20 ms·

Move Slow and Make Things

380 points by mkrazzledazzle 6y ago

systemvoltage 6y ago
It's really great to read this article: the contrast of text against the background is optimally low, it lets our eyes take its sweet time to recognize letter forms. Sit back, relax and poke your eyes out in pain. What more do readers want! Illegible, dysfunctional and decorative design is the future!
solarmist 6y ago
I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.” Artisans make beautiful things and software artisans make beautiful software, but it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business. And artisans moving slowly isn’t arbitrary. They move slow on the things that matter. The things that shine when attention was paid to the details.
- solarmist 6y ago
  Better is “Be deliberate and make (beautiful) things”.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Same here. I was disappointed to realize this isn't a thing.
- JetAlone 6y ago
  Maybe we will have a chance to move slow and make things one day, or in little moments, optimizing for the well-being of the creator etc. What rings true about it we can mull over in our heads at some point and try to implement in some parts of our lives, like hobbies, vacation, retirement, family time, etc. right?
- jiofih 6y ago
  Same feeling here - instead of laughing I was disappointed when the second paragraph laid out the April fools joke. I would love to see “small batch data science” where people actually understand the results. Black box recommendations never feel really right.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem. For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        > But nobody knows why the issue occurs They do know why that occurs. It's because the data set is biased.
        alexashka 6y ago
        Funny, I remember thinking the questions were biased, every time they weren't the ones I studied to answer in my exam preparations. Too bad I wasn't a data scientist or else I could just get a passing grade by claiming the questions were chosen from a biased data set, or retake the exam until the data set matched the questions I studied for, at which point the data set would no longer be biased, lol. Funny line of work, this data 'science' where you only use the results that fit the narrative you wanted in the first place. We're in full doublethink mode, just keep repeating data 'science', 'science', 'science'. :)
        jjgreen 6y ago
        I did a geography O-level (the UK exams for 16-year olds at the time) which included a map-reading exercise. It just so happened to be a couple of miles from where I lived, and I knew it well. Still only got a B though.
- lloeki 6y ago
  The best jokes carry a message and use humour as a vessel, challenging preconceptions in a lighthearted way. I chose to take this April’s fool that way.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Thank you for this. I "move slow and make things" in some sense. I will endeavor to use this as a jumping off point for something constructive rather than leaving a pointless whiney comment about how the world will never understand or appreciate me.
- nicbou 6y ago
  One of my favourite articles on the internet is "an app can be a home-cooked meal". It's something you can make for your own enjoyment, with no plans for scaling on monetisation. I have started making this sort of software, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I target the platform I use, I solve the problems I have, and my only metric is pleasure. I wish we all had more of such projects.
  - lloeki 6y ago
    This is the entire premise of Ruby, with Matz openly claiming that it being pleasurable to anyone else but him is a happy side-effect. Part jest, but also very core to it. I wouldn't have been able to put so much work in maintaining ArchMac for so long without going completely bonkers had I not taken it this way either. So it’s entirely possible to build large scale projects this way, and I’m wondering how we could make companies work that way too. At the very least it should be part of any employee sustainability plan.
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    If you like this sentiment, read "The Forever Project": https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    One of the reasons I left software development as a career was I couldn't bear to keep shitting out products that were just barely good enough that the customer wouldn't return it. That's the quality bar in commercial software and I hated having my name on it. I'm more into refactoring it 20 times in order to get the perfect architecture, fix every last bug, find every performance improvement, make it not just work but make the code itself beautiful. Like the Steve Jobs quote: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” Obviously, this is totally incompatible with how most software is made in the industry, so I just do it as a hobby instead.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  The issue is that beautiful software is invisible except in open source projects (and even then few people look under the hood). So to an end user only the UI/UX/bugs matter while everything else doesn't.
- jkingsbery 6y ago
  I had a similar reaction. It's a nice April fool's joke, but I hoped for an actual counter-balance to "move fast and break things." The book that taught me the value of moving slow in programming was Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, who ironically spent several years at Facebook.
- XCSme 6y ago
  > it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business It's not that hard actually, but you must limit growth. You can easily be profitable and make an amazing product if your goal is not $1B in revenue, but just to be profitable at a small scale, which allows you to run things at your own pace.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I've wondered if the software space has been able to get away with "move fast and break things" because liability and regulation haven't caught up with it. At some point, we started expecting civil and mechanical engineers to stop "moving fast and breaking things." If software engineers were similar licensed and on the hook for signing off on garbage, we'd see a dramatic slowdown of the pace of development, but likely an uptick in quality. I could imagine it one day even being a bifurcation of the industry. You want to work on cat videos, you can be a non-licensed programmer. You want to work on medical devices or core financial-backbone things? Better be a full-certified Software Engineer.
