
Fast - doppp
https://patrickcollison.com/fast
======
cldellow
> The Alaska Highway. Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of highway were built over
> the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks,
> Alaska.

I grew up in Dawson Creek. Our claim to fame: "Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway
starts here!"

The Alaska Highway as built in 1942 is nothing like a highway that most people
would envision. It wasn't paved, for example. It was good enough for military
vehicles with crews of soldiers who could make ad hoc repairs to the road as
needed while they transited through, who had extensive survival skills, and
could literally radio for assistance if needed.

It wasn't opened to the public until 1948 -- so perhaps 6 years, not 6 months,
is a better estimate of its time.

It's also shrunk by almost 20% as it has been continually rebuilt to make it
passable by passenger vehicles.

It's an accomplishment, no doubt, but I feel like omitting these significant
caveats is meaningful.

~~~
pc
Hm, thank you. I checked a few sources when adding this one but will go back
and double-check the specifics/qualifiers.

Wikipedia, incidentally, seems to support the shorter timeline:

 _“The official start of construction took place on March 8, 1942, after
hundreds of pieces of construction equipment were moved on priority trains by
the Northern Alberta Railways to the northeastern part of British Columbia
near Mile 0 at Dawson Creek. Construction accelerated through the spring as
the winter weather faded away and crews were able to work from both the
northern and southern ends; they were spurred on after reports of the Japanese
invasion of Kiska Island and Attu Island in the Aleutians. During construction
the road was nicknamed the "oil can highway" by the work crews due to the
large number of discarded oil cans and fuel drums that marked the road's
progress.[9] On September 24, 1942, crews from both directions met at Mile 588
at what became named Contact Creek,[10] at the British Columbia-Yukon border
at the 60th parallel; the entire route was completed October 28, 1942, with
the northern linkup at Mile 1202, Beaver Creek, and the highway was dedicated
on November 20, 1942, at Soldier's Summit.”_

~~~
vinay_ys
"...cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.".

IMO, extrapolations like this are not very useful unless it also means it can
actually be executed at that cost in 2019.

Is that really the case here?

~~~
paggle
No, it's specifically meant to illustrate that the inflation in infrastructure
costs has been wildly faster than the inflation in the rest of the economy.
The US can't build infrastructure for any kind of reasonable cost anymore and
it is a big fucking problem.

~~~
jacobush
It IS a big problem, but shifting stuff around in a dense city is different
from piling some dirt into a shape on the tundra.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Most of the route is through extremely rugged mountainous terrain, not tundra,
and developing a roadbed that can survive -70 F winters is a lot more involved
than "piling dirt into a shape"

I traveled it before was paved, and it was, and is, a true engineering marvel.

~~~
jacobush
Yes, I both unravelled my vast illiteracy on road engineering in general and
understated a bit on purpose. My point was that there is not much existing
infrastructure to take into account up there. Your point taken though.

------
thedudeabides5
This link has been submitted 8 times.

It has taken 7 months to get to the front page.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19846868)

That's like 1.5 Apollo 8s

~~~
misiti3780
where can you get those pieces of data?

~~~
IA21
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpatrickcollison.com%...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpatrickcollison.com%2Ffast)

Algolia hosts a HN search site

~~~
misiti3780
thanks.

------
neilk
There's no question in my mind that North America has gotten a lot worse at
completing great civic projects.

Sometimes, that's for good reasons. We don't have slave labor, we have
environmental review, and we allow affected communities to protest and block
approval. In the old days when the city fathers had a bright idea they'd just
plow through the neighborhood of $LEAST_POWERFUL_ETHNIC_GROUP.

We might have overcorrected! But I also don't know what model there might
exist for moving quickly with a multi-stakeholder process.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
There's not one.

Time and time again, organizations prove that product design/project
management by consensus leads to budget overruns and under delivery.

Quality at speed requires dictatorial like organisation with high risk to all.
In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had mental
breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of something
like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause that would
motivate such projects.

~~~
roenxi
> In every example given people died, more were maimed and even more had
> mental breakdowns. Seems like most people aren't willing to be a part of
> something like that today and there doesn't seem to be any popular cause
> that would motivate such projects.

People are still totally willing to be part of something like that; people are
as haphazard and risky as they ever were. The government won't let them
because it doesn't trust people to assess the risks properly (there is
evidence that the government is right; people are very bad at assessing risk).

However improving safety probably isn't going to cause the speed reductions,
safety and speed don't usually conflict. The fastest way is often also a very
safe way because it involves less unnecessary exposure of people to hazards.
The issue is the government deciding that work flat-out can't be done (eg,
can't open a mine, can't build a highway, can't build a building, can't
hire/fire someone, etc, etc). There is usually a good reason but at the end of
the day building infrastructure is a break-eggs-make-omelette situation. We
don't know how to build infrastructure at scale without collateral damage, as
it were. If we first gain consensus that something is a good idea,
infrastructure will not be built.

