11 ms·

I could do that in a weekend (2016)

121 points by defaulty 5y ago

mbrodersen 5y ago
The rule seems to be that the less a software developer knows about how to build X, the easier it seems to be for him/her/it to build X.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This is an excellent summary of the non-obvious realities of building software at scale. Engineers often become so good at building quick, weekend prototypes that they don’t understand the realities of shipping software at scale. Practically speaking, the initial greenfield software development is almost always a tiny fraction of the effort that goes into building a business. This is a common downfall of engineers who try entrepreneurship before they’ve gained managerial or operational experience. I’ve lost count of how many entrepreneurs I’ve talked to who got something running on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and think that they’re one step away from a successful business. Really, the hard work is only beginning.
jgwil2 5y ago
From 2016. Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
moksly 5y ago
I think this article raises a lot of good points about the weekend prototype, but I also think there is some merit in the question of “what do all those people do?”. I’ve worked in digitalisation in the public sector of Denmark for quite some time. A few years ago I was part of the group who redefined our national principals for architecture in municipality IT systems. The whole thing is called rammearkitekturen which translates directly into “the framework architecture” and without getting into too much details it was made because we had 98 muniplacities times 300 average IT systems ways or defining what a person was. Which made buying and integrating IT hard. Rammeaekitekturen still hasn’t fixed that, but that’s not what I want to talk about. One of the things to come out of this mindset was how to design an IT system for eldercare. Where there used to be a physical folder with a printed note containing all the “Moksly may attempt to hit you during showers and this requires two caretakers” and so on as well as hand written notes for day to day things, medicine used to come in little sorted bags clearly labelled “MORNING” and so on, and every morning people would get a printed list of their route that was adjusted for coworkers who were off sick and so on, and that was pretty much it. Today we have multiple different billion dollar systems to handle those basic things, and after two years of being used they still can’t handle differences between day and night-shifts or giving call-in temps the correct sorts of data access. Instead of having two planners and a subscription to a pharmacy for the sorted medicine bags, we now employ almost 50 people as full time support staff to operate this system as well as throwing endless amounts of resources after project managers, lean consultants, educators and so on to get this system to work. When polled everything single citizen and caretaking employee replied that the old non-digital systems were better. At no point has anyone asked whether or not it made sense to digitalise this area or if it makes sense to continue trying to implement it. So I do think that it’s sometimes reasonable to wonder just what all those people are doing in some organisation. Because sometimes systems have a way of making themselves important to the organisation without actually being important to the organisation.
- shuckles 5y ago
  In cases like this, it’s always useful to have an expansive definition of “user”. For example, day to day experiences for caretakers might have degraded under the new patient information system, but maybe it’s now easier to produce charts which bosses want. For better or worse, they are users of the system as well. To whom a change is worthwhile often leads to unexpected beneficiaries with unexpected motivations.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    So maybe let the caretakers work in peace and have one additional person draw pretty charts out of thin air which would be just as good? I've been working on a product which everybody was convinced had Gantt chart functionality. Said functionality was using the venerable Math.random() top to bottom, with nobody being the wiser.
    - shuckles 5y ago
      Malicious compliance is certainly one approach, but an org which relies on it is probably messing up in a way that will leak to everything else. I never said the desire for reporting was useful, but it is fundamental to how management works in most places today.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  Thinking back on the overall strategy, would it have been better to "just" digitize, OCR and timestamp the coordinating documents for logging and audit purposes? A "document management system" rather than "an eldercare management system"? That way it's "just" "Pull up the most recent documents relating to or updated for patient Doe, Jane" or "What has changed in the medications prescribed in this district?" The Document Management System would still manage all the PDFs or caretaker notes, but would (eventually) be searchable, and would still support the primary workflow of "I just want to see all the recent documentation for my patient" or "This is caretaker Alex's most recent route assignment document".
  - 5y ago
pgm8705 5y ago
Similar thing with comments whenever a Slack related article ends up on HN. "I don't understand how a shitty IRC clone is worth billions of dollars!" or "Why would anyone use Slack when Matrix is free!" I often wonder if these folks haven't even bothered to actually use the software and realize how much more it does beyond sending messages back and forth and/or how much detail and thought goes into making it usable for the masses, not just software engineers.