valuearb 6y ago
This would have been a great slogan for Steve Jobs. Apple was rarely first with anything, but often first with something useful and special.
- loceng 6y ago
  A good example of this wise type of management: Apple let music platforms mature before learning from them to create their own offering to then easily market to their hundreads of millions of users - with the advantage of customers who 1) are generally willing to pay a higher, and 2) Apple gives the App Store fees to themselves. Their watch, and next the car - will be the next arguably iconic products.
  - clevergadget 6y ago
    will be the next arguably iconic products - yeah I mean if apple released a rock someone would argue about how iconic it was
pcthrowaway 6y ago
I want my small-batch artisanal data analytics on tap.
- ehnto 6y ago
  A pint of the facial recognition dystopian pale ale please.
- jmjanzen 6y ago
  You joke, but there's some truth to this. Better to have a nice tailored report that shows only what's needed to make a decision, than a dump from Looker, Heap, or just a 200MB of CSVs.
mathgladiator 6y ago
I feel suckered, but I do like the idea of moving slow... "slow is smooth and smooth is fast" is something that I'm working to internalize. This is why I believe, at core, in 100% test coverage.
deleted 6y ago
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deadA1ias 6y ago
Disappointed this was an April fool's. I think I might use this slogan anyway.
dstick 6y ago
I know it’s an april fools joke. But I’ve recently “discovered” why this is nevertheless very true. If you move slow, you have a higher chance of meeting the right customer, of actually allowing your idea to grow and improve over time. Without being locked into it in one form or another. Moving slow allows you to work on it as a side project first. Which means no financial stress. And then making things. To me this means no paper prototyping. Not selling people on your idea without having anything tangible. Some may call it smart. To me it feels like gambling with your believability / integrity. There are only so many times you can do this before people get tired of you and your stories / dreams / business ideas. Just make something, show it to people when it’s actually useful. And feel good about actually having made something people liked. Instead of selling something people liked and then suffer the feeling of non-stop pressure, constantly _not_ being where you’ve told others you are. Happy april fools :)
- konschubert 6y ago
  I think even when moving slow, you can still work with prototypes and get feedback as long as you're open about it and you're not taking people's money. For example, I have https://www.invisible-computers.com https://www.invisible-computers.com up as a website. You can read about the product and you can sign up to be notified. But I won't take a cent until I have a product ready to ship.
  - dstick 6y ago
    I agree, but the general consensus in startup pop-literature (is that a thing? :D) is that you can never be sure unless you ask money and people are willing to pay. Otherwise people can just say they like / want / need it, without risk. I have to say that I agree. Too many times I've experienced that people _say_ they'll pay, but never actually do when push comes to shove. But when someone does agree to pay (meaning you've somewhat validated your idea) then you're left empty handed and have to backtrack with your first customer. Not a great start. But that's just me :) YMMV
    - konschubert 6y ago
mseepgood 6y ago
This is good advice.
dtjohnnyb 6y ago
They're on a roll for April fool's, this other one is the geekiest one I've seen in a while! https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in-our-models/ https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in...
fxtentacle 6y ago
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny. I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough. The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit. The belt they included was a completely different size than the trouser and I'm still waiting for the shirt to arrive. And now I'm fighting the usual uphill battle to talk to a human and get this mess fixed or get a refund. The core of Stitchfix is personalization, as they say. But that means an individual solution for each individual customer, and not AI for memorizing generic trends in a huge dataset.
- bambax 6y ago
  > I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit That is nothing short of hilarious. The machine knows best! Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?! > AI for memorizing generic trends It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual. It's also an internal distraction. They'd achieve something much closer to what they promise if they just threw some old-school regression analysis at the problem. But that's not cool these days, plus it's hard to relabel as AI even for the marketroids these days, and would involve actual work :). This applies to many "AI companies" - so many want to either have easy process (throw data at some random Kaggle model and hope it sticks) or just a buzzword to bullshit investors with. Sometimes both.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
samueladam 6y ago
This is the way I build cybersecurity opertions centers and ingest data for mining. Every log structure is analyzed by hand. Every log structure data behaviour is verified with statistics by hand. Every log data is normalized by hand. Every parser is done by hand. Every log is documented and gets unit tests. What has not gone through this process ends up in the "automatic extraction" bucket waiting to get human love. April's fool or not, you may laugh at me. My L3 security analysts don't.
rapnie 6y ago
"A Mere April Fool's Joke for One, is the Solid Revenue Model for the Other" The 'move slow an make things' movement is a much-needed niche to be explored, and a place where I'd love to be.
lmarcos 6y ago
