> And if you read HN and can't think of progress in the last five years, then you must be incredibly cynical.
Reading on HN means 99% of the times aspirational stuff. Aspirational stuff doesn't count.
What counts is stuff that improves quality of life in the real world, not just aspirationally sometimes in the future in order to play the musical chair game of the stock market or VC markets.
Stuff like mRNA vaccines.
An other example would be fracking but that largely happened 2005-2015