15 ms·

Fast

905 points by valtism 3y ago

valtism 3y ago
> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast
- entrepy123 3y ago
  Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads like, to me. So I'm adding this comment, for clarification. (Heck, the story I read about the first iPod and its HDD was probably originally linked from HN!)
  - norir 3y ago
    Wow, I did not know that story but it makes so much sense that the ipod was an almost inevitable development from the mini hdd. Goes to show how important it is to have people who can see the big picture and find the right people to execute.
    - danudey 3y ago
      It's worth noting that hard-drive based MP3 players did exist at the time, but they had several drawbacks that Apple found solutions for. First, they used physically larger 2.5" hard drives, making them larger and heavier. The small 1.8" HDD that the iPod used allowed it to be the size of a deck of cards, meaning it was much more portable. Secondly, hard drives consume a large amount of power to operate, so HDD-based players had terrible battery life because it was always spinning up the disk to get the next song. The iPod solved this by just adding 32 MB of RAM as a cache, so when you started an album the system would just read in the next 15 minutes (or so? that's about 30 MB at 160 kbit) of songs and then power down the HDD until the cache was running out or the user changed albums/playlists/tracks. It was also fast; using firewire to transfer songs restricted it to Mac users at first, but it meant that you could rip a new CD and put it on your iPod in a short amount of time, or, later, buy an album on iTunes and have it ready for your jog in ten minutes. It's funny to think how many people saw the iPod as an obvious immediate failure. As the infamous Slashdot post[0] said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." [0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
  - yellow_lead 3y ago
    Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work. i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years of prior research.
    - samtho 3y ago
      We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. I don’t see the same criticism for anything else that required prior human knowledge and achievement.
      - selcuka 3y ago
        "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan
  - gizmo 3y ago
    They had to design the software, the UX including the touch wheel, the mac integration and syncing, and everything relating to the design, materials, and sourcing of the components. It’s astonishing that they got it done in less than a year. (And I highly recommend Fadell’s book)
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Everything around the software would have been quick -- both the iPod UX and syncing were extremely simple back then. The iPod didn't really have a GUI, it was just six lines of text and a header line. It's the manufacturing speed that astonishes me -- the sourcing as you say, the supply chains and the factory capacity. I'm also very curious about the manufacture of the scroll wheel -- was that something really new that had to be figured out (it seemed/felt like it) or was it a trivial combination of existing components?
      - ricardobeat 3y ago
        Most inventions become trivial right after they are released. Creation, research, design are the hard parts, and you cannot judge those by the complexity of the final product.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      The iPod's OS was bought off the shelf. All of the music library functionality and a lot of the sync functionality already existed within SoundJa...iTunes. That's not to knock the speed of the iPod's development but it wasn't built totally from scratch. Apple also wasn't a garage startup, peeling some hardware engineers off for the iPod wasn't going to cripple the iMac's continued development.
    - rglover 3y ago
      The UX of the touch wheel was wholesale ripped off of Dieter Rams. I love Jony Ive but he (technically, the rumor is it was Phil Schiller) ganked/remixed that one: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/141242/what-was-the-inspiration-and-logic-behind-the-ipod-click-wheel-and-why-did-it-d https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/141242/what-was-the-i...
  - pedalpete 3y ago
    Also, don't forget that Tony Fadell had been built many MP3 players before, so for him it was more like an iteration than starting from scratch.
  - wmf 3y ago
    We got samples of the Toshiba 1.8" drive at IBM Research around August 2001 for the Super Dense Server prototype and I remember thinking how neat they were and wondering what else they could be used for.
- m463 3y ago
  I think they leveraged portalplayer and synaptics to put everything together. Still quick to market.
mamonster 3y ago
Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.
- cscheid 3y ago
  One thing that saved an estimated couple of million lives comes to mind.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside the decade. A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that. ----------- EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing, there's not much point in doing anything quickly. We've got stupendously stupid ideas like MoviePass getting deployed, and bankrupted, within months. Does that count? Presumably we want something that wasn't "just" fast, but also impressive / accomplished something real.
    - SamReidHughes 3y ago
      It was announced in November 2020.
    - jyxent 3y ago
      I guess it depends what endpoint you are talking about. The actual vaccine was pretty quick, it was the phases of testing that took longer: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520074867/d884510dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520...
      - rzzzt 3y ago
        Also the starting point. IIRC the technology already existed for SARS-CoV-1, but it went on a hiatus before producing a vaccine became necessary.
yankput 3y ago
What about Duke Nukem Forever?
draw_down 3y ago
I have to admit this one does make me grumble a bit. Greenfields is fast! You don’t have to keep the old thing going or take care to avoid disturbing it because there is no old thing! It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.
dang 3y ago
Related: Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments) 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)
oli5679 3y ago
I was really interested that the current Haggia Sophia structure was built in less than 6 years. I am used to construction times of cathedrals and other religious buildings spanning multiple generations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia
nine_zeros 3y ago
Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal. But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate. Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.
- coldcache 3y ago
  Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-middle-manager-hell https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-...
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    This post is incredibly accurate.
lemming 3y ago
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.
  - soggybutter 3y ago
    Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers
    - thecopy 3y ago
      I don't really mind that "a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested" into JS. It works great for me and my team and we are hugely productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a lot of value.
      - nitwit005 3y ago
        You don't mind, because someone else spent the money. The people signing the checks probably did care.