On a more serious tone: what would take to the IT industry to switch from "move fast and get shit done" to "move slow and make things'? Geninuosly asking. If it becomes a thing, it would only be because the developers push it further... and HN is full of devs. I doubt such a perspective would ever come from "lean" managers and the like.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  This already comes from regulators, e.g. "right to explanation" laws which require any automated legaly binding decisions to be explained. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I feel that at this point nothing except very severe regulatory fines would help. It's just that the current way of doing things is financially incentivized.
- nicbou 6y ago
  A generous amount of free time. I move slow and make things because my livelihood doesn't depend on it. I have practically unlimited free time and sufficient income, so I can build things that don't matter. This isn't the case for more people. Time is money, and being slow means you're not earning much for your time.
fortyrod 6y ago
"Move slow and make things" is no joke. I mumble that every morning as I fall out of bed.
deleted 6y ago
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pdimitar 6y ago
I have to admit: if they didn't go overboard with hand-printed cards and carrier pigeons, I'd believe the article. As others have mused here and I'll join them: we can use a lot more hand-crafted and "slow" approach. We're chasing our own tails -- ESPECIALLY in programming! -- and progress is nearly non-existent. I mean, in 2021, people are still debugging multithreaded shared state problems. These should belong to the past -- make it impossible on a hardware level as a start, then the programming languages will adapt in a matter of a few months at the maximum.
- swiley 6y ago
  Shared state is fundamentally hard. I don't think you can make it bullet-proof at the hardware level without sacrificing performance.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    Exactly because it's fundamentally hard, it must be avoided -- we the humans simply can't be trusted with it (speaking as a former C/C++ dev here). It should also be hardware-assisted (if it's impossible to stop it at the hardware level). Stuff like atomic counters were a good first step but the state of the art there hasn't moved in a long time (we don't have atomic 512-bit update operations, do we? if we did, a lot of kernel data structures could be atomically updated; this alone would fix a lot of contention problems). The hardware can also just work in a CRDT/OT-like manner, namely accumulate update requests for a memory location in small queues (that get flushed after 10 nanoseconds or after the mini queue fills up). This could help with a good chunk of the buggy scenarios as well. Not saying we can make it perfect tomorrow -- of course we can't. What I am saying is that nobody [who can truly make a difference] is even trying. It gets a bit disappointing and grim after you have been in the profession for a while, you know?
    - lanstin 6y ago
      Switch to go and channels. You won’t have to worry about locking any more, the design of your program becomes a data flow design issue. (Speaking as a former C programmer). Hardware takes so long to change but more atomicity would be great, but 8n the meantime go runtime is fast, generally lock less to the per request application code flow, and you use all the cores evenly.
bovermyer 6y ago
My thoughts on this were a little too long for a comment, so I posted them on my blog: https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/ https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/
- nicbou 6y ago
  Just a heads up: your website does not render properly on mobile (Firefox for Android). The page is much wider than the screen, but zooming out is not possible.
  - bovermyer 6y ago
    Thanks for that, I'll look into it.
TrispusAttucks 6y ago
The prank is good. The slogan is pure gold. "move slow and make things."
rectang 6y ago
"Move slow and make things" seems like a credo for developer-run Open Source software projects. The software ships when it is ready, not when a commercial entity needs it to. For a tech business, "move slow and make things" can only be a joke. But for a developer collective, it can be real.
- lupire 6y ago
  Yes. Build the best ideas for posterity. This is GHC / Haskell philosophy. Golang tries too.
halfmatthalfcat 6y ago
It's interesting because moving "fast" is very relative to the circumstances you're currently in. If you have an army of engineers, it's very easy to move fast (sometimes, depending on the organization) but moving fast for an individual is objectively slow in comparison.
jmull 6y ago
This is the best April fools joke I've seen this year. The article itself is excellent. But the best part is the title is a so much better real credo than the "real" one it parodies.
- lupire 6y ago
  What happened to all the social netwoks using the Slow credo?
RhodoGSA 6y ago
>our staff of mathematicians who will perform all computations by hand using pencil and paper This part is about when i started dying laughing at every sentence, before i was a bit confused. But only after checking the comments did i realize it was on 1 april.
exabrial 6y ago
The fact they think that individual customizations of clothing is a joke, when that's exactly what they advertise, says a lot about the company. You're just cattle, and they think it's hilarious you're actually falling for their marketing wank. I'd _highly_ recommend M-Tailor however as an alternative. It's not a subscription box, but the clothes are extremely well made and the "body scanning" technology actually works (especially for someone of an odd body size like myself: 6'5", 205lbs, athletic build). Another good company, but I don't know much about other than they're based in Southeast Asia is iTailor. They'll build you -exactly- what you want, to a fault in my experience. Get measured professionally by someone with experience if you're going this route.
hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
Stitch Fix is trash, their clothes are no name slave made, they never have anything in stock for the "stylists" to actually ship to customers. Their "AI" that they're trying to sell, seriously suggests parkas to people in Florida like climates... AND WORSE... LOCK THE "STYLISTS" TO NOT BE ABLE TO SELECT OTHER OPTIONS TO SEND... They never stfu about diversity, and their entire engineering team is white and asian dudes.

