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159 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | | HN request time: 2.68s | source
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smallstepforman ◴[] No.40713897[source]
Complexity builds rockets with thrust vectoring and lands modules on the moon, simplicity is good for fire crackers.

Once you scale past simple prototypes, you need performance and new features. And the architecture stops being simple and complexity eventually creeps in.

I’ve implented 4 iterations of a product from scratch, and eventually they all get complex, even though each one started out with the goal of being simpler than the previous iteration. Yes, iteration #4 is more complex than #1, but it is more performant.

In parallel I’m building a new house, and each iteration of the plans is more complex. You try to manage compromises. You take 2 steps forward, one back. Which way do windows face, can an older person navigate, is there enough storage space, cost, esthetics, where does a dirty dog enter, where is the chimney for preppers, driveway and orchard, septics and wells, drainage and water collection, guest rooms and hot tubs, all on a budget … Simple wont do.

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tristramb ◴[] No.40714742[source]
The vast complexity of the 21st Century has still not managed to land a single person on the Moon.
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1. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.40715146[source]
That's not on technology, that's on people holding the purse strings only caring about growing their purses. Capitalism grew up, and is a boring old fart now.
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2. CRConrad ◴[] No.40716879[source]
Capitalism supplanted its father, Mercantilism, in the eighteenth or at the very latest the nineteenth century. It was "an old fart" well before WW2.
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3. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.40717232[source]
I liked the pist-WW2 middle-age crisis - threat of nuclear annihilation was bad, of course, but beyond that, people had ambitious and hopeful visions of the future.