Ask HN: What are the most complicated machines humans have built? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the most complicated machines humans have built?

3 pointsrishikeshs20 comments

I'm researching for a blog post on humanity's most complex machines. JWST, EUV lithography, and LHC come to mind.

What other engineering marvels should I look into?

Look into the changes wrought by Henry Maudslay. He changed the world from one where a single threaded screw took a week's work by an apprentice, to one where you could make them with a lathe. He changed the best tolerance from a 10th of an inch to a 10,000th of an inch. He's best known for the first practical screw cutting lathe.

Also see the 3 plate method of Whitworth, who made it possible to make accurate flat surfaces.

Also see the work of Carl Edvard Johansson, the Gage Block system. Without it, Ford couldn't have mass produced the Model T, and life would be completely different.

Wow this is gold

Our social machines. A judiciary, political, health, social system which works relatively smoothly

Can we call these machines?

Obviously, they're defined with rules and algorithms and everything.

The ultimate technology is the social technology: the one whose purpose is to make people happy

I'd argue that like all technology, social technology serves to increase efficiency, not happiness. Highly recommend

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

Really? I feel exactly the opposite, that as a species we are extremely primitive in that regard. We underinvest into social "technology." Systems of collaboration and alignment aren't widespread, and research into it isn't taken seriously

Don't get me wrong, what we have is working (so far? Political happenings around the world don't inspire confidence)

I think electricity grids are very very impressive. Even the US' which is considered out of date works in that it spreads across the entire country, needs to meet demand and supply down to milliseconds, has do many points that withdraw power and points that add power to the grid. Crazy stuff

I mean the scale is impressive, but are they complex?

One thing that keeps on giving for me me is being able to watch some random youtube video like its nothing. I can click on a random 200 view video from 12 years ago and scrub through it basically no latency. Thinking about how every little packet goes up and down the stack and around the world... The whole infrastructure to make it so seamless.

Meanwhile watching a video from an external drive or my wired SMB NAS fails half the time :|

somewhat related: "IMG_0416" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42102506

I've often seen the space shuttle get tossed in when discussing complex achievements.

Yeah! That’s true!

It used too many cutting edge technologies, to "reuse" the ship it was necessary to do a complete refurbish [1]. It was closer to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

[1] More details in the Feynman's appendix https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf

There was also a cold war era icbm ins with over 15000 parts with accuracy within a few hundred meters anywhere on the globe. Can't remember the exact model number.

The fascinating thing about later model ICBMs is that their gyros have been spinning since they were installed. As part of the alignment process, the first models had to be very carefully aligned with true north. The later models would detect the rotation of the earth underneath them, and determine true north on their own.

For a certain definition of complicated, I would say atomic clocks.

Saturn V rocket

Why specifically Saturn V?

our corporate jira

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