It's really great to read this article: the contrast of text against the background is optimally low, it lets our eyes take its sweet time to recognize letter forms. Sit back, relax and poke your eyes out in pain. What more do readers want! Illegible, dysfunctional and decorative design is the future!

solarmist 6y ago

I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.” Artisans make beautiful things and software artisans make beautiful software, but it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business. And artisans moving slowly isn’t arbitrary. They move slow on the things that matter. The things that shine when attention was paid to the details.

solarmist 6y ago
Better is “Be deliberate and make (beautiful) things”.
rkagerer 6y ago
Same here. I was disappointed to realize this isn't a thing.
JetAlone 6y ago
Maybe we will have a chance to move slow and make things one day, or in little moments, optimizing for the well-being of the creator etc. What rings true about it we can mull over in our heads at some point and try to implement in some parts of our lives, like hobbies, vacation, retirement, family time, etc. right?
jiofih 6y ago
Same feeling here - instead of laughing I was disappointed when the second paragraph laid out the April fools joke. I would love to see “small batch data science” where people actually understand the results. Black box recommendations never feel really right.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  It's called statistics, to be fair. In general, if your DS's can't explain the model then something has gone horribly wrong.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    People usually just call it AI then and pretend that it's not a problem. For example, there's been plenty of issues like racial bias with the computer vision algorithms that police uses, which effectively is data science on pictures. But nobody knows why the issue occurs and nobody can specifically fix it without the risk of breaking a thousand unrelated other things.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      > But nobody knows why the issue occurs They do know why that occurs. It's because the data set is biased.
      - alexashka 6y ago
        Funny, I remember thinking the questions were biased, every time they weren't the ones I studied to answer in my exam preparations. Too bad I wasn't a data scientist or else I could just get a passing grade by claiming the questions were chosen from a biased data set, or retake the exam until the data set matched the questions I studied for, at which point the data set would no longer be biased, lol. Funny line of work, this data 'science' where you only use the results that fit the narrative you wanted in the first place. We're in full doublethink mode, just keep repeating data 'science', 'science', 'science'. :)
        jjgreen 6y ago
        I did a geography O-level (the UK exams for 16-year olds at the time) which included a map-reading exercise. It just so happened to be a couple of miles from where I lived, and I knew it well. Still only got a B though.
lloeki 6y ago
The best jokes carry a message and use humour as a vessel, challenging preconceptions in a lighthearted way. I chose to take this April’s fool that way.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Thank you for this. I "move slow and make things" in some sense. I will endeavor to use this as a jumping off point for something constructive rather than leaving a pointless whiney comment about how the world will never understand or appreciate me.
nicbou 6y ago
One of my favourite articles on the internet is "an app can be a home-cooked meal". It's something you can make for your own enjoyment, with no plans for scaling on monetisation. I have started making this sort of software, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I target the platform I use, I solve the problems I have, and my only metric is pleasure. I wish we all had more of such projects.
- lloeki 6y ago
