16 ms·

Fast

1314 points by doppp 7y ago

justinmark869 7y ago
http://gopccrack.com/microsoft-office-2016-product-key/ http://gopccrack.com/microsoft-office-2016-product-key/
Austin_Conlon 7y ago
The Xerox Alto was done in three months: https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-Xerox-Alto-done-in-only-3-months/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-Xerox-Alto-done-in-only-3-....
wruza 7y ago
>JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. >Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks. 11 extra days completely worth investing.
- bjoli 7y ago
  Poor Brendan. Wanting to write Scheme for the browser and ending up writing JavaScript. Sure, today JS is a proper language, but it atillmlacks the elegance and adherence to principle of scheme. Maybe that's why it's so successful :)
  - seanparsons 7y ago
    > Sure, today JS is a proper language It is?
    - Kovah 7y ago
      Definitely not.
  - nonsince 7y ago
    Yeah that really sucks for him that he became CEO of Mozilla off the back of a subpar baby’s first scheme built in a 10-day adderall binge and then lost his cushy undeserved position by being an unabashed homophobe. Poor guy.
fulafel 7y ago
Wonder why reader mode doesn't work on this mobile borked page, even though there is a big wall of text.
tomaskafka 7y ago
What is notable to me is that almost all of these examples seem to come from times of war - world war, trade wars, war for space domination ... (plus some of them are very coloured - the Alaska highway was a dirtroad, the Apollo definitely wasn't made in 143 days ...)
ahmad4672 7y ago
Wondershare Dr Fone Crack Downloiad Link: https://crackget.com/wondershare-dr-fone/ https://crackget.com/wondershare-dr-fone/
pfranz 7y ago
I do think these kinds of things are worth remembering, but looking them over it just reminded me of the quote, "it took me 10 years to become an overnight success"
vemotim2 7y ago
We achieve some incredible things together and get 20000 downloads for the first month with this Indie Minesweeper game for Android. This is achieved within 30 days of development. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.popoko.minesweeper https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.popoko.min...
deleted 7y ago
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jimnotgym 7y ago
FYI This page doesn't display very well on my mobile, and Firefox does not seem able to put it into reader view, which seems odd for a page of plain text. I enjoyed it though.
seem_2211 7y ago
A relatively recent example of rapid infrastructure building (in California no less!) can be found with C.C Meyers. "Proclaimed a “Local Hero,” Clinton “C.C.” Myers was lauded on the cover of the July 1995 issue of Comstock’s magazine for “working miracles in heavy construction.” Three big projects by C.C. Myers Inc. cemented his legacy: rebuilding two bridges in Watsonville after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; reconstructing the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; and rebuilding a stretch of Interstate 5, including a bridge, near Coalinga after the 1995 floods. He was equally famous for the efficiency of these projects — 55 days in Watsonville, 66 days in Santa Monica and 21 days in Coalinga — and the huge bonuses he earned for finishing projects early." https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catching-cc-myers https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catc... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-...
StuffedParrot 7y ago
What is the BankAmericard? Edit: spelling
- dasmoth 7y ago
  Like the article says, it was renamed to Visa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.
aneutron 7y ago
While I do get the "spirit" of this, I feel it's highly inaccurate and/or misrepresentative in some cases. An example would be Javascript. Sure he implemented a prototype in 10 days, but the whole implementation was probably a fraction of the test code for V8, a modern implementation of the beast that is Javascript today. I'd even argue that the VM engines from 5 year ago would still hold the same property.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
garyclarke27 7y ago
Great Article. Here’s another, Tesla Gigafactory China, brownfield Jan 2019, 1000 cars per week Dec 19, mind blowing.
RupertEisenhart 7y ago
The 1000 dollar human genome [1] is one of the most staggering examples of this. "In dozens of presentations over the past few years, scientists have compared the slope of Moore's law with the swiftly dropping costs of DNA sequencing. For a while they kept pace, but since about 2007, it has not even been close." To go from a cost of 2.7billion and one decade to where we are today (people are now talking seriously about the zero dollar genome, aka the price of sequencing can be trivially offset by selling some meta information to some company or other) can be seen as a feat of scientific infrastructure-making that blows any Alaskan highway out of the swamps. https://www.nature.com/news/technology-the-1-000-genome-1.14901 https://www.nature.com/news/technology-the-1-000-genome-1.14...
code-is-code 7y ago
Impressive how many big structure were build during ww2
- saagarjha 7y ago
  War has a tendency to incentivize rapid construction.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Things were built quickly in that era. Most skyscrapers wenr up in a year or so, like the Empire State Building. The whole Hoover Dam project took less than five years.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      The war production in particular was incredible: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm > Japan, an island empire totally dependent on maintaining open sea lanes to ensure her raw material imports, managed to build just sixty-three DDs (some twenty or so of which would have been classified by the Allies as DEs) and an unspecified (and by my unofficial count, relatively small) number of 'escort' vessels. In the same time span, the US put some eight hundred forty-seven antisubmarine capable craft in the water! > The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years. > Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
      - thrower123 7y ago
        Agreed, it is nuts. The Liberty ships being built in just days. Planes and tanks and trucks streaming off the assembly lines in the tens of thousands. Millions of tons of high explosives. Truly incredible. Nowadays, it takes us the better part of a decade to get a minor bridge project done, and building a four-story apartment building is a multi-year endeavor.
freddref 7y ago
Stripe was valued at roughly 1B after 5 years. Realex payments, an Irish payments processor formed around 2000, was sold for 115M after 15 years.
pithymaxim 7y ago
Based on that last entry about the SF bus line, I would really love to see https://patrickcollison.com/slow https://patrickcollison.com/slow
- sonofgod 7y ago
  Related: The Duke Nukem Forever list. Written in the aftermath of Duke Nukem Forever finally being canned, twelve years after being announced. (It did finally ship, to a poor reception) http://duke.a-13.net/ http://duke.a-13.net/
- dylanz 7y ago
  Definitely! That would be very cool to see. I bet there are a lot of great things that have moved slowly with great success. Berkshire Hathaway is probably a good example, although I don't know how it compares to other companies during a similar window of time.
- seltzered_ 7y ago
  Hum, I think things should be broadened beyond just a fast/slow axis, and inquire what some of these projects actually serve. Or at the least what they've costed in the long-run in terms of resource use. Personally I've been meaning to really do an exercise in evaluating projects against a regenerative framework (see https://capitalinstitute.org/8-principles-regenerative-economy/ https://capitalinstitute.org/8-principles-regenerative-econo... & http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/whats-regenerative.html http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/whats-regenerative.ht... ). I'm not saying this framework is perfect nor am I endorsing Capital Inst, but there needs to be better evaluation than just speed.
- divbzero 7y ago
  Construction on the Basílica de la Sagrada Família began in 1882 and was less than a quarter complete when its architect passed away in 1926. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família It remains a work in progress today.
  - 7y ago
avmich 7y ago
> Apollo 8... went to the Moon... Early on in the Apollo program there was the plan to build a series of spacecrafts which would progressively solve intermediate problems on the path to the Moon landing. For that, a series of Apollo spacecrafts were planned, and production was running for years - Apollos flew also to Skylab and to 1975 docking with Soyuz. Specific Apollo 8 was chosen to fly to the Moon because LEM wasn't ready - it was later tested on Earth orbit with Apollo 9 and flew to the Moon with Apollo 10 first time. So, Apollo 8 flying to the Moon isn't a separate decision, but change of existing plans - with a couple of missions swapped in time; fast, but not nearly as fast as creation from scratch of a spaceship or a program would assume.
- interfixus 7y ago
  True, but still a dizzying feat by any standard. World's in-a-class-of-its-own largest rocket, so far only tested in two unmanned launches, one of them a near disaster, stability problems now theoretically fixed, but fixes never tested in actual flight. Sure, let's improvise a new kind of missio in four months time, strap people on top of that thing, and shoot them to the Moon for the first time ever. I don't believe that's quite how things are done these days. Wildly successful things, mind you.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    I went back and looked at the significant failures that happened. They were really really lucky.
the_reformation 7y ago
Fascinating that the Stripe CEO has become the foremost critic of San Francisco municipal governance.
- nrp 7y ago
  Is this in relation to Stripe's move out of San Francisco (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuable-U-S-startup-to-leave-SF-as-14558067.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuab...) or something else?
  - freyr 7y ago
    San Francinsco's city government is completely incompetent and the city itself has devolved into a disgusting cesspool. But if you live in the city, you don't mention this. Instead, you loudly proclaim at every opportunity that San Francisco is best city in the world, and you express your pity for the poor schmucks who are forced to live anywhere else. The crime, the drug addicts, the homelessness, the mental illness, the broken car windows, the absurd cost of living, the blighted neighborhoods, the pervasive human misery, the garbage, the heroin needles, the human feces -- this is to be considered part of San Francisco's urban charm. Anyone who acknowledges how bad the situation has become should be ostracized, downvoted, or told to move to Walnut Creek. You especially shouldn't be critical if you run a tech startup in the city, since you need a continual supply of young, impressionable employees to buy into the hype and move here. But once you move just outside the city perimeter, then you can afford to be a obliquely critical of the city's slow bus lane construction.
    - kick 7y ago
      'pc proclaims that San Francisco is the best city in the world elsewhere on his site. Your critique has a tinge of irony to it. https://patrickcollison.com/advice https://patrickcollison.com/advice
      - seem_2211 7y ago
        I think both things can be true at the same time. San Francisco is an amazing place to work in technology (in my view, nowhere else comes close). But the municipal government is also a complete cesspool of inefficiency & corruption.
juanbyrge 7y ago
