9 ms·
Fast (2019)
- Liron 5y agoI thought this was going to be about Stripe's investment in Fast Checkout
- xxpor 5y agoRelated to the bottom: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoRelated: Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments) Fast – Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844301 - Dec 2019 (2 comments) Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (3 comments)
- sandstrom 5y ago”JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days” A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work. (yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself) Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!
- oh_sigh 5y agoIt's only rushed if you think Brendan can see the future, and knows that there will be billions of hours of work done using the language he is creating. Apollo 8 had a ton of flaws in it as well. But for the most part it did the job that was intended for it. If the world decided to keep flying Apollo 8 for the next 30 years, I'm sure even more flaws would show up, but I wouldn't exactly blame the original designers.
- KerrAvon 5y agoApollo 8 wasn't the first Apollo mission. The number may be a clue! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oh_sigh 5y agoLikewise, Javascript wasn't the first attempt at embedding a scripting language into the browser (Netscape first tried to embed Java and Scheme).
- tylerhou 5y agoI think it's an exaggeration to say that design flaws in JavaScript are "horrible" and that they have caused billions of hours of work. Of course there are warts in the language (e.g. everything gets cast to a string) but similar design issues have plagued other languages as well. It's not like JavaScript is unique in providing footguns. And the language is operating in a different context than most other languages (prioritizing not breaking at all costs), so it is really hard to fix defects. That context would have been impossible to foresee.
- santiagobasulto 5y agoI agree. We all know that JS was not perfect (that's why we had to stick to "the good parts" for several years). But I think it was still elegant and concise and got the job done. Prototype based OOP, event-driven, etc were all very good decisions. And also, the argument that "made in 10 days and is horrible" is counter-factual. We don't know if we could have gotten a better language if they spent 1 year or 5 years. The achievement is impressive.
- dgb23 5y ago> JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year. I have a bit of a love have relationship with this one. It was inspired by two languages, Self and Scheme, that are both incredibly beautiful, was then made ugly to be familiar and since then introduced major churn and bloat that was never needed. --- Imagine a world where HTML, CSS and JS were all just a unified language, with sound, simple primitives at the bottom, extensibility (macros, schema...) built-in, and a well designed standard library. Think of how much more productive developers would be, the possible performance optimizations in browser engines, much simpler tooling, less arbitrary choices, less hacks and workarounds. We would have more time to create useful and beautiful things than solve problems we imposed on us ourselves.
- pphysch 5y agoI blame the various "Internet gold-rushes" for this. Dotcom bubble, Smartphone Globalization, SaaS Dark Ages (we are here). Too much money to be made to do things thoughtfully and sustainably.
- dimgl 5y ago> SaaS Dark Ages (we are here). People actually feel this way? I find web development and entrepreneurship to be as accessible and as fun as ever. So many amazing technologies within reach. I really enjoy web development now more than ever.
- pphysch 5y agoI think there is an obscene amount of intellectual & economic waste happening right now due to rent-seeking SaaS and draconian IP regulation, at least in the West. You know what would be really enjoyable? If there was a dominant culture of interoperability within hardware, social media and information-sharing. What "Web3" should have been about instead of appealing to / being co-opted by wealth-hoarding, destructive ideologies, and other crimes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mths 5y agoMakes me wonder how many days Linus was pondering Git before he "started" working on it.
- DC-3 5y agoGood point. As anyone who has written an essay before can attest, if you have it all in your head before you start writing it can flow out from your fingers remarkably quickly. If you're still piecing it together as you go along it will typically take an order of magnitude longer.
- dat_effing_guy 5y agoGit was "heavily influenced" by BitKeeper.
- marcosdumay 5y agoBetween he publicly deciding to abandon BitKeeper and making git there were a few months. I imagine he would start pondering it right away, even if only to get a feature list to look in a replacement.
- Mawr 5y agoSome clues are available in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 (Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git). There's nothing conclusive about the length of the pondering, but he does say the writing itself took two weeks: "I decided I can write something better than anything out there in two weeks. And I was right." [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/4XpnKHJAok8?t=736 https://youtu.be/4XpnKHJAok8?t=736
- Ken_At_EM 5y agoDoes anyone have evidence that Faddell's claim is genuine? I have no doubt the iPod "came together" that fast, but I recall reading about this and it seemed like the building blocks were in development for years prior.
- wmf 5y agoMP3 players certainly existed so the idea of the iPod wasn't new. All the chips were off the shelf, the Pixo OS already existed, and Apple already had iTunes. The timeline has been verified by multiple people who were there but maybe Fadell already had the idea worked out before he was hired.
