Fast • Hacker News Board

Re: Fast

#241

Post by wmf » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 3:53 AM UTC

entrepy123 wrote: post #6

valtism wrote: post #2

> Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell. Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads…

We got samples of the Toshiba 1.8" drive at IBM Research around August 2001 for the Super Dense Server prototype and I remember thinking how neat they were and wondering what else they could be used for.

Re: Fast

#242

Post by stocknoob » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:03 AM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #77

anonymousiam wrote: post #53

This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012

> environmental studies There's your answer. It's one of the biggest reasons why it's so hard to build infrastructure and housing, even for green projects like wind farms.

I wonder if the environmental studies account for the impact of using cars and planes for 15 years instead of trains.

Re: Fast

#243

Post by slt2021 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #67

AYBABTME wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, complications happened. But how efficiently was each day, each hour, used to solve these problems.

Hey if there's some delay caused by your team you can always just go back to the gov with shaking the money tin and explaining some 'unexpected outcomes'. The fact it's the same outcome every project is a feature not a bug.

bait & switch strategy.

if project realistically costs $100M and should take 3 years - it won't be approved due to budgetary and other political reasons.

Much easier to announce a project as $30M that can be done in 1 year, and intentionally skip over planning, and contingencies+complications.

Plan for naively simple project, like a Wordpress website, even if it is for is amazon.com.

When the project SNAFUs, go back to customer and use sunken cost fallacy to get more budget & time, until customer runs out of either Money (budget) or Patience (time), then complete the project and move on to the next "Grande Project"

Re: Fast

#244

Post by nunez » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:14 AM UTC

The pattern amongst them? It's a lot easier to move fast with greenfield projects.

The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!

Re: Fast

#245

Post by JimDabell » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:18 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #146

m463 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to knock the success of git, or the amazing effort under pressure, but the cohesiveness / understandability could be better.

Most of the inconsistencies, like "checkout" having three different functions, were added much later, in attempts to make UX niftier locally, without thinking about the product as a whole.

For what it’s worth, this is now being separated out a bit to be clearer. You can use `git switch ` to switch to an existing branch, `git switch --create ` to create a new branch and switch to it, and `git restore ` or `git restore --source file` to restore a version of a file to your working directory.

Re: Fast

#246

Post by dash2 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 4:58 AM UTC

WiSaGaN wrote: post #217

aeternum wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worr…

Safety: "(2022) No major accidents occurred in the field of highway and water transport engineering construction throughout the year. There were 47 safety production accidents, causing 61 deaths. This represents a decrease of 26.6% and 32.2% respectively compared to the previous year." [1] Based on the context, this includes all infrastructure construction such as roads and rails. There were 61 fatalities in 2022, wh…

I too admire how the PRC gets things done, but how is this different from “trust the government, we know best”?

> This approach contrasts markedly with that of the West or areas heavily influenced by the West like Hong Kong, where a small environmental group can obstruct major projects. China adopts a holistic approach, balancing economic needs with environmental concerns through different stages of development.

Re: Fast

#247

Post by giantrobot » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:23 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #213

giantrobot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video codec encoding was such a mess for such a long time due to the issues with MP4 and all the patent nightmare mess that unfortunately took way longer than it should have. Dude this isn't even wrong . It's just nonsensical and ahistorical.

Like, no, dude, it's totally sensical, historical, documented and written down for all time, part of the patent system of the United States and even if its dissatisfactional... it's actually really, truly, factual: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14694/mp4-h-264-pa... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA https://www.osnews.com/story/23299/why-flash-dissatisfies-me...

The parent issues around MPEG-4 had effectively zero influence on media tags in the HTML spec prior to HTML5. In the late 90s and the early 2000s it was the W3C's opinion that video and audio media was best left to plug-ins using an object tag. They were far more concerned about XHTML/DOM and related technologies than media support.

You're trying to draw a connection to unrelated issues. The MPEG-LA has a pretty clear licensing structure for h.264. Mobile SoCs with hardware h.264 decoders come with playback licenses just rolled into the cost of the decoder. Microsoft and Apple both shipped playback licenses. Adobe also had playback licenses for Flash because it supported h.264 in both FLV and MP4 containers. Only Firefox had any problem with h.264 licensing because they insisted on shipping their own decoder instead of just hooking into the OS' native decoder. That was a problem of their own making and was only really an issue on desktop Linux. The vast majority of people in the web have no need for concern of MPEG-LA licenses.

Even that is immaterial because the HTML5 video tag spec doesn't have a "must implement" codec specified. It readily supports references to multiple video sources based on what the browser/OS combination supports.

That still has nothing to do with issues around video delivery in browsers. Even YouTube didn't have HTML5-based playback until 2010 (for a limited amount of content). IE still had over 50% usage share of browsers so Flash-based video players were the most reliable means of video playback for most users.

Licensing of codecs just was not a limiting factor. Licensing for h.264 wasn't any more onerous than licensing for Sorensen Spark, VP6, WMV or Real Video video streaming sites were using before they started to adopt h.264.

It's fine to complain about software patents but don't conflate unrelated issues. MPEG-LA licensing didn't make the W3C ignore media playback for years. The MPEG-LA didn't affect IE's outsize influence on the web for a decade.

Re: Fast

#248

Post by sillysaurusx » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #214

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work.

Just want to mention this because this parable gets thrown around a lot. The delta between what git is now and what it was when first released is massive. Junio Hamano has been a absolute force of a maintainer and steward over the interim 18 years (!!) since 2005. This story often gets tossed around, as if to imply all of what git is today was put out by Linus in 2 weeks, but I think it suffers from a bit of a hero w…

I think that’s mostly understood. It’s up there with “JS was implemented in a week.” Yet in both cases, the skeleton defined the rest of the animal; git and JS are still recognizable from that initial version, even if the diff is massive.

Maintainers should get more credit, but the hero worship isn’t entirely misplaced. It’s not often that someone gets to change the world.

Re: Fast

#249

Post by madprgmr » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #35

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.

The entire ride-sharing/delivery/logistics space was moving ridiculously fast during that time. Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi medallion market, regulatory debates in every city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or days), the Darwinian M&A scene as…

IIRC, a lot of that was enabled (at least in the US) by the wider-scale rollout of 3g and smartphones. Before that, not only did few people have smartphones (uber initially had both a website and phone number you could contact to get a ride for at least a few years), but even metropolitan service areas were too spotty for near-realtime apps to work effectively.

Re: Fast

#250

Post by ecuaflo » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:01 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #174

mordae wrote: post #138

Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane. I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with th…

Ordinary employees can't choose to break the rules, the boss can, that's ... how everything works?

Everyone working in a functional org needs the autonomy and sense of ownership to make calls when needed.