Here's something fast: the Holocene extinction. Since the dawn of modern civilization, countless species have become extinct, and around 1 million species face extinction caused by human events. Should we really be worshipping economic progress?
- drenvuk 7y ago
  This isn't about economic progress, it's about humans getting things done in a short amount of time and with fewer resources that what we currently hear about. If you want to expand his list to include other things why don't you send your examples to him?
- thrower123 7y ago
  > Should we really be worshipping economic progress? Yes. The genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back to some imaginary idylic pre-industrial world. The best way to preserve what there is and free up more space for preservation is to pursue technology and efficiency ruthlessly. Do more with less.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    We can have development with constraint, we can have development without the cult of growth, we could go back to the more inclusive, constrained form of economic progress seen in the immediate post war. We could even try to tune the system in new ways to limit the clear problems of unconstrained globalised capitalism. We do not need to go back to a Medieval agrarian feudalism, return to mercantilism or unwind the industrial revolution. It happened, we should learn from it and make the best of it...
scarejunba 7y ago
This is part of why I support subways in San Francisco so long as they're not American built.
cldellow 7y ago
> The Alaska Highway. Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of highway were built over the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska. I grew up in Dawson Creek. Our claim to fame: "Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway starts here!" The Alaska Highway as built in 1942 is nothing like a highway that most people would envision. It wasn't paved, for example. It was good enough for military vehicles with crews of soldiers who could make ad hoc repairs to the road as needed while they transited through, who had extensive survival skills, and could literally radio for assistance if needed. It wasn't opened to the public until 1948 -- so perhaps 6 years, not 6 months, is a better estimate of its time. It's also shrunk by almost 20% as it has been continually rebuilt to make it passable by passenger vehicles. It's an accomplishment, no doubt, but I feel like omitting these significant caveats is meaningful.
- audi0slave 7y ago
  Sounds a lot like the Dalton highway , we had to rent a special vehicle which had a radio to do 2 way communication with the traffic and the highway wasn't paved.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    A CB radio is not necessary on the Dalton highway, though vehicles that transit it frequently are usually equiped with one to communicate with the semis that make up much of the traffic (especially to coordinate passing on dusty sections). The Dalton has several unpaved sections but is fairly highly maintained and certainly does not require vehicles transiting to perform road work themselves. You certainly do not need survival skills (at least during the summer) to drive it as there is a consistent amount of semi traffic that can assist you if something goes wrong as well as periodic pump stations for the pipline. If anything, the Dalton would be more akin to the Alaska highway some time after it was opened to the public.
- travbrack 7y ago
  This definitely cuts the snarky comparison to the bus lane in San Francisco down to size.
- 7y ago
pbreit 7y ago
Tesla’s speed on the China factory is pretty amazing. Germany will not have any excuses.
- Kovah 7y ago
  Ha... Ever heard of our bureaucracy? It's destroying so many good ideas or makes them so much more expensive.
xixixao 7y ago
Empire State Building has always boggled my mind, with its speed. Built faster than most houses today, biggest building in the city by far, in the middle of the city, amazing endurance. I need to read more about the process. I wish governments everywhere learned a few lessons from it.
- nine_k 7y ago
  I also remember that the construction site did not have a stellar safety record. It was typical for the industry back then, though. In the middle of the Great Depression, a builder would likely not be too picky and reject a chance to work on such a high-profile project when unemployment was high.
  - slim 7y ago
    less work days probably also means less worker casualities
- Animats 7y ago
  It was during the Great Depression. Hiring and getting stuff delivered was really fast if you had money. Steel-framed structures go up fast. One floor every day or two is normal. Faster is possible. Here's a prefab skyscraper going up in 15 days.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvmru5JmXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvmru5JmXk
  - jdpigeon 7y ago
    This is incredibly inspiring
zuhayeer 7y ago
Time is the uppermost bound you can play with, everything else is simply a subset of time
adamnemecek 7y ago
This sort of time accounting makes no sense. A lot of these feats were the first _successful_ version, however the people behind them had careers of doing the same thing over and over again. It's not like Brendan Eich went from not knowing how to write a language to shipping a language in 10 days however this article presents it like this. It's not like Boeing went from nothing to 747 in whatever amount of time. Building an airplane get much easier when you already have a factory for building airplanes. Like I can work on something for a decade and day before shipping, give it a new name and say "hey, I shipped it in a day". It might take a chef an hour to make a meal. But he might have been optimizing that hour his whole life.
- winfred 7y ago
  The tale of the Chinese emperor and the picture of the rooster Once upon a time, there was an emperor who was extremely fond of roosters, and so one day he commissioned the most famous painter in all his realm to paint him a picture of a rooster. The painter replied that it would take him three years to accomplish this. The emperor was secretly rather annoyed, but in the end he agreed. When the three years came to an end, the emperor summoned the painter, but on seeing that he was empty-handed impatiently demanded: "What about my painting of a rooster?" The painter remained perfectly calm, took up a piece of paper right where he stood, and started to paint. The brush flew across the page, the ink danced. With apparent ease, he produced the lifelike image of a rooster, capturing its very essence. It took him less than three minutes to complete. On seeing this, the emperor was furious and could stand it no longer: "Have you been deliberately deceiving your king? Is this some act of rebellion? It took you just three minutes to paint that picture; why did you make me wait three whole years?" To which the painter replied: "Sire, first please calm your fury; and when you have done so, follow me and see for yourself." The painter led the emperor to a large house and opened the door, and on looking inside, the emperor realised that the house was filled to the roof with sketches of roosters. Then the painter spoke: "These are my efforts of the last three whole years. Without those three years of labour how could I possibly have produced that perfect rooster for you in less than three minutes?"
- blondin 7y ago
  thank you! was having the same thought as i was going through the examples. and when the unix example came up, it dawn on me that the author is clearly omitting the background of these people to make a more compelling point. yes they did great feats but most have a history of doing similar and learning from it in the past. fast-forward to present days, and our issues with not going fast enough, maybe the conditions and situations are different? maybe we are in a learning phase? also for a better account of what happened in unix case, i recommend kernighan's latest: unix: a history and a memoir.
savrajsingh 7y ago
The SR-71 should be on this list. <2 years from idea to one of the most remarkable aircraft ever built. Also quite fast :)
- dewarrn1 7y ago
  Obligatory SR-71 story about going fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0
- sneak 7y ago
  Fast for fifty years ago, maybe. I wish they’d tell us about the cool stuff they built in the 80s or 90s.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Well fast aircraft sort of lost their purpose once satellites got good, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out they stopped caring about manned, fast aircraft with the SR-71.
    - sneak 7y ago
      Okay, what cool hypersonic suborbital drones do they have? Are any satellite-launched?
      - amdavidson 7y ago
        They don't and they're not. Look at the defense allocations for basic research into hypersonic capable materials to prove that they are still years away the most basic deployment and once the research is done, there is no supply base to make the materials (FA8650-20-S-5003)
  - Cougher 7y ago
    "Fast for fifty years ago . . ." How many aircraft today can fly horizontally over 2,000 mph? ". . . maybe." It may have been fast 50 years ago?
gordon_freeman 7y ago
On Amazon Prime: From The Everything Store, A book by Brad Stone -- what I got to know was that Amazon had the pieces in place that eventually helped create Prime service such as efficient warehouse operation that can deliver packages in 2 days, quick payment processing, rich customer data etc. So to think that suddenly Amazon Prime was invented and implemented in just 6 weeks seems wrong.
hliyan 7y ago
Constraints foster creativity (if the right people are in the team). When JFK announced (in 1961) USA's intention to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, he set a time constraint that could not be moved without considerable global embarassment. In less than 9 years, it was accomplished. Perhaps the formula is: a deadline + right people + leadership support.
- eugeniub 7y ago
  + 4% of the entire nation’s federal budget doesn’t hurt.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I wonder how quickly we'd solve fusion with this level of focus. I bet it'd be less than 5 years to "energy too cheap to meter", unlimited carbon capture, etc, etc. Instead we've been bombing people in the Middle East for the last 20 years.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    I suppose this is the "leadership support", that is, the coffers opened by the (high above) leadership. Time is money, so if you can't put enough time, your only option is to compensate with money.
  - Jack000 7y ago
    It depends on the problem. Some problems can't be solved regardless of how much money you throw at it, and some problems get worse with more funding. eg. the war on cancer, terror, etc etc..
  - rrss 7y ago
    Even adjusted for inflation, the U.S. federal budget is far, far larger than it was in the 1960s. So much so that even though NASA's budget is now less than 0.5% of the federal budget, NASA still spends roughly enough money in a decade to pay for the Apollo program. I've seen various figures for the cost of the Apollo program, ranging from $150 to $290 billion (adjusted to current dollars). In the last decade, NASA spent over $200 B.
lordlic 7y ago
> Neighbors previously complained about the replacement of historic streetlight poles for Van Ness BRT. Replacement poles made to look like the originals ballooned the project cost by $6.5 million, according to city documents This is a perfect microcosm of San Francisco governance. A small number of highly-motivated landowners unashamedly hijacking city policy for their own interests. How do we stand up to this?
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  Complain to your supervisor or run yourself.
- jachee 7y ago
  Show up to hearings and point out ridiculous NIMBYism for what it is.
  - jachee 7y ago