- lordofmoria 5y agoIt’s interesting how many of these happened during WWII. The fact that the Pentagon was built in under 500 days is astounding, if you’ve ever walked through the place. True urgency is really such a key predictor to things getting done impossibly fast, and our brains are great at detecting manufactured urgency.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI wonder how USA would fare in the face of a real war on the scale of WWII or bigger. For once, the government would need a real jolt, a voice of a leader, to send a spine chilling message down to every corner of the gov to stand up and get up. This seems impossible in the day of social media and the internet. Second, the financing machinery of the government would need to be completely replaced with something temporary the 1000x size of DARPA to get things going. Most people don’t know but the marginal tax rate during WWII and well into 1970’s was insanely high, at one point 91%. Reagan reduced marginal taxes from 70% to 28% by the end of his term. Laws would be slashed or dismantled. Bureaucracy would see the face of reality it has never seen. Then, the will of the people. Which I feel the most optimistic about. Humans are pretty good at getting together in a war like urgency. Counter point is COVID, but I can imagine every person to be onboard if a nuclear bomb was detonated in New York. It would be a strangely fascinating thing to witness, as much as I wish no war to ever happen.
- paxys 5y ago> San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was delayed to 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 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. A similar example – the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years in the 1930s at a (inflation adjusted) cost of $500M, ahead of schedule and 10% under budget. A project to install suicide nets below the bridge started in 2008 and is still ongoing after multiple delays, with a total projected cost of $211M.
- planetsprite 5y agowhy does this happen? Our technology is magnitudes more advanced, we have better preexisting infrastructure, materials, measuring equipment, yet the nation with the world's most powerful economy doesn't hold a candle to it's past achievements.
- ummonk 5y agoInflation adjustment takes into account the advancements though. The comparison would look a little better if we adjusted for median hourly wages instead of adjusting for inflation.
- pixl97 5y agoBecause it's not a technology problem. In general it's a political and regulatory problem. There's a term for this, but I cant think of it at the moment.
- paxys 5y agoBecause we have spent decades retooling our entire economy to send manufacturing and heavy industry to cheaper countries. Get an entire Chinese construction crew to come build a bridge in San Francisco under their own labor/safety/environmental laws and they will show you that early-mid 1900s efficiency.
- renw0rp 5y agoWhat is needed to make energy transformation happen on such an impressive timeline rather than taking 30 more years?
- syassami 5y agohttps://en.byd.com/news/how-an-electric-vehicle-company-became-the-worlds-largest-mask-manufacturer/ https://en.byd.com/news/how-an-electric-vehicle-company-beca... Add to the list pc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kaycebasques 5y agoJust a data point. Disneyland cost $17M, equivalent of $133M in 2020 dollars.
- bluedino 5y agoThe guys at ID cloned the first level of Super Mario 3 overnight (on a PC)
- reso 5y agoCollison's theories page nudges the reader to look at "red tape" as an explanation for why things go slower these days, but I think there are hidden variables behind a lot of these which are simpler explanations. First is the price of labour. Most countries have gotten wealthier over the 20th century, America is not full of desperate people willing to work 16 hour days in dangerous construction jobs any more. The Empire State Building, as an example, required 14 human sacrifices to build in 400 days (and likely many more injuries). I hazard to guess the average 80 story building today is built with much fewer deaths. Second is state or military intervention. Apollo, the Pentagon, and the Berlin Airlift are all projects of the US military at the height of their influence. Shenzen's fast growth is certainly some Chinese planning department's work. It isn't surprisng to me that motivated non-democratic institutions can make big things happen quickly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KerrAvon 5y agoPedantry of the day: Apollo was the US government, but NASA never was and still is not military. Otherwise, spot on.
- stretchwithme 5y agoNo, but Apollo was part of a competition with a nuclear enemy that got to space first.
- KerrAvon 5y agoDo read carefully, sir.
- pc 5y agoI genuinely don't know why there are fewer instances today, and the question at the bottom is literal rather than rhetorical. (I don't even know whether there are fewer instances today -- maybe they're just happening in less legible domains, or something.) That said, I'm somewhat skeptical of the safety argument, which I often hear. For example, 60 workers were apparently killed during the construction of the World Trade Center[0] -- 4x more deaths than occurred during the construction of the Empire State Building. Nor is it a priori clear to me that safety and speed would necessarily be in opposition -- maybe better planning causes both more safety and more speed, for example. I'd certainly be interested in a more comprehensive investigation of this question. I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places? I do believe that state/military intervention clearly plays some role in a few, but there are certainly plenty of examples of remarkably slow military projects, and many of the projects on the page have nothing to do with the military. (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Boeing 747, NYC Subway.) So, I haven't found a satisfying explanation, and I'd be curious to read other analyses or diagnoses. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trade_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trad...
- mhh__ 5y agoTo a lesser extent pretty much every formula 1 car can go into these types of lists. A huge amount of engineering and art goes into them and it better be ready a 9AM in the pre-season test.
- chrisbrandow 5y agoP-51 mustang was delivered from scratch to England in just 102 days.
- eek2121 5y agoI LOVE this.
- mcemilg 5y agoIt is nonsense to compare the timeline of those products in days. I think three main things are missing, budget, know-how, and how many people are involved which multiplies the working days.