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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Historical Tech Tree
boltzmann_ wrote 10 min ago:
Most comments here seems to be historical complaints.
But I love this!)
fHr wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
Very cool, cheers!
mattlondon wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
A way to zoom in and out would be very handy. On mobile it is pretty
difficult to use as you need to scroll past vast empty spaces.
Pretty cool though and I learnt a thing or two. Thanks
cocodill wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
So, when's the flight to Alpha Centauri?
kubanczyk wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
I'd prefer we only ever produced chariots and set tax to 90%.
umanwizard wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
Somewhat tangential, but can anyone explain or give any insight into
how candles were invented? This has always puzzled me. The idea that if
you put a piece of string in some wax, and light it on fire, the string
will get hot enough to melt wax, and the molten wax will be sucked into
it by capillary action, and burn, before the string itself burns, seems
very counterintuitive and hard to come up with before a modern
understanding of chemistry and physics. And yet, candles have
apparently existed since 700 BC. How?
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Because the people from 700 BC were just as smart as we are.
Observing the world around you is one of the best sources for ideas
and there are predecessors to 'real' candles that must have
fertilized the ground for the discovery. For instance, a stick dipped
in rendered fat could serve as a torch. Not quite a candle but a
significant step on the way there.
drcode wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
Pure speculation, but I would guess people first mixed wax and lamp
oil in different ways to still get the burning effect of oil, with
less of the cost of the oil, then added a wick to help light the
oil/wax.
Then eventually that product morphed over time to the point where
they realized the oil wasn't actually a necessary component
umanwizard wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Good idea, it sounds plausible! But it still leaves open the
question of how oil lamps were invented. How did someone figure out
that a wick would be helpful?
slightwinder wrote 38 min ago:
The first oil-lamps were basically a bowl with animal-fat and
plant parts as wick. It's not hard to imagine how ten thousands
years ago a hunting tribe could discover such a device by
accident or on purpose.
Qwertious wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
1. Someone dips a rope in flammable oil before lighting it, and
sees that it's quite flammable.
2. Some other time, someone tries to use a rope dipped in
flammable oil as a fuse to trigger the lighting of the oil once
it burns back to the oil
3. They notice that the fuse keeps burning but doesn't burn back
- in other words, the wicking effect
4. They shorten the rope and reshape the pot, and that's an oil
lamp.
dmurray wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
Before wicks, how do you burn oil? It's not easy to just ignite a
bucket of lamp oil (putting aside what you might make the bucket
out of). Probably you soak other fuel like wood or rags in the
oil and burn the result. It's not a huge step from there to
accidentally find out that you can make do with one piece of wood
or cloth or string for a lot of oil, assuming you have something
to put the oil in.
teruakohatu wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Rope was around long before the wick. It seems conceivable that
rope shavings or pieces or old rope were an easy way to start a
fire.
This was then used with oil to make an even better fire starter
or means of transferring fire. Eventually someone realises that a
rope soaking in oil is easily lit and sustains a flame.
umanwizard wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Genuine question: how does it make sense that both bread and alcohol
fermentation were invented before the domestication of any grain? Were
people making bread (and beer!) with gathered seeds?
dmurray wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
Wine is much easier than beer, because ripe fruit will ferment on
it's own. Even wild animals get drunk sometimes; it's sometimes said
that wine was discovered but beer was invented.
So alcohol without any grain is easy, but I don't know the answer for
beer. On the other hand, why would you domesticate grain unless you
already knew you could turn it into beer or bread?
Qwertious wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Grain can be turned into porridge (so basically just soaked) and
eaten, bread and beer is optional. In fact, IIRC classical-era
armies would eat their grain as porridge instead of spending hours
in camp baking it into bread. For obvious reasons.
benzayb wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
Cool. So when was the nail cutter/clipper invented?
geor9e wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to follow
lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is there a snap to
next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?
jeff_lee wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
A tech tree without metallurgy roots is like building a spaceship with
no screwdriverâlooks cool, but itâs gonna fall apart fast.
anotherpaulg wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
If you like this then you will probably enjoy the book How to Invent
Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by
cartoonist and computer-scientist Ryan North.
