Fast (2019)
patrickcollison.com
patrickcollison.com
First is the price of labour. Most countries have gotten wealthier over the 20th century, America is not full of desperate people willing to work 16 hour days in dangerous construction jobs any more. The Empire State Building, as an example, required 14 human sacrifices to build in 400 days (and likely many more injuries). I hazard to guess the average 80 story building today is built with much fewer deaths.
Second is state or military intervention. Apollo, the Pentagon, and the Berlin Airlift are all projects of the US military at the height of their influence. Shenzen's fast growth is certainly some Chinese planning department's work. It isn't surprisng to me that motivated non-democratic institutions can make big things happen quickly.
Otherwise, spot on.
That said, I'm somewhat skeptical of the safety argument, which I often hear. For example, 60 workers were apparently killed during the construction of the World Trade Center[0] -- 4x more deaths than occurred during the construction of the Empire State Building. Nor is it a priori clear to me that safety and speed would necessarily be in opposition -- maybe better planning causes both more safety and more speed, for example. I'd certainly be interested in a more comprehensive investigation of this question.
I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?
I do believe that state/military intervention clearly plays some role in a few, but there are certainly plenty of examples of remarkably slow military projects, and many of the projects on the page have nothing to do with the military. (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Boeing 747, NYC Subway.)
So, I haven't found a satisfying explanation, and I'd be curious to read other analyses or diagnoses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trad...
As far as I can tell, for a lot of transit projects in the US, at least, the capital isn't there up-front to just pay more to parallelize things. The money is being raised by a long-duration tax so it comes in incrementally.
And then there's a second closely related factor: do we have the production capacity to switch from a five-year-project-horizon to a one-year one even if we wanted to spend the money faster?
It seems like it feeds itself, when it comes to cities and infrastructure:
- huge early growth spurs a big demand, construction industry spins up around it (this, I think, answers the "why did stuff happen in high-cost areas" question - high demand is what causes high cost, so in an area where nobody is demanding infrastructure, there's gonna be a lot less reason to build it)
- a lot of stuff, once built, will last decades or longer, and would be extra-hard and expensive to replace. so once demand starts to be met, and growth starts to slow, the construction industry gets less and less business, so it shrinks
- this is a limiting factor on new projects, but they're also seen as less urgent than the initial stuff (road widening is less critical than creating a road where there was none, say), so the slower pace is accepted.
- red tape also starts to develop, since in a new-frontier situation there are fewer entrenched powers to create regulations to protect things (whether or not those regulations are net-beneficial!)
That's my current pet theory, anyway: It's not that we've deteriorated, it's more that priorities, effort, and industry have shifted. There are a LOT of other things that happen far faster now than they did 30 years ago in 1992, after all; and unbelievably faster than they did when the Empire State Building was constructed. Sometimes it's harder to repair a body than to make a new human in the first place, if you will ;)
In larger projects, there are generally larger staging issues (less footprint to put materials relative to the amount and size of materials), and there are many more specialists involved (including inspectors), increasing the frequency and delays of sync points. The materials for large projects are also much larger now. The Empire State Building exterior was built of bricks, layer by layer. The exterior of most modern buildings are giant panes of glass, requiring cranes and such to move them into place.
I think examining the sync points and staging requirements could shed some light on why construction projects are taking so much longer nowadays.
Americans still live like this in states you're clearly not looking at.
A similar example – the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years in the 1930s at a (inflation adjusted) cost of $500M, ahead of schedule and 10% under budget. A project to install suicide nets below the bridge started in 2008 and is still ongoing after multiple delays, with a total projected cost of $211M.
In general it's a political and regulatory problem. There's a term for this, but I cant think of it at the moment.
> If there’s one construction job that set the modern standards for work site safety precautions, it is the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. When construction on this bridge began in 1933, it was the first suspension bridge supported by a tower in the ocean and surrounded by harsh weather and water conditions.
> Before this project bridge construction workers, or “bridgemen,” had been considered reckless daredevils who worked without any safety precautions. They had to be fearless to climb the high steel and deal with the rugged weather and risky footing. The Golden Gate Bridge was built during the Great Depression – when 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed – and despite the risks, workers applied in droves.
> /../
> Even with these precautions, 11 men died during construction – including 10 who lost their lives when a section of scaffold fell through the safety net. However, there were 28 worker fatalities during the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Strauss’ safety regulations can be reasonably credited with saving many lives and setting a new worksite safety standard. He proved to the world that safety gear saves lives.
https://www.fixfastusa.com/news-blog/golden-gate-bridge-chan...
That doesn't mean it's what it actually does.
I'm pretty confident that still doesn't justify all the delays or huge cost overruns. SF is not well known for completing anything in time or on budget. But it's frustrating and inaccurate to see "San Francisco's expensive bus lane" becoming a talking point while omitting the costly and necessary infrastructure upgrades included in that cost. The omission feels designed to malign projects that improve public transit. (And probably also to fit into talking points about "liberal San Francisco"). [Edit: I mean in general, not necessarily assuming ill will on the part of this particular site/author.]
Prague built 35km of tram lines in 14 years after 1893 and another 45km during the next 20 years. (Different era and tech, but still it was building tram lines through existing streets)
A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work.
(yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself)
Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!
Apollo 8 had a ton of flaws in it as well. But for the most part it did the job that was intended for it. If the world decided to keep flying Apollo 8 for the next 30 years, I'm sure even more flaws would show up, but I wouldn't exactly blame the original designers.