- burnished 5y ago
  I think competency in the domain reduces friction, and without reflection folks generally don't seem to realize that their experiences are usually specialized. So yeah, I think it's a combo of not trying the new thing (because they already have a comfy work flow) and not honestly assessing how the knowledge they take for granted changes their experience. Not that it's that easy of course.
- criddell 5y ago
  > these folks haven't even bothered to actually use the software and realize how much more it does beyond sending messages back and forth Are you saying that sending messages back and forth involves a lot more complexity that you don't see or that Slack does a lot more than just messages?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    That's kinda a "gotcha" question, because it's not clear what your definitions are. For example, is authentication (single sign-on, etc.) part of what you describe as "sending messages back and forth"? Are files, screen sharing, video calls, etc. still "just messages"?
    - criddell 5y ago
      I didn't intend it to be a gotcha question. > Are files, screen sharing, video calls, etc. still "just messages"? I wouldn't think any of those as messages that a basic message-only client would have. I guess that's the distinction I was after - was the person I replied to talking about all the complexity of a basic message-only client, or were they talking about the complexity of all the stuff beyond that.
dangoor 5y ago
I've seen this so often. Almost every time something about Khan Academy's technology makes it to the front page here, someone brings up some form of this complaint. It got to the point at which I wrote a post [specifically to address why Khan Academy has so much code](https://www.kevindangoor.com/posts/why-khan-academy-has-so-much-code/ https://www.kevindangoor.com/posts/why-khan-academy-has-so-m...). There's just so much complexity involved in making reliable services that provide features used by a variety of types of users.
tofuahdude 5y ago
We were just having this discussion around the Postman fundraise - various people saying "its just a GUI around Curl!!!" and being all offended at the raise's price tag. There's so much more that goes into building an actual business.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  Also folks making similar comments are missing that funding is about the future of the product/business, not just scaling growth (though you do see with later stage funding). Something like Postman is a bet on enterprise tooling for APIs, both building and integrating with them. Looks like Postman has gone beyond their chrome extension, and leveraged that to add more a bunch more features. But even if all that was easy enough to build, the investment is really about the trend and the business ability to capitalize on the trend. VC investment is always more forward-looking than the current product state.
  - tofuahdude 5y ago
    For sure. Valuation of a VC raise !== technical complexity. Easy to conflate from an engineer's seat, I guess.
- ozim 5y ago
  Well yeah I could do Postman in the weekend. Really I hate Postman and I have it on my todo list. I also try not to use it unless someone sends me his Postman collection. Thing is, I could do that for myself and I would be the only user and I would never turn it into a company. Because what devs usually say they could do that product in the weekend - but usable only for themselves. While turning software package into successful product that a lot of people would use is totally different story. Just like playing piano for your friends on the weekend or guitar by the fire that takes maybe couple weeks of training. To become a pop-star well that is just different pair of shoes.
  - tofuahdude 5y ago
    Yeah, I agree. It's just that many times these comments are on threads about the fundraise itself. "Why is Postman worth $B when I could build that in a weekend?" is completely missing what it takes to build a business.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
One other thing he touched on in passing: people are assuming they'd know what to build from the start. Even in relatively trivial applications a lot of work goes into finding the right way to express what you're trying to build. I recently worked on a small app and spent 40 hours trying out different approaches to the user interface. The solution I went with could be coded up in about 2 hours, but I had to do 38 hours of work that eventually got thrown away before I arrived at it. This sort of thing happens all the time in professional software development. Sometimes it is a waste of time, e.g. people rewriting things in a new language/framework for negligible benefits, but a lot of it is a necessary part of developing a polished app.
- slongfield 5y ago
  “I didn't have time to write you a simple UI, so I wrote you a complicated one instead.” -- Mark Twain, paraphrased.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Blaise Pascal, translated and paraphrased. (Or at least as a lower-bound on its age anyway.) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Except today more often I see "Our devs put together a basically usable UI, then we ramped up and hired a full time UXer, and it sucks now."
    - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
      I've seen that happen a thousand times, yes. (Slightly exaggerating, but still.) I guess we'll just have to wait until people get used to the idea that the Web is an interactive document format, not a replacement for the GUI. I'm hoping the modern SPA trends pass into the void like the Macromedia Flash UI trends did.
