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Fast

patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#71

Post by ben_w »

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.

> I suspect it would still be pretty decent.

A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big to lobby against.

And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would probably evolve faster than two people could react.

Re: Fast

#72

Post by jonny_eh »

soggybutter wrote: post #31
skrebbel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers

> a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such

Great things require tremendous effort and even time.

Re: Fast

#73

Post by carabiner »

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 rover on Mars in 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong_(rover), but I"m not sure how it compares development speed to NASA. Designed for 90 days, lasted 4x that.

As much as the US denigrates China for allegedly trampling on "freedoms," I bet our way of doing speedy big projects in the past has a lot in common with China's current progress. You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.

Re: Fast

#74

Post by gowld »

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.

That's thanks to the HTML and DOM API, not "JavaScript".

Early web companies didn't even need JS; every interaction coulf reload a page.

Re: Fast

#75

Post by jonny_eh »

dblohm7 wrote: post #59

Apollo 8 is not a very good example; it's not like the hardware pipeline wasn't well on its way to be ready to go by the time the decision was made. Don't get me wrong, Apollo 8 was an extremely risky and critical part of the program, but it's not like somebody conjured everything up from thin air in 134 days.

None of these projects were created from dust.

Re: Fast

#76

Post by bunga-bunga »

soperj wrote: post #70
skrebbel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are all variables still global unless defined not to be?

Not in a module context:

    # a.mjs
    (()=>{
      a = 1
    })();

    # in a shell
    $ node a.mjs
    ReferenceError: a is not defined

Re: Fast

#77

Post by jonny_eh »

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.

Re: Fast

#78

Post by gowld »

djbusby wrote: post #37
soggybutter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers

All the "good" languages have tremendous effort - it's how they get good. Nothing starts great...it's a journey. We've been watching the sausage being made.

Most languages were OK and got enhancements, JS was terrible and got repaired.

Python, for example, got a lot better a lot faster than JS did.

Re: Fast

#79

Post by ben_w »

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.

JS is a core component to all that in the same way that coal and oil are core to the industrial revolution: not the best, but it's easy and cheap and everyone has a lot of experience and sunk-cost investments.
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