And the language is operating in a different context than most other languages (prioritizing not breaking at all costs), so it is really hard to fix defects. That context would have been impossible to foresee.
And also, the argument that "made in 10 days and is horrible" is counter-factual. We don't know if we could have gotten a better language if they spent 1 year or 5 years. The achievement is impressive.
I can't remember ever running into JS's quirks. If I did it was no different than any language's quirks.
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)
True urgency is really such a key predictor to things getting done impossibly fast, and our brains are great at detecting manufactured urgency.
For once, the government would need a real jolt, a voice of a leader, to send a spine chilling message down to every corner of the gov to stand up and get up. This seems impossible in the day of social media and the internet.
Second, the financing machinery of the government would need to be completely replaced with something temporary the 1000x size of DARPA to get things going. Most people don’t know but the marginal tax rate during WWII and well into 1970’s was insanely high, at one point 91%. Reagan reduced marginal taxes from 70% to 28% by the end of his term.
Laws would be slashed or dismantled. Bureaucracy would see the face of reality it has never seen.
Then, the will of the people. Which I feel the most optimistic about. Humans are pretty good at getting together in a war like urgency. Counter point is COVID, but I can imagine every person to be onboard if a nuclear bomb was detonated in New York.
It would be a strangely fascinating thing to witness, as much as I wish no war to ever happen.
The real threat to the USA is ourselves, not something like WW3.
You are way more optimistic than me. If WW3 breaks out government machinery, military, intelligence are all not going to be a problem at all. Before that though you'd have to align most of the country on what the right side even is. And yes, that includes the side that dropped a nuke on New York ("How do we know they did it? It may have been a false flag operation. Here's a Facebook video that proves it. They anyways deserved it for voting blue.")
The media would be under sorts of a martial law and things would shut down dramatically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_George_W._Bush...
...or a major pandemic which is more deadly than most wars?
And tax revenues rose.
A lot of them directly attribute this to the Americans scientists not being at risk of being invaded.
British Leyland went bust about 16 years before I was born but the legacy lives on eh
"I decided I can write something better than anything out there in two weeks. And I was right." [1]
I have a bit of a love have relationship with this one. It was inspired by two languages, Self and Scheme, that are both incredibly beautiful, was then made ugly to be familiar and since then introduced major churn and bloat that was never needed.
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Imagine a world where HTML, CSS and JS were all just a unified language, with sound, simple primitives at the bottom, extensibility (macros, schema...) built-in, and a well designed standard library.
Think of how much more productive developers would be, the possible performance optimizations in browser engines, much simpler tooling, less arbitrary choices, less hacks and workarounds. We would have more time to create useful and beautiful things than solve problems we imposed on us ourselves.
Too much money to be made to do things thoughtfully and sustainably.
People actually feel this way? I find web development and entrepreneurship to be as accessible and as fun as ever. So many amazing technologies within reach. I really enjoy web development now more than ever.
You know what would be really enjoyable? If there was a dominant culture of interoperability within hardware, social media and information-sharing. What "Web3" should have been about instead of appealing to / being co-opted by wealth-hoarding, destructive ideologies, and other crimes.
[0]: https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/blob/master/tutorial...
Javascript development used to be simple, elegant and fun, back in the days of JQuery plugins when all you needed was a text editor and an FTP account. All of this churn and bloat isn't the fault of the language, it's the fault of Node.js and the commodification of Javascript by enterprise and startups wanting to force the language to be something it was never meant to be, because Javascript developers are a dime a dozen.
>Imagine a world where HTML, CSS and JS were all just a unified language, with sound, simple primitives at the bottom, extensibility (macros, schema...) built-in, and a well designed standard library.
That's the world we live in now. A lot of the bloat of modern javascript comes from generating HTML and CSS dynamically, rather than having them be static as intended. That separation of concerns is there for a reason, and the simplicity of that model is what makes the web so hackable. It's easy to drop a script into a page or a new CSS file. Hotpatching a running application not so much. Degradation is easier when things are separate as well. An HTML page should work without CSS or JS. Having everything be a single, executable language means even simple hypertext documents can fail to render because of errors.
Which i know seems like a great idea to developers, but there's a good reason XHTML, which had the same "feature", never took off. People would much rather have error correction even at the cost of greater complexity because it's more important that the web work than that it look pretty doing so.
>Think of how much more productive developers would be, the possible performance optimizations in browser engines, much simpler tooling, less arbitrary choices, less hacks and workarounds.
That's not what would happen. Think of the worst, ugliest, most sprawling spaghetti codebase you've ever seen.
Everything would look like that. Everything.
The separation of concerns doesn't hold and is failing us all the time, HTML is not just information structure, it is also interactivity and layout. CSS is rigid, complex and inexpressive. One often has to at least generate it and sometimes manipulate the DOM via JS to build even simple visual constraints and relations.
Why do the specs of the languages keep growing? Some of it is what you said about programming culture, but the more fundamental problem is that we're dealing with an entirely inappropriate, inextensible model that we keep on patching.
> That's not what would happen. Think of the worst, ugliest, most sprawling spaghetti codebase you've ever seen.
> Everything would look like that. Everything.
That's exactly what we have now pretty much everywhere, but with extra layers, workarounds and patches on top. It's not good!
Don't get me wrong though. I love the web - and all of this is hindsight. The above is maybe just wishful thinking and fantasy.
Add to the list pc.
For those who haven't clicked the link: This is a really cool list of ambitious projects that were successfully delivered in relatively short amounts of time.