  This is the entire premise of Ruby, with Matz openly claiming that it being pleasurable to anyone else but him is a happy side-effect. Part jest, but also very core to it. I wouldn't have been able to put so much work in maintaining ArchMac for so long without going completely bonkers had I not taken it this way either. So it’s entirely possible to build large scale projects this way, and I’m wondering how we could make companies work that way too. At the very least it should be part of any employee sustainability plan.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  If you like this sentiment, read "The Forever Project": https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-project.html https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...
- ryandrake 6y ago
  One of the reasons I left software development as a career was I couldn't bear to keep shitting out products that were just barely good enough that the customer wouldn't return it. That's the quality bar in commercial software and I hated having my name on it. I'm more into refactoring it 20 times in order to get the perfect architecture, fix every last bug, find every performance improvement, make it not just work but make the code itself beautiful. Like the Steve Jobs quote: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” Obviously, this is totally incompatible with how most software is made in the industry, so I just do it as a hobby instead.
marcinzm 6y ago
The issue is that beautiful software is invisible except in open source projects (and even then few people look under the hood). So to an end user only the UI/UX/bugs matter while everything else doesn't.
jkingsbery 6y ago
I had a similar reaction. It's a nice April fool's joke, but I hoped for an actual counter-balance to "move fast and break things." The book that taught me the value of moving slow in programming was Test Driven Development by Kent Beck, who ironically spent several years at Facebook.
XCSme 6y ago
> it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business It's not that hard actually, but you must limit growth. You can easily be profitable and make an amazing product if your goal is not $1B in revenue, but just to be profitable at a small scale, which allows you to run things at your own pace.
hakfoo 6y ago
I've wondered if the software space has been able to get away with "move fast and break things" because liability and regulation haven't caught up with it. At some point, we started expecting civil and mechanical engineers to stop "moving fast and breaking things." If software engineers were similar licensed and on the hook for signing off on garbage, we'd see a dramatic slowdown of the pace of development, but likely an uptick in quality. I could imagine it one day even being a bifurcation of the industry. You want to work on cat videos, you can be a non-licensed programmer. You want to work on medical devices or core financial-backbone things? Better be a full-certified Software Engineer.

valuearb 6y ago

This would have been a great slogan for Steve Jobs. Apple was rarely first with anything, but often first with something useful and special.

loceng 6y ago
A good example of this wise type of management: Apple let music platforms mature before learning from them to create their own offering to then easily market to their hundreads of millions of users - with the advantage of customers who 1) are generally willing to pay a higher, and 2) Apple gives the App Store fees to themselves. Their watch, and next the car - will be the next arguably iconic products.
- clevergadget 6y ago
  will be the next arguably iconic products - yeah I mean if apple released a rock someone would argue about how iconic it was

pcthrowaway 6y ago

I want my small-batch artisanal data analytics on tap.

ehnto 6y ago
A pint of the facial recognition dystopian pale ale please.
jmjanzen 6y ago
You joke, but there's some truth to this. Better to have a nice tailored report that shows only what's needed to make a decision, than a dump from Looker, Heap, or just a 200MB of CSVs.

mathgladiator 6y ago

I feel suckered, but I do like the idea of moving slow... "slow is smooth and smooth is fast" is something that I'm working to internalize. This is why I believe, at core, in 100% test coverage.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deadA1ias 6y ago

Disappointed this was an April fool's. I think I might use this slogan anyway.