    C’mon now. Don’t just downvote. What’re your alternate plans?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I for one appreciate when a modern project takes care and expense to recreate certain historic elements that tie the project into its setting more seamlessly than a lowest possible cost execution. I appreciate that whether it’s directly in my backyard or across town.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Governance by whoever can show up at a Tuesday afternoon meeting and argue has to be one of the worst systems ever devised. That's the root cause to fight!
  - nielsole 7y ago
    Aka Grassroot democracy
adventured 7y ago
The Manhattan Project moved along remarkably quickly. From the time 56,000 acres were authorized for purchase at Oak Ridge, to the Trinity test, was under three years (September 1942, July 1945). In 5.x years id Software built and released: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2.
- philwelch 7y ago
  The B-29 Superfortress--the bomber that dropped both atomic bombs on Japan--took longer and cost more money to develop than the Manhattan Project.
fluxic 7y ago
1599: Shakespeare writes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, As You Like it, Henry V. "It's the year in which the thirty-five-year-old playwright went from being an exceptionally talented writer, to one of the greatest who ever lived.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-life-of-william-shakespeare-1599 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-...
blt 7y ago
A lot of the construction projects came at the cost of bad safety standards and general poor treatment of workers, including plenty of workers deaths. Something to keep mind when bemoaning the slower speeds nowadays.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I don't know how to disentangle that from the fact that it was a vastly poorer time with very little technology and health care compared to now.
brenden2 7y ago
It’s always interesting to see what kinds of things make it to the front page because of who wrote them, rather than the content itself (which in this case is just a few cherry picked examples with no context). I’m not exactly sure what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from the facts themselves.
- blondin 7y ago
  totally agree with you on this one. it's becoming a hn's favorites hub here. that's not a good thing.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > I’m not exactly sure what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from the facts themselves. What's wrong with learning facts?
  - alphakappa 7y ago
    Nothing wrong in itself. But it is appropriate to wonder about the takeaways. Without proper context and history, the lessons you draw might not be helpful ones.
  - gonational 7y ago
    Good point; it makes me think most people open articles because they want to be sold into a narrative, rather than learn facts. This is why folks listen to the “news” media yammer about a topic even after they know the facts.
- sneak 7y ago
  When we pick a set of facts to highlight, we are editorializing by what we choose to include or not include in such a list. This is the core of every good documentary I have ever seen: ultimately, they are compelling editorials because they construct a narrative by telling or showing you things that actually happened. Whether or not those things are a representative sample, or plausibly support the narrative in the wider context of human society, is left as an exercise to the reader. I recall reading once that Thiel said that most or all of the critically important events in history were accomplished by small, highly motivated teams. (Pardon me if I am misremembering the quote exactly.) Perhaps pc is simply reminding us that “move fast and break things” isn’t always a bad thing? Just speculating, though.
apl002 7y ago
And here I am 4 months past the date I expected to be done with my MVP....
- verttii 7y ago
  What are you building?
neilk 7y ago
There's no question in my mind that North America has gotten a lot worse at completing great civic projects. Sometimes, that's for good reasons. We don't have slave labor, we have environmental review, and we allow affected communities to protest and block approval. In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP. We might have overcorrected! But I also don't know what model there might exist for moving quickly with a multi-stakeholder process.
- ansible 7y ago
  > In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP This definitely happened in Chicago. In multiple cases, the city ran highways through ethnic neighborhoods, effective killing the local communities.
  - astura 7y ago
    This is one of the major criticisms of the Cross-Bronx expressway.
- Tempest1981 7y ago
  We squandered the last few years of a booming economy: Study: America has ‘squandered’ the recovery and is falling behind the rest of the world, according to Harvard study https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-squandered-the-recovery-and-is-falling-behind-the-rest-of-the-world-according-to-harvard-study-2019-12-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-squandered-the...
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  There's not one. Time and time again, organizations prove that product design/project management by consensus leads to budget overruns and under delivery. Quality at speed requires dictatorial like organisation with high risk to all. In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of something like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause that would motivate such projects.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nine_k 7y ago
It would be interesting to have something opposite: "Cheap". Notable, well-known things to be built on a shoestring budget.
- maddyboo 7y ago
  Cheap, fast, and good are three interesting measures. It’s often said you can pick any two, and from experience I would have to agree. I’d be curious to hear about projects spanning this gamut – something done fast n’ good but costing dearly; fast and cheap but horribly executed (I’d bet a large slice of projects fit in quite well here), or the amusing slow, expensive, and ultimately shitty. Perhaps most interesting would be story or two about projects which miraculously attained the trifecta... that is, if any of these stories actually happen to exist.
  - evilotto 7y ago
    "Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three." -- https://sqlite.org/index.html https://sqlite.org/index.html
k_sze 7y ago
I get the feeling that the purpose of the page is to shame the SF new bus lane project.
jcims 7y ago
Given their scale i think Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge deserve honorable mention. (Five and four years respectively)
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  There is the B-29. The US spent more money on that than the Manhattan project. I think the US spent even more money on radio and radar development during WWII.
rubiquity 7y ago
2004: DHH built a blog in 15 minutes 2019: San Francisco Web Developer, also opposed to the new bus lane, is still configuring webpack and package.json. Their intent to build a blog was announced in early 2015 via a Twitter post containing way too many emoji.
- wruza 7y ago
  Configuring webpack is mastering of zen. It’s not done until you stop pretending.
omosubi 7y ago
I just started following Patrick Collison's career and have read 2 books from his reading list. he's one of those people that you feel lucky to be living at the same as. Going through his website is fascinating and he does this in his spare time while also building one of the most admired startups in existence. I'm excited to see what he does next. What a fascinating mind
iconjack 7y ago
Here's another one that I think belongs on this list: NYC spent 6+ years and $13 million trying to reopen the Wollman skating rink in Central Park. In 1986, Trump negotiated a deal with the city for 2½ million, promising completion in 6 months, by Dec 15, in time to salvage most of the winter season. He and his team opened the rink 2 months ahead of schedule, and ¾ million under budget. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-rebuild-wollman-rink-at-the-city-s-expense-by-dec-15.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-rebuild...
- Medicalidiot 7y ago
  Trump took the credit that HRH Construction deserves, then screwed them over after it was done by not mentioning them at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink
tim333 7y ago
Also Gmail 1 day for the first prototype. An an aside I found Musk interesting talking about how they get the Starship type projects to progress quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be&t=74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... >And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to delete parts and processes. etc
thedudeabides5 7y ago
This link has been submitted 8 times. It has taken 7 months to get to the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868 That's like 1.5 Apollo 8s
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  You can submit a link more than once?
  - WildGreenLeave 7y ago
    If there is enough time in between it you can. But I'm not sure how many days you have to wait, I think it is probably around 30 days.
    - snazz 7y ago
      Even quicker seems to be fine if the first time it only got to 3 or 4 points.
- cjbprime 7y ago
  Impressively meta.
- kresten 7y ago
  So, not fast?
- misiti3780 7y ago
  where can you get those pieces of data?
  - majewsky 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcollison.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcollison.com
  - IA21 7y ago
desdiv 7y ago
Nuclear fission was discovered on December 17, 1938. It was first used in warfare on August 6, 1945, 2,424 days later.
divbzero 7y ago
“The development of Git began on 3 April 2005. Torvalds announced the project on 6 April; it became self-hosting as of 7 April.” [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  The development of Git May have started in the back of his brain earlier than that. Code being written is kind of the very final stage of software dev.
  - tim333 7y ago
    I think he said he'd been thinking about if for a year or so. From https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git-an-interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git... >So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
- pc 7y ago
  That’s a good one!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ncmncm 7y ago
  It's impressive even though the design was copied from Monotone.
- swyx 7y ago
  what is the significance of it becoming self-hosting? does that mean mostly feature complete in 4 days?
owens99 7y ago
1. Several examples are false (as pointed out in HN comments) 2. This post is descriptive, but not explanatory (startup bro science) 3. Even taken at face value, it’s Confirmation Bias presenting outliers
- webmaven 7y ago
  Survivorship Bias, rather.
narrator 7y ago
You forgot Banting and Best[1]. They went from coming up with the idea for synthetic insulin, developing the treatment, testing it on animals, then themselves, then testing it on patients, then developing and releasing a commercial product and winning the nobel prize in medicine in 3 years! This was of course long before the FDA was around and if they tried to do the same thing at that pace today we'd throw them in prison. [1]https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-discovery-of-insulin https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-discov...
- aaavl2821 7y ago
  Genentech (dave Goeddel, herb heyneker, Dennis Kleid, herb boyer) cloned human insulin in a year (1977-8 I think) and got it approved by FDA ~4 years later
ncmncm 7y ago
Pyramid at Giza, 20 years -- laying one 2.5-ton stone block every 2 minutes, of every daylight hour, for the entire period. Some people say 10 years, one per minute. Or, construction for half of each of 20 years, one per minute. You could imagine getting pretty good at it, five years in.
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
