Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

One thing often feeds on the other. Because the system is hard to change, it does not get necessary features. Because it does not have necessary features, it provides less business value. Because it provides less business value, there is less of a budget for improving it. And so on.

The problem was two-fold:

1. The relevant tools (Unity3D) were extremely immature and the problem was quite diffuse. No profiler, poor quality of generated code, tiny caches, etc.

2. A problem in string-handling code that was quite diffuse throughout the game. As near as I can tell, it was blowing out the tiny CPU cache hundreds of times per frame.

On desktop, this code was a complete non-issue. On the puny little ARM on the iPhone? It was the difference between having dozens of towers and 50 enemies in play vs half a dozen towers and less than a dozen enemies in play. The impact on game dynamics, and need to re-balance everything by itself would add weeks to the shipping schedule.

There were plenty of other things that needed to be scaled WAY back of course: Switching from 3D to 2D to get vertex count and draw call count down. Completely rebuilding the entire UI. Revamping the pathfinding and suffix caching to not play havoc with the CPU cache. Moving from a 24x24 grid to a 12x12 grid. All of that combined helped a LOT, but not nearly enough.

The string manipulation was for a hierarchical property system that let me parameterize all sorts of attributes for enemies/spells/towers/projectiles in a set of text files. Ultimately, I had over-engineered on the assumption that I would be tweaking many more things -- with much greater frequency -- than I wound up actually tweaking.

Had I ripped most of it out and just had local properties on each prefab that I assigned manually, I might've hit that market opportunity. Finding that that was the cause was a multi-month project because of how interwoven it was with everything else. Hell, it would've been fine, had a not over-generalized it into a shared component on each prefab that the other components inquired with to get property values. But I did. And it took me vastly too long to identify it was the major problem it was.

Opportunity missed, and that was the final nail in the coffin for my fledgling game studio.

That's orthogonal. What you really mean is that you want high(ish) voltage to distribute power in a home, in order to mimimize losses due to wire resistance over distances of dozens of meters.

You don't need AC to do that. In fact, with modern power electronics, the switching converters we now use for supplying LVDC to our devices can work just as well with DC as with AC input power.

The primary advantage of AC over DC is that it can be converted between voltage levels easily with transformers. But today, we can do the same thing with DC using DC-to-DC converters. These didn't really exist in an economical way before a couple decades ago, maybe even more recently.

If for some odd reason, western society decided to re-engineer and replace the whole power grid, it's quite likely I think they would simply switch to DC for everything. With deployment at that scale, the cost issues with the equipment should go away, making it no more expensive to replace everything with DC converters than transformers. DC is more efficient than AC because it stays at its peak voltage, and because it has no skin effect. But the technology needed to make it inexpensive to use for power transmission has only been around for a somewhat short time (namely, modern power electronics). Up until recently, it was simply a no-brainer to use AC because of its simplicity in generation, transmission (with transformers for stepping up the voltage), and usage (with AC motors).