~~~
adriand
> People are still totally willing to be part of something like that; people
> are as haphazard and risky as they ever were.

I think people were much more willing to risk their lives (and risk other
people’s lives) in the past than they are today. We have elevated the role of
the individual. Younger generations are all “me” generations. (I’m not saying
that’s a bad thing, it’s true for me as well.)

Case in point is the Western expectation of acceptable losses due to warfare.
If we needed to pull off another D Day invasion, I don’t think we could.
Generation Z is not signing up to die in tens of thousands and I don’t blame
them. The casualty rates that were once seen as the normal cost of war and
industry are totally unacceptable today.

~~~
hodgesrm
This is a somewhat misleading argument. The US did away with the draft so that
most people have not had to make this choice. The troops that did go to the
Middle East wars have suffered many casualties (6-7K dead, many more wounded,
many US contractors dead/wounded, PTSD/suicides/mental health issues
afterwards, etc.). [1] All those affected were volunteers.

It's also clear that there are times when virtually everyone in the US has
agreed on the necessity of war, the 9/11 attacks being the latest case in
point. Conversely, many wars that in retrospect might seem to have been widely
supported were in fact quite controversial. The Civil War is a case in point.
[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war)
[2] [https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/draft-
riot...](https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/draft-riots)

~~~
Nimitz14
> The troops that did go to the Middle East wars have suffered many casualties
> (6-7K dead, many more wounded, many US contractors dead/wounded,
> PTSD/suicides/mental health issues afterwards, etc.).

That is objectively not "many casualties". Which was also his point (which you
apparently did not understand, somehow).

And I find your implication that as long as people volunteer it's fine if they
die quite disturbing, although funnily enough a perfect example of the
"me"-generation the poster you were replying to was talking about! Who cares
what my country is doing as long as I'm not affected right!

~~~
hodgesrm
It seems you inferred something quite different from what I was trying to say.

Having a small fraction of US society bear the costs of prolonged wars is a
terrible policy that brought unnecessary pain to 10s of thousands of American
families and many more in countries like Iraq. It also allowed American
involvement in those wars to continue unchecked. If we want them to stop the
simplest solution is to bring back the draft.

p.s., I was in the volunteer military (USAF).

------
lordlic
> Neighbors previously complained about the replacement of historic
> streetlight poles for Van Ness BRT. Replacement poles made to look like the
> originals ballooned the project cost by $6.5 million, according to city
> documents

This is a perfect microcosm of San Francisco governance. A small number of
highly-motivated landowners unashamedly hijacking city policy for their own
interests. How do we stand up to this?

~~~
BurningFrog
Governance by whoever can show up at a Tuesday afternoon meeting and argue has
to be one of the worst systems ever devised.

That's the root cause to fight!

~~~
nielsole
Aka Grassroot democracy

~~~
noobermin
Democracy for people who have time to go in to meeting on a weeknight, ie.,
wealthy people.

------
narrator
You forgot Banting and Best[1]. They went from coming up with the idea for
synthetic insulin, developing the treatment, testing it on animals, then
themselves, then testing it on patients, then developing and releasing a
commercial product and winning the nobel prize in medicine in 3 years! This
was of course long before the FDA was around and if they tried to do the same
thing at that pace today we'd throw them in prison.

[1][https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-
discov...](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-discovery-of-
insulin)

~~~
aaavl2821
Genentech (dave Goeddel, herb heyneker, Dennis Kleid, herb boyer) cloned human
insulin in a year (1977-8 I think) and got it approved by FDA ~4 years later

------
avmich
> Apollo 8... went to the Moon...

Early on in the Apollo program there was the plan to build a series of
spacecrafts which would progressively solve intermediate problems on the path
to the Moon landing. For that, a series of Apollo spacecrafts were planned,
and production was running for years - Apollos flew also to Skylab and to 1975
docking with Soyuz.

Specific Apollo 8 was chosen to fly to the Moon because LEM wasn't ready - it
was later tested on Earth orbit with Apollo 9 and flew to the Moon with Apollo
10 first time. So, Apollo 8 flying to the Moon isn't a separate decision, but
change of existing plans - with a couple of missions swapped in time; fast,
but not nearly as fast as creation from scratch of a spaceship or a program
would assume.