      - Mystery-Machine 3y ago
        It works great for you because you haven't seen better. Which other languages do you have more than 1 year of professional experience with? May I answer that for you? None. Just because you've just discovered a knife, doesn't mean it's the best tool to eat the soup with.
    - djbusby 3y ago
cornfutes 3y ago
> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  If only we were using Java Applets or Flash ActionScript or Silverlight, all our problems would be solved.
  - cornfutes 3y ago
    Actually, Runescape one of the most successful MMOs ever was a Java applet. Java is much more effective at complex object-oriented modeling and an MMO is a canonical example of where OOP not only shines but is necessary. Before ES6, there were half a dozen styles of approximating classes in JavaScript, the main one being with closure-returning-functions. Even utilizing these clever tricks to make JavaScript a decent language, the runtime would not have been powerful enough to run a game like Runescape. For a very long time, JavaScript was primitive in even managing media. Flash allowed Youtube to bridge the gap of playing videos in the browser. JavaScript-based web apps to stream music didn't become prominent until the 2010s, a decade and half after JavaScript was invented. Yahoo music, the prominent web-based music player in the 2000s, used a Flash plugin. So Indeed, Flash and Java did some solve a lot of problems that JavaScript did not. JavaScript won out because it was browser-native and now WebAssembly is gaining traction because JavaScript is still not that great. TypeScript is solid, but that took years of development and Microsoft resources to launch.
    - terribleperson 3y ago
      Runescape was crazy for the time (pre-WoW). A full-featured MMO you could play on a wide variety of computers without downloading or installing anything. All you needed was Java.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
babelfish 3y ago
I recently read the book “How Big Things Get Done”, about planning megaprojects successfully, which incidentally touched on a lot of the projects here. While I mostly found the book to be worthless thought leadership, the authors thesis on why these projects were able to succeed is that they were able to “think slow, build fast”.
boringg 3y ago
Manhattan project is the epitome of fast.
zetazzed 3y ago
One of the examples here is the Berlin airlift. If you are interested in the Berlin airlift, I'd really recommend the book "Checkmate Berlin" (Giles Milton). It starts in 1945 and covers the whole arc of the Soviet-Western relationship. You could argue that it is rather rah-rah anti-Soviet, but I read it in mid-2022 and was down for that. Really fun read with great spy and political stories.
crop_rotation 3y ago
Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy). * Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work. * Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable. * Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power). * The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  May I ask what are these metrics
- sealeck 3y ago
  Having worked at some startups I think there are a lot of problems too - too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control - because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups reach. - a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup
jljljl 3y ago
For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure project. Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to deal with, or cut corners on planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal with. https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid-transit-history-timeline/ https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid... Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began. Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors. The utility placement also made the BRT’s center-lane design a challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews. Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design — deemed the best for traffic flow.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  I can't comment on the bus line example, but the New York Times had a great write-up (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...) about subway building in New York. At least in New York there's a lot more going on than the reasons you point out. Particularly damning is the fact that Paris is successfully building subways at a 10th of the cost in far less time despite having even more constraints around digging.
  - jljljl 3y ago
    Yeah, this is a much better example and reflection of how weakened institutions and process can drive up costs.
  - porphyra 3y ago
    The recent additions to the Rome Metro were also built faster and cheaper compared to, say, the Central Subway in San Francisco, despite all the archaeological artifacts in Rome slowing down the digging.
coldcache 3y ago
For a recent infrastructure example, I would point to Beijing's high speed rail expansion. Around 24k miles constructed since 2008, and around ~12k in five years [1]. [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  I was told Delhi built 400 km of subway in the past 20 years. Not shabby.
  - randoglando 3y ago
    A lot of Indian cities have built a subway in the past 20 years. Compared to the US you can see what can be done when it's needed.
moffkalast 3y ago
> To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas. Seems legit.
egonschiele 3y ago
Fun fact on the Eiffel Tower: during the Chicago World's Fair, they wanted to build something that would rival the Eiffel Tower. After a LOT of proposals, and work, and time, they came up with... the Ferris wheel.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  They're making hay of that in London and Dubai ... (London Eye, for a couple of decades, Ain Dubai, last year I think)
nodesocket 3y ago
The iconic patrol boat river[1] used in Vietnam took just seven days to create a prototype from the civilian boat maker Hatteras Yachts. It used Jacuzzi jets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River
firebirdn99 3y ago
Moving fast, means breaking things. With more scale, more danger.
nickdothutton 3y ago
In the UK we have been debating building 1 more runway at 1 airport for about 50 years and still it’s not settled. Meanwhile China has built several entire islands in the ocean and put airports on them.
anonymousiam 3y ago
This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012 https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  > environmental studies There's your answer. It's one of the biggest reasons why it's so hard to build infrastructure and housing, even for green projects like wind farms.
  - stocknoob 3y ago
