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Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

I tell my students that the purpose of Engineering is not to build something stronger. It is to build something as weak as possible without breaking. Any baron can conscript a bunch of peasants and build a castle with walls 10 meters thick. But some will go bankrupt trying. Or, get an engineer to figure out how to build a wall 50 cm thick that can withstand trebuchet attacks.

If you're not minimizing something, you're not engineering.

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"Among the hundreds of quotes that [Alice] Calaprice notes are misattributed to Einstein are many that are subtly debatable. Some are edited or paraphrased to sharpen or neaten the original. 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler' might, says Calaprice, be a compressed version of lines from a 1933 lecture by Einstein: 'It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.'" From: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05004-4

You forget "...to last 5 days longer than the warranty."

Really the blame for that lies with the public for not demanding a longer warranty.

If enough people were prepared to pay double to buy something with a 25 year warranty, I'm sure companies would step up and make those products. People don't want to pay enough for it though.

No warranty necessary. Reputation alone would be enough. At least in those cases where people care about a reputation for longevity.

Paying more now for a longer lasting product depends on how much you discount the future (ie effectively your internal interest rate), and on how likely you'll think that you'll even want to use that gadged in the future. Eg the NES was probably ridiculously over-engineered for most people, since realistically they'd only need to not fall apart until you buy a SNES or Playstation.

People do, though; There is a thriving market for (heavy and expensive) stuff built to last a really long time. Obviously, if you want your product to be light and/or cheap, especially if (as in my case) your light product is supporting something very heavy, some sacrifices will have to be made.

Thank you, honestly I've been struggling with a decision I made at work around array design ... But honestly based on this concept I can only defend the way I fell

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