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Comment by jakevoytko | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works with autonomous robots, restarting a system 30 feet away in demo conditions can cause pins and needles. I can't fathom how the NASA engineers felt. They probably didn't get any good work done waiting for the ACK

It's incredible that NASA, 30 years ago, built such a durable and reliable system. The hardware has withstood one of the harshest environments in the universe for decades, and the software hasn't been irreversibly scrambled by passing cosmic rays. My cable modem doesn't even last an afternoon without rebooting itself.

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The Egyptians built the pyramids 5000 years ago. What I find incredible is how we can't seem to build things that last anymore.

Yeah, but they built them for religious reasons, not because they actually wanted to do something useful with them (for some definition of useful).

Sure, we could build pyramids – better pyramids even than the original ones – but they wouldn’t be terribly useful.

(Oh, and sometimes we do build things that last. The six Apollo descent stages are still on the moon and probably will be for Millennia. That, to me, is a lot more impressive than any pyramid.)

> Sure, we could build pyramids - better pyramids even than the original ones - but they wouldn’t be terribly useful.

There are innumerable Discovery Channel-esque documentaries explaining that we can barely build a small scale reproduction of the Pyramids, at least using the knowledge they had available then.

We build things intentionally so that they don't last long anymore. There's an entire realm of engineering dedicated to predicting failures of mechanical devices at a certain range. The ipod comes to mind of course, but there are many more all designed to maximize returns by having customers buy new ones.

Market forces - people are quite happy paying for cheap stuff that doesn't last very long.

http://www.longnow.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis

I think there are still some attempts to build things to last:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Svalbard_Glob...

Las Vegas will last forever. Arid climate, Lots of concrete.

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