    I wonder if the environmental studies account for the impact of using cars and planes for 15 years instead of trains.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It may delight you to know, then, that they've started building, and in fact they've built a bunch of stuff for it already! As of March 2023, 50 miles of guideway are complete, 39 are underway; 41 structures are complete, and 29 are underway¹. Some of the completed structures include: - The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design². - The Hanford Viaduct, a 3,300-foot-long bridge over the Kings River and State Route 43 in Kings County, which is the longest structure in Construction Package 2-3²⁴. - The San Joaquin River Viaduct, a 4,700-foot-long bridge over the San Joaquin River and North Avenue in Fresno County, which includes a pergola structure to allow future trains to cross over the existing BNSF Railway tracks²³. - The Tuolumne Street Bridge, a two-way bridge that spans the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and future high-speed rail tracks in downtown Fresno²³. - The Fresno Trench and State Route 180 Passageway, a two-mile-long trench that will carry high-speed trains under several streets in Fresno, including State Route 180²³. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_Hig.... [2] https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project-update-report/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project.... [3] https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-rail-releases-spring-2023-construction-update/ https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-rail-.... [4] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article275284756.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article...
dblohm7 3y ago
Apollo 8 is not a very good example; it's not like the hardware pipeline wasn't well on its way to be ready to go by the time the decision was made. Don't get me wrong, Apollo 8 was an extremely risky and critical part of the program, but it's not like somebody conjured everything up from thin air in 134 days.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  None of these projects were created from dust.
- Archelaos 3y ago
  I think you have a point here. Our standard approach of looking at the duration of a project too often neglects the effort of preparation.
pyrale 3y ago
I don't deny the achievements, but this article is the quintessential illustration of survivorship bias.
- numbsafari 3y ago
  It’s also a great example of “headlines without reading the article”. There’s no discussion of consequences, and some of the items don’t really reflect how much work had to go on after the initial effort to make things what they are today (JS and git being prime examples).
  - danudey 3y ago
    My son built a fort out of couch cushions in just six minutes, and yet the city can't approve a condo tower project without months or years of public consultations and impact assessments? Ridiculous!
andrewstuart 3y ago
When rich people and rich companies tell you to do things fast.
nashashmi 3y ago
By not overthinking, they come up with very quick and dirty Designs, and leave the rest for future generations to fix. This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.
- kristianp 3y ago
  Kind of MVPs compared to the overspecifed-gold plated modern projects.
carabiner 3y ago
Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a18277/beijing-overpass-replaced-in-less-than-two-days/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a.... General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that. As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
- dtgriscom 3y ago
  > You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done. This is a classic "pros and cons" situation. I'm not sure the ability for the authorities to "get shit done" would balance the downsides, e.g.: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/why-hong-kong-is-criminalising-a-song https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/...
  - chongli 3y ago
    There has to be a middle ground. The US did some amazing things without autocracy, such as the public works projects under the New Deal [1] [2] [3], the Marshall Plan [4] for helping to rebuild Europe, the Federal-Aid Highway Act [5] to build 41,000 miles of Interstate highways. I don't know why things are so difficult now. There's got to be some detailed studies into this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
bovermyer 3y ago
Fast always has a price. > Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
GuB-42 3y ago
The website checks out. Less than 20kB (10kB with compression), loads instantly.
- davidhaymond 3y ago
  I was specifically looking for this comment. Sites like these are a breath of fresh air in the world of bloated SPAs.
briangle 3y ago
This reminds me of when I interviewed at Stripe, a few years back. It was a surreal experience. We were in a small conference room. I sat at the table on one side, Patrick and Edwin sat on the other side. They asked me questions, I answered them. It was a good discussion. Then there was a brief pause in the conversation. Suddenly, Patrick let off the most absurdly loud fart. I chuckled in surprise. Patrick and Edwin stared back at me, in a stony silence, neither of them making any acknowledgement of Patrick's colonic eruption. I forced myself to adopt a similarly straight face. As the smell of it filled the room and my nostrils, I could only assume this was a power move, intended to dominate. I held my nerve, and continued the interview. Unfortunately, I wasn't offered the job. Now I wonder if maybe it was a cue to speak up and point out the loud, smelly elephant in the room. I suppose I'll never know. Has anyone else here who's interviewed at Stripe had a similar experience? To this day, I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated part of the hiring process.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  I’m going to guess dude just needed to let go and didn’t like that you laughed about it. Maybe they just openly rip in the office and are used to it. Maybe you didn’t get hired for totally unrelated reasons. We’ll never know..
  - ftxbro 3y ago
    Culture fit. They expected the candidate to rip ass as well showing he was a team player.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > "I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated" I mean if it was planned then that's some impressive intestinal agency. But maybe with his diet he always got it chambered at that time of day so he can plan around it.
- joshxyz 3y ago
  what the fuck am i reading that is fucking hilarious
antipaul 3y ago
> On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later But they were planning to get to that destination, with the same Apollo program, for years before that... This example seems a bit of a stretch, which makes me hesitate on the other examples. And another source of hesitation comes from this parallel: - During Covid, it was said that China built a new hospital in like 8 days, and it was claimed "we can't do that" etc - But then we created a temporary 1000-bed hospital in 7 days: "It was much quicker than we usually design, engineer and construct a project... We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week with our vertical team to spec out the sites [and] award contracts, and then began work immediately after the contracts were awarded." [1] [1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2133514/corps-of-engineers-converts-nycs-javits-center-into-hospital https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/21...
shaftoe444 3y ago
Given how impossible it is to build anything here anymore the spped in which the Victorians built the railway network in the UK amazes me. 6,000 miles of track were built in 1846-1848 alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
antipaul 3y ago
As another comment points out, what about "preparation" time? I guess the timelines depend on when you start the clock. Does anyone have a credible example of going fast, and where it really was a "zero to one" kind of process?
mordae 3y ago
Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane. I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with the pandemic and had other matters to addend to" and "doing job of another organization would be a violation of budget discipline". And then the literal guys responsible for auditing them for such violations just broke the rules and did the right and necessary thing. In the end, it boils down to a simple rule. If you live in a society where rules outweight the public good and you can get into trouble for doing the right thing the "wrong way", progress grinds to a halt.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  Ordinary employees can't choose to break the rules, the boss can, that's ... how everything works?
  - ecuaflo 3y ago
    Everyone working in a functional org needs the autonomy and sense of ownership to make calls when needed.
  - perryizgr8 3y ago
    In a well-functioning org, every employee should be empowered to not let rules impede progress.
    - WJW 3y ago
      It's not a problem when "progress" is easily determined. But regulations are famously "written in blood", created after some employee was a little bit too empowered and caused an accident. For example, I'm very happy that employees of the nuclear power plant approval committee don't ignore safety rules even if it does impede the progress of the building process.
- 3y ago
mnot 3y ago
HTTP/2 was standardized in two years and 16 days. That’s fast for standards :)
ftxbro 3y ago
What if they add some fast ones that were fast but that didn't work out so great, like Theranos or the submarine guys. Also Apollo 8 is in there but I mean a relatively large percent of astronauts died compared to like your company's new agile plan how many agile blackbelts do you expect to literally decease because of shortcuts taken in the implementation of their workplace environment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
I'd like to add the 2017 Atlanta I-85 bridge collapse and rebuild to this list. The entire rebuild took only 45 days! https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-collapse-and-rebuild https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...
antipaul 3y ago
Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site: https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-major-projects/ https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-majo... Excerpt: > So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or stagnation in general for major projects.
whoisthemachine 3y ago
We like to focus on how long it takes governments to build things these days (especially US government(s)), but these discussions remind me of the Washington Monument, which was under construction for 36+ years depending on how you count it! And this was in the 1850's, when this type of construction was certainly feasible. As may sound familiar today, construction moved haltingly due to lack of funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument
Avalaxy 3y ago
Things still happen fast. The twitter blue checkmark has been developed in a weekend ;)
ignoramous 3y ago
One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees. OpenAI's top executives were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4. And putting something out quickly. So they decided to update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3 which came out in 2020. (snipped) Ref: https://archive.is/d6dI2 https://archive.is/d6dI2 / https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai...
interroboink 3y ago
One semi-common thread to these is how much of the invisible groundwork had already been laid, in order to execute so quickly. I wonder how much is "fast" and how much is "right time, right place" and/or "right preparation." I'm reminded of Alexander the Great, and his massive conquests within a short lifetime. But my understanding is that his father Philip II paved the way for him, building a lot of the political and military structure that he would leverage. But people don't remember the accomplishments of Philip II nearly as much as Alexander.
hiatus 3y ago
The Fukuyama interview is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/news/interview-francis-fukuyama https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpol...
throwaway892238 3y ago
Some things are pretty fast considering what they accomplished. The Lockheed A-12 was built 2 years after its designs were approved, with 2 years before that of planning. Still the fastest air-breathing airplane in existence. Its first flight was in 1962. In March 1940, John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. August 6, 1945, the first atomic nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. During the Great Depression, in 1931, the largest dam in the world, the Hoover Dam, was built. At the time, no such large-scale uses of concrete had been proven, and it was unknown how construction could be finished in a way that would cure the concrete in time and prevent it from deteriorating. Construction was completed in 1936, over two years ahead of schedule. Testing in 1995 concluded that the dam's concrete has gotten stronger over the years.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  The Hoover dam getting stronger is just luck, it could have just as well deteriorated if they didn't know it would get stronger.
richdougherty 3y ago
A classic 20 year old article on the principle of Stop Energy. "Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception" https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEnergyByDaveWiner.html?ref=buffer.com https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEne...
BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? Probably because the author either can't count or doesn't know what disproportionate means. 1/3 of the entries on the list going back to 1889 happened after 1970 (which is about 1/3 of the timespan). That sounds very proportionate. Why no questions about the long gap after the Eiffel Tower? The most disproportionate things about the list are World War II and the fact that the list is extremely arbitrary.
revskill 3y ago
Any proof of first real Apollo Moon landing ?
nunez 3y ago
The pattern amongst them? It's a lot easier to move fast with greenfield projects. The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!
jasmer 3y ago
[dead]
rocgf 3y 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 find this really easy to believe, actually.
fwlr 3y ago
“ The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? ” If you Google image search “growth of environmental regulation”, there is a huge increase in the slope of those graphs right around 1960-1970. A simple explanation might be that environmental regulation strangled the speed of physical infrastructure building. A more complex explanation might be that environmental regulation, along with other regulation, experienced this massive growth as a symptom of massive growth in management, consulting, and bureaucracy employment - and it is this proliferation of managers and consultants and bureaucrats that have slowed things down. I do like the second explanation more. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-did-all-the-workers-go-60-years-of-economic-change-in-1-graph/252018/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...) tells me that “professional and business services”, their catchall for managers and consultants, grew from 2.3% of GDP in 1947 to 12.1% of GDP in 2009. This sextupling of management work could very well correspond to a sextupling of the length (in time) of projects. A mile of road takes just as much asphalt whether you build it in one month or six months, but it takes ~six times as much management when it takes six months.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
The Covid "vaccine" one is a little too fast, almost so fast it's suspicious ...