~~~
interfixus
True, but still a dizzying feat by any standard. World's in-a-class-of-its-own
largest rocket, so far only tested in two unmanned launches, one of them a
near disaster, stability problems now theoretically fixed, but fixes never
tested in actual flight. Sure, let's improvise a new kind of missio in four
months time, strap people on top of that thing, and shoot them to the Moon for
the first time ever.

I don't believe that's quite how things are done these days. Wildly successful
things, mind you.

~~~
Gibbon1
I went back and looked at the significant failures that happened. They were
really really lucky.

------
fluxic
1599: Shakespeare writes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, As You Like it, Henry V.

"It's the year in which the thirty-five-year-old playwright went from being an
exceptionally talented writer, to one of the greatest who ever lived.”

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-
the-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-life-of-
william-shakespeare-1599)

------
GuB-42
I'd like to see the opposite: slow projects that turned out awesome.

Doing things really fast is more often than not the result of external
circumstances. Maybe some new tech has just been made available, maybe it was
a life-or-death situation, where dying at work is considered acceptable (ex:
at war), maybe it had an unreasonable budget, maybe the "fast" project was
just the tip of the iceberg, made visible by decades unnoticed of ground work,
or maybe it massively prioritized speed over quality.

These situations are unlikely to relate to your projects, so yeah, things are
going to be slow for you. Buy that's better than expecting some miracle, or
considering human lives as disposable.

What would be more inspirational would be a list of slow projects, where
people are trapped for years in development hell, with cost cutting, bad
technical choices, mistakes and mismanagement. Projects where everyone
involved say it is doomed and yet, at the end, something awesome came out.

If you are working on a building, what's the best thing to say? "That building
took 1 year to make, you are at 2 and you didn't finish, you suck" or "That
building almost crumbled, contractors defaulted, it took 10 years, but now, it
is the pride of the city"? In the second example, you can see the mistakes and
how they fixed them, the first one most likely involves a lot of luck and just
sets unrealistic expectations.

~~~
Zanni
Here's one for you:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia)

------
divbzero
“The development of Git began on 3 April 2005. Torvalds announced the project
on 6 April; it became self-hosting as of 7 April.” [1]

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History)

~~~
quickthrower2
The development of Git May have started in the back of his brain earlier than
that. Code being written is kind of the very final stage of software dev.

~~~
tim333
I think he said he'd been thinking about if for a year or so. From
[https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-
git...](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git-an-
interview-with-git-creator-linus-torvalds/)

>So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten
days or so (at which point I did my first _kernel_ commit using git), it
wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that
early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic
ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole
project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to
avoid doing.

------
xixixao
Empire State Building has always boggled my mind, with its speed. Built faster
than most houses today, biggest building in the city by far, in the middle of
the city, amazing endurance. I need to read more about the process. I wish
governments everywhere learned a few lessons from it.

~~~
nine_k
I also remember that the construction site did not have a stellar safety
record. It was typical for the industry back then, though. In the middle of
the Great Depression, a builder would likely not be too picky and reject a
chance to work on such a high-profile project when unemployment was high.

~~~
slim
less work days probably also means less worker casualities

------
seem_2211
A relatively recent example of rapid infrastructure building (in California no
less!) can be found with C.C Meyers.

 _" Proclaimed a “Local Hero,” Clinton “C.C.” Myers was lauded on the cover of
the July 1995 issue of Comstock’s magazine for “working miracles in heavy
construction.” Three big projects by C.C. Myers Inc. cemented his legacy:
rebuilding two bridges in Watsonville after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake;
reconstructing the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake;
and rebuilding a stretch of Interstate 5, including a bridge, near Coalinga
after the 1995 floods. He was equally famous for the efficiency of these
projects — 55 days in Watsonville, 66 days in Santa Monica and 21 days in
Coalinga — and the huge bonuses he earned for finishing projects early."_

[https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-
catc...](https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catching-cc-
myers)

[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-story.html)

------
hliyan
Constraints foster creativity (if the right people are in the team). When JFK
announced (in 1961) USA's intention to put a man on the moon before the end of
the decade, he set a time constraint that could not be moved without
considerable global embarassment. In less than 9 years, it was accomplished.
Perhaps the formula is: a deadline + right people + leadership support.

~~~
eugeniub
\+ 4% of the entire nation’s federal budget doesn’t hurt.

~~~
angry_octet
I wasn't just money, it was changing the rules for spending the money. PhD
students were funded. Science & math teachers were well paid and respected.
People wanted to work on the space program, even if on the periphery.