lhorie 5y ago
I don't see nearly as many people claiming Google could be built in a weekend, but I do see that sentiment a lot in threads about Uber. It's easy to think it's a simple app, but there was a great response from a former EM highlighting just why that isn't so[0]. > This reminds me of a common fallacy we see in unreliable systems, where people build the happy path with the idea that the happy path is the “real” work, and that error handling can be tacked on later. For reliable systems, error handling is more work than the happy path. Is there a name for this fallacy? I think this isn't merely a familiar anecdote, but something that points to the root of why armchair architects think things are easier than they actually are. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  On the one hand I agree but on the other hand it’s really much easier to be a follower and avoid the mistakes the pioneers have made. I am pretty sure there are a ton of legacy things in the Uber platform that are obsolete now and you wouldn’t have to implement if you stated from scratch. But you would also probably run into the same issues that Uber took many years to solve and you probably also would need years. So many be the advantage of being second isn’t as much as thought initially. I often think SpaceX was able to move that quickly because they could learn from decades of experience of NASA and others what works and what doesn’t.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  People make this observation about Uber mostly because they can replicate the thing in a few months (it's never a weekend). And proof of that is that many people did replicate Uber software in a few months, some times even with some commercial success. Differently from Google search, the hard thing about Uber is not the software. What makes a lot of sense, but leaves the question of what are all those people doing there, what the article answers, but the answer is not trivial in any way.
stevieb89 5y ago
Any chance you could add, that wide text is really hard to read body > *:not(pre) { max-width: 600px; margin-left: auto; display: block; margin-right: auto; } pre { max-width: 1200px; margin: 40px auto; background: #f6f6f6; padding: 16px; }
- 5cott0 5y ago
  I could do that in a weekend.
- iib 5y ago
  There is a firefox extension that I use, called Stylus[1], that lets you add custom CSS to websites. The thing that helps most is that Stylus lets you browse other people's styles for website, and there are already themes for Dan Luu's website. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
- meowzero 5y ago
  Safari and Firefox has reader view. I'm not sure about Chrome or IE since I don't use those. I'm sure they'll have something similar.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lucis 5y ago
  First thing I did was hitting the shortcut for Safari's Reader. Would love to see that in other browsers.
abnry 5y ago
Sounds like the Pareto Principle at play: 80% of the product is created with 20% of the effort. It is getting the next 19%, then 0.9%, then 0.09%, and so on, that is the challenge.
- elcritch 5y ago
  That 0.9% then 0.09% are also where the real success comes from in many fields.
- dvirsky 5y ago
  Also sounds a bit like Dunning Kruger. It looks easy because people are ignorant of how hard the problem is. Many years ago I built a search engine for a very big discussion board website, which had hundreds of millions of messages. Keep in mind back then a powerful server had 2GB of RAM and a pretty slow CPU and HDD, so it had to be distributed across multiple shards to work fast enough, and there was no Elastic Search back then, so it really was hard work, plus getting the ranking and quality tuned was a huge effort. Of course when we launched it people responded with "I don't get what the big deal is, why can't you just run a SELECT WHERE LIKE query and get it over with over the weekend?". It was hurtful at first but then I realized how ignorant the person making such a statement is about the problem.
wpasc 5y ago
One could build a self driving prototype in a weekend of hacking (using the libraries, tooling, etc available) and train it. I think it's a perfect example of the weekend prototype vs production reality difference.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 5y ago
"I could do that in a weekend" is obviously idiotic but why choose Google as the example (possibly the hardest piece of software to replicate)?
- jldugger 5y ago
  If you follow the citation trail: 0. Dan writes an article about marginal employment decisions, which cites 1. Alex Clemmer wrote (http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html) about building a search engine to compete with Google, who cites 2. John Peebles, who wrote (https://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-competition-now/ https://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-co...) about the urgent need for a viable competitor to Google, saying: > I wonder if we haven’t all been hypnotised by the complexity, much of which is marketing hype, and have missed the enormous opportunity that exists right in front of our noses. Does the next search engine have to be as big, involved in as many things, employ as many people, and fight on the same footing to be accomplish the goal of providing a counterpoint to Google? This article was upvoted fairly well on on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011472), though the top comments are all in agreement this is not a simple task. This zeitgeist, along with Dan's personal experience on the subject, is why he wrote the article using Google as the example.
