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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

What are the most impressive or valuable things they are building recently?

If you demand the things to be impressive in order to count, you can not build culture of building. You will build culture of impressing. And impressing in most cases requires a lot of money thrown on pr.

This is so true. I'm more impressed by the focused and successful long-term (~20 year) plan of revitalization of the local downtown than I am by most things out of Silicon Valley. It started with a cheesy video [1] and now you can go find small businesses [2][3][4] operating in what used to be the hollowed out husks of a past era.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7n1ZFJFtP4

[2] http://www.bistrooffbroad.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dpl7xGhzhA / https://www.latinflavorssteakhouse.com/

[4] http://hometownrhythms.com/

This is in a place where every building used to look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.9922385,-83.7205603,3a,90y,2...

It started from a dying post-WW2 textile town and now it's showing up in movies and TV shows as an idyllic small town. It's not even that kind of idyllic small town. The local paper's editor wrote articles in favor of marriage equality, trans rights, and racial equality and still hasn't been run out of town.

You're not wrong, but it's like you didn't read "or valuable" in the comment you're responding to.

One is Neural Machine Translation, as embodied by, for example, the new Google Translate. For many language pairs you can get automated translation that is actually mostly plausible. It's an incredible aid to global communication.

I think they meant "Machinists, masons, mechanics and teachers."

To which I would say a lot. Spaceships, CERN, LIGO, giant skyscrapers, and a lot more.

And those are just the high-tech, high-profile projects.

Even a mundane bridge near a small town saves thousands of people a day of making a detour. This might not sound 'impressive', but imagine a bridge that gets used by just a thousand people a day and that replaces a detour that takes 15 minutes longer. That's a 1000 people * 0.25 hours * 2 times a day = 500 human hours saved per day, or over 180.000 hours saved per year. With a lifespan of 50 years equals that to close to 10 million(!) hours or 4500 'working years' saved. This is an example of just a small bridge near a small town, just imagine the benefit of larger bridges (and other infrastructure projects) near the big cities.

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