It would still be great to work at SpaceX, even if Elon is diet Howard Hughes.

~~~
jacobush
Lol Diet Howard Hughes!

------
savrajsingh
The SR-71 should be on this list. <2 years from idea to one of the most
remarkable aircraft ever built. Also quite fast :)

~~~
sneak
Fast for fifty years ago, maybe. I wish they’d tell us about the cool stuff
they built in the 80s or 90s.

~~~
kortilla
Well fast aircraft sort of lost their purpose once satellites got good, so it
wouldn’t surprise me to find out they stopped caring about manned, fast
aircraft with the SR-71.

~~~
sneak
Okay, what cool hypersonic suborbital drones do they have? Are any satellite-
launched?

~~~
amdavidson
They don't and they're not.

Look at the defense allocations for basic research into hypersonic capable
materials to prove that they are still years away the most basic deployment
and once the research is done, there is no supply base to make the materials
(FA8650-20-S-5003)

------
ncmncm
Pyramid at Giza, 20 years -- laying one 2.5-ton stone block every 2 minutes,
of every daylight hour, for the entire period. Some people say 10 years, one
per minute. Or, construction for half of each of 20 years, one per minute.

You could imagine getting pretty good at it, five years in.

------
adamnemecek
This sort of time accounting makes no sense.

A lot of these feats were the first _successful_ version, however the people
behind them had careers of doing the same thing over and over again.

It's not like Brendan Eich went from not knowing how to write a language to
shipping a language in 10 days however this article presents it like this.

It's not like Boeing went from nothing to 747 in whatever amount of time.
Building an airplane get much easier when you already have a factory for
building airplanes.

Like I can work on something for a decade and day before shipping, give it a
new name and say "hey, I shipped it in a day".

It might take a chef an hour to make a meal. But he might have been optimizing
that hour his whole life.

~~~
freyr
Is he claiming that the people involved weren't experts? It doesn't seem that
way to me.

I think it's just the opposite – he's demonstrating how much rapid progress
can be made when you cut the red tape and get the right people working at full
capacity.

He then contrasts this with the municipal government of San Francisco, which
operates under a different set of principles. Namely: maximize red tape, use
unqualified people, and exert minimal effort, all while lighting money on fire
because you have an enormous annual budget and no accountability.

~~~
wilg
I agree that's the point, but for all we know there could be years of
education, planning, failed trials, preparation, and/or red tape omitted from
these timelines.

~~~
freyr
No doubt they put in a lot of work.

But also, it's very unlikely that any of them would have taken 20 years and
$310 million dollars to create a bus lane.

------
wruza
>JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10
days, in May 1995.

>Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks.

11 extra days completely worth investing.

~~~
bjoli
Poor Brendan. Wanting to write Scheme for the browser and ending up writing
JavaScript. Sure, today JS is a proper language, but it atillmlacks the
elegance and adherence to principle of scheme. Maybe that's why it's so
successful :)

------
weinzierl
Almost every item on the list is from before 1960. After 1960 there is not a
single construction project in the US. The later projects happened either in
unregulated areas (JavaScript, Amazon Prime) or in China (Shenzhen, Luckin
Coffee), with a single European outlier - the TGV.

------
tomatohs
The original Jeep was designed in 14 hours.

> The war was under way in Europe, so the Army's need was urgent and
> demanding. Bids were to be received by July 22, a span of just eleven days.
> Manufacturers were given 49 days to submit their first prototype and 75 days
> for completion of 70 test vehicles.

> Probst turned down Bantam initially, but agreed to work without pay after an
> Army request and began work on July 17, 1940.[39]

> Probst laid out full design drawings for the Bantam prototype, known as the
> Bantam Reconnaissance Car, or BRC, in just two days, and worked up a cost
> estimate the next day. Bantam's bid was submitted, complete with blueprints,
> on July 22.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willys_MB)

------
blt
A lot of the construction projects came at the cost of bad safety standards
and general poor treatment of workers, including plenty of workers deaths.
Something to keep mind when bemoaning the slower speeds nowadays.

~~~
BurningFrog
I don't know how to disentangle that from the fact that it was a vastly poorer
time with very little technology and health care compared to now.

------
RupertEisenhart
The 1000 dollar human genome [1] is one of the most staggering examples of
this.

"In dozens of presentations over the past few years, scientists have compared
the slope of Moore's law with the swiftly dropping costs of DNA sequencing.
For a while they kept pace, but since about 2007, it has not even been close."

To go from a cost of 2.7billion and one decade to where we are today (people
are now talking seriously about the zero dollar genome, aka the price of
sequencing can be trivially offset by selling some meta information to some
company or other) can be seen as a feat of scientific infrastructure-making
that blows any Alaskan highway out of the swamps.

[https://www.nature.com/news/technology-
the-1-000-genome-1.14...](https://www.nature.com/news/technology-
the-1-000-genome-1.14901)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
This is a cool, inspirational list, pc. Thanks!

