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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

This has to be one of the worst advice lists of its kind I've seen.

- Too long to be remembered

- Half of it is clever quips and not actual insights

- A lot of the points contradict each other

A list like this mostly serves as a feel-good piece for experienced engineers rather than useful advice for inexperienced ones, since they don't know which part of the list to take how seriously and how to interpret the contradicting ones.

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Yeah it’s a bunch of inside jokes from building spacecraft the same way many times with varying degrees of success. There is little to no practical advice. The bit about never exceeding the requirements is great if you want to build something once and wash your hands of it. The “advice” on not building new launch vehicles sounds like someone had a bad time building a launch vehicle and I guess we should double down on the shuttle?

Yes. Now imagine being at a design review meeting with someone with the “gift” of being able to crank out these truthy quips as justifications. If they happen to be right, great. But if not, you are at their mercy.

Any list of advice without contradictions is bound to be a poor representation for full reality. "Experience" is precisely the ability of resolving these contradictions properly in a given situation.

Meh. This list is for entertainment purposes.

If you want some actual advice, read Rechtin and Meier

"The Art of Systems Architecting" ISBN-13: 978-1420079135

Appendix A Heuristics for systems-level Architecting. While the issues of mutual inconsistent advice remain, at least the rest of the book gives enough guidance in navigation through the political technical and economic issues of systems engineering.

Note: systems engineering not software engineering.

(I have a first edition and haven't seen the current 3rd edition.)

If long and contradictory lists are so bad, how do you explain the Ferengi culture's success in adopting the 300 or so Rules of Acquisition? [1]

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

Quite easily: Star Trek being a work of fiction, its contents are unconstrained by any aspects of reality other than the limitations of its medium (in this case, live-action television).

Answers without problems are useless as there is no way to confirm them. So a law (principle) is that something is determined.

Advice should be better understood under modal logic instead of absolute truths.

This is HN, don't try to bring reality in here.

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