We need to build cooler things
The article argues that Silicon Valley has shifted from revolutionary ideas to optimizing for enterprise clients, resulting in a lack of impactful projects. It emphasizes the need for innovators to focus on building solutions that improve lives rather than merely catering to business compliance. The author calls for a return to creativity and boldness in technology, urging individuals and investors to prioritize meaningful advancements over stable revenue.
- ▪Silicon Valley has transitioned from revolutionary ideas to optimizing for enterprise clients.
- ▪The focus has shifted to solving small problems for big companies rather than impactful innovations.
- ▪The author encourages building solutions that improve lives and calls for a return to creativity in technology.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 32 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ How do you build new things? — r/learnprogramming
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://sammacginty.substack.com/p/there-are-enough-shovels |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 17:27:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T17:37:39.277Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T17:37:39.277Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8xTNQOiORkth · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
There are enough shovelsSilicon valley needs to dig for gold againSam MacGintyMay 24, 2026ShareSan Francisco was built on the backs of gold miners. People across the world dropped everything in search of a fortune in the California hills. The city grew from a small colonial outpost on the far reaches of the continent into a thriving metropolis.When the city established itself as the catalyst for the internet revolution, the spirit of the gold miners looked to be alive and well — smart, determined people, out to change the world.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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