I would also be interested in a similar list, but one that listed "fast
failures," like _Vasa_ or _Fidenae_.

I sometimes think that we need cautionary examples, these days, as "move fast
and break things" has broken a lot of things.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Look up the death rates for these projects if you want a more complete
picture.

------
adventured
The Manhattan Project moved along remarkably quickly. From the time 56,000
acres were authorized for purchase at Oak Ridge, to the Trinity test, was
under three years (September 1942, July 1945).

In 5.x years id Software built and released: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2,
Quake, Quake 2.

~~~
philwelch
The B-29 Superfortress--the bomber that dropped both atomic bombs on Japan--
took longer and cost more money to develop than the Manhattan Project.

------
Austin_Conlon
The Xerox Alto was done in three months: [https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-
Xerox-Alto-done-in-only-3-...](https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-Xerox-Alto-
done-in-only-3-months/answer/Alan-Kay-11).

------
owens99
1\. Several examples are false (as pointed out in HN comments)

2\. This post is descriptive, but not explanatory (startup bro science)

3\. Even taken at face value, it’s Confirmation Bias presenting outliers

~~~
webmaven
Survivorship Bias, rather.

------
desdiv
Nuclear fission was discovered on December 17, 1938. It was first used in
warfare on August 6, 1945, 2,424 days later.

------
brenden2
It’s always interesting to see what kinds of things make it to the front page
because of who wrote them, rather than the content itself (which in this case
is just a few cherry picked examples with no context). I’m not exactly sure
what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from the facts themselves.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> I’m not exactly sure what anyone is supposed to learn from this aside from
> the facts themselves.

What's wrong with learning facts?

~~~
alphakappa
Nothing wrong in itself. But it is appropriate to wonder about the takeaways.
Without proper context and history, the lessons you draw might not be helpful
ones.

------
habosa
I just went to Dubai for the first time ... one thing about Dubai is they can
still build fast. All of Downtown Dubai was built in about a decade and it is
really something. Tallest building in the world, largest mall in the world,
multiple huge public spaces and many luxury hotels and residential buildings.
All built in the 2000s in the shadow of the financial crisis.

And what they're doing for the upcoming 2020 Dubai Expo is equally mind
blowing.

Before the downvotes come: I know it's an autocracy and the building labor
practices are questionable. But many achievements on the list are subject to
those caveats so it deserves mentioning.

------
the_reformation
Fascinating that the Stripe CEO has become the foremost critic of San
Francisco municipal governance.

~~~
nrp
Is this in relation to Stripe's move out of San Francisco
([https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-
valuab...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/2nd-most-valuable-U-S-
startup-to-leave-SF-as-14558067.php)) or something else?

~~~
freyr
San Francinsco's city government is completely incompetent and the city itself
has devolved into a disgusting cesspool.

But if you live in the city, you don't mention this. Instead, you loudly
proclaim at every opportunity that San Francisco is best city in the world,
and you express your pity for the poor schmucks who are forced to live
anywhere else.

The crime, the drug addicts, the homelessness, the mental illness, the broken
car windows, the absurd cost of living, the blighted neighborhoods, the
pervasive human misery, the garbage, the heroin needles, the human feces --
this is to be considered part of San Francisco's urban charm. Anyone who
acknowledges how bad the situation has become should be ostracized, downvoted,
or told to move to Walnut Creek.

You _especially_ shouldn't be critical if you run a tech startup in the city,
since you need a continual supply of young, impressionable employees to buy
into the hype and move here.

But once you move just outside the city perimeter, then you can afford to be a
obliquely critical of the city's slow bus lane construction.

~~~
kenneth
Finally moving out of SF was the best decision I ever made. It only became
clear once I was removed from SF for enough time. Fuck that place. Yeah, it's
the home of technology, but it's slowly rotting and dying and it makes its
resident miserable terrible people.

I'm happy to be living somewhere I love now (HK). And if things ever change,
I'll hope not to make the same mistake and stick around so long.

~~~
freyr
Congrats on getting out! I started a new job here a few months ago, but I'll
be requesting to transfer to a remote team as soon as I hit my 1-year mark.

------
nine_k
It would be interesting to have something opposite: "Cheap".

Notable, well-known things to be built on a shoestring budget.

~~~
maddyboo
Cheap, fast, and good are three interesting measures. It’s often said you can
pick any two, and from experience I would have to agree.