pphysch 5y ago
> A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. Fully agree, and would extend to any social organization. One of the most important aspects of organizational efficiency is managing the signal/noise ratio of internal communications. We now have the ability to turn effective bureaucratic protocols into material reality with automated information systems. The organizations, whether private or public, that best tackle this problem will come out on top on the 21st century, regardless of ideology and historical advantage.
- ozim 5y ago
  That is why you want to have one pizza size teams. Those teams should also be as independent as possible. Unfortunately it takes quite a bit of orchestration on higher level of abstraction and having well organized management.
mtnGoat 5y ago
maybe part of the whole conversations is survivorship bias? id be interested to see data on the past positions and companies people on both sides of the argument have worked on. ie: if you have seen how teams of hundreds are justified, it makes sense. likewise, if you have only worked on small teams, its hard to understand what 100s of engineers would do. its been a few years but i knew of multiple alexa-100 sites that were all running on just two 4 core servers(this is back when alexa was a useful measure of size, mind you). managed essentially by the hosting company. so "scale" is not always directly linked to traffic, i would think complexity dictates the need for more engineers rather then size.
bern4444 5y ago
Fun article, but exceptionally difficult to read. I know some people like using plain ol html, but just a few lines of CSS would vastly improve the reading experience. I know its from 2016, but still. Eyes read best when content is a few hundred pixels long. Content should be centered etc. It's pretty terrible as it is
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  One of the nice things about HTML/CSS is that there's such a thing as "user styles", which can apply on top (or instead of) the "author styles". Opera pioneered this interface, AFAIK, and even had one-click toggle buttons for both author and user styles (as well as images), but most of today's browsers don't make this functionality transparent and available. I suppose you could do via dev tools? For a simple change like what you're asking, perhaps even changing browser's font settings would suffice?
- nmz 5y ago
  get stylish then
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  Yep it was pretty horrible, so I hit reader mode that narrowed everything down and increased the font size. I find it's quite a bother to have to do all the CSS necessary for good reflow on a number of devices, so I too just have everything just spill to the ends, and just do reader mode on devices. But I don't really know much CSS apart from the really basic stuff, and haven't ever sat down to see how it would be done.
  - bern4444 5y ago
    Yeah, for a site like this, it could literally be just adding max-width: 700px; margin: 0 auto; This would make it look great on pretty much all screens.
    - bzbarsky 5y ago
      A 700px max-width would actually make it quite annoying to read for me (as a lot of content on the web is, unless I switch to reader mode)....
dblohm7 5y ago
This post describes the entire web browser peanut gallery in a nutshell.
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Sometimes, though, you do need to scale back to a weekend prototype. Understanding what it takes to scale the system is good, but the analysis paralysis from imagining that every problem must have a Facebook-scale solution is silly too. I mean, those Volvo XC90s are damn slick, but somehow my local pizza place delivers hot tasty stuff on time in an old Fiat Seicento. I think the pizza quality would suffer if the owner invested in a more reliable and better car.
Havoc 5y ago
I suspect this is connected to the happy path coding phenomenon. The core issue probably IS that easy. But you need to cover all the edge cases reasonably well too to have a business and those you can’t necessarily see until you start coding
SilasX 5y ago
If you're going to make this criticism, I feel you also need to be capable of recognizing when such criticism actually is valid [1]. That is, under which circumstances would someone be justified in saying "okay this is not an optimal problem" (A famous example from the other direction was when Uber re-engineered a querying service to better fit the use case, where several HNers and a Medium article showed why their re-invented wheel was worse than an off-the-shelf solution that they just weren't using correctly [2].) If you can't satisfy that, then this feels like a fully-general rejection of any claim that an org has over-complicated a problem or has unnecessary bloat, and/or that no one can criticize until they've personally worked (for n months) at the org. Which itself would be hard to defend. [1] Based on my "Scylla-Charybdis"/Goldilocks Heuristic: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybdis-heuristic-if-more.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybd... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21537008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21537008
superjan 5y ago
One other thing is, many of you could write something like a mouse driver in a weekend. That is not enough for the business however. The UI needs to be Electron based for easy maintenance, and you need to add telemetry, because how else will you know if people actually use your product? So you need backend and API teams too for each platform.
aqualinux 5y ago
"Considering how much of Google's $500B market cap comes from search" Time flies

