[ajross]

I had to jump in here, not to argue with the substance of the article[1] but to pull out this one quote that I just can't get behind:

> In popular media, a genius hacker codes some solution from scratch in the space of an hour or two, solving a problem that would otherwise doom the other protagonists. But in reality, programming is slow.

I mean, sure, it's not like The Movies. But hacking is fast! In no other profession can you wake up, sit down at your keyboard, be presented with a new problem no one else has addressed before, and build a machine to solve it. All before dinner. That's just magic. Who else gets to do that? No other engineering profession for sure. Maybe some artists can work that fast, but they're shackled to ideas about the subjective value of their work to others whereas we can watch our creations do their magic with our own eyes.

It's the best job there is.

[1] Which is broadly the same point I just made here, but expressed as one anecdote. I'm saying that this is something we can all share.

[macintux]

I was faced with a problem like that. Heard the description of a task that a colleague was failing utterly to solve, figured I could knock out the bulk of it in a weekend.

Wrapped up the project 6 months later.

I don’t disagree with you, it really is magic what we can do with computers. Just doesn’t always work out like we think it will.

[colechristensen]

Yup, sometimes a project takes 6 hours, sometimes 6 minutes, sometimes 6 months.

It’s not necessarily always obvious which one.

[Eleison23]

In 1989, a freshman in college, I was introduced to the world of TinyMUDs. The creator, Jim Aspnes, was at Carnegie-Mellon at the time; he whipped up a server codebase basically from scratch over a weekend, and spun it up on his desktop NeXTstation. Before he knew it, there were up to 64 concurrent players and the thing was eating all his physical RAM space.

His famous quote was: "It was a weekend hack that got out of hand!" and with hindsight, that motto ruled the lives of many MUD hackers. Whether or not we stayed in college, for better or worse, we took on coding projects as weekend hacks, and they took over our lives!

[bryanlarsen]

> Who else gets to do that? No other engineering profession for sure.

You've never met that wizard with the machine shop, have you? He'd be insulted if you called him an engineer, but he eats engineers for breakfast.

[kragen]

I watch MrPete222 on YouTube. He's certainly capable of whipping things up on the lathe on occasion without drawings, and he's no novice, but it's common for him to spend days or a week making a part that you could design in CAD in fifteen minutes. Same with Abom79, Stefan Gotteswinter, Joe Pieczynski, and Tom Lipton. Dan Gelbart is still using the spot welder he made in his youth 30 or 40 years ago.

Some of these guys "eat engineers for breakfast" but they still can't "wake up, ... be presented with a new problem no one else has addressed before, and build a machine to solve it, all before dinner." The timescale for solving novel problems just seems to be a lot longer. Even building a steam engine from a kit is a matter of weeks on a manual machine.

If you need a key copied, a lock pick ground from a street sweeper bristle, a transfer punch made from drill rod, or a weird left-hand screw with a strange thread pitch, they can probably do that before dinner, yeah. But that's because those are well-understood and fairly simple problems.

CNC machining opens up more possibilities, but the timescale is still longer. You don't want to find out your G-code is buggy by crashing a US$150k milling machine; crashing a mill is more like crashing a truck than crashing a computer. So machinists are generally methodical, patient, and careful.

[bsder]

> Abom79

What in particular are you referring to that could have been designed on CAD in 15 minutes here?

Normally, whenever I have seen an Abom79 video doing something, it was some big-ass part that they were doing manually because either:

A) they were refurbishing something so they had to kind of cope with any non-idealities that arose

B) the part was very simple but was just a really big-ass part that really didn't fit well on anything so that had to kind of make it up as they went along.

Of course, it could just be that I don't really watch Abom79 videos unless it's about some big-ass part, so I could very well be biased.

[kragen]

Yes, quite commonly he spends several days making a part where he gives you all the dimensions and tolerances in three minutes at the beginning of the video, and the reason it takes several days is that if at any point he screws up, the part will obliterate him, his lathe, both, or his client, so he doesn't rush anything. And, yes, he spends a lot of his time coping with non-idealities. These are among the reasons that whipping up a quick Perl script is so much faster than whipping up a quick hydraulic cylinder.

[sgtnoodle]

> So machinists are generally methodical, patient, and careful.

Some machinists do shots of vodka while operating a lathe.

[kragen]

Sometimes that's necessary.

[derekp7]

I'm getting a taste for that since I got into 3D printing. Just type in some math formulas in a text editor, press a few more buttons, and all of a sudden I get a pivot-fence micro adjustable router table for my Dremel tool. Or I get a doo-hickey that holds a nut and washer, and can screw under my full sized router table to hold the nut in place so I can screw in various pivot-posts or other 3D-printed attachments on the top side. Or make a custom connector for something on my bicycle. Essentially I can fabricate products that just aren't purchasable.

But I really wish I had machine shop skills, as there is so much more you can do with a lathe, stamper, roller, and other equipment with basic input materials.

[sgtnoodle]

You may enjoy reading the non-fiction book, "Hot Tech, Cold Steel", by Chuck Hutchins. It's his story of starting a tech company on the forefront of CNC machining.

One of the chapters talks about Chuck's experience in his first job after graduating from college. He accepted a relatively low compensation offer at a machine tool manufacturer, on the condition that he would spend his first year sequentially shadowing every other employee. There's an anecdote about him being handed a power tool by a machinist and told to go ahead and cut metal on a several hundred thousand dollar linear rail (in 1950s dollars), and the boss running and screaming across the shop to stop him.

[bombcar]

Yep - especially those who are experts at jig making. Turns a multi hour project into a simple repeatable one.

[bcbrown]

Someone writes up an interesting story about a pretty neat achievement in developing a system under extreme time pressure of which they're understandably proud, and your response is to criticise a sentence from the introductory framing paragraph? To make the same point as the rest of the writeup?

I thought it was a pretty cool story.

[aliqot]

We all get times like that, but capes are like tuxes, you don't get to wear them every day.

[dylan604]

The thing about the cape is that it usually comes with a lot of spandex too. Everyone conveniently leaves that part out.

[vlunkr]

Agreed, writing production-grade, user-facing software is slow, which is what we spend lots of our time on. On the other hand, writing small programs to automate boring stuff can be incredibly fast.

[oritart]

No for sure its definitely more common than I made it out to be, but I took some artistic license with this for the sake of entertainment. ;)

[TheRealPomax]

You just described spending about 10 hours on a problem, rather than 1 or 2 hours.

That's an incredible difference.