Fast(patrickcollison.com) |
(London Eye, for a couple of decades, Ain Dubai, last year I think)
Probably because the author either can't count or doesn't know what disproportionate means.
1/3 of the entries on the list going back to 1889 happened after 1970 (which is about 1/3 of the timespan). That sounds very proportionate. Why no questions about the long gap after the Eiffel Tower?
The most disproportionate things about the list are World War II and the fact that the list is extremely arbitrary.
Less than 20kB (10kB with compression), loads instantly.
I guess the timelines depend on when you start the clock.
Does anyone have a credible example of going fast, and where it really was a "zero to one" kind of process?
The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!
> Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
Seems legit.
I find this really easy to believe, actually.
That’s fast for standards :)
This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.
Then there was a brief pause in the conversation. Suddenly, Patrick let off the most absurdly loud fart. I chuckled in surprise. Patrick and Edwin stared back at me, in a stony silence, neither of them making any acknowledgement of Patrick's colonic eruption. I forced myself to adopt a similarly straight face.
As the smell of it filled the room and my nostrils, I could only assume this was a power move, intended to dominate. I held my nerve, and continued the interview. Unfortunately, I wasn't offered the job. Now I wonder if maybe it was a cue to speak up and point out the loud, smelly elephant in the room. I suppose I'll never know.
Has anyone else here who's interviewed at Stripe had a similar experience? To this day, I still wonder if Patrick's fart was a deliberate and calculated part of the hiring process.
I mean if it was planned then that's some impressive intestinal agency. But maybe with his diet he always got it chambered at that time of day so he can plan around it.
Maybe they just openly rip in the office and are used to it.
Maybe you didn’t get hired for totally unrelated reasons.
We’ll never know..
that is fucking hilarious
It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.
And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.
Early web companies didn't even need JS; every interaction coulf reload a page.
Plenty chose Flash, Java, and friends when there were other options.
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.
because of the positive ROI
So often though the GoodThing doesn't have a clear payoff and another FastThing does.
For example -- it took 10 days to build a JS prototype, but 10 more years of evolution before it became the dominant Web Development language.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_version_history#ES2...
AFAIK core javascript works exactly like 25 years ago, and they haven't changed anything on it, not removing a single keyword or altering a semantics of any less used function, so your 25 years old javascript programs can still run in modern browsers.
# a.mjs
(()=>{
a = 1
})();
# in a shell
$ node a.mjs
ReferenceError: a is not defined<script scr=...>
And in the .js file: var x = 5. That x is global.
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.
Most Javascript beginners do not already have a Javascript programming job.
It works great for me and my team and we are hugely productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a lot of value.
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 repeats.
BASIC/visual basic/VB.net went through that cycle in the 90's. C then C++ went through that in the 2010's. Python/Javascript is going through that now. Go is about to go through the same.
Python, for example, got a lot better a lot faster than JS did.
Great things require tremendous effort and even time.
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 deal with, or cut corners on planning and mapping, which future projects now have to deal with.
https://sfstandard.com/transportation/van-ness-brt-bus-rapid...
Immediately after breaking ground, construction delays began. Existing maps of old gas, water and sewer lines flowing beneath the center of Van Ness Avenue proved inaccurate, slowing excavation and causing the city to bring in utility contractors. The utility placement also made the BRT’s center-lane design a challenge: Any future sewer and water repairs would disable bussing for the duration of repair. Plus, overhead bus electrical wires would need to be fully removed for the safety of the crews. Water and sewer infrastructure needed to be moved to the outside lanes to keep the center-lane BRT design — deemed the best for traffic flow.One of the big reasons, was that regulatory hurdles were removed.
The result:
Long Island is one big Superfund site, and our cancer rates are through the roof. I know of at least six women, in my immediate orbit, that are currently being, or have recently been, treated for breast cancer.
Before I moved here, thirty-two years ago, I had never met anyone that had cancer. Since moving here, I have known at least one person per year (often more), that had/have cancer.
Part of that is probably age, as I've gotten older, so too, has my peer group, but I wasn't that old, in 1990, when I moved here.
The difference is that they died a lot more frequently, back then.
https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2020_2021/2021%20CGJ%20Repo...
Ironically, more planning and analysis at the beginning of the project (e.g., by potholing and inspecting the condition of utilities underneath Van Ness may have avoided the construction delays.
The fact every single major infrastructure project is a decade late and 3x over budget is just normal and tolerated by the people running the show across the US/Canada. The gov workers picking who wins these gov contracts (usually the same small set of companies) doesn't seem to care, despite extensive track records of the same behaviour. They probably have jobs lined up at these companies there afterwards.
