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by vlovich123 771 days ago
Iteration always wins. There may be other constraining factors, but if you can violate those to iterate more (i.e. cheat), you’ll beat your competitors who honor those constraints.

This has nothing to do with the success or failure of any given company.
1 comments
wizzwizz4 771 days ago
> but if you can violate those to iterate more (i.e. cheat), you’ll beat your competitors who honor those constraints.

Until people die. Then suddenly, you can't cheat any more. And everybody else has to live with your decisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Thiokol

I wouldn't call that winning.

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vlovich123 771 days ago
You seem to have misunderstood what I’m saying. Iteration is how you learn. Learning through iteration, which is known under various names like Wright’s law or more generally experience curve effects [1], goes hand in hand with economies of scale in driving down costs.

Yes, iteration requires you to survive. Not sure how that’s relevant. Cutting corners also isn’t necessarily a bad thing - you’re focusing on the extreme example where people die. Cutting corners can also be a careful evaluation of what processes are and aren’t relevant to a given situation but that becomes trickier when it’s enshrined in law. Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.

Regulations more often than not do ignore the flip side in terms of the cost of compliance because it’s difficult to show the counter factual universe in which a regulation may save 10% more lives (or maybe even 0% more lives) but drove up costs by 100x.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

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wizzwizz4 771 days ago
> Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.

If Edsger W. Dijkstra's wild ravings from the 80s were enshrined in law, perhaps we wouldn't have quite so many fatalities attributable to crap software. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".

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