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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#151

Post by lchengify »

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…

> one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated.

New York calls this "peek and shriek" [1]. No one really knows whats under the street until you start digging.

The Van Ness Bus line was particularly bad because it failed to adjust expectations and project management once this was discovered. In NY at least everyone expects it to happen, infrastructure there dates back hundreds of years.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-...

Re: Fast

#152

Post by kristianp »

nashashmi wrote: post #68

By not overthinking, they come up with very quick and dirty Designs, and leave the rest for future generations to fix. This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.

Kind of MVPs compared to the overspecifed-gold plated modern projects.

Re: Fast

#153

Post by gwd »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57
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.

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.

> But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work.

To be fair, Linus was trying to replace Bitkeeper, a proprietary DVCS which he'd been using to maintain the kernel for several years at that point. Mercurial, which runs on similar principles, was around at the time too. He didn't just make a quantum conceptual leap straight from SVM to git on his own in 10 days; he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to build (probably even ideas about the architecture) before he started.

It's still darned impressive; just not supernaturally impressive. :-)

Re: Fast

#155

Post by antipaul »

Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site:

https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-majo...

Excerpt:

> So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or stagnation in general for major projects.

Re: Fast

#156

Post by khuey »

chongli wrote: post #141
dtgriscom wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done. This is a classic "pros and cons" situation. I'm not sure the ability for the authorities to "get shit done" would balance the downsides, e.g.: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/...

There has to be a middle ground. The US did some amazing things without autocracy, such as the public works projects under the New Deal [1] [2] [3], the Marshall Plan [4] for helping to rebuild Europe, the Federal-Aid Highway Act [5] to build 41,000 miles of Interstate highways. I don't know why things are so difficult now. There's got to be some detailed studies into this problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…

The Federal Highway Act was pretty bad! They plowed interstates through poor (and usually black) neighborhoods to get to the city centers and at least contributed to the urban dysfunction that's been a feature of American cities since.

Re: Fast

#157

Post by nitwit005 »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #112
nitwit005 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but they could have made something very different, and that would still be true. People just have no choice but to use JS. Plenty chose Flash, Java, and friends when there were other options.

And JavaScript beat those.

Not due to some sort of virtue of the language being better. The browser devs wanted to cut down the security surface area. Javascript wasn't as removable as the plugins that used other languages were.

Re: Fast

#158

Post by fragmede »

dang wrote: post #115
fragmede wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may delight you to know, then, that they've started building, and in fact they've built a bunch of stuff for it already! As of March 2023, 50 miles of guideway are complete, 39 are underway; 41 structures are complete, and 29 are underway¹. Some of the completed structures include: - The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design². - The Han…

> What are you talking about? Please edit swipes like that out of your HN posts, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

Fixed, thanks.

Re: Fast

#159

Post by crabmusket »

kybernetikos wrote: post #118
crabmusket wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google acquired both Maps and Earth, they didn't create them.

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 for the company that built what became Earth was from the military. Google took that and made it "free" for regular people.

Re: Fast

#160

Post by fragmede »

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's been 15 years and we have 50 miles of guideway complete, with 39 more underway; 41 structures complete, and 29 more underway¹.

Some of the completed structures include:

- The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design².

- The Hanford Viaduct, a 3,300-foot-long bridge over the Kings River and State Route 43 in Kings County, which is the longest structure in Construction Package 2-3²⁴.

- The San Joaquin River Viaduct, a 4,700-foot-long bridge over the San Joaquin River and North Avenue in Fresno County, which includes a pergola structure to allow future trains to cross over the existing BNSF Railway tracks²³.

- The Tuolumne Street Bridge, a two-way bridge that spans the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and future high-speed rail tracks in downtown Fresno²³.

- The Fresno Trench and State Route 180 Passageway, a two-mile-long trench that will carry high-speed trains under several streets in Fresno, including State Route 180²³.

It's nowhere near 5,000, but this whole CAHSR isn't going anywhere... it's going! Slowly but surely. Would I like it to be done before I have grandkids? Absolutely. As the proverb goes though: Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_California_Hig....

[2] https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project....

[3] https://hsr.ca.gov/2023/05/11/video-release-high-speed-rail-....

[4] https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/high-speed-rail/article...

(Not to reuse my comment from upthread, but.)

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