This isn't necessarily a good thing. The earliest versions of Javascript were insane. Bad isn't the word. Buggy isn't the word. You've never seen a language as ridiculous as early Javascript. It took a good twenty years to fix it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Some may say that it was never fixed ;)
- cachvico 7y ago
  Difficult to understate the repercussions, in developer hours through the years, of such a briefly thought-out design and implementation!
angry_octet 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza 4500 years old. Construction 10-15 years, >10000 workers (some estimate 200,000). Accuracy of construction is fantastic.
gok 7y ago
The TGV entry skips over the 20 years of R&D on high speed rail that preceded the first major construction, much of which was wasted on gas turbine designs.
spodek 7y ago
Nothing about Einstein's miracle year?
bredren 7y ago
Yes, Disneyland opened that fast but to many it was a disaster. [1] Heralding quick launches should come with tribute to the sacrifices of early users. https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-day-60-years-ago https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-...
bobjordan 7y ago
When you see examples of waste like this, which are not uncommon, it really doesn't take much critical thinking to become skeptical of those in favor of increasing taxes to pay for solutions managed by any Government agencies. >>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
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ible 7y ago
The Shanghai subway system is a good example. Construction started in 1986, first 28 stations opened in 1993. It now has 413 stations and is the largest subways system by length (676 km) in the world.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  Subways drastically vary depending on the material the ground is made of and what is there already. For example London is relatively easy to build deep tunnels in, but on of the big things that has increased the complexity of Crossrail is that central London has a lot of stuff underground that isn't necessarily documented correctly. There are water mains, sewers, electrical cables, ventilation shafts, other subway tunnels, stations, then abandoned instances of all of those and plenty of archeological materials (London as a city has been around for over 2000 years).
  - jiofih 7y ago
    True, totally unfair. Shanghai has only been occupied for ~8000 years.
weinzierl 7y ago
Almost every item on the list is from before 1960. After 1960 there is not a single construction project in the US. The later projects happened either in unregulated areas (JavaScript, Amazon Prime) or in China (Shenzhen, Luckin Coffee), with a single European outlier - the TGV.
andybak 7y ago
Bear this in mind when people express skepticism about the existence of the 10x developer. My own productivity can vary over approximately 2 orders of magnitude day to day so I don't have any problem with believing in individuals differing by a single order over time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
This is a cool, inspirational list, pc. Thanks! I would also be interested in a similar list, but one that listed "fast failures," like Vasa or Fidenae. I sometimes think that we need cautionary examples, these days, as "move fast and break things" has broken a lot of things.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Look up the death rates for these projects if you want a more complete picture.
k__ 7y ago
lol, here in Germany things somehow never get done on time. We are still waiting for an airport in Berlin and a trainstation in Stuttgart. While the last one still has about 3 years to be "on time" it will probably be late.
jonplackett 7y ago
So - why does everything take so long and end up so much more expensive these days?
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  Covered quite well in other comments but: health and safety, working around existing infrastructure, political constraints on throwing money at problems[2], lack of skilled workers[1], etc. [1] e.g. Crossrail hit delays because other projects like Spurs' new stadium were willing to pay 2x the daily rate; https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-blames-spurs-stadium-delay-for-labour-woes-22-01-2019/ https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-blame... [2] Although if you can convince politicians that infrastructure helps fight terrorists/blocks immigration/lowers taxes for the rich, you'll probably be drowning in money pretty quickly.
RayMan1 7y ago
Look ma, a site without ads, upvote
mensetmanusman 7y ago
The fast construction projects killed lots of workers.
- lgeorget 7y ago
  The Eiffel tower did not though. Nobody died while building the Eiffel tower although one worker died on the site outside working hours.
tomatohs 7y ago
The original Jeep was designed in 14 hours. > The war was under way in Europe, so the Army's need was urgent and demanding. Bids were to be received by July 22, a span of just eleven days. Manufacturers were given 49 days to submit their first prototype and 75 days for completion of 70 test vehicles. > Probst turned down Bantam initially, but agreed to work without pay after an Army request and began work on July 17, 1940.[39] > Probst laid out full design drawings for the Bantam prototype, known as the Bantam Reconnaissance Car, or BRC, in just two days, and worked up a cost estimate the next day. Bantam's bid was submitted, complete with blueprints, on July 22. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB
freeslugs 7y ago
I would not be proud to include JavaScript on this list. Haste makes waste
jpswade 7y ago
I think it's easy to forget that although these things were achieved in a very short space of time, it's not without years of toil that lead to it. For example, you can't write a programming language in 10 days, without having spent a long time thinking about how you'd go about doing that prior to doing it.
gist 7y ago
This is all so ridiculous. Yes so much can be done quickly if you take chances, ignore worker protections, cut corners, and do things like they used to be done back in the day. Let's take this Marinship as one small example of why almost everything on the page is probably not relevant today: > Physical construction began on 28 March. Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move." So 'delayed two weeks to allow 42 families to move'. Can you imagine what would happen now or even 20 years ago? It would be tied up in courts (including the court of public opinion) for years even decades. Lawsuits filed, legal challenges and so on. (see 'Blue Route' in Philadelphia) [1] [1] https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-route/ https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-route/
rapfaria 7y ago
St. Elmo's Fire was created and edited in 24 hours
HOOVERDAM 7y ago
HOOVER DAM
habosa 7y ago
I just went to Dubai for the first time ... one thing about Dubai is they can still build fast. All of Downtown Dubai was built in about a decade and it is really something. Tallest building in the world, largest mall in the world, multiple huge public spaces and many luxury hotels and residential buildings. All built in the 2000s in the shadow of the financial crisis. And what they're doing for the upcoming 2020 Dubai Expo is equally mind blowing. Before the downvotes come: I know it's an autocracy and the building labor practices are questionable. But many achievements on the list are subject to those caveats so it deserves mentioning.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
Calling the Eiffel tower a building is a bit like calling a bridge a building. It was built, certainly, and it even has a small portion that offers "rooms", but it's really just a structural skeleton. And in that light, 2 years 2 months is really not all that surprising, or even fast.
GuB-42 7y ago
I'd like to see the opposite: slow projects that turned out awesome. Doing things really fast is more often than not the result of external circumstances. Maybe some new tech has just been made available, maybe it was a life-or-death situation, where dying at work is considered acceptable (ex: at war), maybe it had an unreasonable budget, maybe the "fast" project was just the tip of the iceberg, made visible by decades unnoticed of ground work, or maybe it massively prioritized speed over quality. These situations are unlikely to relate to your projects, so yeah, things are going to be slow for you. Buy that's better than expecting some miracle, or considering human lives as disposable. What would be more inspirational would be a list of slow projects, where people are trapped for years in development hell, with cost cutting, bad technical choices, mistakes and mismanagement. Projects where everyone involved say it is doomed and yet, at the end, something awesome came out. If you are working on a building, what's the best thing to say? "That building took 1 year to make, you are at 2 and you didn't finish, you suck" or "That building almost crumbled, contractors defaulted, it took 10 years, but now, it is the pride of the city"? In the second example, you can see the mistakes and how they fixed them, the first one most likely involves a lot of luck and just sets unrealistic expectations.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Here's one for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
piinbinary 7y ago
One of the parts of the answer may be that organizations are now designed for more creativity, being better places to work, and maybe even throughput at the expense of latency.
willyt 7y ago
Madrid Baracas Terminal 4 roughly equivalent to building the whole of Heathrow airport i.e including 2 runways and a metro line extension. 7 years from conception to first passengers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas...
dchs 7y ago
My boss used to have a poster that read "Good, cheap, fast. Pick two." For all these fast projects, I wonder what the resulting costs and quality were!
apexalpha 7y ago
>TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later. On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033, 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was formed. Source: On the Fast Track. Wow, what the hell is wrong with the TGV in California? Are they still working on it? 33 years!
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Proposition 1A which gave it partial funding didn't pass till 2008.
maremp 7y ago
As a programmer, I often stumble upon the performance arguments and pitching technology Y over currently used X "because of better performance, i.e. it's fast". Sure, the impressive feats of engineering accompanied by a short time to build, sounds good. But how much money and time went into maintaining all the flawed decisions? The stories of Xerox Alto's first GUI-oriented computer are usually accompanied by how Apple stole it and made it better. To me, this sounds like their speed did not help them ship a great product to the end-users. JavaScript was prototyped in 10 days, which is impressive. But there are also many jokes using this same fact as a punchline. This quick development was paid many times over by having to deal with poor language decisions. It took another 20 years for the language to start moving and developing in a more developer-friendly direction. And some of it will never be better because it has to be backwards compatible for all browsers that ever existed. Comparing a "highway" (later edited to the military roadway) from 1942 to construction project in one of the larger cities in the world is not fair. I agree the time it's taking, and the cost is absurd. But the cost of work has drastically changed since, and the 1942 number most likely doesn't account for the fact that it was built by soldiers who are already on the payroll, so there were probably little additional worker expenses. And the standards now are more strict than they used to be.

