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Ask HN: What is mankind's greatest engineering achievement?

by donjuanica on 4/6/16, 12:56 AM with 6 comments

• by 11thEarlOfMar on 4/6/16, 1:23 AM

  Hands down, the state-of-the-art in semiconductors.

  - Print pictures with features measured in single-digit nanometers

  - Deposit layers of photo-sensitive, conducting and non-conducting materials measured in atoms

  - Remove layers of materials measured in atoms

  - Create devices at these geometries that execute logic at 238,310 MIPS (Intel Core i7 5960X)

  There are >250,000 scientists and engineers globally working to make this happen. I can not think of another technology getting this much focus.

• by petra on 4/6/16, 1:18 AM

  I would say windows and it's developer tools. It was the first platform that enabled engineering collaboration on such a scale that the world has never seen before - between any hardware/software/library designer - all while making the fruits of this efforts extremely accessibly to the common people.

  And it succeeded in running the "mind of the world" for quite a few years.

  On the same note i would add the internet, but i'm torn, i think(maybe mistakenly) that windows is a bigger engineering achievement - something much harder to pull off, and the internet on the other hand is brilliant in it's conceptual simplicity{ routers + links + packets + redundancy + intelligence at the edge} - although the implementation has definitely pushed many boundaries.

• by elmerfud on 4/6/16, 1:40 AM

  It kind of depends. If you consider the achievement in the context of the time period it was done vs achievement of all time you'll get different answers.

  Semiconductors are a marvelous feat of engineering but in the time from when they were first developed until now the ability to share communication has been unparalleled allowing this to happen.

  In the other hand the concrete dome on the Pantheon is quite a feat as well considering their relatively basic understanding of the principals of forces and simplistic methods of collaborative sharing.

• by ankurdhama on 4/6/16, 4:41 AM

  I don't think it can be one single thing as we know all of our achievements are based on the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giant". I can suggest various vaccinations and medical technologies.

• by pinewurst on 4/6/16, 1:38 AM

  The New Horizons probe. Not only combining the parts into the whole, but sending it so far away over such a long time, only to arrive with great precision fully operational.

• by GFK_of_xmaspast on 4/6/16, 1:20 AM

  How about them pyramids.