3 ms·

This stuck out: "Whatever you think of the morality of nuclear weapons, building an atomic bomb is a far harder undertaking than building a website." I disagr

This stuck out: "Whatever you think of the morality of nuclear weapons, building an atomic bomb is a far harder undertaking than building a website." I disagree, Mr. Thiel. In building an atom bomb you have the laws of nature as a guide. Those laws are fixed ahead of time and do not change through the project. When you are doing something wrong, there is exactly one ultimate authority which will tell you so unequivocally. That kind of absolute feedback has value. On the other hand, making a web site? No one knows what it should look like ahead of time because it doesn't exist yet. The managers also don't know, and the feedback they give about the project along the way will be either intentionally or unintentionally misleading, misinformed, and wrong. They may be trying to spare someone's feelings by giving some positive feedback. Nature doesn't have those kinds of problems with perpetuating false information.

uvTwitch 12y ago
Are you seriously trying to claim that moving-target web development is more difficult an undertaking than applied high-energy nuclear physics? Get real.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
On the other hand, getting an a-bomb right requires actually following those rules. Websites are fashion. You can throw shit together randomly and still have a perfectly successful website - especially if you get your sales/marketing team involved in pushing it down people's throats. Nature doesn't tolerate bullshit. Web industry is in big part built on it.
vacri 12y ago
A good website can be hacked together by a single person in an evening. A nuclear bomb is such a huge undertaking that only nations with big economies can afford it. I'm not seeing how a website is harder than a nuclear bomb.
tragomaskhalos 12y ago
If you want to be pedantic, building the uranium bomb was easy - it was just a gun that fired one subcritical mass into another; the technical challenge was refining enough of the required isotope, and that really boiled down to organisation and resourcing. The plutonium bomb required creating a sphere that would implode uniformly enough to trigger the reaction; this was significantly more complicated, but again a fairly bounded problem, probably the most significant challenge being the lack of cheap and available computing power to run the numbers. The point is that the science was already almost completely known, the Manhattan project was primarily an engineering challenge. We are nowhere near that stage of maturity in software development yet.
bdowling 12y ago
The context of the quote was building the Obamacare web site, healthcare.gov, one which had many public failures including missed deadlines, cost overruns, and poor performance. My initial statement could have more simply stated that Mr. Thiel's statement contains a false analogy fallacy. Building an atomic bomb is not comparable to building a complex website for the simple reason that success of the bomb is decided by the forces of nature, which are absolute, whereas the success of a website is determined in part by the responses of humans, who act irrationally and are subject to various whims.

uvTwitch 12y ago

Are you seriously trying to claim that moving-target web development is more difficult an undertaking than applied high-energy nuclear physics? Get real.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

On the other hand, getting an a-bomb right requires actually following those rules. Websites are fashion. You can throw shit together randomly and still have a perfectly successful website - especially if you get your sales/marketing team involved in pushing it down people's throats. Nature doesn't tolerate bullshit. Web industry is in big part built on it.

vacri 12y ago

A good website can be hacked together by a single person in an evening. A nuclear bomb is such a huge undertaking that only nations with big economies can afford it. I'm not seeing how a website is harder than a nuclear bomb.

tragomaskhalos 12y ago

If you want to be pedantic, building the uranium bomb was easy - it was just a gun that fired one subcritical mass into another; the technical challenge was refining enough of the required isotope, and that really boiled down to organisation and resourcing. The plutonium bomb required creating a sphere that would implode uniformly enough to trigger the reaction; this was significantly more complicated, but again a fairly bounded problem, probably the most significant challenge being the lack of cheap and available computing power to run the numbers. The point is that the science was already almost completely known, the Manhattan project was primarily an engineering challenge. We are nowhere near that stage of maturity in software development yet.

bdowling 12y ago

The context of the quote was building the Obamacare web site, healthcare.gov, one which had many public failures including missed deadlines, cost overruns, and poor performance. My initial statement could have more simply stated that Mr. Thiel's statement contains a false analogy fallacy. Building an atomic bomb is not comparable to building a complex website for the simple reason that success of the bomb is decided by the forces of nature, which are absolute, whereas the success of a website is determined in part by the responses of humans, who act irrationally and are subject to various whims.