121 points by defaulty 5y ago

The rule seems to be that the less a software developer knows about how to build X, the easier it seems to be for him/her/it to build X.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

This is an excellent summary of the non-obvious realities of building software at scale. Engineers often become so good at building quick, weekend prototypes that they don’t understand the realities of shipping software at scale. Practically speaking, the initial greenfield software development is almost always a tiny fraction of the effort that goes into building a business. This is a common downfall of engineers who try entrepreneurship before they’ve gained managerial or operational experience. I’ve lost count of how many entrepreneurs I’ve talked to who got something running on an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and think that they’re one step away from a successful business. Really, the hard work is only beginning.

jgwil2 5y ago

From 2016. Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

moksly 5y ago

I think this article raises a lot of good points about the weekend prototype, but I also think there is some merit in the question of “what do all those people do?”. I’ve worked in digitalisation in the public sector of Denmark for quite some time. A few years ago I was part of the group who redefined our national principals for architecture in municipality IT systems. The whole thing is called rammearkitekturen which translates directly into “the framework architecture” and without getting into too much details it was made because we had 98 muniplacities times 300 average IT systems ways or defining what a person was. Which made buying and integrating IT hard. Rammeaekitekturen still hasn’t fixed that, but that’s not what I want to talk about. One of the things to come out of this mindset was how to design an IT system for eldercare. Where there used to be a physical folder with a printed note containing all the “Moksly may attempt to hit you during showers and this requires two caretakers” and so on as well as hand written notes for day to day things, medicine used to come in little sorted bags clearly labelled “MORNING” and so on, and every morning people would get a printed list of their route that was adjusted for coworkers who were off sick and so on, and that was pretty much it. Today we have multiple different billion dollar systems to handle those basic things, and after two years of being used they still can’t handle differences between day and night-shifts or giving call-in temps the correct sorts of data access. Instead of having two planners and a subscription to a pharmacy for the sorted medicine bags, we now employ almost 50 people as full time support staff to operate this system as well as throwing endless amounts of resources after project managers, lean consultants, educators and so on to get this system to work. When polled everything single citizen and caretaking employee replied that the old non-digital systems were better. At no point has anyone asked whether or not it made sense to digitalise this area or if it makes sense to continue trying to implement it. So I do think that it’s sometimes reasonable to wonder just what all those people are doing in some organisation. Because sometimes systems have a way of making themselves important to the organisation without actually being important to the organisation.

shuckles 5y ago
In cases like this, it’s always useful to have an expansive definition of “user”. For example, day to day experiences for caretakers might have degraded under the new patient information system, but maybe it’s now easier to produce charts which bosses want. For better or worse, they are users of the system as well. To whom a change is worthwhile often leads to unexpected beneficiaries with unexpected motivations.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  So maybe let the caretakers work in peace and have one additional person draw pretty charts out of thin air which would be just as good? I've been working on a product which everybody was convinced had Gantt chart functionality. Said functionality was using the venerable Math.random() top to bottom, with nobody being the wiser.
  - shuckles 5y ago
    Malicious compliance is certainly one approach, but an org which relies on it is probably messing up in a way that will leak to everything else. I never said the desire for reporting was useful, but it is fundamental to how management works in most places today.
NortySpock 5y ago
Thinking back on the overall strategy, would it have been better to "just" digitize, OCR and timestamp the coordinating documents for logging and audit purposes? A "document management system" rather than "an eldercare management system"? That way it's "just" "Pull up the most recent documents relating to or updated for patient Doe, Jane" or "What has changed in the medications prescribed in this district?" The Document Management System would still manage all the PDFs or caretaker notes, but would (eventually) be searchable, and would still support the primary workflow of "I just want to see all the recent documentation for my patient" or "This is caretaker Alex's most recent route assignment document".
- 5y ago

pgm8705 5y ago

Similar thing with comments whenever a Slack related article ends up on HN. "I don't understand how a shitty IRC clone is worth billions of dollars!" or "Why would anyone use Slack when Matrix is free!" I often wonder if these folks haven't even bothered to actually use the software and realize how much more it does beyond sending messages back and forth and/or how much detail and thought goes into making it usable for the masses, not just software engineers.