It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if there's no consequences or risk in doing so. This is Public/private partnerships 101.
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-...
The whole point of this article is that we should aspire to be better, faster, more relisilient to failures, less bureaucratic and efficient. My gut sense (subjective) is that we profoundly suck today at doing anything aspirational. But, nitpicking each of the examples as many comments here are doing, is IMO missing the point. I don't think Patrick is trying to be super objective here besides trying to be as accurate as possible with sources/number of days it took to build those projects. It is kind of silly to say "Oh, they didn't have X, Y and Z in 1955" because you cannot accurately judge what would have happened if X, Y and Z were actually the impediments in 1955. I used 1955 as an arbitrary year to illustrate the point.
The project planning and construction is done by a single company, Truebeck Construction, and they seem to know what they're doing.
I don't know what Patrick's list is trying to illustrate but most construction projects in the US happen very fast.
It's ideal to have an uber-specialist, an experienced and respected senior overseer who knows the industry and the project inside-out in both theory and practice, dedicated to the project. That gets things going. It's also rare and expensive - there are a lot more development projects than there are such individuals. They are powerful cards coveted by successful owning developers.
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.
I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with the pandemic and had other matters to addend to" and "doing job of another organization would be a violation of budget discipline". And then the literal guys responsible for auditing them for such violations just broke the rules and did the right and necessary thing.
In the end, it boils down to a simple rule. If you live in a society where rules outweight the public good and you can get into trouble for doing the right thing the "wrong way", progress grinds to a halt.
E.g. policeman pulls over another person for speeding. Which of following do you think is more likely situation and for policeman to issue a warning and let them go without a ticket:
- pulled over person is also cop but not on duty
- pulled over person is non-cop
Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments)
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)
Fast – Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844301 - Dec 2019 (2 comments)
Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (3 comments)
Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast
* Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work.
* Centralized internal product offerings which act similar to government given monopoly companies (think AT&T before breakup). Since that is the only entity offering that product, their offering doesn't have to compete with the in market offerings and thus can be as bad as needed, as long as it is tolerable.
* Everyone laser focused on their own org size and org power. This means tons of metric chasing, a lot of which requires creating work. For instance, if writing an if else can have a big impact delivering a lot in revenue, you write 5 new applications to soak up the revenue impact and show that something big was done. (A brilliant 2 liner regardless of impact will receive some claps but won't do much for the org power).
* The slowly increasing number of incompetent hires. The politically savvy ones survive and keep moving up and keep doing whatever needed to increase their power.
But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate.
Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don't even realize what is actually going on in the company.
I'm reminded of Alexander the Great, and his massive conquests within a short lifetime. But my understanding is that his father Philip II paved the way for him, building a lot of the political and military structure that he would leverage. But people don't remember the accomplishments of Philip II nearly as much as Alexander.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...
And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.
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.
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...
If you Google image search “growth of environmental regulation”, there is a huge increase in the slope of those graphs right around 1960-1970. A simple explanation might be that environmental regulation strangled the speed of physical infrastructure building. A more complex explanation might be that environmental regulation, along with other regulation, experienced this massive growth as a symptom of massive growth in management, consulting, and bureaucracy employment - and it is this proliferation of managers and consultants and bureaucrats that have slowed things down.
I do like the second explanation more. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...) tells me that “professional and business services”, their catchall for managers and consultants, grew from 2.3% of GDP in 1947 to 12.1% of GDP in 2009. This sextupling of management work could very well correspond to a sextupling of the length (in time) of projects. A mile of road takes just as much asphalt whether you build it in one month or six months, but it takes ~six times as much management when it takes six months.
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.
One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees.
OpenAI's top executives were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4. And putting something out quickly. So they decided to update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3 which came out in 2020. (snipped)
The Lockheed A-12 was built 2 years after its designs were approved, with 2 years before that of planning. Still the fastest air-breathing airplane in existence. Its first flight was in 1962.
In March 1940, John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. August 6, 1945, the first atomic nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
During the Great Depression, in 1931, the largest dam in the world, the Hoover Dam, was built. At the time, no such large-scale uses of concrete had been proven, and it was unknown how construction could be finished in a way that would cure the concrete in time and prevent it from deteriorating. Construction was completed in 1936, over two years ahead of schedule. Testing in 1995 concluded that the dam's concrete has gotten stronger over the years.
https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...
"Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception"
https://radio-weblogs.com/0107584/stories/2002/05/05/stopEne...
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.