905 points by valtism 3y ago

> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast

entrepy123 3y ago
Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads like, to me. So I'm adding this comment, for clarification. (Heck, the story I read about the first iPod and its HDD was probably originally linked from HN!)
- norir 3y ago
  Wow, I did not know that story but it makes so much sense that the ipod was an almost inevitable development from the mini hdd. Goes to show how important it is to have people who can see the big picture and find the right people to execute.
  - danudey 3y ago
    It's worth noting that hard-drive based MP3 players did exist at the time, but they had several drawbacks that Apple found solutions for. First, they used physically larger 2.5" hard drives, making them larger and heavier. The small 1.8" HDD that the iPod used allowed it to be the size of a deck of cards, meaning it was much more portable. Secondly, hard drives consume a large amount of power to operate, so HDD-based players had terrible battery life because it was always spinning up the disk to get the next song. The iPod solved this by just adding 32 MB of RAM as a cache, so when you started an album the system would just read in the next 15 minutes (or so? that's about 30 MB at 160 kbit) of songs and then power down the HDD until the cache was running out or the user changed albums/playlists/tracks. It was also fast; using firewire to transfer songs restricted it to Mac users at first, but it meant that you could rip a new CD and put it on your iPod in a short amount of time, or, later, buy an album on iTunes and have it ready for your jog in ten minutes. It's funny to think how many people saw the iPod as an obvious immediate failure. As the infamous Slashdot post[0] said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." [0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work. i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years of prior research.
  - samtho 3y ago
    We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. I don’t see the same criticism for anything else that required prior human knowledge and achievement.
    - selcuka 3y ago
      "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan
- gizmo 3y ago
  They had to design the software, the UX including the touch wheel, the mac integration and syncing, and everything relating to the design, materials, and sourcing of the components. It’s astonishing that they got it done in less than a year. (And I highly recommend Fadell’s book)
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Everything around the software would have been quick -- both the iPod UX and syncing were extremely simple back then. The iPod didn't really have a GUI, it was just six lines of text and a header line. It's the manufacturing speed that astonishes me -- the sourcing as you say, the supply chains and the factory capacity. I'm also very curious about the manufacture of the scroll wheel -- was that something really new that had to be figured out (it seemed/felt like it) or was it a trivial combination of existing components?
    - ricardobeat 3y ago
      Most inventions become trivial right after they are released. Creation, research, design are the hard parts, and you cannot judge those by the complexity of the final product.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    The iPod's OS was bought off the shelf. All of the music library functionality and a lot of the sync functionality already existed within SoundJa...iTunes. That's not to knock the speed of the iPod's development but it wasn't built totally from scratch. Apple also wasn't a garage startup, peeling some hardware engineers off for the iPod wasn't going to cripple the iMac's continued development.
  - rglover 3y ago
    The UX of the touch wheel was wholesale ripped off of Dieter Rams. I love Jony Ive but he (technically, the rumor is it was Phil Schiller) ganked/remixed that one: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/141242/what-was-the-inspiration-and-logic-behind-the-ipod-click-wheel-and-why-did-it-d https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/141242/what-was-the-i...
- pedalpete 3y ago
  Also, don't forget that Tony Fadell had been built many MP3 players before, so for him it was more like an iteration than starting from scratch.
- wmf 3y ago
  We got samples of the Toshiba 1.8" drive at IBM Research around August 2001 for the Super Dense Server prototype and I remember thinking how neat they were and wondering what else they could be used for.
m463 3y ago
I think they leveraged portalplayer and synaptics to put everything together. Still quick to market.

mamonster 3y ago

Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.

cscheid 3y ago
One thing that saved an estimated couple of million lives comes to mind.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside the decade. A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that. ----------- EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing, there's not much point in doing anything quickly. We've got stupendously stupid ideas like MoviePass getting deployed, and bankrupted, within months. Does that count? Presumably we want something that wasn't "just" fast, but also impressive / accomplished something real.
  - SamReidHughes 3y ago
    It was announced in November 2020.
  - jyxent 3y ago
    I guess it depends what endpoint you are talking about. The actual vaccine was pretty quick, it was the phases of testing that took longer: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520074867/d884510dex991.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312520...
    - rzzzt 3y ago
      Also the starting point. IIRC the technology already existed for SARS-CoV-1, but it went on a hiatus before producing a vaccine became necessary.

yankput 3y ago

What about Duke Nukem Forever?

draw_down 3y ago

I have to admit this one does make me grumble a bit. Greenfields is fast! You don’t have to keep the old thing going or take care to avoid disturbing it because there is no old thing! It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.

dang 3y ago

Related: Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments) 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)

oli5679 3y ago

I was really interested that the current Haggia Sophia structure was built in less than 6 years. I am used to construction times of cathedrals and other religious buildings spanning multiple generations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

nine_zeros 3y ago

Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal. But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate. Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.

coldcache 3y ago
Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-middle-manager-hell https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-...
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  This post is incredibly accurate.

lemming 3y ago

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.

skrebbel 3y ago
This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.
- soggybutter 3y ago
  Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers
  - thecopy 3y ago
    I don't really mind that "a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested" into JS. It works great for me and my team and we are hugely productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a lot of value.
    - nitwit005 3y ago
      You don't mind, because someone else spent the money. The people signing the checks probably did care.
    - Mystery-Machine 3y ago
      It works great for you because you haven't seen better. Which other languages do you have more than 1 year of professional experience with? May I answer that for you? None. Just because you've just discovered a knife, doesn't mean it's the best tool to eat the soup with.
  - djbusby 3y ago

cornfutes 3y ago

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.

