Hacker News Reader

Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, houses got better because materials got better. Windows are better. But the construction of the houses is worse.

The precision of how the wood or material meets is worse (when cut at the site). There is a huge amount of sloppy work in modern construction.

View on HN

I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another.

It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it.

But I have no proof of that.

Fortunately, there are millions of buildings that remain standing as evidence of what was done in the past. So at least there's that!

Massive selection bias - only the good quality ones remain standing, the low quality ones are not.

You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.

So there's that!

Buildings don't get taken down because 'they were built poorly', it's cheaper to rebuild than refurbish.

And we can accommodate for 'selection bias'.

We have all of the historical evidence we could ever want for 'how things were built', basically 'infinity examples'.

I think some things were more robust, particularly some of the old framing, like in Europe, with non load-bearing walls etc. Those will stand for 1K years, but arguably unnecessary.

this is not true in my experience. prefab kits of all sizes (from sheds to houses to barns, like were once possible to order from a Sears catalog) have worse tolerances than a carpenter working on site. you can measure 3 times and cut perfectly, and still end up with a few mm gap (or sometimes worse) after tiny errors accumulate as you assemble piece after piece. it _requires_ measuring as you go and cutting on site to handle this small amount of drift and to really produce something of high quality. it doesn't come in a box

Correct about large scale kits. I had meant to head off the fact that preassembled pieces like windows have improved a lot, things that used to be assembled on-site but are now delivered as a unit or small kit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com