Cargo Airships Are Happening

This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.

"I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction."

What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?

New container ships being built is around all time high. Look it up.

It points to that the business is not only doing good but that investments is being made, heavily.

If the economics work, I’d imagine the best time is when there are the most ships built since that indicates unmet cargo demand.

Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.

On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.

CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.

It's a cyclical industry, so whether it "points" or peaks can be argued, but in 2021 561 container ships were ordered vs 114 in 2020

• Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built or on order worldwide

• These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units)

Major shipping lines:

• Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2024-2025)

• OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity

• MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships and smaller vessels

• CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html —

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here. Sometimes people get (or try to get) a boat-load of money to do a thing that's bad from first principles, because they lack experience in the relevant field. In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.

In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypass customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime. And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit rebuttal. It merits mockery.

Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here, programming; suddenly think that everything else is less complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap" and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.

That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My bad there.

> Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here.

Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity, and not for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or ideological battle.

And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a reason for them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-ish decades of existence and significant user growth is because of those guidelines and dang's impartial commitment to implementing them.

Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-pasted above) can see that.

> In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.

Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on Twitter.

Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.

I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.

I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.

I think it's more like the Western economy is silently crashing than technological development having reverted back to ~19th century rate, although the latter is said to be happening too - something feels wrong about tech lately.

I get why someone will have the conservative position. I even get that someone enjoys schadenfreude at people who are not conservative. I just don’t get why someone who has low risk-tolerance would come to a startup forum to express their low risk-tolerance.

That would be like if I spent any amount of time on child-free subreddits or on forums about stanced cars.

Well for one, the topics covered on here are far broader than just startups. And for two, a lot of the ones that are startups are actually interesting, they're trying to solve actual problems. In fact, putting aside the incompetence, this one I would say falls into that category.

That said, not all ideas are created equal, and IMO at least, this one is not, and what makes it fall short is so obvious that I have trouble treating it as a serious proposition on the part of the people behind it, let alone one worth putting money into.

I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.

I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.

Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.

Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.

Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.

GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.

TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.