chrisco255 3y ago
If only we were using Java Applets or Flash ActionScript or Silverlight, all our problems would be solved.
- cornfutes 3y ago
  Actually, Runescape one of the most successful MMOs ever was a Java applet. Java is much more effective at complex object-oriented modeling and an MMO is a canonical example of where OOP not only shines but is necessary. Before ES6, there were half a dozen styles of approximating classes in JavaScript, the main one being with closure-returning-functions. Even utilizing these clever tricks to make JavaScript a decent language, the runtime would not have been powerful enough to run a game like Runescape. For a very long time, JavaScript was primitive in even managing media. Flash allowed Youtube to bridge the gap of playing videos in the browser. JavaScript-based web apps to stream music didn't become prominent until the 2010s, a decade and half after JavaScript was invented. Yahoo music, the prominent web-based music player in the 2000s, used a Flash plugin. So Indeed, Flash and Java did some solve a lot of problems that JavaScript did not. JavaScript won out because it was browser-native and now WebAssembly is gaining traction because JavaScript is still not that great. TypeScript is solid, but that took years of development and Microsoft resources to launch.
  - terribleperson 3y ago
    Runescape was crazy for the time (pre-WoW). A full-featured MMO you could play on a wide variety of computers without downloading or installing anything. All you needed was Java.
    - chrisco255 3y ago

babelfish 3y ago

I recently read the book “How Big Things Get Done”, about planning megaprojects successfully, which incidentally touched on a lot of the projects here. While I mostly found the book to be worthless thought leadership, the authors thesis on why these projects were able to succeed is that they were able to “think slow, build fast”.

boringg 3y ago

Manhattan project is the epitome of fast.

zetazzed 3y ago

One of the examples here is the Berlin airlift. If you are interested in the Berlin airlift, I'd really recommend the book "Checkmate Berlin" (Giles Milton). It starts in 1945 and covers the whole arc of the Soviet-Western relationship. You could argue that it is rather rah-rah anti-Soviet, but I read it in mid-2022 and was down for that. Really fun read with great spy and political stories.

crop_rotation 3y ago

Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy). * Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work. * Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable. * Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power). * The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.

moneywoes 3y ago
May I ask what are these metrics
sealeck 3y ago
Having worked at some startups I think there are a lot of problems too - too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control - because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups reach. - a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup

jljljl 3y ago

For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure project. Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to deal with, or cut corners on planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal with. https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid-transit-history-timeline/ https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid... Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began. Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors. The utility placement also made the BRT’s center-lane design a challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews. Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design — deemed the best for traffic flow.

seti0Cha 3y ago
I can't comment on the bus line example, but the New York Times had a great write-up (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...) about subway building in New York. At least in New York there's a lot more going on than the reasons you point out. Particularly damning is the fact that Paris is successfully building subways at a 10th of the cost in far less time despite having even more constraints around digging.
- jljljl 3y ago
  Yeah, this is a much better example and reflection of how weakened institutions and process can drive up costs.
- porphyra 3y ago
  The recent additions to the Rome Metro were also built faster and cheaper compared to, say, the Central Subway in San Francisco, despite all the archaeological artifacts in Rome slowing down the digging.

coldcache 3y ago

For a recent infrastructure example, I would point to Beijing's high speed rail expansion. Around 24k miles constructed since 2008, and around ~12k in five years [1]. [1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
I was told Delhi built 400 km of subway in the past 20 years. Not shabby.
- randoglando 3y ago
  A lot of Indian cities have built a subway in the past 20 years. Compared to the US you can see what can be done when it's needed.

moffkalast 3y ago

> To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas. Seems legit.

egonschiele 3y ago

Fun fact on the Eiffel Tower: during the Chicago World's Fair, they wanted to build something that would rival the Eiffel Tower. After a LOT of proposals, and work, and time, they came up with... the Ferris wheel.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
They're making hay of that in London and Dubai ... (London Eye, for a couple of decades, Ain Dubai, last year I think)

nodesocket 3y ago

The iconic patrol boat river[1] used in Vietnam took just seven days to create a prototype from the civilian boat maker Hatteras Yachts. It used Jacuzzi jets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrol_Boat,_River

firebirdn99 3y ago

Moving fast, means breaking things. With more scale, more danger.

nickdothutton 3y ago

In the UK we have been debating building 1 more runway at 1 airport for about 50 years and still it’s not settled. Meanwhile China has built several entire islands in the ocean and put airports on them.

anonymousiam 3y ago

This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012 https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012

jonny_eh 3y ago
> environmental studies There's your answer. It's one of the biggest reasons why it's so hard to build infrastructure and housing, even for green projects like wind farms.
- stocknoob 3y ago
  I wonder if the environmental studies account for the impact of using cars and planes for 15 years instead of trains.
fragmede 3y ago
It may delight you to know, then, that they've started building, and in fact they've built a bunch of stuff for it already! As of March 2023, 50 miles of guideway are complete, 39 are underway; 41 structures are complete, and 29 are underway¹. Some of the completed structures include: - The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design². - The Hanford Viaduct, a 3,300-foot-long bridge over the Kings River and State Route 43 in Kings County, which is the longest structure in Construction Package 2-3²⁴. - The San Joaquin River Viaduct, a 4,700-foot-long bridge over the San Joaquin River and North Avenue in Fresno County, which includes a pergola structure to allow future trains to cross over the existing BNSF Railway tracks²³. - The Tuolumne Street Bridge, a two-way bridge that spans the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and future high-speed rail tracks in downtown Fresno²³. - The Fresno Trench and State Route 180 Passageway, a two-mile-long trench that will carry high-speed trains under several streets in Fresno, including State Route 180²³. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_High-Speed_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_Hig.... [2] https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project-update-report/ https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project.... [3] https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-rail-releases-spring-2023-construction-update/ https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-rail-.... [4] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article275284756.html https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article...

