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.
>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.
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!!!
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)
[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...
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.
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.
– 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!
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.
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/
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...
Or Cologne Cathedral, which took more than 600 years to complete. Though actual build times were a bit shorter (1248–1560, 1842–1880).
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.
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 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).
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."
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with
preparatory construction beginning in
1942. First phase opened in 2017.
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.
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...
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.
That’s longer than some of the list items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
- 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)
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
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.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-...
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives? Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks. Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships. Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
> 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
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (417 comments)
I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
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.
https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
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.
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?
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
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.
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 )
> 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.
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).
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
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.
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.
Does this program halt?
a = 8
b = 0
while b != -1:
if a % 2 == 0:
b += 2
else:
b -= 1
a += a//2
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."
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
> 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.
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...
"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.
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...
Yeah, being French sucks.
... what?
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.
It's even more admirable, since comments in this Medium are Rarely Well Done.
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?
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.
I should see if I can model this in Isabelle or something and see what happens.
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.
So the punchline of the urban legend is in question? The part that makes it so interesting? Not sure that qualifies as 'pedantic hair splitting'.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I think there's a positive side to it.
When was the glory days? Pre 1900s with slavery? The war and interwar years?
The cold war?
Pessimistic.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, but it does.
Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
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).
Well, there were people living in that part of the world..
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?
9 SCRATCHED
9 SCREECHED
9 SCROUNGED
9 SCRUNCHED
9 SQUELCHED
9 STRAIGHTS
9 STRENGTHS
9 STRETCHED
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 (/l̩/), 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 [ˈiːvn̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈiːvən/).
That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing, perhaps treating /l̩/ as /əl/.
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.
Sure
Better to know up front that a tale is only a parable.
What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity.
> 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.
Have a look at the history of shareprices for eg Amazon or Tesla. The stock market loved these companies long before they ever turned a profit. Investors can and do look into the future. (And even short termist who only want to quickly flip some shares will look into the future to try and predict what other people are going to be willing to pay for the shares soon.)
Another exhibit: during the pandemic stock prices recovered long before the world emerged from Covid. They recovered as soon as traders anticipated the broader recovery.
> (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disasters, at some level. They're hard enough problems to solve as it is.
Hahaha, that's next level cope. Compared to what, the 1910s?
Because compared to just a few decades ago we live in an era of diminishing middle class, less affordable rent and housing, worse job prospects, crap politics, worsening climate crisis, failing infrastructure, inflation, and more widespread depression...
>Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
Markets don't even solve today's problems anymore, they'd rather enshittify and seek short term profit
Basically lots of forward-looking hot air like a financials press release for shareholders.
Utter nonsense.
EDS is a thing, I guess. Sad to see on HN of all places.
He is doing that. Whether you believe him, or whether he succeeds, or whether he's lying, is an entirely different conversation and something I can't _prove_. All I can prove is that there are public claims he is doing it, and he keeps saying it in interviews.