burnished 5y ago
I think competency in the domain reduces friction, and without reflection folks generally don't seem to realize that their experiences are usually specialized. So yeah, I think it's a combo of not trying the new thing (because they already have a comfy work flow) and not honestly assessing how the knowledge they take for granted changes their experience. Not that it's that easy of course.
criddell 5y ago
> these folks haven't even bothered to actually use the software and realize how much more it does beyond sending messages back and forth Are you saying that sending messages back and forth involves a lot more complexity that you don't see or that Slack does a lot more than just messages?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  That's kinda a "gotcha" question, because it's not clear what your definitions are. For example, is authentication (single sign-on, etc.) part of what you describe as "sending messages back and forth"? Are files, screen sharing, video calls, etc. still "just messages"?
  - criddell 5y ago
    I didn't intend it to be a gotcha question. > Are files, screen sharing, video calls, etc. still "just messages"? I wouldn't think any of those as messages that a basic message-only client would have. I guess that's the distinction I was after - was the person I replied to talking about all the complexity of a basic message-only client, or were they talking about the complexity of all the stuff beyond that.

dangoor 5y ago

I've seen this so often. Almost every time something about Khan Academy's technology makes it to the front page here, someone brings up some form of this complaint. It got to the point at which I wrote a post [specifically to address why Khan Academy has so much code](https://www.kevindangoor.com/posts/why-khan-academy-has-so-much-code/ https://www.kevindangoor.com/posts/why-khan-academy-has-so-m...). There's just so much complexity involved in making reliable services that provide features used by a variety of types of users.

tofuahdude 5y ago

We were just having this discussion around the Postman fundraise - various people saying "its just a GUI around Curl!!!" and being all offended at the raise's price tag. There's so much more that goes into building an actual business.

jacobr1 5y ago
Also folks making similar comments are missing that funding is about the future of the product/business, not just scaling growth (though you do see with later stage funding). Something like Postman is a bet on enterprise tooling for APIs, both building and integrating with them. Looks like Postman has gone beyond their chrome extension, and leveraged that to add more a bunch more features. But even if all that was easy enough to build, the investment is really about the trend and the business ability to capitalize on the trend. VC investment is always more forward-looking than the current product state.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  For sure. Valuation of a VC raise !== technical complexity. Easy to conflate from an engineer's seat, I guess.
ozim 5y ago
Well yeah I could do Postman in the weekend. Really I hate Postman and I have it on my todo list. I also try not to use it unless someone sends me his Postman collection. Thing is, I could do that for myself and I would be the only user and I would never turn it into a company. Because what devs usually say they could do that product in the weekend - but usable only for themselves. While turning software package into successful product that a lot of people would use is totally different story. Just like playing piano for your friends on the weekend or guitar by the fire that takes maybe couple weeks of training. To become a pop-star well that is just different pair of shoes.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree. It's just that many times these comments are on threads about the fundraise itself. "Why is Postman worth $B when I could build that in a weekend?" is completely missing what it takes to build a business.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

One other thing he touched on in passing: people are assuming they'd know what to build from the start. Even in relatively trivial applications a lot of work goes into finding the right way to express what you're trying to build. I recently worked on a small app and spent 40 hours trying out different approaches to the user interface. The solution I went with could be coded up in about 2 hours, but I had to do 38 hours of work that eventually got thrown away before I arrived at it. This sort of thing happens all the time in professional software development. Sometimes it is a waste of time, e.g. people rewriting things in a new language/framework for negligible benefits, but a lot of it is a necessary part of developing a polished app.

slongfield 5y ago
“I didn't have time to write you a simple UI, so I wrote you a complicated one instead.” -- Mark Twain, paraphrased.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Blaise Pascal, translated and paraphrased. (Or at least as a lower-bound on its age anyway.) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- SilasX 5y ago
  Except today more often I see "Our devs put together a basically usable UI, then we ramped up and hired a full time UXer, and it sucks now."
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    I've seen that happen a thousand times, yes. (Slightly exaggerating, but still.) I guess we'll just have to wait until people get used to the idea that the Web is an interactive document format, not a replacement for the GUI. I'm hoping the modern SPA trends pass into the void like the Macromedia Flash UI trends did.