dblohm7 3y ago

Apollo 8 is not a very good example; it's not like the hardware pipeline wasn't well on its way to be ready to go by the time the decision was made. Don't get me wrong, Apollo 8 was an extremely risky and critical part of the program, but it's not like somebody conjured everything up from thin air in 134 days.

jonny_eh 3y ago
None of these projects were created from dust.
Archelaos 3y ago
I think you have a point here. Our standard approach of looking at the duration of a project too often neglects the effort of preparation.

pyrale 3y ago

I don't deny the achievements, but this article is the quintessential illustration of survivorship bias.

numbsafari 3y ago
It’s also a great example of “headlines without reading the article”. There’s no discussion of consequences, and some of the items don’t really reflect how much work had to go on after the initial effort to make things what they are today (JS and git being prime examples).
- danudey 3y ago
  My son built a fort out of couch cushions in just six minutes, and yet the city can't approve a condo tower project without months or years of public consultations and impact assessments? Ridiculous!

andrewstuart 3y ago

When rich people and rich companies tell you to do things fast.

nashashmi 3y ago

By not overthinking, they come up with very quick and dirty Designs, and leave the rest for future generations to fix. This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.

kristianp 3y ago
Kind of MVPs compared to the overspecifed-gold plated modern projects.

carabiner 3y ago

Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a18277/beijing-overpass-replaced-in-less-than-two-days/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a.... General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that. As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.

dtgriscom 3y ago
> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done. This is a classic "pros and cons" situation. I'm not sure the ability for the authorities to "get shit done" would balance the downsides, e.g.: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/why-hong-kong-is-criminalising-a-song https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/...
- chongli 3y ago
  There has to be a middle ground. The US did some amazing things without autocracy, such as the public works projects under the New Deal [1] [2] [3], the Marshall Plan [4] for helping to rebuild Europe, the Federal-Aid Highway Act [5] to build 41,000 miles of Interstate highways. I don't know why things are so difficult now. There's got to be some detailed studies into this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

bovermyer 3y ago

Fast always has a price. > Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.

GuB-42 3y ago

The website checks out. Less than 20kB (10kB with compression), loads instantly.

davidhaymond 3y ago
I was specifically looking for this comment. Sites like these are a breath of fresh air in the world of bloated SPAs.

briangle 3y ago

This reminds me of when I interviewed at Stripe, a few years back. It was a surreal experience. We were in a small conference room. I sat at the table on one side, Patrick and Edwin sat on the other side. They asked me questions, I answered them. It was a good discussion. Then there was a brief pause in the conversation. Suddenly, Patrick let off the most absurdly loud fart. I chuckled in surprise. Patrick and Edwin stared back at me, in a stony silence, neither of them making any acknowledgement of Patrick's colonic eruption. I forced myself to adopt a similarly straight face. As the smell of it filled the room and my nostrils, I could only assume this was a power move, intended to dominate. I held my nerve, and continued the interview. Unfortunately, I wasn't offered the job. Now I wonder if maybe it was a cue to speak up and point out the loud, smelly elephant in the room. I suppose I'll never know. Has anyone else here who's interviewed at Stripe had a similar experience? To this day, I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated part of the hiring process.

highwaylights 3y ago
I’m going to guess dude just needed to let go and didn’t like that you laughed about it. Maybe they just openly rip in the office and are used to it. Maybe you didn’t get hired for totally unrelated reasons. We’ll never know..
- ftxbro 3y ago
  Culture fit. They expected the candidate to rip ass as well showing he was a team player.
ftxbro 3y ago
> "I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated" I mean if it was planned then that's some impressive intestinal agency. But maybe with his diet he always got it chambered at that time of day so he can plan around it.
joshxyz 3y ago
what the fuck am i reading that is fucking hilarious

antipaul 3y ago

> On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later But they were planning to get to that destination, with the same Apollo program, for years before that... This example seems a bit of a stretch, which makes me hesitate on the other examples. And another source of hesitation comes from this parallel: - During Covid, it was said that China built a new hospital in like 8 days, and it was claimed "we can't do that" etc - But then we created a temporary 1000-bed hospital in 7 days: "It was much quicker than we usually design, engineer and construct a project... We worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week with our vertical team to spec out the sites [and] award contracts, and then began work immediately after the contracts were awarded." [1] [1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2133514/corps-of-engineers-converts-nycs-javits-center-into-hospital https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/21...

shaftoe444 3y ago

Given how impossible it is to build anything here anymore the spped in which the Victorians built the railway network in the UK amazes me. 6,000 miles of track were built in 1846-1848 alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

antipaul 3y ago

As another comment points out, what about "preparation" time? I guess the timelines depend on when you start the clock. Does anyone have a credible example of going fast, and where it really was a "zero to one" kind of process?

