Patrick Collison

Rose-tinted Red Car nostalgia is common in the post Roger Rabbit era. It was a poor private solution to what would later be a big public problem, and you can read a more neutral take on its demise at 99% Invisible [0].

I lived in LA for quite a few years and they opened the expo line through my neighborhood (Culver City) towards the end of my time there. It was transformational. It wasn't the fastest way to get downtown (assuming no traffic), but it meant you could have a drink without worrying about getting home. You could have a nice afternoon walking around without searching for parking. You could see an event at Staples Center and easily get home when it was over. Now the line goes all the way to Santa Monica, bringing more and more people into the fold.

I get that it is not as extensive as other systems, and parts of it share passage with cars, but it would have never gotten done as an underground system [1], and it works quite well as a complement to local bus lines.

Basically, LA Metro is actually building the infrastructure people imagine Red Car to have been. It takes decades because it is a big project and we are not good at building infrastructure quickly anymore [2], but it is a long-term investment in helping the city grow.

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
[2] https://patrickcollison.com/fast

Very insightful article. I find it crazy how few people I know read. Successful people seem to unanimously agree with the article that books are "one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small".

From Warren Buffett[0] to patio11[1] to Bill Gates[2] to Patrick/John Collison [3][4] it seems incredibly rare to find a successful investor/CEO/founder who _doesn't_ read.

Yet for some reason almost no one (especially not my friends in their early 20s!) reads. I'd like to understand why, if anyone has any ideas? I think the obvious argument is social media and shortening attention spans, but it's probably more nuanced than that.

[0] Warren Buffett apparently spends 80% of his day reading
[1] "This makes buying books a stupidly high ROI, assuming you read and get value out of them." from https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing-for-geeks
[2] Bill Gates reads a book a week, from http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-favorite-books-2015-10
[3]http://www.johncollison.ie/2013reading.html
[4]https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

By the way, I'm working on a tool that makes it easier to keep track of what you're reading and discover who's read what. I'd love to chat with any active readers on HN and hear about your reading pain points (I'm at me@tristanhomsi.com ).

To emphasize, I agree with you. I don't think "back in the good ol' days" that things were always benevolent, nor do I believe that today that things are always evil.

But I do think it's a mistake to say this is just another step, or going from an "8 to a 9". I think this idea that so much of our technology is actively hostile is a part of the puzzle around why many people feel that our pace of real technological advancement and our ability to build big projects has slowed greatly (Patrick Collison has a great blog piece, https://patrickcollison.com/fast)

I feel part of this is a consequence of the fact that we've gotten so good at data analysis, when you look at 2 alternatives and one shows an immediate, clear payoff (but the downsides are long term and not all that clear), while the other shows a riskier, longer term payoff, we (collectively) nearly always go with the short term win. E.g we can see with A/B testing what keeps people the most "engaged", but we just kind of ignore that this "engagement" is with the lowest common denominator of content like rage-inducing tribalism.

I agree with this article, however I think it misses the most valuable aspect of speed: compounded returns on experience.

Experience isn't 1:1 with time spent. It's easy to spend a lot of time on something but learn very little. Conversely, its possible to gain a large amount of experience in a short period of time.

By being able to develop faster, you become able to accumulate more experience in a smaller amount of time. This experience then enables you to develop faster, kicking off a virtuous cycle of growth.

Following this thought provides clarity on what action you should take immediately: do anything as long as its something. Through doing something, you will become more experienced and that experience will enable you to do something else even faster.

This is why you end up with so many aphorism in the industry promoting rapid action over inaction:

- Move fast and break things

- Worse is better

- Fail fast

- Hacker mentality

- "Action oriented"

See also: https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ and https://patrickcollison.com/fast

The 10x developer was never supposed to be "churning out code at breakneck speed" or "leave a trail of destruction in their wake", except for maybe some misguided recruiter/manager/CV-padder. Saying that they are is an easy strawman argument since we all agree no one wants those.

When you think 10x developer, you should instead think about devs who built industries, or devs that made such huge impact that them being human has been questioned. Widely known examples might be: John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Joel Spolsky, etc. For industry-specific ones, in JS-land you could think of TJ Holowaychuk or Sindre Sorhus. And for quantifying it a bit from the "business" side, think that Instagram reached 14M users with 3 Engineers and Whatsapp supported 450M users with 35 engineers. For a more general view, "/fast" is a great read: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

> I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up hurting tech development in Ireland in the long term.

I'm not sure there is much tech development to hurt.

"The talent pool here is much smaller than that of Silicon Valley. The single most important aspect of Silicon Valley is that it’s where many great people choose to live. Stripe’s employees come from Honduras, Kenya, India, Sweden, Canada, Austria, and more—but they’ve all chosen to live in Silicon Valley. Because Ireland has fewer of these immigrants, Irish start-ups are forced to either hire from a much more limited group, or to try to convince people to move here. (A third option is to have a geographically distributed team from the start; this route is also quite tough.)"

source: (scroll down) http://patrickcollison.com/