URI [1]: https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
milst wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
This is awesome. I worked on a 'conversational historical timeline
generator' a little bit ago: [1] I wonder if something similar could be
added here where I say something like "what's the most important
descendant of x" and it would bring me to that tech and give me a
little explanation of why
URI [1]: https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
msikora wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
Super Easy Improvement: add thousands separator. It's easy to mistake
1,500,000 BC with 150,000 BC.
Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
Great idea though!
LeoPanthera wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
This version of Sid Meier's Civilization would take ages to play.
sloww_turtle3 wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
have always wanted something like this! awesome!!
narcraft wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
Related:
The Universal Tech Tree -
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
fersarr wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Very cool! Will explore it a bit :)
justinzollars wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
Reminds me of the tech tree featured in the game Civilization. Pretty
cool stuff
UncleMeat wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
I dunno man. Surely this is the sort of thing that it makes sense for a
historian to do (they don't tend to like this sort of approach).
Nition wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
This is really cool but hard to view well on a PC. I'd love to have a
simplified version of this on a big A2 poster.
fudged71 wrote 15 hours 50 min ago:
Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool
to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph.
Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and
their development.
wongarsu wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech
tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in
metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might
call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not
depending on any previous technology
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material
science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like
interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war, another is
population growth and education.
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all
links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in
materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for
instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once
started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that
doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and
there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
ghaff wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in
the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but
so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about
electronics but that's materials-related as well.
It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented
$X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably
exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth
but it's mostly true.
jacquesm wrote 55 min ago:
Any post about tech trees sooner or later mentions 'I, pencil',
so let's get it over with:
URI [1]: https://fee.org/ebooks/i-pencil/
otabdeveloper4 wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Metallurgy is by far the most important human technology. That's why
"copper", "bronze" and "iron" are used to classify ages.
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
There is no 'most important' human technology. All of it
interlocks, and usually the prerequisite steps all need to be
followed before you can progress to the next level. I wonder how
long it would take given a paper copy of wikipedia (hopefully
printed on acid free paper) to get back to a functional technology
society. I'm sure it would go faster than the first time around,
but I'm not so sure it would be less than a few hundred years.
arethuza wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
Even more than agriculture?
AlotOfReading wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they
seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it
consistently, they would have excluded certain
cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made
the list.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot
of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is.
"Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a
t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different
technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes
appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are
implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
URI [1]: https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
rtpg wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just
basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all
the nodes, obviously!
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies
were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying
on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is
its own exercise)
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
You will end up writing a technology focused complete history of
the world. That tapestry would be absolutely fascinating to be
able to navigate and it would also be always out of date.
thaumasiotes wrote 13 hours 12 min ago:
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded
certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization
that made the list.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very
important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to
contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to
do to corn before eating it.
umanwizard wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
On the other hand, itâs basically impossible to have large
organized civilization in Mesoamerica without hominy[1]. So
should hominy be upstream of anything Mesoamericans invented?
1: For anyone whose Nahuatl is a bit rusty: the English word for
nixtmalized corn is âhominyâ.
AlotOfReading wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of
technology is extremely expansive.
You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible
without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn
outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and
importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient
societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like
vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the
economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm
trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such
and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was
culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better
understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more
intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins
nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those
missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.
This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient
technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the
technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see
that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what
they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have
specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the
time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very
specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed
because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the
variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that
poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific
"recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas
in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries.
You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you
had the craftspeople.
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
A lot of tradecraft is in the most literal sense tradition,
passed from one person to another with no other context than
'it works' and 'this is the way it is done'. The analogies in
the software world are probably libraries, design patterns and
languages. Each of these embody a lot of knowledge without
being - usually - very explicit about the reasons why they are
the way they are.
Researching those reasons requires a lot of work and most
people just want to get to the result step without necessarily
understanding why you put the oil in the pan before the egg.
