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Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. It's the same reason soldiers only wear heavy armour in the centre of their chests and backs. Why don

Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. It's the same reason soldiers only wear heavy armour in the centre of their chests and backs. Why don't we armour the rest? Because the cost outweighs the benefits ... and the tooling (i.e. medevac and modern medicine) makes up for the deficits.

anon1385 11y ago
>Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. This is only true if you are superstitious or religious and believe that good things that happens to you (or humanity in general) must be balanced out by something bad happening.
- JabavuAdams 11y ago
  Are fucking serious? Have you built anything significant? This is a very empirical view, not a superstition. If you want to learn more about this, and aren't just trolling look at the development of the A4 Skyhawk, the lunar lander, the space shuttle ... hell, any well documented large system. I wish I could reach through the internet and smack you in the head for such a stupid comment.
  - dang 11y ago
    > Are fucking serious? Have you built anything significant? [...] I wish I could reach through the internet and smack you in the head for such a stupid comment. I gave you a general reply upthread, but this comment deserves a specific one. You simply can't attack people like this here. I don't think you intended it in a mean way, but it's still the kind of thing we ban accounts for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- autoreleasepool 11y ago
  That's such an irrational assertion, ironically enough. Every decision has a trade off, even non-engineering decisions. It's called opportunity cost.
  - woodman 11y ago
    > It's called opportunity cost. The law of conservation of energy, as close to the metal as it gets. I remember reading about the same thing in terms of algorithmic complexity (in the context of data compression), and how one can only shift entropy about. Anybody got any keywords handy for practical examples? My hour of searching ended with conservation of information and black holes...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - anon1385 11y ago
    Opportunity cost doesn't make all decisions zero-sum. There is a quirk of human psychology that makes us believe that most things must be zero sum (i.e. that anything I do that improves something I care about must have a 'payback' at a later date and that to achieve a good outcome I must always make an equivalent sacrifice). JabavuAdams is falling for that. Although his inability to control his own violent emotional outbursts is probably going to be the more significant problem in his life.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Costs and benefits don't usually add up to 0. If they did, everything you do in your life would be absolutely irrelevant. The trick is to chose things with best cost+benefit value, and if it's not easy to express all costs and benefits in a single unit (because it may be hard to estimate them), then you chose so that you get costs and benefits you like the most.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
I have seen my share of benefit-free engineering decisions.
pcwalton 11y ago
> Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. Can you elaborate, in detail, what the costs of memory safety are?
- JabavuAdams 11y ago
  At the very least: the cost of rewriting, re-testing, and re-deploying systems in a memory-safe language. The cost of realizing half-way through adoption that there are things that you need to do, used to be able to do, but cannot do in the new language.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > At the very least: the cost of rewriting, re-testing, and re-deploying systems in a memory-safe language. True. In most cases, this is completely outweighed by the benefit of not having these kinds of security vulnerabilities, as well as the other benefits that come with safety. > The cost of realizing half-way through adoption that there are things that you need to do, used to be able to do, but cannot do in the new language. Can you explain exactly you cannot do with Rust?
- RaleyField 11y ago
  Memory safety costs 10% in execution speed and takes 50% more effort to develop, a fair trade-off anyone can take on behalf of their customers. Shortcomings of C are offset by many eyeballs law and the security life-cycle processes so much so that we can afford to safely abandon most organized auditing as well as any defensive coding.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    > Memory safety costs 10% in execution speed and takes 50% more effort to develop, a fair trade-off anyone can take on behalf of their customers. That doesn't match my experience. Source? > Shortcomings of C are offset by many eyeballs law and the security life-cycle processes so much so that we can afford to safely abandon most organized auditing as well as any defensive coding. In effect, you're saying we shouldn't care about security vulnerabilities, because they'll be patched. That may be true for your projects. It's not true for many organizations.

anon1385 11y ago

>Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. This is only true if you are superstitious or religious and believe that good things that happens to you (or humanity in general) must be balanced out by something bad happening.

JabavuAdams 11y ago
Are fucking serious? Have you built anything significant? This is a very empirical view, not a superstition. If you want to learn more about this, and aren't just trolling look at the development of the A4 Skyhawk, the lunar lander, the space shuttle ... hell, any well documented large system. I wish I could reach through the internet and smack you in the head for such a stupid comment.
- dang 11y ago
  > Are fucking serious? Have you built anything significant? [...] I wish I could reach through the internet and smack you in the head for such a stupid comment. I gave you a general reply upthread, but this comment deserves a specific one. You simply can't attack people like this here. I don't think you intended it in a mean way, but it's still the kind of thing we ban accounts for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
autoreleasepool 11y ago
That's such an irrational assertion, ironically enough. Every decision has a trade off, even non-engineering decisions. It's called opportunity cost.
- woodman 11y ago
  > It's called opportunity cost. The law of conservation of energy, as close to the metal as it gets. I remember reading about the same thing in terms of algorithmic complexity (in the context of data compression), and how one can only shift entropy about. Anybody got any keywords handy for practical examples? My hour of searching ended with conservation of information and black holes...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- anon1385 11y ago
  Opportunity cost doesn't make all decisions zero-sum. There is a quirk of human psychology that makes us believe that most things must be zero sum (i.e. that anything I do that improves something I care about must have a 'payback' at a later date and that to achieve a good outcome I must always make an equivalent sacrifice). JabavuAdams is falling for that. Although his inability to control his own violent emotional outbursts is probably going to be the more significant problem in his life.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Costs and benefits don't usually add up to 0. If they did, everything you do in your life would be absolutely irrelevant. The trick is to chose things with best cost+benefit value, and if it's not easy to express all costs and benefits in a single unit (because it may be hard to estimate them), then you chose so that you get costs and benefits you like the most.

thrownaway2424 11y ago

I have seen my share of benefit-free engineering decisions.

pcwalton 11y ago

> Every engineering decision has costs as well as benefits. Can you elaborate, in detail, what the costs of memory safety are?

JabavuAdams 11y ago
At the very least: the cost of rewriting, re-testing, and re-deploying systems in a memory-safe language. The cost of realizing half-way through adoption that there are things that you need to do, used to be able to do, but cannot do in the new language.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > At the very least: the cost of rewriting, re-testing, and re-deploying systems in a memory-safe language. True. In most cases, this is completely outweighed by the benefit of not having these kinds of security vulnerabilities, as well as the other benefits that come with safety. > The cost of realizing half-way through adoption that there are things that you need to do, used to be able to do, but cannot do in the new language. Can you explain exactly you cannot do with Rust?
RaleyField 11y ago
Memory safety costs 10% in execution speed and takes 50% more effort to develop, a fair trade-off anyone can take on behalf of their customers. Shortcomings of C are offset by many eyeballs law and the security life-cycle processes so much so that we can afford to safely abandon most organized auditing as well as any defensive coding.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > Memory safety costs 10% in execution speed and takes 50% more effort to develop, a fair trade-off anyone can take on behalf of their customers. That doesn't match my experience. Source? > Shortcomings of C are offset by many eyeballs law and the security life-cycle processes so much so that we can afford to safely abandon most organized auditing as well as any defensive coding. In effect, you're saying we shouldn't care about security vulnerabilities, because they'll be patched. That may be true for your projects. It's not true for many organizations.