Cited on HN 4 times, 2017–2025, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters use the quote as shorthand in arguments about abstractions, standing on others' work and the limits of building from scratch.
A very short clip of Carl Sagan saying that to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. It illustrates how everything depends on a chain of prior things.
“It took a solid chunk of western civilization to make Uber possible.” (HN, 2018)
I'm fairly certain the "understanding the stack" argument has been sufficiently addressed by Carl Sagan: [this video] We're building abstractions so people can build on top of it. And yes, that includes trusting your tool. When's the last time you ran JTAG debugging on your CPU? Did you use a scope to verify it worked correctly? You should probably have a somewhat decent understanding of the layers close to what you building, but there are plenty of applications where deployment is far removed from what you actually build. That's where the "magic button" matters.
Sagan quote used to defend building on abstractions.
How does he deserves every cent of 1.4 billion dollars? He didn't do $1.4 billion worth of labour. His drivers, carmakers, road builders, telecom providers, smartphone makers and software engineers did $1.4 billion worth of labour. Kalanick found himself in a position where he could extract $1.4 billion worth of rent. He's just one fucking guy. It took a solid chunk of western civilization to make Uber possible. It was literally millions of years in the making. If you wish to make an apple pie from search, you must first invent the universe. [this video]
Sagan quote used to argue no one builds anything alone.
> ...manual process, true Before I get to my real comment, I guess a fair criticism of it would be “Well, where in the [development process] hierarchy do you actually want to live?”, which I guess is a longer discussion, but as a developer, you can’t become battle-hardened without going to battle. So we can nod to Carl Sagan[0] and say “I made this from scratch”, and know there’s value in that. At least occasionally running your REPLs by hand and taking the actual trip, instead of just wanting the destination. It may not be tenable as a full-time production development strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. [0] [this video]
Sagan quote used for the value of doing things from scratch.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more