Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Questions

patrickcollison.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 493 posts

Re: Questions

#151

Post by foolfoolz »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #146
mvilim wrote: post #130

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes…

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

before they build a new station....

do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study? are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified training for specific tools? the company selected must pass random workplace safety visits? are they allowed to impact existing traffic flows during construction?

we did this to ourselves

Re: Questions

#152

Post by dwaltrip »

mvilim wrote: post #130

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes…

I think survivorship bias is highly relevant to this question. It may not be the entire answer, but it definitely needs to he accounted for.

Re: Questions

#154

Post by extygvnpy »

I get paid over $90 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing,

HERE►► ►►► W­­­­W­­­­W­­­­.­­­­t­­­­o­­­­d­­­­a­­­­y­­­­s­­­­f­­­­o­­­­x­­­­.­­­­C­­­­O­­­­M­­­­ᴵᴵᴵ

Re: Questions

#155

Post by Waterluvian »

thrower123 wrote: post #132
Waterluvian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the web, you can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote call entirely. This is true if you go to a production website and try to start debugging. But it's untrue for any modern development environment. The minification comes later and even then, source maps are first class supported in browsers, mapping…

No, just no. Web debugging is worse than anything I've ever seen - maybe a bit better than cmd-line debugging with gdb, but not much. Sourcemaps supposedly work, though I have never seen this actually work in practice. And since babel is apparently indispensible, you can't be entirely sure that conditionals and statements in your source haven't been optimized away in the transpilation. Routinely one sets breakpoints…

"Rube Goldberg" is the best description I've heard for a JS dev stack. So true. Its so awful. But its so much better than it used to be and I pray it continues to improve.

I hear what you're saying. They can be really finicky. I've had very good luck using it all cleanly without issue. I especially love binding vscode to an open browser so that I use vscode for all the inspection, breakpoints, etc.

But I also experienced your lamentations. It took a long time for me to get it all working. Sourcemaps were so unreliable years ago. Now they just seem to work, having learned all the painful lessons about configuration.

There still aren't any sane defaults and the ground won't stop shifting. But now that I have it working, it works great.

Re: Questions

#156

Post by mhjas »

Cenk wrote: post #100
drakonka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously read someone's take on this in relation to people feeling secure enough to take risks here (not just in Stockholm but Sweden as a whole I guess). While notch's success may be an outlier, the process of trying to do your own thing isn't here. I'm not sure when in his development Notch left King, but in general there are quite a few people here who just try to go their own way (sometimes completely outside…

I think the social safety net is definitely a part of it, yes. But after working for a couple years at different startups in Stockholm I can say that another big factor is that most Swedish founders are either rich themselves, or their parents are, or they are very well connected. They don’t see themselves this way of course, they think they are building everything from scratch, but this does tend to be the case from…

I think it is becoming more common. In the early days it seems like there were more of a mix between rich drop outs and poor enthusiasts. Today, especially with the housing market, it seems like there are a lot more 'fake' companies. It used to be that if you came from a wealth family and didn't know what to do you started a public relations, event or media company to pretend that you were doing something. Today that is a "technology startup". Most of which are second or third tier companies in the sense of global reach. While much of the success of Swedish startups come from ending up being first tier companies. Maybe part of that was that Sweden sort of experienced the dot com bubble, which meant that there was less room for phonies for a while.

Re: Questions

#157

Post by sjtgraham »

candiodari wrote: post #110
lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage. Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" envi…

> They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects)

I don’t expect that. Use after free vuln + heap spray + shellcode = Ill effects

Re: Questions

#158

Post by akrymski »

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?

This requires a clear separation of functions and data. Linux pipes are a glimpse of what's possible, and there's been some work in translating English to Bash. I think we aren't far from AI-powered English-to-Code translation being feasible: "order me an uber an hour before my next meeting" -> check calendar, filter, add -1, call the uber function. Alexa must be working on something like this. If I had billion that's what I'd work on.

Re: Questions

#160

Post by fanzhang »

foolfoolz wrote: post #151
tvanantwerp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

before they build a new station.... do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study? are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified t…

That's probably also the answer to the time series question as well -- i.e. why construction is more costly today in the US than 100 years ago.

Interestingly, I think those complexities are not imposed by any monolithic person or organization, but is a the bulk result of lots of little regulations. I'm not sure any one specific person is saying "on the whole, this system of complexity is worth it" but rather each one by itself has a specific good (e.g. environmental study) without explicit accounting of the costs.

To be silly and meta, perhaps in addition to a mandatory environmental impact study of each large construction project, there should be a mandatory economic impact study on the environmental impact study.

Post reply on HN