What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway?
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to as a detailed engineering walkthrough of a major dam incident, and as a parallel to software failures.
What it is
Practical Engineering summarizes the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, explaining the engineering details behind the incident. It also discusses how operators and regulators failed to keep downstream residents safe.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends trestacos · 2023-06 · on “What If California's Dams Fail?”
Practical engineering has a good detailed walkthrough of what happened at Oroville dam from an engineering perspective: [this video]
Cites Mawr · 2026-01 · on “Automatic Programming”
> making it default is often a huge waste of $ for problems you/most don’t have. It's the opposite — knowing the exact spec of your program up front is vanishingly rare, probably <1% of all projects. Usually you have no clue what you're doing, just a vague goal. The only way to find out what to build is to build something , toss it over to the users and see what happens. No developer or, dear god, "stakeholder" can possibly know what the users need. Asking the users up front is better, but still doesn't help much — they don't know what they want either. No plan survives first contact with the enemy and there's no substitute for testing — reality is far too complex for you to be able to model