Social: There was no "coercion" by the government to help build the hospital. The workers who built the hospital were paid over 10,000 CNY for 8 days of work [3]. Despite the need to work extended hours to expedite the process, possibly from 8 am to 12 am, it should be noted that the market rate for a month's work for typical construction workers under normal working hours is approximately 8,000 CNY.
Environmental: The most recent 16kMGW hydrodam at Baihetan received approval from the National Bureau of Environmental Protection despite potential negative impacts on the ecosystem. Various ecological and environmental measures were implemented to mitigate these impacts [4]. 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. China believes that as it develops, it can impose higher standards. For instance, until 2018, China imported plastic waste from the West, but halted this practice to the dismay of many Westerners [5].
[1]: https://www.mot.gov.cn/jiaotonggaikuang/201804/t20180404_300...
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/highwayworkzones/default.ht...
[3]: https://china.caixin.com/2020-02-15/101515765.html
[4]: https://www.mee.gov.cn/gkml/sthjbgw/spwj1/201511/t20151125_3...
[5]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
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.)
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/...
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/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Works_Administration
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
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.
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.
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.
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...
I am not sure why this gets repeated. Hong Kong (pre. China) and Taiwan gets shit done fast too and they are (were) not an autocratic place to live in (actually they had better environments than the US due to that most people comply without a fuss).
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 than efficiency. In the EU and NA we now routinely need to bring military, nuclear or civil engineers out of retirement, because we've built so little that we've lost generations of knowledge.
Yeah yeah, I've heard that story before. "He made the trains run on time." Then we found out there were no trains at all.
Autocracies have always had a knack for really good marketing, gotta admit that.
Chinese HSR does its own marketing. The material benefit to people around the country, particularly in rural areas, cannot be overstated.
Autocracy gets shit work done.
California had only 10 permanent employees on its HSR project, everyone else was a contractor. Furthermore, "Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything." [0]
Other governments do not have to take the same approach. The choice is not limited to "be California or be a dictatorship", there are thousands of examples of states taking both a long and short time to do things, regardless of how autocratic they are. Another example from that article, "The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance." - if you'd like to know more about how that went, see what the Port of Rotterdam has been doing [1] and what the union ultimately got for their strike action [2] - spoiler alert, they did not stop the increasing pace of automation, as US unions seem to have managed.
> Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks.
So did the UK government, and then had to close them all as they weren't useful. Haste made waste. "As of 5 May 2020, six of the seven planned hospitals had opened, and by the following month all had been placed on standby. [...] almost all of the increased demand for critical care was met by expanding capacity in existing hospitals. By June, all the temporary hospitals had been placed on standby. Only two had admitted patients" [3]
> Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours
This is normal these days for reasonably small spans [4]
> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
You don't have to go to one extreme or another, you can allow your citizens rights and still build rapidly. Certainly, there are tradeoffs, and it depends on the history and traditions of your own country, as to what your citizens will accept. Sometimes regulations get in the way of progress. Sometimes, lack of regulations kill and maim your citizens and destroy their lives, and their childrens' lives. [5] There's no single good ideological approach that works best.
[0] https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui...
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/rotterdam-port-ships-automat...
[2] https://www.fnvhavens.nl/component/content/article?id=317:ag...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_hospitals_in_the_Unit...
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
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... (all companies' numbers slightly rounded for easy reading)
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.
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.
- too many startups are founded by non-technical people. This almost inevitably ends in disaster, unless they have a technical co-founder with equal levels of decision and control
- because invariably the money is not the founder's they aren't thinking of ways to save money. Some VC funds like a16z are partially to blame for this by telling the startups they invest in that sometimes it's a good idea to burn money in order to grab land, but the point where it doesn't make sense to spend more effort on efficiency is not one which a lot of startups reach.
- a lot of the business models make zero sense, have zero testing performed on and no data gathered to attempt to validate. Just like you wouldn't build a train without some computer simulations and test models, and wouldn't launch it without test runs you shouldn't do the same for a startup
I've worked at a couple of top 5 tech companies, and it saddens me that people have such a sour/cynical view. You're saying that people don't move unless they get credit... but isn't it more likely that the people you need support from, are (1) already overloaded with work for other teams, (2) busy with their own core work, and (3) it's hard to keep plans aligned between very large number of teams, which then often makes "simple" requests difficult?
The idealists just lose out on promotions
- 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.
[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...
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.
Unfortunately, "high speed" is a misnomer.
This would have been high speed rail had it been deployed before 1990.
At this time it is just "rail" and when it is finished we will be back where we started: 40-ish years behind the state of the art with a product inferior to other modes of travel.