dstick 6y ago

I know it’s an april fools joke. But I’ve recently “discovered” why this is nevertheless very true. If you move slow, you have a higher chance of meeting the right customer, of actually allowing your idea to grow and improve over time. Without being locked into it in one form or another. Moving slow allows you to work on it as a side project first. Which means no financial stress. And then making things. To me this means no paper prototyping. Not selling people on your idea without having anything tangible. Some may call it smart. To me it feels like gambling with your believability / integrity. There are only so many times you can do this before people get tired of you and your stories / dreams / business ideas. Just make something, show it to people when it’s actually useful. And feel good about actually having made something people liked. Instead of selling something people liked and then suffer the feeling of non-stop pressure, constantly _not_ being where you’ve told others you are. Happy april fools :)

konschubert 6y ago
I think even when moving slow, you can still work with prototypes and get feedback as long as you're open about it and you're not taking people's money. For example, I have https://www.invisible-computers.com https://www.invisible-computers.com up as a website. You can read about the product and you can sign up to be notified. But I won't take a cent until I have a product ready to ship.
- dstick 6y ago
  I agree, but the general consensus in startup pop-literature (is that a thing? :D) is that you can never be sure unless you ask money and people are willing to pay. Otherwise people can just say they like / want / need it, without risk. I have to say that I agree. Too many times I've experienced that people _say_ they'll pay, but never actually do when push comes to shove. But when someone does agree to pay (meaning you've somewhat validated your idea) then you're left empty handed and have to backtrack with your first customer. Not a great start. But that's just me :) YMMV
  - konschubert 6y ago

mseepgood 6y ago

This is good advice.

dtjohnnyb 6y ago

They're on a roll for April fool's, this other one is the geekiest one I've seen in a while! https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in-our-models/ https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in...

fxtentacle 6y ago

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny. I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough. The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit. The belt they included was a completely different size than the trouser and I'm still waiting for the shirt to arrive. And now I'm fighting the usual uphill battle to talk to a human and get this mess fixed or get a refund. The core of Stitchfix is personalization, as they say. But that means an individual solution for each individual customer, and not AI for memorizing generic trends in a huge dataset.

bambax 6y ago
> I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit That is nothing short of hilarious. The machine knows best! Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?! > AI for memorizing generic trends It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual. It's also an internal distraction. They'd achieve something much closer to what they promise if they just threw some old-school regression analysis at the problem. But that's not cool these days, plus it's hard to relabel as AI even for the marketroids these days, and would involve actual work :). This applies to many "AI companies" - so many want to either have easy process (throw data at some random Kaggle model and hope it sticks) or just a buzzword to bullshit investors with. Sometimes both.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

samueladam 6y ago

This is the way I build cybersecurity opertions centers and ingest data for mining. Every log structure is analyzed by hand. Every log structure data behaviour is verified with statistics by hand. Every log data is normalized by hand. Every parser is done by hand. Every log is documented and gets unit tests. What has not gone through this process ends up in the "automatic extraction" bucket waiting to get human love. April's fool or not, you may laugh at me. My L3 security analysts don't.

rapnie 6y ago

"A Mere April Fool's Joke for One, is the Solid Revenue Model for the Other" The 'move slow an make things' movement is a much-needed niche to be explored, and a place where I'd love to be.

lmarcos 6y ago

On a more serious tone: what would take to the IT industry to switch from "move fast and get shit done" to "move slow and make things'? Geninuosly asking. If it becomes a thing, it would only be because the developers push it further... and HN is full of devs. I doubt such a perspective would ever come from "lean" managers and the like.

imhoguy 6y ago
This already comes from regulators, e.g. "right to explanation" laws which require any automated legaly binding decisions to be explained. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation
pdimitar 6y ago
I feel that at this point nothing except very severe regulatory fines would help. It's just that the current way of doing things is financially incentivized.
nicbou 6y ago
A generous amount of free time. I move slow and make things because my livelihood doesn't depend on it. I have practically unlimited free time and sufficient income, so I can build things that don't matter. This isn't the case for more people. Time is money, and being slow means you're not earning much for your time.

fortyrod 6y ago

"Move slow and make things" is no joke. I mumble that every morning as I fall out of bed.