mordae 3y ago

Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane. I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with the pandemic and had other matters to addend to" and "doing job of another organization would be a violation of budget discipline". And then the literal guys responsible for auditing them for such violations just broke the rules and did the right and necessary thing. In the end, it boils down to a simple rule. If you live in a society where rules outweight the public good and you can get into trouble for doing the right thing the "wrong way", progress grinds to a halt.

jodrellblank 3y ago
Ordinary employees can't choose to break the rules, the boss can, that's ... how everything works?
- ecuaflo 3y ago
  Everyone working in a functional org needs the autonomy and sense of ownership to make calls when needed.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  In a well-functioning org, every employee should be empowered to not let rules impede progress.
  - WJW 3y ago
    It's not a problem when "progress" is easily determined. But regulations are famously "written in blood", created after some employee was a little bit too empowered and caused an accident. For example, I'm very happy that employees of the nuclear power plant approval committee don't ignore safety rules even if it does impede the progress of the building process.
3y ago

mnot 3y ago

HTTP/2 was standardized in two years and 16 days. That’s fast for standards :)

ftxbro 3y ago

What if they add some fast ones that were fast but that didn't work out so great, like Theranos or the submarine guys. Also Apollo 8 is in there but I mean a relatively large percent of astronauts died compared to like your company's new agile plan how many agile blackbelts do you expect to literally decease because of shortcuts taken in the implementation of their workplace environment.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

d0gsg0w00f 3y ago

I'd like to add the 2017 Atlanta I-85 bridge collapse and rebuild to this list. The entire rebuild took only 45 days! https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-collapse-and-rebuild https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...

antipaul 3y ago

Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site: https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-major-projects/ https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-majo... Excerpt: > So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or stagnation in general for major projects.

whoisthemachine 3y ago

We like to focus on how long it takes governments to build things these days (especially US government(s)), but these discussions remind me of the Washington Monument, which was under construction for 36+ years depending on how you count it! And this was in the 1850's, when this type of construction was certainly feasible. As may sound familiar today, construction moved haltingly due to lack of funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument

Avalaxy 3y ago

Things still happen fast. The twitter blue checkmark has been developed in a weekend ;)

ignoramous 3y ago

One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees. OpenAI's top executives were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4. And putting something out quickly. So they decided to update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3 which came out in 2020. (snipped) Ref: https://archive.is/d6dI2 https://archive.is/d6dI2 / https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai...

interroboink 3y ago

One semi-common thread to these is how much of the invisible groundwork had already been laid, in order to execute so quickly. I wonder how much is "fast" and how much is "right time, right place" and/or "right preparation." I'm reminded of Alexander the Great, and his massive conquests within a short lifetime. But my understanding is that his father Philip II paved the way for him, building a lot of the political and military structure that he would leverage. But people don't remember the accomplishments of Philip II nearly as much as Alexander.

hiatus 3y ago

The Fukuyama interview is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpolicy.stanford.edu/news/interview-francis-fukuyama https://web.archive.org/web/20151211115945/https://publicpol...

throwaway892238 3y ago

Some things are pretty fast considering what they accomplished. The Lockheed A-12 was built 2 years after its designs were approved, with 2 years before that of planning. Still the fastest air-breathing airplane in existence. Its first flight was in 1962. In March 1940, John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. August 6, 1945, the first atomic nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. During the Great Depression, in 1931, the largest dam in the world, the Hoover Dam, was built. At the time, no such large-scale uses of concrete had been proven, and it was unknown how construction could be finished in a way that would cure the concrete in time and prevent it from deteriorating. Construction was completed in 1936, over two years ahead of schedule. Testing in 1995 concluded that the dam's concrete has gotten stronger over the years.

bruce343434 3y ago
The Hoover dam getting stronger is just luck, it could have just as well deteriorated if they didn't know it would get stronger.

richdougherty 3y ago

A classic 20 year old article on the principle of Stop Energy. "Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception" https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEnergyByDaveWiner.html?ref=buffer.com https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEne...

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

> The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? Probably because the author either can't count or doesn't know what disproportionate means. 1/3 of the entries on the list going back to 1889 happened after 1970 (which is about 1/3 of the timespan). That sounds very proportionate. Why no questions about the long gap after the Eiffel Tower? The most disproportionate things about the list are World War II and the fact that the list is extremely arbitrary.

revskill 3y ago

Any proof of first real Apollo Moon landing ?

nunez 3y ago

The pattern amongst them? It's a lot easier to move fast with greenfield projects. The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!

jasmer 3y ago

[dead]

rocgf 3y 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 find this really easy to believe, actually.

fwlr 3y ago

“ The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? ” If you Google image search “growth of environmental regulation”, there is a huge increase in the slope of those graphs right around 1960-1970. A simple explanation might be that environmental regulation strangled the speed of physical infrastructure building. A more complex explanation might be that environmental regulation, along with other regulation, experienced this massive growth as a symptom of massive growth in management, consulting, and bureaucracy employment - and it is this proliferation of managers and consultants and bureaucrats that have slowed things down. I do like the second explanation more. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-did-all-the-workers-go-60-years-of-economic-change-in-1-graph/252018/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...) tells me that “professional and business services”, their catchall for managers and consultants, grew from 2.3% of GDP in 1947 to 12.1% of GDP in 2009. This sextupling of management work could very well correspond to a sextupling of the length (in time) of projects. A mile of road takes just as much asphalt whether you build it in one month or six months, but it takes ~six times as much management when it takes six months.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

The Covid "vaccine" one is a little too fast, almost so fast it's suspicious ...