medium, ofc.
    • WJW 1y ago
      You know why they call it Medium, of course? Because it's definitely not Rare and usually also not Well Done.
      • fuzztester 1y ago
        A comment such as yours is Rare, and also Well Done! It's even more admirable, since comments in this Medium are Rarely Well Done.
    • schappim 1y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
  • frutiger 1y ago
    I imagine the two events are correlated.
    • drivers99 1y ago
      Just to add to that, it does link to https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 ) which is different than yesterday's link to https://www.catherinejue.com/fast https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )
  • 1y ago
• MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  For open source, SQLite has pledged long term support through 2050: https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!
• brudgers 1y ago
  The Art of Computer Programming has been a work in progress since 1962. That’s longer than some of the list items.
  • cubefox 1y ago
    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 Wörterbuch" by the Brothers Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961, long after their death.
    • brudgers 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (variously attributed) Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.
    • dfex 1y ago
      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.
• aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  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-second-avenue-subway 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-per-mile-of-subway-track 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-eight-parking-spaces/ https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
  • jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline. https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• smartmic 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
  • nancyminusone 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      I'd forecast that most of the remaining ones would end up making their way to Southern Florida but they're already there.
• calebm 1y ago
  I assume this is a response to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
  • dang 1y ago
    Thanks! Macroexpanded: Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (417 comments)
  • listeria 1y ago
    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 https://patrickcollison.com/fast
• jmkr 1y ago
  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_Tonal_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...
• alnwlsn 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
      • roryokane 1y ago
        I made the “sit” gloss long: “to rest your body on your bum (while your bum is on a thing such as a chair or the ground) while your back is up”.
  • mateo411 1y ago
    I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.
    • thom 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when the construction started. He kept working at it until his death.
      • heikkilevanto 1y ago
        When people complained about the time scale, Gaudi famously replied that his client was in no hurry.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• internet_points 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Fantastic!
  • mathattack 1y ago
    I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
    • kwhitefoot 1y ago
      We should all strive to make it so.
    • wazoox 1y ago
      As said in Italian "si non è vero, è ben trovato".
  • burkaman 1y ago
    Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-oxford https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
  • urquhartfe 1y ago
    What is a "growth tree"?
• qcnguy 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
    > TCP/IP has already been replaced Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
• phtrivier 1y ago
  I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady" ?
• Bukhmanizer 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  How to game HN: always write rebuttals
• pavel_lishin 1y ago
  A few other proposed entries: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program (the twin spacecraft that have since left the heliopause)
  • bacontremors 1y ago
    [dead]
• MinimalAction 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July 2023 (298 comments) Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments) Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments) Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (418 comments)
• wwarner 1y ago
  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 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/ https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
• neilk 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  I'd add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light to this list.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder 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 θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ). To get θ 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 θ 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 1y ago
  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 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-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... [3] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks-to-its-oversize-stations/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks...
• earthtograndma 1y ago
  The Crazy Horse Memorial has been going since the 1940s. It's progressing nicely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
• russellbeattie 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Interestingly, the post titled "Fast" made the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
• jxf 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  . 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 1y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
• schappim 1y ago
  Making the argument for "Medium" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
• arkmm 1y ago
  Missing the California high-speed rail on their list of examples.
• fazkan 1y ago
  I will post this in defence of speed. https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
• pentagrama 1y ago
  You can watch the Pitch drop experiment [1] live here http://thetenthwatch.com/feed/ http://thetenthwatch.com/feed/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
• morkalork 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  The Sagrada Familia has been criticized as a symbol of bureaucratic inertia, some critics insinuating that the delays are deliberate for financial interests.
• imoverclocked 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Quadratic equations took something like from the ancient Greeks to the middle ages, afaik.
• gowld 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  The 2nd av subway is a bad example… that’s just a masterclass in political incompetence.
• deleted 1y ago
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• m463 1y ago
  I think of The Art of Computer Programming... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
  • blahedo 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  Made me think of https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/as-slow-as-possible/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/as-slow-as-possible/
• fuzzfactor 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program – The oldest bonsai have been in training for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai
• teddyh 1y ago
  I had to enable third-party JavaScript and resource loading to see a rendering of… “1.0 × 10⁻²¹”. Sometimes people use TeX math markup superfluously.
• deleted 1y ago
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• fdch 1y ago
  There’s also John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
• codethief 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  The point of https://patrickcollison.com/fast 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/ https://nat.org/: "time is the denominator"
• stevoski 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Also, all my side-projects. (No, I will NOT use LLM for side-projects. That defeats the purpose of side-projects for me!)