1314 points by doppp 7y ago

http://gopccrack.com/microsoft-office-2016-product-key/ http://gopccrack.com/microsoft-office-2016-product-key/

The Xerox Alto was done in three months: https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-Xerox-Alto-done-in-only-3-months/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-Xerox-Alto-done-in-only-3-....

wruza 7y ago

>JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. >Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks. 11 extra days completely worth investing.

bjoli 7y ago
Poor Brendan. Wanting to write Scheme for the browser and ending up writing JavaScript. Sure, today JS is a proper language, but it atillmlacks the elegance and adherence to principle of scheme. Maybe that's why it's so successful :)
- seanparsons 7y ago
  > Sure, today JS is a proper language It is?
  - Kovah 7y ago
    Definitely not.
- nonsince 7y ago
  Yeah that really sucks for him that he became CEO of Mozilla off the back of a subpar baby’s first scheme built in a 10-day adderall binge and then lost his cushy undeserved position by being an unabashed homophobe. Poor guy.

fulafel 7y ago

Wonder why reader mode doesn't work on this mobile borked page, even though there is a big wall of text.

tomaskafka 7y ago

What is notable to me is that almost all of these examples seem to come from times of war - world war, trade wars, war for space domination ... (plus some of them are very coloured - the Alaska highway was a dirtroad, the Apollo definitely wasn't made in 143 days ...)

ahmad4672 7y ago

Wondershare Dr Fone Crack Downloiad Link: https://crackget.com/wondershare-dr-fone/ https://crackget.com/wondershare-dr-fone/

pfranz 7y ago

I do think these kinds of things are worth remembering, but looking them over it just reminded me of the quote, "it took me 10 years to become an overnight success"

vemotim2 7y ago

We achieve some incredible things together and get 20000 downloads for the first month with this Indie Minesweeper game for Android. This is achieved within 30 days of development. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.popoko.minesweeper https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.popoko.min...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jimnotgym 7y ago

FYI This page doesn't display very well on my mobile, and Firefox does not seem able to put it into reader view, which seems odd for a page of plain text. I enjoyed it though.

seem_2211 7y ago

A relatively recent example of rapid infrastructure building (in California no less!) can be found with C.C Meyers. "Proclaimed a “Local Hero,” Clinton “C.C.” Myers was lauded on the cover of the July 1995 issue of Comstock’s magazine for “working miracles in heavy construction.” Three big projects by C.C. Myers Inc. cemented his legacy: rebuilding two bridges in Watsonville after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; reconstructing the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; and rebuilding a stretch of Interstate 5, including a bridge, near Coalinga after the 1995 floods. He was equally famous for the efficiency of these projects — 55 days in Watsonville, 66 days in Santa Monica and 21 days in Coalinga — and the huge bonuses he earned for finishing projects early." https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catching-cc-myers https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catc... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-...

StuffedParrot 7y ago

What is the BankAmericard? Edit: spelling

dasmoth 7y ago
Like the article says, it was renamed to Visa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.

aneutron 7y ago

While I do get the "spirit" of this, I feel it's highly inaccurate and/or misrepresentative in some cases. An example would be Javascript. Sure he implemented a prototype in 10 days, but the whole implementation was probably a fraction of the test code for V8, a modern implementation of the beast that is Javascript today. I'd even argue that the VM engines from 5 year ago would still hold the same property.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

garyclarke27 7y ago

Great Article. Here’s another, Tesla Gigafactory China, brownfield Jan 2019, 1000 cars per week Dec 19, mind blowing.

RupertEisenhart 7y ago

The 1000 dollar human genome [1] is one of the most staggering examples of this. "In dozens of presentations over the past few years, scientists have compared the slope of Moore's law with the swiftly dropping costs of DNA sequencing. For a while they kept pace, but since about 2007, it has not even been close." To go from a cost of 2.7billion and one decade to where we are today (people are now talking seriously about the zero dollar genome, aka the price of sequencing can be trivially offset by selling some meta information to some company or other) can be seen as a feat of scientific infrastructure-making that blows any Alaskan highway out of the swamps. https://www.nature.com/news/technology-the-1-000-genome-1.14901 https://www.nature.com/news/technology-the-1-000-genome-1.14...

code-is-code 7y ago

Impressive how many big structure were build during ww2

saagarjha 7y ago
War has a tendency to incentivize rapid construction.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Things were built quickly in that era. Most skyscrapers wenr up in a year or so, like the Empire State Building. The whole Hoover Dam project took less than five years.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    The war production in particular was incredible: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm > Japan, an island empire totally dependent on maintaining open sea lanes to ensure her raw material imports, managed to build just sixty-three DDs (some twenty or so of which would have been classified by the Allies as DEs) and an unspecified (and by my unofficial count, relatively small) number of 'escort' vessels. In the same time span, the US put some eight hundred forty-seven antisubmarine capable craft in the water! > The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years. > Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      Agreed, it is nuts. The Liberty ships being built in just days. Planes and tanks and trucks streaming off the assembly lines in the tens of thousands. Millions of tons of high explosives. Truly incredible. Nowadays, it takes us the better part of a decade to get a minor bridge project done, and building a four-story apartment building is a multi-year endeavor.

freddref 7y ago

Stripe was valued at roughly 1B after 5 years. Realex payments, an Irish payments processor formed around 2000, was sold for 115M after 15 years.

pithymaxim 7y ago

Based on that last entry about the SF bus line, I would really love to see https://patrickcollison.com/slow https://patrickcollison.com/slow

sonofgod 7y ago
Related: The Duke Nukem Forever list. Written in the aftermath of Duke Nukem Forever finally being canned, twelve years after being announced. (It did finally ship, to a poor reception) http://duke.a-13.net/ http://duke.a-13.net/
dylanz 7y ago
Definitely! That would be very cool to see. I bet there are a lot of great things that have moved slowly with great success. Berkshire Hathaway is probably a good example, although I don't know how it compares to other companies during a similar window of time.
seltzered_ 7y ago
Hum, I think things should be broadened beyond just a fast/slow axis, and inquire what some of these projects actually serve. Or at the least what they've costed in the long-run in terms of resource use. Personally I've been meaning to really do an exercise in evaluating projects against a regenerative framework (see https://capitalinstitute.org/8-principles-regenerative-economy/ https://capitalinstitute.org/8-principles-regenerative-econo... & http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/whats-regenerative.html http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/whats-regenerative.ht... ). I'm not saying this framework is perfect nor am I endorsing Capital Inst, but there needs to be better evaluation than just speed.
divbzero 7y ago
Construction on the Basílica de la Sagrada Família began in 1882 and was less than a quarter complete when its architect passed away in 1926. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família It remains a work in progress today.
- 7y ago

avmich 7y ago

> Apollo 8... went to the Moon... Early on in the Apollo program there was the plan to build a series of spacecrafts which would progressively solve intermediate problems on the path to the Moon landing. For that, a series of Apollo spacecrafts were planned, and production was running for years - Apollos flew also to Skylab and to 1975 docking with Soyuz. Specific Apollo 8 was chosen to fly to the Moon because LEM wasn't ready - it was later tested on Earth orbit with Apollo 9 and flew to the Moon with Apollo 10 first time. So, Apollo 8 flying to the Moon isn't a separate decision, but change of existing plans - with a couple of missions swapped in time; fast, but not nearly as fast as creation from scratch of a spaceship or a program would assume.

interfixus 7y ago
True, but still a dizzying feat by any standard. World's in-a-class-of-its-own largest rocket, so far only tested in two unmanned launches, one of them a near disaster, stability problems now theoretically fixed, but fixes never tested in actual flight. Sure, let's improvise a new kind of missio in four months time, strap people on top of that thing, and shoot them to the Moon for the first time ever. I don't believe that's quite how things are done these days. Wildly successful things, mind you.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I went back and looked at the significant failures that happened. They were really really lucky.

the_reformation 7y ago

Fascinating that the Stripe CEO has become the foremost critic of San Francisco municipal governance.

nrp 7y ago
Is this in relation to Stripe's move out of San Francisco (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuable-U-S-startup-to-leave-SF-as-14558067.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuab...) or something else?
- freyr 7y ago
  San Francinsco's city government is completely incompetent and the city itself has devolved into a disgusting cesspool. But if you live in the city, you don't mention this. Instead, you loudly proclaim at every opportunity that San Francisco is best city in the world, and you express your pity for the poor schmucks who are forced to live anywhere else. The crime, the drug addicts, the homelessness, the mental illness, the broken car windows, the absurd cost of living, the blighted neighborhoods, the pervasive human misery, the garbage, the heroin needles, the human feces -- this is to be considered part of San Francisco's urban charm. Anyone who acknowledges how bad the situation has become should be ostracized, downvoted, or told to move to Walnut Creek. You especially shouldn't be critical if you run a tech startup in the city, since you need a continual supply of young, impressionable employees to buy into the hype and move here. But once you move just outside the city perimeter, then you can afford to be a obliquely critical of the city's slow bus lane construction.
  - kick 7y ago
    'pc proclaims that San Francisco is the best city in the world elsewhere on his site. Your critique has a tinge of irony to it. https://patrickcollison.com/advice https://patrickcollison.com/advice
    - seem_2211 7y ago
      I think both things can be true at the same time. San Francisco is an amazing place to work in technology (in my view, nowhere else comes close). But the municipal government is also a complete cesspool of inefficiency & corruption.

