[HN Gopher] Fast (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Fast (2019)
Author : samuel246
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-08-01 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (patrickcollison.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (patrickcollison.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Popular in:
|
| 2023 (905 points, 298 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912
|
| 2022 (189 points, 97 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279
|
| 2019 (1314 points, 300 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860
| davidw wrote:
| Part of the reason we have 'not fast' is that along with some
| good things, we also did some bad things 'fast', like lots of
| paving over disproportionately minority parts of cities for
| freeways.
|
| It'd be interesting to try and quantify both columns - the good
| and the bad.
|
| Ideally, we would go back to being able to do some things 'fast'
| and hopefully do a bit better at avoiding the bad things.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Exactly. Most of the dot-com start-ups were built fast (faster
| than many other things)...
| neko_ranger wrote:
| It would be interested to see a list of American tofu dregs
| projects. We only see what is still standing.
|
| The difference now I guess is that we eventually learned and
| (mostly) everything is built without issue, sometimes at the
| tradeoff of time. But some countries are going through their
| own growing pains right now (with the tradeoff of
| money/people/shortcuts)
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The destruction of black-owned neighborhoods for freeways is
| very much worth studying. Sweet Auburn had 30,000 residents
| displaced, turning a once prosperous and flourishing
| neighborhood into a crime-ridden shell of its former self.
|
| I am left dreaming about what Atlanta may have looked like if
| they prioritized public transit and ... not pursuing explicitly
| racist policies. I believe in a world where we can rapidly
| build and roll out infrastructure for everyone without
| destroying so much.
| neogodless wrote:
| Relevant (in my opinion) threads in recent days:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 _Fast_
| (catherinejue.com)
|
| 1500+ points, 400+ comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44748934 _Slow_
| (michaelnotebook.com)
|
| 800+ points, 200+ comments
| thinkingkong wrote:
| We're good at moving fast when we do things for the first time or
| the externalities / consequences of speed are either
| underrepresented or hidden.
|
| As soon as something is done a few times, the barrier of entry
| goes up. We get the ability to measure and evaluate consequences.
| We have regulations based on safety or environmental isues. We
| have additional groups of people with specific concerns that must
| be consulted. Other nations may participate and we coerce then
| into increasing or decreasing their involvement. Its a wild big
| dynamic system.
|
| To me this doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to move quickly. Just
| that the innovation requires tools that can navigate between
| these other constraints - or - that we only innovate in areas
| that have never been done before and we do so at a blistering
| pace.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| From reading that the only one pattern that rises is low anxiety.
| People just execute and deliver without delay from fear.
|
| When I look at things that are slow I see only two things:
| natural disasters and analysis paralysis. When I look at software
| employment I see a lots of anxiety at multiple levels. People do
| and say all kinds of shit to mask their anxiety.
| imjonse wrote:
| > From reading that the only one pattern that rises is low
| anxiety. People just execute and deliver without delay from
| fear.
|
| Some are definitely high-anxiety situations: the large-scale
| ambitious ones in the list were done during a war (or cold
| war). Many of the others are high-pressure scenarios where I am
| sure the construction workers had anything but low anxiety.
| They are typical of an economy which is growing very fast where
| bad working conditions and accidents are tolerated. It is not
| unlike condititions in current fast developing countries some
| with immigrant workers (Quatar) or in China.
| zengid wrote:
| you'll execute pretty fast if your back is up against a wall
| JaiRathore wrote:
| The common theme here is liberating small, trusted, and talented
| teams from normal constraints to pursue a singular, urgent goal.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Not really. A lot of the projects listed involved coordinating
| huge numbers of people, e.g. tens of thousands of construction
| workers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| 2019? It talks about the Covid vaccine in 2020...
| alnwlsn wrote:
| The whole of the 20th century was pretty fast. There were no
| vacuum tubes in 1901; by 1999, 15 million transistors on a chip.
| Plus spacecraft, refrigerants, airplanes, CFCs, antibiotics,
| nukes, plasics, radio, lasers...
|
| It was a real "move fast and break things" time period. We'll
| probably never see anything close ever again.
| namblooc wrote:
| And Mozart's "Linz" symphony was composed in 4 (four) days!
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| It's interesting that if you make a one word comment it's seen as
| cheap and unsubstantial, but if you have a one word title, it's
| encouraged and reposted.
| pncnmnp wrote:
| One of my favorite examples of this is the Beatles:
|
| > On 11 February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a
| single studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me.
|
| > Martin asked the band if they had any songs that they could
| record quickly. According to Martin, "It was a straightforward
| performance of their stage repertoire - a broadcast, more or
| less." Initially, a morning and afternoon session only were
| booked; the evening session was added later. Mark Lewisohn later
| wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes
| in the history of recorded music".
|
| Interestingly,
|
| > .... the Beatles arrived with John Lennon suffering from a bad
| cold, which he attempted to treat with a steady supply of throat
| lozenges
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Please_Me
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Somehow the one that always makes me saddest is high speed rail:
|
| > TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to
| build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first
| high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely
| new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part
| of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981,
| 1,975 days later. On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed
| Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of
| California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San
| Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033,
| 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was
| formed.
|
| Of course, these sorts of projects are still possible and do
| happen ---- but they happen in China.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Sent this email to Patrick 2y ago:
|
| Hi,
|
| re: fast: https://patrickcollison.com/fast 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 had changed their minds. Some were
| worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing
| their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4, according to the people
| with knowledge of OpenAI. And putting something out quickly using
| an old model, they reasoned, could help them collect feedback to
| improve the new one. So they decided to dust off and update an
| unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3, the
| company's previous language model, which came out in 2020.
|
| Ref: https://archive.is/d6dI2 /
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/technology/chatgpt-openai...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-01 23:01 UTC)