Readit NewsBostonFern commented on A skyscraper that could have toppled over in the wind (1995) newyorker.com/magazine/19... · Posted by u/georgecmu
The irony that this was printed just 6 years before 9/11. The lesson is it's hard to anticipate all the possible risks. The two WTC towers were engineered to withstand a jet plane impact (a 707, which was a common passenger jet at the time in the late 60s), just not not a modern airplane packed with fuel at max speed.
First of all, the WTC towers did withstand the impacts but collapsed due to the ensuing fires which weakened the remaining core columns (notably not due to collapsing floors, which did not in fact occur, according to Thornton-Tomasetti who have modeled the impacts and ensuing collapses as part of their forensic investigation commissioned for the insurance claim litigation).
Leslie Robertson, who lead the WTC structural engineering team along with John Skilling, is on tape making the 707 claim, but no surviving documentation has been uncovered to reveal the specific scenario that was modeled or the calculations used.
An important reason why the towers survived the impacts at all was the presence of the two hat trusses, which allowed the increasingly unsupported loads to be redistributed to the surviving exterior columns. Najib N. Abboud of Thornton-Thomasetti has given a detailed account of the findings of the forensic investigation that's available on Youtube[1].
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BostonFern commented on How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not charity.wtf/2025/06/08/on... · Posted by u/zdw
Mildly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What does mildly depressed mean?
Functioning, presumably.
If the machine is that old, couldn't an emulator be used to migrate to modern hardware?
That conjures up memories of Joel Spolsky's cautionary tale about lava flow from his talk at WeAreDevelopers 2019: https://youtu.be/tWKh95Kio38?feature=shared&t=311
BostonFern commented on A masochist's guide to web development sebastiano.tronto.net/blo... · Posted by u/sebtron
> Notice I have changed the extension from .js to .mjs. Don’t worry, either extension can be used. And you are going to run into issues with either choice
As someone that has used module systems from dojo to CommonsJS to AMD to ESM with webpack and esbuild and rollup and a few others thrown in ... this statement hits hard.
Won’t .esm.js work?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1460448/