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Comment by fiter | Hacker News Reader

I think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.

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Kiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions, and the only architecture that matters is the one that lets you change. It's like the dig-once fiber policy for roadways, and is all part of the "don't build to peak value" idea; it's also like a usual problem with user interface design: if you only ever built user tools to do what you imagined, users (or later owners / tenants) are limited to your imagination.

I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"? I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom. Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things.

Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan.

On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.

> Kiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions

You can't outlaw bad decisions - but it seems that some people will never get tired of trying...

Construction codes are all about outlawing bad decisions.

Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. No water lines to urinals fits that descriptions nicely.

As they say:

  Built to code == the worst construction that is legal

> Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost.

Another case in point: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0UG0H720160102

You can outlaw bad decisions. That's the whole point of laws.

I thought law is about forbidding harmful decisions, not bad ones? (At least in theory) Most of the stupid things you do to yourself, without affecting others are not regulated.

Bad decisions are bad because they are harmful. And most stupid things you do to yourself do affect others, and they are regulated according to the significance of the damage, not merely predicated on its existence.

I specifically qualified with not affecting others, because otherwise that would be a different discussion. Yet...

Yet we still find some reason to regulate just about everything, because people are pretty creative about finding ways to pass the consequences of their bad decisions onto other people.

I don't know real estate developers to be any sort of exception, do you?

Just because "we" find reasons to do this doesn't make it right, or a good idea.

No shit. What is it you think I'm trying to say here?

Try outlawing tobacco and see what happens (hint: Prohibition).

I'm not arguing that all bad decisions should be outlawed, so I don't exactly see the relevance.

In an optimal world, those would be the only kinds of decisions we would outlaw.

I think this is a business decision.

Some building developers will reap the reward if it was a good decision, others will suffer the consequence.

Dig-once policy for roadways makes sense because the roadway is a public good, and digging multiple times would cause problems for the public, and would cost more for the public, so the _public_ is well within its rights to require this policy.

Requiring a water line in a building is not the same thing. It's a private building, and the people who own it are well within their rights to decide to risk later disruption and cost if they need water lines. Legislating away that right is insanity and just make-work that costs the building owner money up-front for something they've decided they don't need.

I can actually see this effect in my flat. I live in a fairly old building; it's been renovated and I really like it, but the location of the power plugs is the same as when it was constructed (except for one room in my flat). This means each socket is located at the entry of the respective room - the result being that I have extension cords all over the place. I especially find this interesting since this means the pattern of power consumption by "normal people" must have shifted drastically in the last 60-100 years.

On another note, the obvious parallels to software engineering tasks seem very interesting. This shows that ideas like YAGNI very much depend on a cost-benefit-calculation that's very dependend on variables like scale and the anticipated cost of changes.

That electrical system sounds like a fire hazard. I'd hate to see what some of the other apartments look like!

I don't see how you conclude a fire hazard by the positioning of power sockets. Could you elaborate on that?

The problem is that cities don't want buildings torn down every 10 years because it's cheaper for the buyer to just rebuild from the ground up than to fight what essentially amounts to a heap of technical debt. Well-constructed buildings can last centuries: future-proofing is a pretty big deal.

Why would a city care? That's just more permitting money and local jobs.

Are you familiar with the concept of opportunity cost? Effort spend redoing things all the time instead of improving and building new things is not making a city better.

You're replying to a story about a guy who wants to replace tower cranes because two of them fell over and killed people in the same year.

That's why the city cares. Every time one goes up or comes down there's a risk involved.

If a city had the narrow concerns of a business then that might make sense.

Because construction sites are ugly and noisy.

We do this in lots of places. For example, it's against building code in most places to build a house without power grid feeds, running water, or septic/sewer access. Sometimes there are exceptions for "tiny houses" but other times not.

You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't pay your taxes and the township ends up owning a lien on your house. They don't want to have to spend fifty grand installing electricity or running water before they can sell the house.

Depending on how big the technical deficit is here, it may not even be cost effective to retrofit after the fact (after all it still needs to meet code). And knocking down a house because the previous owner was a weirdo is terribly wasteful.

I suppose I didn't make it explicit, but my point is that these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come.

Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building.

Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation.

Just to meet your last point: - Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary? - Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?

There aren't that many building regulations in the middle of the countryside.

Building busted stuff in the middle of NYC hurts everyone, because there's limited space.

Visionaries can build where other people don't want to be, or convince the people around them that what they want to do is a good idea.

You'd be surprised at the prevalence of regulations! ("You have one flush toilet. U.S. regulations require every legally habitable dwelling to have at least one flush toilet connected to an approved sewer or septic system." -- So a composting-toilet-only house seems to be illegal everywhere in the US.)

Someone could buy an incredibly valuable vacant lot and fence it and never use it. As far as I know, that's not illegal but would cause the same problem you've pointed out. I don't think the utility hookup regulations are based on such "waste of space" reasoning.

> these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come.

You could say the same thing about much of the building code.

A lot of code is there to ensure that the floor doesn't collapse if you fill the tub up with water, have a room full of people jumping up and down, or buy a piano. There's more on ensuring the roof doesn't collapse if there's lot of snow on it, and making sure the house is solid enough to safely sustain reasonably high winds or an earthquake.

If there are no earthquakes, wind or snow storms, you never buy a piano or have a party and only ever use the shower, is the effort put in satisfying these codes wasted?

I think it's important to consider the difference between "possible benefit" and "avoiding injury/death".

When it comes to safety--because we understandably put such a large value on human life--small risks are something we consider.

I believe all of your examples fall into the safety category. Even worse about your examples is that the situations are unsafe and misleading. I think our regulations surrounding the safety issues that you listed are reasonable.

(Additionally, building codes do consider expected usage and alters allowances. No one expects a piano in an attic and the floor load per square foot requirements reflect that.)

In principle, I agree with you but in practice, I so loathe the stink of waterless urinals that on the inside, I'm glad they did that.

In principle, I agree with you, but in practice: Don't use my urinal if you don't like it.

Liberalism goes both ways.

In practice, your urinal is often bundled with things I don't have much choice in, like a university or employer. I'm not going to transfer to a new school because i don't like the urinals.

In principle, I agree with that but in practice; when you've got to go, you've got to go.

I have been nauseated every time I entered a public lavatory where waterless urinals were installed.

I have certainly avoided those lavatories in the future but once I'm nauseated, the damage is done.

Before sanitary sewer regulations, people got cholera and such:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15chol.html

Do you think it should be code that toilets have to be installed? You could shit in a box?

Personally this is not tooooo far off that. Ensuring toilets always work.

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