lhorie 5y ago

I don't see nearly as many people claiming Google could be built in a weekend, but I do see that sentiment a lot in threads about Uber. It's easy to think it's a simple app, but there was a great response from a former EM highlighting just why that isn't so[0]. > This reminds me of a common fallacy we see in unreliable systems, where people build the happy path with the idea that the happy path is the “real” work, and that error handling can be tacked on later. For reliable systems, error handling is more work than the happy path. Is there a name for this fallacy? I think this isn't merely a familiar anecdote, but something that points to the root of why armchair architects think things are easier than they actually are. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

spaetzleesser 5y ago
On the one hand I agree but on the other hand it’s really much easier to be a follower and avoid the mistakes the pioneers have made. I am pretty sure there are a ton of legacy things in the Uber platform that are obsolete now and you wouldn’t have to implement if you stated from scratch. But you would also probably run into the same issues that Uber took many years to solve and you probably also would need years. So many be the advantage of being second isn’t as much as thought initially. I often think SpaceX was able to move that quickly because they could learn from decades of experience of NASA and others what works and what doesn’t.
marcosdumay 5y ago
People make this observation about Uber mostly because they can replicate the thing in a few months (it's never a weekend). And proof of that is that many people did replicate Uber software in a few months, some times even with some commercial success. Differently from Google search, the hard thing about Uber is not the software. What makes a lot of sense, but leaves the question of what are all those people doing there, what the article answers, but the answer is not trivial in any way.

stevieb89 5y ago

Any chance you could add, that wide text is really hard to read body > *:not(pre) { max-width: 600px; margin-left: auto; display: block; margin-right: auto; } pre { max-width: 1200px; margin: 40px auto; background: #f6f6f6; padding: 16px; }

5cott0 5y ago
I could do that in a weekend.
iib 5y ago
There is a firefox extension that I use, called Stylus[1], that lets you add custom CSS to websites. The thing that helps most is that Stylus lets you browse other people's styles for website, and there are already themes for Dan Luu's website. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
meowzero 5y ago
Safari and Firefox has reader view. I'm not sure about Chrome or IE since I don't use those. I'm sure they'll have something similar.
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lucis 5y ago
First thing I did was hitting the shortcut for Safari's Reader. Would love to see that in other browsers.

abnry 5y ago

Sounds like the Pareto Principle at play: 80% of the product is created with 20% of the effort. It is getting the next 19%, then 0.9%, then 0.09%, and so on, that is the challenge.

elcritch 5y ago
That 0.9% then 0.09% are also where the real success comes from in many fields.
dvirsky 5y ago
Also sounds a bit like Dunning Kruger. It looks easy because people are ignorant of how hard the problem is. Many years ago I built a search engine for a very big discussion board website, which had hundreds of millions of messages. Keep in mind back then a powerful server had 2GB of RAM and a pretty slow CPU and HDD, so it had to be distributed across multiple shards to work fast enough, and there was no Elastic Search back then, so it really was hard work, plus getting the ranking and quality tuned was a huge effort. Of course when we launched it people responded with "I don't get what the big deal is, why can't you just run a SELECT WHERE LIKE query and get it over with over the weekend?". It was hurtful at first but then I realized how ignorant the person making such a statement is about the problem.

wpasc 5y ago

One could build a self driving prototype in a weekend of hacking (using the libraries, tooling, etc available) and train it. I think it's a perfect example of the weekend prototype vs production reality difference.

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pbreit 5y ago

"I could do that in a weekend" is obviously idiotic but why choose Google as the example (possibly the hardest piece of software to replicate)?

jldugger 5y ago
If you follow the citation trail: 0. Dan writes an article about marginal employment decisions, which cites 1. Alex Clemmer wrote (http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html http://blog.nullspace.io/building-search-engines.html) about building a search engine to compete with Google, who cites 2. John Peebles, who wrote (https://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-competition-now/ https://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-co...) about the urgent need for a viable competitor to Google, saying: > I wonder if we haven’t all been hypnotised by the complexity, much of which is marketing hype, and have missed the enormous opportunity that exists right in front of our noses. Does the next search engine have to be as big, involved in as many things, employ as many people, and fight on the same footing to be accomplish the goal of providing a counterpoint to Google? This article was upvoted fairly well on on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011472), though the top comments are all in agreement this is not a simple task. This zeitgeist, along with Dan's personal experience on the subject, is why he wrote the article using Google as the example.

