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A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-truck-drive-spent-20-years-making-this-astonishing-scale-model-of-every-single-building-in-new-york-city-180988443/
98•1659447091•1d ago

Comments

tombert•1h ago
Looks like you can buy tickets: https://35948.blackbaudhosting.com/35948/page.aspx?pid=196&t...

I should check it out, it would be fun to see my house recreated as a model.

I love projects like this; no delusions of trying to change the world, just doing it because the creator thinks it would be cool to do.

hermitcrab•1h ago
Brilliant. Stay weird, humans.
llmslave•47m ago
We need people like this around
contubernio•44m ago
Why is it relevant what he does for a living? It's his passion and hobby that is interesting.
bell-cot•38m ago
> Why is it relevant...

I'd say the point is "An Ordinary Guy did X". Vs. an engineering genius, or somebody with deep pockets, or a Hollywood special effects model builder, or 3D printer junkie, or whatever.

billfor•28m ago
Also for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_of_the_City_of_New_Yo...
philipallstar•27m ago
> “We were all standing around squealing, ‘Look, there’s our museum!’ ‘There’s the Met; there’s the Guggenheim,’” Sherman recalls. “It’s this great act of recognition, and then it’s also witnessing [Macken’s] creativity, how he made this complex architecture out of very humble materials.”

Blue collar, dedicated, skillful effort over decades immediately co-opted by nonsense-spewer.

avidruntime•17m ago
co-opted? The last paragraph of the article suggests this was quite literally the artist's goal:

> “One of the reasons Joe is so insistent that every single building is here is because he would never want someone to come and see it and not be able to find where they live and see their story,” Sherman tells Artnet.

Its not like they broke into his shop and shared his model with the world before he could, it is currently an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

krustyburger•4m ago
Nor is it nonsense to acknowledge how cool it is to recognize your own building or that he was able to accomplish the project without expensive materials. Spew is also quite the verb to use. What an all-around unpleasant comment.
Nevermark•24m ago
How long before we can build tiny controlled cars and little tiny "pole people" that wander around?

Micro-machines seem to be taking their time.

tejohnso•22m ago
Looking at the level of detail, and the thoroughness, I wouldn't have expected it to even be possible to complete it in 20 years. How much time does this guy spend driving truck? Amazing accomplishment and display of dedication and creativity.
Carrok•8m ago
"We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a year."

Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era

https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
376•Ryan5453•2h ago•142 comments

System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a10affd749724787c8913a2ae0841.pdf
254•be7a•1h ago•161 comments

Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
142•sweis•2h ago•16 comments

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.1
278•zixuanlimit•3h ago•87 comments

S3 Files and the changing face of S3

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-the-changing-face-of-s3.html
31•werner•31m ago•6 comments

Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rx7xzd10xo
157•speckx•2h ago•31 comments

Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon

https://github.com/mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal
23•MediaSquirrel•38m ago•2 comments

A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-truck-drive-spent-20-years-making-this-astonishing-sc...
99•1659447091•1d ago•14 comments

Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

https://sam-burns.com/posts/concrete-laptop-stand/
624•sam-bee•9h ago•197 comments

Rescuing old printers with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP

https://printervention.app/details
93•gmac•3h ago•31 comments

Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-roadmap/
201•ilreb•6h ago•65 comments

Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

https://rajnandan.com/posts/taste-in-the-age-of-ai-and-llms/
166•speckx•4h ago•150 comments

AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html
71•evakhoury•1d ago•20 comments

Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/google-agent-testbed-scion/
101•timbilt•6h ago•30 comments

Cells for NetBSD: kernel-enforced, jail-like isolation

https://netbsd-cells.petermann-digital.de/
5•akagusu•21m ago•1 comments

The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-boards-of-hayao-miyazaki
20•vinhnx•1d ago•4 comments

We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/a-bug-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/
344•henrygarner•9h ago•174 comments

A new Postcrossing stamp from the USA

https://www.postcrossing.com/blog/2026/03/31/a-new-postcrossing-stamp-from-the-usa
57•Tomte•4d ago•17 comments

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring – Lead Robotics and More

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/9-mothers?utm_source=x8pZ4B3P3Q
1•ukd1•6h ago

John Coltrane Illustrates the Mathematics of Jazz

https://www.americanjazzmusicsociety.com/blog/john-coltrane-draws
61•luu•14h ago•4 comments

Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR

https://blog.zacka.io/p/simplify-then-add-lightness-bc4
82•rryan•5h ago•22 comments

Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM

https://github.com/0xGF/boneyard
8•steveharing1•4d ago•3 comments

Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html
41•Anon84•3d ago•4 comments

12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-im...
212•pulisse•4h ago•75 comments

How a blind man made it possible for others with low vision to build Lego sets

https://apnews.com/article/lego-bricks-for-blind-audio-braille-instructions-5a2a27de4354a0b144317...
6•speckx•5h ago•2 comments

Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net

https://jola.dev/posts/dropping-cloudflare
334•shintoist•6h ago•179 comments

Every GPU That Mattered

https://sheets.works/data-viz/every-gpu
285•jonbaer•11h ago•164 comments

US labor force participation continues to slide

https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/restaurant-economic-insights/analysis-commenta...
40•toomuchtodo•1h ago•10 comments

Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world

https://www.intofarlands.com/atlasofarda
137•intofarlands•8h ago•25 comments

My Experience as a Rice Farmer

https://xd009642.github.io/2026/04/01/My-Experience-as-a-Rice-Farmer.html
338•surprisetalk•5d ago•169 comments