Hacker News Reader

There's a great (long) article on the building of the Palace of Westminster at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/01/a-tale-of-decay..., on how new infrastructure has just been added over time, never removing the old stuff because there's no time, and—with plans being lost—how this results in new shafts being found every now and then in the course of fixing leaks etc.

View on HN

Good to see both software architects and architecture architects run into same issues with legacy stuff.

Blocking a hall is like commenting out code.

Ha, more like putting it in a block like `if (debug == True) ...`

Quite famously, software design patterns take inspiration from the field of Architecture [0]. The industry would do well to learn from them in how they deal with legacy systems, as well?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Histor...

By the time of the Truman presidency, apparently the White House was in such poor condition that the only way to save it was to entirely gut its interior and rebuild. It was gutted so thoroughly that they're driving heavy earth moving equipment around inside the building. There's a good photo at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House#Truman_reconstruct...

Looks like they kept the external walls and built a new steel frame inside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com