I’d be curious to hear about projects spanning this gamut – something done
fast n’ good but costing dearly; fast and cheap but horribly executed (I’d bet
a large slice of projects fit in quite well here), or the amusing slow,
expensive, and ultimately shitty. Perhaps most interesting would be story or
two about projects which miraculously attained the trifecta... that is, if any
of these stories actually happen to exist.

~~~
evilotto
"Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three." \--
[https://sqlite.org/index.html](https://sqlite.org/index.html)

------
angry_octet
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza)

4500 years old. Construction 10-15 years, >10000 workers (some estimate
200,000). Accuracy of construction is fantastic.

------
pithymaxim
Based on that last entry about the SF bus line, I would really love to see
[https://patrickcollison.com/slow](https://patrickcollison.com/slow)

~~~
nhf
He's rightfully dunking on the Van Ness bus line for some reasons, but it's
basically a major utilities infrastructure project disguised as a bus lane.
They're overhead power and reconfiguring the street, but they're also
replacing ~4 miles of 1800s water main, putting in a new earthquake-resistant
sewer system, and redoing the fire hydrant water feeds.

I feel like it's more of a branding failure honestly. People would be much
more understanding - if you heard "we're replacing 1800s utilities with 21st
century tech built for the earthquake zone in SF and you get better transit
along with that", I think the conversation would be much different than "it's
taken a decade to build a new lane".

~~~
Gibbon1
That reminds me a bit of the California High Speed rail project. A bunch of
the work in the central valley is grade separation for existing freight rail
lines.

------
tim333
Also Gmail 1 day for the first prototype. An an aside I found Musk interesting
talking about how they get the Starship type projects to progress quickly:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be&t=74)

>And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to
stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to
delete parts and processes.

etc

------
pfranz
I do think these kinds of things are worth remembering, but looking them over
it just reminded me of the quote, "it took me 10 years to become an overnight
success"

------
gordon_freeman
On Amazon Prime:

From The Everything Store, A book by Brad Stone -- what I got to know was that
Amazon had the pieces in place that eventually helped create Prime service
such as efficient warehouse operation that can deliver packages in 2 days,
quick payment processing, rich customer data etc. So to think that suddenly
Amazon Prime was invented and implemented in just 6 weeks seems wrong.

------
gist
This is all so ridiculous. Yes so much can be done quickly if you take
chances, ignore worker protections, cut corners, and do things like they used
to be done back in the day.

Let's take this Marinship as one small example of why almost everything on the
page is probably not relevant today:

> Physical construction began on 28 March. 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."

So 'delayed two weeks to allow 42 families to move'. Can you imagine what
would happen now or even 20 years ago? It would be tied up in courts
(including the court of public opinion) for years even decades. Lawsuits
filed, legal challenges and so on. (see 'Blue Route' in Philadelphia) [1]

[1] [https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-
route/](https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/blue-route/)

------
pbreit
Tesla’s speed on the China factory is pretty amazing.

Germany will not have any excuses.

~~~
Kovah
Ha... Ever heard of our bureaucracy?

It's destroying so many good ideas or makes them so much more expensive.

------
bredren
Yes, Disneyland opened that fast but to many it was a disaster. [1]

Heralding quick launches should come with tribute to the sacrifices of early
users.

[https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-
opening-...](https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-
day-60-years-ago)

------
tomaskafka
What is notable to me is that almost all of these examples seem to come from
times of war - world war, trade wars, war for space domination ...

(plus some of them are very coloured - the Alaska highway was a dirtroad, the
Apollo definitely wasn't made in 143 days ...)

------
maremp
As a programmer, I often stumble upon the performance arguments and pitching
technology Y over currently used X "because of better performance, i.e. it's
fast".

Sure, the impressive feats of engineering accompanied by a short time to
build, sounds good. But how much money and time went into maintaining all the
flawed decisions?

The stories of Xerox Alto's first GUI-oriented computer are usually
accompanied by how Apple stole it and made it better. To me, this sounds like
their speed did not help them ship a great product to the end-users.

JavaScript was prototyped in 10 days, which is impressive. But there are also
many jokes using this same fact as a punchline. This quick development was
paid many times over by having to deal with poor language decisions. It took
another 20 years for the language to start moving and developing in a more
developer-friendly direction. And some of it will never be better because it
has to be backwards compatible for all browsers that ever existed.

Comparing a "highway" (later edited to the military roadway) from 1942 to
construction project in one of the larger cities in the world is not fair. I
agree the time it's taking, and the cost is absurd. But the cost of work has
drastically changed since, and the 1942 number most likely doesn't account for
the fact that it was built by soldiers who are already on the payroll, so
there were probably little additional worker expenses. And the standards now
are more strict than they used to be.

------
k_sze
I get the feeling that the purpose of the page is to shame the SF new bus lane
project.

