To engineer is human

What Hacker News says

1. titheJul 2026
   Henry Petroski in "To Engineer is Human" has a chapter about the advent of the calculator during the slide rule era, and that calculators (and later computers) eroded a structural engineer's "feel for the numbers", caused engineers to pursue work on the fringe of their abilities, and perhaps more seriously, limited their ability to verify the correctness of the computer's work (this was the era where, for the first time, a machine could perform orders of magnitude calculations more quickly than humans could). He outlines the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center [1] as a case study in when blindly trusting computer output goes wrong (and by sheer luck, no one was killed).

   It feels like the example was cherry-picked, but the combination of "less accurate" and "more confident" made me immediately think of this disaster. I truly worry that it's going to take civilian deaths / liability before the proper use / place of these new technologies is adopted, but we could probably start with 1) not in safety critical systems, and 2) don't replace your specialists / experts with algorithms.

   [1] https://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/thesis/failures/MKP/failures/fai...

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2. almonerthisApr 2026
   Recently I was reading the "To Engineer Is Human" by Henry Petroski, which although is mainly about bridges I find it so inspiring and related to software engineering and systems in general, e.g. the concept of failure by fatigue etc, same for the Antifragility by Nassim Taleb.

   Do you have any suggestions for books from unrelated fields that still inspired you?

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3. GMoromisatoJul 2025
   You could probably summarize the history of bridge-building as "keep subtracting things until they don't stand up anymore."

   Building bridges (and large structures in general) has always been about the tension between over-engineering (for safety) and under-engineering (for cost/aesthetics).

   The Brooklyn Bridge is massive; they'd never built a bridge like that so they over-engineered it. But once they saw that it was more than strong enough to stand up, the next bridge was lighter. And the next one after that was even lighter. And so on, until a bridge collapses because some new factor came into play (e.g., harmonic resonance).

   Source: To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski--one of my favorite engineering books.

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4. sitkackJan 2025
   If folks want to instill this mindset in their kids, themselves or others I would recommend at least

   The Martian by Andy Weir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)

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

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

   To Engineer Is Human - The Role of Failure in Successful Design By Henry Petroski https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/engineeringinsociety/front-ma...

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

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5. BarbaryCoastAug 2024
   If you liked this article, Henry Petroski's "The Book on the Bookshelf" is worth reading. He goes into great detail about the history, explaining why books were usually chained to their shelves, etc.

   If you don't know the author, his most famous is probably "To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design". I liked "The Evolution of Useful Things", because now I realize Americans use their forks wrong. The design of the fork follows function, and that curve is there for a reason.

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6. c6400scJan 2024
   Normal Accidents and To Engineer is Human are two popular and great books.
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