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

121–130 of 306 posts

Re: Fast

#121

Post by danudey »

carabiner wrote: post #73

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/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…

The US also has billionaires and billion-dollar companies deliberately trying to sabotage these sorts of issues. Elon Musk and his 'Boring Company', for example, going around promising a revolution in transportation and then just... ghosting people.[0] "Don't start your public transport infrastructure, we'll build you something objectively worse and far less scalable for a fraction of the price! Uh actually never mind though."

US ISPs also have a history of lobbying to prevent municipal broadband projects, which could provide faster speeds cheaper than large monopolies can. They get the projects blocked by promising to solve the problem themselves, then once the block is in place they just yolo out. Verizon takes massive grants to improve broadband in areas, doesn't do it, and then just... nothing.

Even H&R Block is lobbying to prevent making tax returns easier so that they can continue to be one of the only companies that can file people's taxes without screwing it up (which they do anyway).

China certainly benefits from cutting huge corners, but we also need to remember that every time there's an opportunity to make people's lives better in the US, there's a rich corporation lobbying against it to preserve the profits they're milking out of people's suffering or desperation.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musk-boring-company-tu...

Re: Fast

#122

Post by bsder »

carabiner wrote: post #73

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/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…

> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.

People are all for it--until the steamroller comes for them. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-three-gorges-dam-int...

And we know what happens when you let people ignore the regulations--you get Superfund sites.

There is a political balance between "saving 3 salamanders in a cave" and "pervasive dumping of toxic sludge".

The problem is that there is lots of incentive towards the "pervasive dumping" side and not a lot on the "saving things" side.

Re: Fast

#123

Post by inopinatus »

chrisco255 wrote: post #27
lemming wrote: post #15

> 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.

28 years later the web is a thriving platform responsible for trillions of dollars of economic activity, of which JS is a core component.

Steady on. I’m no fan of JavaScript either but it seems unfair to damn it so completely with such a backhandedly vacuous accolade. Some folks might not even get the irony.

Re: Fast

#124

Post by dekhn »

londons_explore wrote: post #62
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy Underrated point. It didn't really sink in for me until I saw the numbers with my own eyes. From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1] the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022: - Meta: 86,000 - Apple: 164,000 - Amazon: 1,541,000 - Netflix: 12,800 - Google: 190,000 The numbers get a bit smaller…

Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys. If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.

It wouldn't ever have become what we know of as Google today.

When I worked at Google I was lucky and had coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat many mornings when my desk was near them and we had shared interests. I got the chance to quiz Jeff a bunch about the early days. When they joined, L&S had already handed indexing off to a couple programmers who had written a system that had to be run all the way through (all steps of indexing) to build a whole new index. Any failure in any step- even just one simple worker- meant you had to run all over again. That led to the development of MapReduce, GFS, and BigTable, which allowed google to scale search while also improving search prerformance (latency of a query, latency of crawling hot documents and having them appear in the index). Jeff definitely didn't have a high opinion of Larry and Sergey's programming skills.

But then, the search engine was really just phase 0 in Larry's attempt to revoluntize the world of information, sort of the things you have to do at the start of a realtime strategy game to get your tech tree up to AI.

Re: Fast

#125

Post by danudey »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #54
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…

> a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy Underrated point. It didn't really sink in for me until I saw the numbers with my own eyes. From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1] the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022: - Meta: 86,000 - Apple: 164,000 - Amazon: 1,541,000 - Netflix: 12,800 - Google: 190,000 The numbers get a bit smaller…

A friend of mine was working on a contract project for a major Canadian telco. The project was almost entirely complete, just a few things left to get the client to sign off on the project and go live. None of the people involved on the telco side had a huge interest in this project; it was just something else that was going on.

Then, suddenly, it seems as though they realized that this small project was the CEO's pet project. Overnight, everyone involved suddenly had opinions on what could be changed to be better, to be friendlier. Change the colors, the fonts, the layout, move things around, pick a different image, back and forth. As soon as there was an opportunity to attach their name in a place the CEO might see, everyone was clamoring to make some kind of a difference as soon as possible.

In the end, it delayed the project by weeks and wasted huge amount of my friend's agency's time trying to push back on all of these changes on things that had already been approved, or which didn't need to be changed. Incredibly gross.

Re: Fast

#126

Post by aeternum »

carabiner wrote: post #73

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/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…

It would be interesting to look at a wider range of metrics for some of these fast vs. slow projects.

Safety: Did the fast projects result in more injuries or deaths?

Social: Willingly vs. unwilling participation. IE seized land vs. sold willingly at market rate. Coerced by gov to help build the hospital vs. paid market labor rate.

Environmental: Much easier to design and build a hydro dam when you don't need to worry about still allowing the Salmon to swim upstream.

Re: Fast

#127

Post by antipaul »

> 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/21...

Re: Fast

#128

Post by Yasuraka »

chaxor wrote: post #84
londons_explore wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript, like python, was "simple yet flexible". Thats what made them successful. When a language is successful, people start to bolt on extra bits of syntax and features (async, prototypes/classes, lambdas, etc). Eventually it is no longer simple, and the learning curve gets steeper for new users. Someone comes up with a new simple yet flexible language, all the new users start with that instead, and the cycle re…

Go was trashed just about the time they added telemetry to it inherently.

You mean when they added the plan to add opt-in telemetry?

Re: Fast

#130

Post by danudey »

numbsafari wrote: post #87
pyrale wrote: post #63

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

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).

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!
Post reply on HN