------
TheRealPomax
Calling the Eiffel tower a building is a bit like calling a bridge a building.
It was built, certainly, and it even has a small portion that offers "rooms",
but it's really just a structural skeleton. And in that light, 2 years 2
months is really not all that surprising, or even fast.

------
apexalpha
>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. Source: On the Fast Track.

Wow, what the hell is wrong with the TGV in California? Are they still working
on it? 33 years!

~~~
Gibbon1
Proposition 1A which gave it partial funding didn't pass till 2008.

------
freeslugs
I would not be proud to include JavaScript on this list. Haste makes waste

------
ible
The Shanghai subway system is a good example. Construction started in 1986,
first 28 stations opened in 1993.

It now has 413 stations and is the largest subways system by length (676 km)
in the world.

~~~
fyfy18
Subways drastically vary depending on the material the ground is made of and
what is there already. For example London is relatively easy to build deep
tunnels in, but on of the big things that has increased the complexity of
Crossrail is that central London has a lot of stuff underground that isn't
necessarily documented correctly. There are water mains, sewers, electrical
cables, ventilation shafts, other subway tunnels, stations, then abandoned
instances of all of those and plenty of archeological materials (London as a
city has been around for over 2000 years).

~~~
jiofih
True, totally unfair. Shanghai has only been occupied for ~8000 years.

------
gok
The TGV entry skips over the 20 years of R&D on high speed rail that preceded
the first major construction, much of which was wasted on gas turbine designs.

------
aneutron
While I do get the "spirit" of this, I feel it's highly inaccurate and/or
misrepresentative in some cases.

An example would be Javascript. Sure he implemented a prototype in 10 days,
but the whole implementation was probably a fraction of the test code for V8,
a modern implementation of the beast that is Javascript today. I'd even argue
that the VM engines from 5 year ago would still hold the same property.

------
code-is-code
Impressive how many big structure were build during ww2

~~~
saagarjha
War has a tendency to incentivize rapid construction.

~~~
thrower123
Things were built quickly in that era. Most skyscrapers wenr up in a year or
so, like the Empire State Building. The whole Hoover Dam project took less
than five years.

~~~
philwelch
The war production in particular was incredible:
[http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm](http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm)

> Japan, an island empire totally dependent on maintaining open sea lanes to
> ensure her raw material imports, managed to build just sixty-three DDs (some
> twenty or so of which would have been classified by the Allies as DEs) and
> an unspecified (and by my unofficial count, relatively small) number of
> 'escort' vessels. In the same time span, the US put some eight hundred
> forty-seven antisubmarine capable craft in the water!

> The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half
> months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years.

> Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it
> built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no
> joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could
> sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to
> the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian
> cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels
> in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely
> profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a
> can opener before.

~~~
thrower123
Agreed, it is nuts. The Liberty ships being built in just days. Planes and
tanks and trucks streaming off the assembly lines in the tens of thousands.
Millions of tons of high explosives. Truly incredible.

Nowadays, it takes us the better part of a decade to get a minor bridge
project done, and building a four-story apartment building is a multi-year
endeavor.

------
willyt
Madrid Baracas Terminal 4 roughly equivalent to building the whole of Heathrow
airport i.e including 2 runways and a metro line extension. 7 years from
conception to first passengers.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_Airport)

------
jcims
Given their scale i think Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge deserve honorable
mention. (Five and four years respectively)

~~~
Gibbon1
There is the B-29. The US spent more money on that than the Manhattan project.
I think the US spent even more money on radio and radar development during
WWII.

------
garyclarke27
Great Article. Here’s another, Tesla Gigafactory China, brownfield Jan 2019,
1000 cars per week Dec 19, mind blowing.

------
spodek
Nothing about Einstein's miracle year?

------
jpswade
I think it's easy to forget that although these things were achieved in a very
short space of time, it's not without years of toil that lead to it.

For example, you can't write a programming language in 10 days, without having
spent a long time thinking about how you'd go about doing that prior to doing
it.

------
caiocaiocaio
This isn't necessarily a good thing. The earliest versions of Javascript were
insane. Bad isn't the word. Buggy isn't the word. You've never seen a language
as ridiculous as early Javascript. It took a good twenty years to fix it.

~~~
cachvico
Difficult to understate the repercussions, in developer hours through the
years, of such a briefly thought-out design and implementation!

------
jonplackett
So - why does everything take so long and end up so much more expensive these
days?

~~~
zimpenfish
Covered quite well in other comments but: health and safety, working around
existing infrastructure, political constraints on throwing money at
problems[2], lack of skilled workers[1], etc.

