Fast • Hacker News Board

Re: Fast

#251

Post by tarsinge » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:13 AM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #234

rurp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autocracy gets shit done. On certain high profile projects, sure. But autocracy typically embeds a lot of corruption at every level of the system which creates a drag in many ways. A system that prioritizes loyalty and obedience to your superiors more than anything tends to have a lot of waste.

Counter point: Autocracies are actually extremely efficient, but we don't like to admit that. So, we come up with various narratives. Let's be honest, there is plenty of corruption in democracies and autocracies are pretty damn good at infrastructure. Just not an ideal governing structure for individual freedom and things like property rights which we value higher than efficiency of building things fast.

Autocracies have more variability. There were good kings and bad ones. When the tyrant is smart and genuinely lifelong committed to the good of their people you get the most efficient system. This is the classic argument monarchists have. Problem is in reality the planets alignment rarely happened.

Re: Fast

#252

Post by WiSaGaN » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:20 AM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #246

WiSaGaN wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a vast topic. In brief, the relationship between the Chinese people and their government is markedly different from that in the US due to their distinct histories and cultures. The Chinese exert much more informal influence on government officials through culture and traditional norms than in the individualistic US, where influence is typically exerted through law or voting. Chinese government officials are often likened to the common people's parents - a concept that may be difficult for many Americans to comprehend, especially if they've been educated on theories like The Social Contract. This notion harkens back to Confucius's Book of Rites, which states, "When a ruler loves what the people love, and hates what the people hate, then he is what is called ‘The Parent of the People.’" [1] This quote encapsulates the ideal level of trust that the Chinese population holds for its government. However, this trust (alongside the respect and authority granted to officials) only persists when the government can deliver results for the people. The saying "当官不为民做主，不如回家卖红薯" or "If one is an official and does not serve the people, it is better to go home and sell sweet potatoes," may sound silly, but it encapsulates the values ingrained in Chinese government officials from a young age. This is not merely a concept that everyone knows, but it is also common knowledge, forming a significant part of the culture. Is this system perfect? No. Can it be applied universally, for example, to the US? Definitely not. However, throughout thousands of years of Chinese history, this system has generally aligned the government with the people's interests from a Chinese value system perspective.

[1]: http://bs.dayabook.com/five-classics/THE-BOOK-OF-RITES/42-ta...

Re: Fast

#253

Post by perryizgr8 » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:23 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?

In a well-functioning org, every employee should be empowered to not let rules impede progress.

Re: Fast

#254

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #186

ajmurmann wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS on the list is quite interesting, since it being rushed and a prototype ending up getting shipped often gets cited as an explanation for why JS has issues. Given how widespread it is, this is a project I wish had gotten a lot more time. An argument could be made that it succeeded, so it must be good, but given it's the only built-in, full language in the browser just says that it was good enough and now we are kin…

Indeed, there was no choice. Good thing we ended up with a small language that has easy objects, first-class functions, and compact syntax. We could have got something like ABAP were we really unlucky.

True, as much as JS sucks, some of its fundamentals are really good

Deity helps us if it was really Javascript with complete disregard for first order functions and verbosity through the roof

Re: Fast

#255

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:29 AM UTC

crabmusket wrote: post #159

kybernetikos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, but I don't think it diminishes the point - a two person company would have been pretty unlikely to acquire them, or stay two person if it did and needed to integrate them with their search product.

Agreed, but why should we care whether Google was able to acquire service X or Y? (It's one of my pet peeves when people elide the massive amount of innovation that happens in small companies which then gets conglomerated under one of 5 massive brands.) I'd argue that Google's one major innovation is the ad-supported free business model for most of these services. From a casual skim, it looks like most of the revenue…

I chose those because I think maps and street view and to a lesser extent earth are meaningful improvements to the Google search experience that wouldn't have been available to a smaller company.

Re: Fast

#256

Post by onedognight » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:57 AM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #248

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twice.

Re: Fast

#257

Post by cltsang » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:01 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #209

vondur wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at YouTube for “Tofu Dreg” to see the results of rushed Chinese construction projects.

focusing on failures neglects the fact that even those shoddy projects build institutional knowledge. It's funny that there's one place in the US that works the exact same way, the VC/tech industry. The wins pay for the failures ten times over. And while everyone laughs at ghost cities, with what people learned there you can build the next real city twice as fast. Effectiveness, getting things done, is more important…

Tofu Dreg kills people.

I am not sure about putting human lives as an operand in win/loss arithmetic, like some typical resource. China is not in a hot war.

Re: Fast

#258

Post by skrebbel » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:06 AM UTC

lemming wrote: post #89

skrebbel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.

I didn't say anything about JS being bad. But this article is predicated on the assumption that doing things fast is good. I think it's hard to argue that if Eich had spent 20 days (or perhaps even 30 days!!!!) we would have been in a much better place for the last couple of decades. We're not working around the fact that JS is intrinsically a bad language, we're working around the fact that it was ridiculously rushe…

He made the world’s most popular programming language in 10 days. By most people’s definition that’s very impressive.

Sure, he did it mostly by being in the right place at the right time. But lots of geniuses tried to do web programmability before, eg with java applets. They were in the right place at the right time too. They spent man years getting it all right, and even Eich’s very first 10-day hacked version of JS (or, well, LiveScript) was better. Don’t dismiss all the stuff he got right. It’s a lot!

Re: Fast

#259

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:22 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #124

londons_explore wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Fast

#260

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:23 AM UTC

post-it wrote: post #83

IshKebab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern Typescript is fairly decent. Plain Javascript is still awful. And I wouldn't say either are great. I especially don't understand why Javascript doesn't have a "modern" mode where `var` and `==` are banned, prototypes are immutable, etc. You can do all that with linters but the people that need help with that stuff don't know how to set up a linter in the first place or what options to choose.

> You can do all that with linters but the people that need help with that stuff don't know how to set up a linter in the first place or what options to choose. Then how would they know how to enable "modern" mode? Junior devs shouldn't be setting up any of that stuff anyway, they should be given a laptop with VSCode + prettier already installed, and all of the config they need should be in the project repo.

> they should be given a laptop with VSCode + prettier already installed, and all of the config they need should be in the project repo.

Most Javascript beginners do not already have a Javascript programming job.