Disclaimer: I want very badly for a real HSR between SF and LA[1] and am deeply disappointed at the - sometimes comical - concessions and degradations that have accompanied this project since day one.
[1] Non-stop express service in less than 120 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-Spe...
https://hsr.ca.gov/about/project-update-reports/2023-project...
"Progress continues across the 171 miles under construction and development in the Central Valley, including more than 30 active construction sites and 69 structures or grade separation projects either underway or completed."
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.
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 companies were devoured in the jungle as quickly as they were founded...
...and, of course, the fact that you could finally push a button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn't great on that one.)
A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that.
-----------
EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing, there's not much point in doing anything quickly.
We've got stupendously stupid ideas like MoviePass getting deployed, and bankrupted, within months. Does that count? Presumably we want something that wasn't "just" fast, but also impressive / accomplished something real.
Depends exactly how you define this. If it’s inclusive of 2020, sure. If it isn’t, then it won’t include the COVID vaccines.
Redis barely misses the decade cut I think, with an early 2009 start to a production launch and rapid adoption starting around mid-2009.
Germany installed 6 (floating) LNG import terminals in 2022.
California built five gas-fired power plants in a few months in 2021, after a blackout.
We can still build things fast when there is institutional will to do so.
I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was marked as being decades away by many experts at the time.
I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the Space X rocket development programs count as ‘fast’ although I don’t know all the details.
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"
For example, I'm very happy that employees of the nuclear power plant approval committee don't ignore safety rules even if it does impede the progress of the building process.
First, they used physically larger 2.5" hard drives, making them larger and heavier. The small 1.8" HDD that the iPod used allowed it to be the size of a deck of cards, meaning it was much more portable.
Secondly, hard drives consume a large amount of power to operate, so HDD-based players had terrible battery life because it was always spinning up the disk to get the next song. The iPod solved this by just adding 32 MB of RAM as a cache, so when you started an album the system would just read in the next 15 minutes (or so? that's about 30 MB at 160 kbit) of songs and then power down the HDD until the cache was running out or the user changed albums/playlists/tracks.
It was also fast; using firewire to transfer songs restricted it to Mac users at first, but it meant that you could rip a new CD and put it on your iPod in a short amount of time, or, later, buy an album on iTunes and have it ready for your jog in ten minutes.
It's funny to think how many people saw the iPod as an obvious immediate failure. As the infamous Slashdot post[0] said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
[0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
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.
The lack of meaningful technical planning was a big part of it, and so was the contract-awarding math, but I think the most striking - and generally applicable - behind-the-scenes stories were about what happens when trust breaks down at a human level. The city's internal back and forth on approving and then un-approving a subcontractor at the beginning meant that the GC was more likely to work to the letter of the contract when things went wrong later, instead of collaborating to solve problems. The one positive thing the city eventually did to get the project moving forward, according to all the information we got, was put someone with some amount of authority on the ground to talk to people.
Rereading the report now, all of these facts are in there, but I wish we'd found a way to stress this part more. You see the same thing in every industry, whether it's individuals or teams or companies working together - the best laid plans mean nothing unless the people involved are actually interested in tackling challenges as they come up. Culture eats strategy, and all that. A culture of writing a plan and then either strictly following it or throwing a fit when it can't be followed isn't a culture that can do great work.
It definitely does convey that once things were going wrong, the relationship broke down quickly, and it was hard to adapt once the trust was lost.
That's not to knock the speed of the iPod's development but it wasn't built totally from scratch. Apple also wasn't a garage startup, peeling some hardware engineers off for the iPod wasn't going to cripple the iMac's continued development.
It's the manufacturing speed that astonishes me -- the sourcing as you say, the supply chains and the factory capacity. I'm also very curious about the manufacture of the scroll wheel -- was that something really new that had to be figured out (it seemed/felt like it) or was it a trivial combination of existing components?
> 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.
[1]: http://bs.dayabook.com/five-classics/THE-BOOK-OF-RITES/42-ta...
That’s nonsense. That’s like saying that it’s only natural human behavior to abuse and be abused. If I put myself in the shoes of an underpaid sewage worker, that has a family to maintain, that sees the owner and investors of said private companies getting obscenely rich just by closings contracts under their AC… yeah, I’d slack the s* out of it too.
I think that's exactly what experiments have shown the world. There are many follow-up experiments that prove exactly that.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic illustrations of how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces.
Those traceable situational forces can be minor and subtle things, and yet.
Thoroughly debunked[1][2][3], no?
[1] https://themindlab.co.uk/academy/epic-fails-what-can-we-lear...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...