pphysch 5y ago

> A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. Fully agree, and would extend to any social organization. One of the most important aspects of organizational efficiency is managing the signal/noise ratio of internal communications. We now have the ability to turn effective bureaucratic protocols into material reality with automated information systems. The organizations, whether private or public, that best tackle this problem will come out on top on the 21st century, regardless of ideology and historical advantage.

ozim 5y ago
That is why you want to have one pizza size teams. Those teams should also be as independent as possible. Unfortunately it takes quite a bit of orchestration on higher level of abstraction and having well organized management.

mtnGoat 5y ago

maybe part of the whole conversations is survivorship bias? id be interested to see data on the past positions and companies people on both sides of the argument have worked on. ie: if you have seen how teams of hundreds are justified, it makes sense. likewise, if you have only worked on small teams, its hard to understand what 100s of engineers would do. its been a few years but i knew of multiple alexa-100 sites that were all running on just two 4 core servers(this is back when alexa was a useful measure of size, mind you). managed essentially by the hosting company. so "scale" is not always directly linked to traffic, i would think complexity dictates the need for more engineers rather then size.

bern4444 5y ago

Fun article, but exceptionally difficult to read. I know some people like using plain ol html, but just a few lines of CSS would vastly improve the reading experience. I know its from 2016, but still. Eyes read best when content is a few hundred pixels long. Content should be centered etc. It's pretty terrible as it is

forgotmypw17 5y ago
One of the nice things about HTML/CSS is that there's such a thing as "user styles", which can apply on top (or instead of) the "author styles". Opera pioneered this interface, AFAIK, and even had one-click toggle buttons for both author and user styles (as well as images), but most of today's browsers don't make this functionality transparent and available. I suppose you could do via dev tools? For a simple change like what you're asking, perhaps even changing browser's font settings would suffice?
nmz 5y ago
get stylish then
MonkeyClub 5y ago
Yep it was pretty horrible, so I hit reader mode that narrowed everything down and increased the font size. I find it's quite a bother to have to do all the CSS necessary for good reflow on a number of devices, so I too just have everything just spill to the ends, and just do reader mode on devices. But I don't really know much CSS apart from the really basic stuff, and haven't ever sat down to see how it would be done.
- bern4444 5y ago
  Yeah, for a site like this, it could literally be just adding max-width: 700px; margin: 0 auto; This would make it look great on pretty much all screens.
  - bzbarsky 5y ago
    A 700px max-width would actually make it quite annoying to read for me (as a lot of content on the web is, unless I switch to reader mode)....

dblohm7 5y ago

This post describes the entire web browser peanut gallery in a nutshell.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago

Sometimes, though, you do need to scale back to a weekend prototype. Understanding what it takes to scale the system is good, but the analysis paralysis from imagining that every problem must have a Facebook-scale solution is silly too. I mean, those Volvo XC90s are damn slick, but somehow my local pizza place delivers hot tasty stuff on time in an old Fiat Seicento. I think the pizza quality would suffer if the owner invested in a more reliable and better car.

Havoc 5y ago

I suspect this is connected to the happy path coding phenomenon. The core issue probably IS that easy. But you need to cover all the edge cases reasonably well too to have a business and those you can’t necessarily see until you start coding

SilasX 5y ago

If you're going to make this criticism, I feel you also need to be capable of recognizing when such criticism actually is valid [1]. That is, under which circumstances would someone be justified in saying "okay this is not an optimal problem" (A famous example from the other direction was when Uber re-engineered a querying service to better fit the use case, where several HNers and a Medium article showed why their re-invented wheel was worse than an off-the-shelf solution that they just weren't using correctly [2].) If you can't satisfy that, then this feels like a fully-general rejection of any claim that an org has over-complicated a problem or has unnecessary bloat, and/or that no one can criticize until they've personally worked (for n months) at the org. Which itself would be hard to defend. [1] Based on my "Scylla-Charybdis"/Goldilocks Heuristic: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybdis-heuristic-if-more.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybd... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21537008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21537008

superjan 5y ago

One other thing is, many of you could write something like a mouse driver in a weekend. That is not enough for the business however. The UI needs to be Electron based for easy maintenance, and you need to add telemetry, because how else will you know if people actually use your product? So you need backend and API teams too for each platform.

aqualinux 5y ago

"Considering how much of Google's $500B market cap comes from search" Time flies