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

Fast

patrickcollison.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 306 posts

Re: Fast

#41

Post by cornfutes »

chrisco255 wrote: post #30
cornfutes wrote: post #16

> 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.

If only we were using Java Applets or Flash ActionScript or Silverlight, all our problems would be solved.

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.

Re: Fast

#42

Post by sealeck »

crop_rotation wrote: post #23

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 tak…

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

Re: Fast

#43

Post by egonschiele »

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.

Re: Fast

#45

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jljljl wrote: post #24

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…

Lots of things happened fast during WWII.

One of the big reasons, was that regulatory hurdles were removed.

The result:

Long Island is one big Superfund site, and our cancer rates are through the roof. I know of at least six women, in my immediate orbit, that are currently being, or have recently been, treated for breast cancer.

Before I moved here, thirty-two years ago, I had never met anyone that had cancer. Since moving here, I have known at least one person per year (often more), that had/have cancer.

Part of that is probably age, as I've gotten older, so too, has my peer group, but I wasn't that old, in 1990, when I moved here.

The difference is that they died a lot more frequently, back then.

Re: Fast

#46

Post by Hovertruck »

mamonster wrote: post #3

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.

Depending on where you draw the lines, maybe Oculus. I think from the formation of the company to shipping dev kits was less than a year, but there was obviously research and prototypes that happened prior to that, and it was a while before they were shipping consumer devices.

Redis barely misses the decade cut I think, with an early 2009 start to a production launch and rapid adoption starting around mid-2009.

Re: Fast

#47

Post by nine_zeros »

coldcache wrote: post #33
nine_zeros wrote: post #12

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'…

Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-...

This post is incredibly accurate.

Re: Fast

#49

Post by netghost »

djbusby wrote: post #39
jljljl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of red-tape and delays in modern projects is contending with debt from "Fast" projects

If done right, the FastThing gets the money flowing to refactor into the GoodThing

It's the "if done right" bit that's so tricky.

So often though the GoodThing doesn't have a clear payoff and another FastThing does.

Re: Fast

#50

Post by jljljl »

djbusby wrote: post #39
jljljl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of red-tape and delays in modern projects is contending with debt from "Fast" projects

If done right, the FastThing gets the money flowing to refactor into the GoodThing

Sure, but you have to reinvest that money too. And it's a bit misleading to take just the FastThing cost and disregard the GoodThing costs.

For example -- it took 10 days to build a JS prototype, but 10 more years of evolution before it became the dominant Web Development language.

Post reply on HN