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Comment by glanzwulf | Hacker News Reader

I get your friend, and there's another point he can make: Imagine a world with self taught Civil Engineers.

Oh yeah the last bridge collapsed, but that is a known issue. It is fixed in this bridge, trust me.

Blame the contractor is what you normally do in this case :-)

I once built a system reverse engineering a program used for soil analysis to see why one of our bridges fell off its suports.

Can you tell us more? This sounds oddly fascinating.

That’s sort of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge story.

Pretty much. IT as a field is a toddler. But it makes so many people happy we don't care it's still at the anal stage.

Maybe in a century techs and standards will stabilize.

>Pretty much. IT as a field is a toddler.

It's exactly as old as nuclear engineering.

If it's a toddler, it's because of the mentality of the people involved, not because there was no time to figure things out.

It’s almost like we have different standards for different types of engineering.

The devs writing code for the next social media app operate under very different standards than the ones writing code for nuclear reactors. And that’s ok.

Which was left in the hands of a small elite from the beginning. I don't think reddit could have been born that way :)

Pretty sure this is because most of our public investing goes towards spying programs instead of more funding for places like NIST.

Not to mention funding for governments that actively sell exploits to other nations. Standards seem to be left up to the industry. I saw the Kubernetes hardening guildelines from NIST a while back that was cool.

nuclear engineering is a direct combination of applied physics, civil engineering and mechanical engineering, all having a long history.

SE started out from mathematics, but the hardest problems are not related to it. We're only pretty good at nailing the things directly from mathematics like algorithmic complexity or distributed system guarantees.

To make the comparison fair, in that world civil engineers would also have the ability to change the laws of physics.

And the bridge collapsing would usually not kill people but strip all their clothes.

Also you can start a bridge in your garage.

The clients also usually don't want to pay for a stable safe bridge because the collapsing one is good enough.

If only building a bridge in your garage could make you a billionaire. People would build bridges like crazy.

Or you can just compare them to software engineers that work on critical software like launch systems and nuclear reactors.

Software can be just as reliable when there is a need for it. Thing is, 99% of the time you don't need those extra 9s.

Yeah, that’s a very good point! I imagine if civil engineers could change physics, they’d lockdown what you’re allowed to change for critical systems. And like you said, systems that don’t need the 9s can experiment and learn.

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