To be fair though, Japan is two-thirds the size of Texas and South Korea is two-thirds the size of New York state.

It sounds like you're making the claim that media coverage is a useful proxy (at all) for innovation occurring in a region. In case I'm not misunderstanding you, do you also think that the stories broadcast on CNN are a useful compilation of the most important global issues right now? I don't really know what else to say about that.

As with other people in this thread, I think your issue here is that one hears about things in their speculative research-study phase (when there's often still 95% of the work to be done for the findings to be actually used), and then lose interest and (somewhat subconsciously) stop classifying it as "innovation". You'll notice that when you do this, literally everything falls through the cracks between "vaporware" and "not interesting anymore and therefore not innovation". In a response to another commenter, I gave a more complete response (of off-the-top-of-my-head general examples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988431

EDIT: Ah haha, I just realized that your newspaper comment was in direct response to my allusion to a newspaper. The second paragraph of my comment is still relevant though. As an example, there was a cellular matrix spray that the military was investigating for immediate application to large open wounds which had FANTASTIC potential for promoting the healing process (by sealing things up a lot more quickly without foreign materials and thus lowering chance for infection by an INCREDIBLE amount, etc). Newspapers won't give you constant updates about (e.g.) every step of the process of bringing this to market, because the only way to add new information is to go into technical detail, which will turn off tons of readers.

That doesn't prevent you from seeing the story in the newspaper during its eye-catching vaporware phase, and then following it on your own after that. (Note that even this latter step is unnecessary if you have at least a decent ballpark of what percent of things like that never end up being feasible for actual usage).

EDIT2: To be absolutely clear, I was using the spray-on skin thing as an example of how using the newspaper the way you just did is an incredibly poor way to understand what's happening in a given regional center of an industry. I wasn't implying that that example was from Silicon Valley.

Mostly 30 year old DARPA projects.

I joke, I too would like to hear about exciting SV research projects.

I would imagine that many of us working on interesting things are prohibited from telling you about them. No point in letting everyone taste the secret sauce.

> I keep my ears to the ground for this sort of thing, but I don't hear much about it.

I'm actually kind of shocked to hear this question. The person I was responding to originally is probably just going for the childishly rebellious "I'm gonna say something contrarian to seem like a deep thinker!!!!", but you don't seem to be saying anything of the sort.

I would be extremely surprised if you hadn't heard of any of this stuff; I think the problem is rather that your definition of what innovation is may be arbitrarily and inappropriately defined with respect to the topic of conversation.

This has been a good few years for AI and there have been some impressive advances recently in voice recognition, computer vision, language understanding, core machine learning research, etc. The AI labs at Google and Facebook alone are an important part of this ecosystem. Silicon Valley has also been producing advancements in diagnostic nanotechnology, space exploration and travel, feasible and long-range electric cars, self-driving cars, power generation and distribution systems, manufacturing efficiency, etc. There's a thriving biotechnology startup scene. Then you get down to less "sexy" (but still very important) innovation in things like datacenter design, distributed systems, software-defined networking, network protocols (like SPDY), etc. Even softer stuff like the work being done on the economics of distribution, or the efficient delivery of compute cycles is seeing a lot of advancement in the last several years, and a lot of it is centered around here.

I fully expect a response from some commenter who hasn't been able to grasp what this conversation is about to claim that a lot of that isn't "true" innovation at the kind of low level one finds in academia, but that's missing the point. It begs the question of whether companies in SV are innovative by defining innovation in for-profit companies as more or less impossible (which is, of course, nonsense). Government-funded academia is an excellent vehicle for fundamental research, just as corporations are good vehicles for the next step in the chain (and occasionally fundamental research). The funny thing is that even if you move the goalposts by restricting yourself to academic advancements, both Stanford and Berkeley are world-class research universities and parts of the SV ecosystem.