juanbyrge 7y ago

Here's something fast: the Holocene extinction. Since the dawn of modern civilization, countless species have become extinct, and around 1 million species face extinction caused by human events. Should we really be worshipping economic progress?

drenvuk 7y ago
This isn't about economic progress, it's about humans getting things done in a short amount of time and with fewer resources that what we currently hear about. If you want to expand his list to include other things why don't you send your examples to him?
thrower123 7y ago
> Should we really be worshipping economic progress? Yes. The genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back to some imaginary idylic pre-industrial world. The best way to preserve what there is and free up more space for preservation is to pursue technology and efficiency ruthlessly. Do more with less.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  We can have development with constraint, we can have development without the cult of growth, we could go back to the more inclusive, constrained form of economic progress seen in the immediate post war. We could even try to tune the system in new ways to limit the clear problems of unconstrained globalised capitalism. We do not need to go back to a Medieval agrarian feudalism, return to mercantilism or unwind the industrial revolution. It happened, we should learn from it and make the best of it...

scarejunba 7y ago

This is part of why I support subways in San Francisco so long as they're not American built.

cldellow 7y ago

> The Alaska Highway. Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of highway were built over the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska. I grew up in Dawson Creek. Our claim to fame: "Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway starts here!" The Alaska Highway as built in 1942 is nothing like a highway that most people would envision. It wasn't paved, for example. It was good enough for military vehicles with crews of soldiers who could make ad hoc repairs to the road as needed while they transited through, who had extensive survival skills, and could literally radio for assistance if needed. It wasn't opened to the public until 1948 -- so perhaps 6 years, not 6 months, is a better estimate of its time. It's also shrunk by almost 20% as it has been continually rebuilt to make it passable by passenger vehicles. It's an accomplishment, no doubt, but I feel like omitting these significant caveats is meaningful.

audi0slave 7y ago
Sounds a lot like the Dalton highway , we had to rent a special vehicle which had a radio to do 2 way communication with the traffic and the highway wasn't paved.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  A CB radio is not necessary on the Dalton highway, though vehicles that transit it frequently are usually equiped with one to communicate with the semis that make up much of the traffic (especially to coordinate passing on dusty sections). The Dalton has several unpaved sections but is fairly highly maintained and certainly does not require vehicles transiting to perform road work themselves. You certainly do not need survival skills (at least during the summer) to drive it as there is a consistent amount of semi traffic that can assist you if something goes wrong as well as periodic pump stations for the pipline. If anything, the Dalton would be more akin to the Alaska highway some time after it was opened to the public.
travbrack 7y ago
This definitely cuts the snarky comparison to the bus lane in San Francisco down to size.
7y ago

pbreit 7y ago

Tesla’s speed on the China factory is pretty amazing. Germany will not have any excuses.

Kovah 7y ago
Ha... Ever heard of our bureaucracy? It's destroying so many good ideas or makes them so much more expensive.

xixixao 7y ago

Empire State Building has always boggled my mind, with its speed. Built faster than most houses today, biggest building in the city by far, in the middle of the city, amazing endurance. I need to read more about the process. I wish governments everywhere learned a few lessons from it.

nine_k 7y ago
I also remember that the construction site did not have a stellar safety record. It was typical for the industry back then, though. In the middle of the Great Depression, a builder would likely not be too picky and reject a chance to work on such a high-profile project when unemployment was high.
- slim 7y ago
  less work days probably also means less worker casualities
Animats 7y ago
It was during the Great Depression. Hiring and getting stuff delivered was really fast if you had money. Steel-framed structures go up fast. One floor every day or two is normal. Faster is possible. Here's a prefab skyscraper going up in 15 days.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvmru5JmXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwvmru5JmXk
- jdpigeon 7y ago
  This is incredibly inspiring

zuhayeer 7y ago

Time is the uppermost bound you can play with, everything else is simply a subset of time

adamnemecek 7y ago

This sort of time accounting makes no sense. A lot of these feats were the first _successful_ version, however the people behind them had careers of doing the same thing over and over again. It's not like Brendan Eich went from not knowing how to write a language to shipping a language in 10 days however this article presents it like this. It's not like Boeing went from nothing to 747 in whatever amount of time. Building an airplane get much easier when you already have a factory for building airplanes. Like I can work on something for a decade and day before shipping, give it a new name and say "hey, I shipped it in a day". It might take a chef an hour to make a meal. But he might have been optimizing that hour his whole life.

winfred 7y ago
The tale of the Chinese emperor and the picture of the rooster Once upon a time, there was an emperor who was extremely fond of roosters, and so one day he commissioned the most famous painter in all his realm to paint him a picture of a rooster. The painter replied that it would take him three years to accomplish this. The emperor was secretly rather annoyed, but in the end he agreed. When the three years came to an end, the emperor summoned the painter, but on seeing that he was empty-handed impatiently demanded: "What about my painting of a rooster?" The painter remained perfectly calm, took up a piece of paper right where he stood, and started to paint. The brush flew across the page, the ink danced. With apparent ease, he produced the lifelike image of a rooster, capturing its very essence. It took him less than three minutes to complete. On seeing this, the emperor was furious and could stand it no longer: "Have you been deliberately deceiving your king? Is this some act of rebellion? It took you just three minutes to paint that picture; why did you make me wait three whole years?" To which the painter replied: "Sire, first please calm your fury; and when you have done so, follow me and see for yourself." The painter led the emperor to a large house and opened the door, and on looking inside, the emperor realised that the house was filled to the roof with sketches of roosters. Then the painter spoke: "These are my efforts of the last three whole years. Without those three years of labour how could I possibly have produced that perfect rooster for you in less than three minutes?"
blondin 7y ago
thank you! was having the same thought as i was going through the examples. and when the unix example came up, it dawn on me that the author is clearly omitting the background of these people to make a more compelling point. yes they did great feats but most have a history of doing similar and learning from it in the past. fast-forward to present days, and our issues with not going fast enough, maybe the conditions and situations are different? maybe we are in a learning phase? also for a better account of what happened in unix case, i recommend kernighan's latest: unix: a history and a memoir.

savrajsingh 7y ago

The SR-71 should be on this list. <2 years from idea to one of the most remarkable aircraft ever built. Also quite fast :)

dewarrn1 7y ago
Obligatory SR-71 story about going fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0
sneak 7y ago
Fast for fifty years ago, maybe. I wish they’d tell us about the cool stuff they built in the 80s or 90s.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Well fast aircraft sort of lost their purpose once satellites got good, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out they stopped caring about manned, fast aircraft with the SR-71.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Okay, what cool hypersonic suborbital drones do they have? Are any satellite-launched?
    - amdavidson 7y ago
      They don't and they're not. Look at the defense allocations for basic research into hypersonic capable materials to prove that they are still years away the most basic deployment and once the research is done, there is no supply base to make the materials (FA8650-20-S-5003)
- Cougher 7y ago
  "Fast for fifty years ago . . ." How many aircraft today can fly horizontally over 2,000 mph? ". . . maybe." It may have been fast 50 years ago?

gordon_freeman 7y ago

On Amazon Prime: From The Everything Store, A book by Brad Stone -- what I got to know was that Amazon had the pieces in place that eventually helped create Prime service such as efficient warehouse operation that can deliver packages in 2 days, quick payment processing, rich customer data etc. So to think that suddenly Amazon Prime was invented and implemented in just 6 weeks seems wrong.

hliyan 7y ago

Constraints foster creativity (if the right people are in the team). When JFK announced (in 1961) USA's intention to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, he set a time constraint that could not be moved without considerable global embarassment. In less than 9 years, it was accomplished. Perhaps the formula is: a deadline + right people + leadership support.

eugeniub 7y ago
+ 4% of the entire nation’s federal budget doesn’t hurt.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I wonder how quickly we'd solve fusion with this level of focus. I bet it'd be less than 5 years to "energy too cheap to meter", unlimited carbon capture, etc, etc. Instead we've been bombing people in the Middle East for the last 20 years.
- nine_k 7y ago
  I suppose this is the "leadership support", that is, the coffers opened by the (high above) leadership. Time is money, so if you can't put enough time, your only option is to compensate with money.
- Jack000 7y ago
  It depends on the problem. Some problems can't be solved regardless of how much money you throw at it, and some problems get worse with more funding. eg. the war on cancer, terror, etc etc..
- rrss 7y ago
  Even adjusted for inflation, the U.S. federal budget is far, far larger than it was in the 1960s. So much so that even though NASA's budget is now less than 0.5% of the federal budget, NASA still spends roughly enough money in a decade to pay for the Apollo program. I've seen various figures for the cost of the Apollo program, ranging from $150 to $290 billion (adjusted to current dollars). In the last decade, NASA spent over $200 B.

lordlic 7y ago

> Neighbors previously complained about the replacement of historic streetlight poles for Van Ness BRT. Replacement poles made to look like the originals ballooned the project cost by $6.5 million, according to city documents This is a perfect microcosm of San Francisco governance. A small number of highly-motivated landowners unashamedly hijacking city policy for their own interests. How do we stand up to this?

