Top all-time · #306
construction-physics.com
Personal blog · construction-physics.comeconomicsbusinesshistory
construction-physics.com is a personal blog at construction-physics.com about economics, business and history. Since 2023, 163 different Hacker News readers have linked it 404 times, most often “A Cycle of Misery: The business of building commercial aircraft”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Construction Physics for data-driven analysis of why housing, shipbuilding, nuclear, aviation and other construction-heavy industries cost and perform as they do.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Called 'good', 'great' and 'convincing'; one commenter says it is 'the best collection of info' they have seen.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A Cycle of Misery: The business of building commercial aircraft8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-01-31
- How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-08-27
- How Common Is Accidental Invention?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-09-25
- The Story of Titanium7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-07-07
- I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-09-01
- Can We Afford Large-scale Solar PV?5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2025-05-29
- /p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-04-26
- The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-03-12
- Why Are Homes in Western US States So Expensive?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-06-26
- Who Wins Nobel Prizes?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-03-26
What Hacker News says?
There was a post[0] on here recently about how the US went from producing woefully insufficient numbers of aircraft to producing 300k by the end of world war 2. One of the things that the post mentioned was the meager profit margin that the companies made during this time. But the thing is that this set the America auto and aviation industry up to rule the world for decades. A government going to a company and sayin…
Comment linking /p/how-to-build-300000-airplanes-in
on “Open source AI is the path forward”Submitted How to build a 50k ton forging press as a story · 451 points
HN discussionIndia, China, both home to a billion people. Mathematically if we collected all the brightest people from both these nations, say the top 5 percent of their population thats 100 million people in that pool to pick from. The entire population of the US is 350million. Comp sci went from something people did cause they enjoyed to something they did cause they thought it was a pay day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbea…
Comment linking /p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history
on “Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says”Submitted Why it's so hard to build a jet engine as a story · 444 points
HN discussion> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve. I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
Comment linking /p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history
on “Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce”Submitted 300k airplanes in five years as a story · 373 points
HN discussionYou totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload orien…
Comment linking /p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv
on “EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy”Submitted How to build a $20B semiconductor fab as a story · 349 points
HN discussionMaybe this article? https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power... There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations. https://w…
Comment linking /p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
on “EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy”Submitted What would it take to recreate Bell Labs? as a story · 335 points
HN discussionWell most of the highest purity quartz for IC manufacturing (crucibles) comes from the Spruce Mine funny enough. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/does-all-semiconducto...
Comment linking /p/does-all-semiconductor-manufacturing
on “Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML”Submitted Why is it so hard to build an airport? as a story · 262 points
HN discussion> The water issue really is a distraction which harms the credibility of people who lean on it Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people..." "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptio…
Comment linking /p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water
on “AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering”Submitted Understanding Solar Energy as a story · 261 points
HN discussionI'm not finding much support costs being that low... best collection of info I have seen is here: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power... At 1.5-1.7x the cost of diesel ship, and the "well-managed" Virginia class costing $3.6B, we are at over $1B for 60MW of power, 200MW thermal, which is far worse than larger civilian reactors per watt. The reason we use nuclear submarines and aircraft carri…
Comment linking /p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction-c3c
on “US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified”Submitted "No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel as a story · 253 points
HN discussionBecause the U.S. doesn't actually have a supply problem, despite this often getting repeated. U.S. construction of homes has actually kept up with population growth and moves, by every conceivable metric. What IS happening though is that landlords (private and corporate) "warehouse" units constantly to artificially restrict supply and demand, and they do it in collaboration with each other. Every single city and sta…
Comment linking /p/is-there-a-housing-shortage-or-not
on “Priced out of home ownership”Submitted How good are American roads? as a story · 252 points
HN discussionYou would think, but constructions seems amazingly resistant to this. construction-physics.com writes extensively and convincinly on this. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of...
Comment linking /p/sketch-of-a-theory-of-construction
on “The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong”Submitted Will we ever get fusion power? as a story · 251 points
HN discussionI'm an architect. Well really now an architecture professor who (elevator pitch) writes computational tools to implement sophisticated geometries in advanced fabrication... That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too... These folks s…
Comment linking /p/where-are-the-robotic-bricklayers
on “Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction”Submitted How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine as a story · 249 points
HN discussionShort answer to the riddle is: not enough demand to warrant investment (because you would need a long string of a few magnitudes bigger projects). Basically, the same structural problem that plagues nuclear power plant construction. All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, fra…
Comment linking /p/why-its-hard-to-innovate-in-construction
on “Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026”Submitted How does the US use water? as a story · 241 points
HN discussionOf course depending on the definition, but light-framed wood is good for around 5 stories. And mass timber (eg. CLT - cross-laminated timber) is good up to ~20. And for the foundation concrete is still needed. But a lighter one. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-...
Comment linking /p/mass-timber-is-great-but-it-will
on “Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026”Submitted Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships as a story · 241 points
HN discussionMeh, we're still very very far from mass-production. We got rich and spend a lot of that on inefficiently building higher quality houses. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
Comment linking /p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of
on “Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026”Submitted Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC as a story · 237 points
HN discussionHow the Empire State building got built in only a year: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-fast-and-slo... (article)
Comment linking /p/building-fast-and-slow-the-empire
on “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things”Submitted How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry as a story · 232 points
HN discussion
