by valtism on 7/5/23, 7:34 PM with 298 comments
by jljljl on 7/5/23, 8:36 PM
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.by carabiner on 7/5/23, 9:27 PM
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.
by mordae on 7/5/23, 10:13 PM
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.
by dang on 7/5/23, 8:18 PM
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)
by valtism on 7/5/23, 7:36 PM
Just 290 days for the iPod to go from idea to customer is crazy fast
by ftxbro on 7/5/23, 10:19 PM
by crop_rotation on 7/5/23, 8:35 PM
* 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.
by nine_zeros on 7/5/23, 8:22 PM
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.
by anonymousiam on 7/5/23, 9:03 PM
by interroboink on 7/6/23, 12:15 AM
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.
by arvindh-manian on 7/5/23, 8:41 PM
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd...
by cornfutes on 7/5/23, 8:26 PM
And thousands of developer years have been wasted smoothing over pre ES6 JavaScript warts.
by dblohm7 on 7/5/23, 9:10 PM
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.
by antipaul on 7/5/23, 10:04 PM
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...
by oli5679 on 7/5/23, 8:20 PM
by whoisthemachine on 7/5/23, 11:00 PM
by fwlr on 7/6/23, 10:48 AM
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.
by antipaul on 7/5/23, 10:35 PM
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.
by zetazzed on 7/5/23, 8:34 PM
by ignoramous on 7/5/23, 11:43 PM
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)
by throwaway892238 on 7/6/23, 1:52 AM
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.
by shaftoe444 on 7/5/23, 10:06 PM
by d0gsg0w00f on 7/5/23, 10:33 PM
https://transportationops.org/case-studies/i-85-bridge-colla...
by richdougherty on 7/6/23, 2:24 AM
"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...
by mamonster on 7/5/23, 7:48 PM
by egonschiele on 7/5/23, 8:51 PM
by BugsJustFindMe on 7/6/23, 2:25 AM
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.
by Avalaxy on 7/5/23, 11:26 PM
by GuB-42 on 7/5/23, 9:44 PM
Less than 20kB (10kB with compression), loads instantly.
by antipaul on 7/5/23, 10:10 PM
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?
by nickdothutton on 7/5/23, 9:01 PM
by nunez on 7/6/23, 4:14 AM
The NYC subway and TGV are great examples. They were built when land was plentiful and people were sparse!
by bovermyer on 7/5/23, 9:45 PM
> 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.
by pyrale on 7/5/23, 9:17 PM
by hiatus on 7/6/23, 12:49 AM
by babelfish on 7/5/23, 8:27 PM
by nodesocket on 7/5/23, 8:56 PM
by moffkalast on 7/5/23, 8:41 PM
Seems legit.
by rocgf on 7/6/23, 10:25 AM
I find this really easy to believe, actually.
by firebirdn99 on 7/5/23, 8:59 PM
by boringg on 7/5/23, 8:30 PM
by mnot on 7/5/23, 10:16 PM
That’s fast for standards :)
by andrewstuart on 7/6/23, 12:21 AM
by revskill on 7/6/23, 3:36 AM
by nashashmi on 7/5/23, 9:21 PM
This is why we get lessons like environmental studies assessment. We become extra careful now.
by yankput on 7/5/23, 9:45 PM
by jdthedisciple on 7/6/23, 5:36 PM
by briangle on 7/5/23, 9:57 PM
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.
by draw_down on 7/5/23, 8:18 PM
It seems an obvious point; I remember watching him present a version of this in person and it occurred to me sitting there.
by lemming on 7/5/23, 8:26 PM
And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.