Hacker News Reader

Civil engineering doesn’t change. Gravity is a constant. Physics are constants.
Physics may be a constant, but materials and methods are not. There is a reason why ISO/IEC/ICC/ASTM/ANSI/ASME/ASHRAE/DIN/IEEE/etc standards have specific dates associated with them.

If Rome wrote an engineering manual, it would still be quite valid today.*

Considering many engineering standards from a few years ago are no longer valid, this is almost certainly not true.

View on HN

>> If Rome wrote an engineering manual, it would still be quite valid today.

We have some ancient engineering manuals. A book I read, most likely Brotherhood of Kings, remarked that Mesopotamian engineering manuals are primarily concerned with how many bricks will be required for a given structure.

The manuals are valid today, I guess, but useless. We prefer pipelines to brick aqueducts. Our fortresses are made of different materials and need to defend us from different things.

That’s only a formality, but reality did not change, and neither did the fact that those standards would still work even if they would be slightly inferior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com