StuffedParrot 7y ago
Complain to your supervisor or run yourself.
jachee 7y ago
Show up to hearings and point out ridiculous NIMBYism for what it is.
- jachee 7y ago
  C’mon now. Don’t just downvote. What’re your alternate plans?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I for one appreciate when a modern project takes care and expense to recreate certain historic elements that tie the project into its setting more seamlessly than a lowest possible cost execution. I appreciate that whether it’s directly in my backyard or across town.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Governance by whoever can show up at a Tuesday afternoon meeting and argue has to be one of the worst systems ever devised. That's the root cause to fight!
- nielsole 7y ago
  Aka Grassroot democracy

adventured 7y ago

The Manhattan Project moved along remarkably quickly. From the time 56,000 acres were authorized for purchase at Oak Ridge, to the Trinity test, was under three years (September 1942, July 1945). In 5.x years id Software built and released: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2.

philwelch 7y ago
The B-29 Superfortress--the bomber that dropped both atomic bombs on Japan--took longer and cost more money to develop than the Manhattan Project.

fluxic 7y ago

1599: Shakespeare writes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, As You Like it, Henry V. "It's the year in which the thirty-five-year-old playwright went from being an exceptionally talented writer, to one of the greatest who ever lived.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-life-of-william-shakespeare-1599 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-...

blt 7y ago

A lot of the construction projects came at the cost of bad safety standards and general poor treatment of workers, including plenty of workers deaths. Something to keep mind when bemoaning the slower speeds nowadays.

BurningFrog 7y ago
I don't know how to disentangle that from the fact that it was a vastly poorer time with very little technology and health care compared to now.

brenden2 7y ago

It’s always interesting to see what kinds of things make it to the front page because of who wrote them, rather than the content itself (which in this case is just a few cherry picked examples with no context). I’m not exactly sure what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from the facts themselves.

blondin 7y ago
totally agree with you on this one. it's becoming a hn's favorites hub here. that's not a good thing.
OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> I’m not exactly sure what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from the facts themselves. What's wrong with learning facts?
- alphakappa 7y ago
  Nothing wrong in itself. But it is appropriate to wonder about the takeaways. Without proper context and history, the lessons you draw might not be helpful ones.
- gonational 7y ago
  Good point; it makes me think most people open articles because they want to be sold into a narrative, rather than learn facts. This is why folks listen to the “news” media yammer about a topic even after they know the facts.
sneak 7y ago
When we pick a set of facts to highlight, we are editorializing by what we choose to include or not include in such a list. This is the core of every good documentary I have ever seen: ultimately, they are compelling editorials because they construct a narrative by telling or showing you things that actually happened. Whether or not those things are a representative sample, or plausibly support the narrative in the wider context of human society, is left as an exercise to the reader. I recall reading once that Thiel said that most or all of the critically important events in history were accomplished by small, highly motivated teams. (Pardon me if I am misremembering the quote exactly.) Perhaps pc is simply reminding us that “move fast and break things” isn’t always a bad thing? Just speculating, though.

apl002 7y ago

And here I am 4 months past the date I expected to be done with my MVP....

verttii 7y ago
What are you building?

neilk 7y ago

There's no question in my mind that North America has gotten a lot worse at completing great civic projects. Sometimes, that's for good reasons. We don't have slave labor, we have environmental review, and we allow affected communities to protest and block approval. In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP. We might have overcorrected! But I also don't know what model there might exist for moving quickly with a multi-stakeholder process.

ansible 7y ago
> In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP This definitely happened in Chicago. In multiple cases, the city ran highways through ethnic neighborhoods, effective killing the local communities.
- astura 7y ago
  This is one of the major criticisms of the Cross-Bronx expressway.
Tempest1981 7y ago
We squandered the last few years of a booming economy: Study: America has ‘squandered’ the recovery and is falling behind the rest of the world, according to Harvard study https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-squandered-the-recovery-and-is-falling-behind-the-rest-of-the-world-according-to-harvard-study-2019-12-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-has-squandered-the...
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
There's not one. Time and time again, organizations prove that product design/project management by consensus leads to budget overruns and under delivery. Quality at speed requires dictatorial like organisation with high risk to all. In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of something like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause that would motivate such projects.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nine_k 7y ago

It would be interesting to have something opposite: "Cheap". Notable, well-known things to be built on a shoestring budget.

maddyboo 7y ago
Cheap, fast, and good are three interesting measures. It’s often said you can pick any two, and from experience I would have to agree. I’d be curious to hear about projects spanning this gamut – something done fast n’ good but costing dearly; fast and cheap but horribly executed (I’d bet a large slice of projects fit in quite well here), or the amusing slow, expensive, and ultimately shitty. Perhaps most interesting would be story or two about projects which miraculously attained the trifecta... that is, if any of these stories actually happen to exist.
- evilotto 7y ago
  "Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three." -- https://sqlite.org/index.html https://sqlite.org/index.html

k_sze 7y ago

I get the feeling that the purpose of the page is to shame the SF new bus lane project.

jcims 7y ago

Given their scale i think Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge deserve honorable mention. (Five and four years respectively)

Gibbon1 7y ago
There is the B-29. The US spent more money on that than the Manhattan project. I think the US spent even more money on radio and radar development during WWII.

rubiquity 7y ago

2004: DHH built a blog in 15 minutes 2019: San Francisco Web Developer, also opposed to the new bus lane, is still configuring webpack and package.json. Their intent to build a blog was announced in early 2015 via a Twitter post containing way too many emoji.

wruza 7y ago
Configuring webpack is mastering of zen. It’s not done until you stop pretending.

omosubi 7y ago

I just started following Patrick Collison's career and have read 2 books from his reading list. he's one of those people that you feel lucky to be living at the same as. Going through his website is fascinating and he does this in his spare time while also building one of the most admired startups in existence. I'm excited to see what he does next. What a fascinating mind

iconjack 7y ago

Here's another one that I think belongs on this list: NYC spent 6+ years and $13 million trying to reopen the Wollman skating rink in Central Park. In 1986, Trump negotiated a deal with the city for 2½ million, promising completion in 6 months, by Dec 15, in time to salvage most of the winter season. He and his team opened the rink 2 months ahead of schedule, and ¾ million under budget. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-rebuild-wollman-rink-at-the-city-s-expense-by-dec-15.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-rebuild...

Medicalidiot 7y ago
Trump took the credit that HRH Construction deserves, then screwed them over after it was done by not mentioning them at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink

tim333 7y ago

Also Gmail 1 day for the first prototype. An an aside I found Musk interesting talking about how they get the Starship type projects to progress quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be&t=74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... >And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to delete parts and processes. etc

thedudeabides5 7y ago

This link has been submitted 8 times. It has taken 7 months to get to the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868 That's like 1.5 Apollo 8s

aledalgrande 7y ago
You can submit a link more than once?
- WildGreenLeave 7y ago
  If there is enough time in between it you can. But I'm not sure how many days you have to wait, I think it is probably around 30 days.
  - snazz 7y ago
    Even quicker seems to be fine if the first time it only got to 3 or 4 points.
cjbprime 7y ago
Impressively meta.
kresten 7y ago
So, not fast?
misiti3780 7y ago
where can you get those pieces of data?
- majewsky 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcollison.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcollison.com
- IA21 7y ago

desdiv 7y ago

Nuclear fission was discovered on December 17, 1938. It was first used in warfare on August 6, 1945, 2,424 days later.

divbzero 7y ago

“The development of Git began on 3 April 2005. Torvalds announced the project on 6 April; it became self-hosting as of 7 April.” [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History

quickthrower2 7y ago
The development of Git May have started in the back of his brain earlier than that. Code being written is kind of the very final stage of software dev.
- tim333 7y ago
  I think he said he'd been thinking about if for a year or so. From https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git-an-interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git... >So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
pc 7y ago
That’s a good one!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ncmncm 7y ago
It's impressive even though the design was copied from Monotone.
swyx 7y ago
what is the significance of it becoming self-hosting? does that mean mostly feature complete in 4 days?

owens99 7y ago

1. Several examples are false (as pointed out in HN comments) 2. This post is descriptive, but not explanatory (startup bro science) 3. Even taken at face value, it’s Confirmation Bias presenting outliers

webmaven 7y ago
Survivorship Bias, rather.

narrator 7y ago

You forgot Banting and Best[1]. They went from coming up with the idea for synthetic insulin, developing the treatment, testing it on animals, then themselves, then testing it on patients, then developing and releasing a commercial product and winning the nobel prize in medicine in 3 years! This was of course long before the FDA was around and if they tried to do the same thing at that pace today we'd throw them in prison. [1]https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-discovery-of-insulin https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-discov...

aaavl2821 7y ago
Genentech (dave Goeddel, herb heyneker, Dennis Kleid, herb boyer) cloned human insulin in a year (1977-8 I think) and got it approved by FDA ~4 years later

ncmncm 7y ago

Pyramid at Giza, 20 years -- laying one 2.5-ton stone block every 2 minutes, of every daylight hour, for the entire period. Some people say 10 years, one per minute. Or, construction for half of each of 20 years, one per minute. You could imagine getting pretty good at it, five years in.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

