[idiotsecant]

It's interesting how much 'move fast and break things lightweight hacker spirit' when it's applied to stuff you actually know about turns out to be actually just be an ethos of churning out really poorly designed systems that disregard the mountain of best practices that are very well known.

It's enough to make one suspicious of the whole attitude ...

[harrall]

Moving fast is fine when you’re building a prototype. Having to double check everything when you are spiking an idea slows you down too much.

But once you get something going, go back, apply all your learning (because you will have learned a lot), and do a little cleanup. Especially if it’s your own personal DIY project.

Cleanup does take some time so budget it in.

My first solar project initially looked like a mess of wires like OP’s, although confined to my workbench. But after I got it working, I calculated all wire gauges, put fuses and breakers everywhere, and put the right type of wires in the right type of conduits. As it had to transit a living space, I also made it look nice — you didn’t see a single bare wire anywhere — definitely no 2/0 cable running up a wall.

You could also look at it as craftsmanship.

[MandieD]

What I've discovered in nearly three decades of working in various aspects of IT: any useful prototype/proof of concept system will become a production system if you do not take specific measures from the outset to prevent that from happening.

[idiotsecant]

Meanwhile - the person who knew what they were doing would design the whole thing to be safe, code compliant, and efficient from the beginning, skipping the 'making it up as I go' phase.

There is this common pattern with a certain kind of HN user of not bothering to learn about something before assuming you are way smarter than any other human who has ever lived and just doing it yourself from base principles, before inevitably finding out what everyone else already knew.

If it was just diy projects it would be one thing, but entire companies are run on this principle.

[gritzko]

I recall a WWII sabotage manual that recommends it as a very effective sabotage technique: “let relevant authorities handle it”. Then everyone waits as the relevant authorities have being inquired through proper channels.

You can’t even hire a competent person unless you have a bit of expertise yourself. You wouldn’t know the difference.

There is some productive Middle Way here.

[theothertimcook]

CIA simple sabotage manual - insist works are completed through proper channels and where possible referred to relevant committee.

[idiotsecant]

Huh? You can absolutely hire a competent solar system designer quite easily as a layperson.

[jenders]

Very well said. Reminds me of the old adage about /r/crypto “a place where people who don’t believe in financial regulations learn why financial regulations exist”

[kimos]

A place where you can watch people slowly reinvent the existing financial system.

[numpad0]

"Move fast" thing applies to lots of software because most software belongs to "fundamentally safe" class of things, along butter knives and clay sculptures. People might temporarily experience sadness if they were served a mangled butter knife or saw your sand castle collapse, but they shouldn't be hurt. You don't even have to have heard of the word "functional safety" to be safe with those. Your creation is going to be default safe and perpetually safe so let them crash and burn, is the idea.

If you were writing pieces of self driving code or were building a wooden chair for yourself to sit on, that change up things a bit. The most fundamental distinction isn't in whether it's hardware or software, but whether it's safe or not.

[IAmBroom]

"but whether its failure would be dangerous or not."

[jeffbee]

It's also complete bullshit if you know anything about writing software.

[BoredPositron]

move fast and break things was always a software mantra.

[adriand]

And it only works for things that no one truly needs. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, we’d all be better off. If the software that runs the electrical grid disappeared, it’s a different story.

[okanat]

There is a reason we still run COBOL systems, and it is nothing but the opposite of that mantra.

Move fast and break things has only been a VC-backed company thing.