They're hungry.
umanwizard wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
Craftsmen having secret recipes isnât quite restricted to the
past. According to my drummer friends, nobody knew how to make
cymbals as good as Zildjianâs until very, very recently.
thaumasiotes wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave him an
advantage over other steel manufacturers was that he hired a
chemist to test ore for iron content.
By implication, this was something that had never been done
before.
Cordiali wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
I just looked it up, and he was born the year after
Mendeleev, who'd go on to design/arrange the periodic table
of elements.
I'm guessing they had traditional assaying techniques, just
with less accuracy than a contemporary chemist.
thaumasiotes wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
I don't think you're right about that. They judged ore, as
the comment above mentions, by the location it came from.
They tried standard techniques to process whatever ore they
had, and if those techniques led to a bad result, they
considered the ore bad.
Andrew Carnegie discovered that certain "bad" ore was that
way because its iron content was much higher than usual.
Secure in the knowledge that this ore was actually better
than "good" ore, he developed the techniques to use it.
Akronymus wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto
each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end
up with something entirely different.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a
node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of
advances.
drivers99 wrote 15 hours 43 min ago:
They are expecting suggestions for this work in progress.
URI [1]: https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing
mwkaufma wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
I'd expect something things like Chinese Writing to be a big upstream
dependency, but here it's a terminus. Detecting a western-bias in the
sourcing.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
what's the technological difference between Chinese Writing and
Western Writing?
why are they separate?
Qwertious wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
(Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres
'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very small
character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press, whereas
hieroglyphics have thousands of characters (for thousands of
concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked to the language like
western characters are.
ljsprague wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Such as?
macote wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
Source code found here :
URI [1]: https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree
kristopolous wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
[1] this is kind of how I expected it. Honestly I would have done
[2] and then parsed it.
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the
timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities,
Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively
organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible
without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it.
Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
URI [1]: https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree/blob/main/src/scr...
URI [2]: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
sampton wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
1760000 BC: StoreTool 3. This is our greatest model yet. You are going
to love it.
Difwif wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
Looking forward to the new Civilization mod that uses this.
dawnofdusk wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
Pretty cool. Makes me think if we're overdue for another 1960s era tech
boom?
andrewmutz wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
These paradox games are getting out of control
sizediterable wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story
with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with
the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.
vunderba wrote 14 hours 44 min ago:
Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot
device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
pcthrowaway wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
I second this. It's the only show I've seen making a semi-realistic
attempt at this (ignoring the absurdity of the initial petrification
in the first place and Dr. Stone having superhuman knowledge of all
human inventions)
RHSeeger wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with
"narration", talking about the context/details of things, and Dr
Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't really a
narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).
pavel_lishin wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise
is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of
humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately
standard isekai hijinks ensue.
I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the
"competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
RHSeeger wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
> "competence porn"
See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I
have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do
_not_ want to search for that term. Lol
pavel_lishin wrote 15 hours 50 min ago:
I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so you
can search for that as well.
emeraldd wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel.
fellowniusmonk wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the recent part
of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an insane amount of stuff
innovation that's happening.
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine
per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just
amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
FredPret wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of this
book [0]
Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time
for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input
into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow
into an economic ecosystem.
So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next
couple of centuries.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...
mikewarot wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that
the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by
about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work.
I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
flexagoon wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
> I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
geor9e wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent
screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing",
but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this
universe's elements and physics?
bee_rider wrote 9 hours 43 min ago:
It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human thing.
Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially another
intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not invent
throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the chimpanzees,
canât use them well at all. Even fairly flighty animals seem to
barely have the idea that a creature standing, like, tens of feet
away from them might be âin range.â
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development
of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all
of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big
difference.
tnorthcutt wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is excellent:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking
anitil wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go
through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference
plate using the three plate method and the build up from there
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
mitthrowaway2 wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate
enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever,
being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination,
as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews
in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy.