[1] e.g. Crossrail hit delays because other projects like Spurs' new stadium
were willing to pay 2x the daily rate;
[https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-
blame...](https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/crossrail-boss-blames-spurs-
stadium-delay-for-labour-woes-22-01-2019/)

[2] Although if you can convince politicians that infrastructure helps fight
terrorists/blocks immigration/lowers taxes for the rich, you'll probably be
drowning in money pretty quickly.

------
k__
lol, here in Germany things somehow never get done on time.

We are still waiting for an airport in Berlin and a trainstation in Stuttgart.
While the last one still has about 3 years to be "on time" it will probably be
late.

------
bobjordan
When you see examples of waste like this, which are not uncommon, it really
doesn't take much critical thinking to become skeptical of those in favor of
increasing taxes to pay for solutions managed by any Government agencies.

>>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was
recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days.
“The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the
project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation
Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per
meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra,
cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

------
piinbinary
One of the parts of the answer may be that organizations are now designed for
more creativity, being better places to work, and maybe even throughput at the
expense of latency.

------
jimnotgym
FYI This page doesn't display very well on my mobile, and Firefox does not
seem able to put it into reader view, which seems odd for a page of plain
text.

I enjoyed it though.

------
freddref
Stripe was valued at roughly 1B after 5 years. Realex payments, an Irish
payments processor formed around 2000, was sold for 115M after 15 years.

------
dchs
My boss used to have a poster that read "Good, cheap, fast. Pick two."

For all these fast projects, I wonder what the resulting costs and quality
were!

------
rubiquity
2004: DHH built a blog in 15 minutes

2019: San Francisco Web Developer, also opposed to the new bus lane, is still
configuring webpack and package.json. Their intent to build a blog was
announced in early 2015 via a Twitter post containing way too many emoji.

~~~
wruza
Configuring webpack is mastering of zen. It’s not done until you stop
pretending.

------
omosubi
I just started following Patrick Collison's career and have read 2 books from
his reading list. he's one of those people that you feel lucky to be living at
the same as. Going through his website is fascinating and he does this in his
spare time while also building one of the most admired startups in existence.
I'm excited to see what he does next. What a fascinating mind

------
apl002
And here I am 4 months past the date I expected to be done with my MVP....

~~~
verttii
What are you building?

------
andybak
Bear this in mind when people express skepticism about the existence of the
10x developer.

My own productivity can vary over approximately 2 orders of magnitude day to
day so I don't have any problem with believing in individuals differing by a
single order over time.

------
rapfaria
St. Elmo's Fire was created and edited in 24 hours

------
mensetmanusman
The fast construction projects killed lots of workers.

~~~
lgeorget
The Eiffel tower did not though. Nobody died while building the Eiffel tower
although one worker died on the site outside working hours.

------
fulafel
Wonder why reader mode doesn't work on this mobile borked page, even though
there is a big wall of text.

------
zuhayeer
Time is the uppermost bound you can play with, everything else is simply a
subset of time

------
StuffedParrot
What is the BankAmericard?

Edit: spelling

~~~
dasmoth
Like the article says, it was renamed to Visa

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc).

------
RayMan1
Look ma, a site without ads, upvote

------
iconjack
Here's another one that I think belongs on this list:

NYC spent 6+ years and $13 million trying to reopen the Wollman skating rink
in Central Park. In 1986, Trump negotiated a deal with the city for 2½
million, promising completion in 6 months, by Dec 15, in time to salvage most
of the winter season. He and his team opened the rink 2 months ahead of
schedule, and ¾ million under budget.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3wtqnPYlk)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-
rebuild...](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/nyregion/trump-to-rebuild-
wollman-rink-at-the-city-s-expense-by-dec-15.html)

~~~
Medicalidiot
Trump took the credit that HRH Construction deserves, then screwed them over
after it was done by not mentioning them at all.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wollman_Rink)

------
juanbyrge
Here's something fast: the Holocene extinction.

Since the dawn of modern civilization, countless species have become extinct,
and around 1 million species face extinction caused by human events.

Should we really be worshipping economic progress?

~~~
thrower123
> Should we really be worshipping economic progress?

Yes.

The genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back to some imaginary idylic
pre-industrial world. The best way to preserve what there is and free up more
space for preservation is to pursue technology and efficiency ruthlessly. Do
more with less.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
We can have development with constraint, we can have development without the
cult of growth, we could go back to the more inclusive, constrained form of
economic progress seen in the immediate post war. We could even try to tune
the system in new ways to limit the clear problems of unconstrained globalised
capitalism.

We _do not_ need to go back to a Medieval agrarian feudalism, return to
mercantilism or unwind the industrial revolution. It happened, we should learn
from it and make the best of it...

