HN Explorer

Ask HN: What Moonshots Have Had Real, Tangible Progress?

37 points by hsikka ↗ HN
I was just listening to a technical podcast about self driving cars, and it seems like a lot of progress has been made. I want to work on something similarly difficult, building a diagnostic, preventative health system that we can all access.

Are there any other examples of moonshots with tangible progress?

25 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 63.9 ms ] thread
rplst8
Vaccinations in the third world? I heard a statistic that something like 70-80% of third world children have had at least some exposure to vaccines.
hprotagonist
guinea worm is pretty much dead. 22 cases in 2015, down from 3.5 million in 1986.

The CDC and the Carter Center decided it was bad, and fixed it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis

burfog
There is something really hypocritical about the difference in how we treat guinea worm and wolves. Going by what we've done with wolves, we would reintroduce the guinea worm over the objections of the people living in the area.
zylent
Are you trolling? One is a parasite and the other an integral part of the food chain.
yjftsjthsd-h
Wolves are beneficial (as observed in the cases where they were endangered). What benefits do we gain from the guinea worm existing?
toomuchtodo
HPV vaccine is going to reduce the incident rate of cervical cancer to zero within two decades in Australia.

If you notice in this thread, vaccines and parasite interventions have the biggest impacts. Consider finding ways to improve vaccination development pipelines or getting more humans vaccinated.

When you think “moonshot”, I’d encourage you to think not specifically of wildly radical ideas, but of all ideas rank sorted by what delivers the most gains of quality of life for the most people with the least cost.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
reassembled
Along the same lines, the recent cures for Hepatitis C have been an amazing feat. I'm hoping the cost for treatment comes down over time. Currently treatment costs upwards of 60-$80k.
toomuchtodo
Agreed! IMHO we’re in a golden age of biomedical research that will eclipse the silicon revolution.
rcaught
Your golden age of biomedical research is powered by the silicon revolution.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
sidcool
Waymo is a good example. The Google moonshot seemed quite ambitious decade ago. Many believed it won't happen at all. And now here we are. Closer than ever. Still work needed though.
demygale
Here we are with a handful of cars driving around in the least regulated state in the US. From Theranos to Uber, if you want to test unproven technology on private citizens, Arizona is the place to be.

Google can’t even roll out fiber to a whole neighborhood without getting distracted. Waymo is still vaporware and years beyond when they said it would be available.

jonkiddy
I'm the technical lead for the IOTN [1] which is a part of the Cancer Moonshot program [2]. Our mission is to improve immunotherapy outcomes and to ultimately prevent cancer before it occurs. Our team is moving forward on a few projects internally that I'm not at liberty to share but will be released later this year. There is a lot of hope that immunotherapy will have a profound affect on patient outcomes.

[1] https://www.iotnmoonshot.org [2] https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-can...

jamestimmins
The smallpox eradication should be at the top of any list of audacious moonshots. According to Wikipedia, there were 50 million cases annually around 1950. By 1979 the disease was eradicated globally, mainly because of a massive international campaign lead by the WHO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication

lvs
I find it interesting that all of the examples ITT so far are vaccination and public health related, the products of rigorous nonprofit science and implementation done by researchers and clinicians --- i.e. not in the private sector. Of course, the origin of the buzzword is (I assume) the Apollo program.

Think on that a bit.

afarrell
We tend to get concerned when private corporations get so large that they can weild more society-shaping power than the governments of great powers.
ralusek
SpaceX was a moonshot. Who in their right mind would think of a relatively minor private enterprise being able to stand toe to toe with NASA.

Google Maps/Earth, and GPS in general, blow my mind to this day. Think of the applications that most of us work on. Not even close.

I think ZBrush, the 3d modeling/sculpting program, was a total moonshot. It's been copied many times since, but it totally changed the way movie and game art is made.

Neural nets in general. Observe the simplicity of a neuron, attempt to arrange roughly analogous entities and connections with gradient descent error minimizing, and something approximating intelligence emerges. Pretty crazy.

The internet is a moonshot.

quickthrower2
Everytime I listen to Spotify in the car I think this. I think back to the days of cassette mixtapes, and now I am streaming fast internet to a moving object and listening to anything I can think of.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ai_ia
I think an AI bot similar to the one described in the book The Diamond Age is a moonshot. I have made some tangible progress on that one. We can have a bot that is able to help learners learn on their own. Checkout www.primerlabs.io