But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because
it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
having no experience in precision manufacturing and metrology...
how does one become more precise than input tools?
jacquesm wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Just some examples: take a string, don't bother to measure it,
just any length between 1 and two meters or so would do. Take a
pencil (or a piece of charcoal if you really want to go native)
and a smooth branch. Stick the branch in the ground, tie the
string around it so that it can slide with little friction and
put the pencil in a loop of string on the other side. Now use
this to create a circle. You started off with very rough elements
not specifically sized for any purpose and ended up with a high
precision representation of a mathematical concept.
Another: take a bunch of roughly cast metal balls. Put them on a
sieve and let it vibrate until the balls have all passed through
the holes in the sieve. Behold: metal spheres, so precise that
you probably can't really measure the degree to which they are
not spherical without resorting to instruments that you're not
supposed to have in this scenario. Then sort by weight (which is
a proxy for size). Now you can make ball bearings.
Yet another example: you can cut a lens for a telescope to within
ridiculous precision using very primitive methods ( [1] ).
Put another way: it is always possible to increase your precision
as long as you don't particularly care about absolutes or
temperature effects.
URI [1]: https://www.instructables.com/Grind-and-Polish-a-Dobsoni...
abeppu wrote 16 hours 49 min ago:
It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there are
still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived relatively
fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g. a lot more
entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the 200 - 500 range.
Orbital_Armada wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these days, the
slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a real and
sustained change in material conditions. Notably, population density
and urbanization both decreased, along with the labor specialization
that accompanies them. I'd expect most 'inventions' to happen when
and where people have the most hands on time to make them! (I can't
really speak to Indian and Chinese civilizations, but they have also
had integration and disintegration periods)
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 16 hours 53 min ago:
No fire, and no knot. Hmmm...
hk__2 wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
Yes there is: "control of fire". No knots, but ropes around 50000
BCE.
strongpigeon wrote 16 hours 49 min ago:
"Control of Fire" is right under 1000000 BC
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
Ok, I'm just bad at search.
Evidlo wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
This is cool, but I think the execution is off because there's so much
empty space. I think it would work better if the nodes were much
smaller and closer together so you can see more of the graph in one
screen.
esafak wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
where is the zoom functionality??
spawarotti wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
And a related page, in the other direction:
URI [1]: https://www.futuretimeline.net/
throwanem wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
In what sense related?
Leary wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
Does anyone know which technology on this tree has the most
descendents?
croddin wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json ( [1] ) to get this list:
Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants
1: High-vacuum tube â 13
2: Automobile â 12
3: Stored-program computer â 12
4: Voltaic pile â 11
5: High-pressure steam engine â 11
6: Glass blowing â 10
7: Papermaking â 10
8: Bipolar junction transistor â 10
9: Writing (Mesopotamia) â 9
10: MOSFET â 8
URI [1]: https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions
croddin wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
Top 10 by total descendants (direct + indirect)
1: Control of fire â 585
2: Charcoal â 444
3: Iron â 422
4: Iron smelting and wrought iron â 419
5: Ceramic â 404
6: Pottery â 402
7: Induction coil â 389
8: Raft â 365
9: Boat â 363
10: Alcohol fermentation â 353
Top 10 by total ancestors (direct + indirect)
1: Robotaxi â 253
2: Moon landing â 242
3: Space telescope â 238
4: Lidar â 236
5: Satellite television â 231
6: Space station â 228
7: Stealth aircraft â 228
8: Reusable spacecraft â 224
9: Satellite navigation system â 224
10: Communications satellite â 224
throwanem wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted
something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he
kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the
structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to
get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and
this is an impressive realization!
dang wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
Discussed once (and I do mean once):
Historical Tech Tree - [1] - May 2025 (1 comment)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243
matsemann wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
Someone else found [1] (A link to an article about how it's made,
with 65 comments)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
theSherwood wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
This site is an absolute gem. Thank you.
jahewson wrote 9 days ago:
Cool concept. Iâd love a vertical version for mobile.
DIR <- back to front page