I suggest reading Eli Dourado's blog: https://www.elidourado.com/
and his many blog posts on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-america-cant-build-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/california-high-speed-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/economy-construct...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/opinion/manufacturing-uni...
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/infrastructure-us-costly-explai...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/why-cant-we-build-anything...
But is China’s really so bad it is going to crumble in half of that?
https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScript
Far more apps were written in Flash than in Java Applets. Java Applets were problematic for their large file size and memory requirements. You would also need to regularly download updates for the runtime and manually run through an installer on the base operating system in order to get applets to work. They were also a security nightmare, and critical vulnerabilities continued right up until Applets were finally canned for good in 2013: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2013/01/10/oracle-ja...
Flash had plenty of its own vulnerabilities, but it was at least efficient for what it did with the network resources of the time.
I know the history of the web, and I know JS wasn't practical for a lot of complex apps before Chrome's v8 engine came out in 2008. That being said, it was still plenty powerful enough for apps like Gmail and Facebook.
I'm not even criticizing these technologies for existing or having been important plugins of the web at one time, I very much understand why they were used and why JS wasn't. HTML had no native video encoding, but also, the browser war held back the web standards a great deal as companies competed on the peripheral features of the web like video encoding and Silverlight vs Flash. 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. At least Adobe could bypass a lot of that without having to deal with the Microsoft vs Mozilla vs Apple vs Google business. And Adobe could cover the license fees for any tech it needed with its editor prices.
I get it. My point, however, is that those other technologies introduced different tradeoffs in compile time size, runtime performance, proprietary tech stack (Java is still owned by Oracle, not an open standard, to this day), mobile compatibility, etc. And none of them would have satisfied all the requirements for the web then or now. Meanwhile, since the web was able to evolve, and open standards got better and browser compatibility got better, JS is now a pretty good choice.
Dude this isn't even wrong. It's just nonsensical and ahistorical.
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...
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.
The conclusion was self-evident before they ran the experiment, so another criticism that could be leveled at the experiment was that it was redundant.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...
https://www.psypost.org/2019/11/unpublished-data-from-stanle...
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...
Milgram found that 42% of people will administer electric shocks to someone who appears to be screaming in pain, as long as the order is given by an apparent authority figure. What is there to debunk, exactly?
Keep in mind what motivated these experiments: a desire to understand more about how the Nazis were able to accomplish what they did. It's not as if the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo were novel or controversial; they were merely trying to reproduce and understand something that the entire world had just observed.
"It's just common sense" is not a solid scientific proof. Testing something that we _think_ we know (but have no proven) is not a bad thing.
Simple “we confirmed water is wet” tests are not very good science. Whereas “what is wetness & why does it happen” is.
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.
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.
E.g. a product that is clearly better can legally capture 100% market share. Only leveraging that market power is illegal.
I genuinely think a rule along the lines of "anything with 30%+ market share is scrutinized as having monopolistic network effect advantage" would have net positive outcomes on competition.
But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days.
It totally changed the way we all work.
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 worship problem. It was no doubt impressive and should be recognized, but I just want to make it clear: Git was made by many people over many years.
Maintainers should get more credit, but the hero worship isn’t entirely misplaced. It’s not often that someone gets to change the world.
I was the original author of multiple systems that have lasted decades, but I'll bet that you'd be hard-pressed to find much of my original code, in the current iterations.
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. :-)
On the other end of that, like what you're talking about, you have the artist who answers "how long did it take you to paint that?" with: "my whole life". I think this holds true in most disciplines and especially in software. The actual code that makes a thing work is trivial - but you have to know which of the 9 gazillion ways of doing it is the one you want, which only comes from experience.
If you know both BitKeeper and Git internals, you can think of their data models as near identical, with BitKeeper implementation using text files and SCCS, and Git using from-scratch data structures.
I'd say that internally git is more consistent %)
And boy does it show!
I constantly use this, having created an alias:
[some other branch]$ git cob feature/foo123 mainI think the benefit of such an imaginary rule is that in your imagination it’d actually be enforced.
(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.
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.
Kind of like English, which is also a terrible choice for a global language, it's shown a fairly powerful ability to incorporate new idioms.
Deity helps us if it was really Javascript with complete disregard for first order functions and verbosity through the roof
You'd start by telling yourself that, so it would be easy enough to convince people looking to "debunk" the experiment later.
The new research builds upon findings from a previous study, which analyzed recordings of 91 conversations conducted immediately after the termination of the experiments. The recordings showed that most of the obedient subjects justified continuing the experiment because they believed the learner was not really being harmed.