This isn't necessarily a good thing. The earliest versions of Javascript were insane. Bad isn't the word. Buggy isn't the word. You've never seen a language as ridiculous as early Javascript. It took a good twenty years to fix it.

saagarjha 7y ago
Some may say that it was never fixed ;)
cachvico 7y ago
Difficult to understate the repercussions, in developer hours through the years, of such a briefly thought-out design and implementation!

angry_octet 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza 4500 years old. Construction 10-15 years, >10000 workers (some estimate 200,000). Accuracy of construction is fantastic.

gok 7y ago

The TGV entry skips over the 20 years of R&D on high speed rail that preceded the first major construction, much of which was wasted on gas turbine designs.

spodek 7y ago

Nothing about Einstein's miracle year?

bredren 7y ago

Yes, Disneyland opened that fast but to many it was a disaster. [1] Heralding quick launches should come with tribute to the sacrifices of early users. https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-day-60-years-ago https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-...

bobjordan 7y ago

When you see examples of waste like this, which are not uncommon, it really doesn't take much critical thinking to become skeptical of those in favor of increasing taxes to pay for solutions managed by any Government agencies. >>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago

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ible 7y ago

The Shanghai subway system is a good example. Construction started in 1986, first 28 stations opened in 1993. It now has 413 stations and is the largest subways system by length (676 km) in the world.

fyfy18 7y ago
Subways drastically vary depending on the material the ground is made of and what is there already. For example London is relatively easy to build deep tunnels in, but on of the big things that has increased the complexity of Crossrail is that central London has a lot of stuff underground that isn't necessarily documented correctly. There are water mains, sewers, electrical cables, ventilation shafts, other subway tunnels, stations, then abandoned instances of all of those and plenty of archeological materials (London as a city has been around for over 2000 years).
- jiofih 7y ago
  True, totally unfair. Shanghai has only been occupied for ~8000 years.

weinzierl 7y ago

Almost every item on the list is from before 1960. After 1960 there is not a single construction project in the US. The later projects happened either in unregulated areas (JavaScript, Amazon Prime) or in China (Shenzhen, Luckin Coffee), with a single European outlier - the TGV.

andybak 7y ago

Bear this in mind when people express skepticism about the existence of the 10x developer. My own productivity can vary over approximately 2 orders of magnitude day to day so I don't have any problem with believing in individuals differing by a single order over time.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

This is a cool, inspirational list, pc. Thanks! I would also be interested in a similar list, but one that listed "fast failures," like Vasa or Fidenae. I sometimes think that we need cautionary examples, these days, as "move fast and break things" has broken a lot of things.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
Look up the death rates for these projects if you want a more complete picture.

k__ 7y ago

lol, here in Germany things somehow never get done on time. We are still waiting for an airport in Berlin and a trainstation in Stuttgart. While the last one still has about 3 years to be "on time" it will probably be late.

jonplackett 7y ago

So - why does everything take so long and end up so much more expensive these days?

zimpenfish 7y ago
Covered quite well in other comments but: health and safety, working around existing infrastructure, political constraints on throwing money at problems[2], lack of skilled workers[1], etc. [1] e.g. Crossrail hit delays because other projects like Spurs' new stadium were willing to pay 2x the daily rate; https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-blames-spurs-stadium-delay-for-labour-woes-22-01-2019/ https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-blame... [2] Although if you can convince politicians that infrastructure helps fight terrorists/blocks immigration/lowers taxes for the rich, you'll probably be drowning in money pretty quickly.

RayMan1 7y ago

Look ma, a site without ads, upvote

mensetmanusman 7y ago

The fast construction projects killed lots of workers.

lgeorget 7y ago
The Eiffel tower did not though. Nobody died while building the Eiffel tower although one worker died on the site outside working hours.

tomatohs 7y ago

The original Jeep was designed in 14 hours. > The war was under way in Europe, so the Army's need was urgent and demanding. Bids were to be received by July 22, a span of just eleven days. Manufacturers were given 49 days to submit their first prototype and 75 days for completion of 70 test vehicles. > Probst turned down Bantam initially, but agreed to work without pay after an Army request and began work on July 17, 1940.[39] > Probst laid out full design drawings for the Bantam prototype, known as the Bantam Reconnaissance Car, or BRC, in just two days, and worked up a cost estimate the next day. Bantam's bid was submitted, complete with blueprints, on July 22. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB

freeslugs 7y ago

I would not be proud to include JavaScript on this list. Haste makes waste

jpswade 7y ago

I think it's easy to forget that although these things were achieved in a very short space of time, it's not without years of toil that lead to it. For example, you can't write a programming language in 10 days, without having spent a long time thinking about how you'd go about doing that prior to doing it.

gist 7y ago

This is all so ridiculous. Yes so much can be done quickly if you take chances, ignore worker protections, cut corners, and do things like they used to be done back in the day. Let's take this Marinship as one small example of why almost everything on the page is probably not relevant today: > Physical construction began on 28 March. Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move." So 'delayed two weeks to allow 42 families to move'. Can you imagine what would happen now or even 20 years ago? It would be tied up in courts (including the court of public opinion) for years even decades. Lawsuits filed, legal challenges and so on. (see 'Blue Route' in Philadelphia) [1] [1] https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-route/ https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-route/

rapfaria 7y ago

St. Elmo's Fire was created and edited in 24 hours

HOOVERDAM 7y ago

HOOVER DAM

habosa 7y ago

I just went to Dubai for the first time ... one thing about Dubai is they can still build fast. All of Downtown Dubai was built in about a decade and it is really something. Tallest building in the world, largest mall in the world, multiple huge public spaces and many luxury hotels and residential buildings. All built in the 2000s in the shadow of the financial crisis. And what they're doing for the upcoming 2020 Dubai Expo is equally mind blowing. Before the downvotes come: I know it's an autocracy and the building labor practices are questionable. But many achievements on the list are subject to those caveats so it deserves mentioning.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Calling the Eiffel tower a building is a bit like calling a bridge a building. It was built, certainly, and it even has a small portion that offers "rooms", but it's really just a structural skeleton. And in that light, 2 years 2 months is really not all that surprising, or even fast.

GuB-42 7y ago

I'd like to see the opposite: slow projects that turned out awesome. Doing things really fast is more often than not the result of external circumstances. Maybe some new tech has just been made available, maybe it was a life-or-death situation, where dying at work is considered acceptable (ex: at war), maybe it had an unreasonable budget, maybe the "fast" project was just the tip of the iceberg, made visible by decades unnoticed of ground work, or maybe it massively prioritized speed over quality. These situations are unlikely to relate to your projects, so yeah, things are going to be slow for you. Buy that's better than expecting some miracle, or considering human lives as disposable. What would be more inspirational would be a list of slow projects, where people are trapped for years in development hell, with cost cutting, bad technical choices, mistakes and mismanagement. Projects where everyone involved say it is doomed and yet, at the end, something awesome came out. If you are working on a building, what's the best thing to say? "That building took 1 year to make, you are at 2 and you didn't finish, you suck" or "That building almost crumbled, contractors defaulted, it took 10 years, but now, it is the pride of the city"? In the second example, you can see the mistakes and how they fixed them, the first one most likely involves a lot of luck and just sets unrealistic expectations.

Zanni 7y ago
Here's one for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

piinbinary 7y ago

One of the parts of the answer may be that organizations are now designed for more creativity, being better places to work, and maybe even throughput at the expense of latency.

willyt 7y ago

Madrid Baracas Terminal 4 roughly equivalent to building the whole of Heathrow airport i.e including 2 runways and a metro line extension. 7 years from conception to first passengers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_Airport https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas...

dchs 7y ago

My boss used to have a poster that read "Good, cheap, fast. Pick two." For all these fast projects, I wonder what the resulting costs and quality were!

apexalpha 7y ago

>TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later. On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033, 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was formed. Source: On the Fast Track. Wow, what the hell is wrong with the TGV in California? Are they still working on it? 33 years!

Gibbon1 7y ago
Proposition 1A which gave it partial funding didn't pass till 2008.

maremp 7y ago

As a programmer, I often stumble upon the performance arguments and pitching technology Y over currently used X "because of better performance, i.e. it's fast". Sure, the impressive feats of engineering accompanied by a short time to build, sounds good. But how much money and time went into maintaining all the flawed decisions? The stories of Xerox Alto's first GUI-oriented computer are usually accompanied by how Apple stole it and made it better. To me, this sounds like their speed did not help them ship a great product to the end-users. JavaScript was prototyped in 10 days, which is impressive. But there are also many jokes using this same fact as a punchline. This quick development was paid many times over by having to deal with poor language decisions. It took another 20 years for the language to start moving and developing in a more developer-friendly direction. And some of it will never be better because it has to be backwards compatible for all browsers that ever existed. Comparing a "highway" (later edited to the military roadway) from 1942 to construction project in one of the larger cities in the world is not fair. I agree the time it's taking, and the cost is absurd. But the cost of work has drastically changed since, and the 1942 number most likely doesn't account for the fact that it was built by soldiers who are already on the payroll, so there were probably little additional worker expenses. And the standards now are more strict than they used to be.