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pdimitar 6y ago

I have to admit: if they didn't go overboard with hand-printed cards and carrier pigeons, I'd believe the article. As others have mused here and I'll join them: we can use a lot more hand-crafted and "slow" approach. We're chasing our own tails -- ESPECIALLY in programming! -- and progress is nearly non-existent. I mean, in 2021, people are still debugging multithreaded shared state problems. These should belong to the past -- make it impossible on a hardware level as a start, then the programming languages will adapt in a matter of a few months at the maximum.

swiley 6y ago
Shared state is fundamentally hard. I don't think you can make it bullet-proof at the hardware level without sacrificing performance.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  Exactly because it's fundamentally hard, it must be avoided -- we the humans simply can't be trusted with it (speaking as a former C/C++ dev here). It should also be hardware-assisted (if it's impossible to stop it at the hardware level). Stuff like atomic counters were a good first step but the state of the art there hasn't moved in a long time (we don't have atomic 512-bit update operations, do we? if we did, a lot of kernel data structures could be atomically updated; this alone would fix a lot of contention problems). The hardware can also just work in a CRDT/OT-like manner, namely accumulate update requests for a memory location in small queues (that get flushed after 10 nanoseconds or after the mini queue fills up). This could help with a good chunk of the buggy scenarios as well. Not saying we can make it perfect tomorrow -- of course we can't. What I am saying is that nobody [who can truly make a difference] is even trying. It gets a bit disappointing and grim after you have been in the profession for a while, you know?
  - lanstin 6y ago
    Switch to go and channels. You won’t have to worry about locking any more, the design of your program becomes a data flow design issue. (Speaking as a former C programmer). Hardware takes so long to change but more atomicity would be great, but 8n the meantime go runtime is fast, generally lock less to the per request application code flow, and you use all the cores evenly.

bovermyer 6y ago

My thoughts on this were a little too long for a comment, so I posted them on my blog: https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/ https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/

nicbou 6y ago
Just a heads up: your website does not render properly on mobile (Firefox for Android). The page is much wider than the screen, but zooming out is not possible.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Thanks for that, I'll look into it.

TrispusAttucks 6y ago

The prank is good. The slogan is pure gold. "move slow and make things."

rectang 6y ago

"Move slow and make things" seems like a credo for developer-run Open Source software projects. The software ships when it is ready, not when a commercial entity needs it to. For a tech business, "move slow and make things" can only be a joke. But for a developer collective, it can be real.

lupire 6y ago
Yes. Build the best ideas for posterity. This is GHC / Haskell philosophy. Golang tries too.

halfmatthalfcat 6y ago

It's interesting because moving "fast" is very relative to the circumstances you're currently in. If you have an army of engineers, it's very easy to move fast (sometimes, depending on the organization) but moving fast for an individual is objectively slow in comparison.

jmull 6y ago

This is the best April fools joke I've seen this year. The article itself is excellent. But the best part is the title is a so much better real credo than the "real" one it parodies.

lupire 6y ago
What happened to all the social netwoks using the Slow credo?

RhodoGSA 6y ago

>our staff of mathematicians who will perform all computations by hand using pencil and paper This part is about when i started dying laughing at every sentence, before i was a bit confused. But only after checking the comments did i realize it was on 1 april.

exabrial 6y ago

The fact they think that individual customizations of clothing is a joke, when that's exactly what they advertise, says a lot about the company. You're just cattle, and they think it's hilarious you're actually falling for their marketing wank. I'd _highly_ recommend M-Tailor however as an alternative. It's not a subscription box, but the clothes are extremely well made and the "body scanning" technology actually works (especially for someone of an odd body size like myself: 6'5", 205lbs, athletic build). Another good company, but I don't know much about other than they're based in Southeast Asia is iTailor. They'll build you -exactly- what you want, to a fault in my experience. Get measured professionally by someone with experience if you're going this route.

hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago

Stitch Fix is trash, their clothes are no name slave made, they never have anything in stock for the "stylists" to actually ship to customers. Their "AI" that they're trying to sell, seriously suggests parkas to people in Florida like climates... AND WORSE... LOCK THE "STYLISTS" TO NOT BE ABLE TO SELECT OTHER OPTIONS TO SEND... They never stfu about diversity, and their entire engineering team is white and asian dudes.