What is meant by "Hard Tech"? Hardware technology, nontrivial problems, or something else?
In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.
Yes, and Steph Curry is just a guy shooting a ball in a basket.
A decade-long life extension or growing meat without animals would both probably involve more "Hard Tech" style innovation than building Facebook.
Other observations are IMO less pat. E.g. designing cheaper/better sensors could be either harder or significantly easier than building a Facebook. Depending on the type of sensor and the cost improvement.
Facebook is doing more than that. Mark recently claimed that they are working on "a world-class News Feed, and a world-class messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system, and invent[ing] virtual reality, and build[ing] drones".
Based on the glaring flaws in the base product, I'm unconvinced it has the smarts to do any of those things well.
Stuff that's non-obvious but amazing and makes you think sci-fi... DARPA does a lot of this kind of stuff.
Definitely non-trivial problems, most likely hardware, maybe materials science or something in the other science fields. Maybe new math, or solvers that take days to run on thousands of CPUs. Stuff that might take thousands of man-hours to develop.
Not sure how YC would be involved here, as this is expensive to develop, but DARPA has a funding model.
(edit: okay, okay, maybe the article isn't clear.)
SV has its own jargon, and not being from SV, I think it's fair to want to clarify what is meant by a capitalized phrase like "Hard Tech" in case there is a deeper meaning known to those inside SV.