34 ms·

Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

• smitty1e 5y ago
  Spitballing a little, is it fair to say that something like emergence[1] affects information systems, and generally not in a good way? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
• btrettel 5y ago
  How does one stay employed for a long time as an "unusually unreasonable" employee who points out major issues? The Yossi Kreinin link in the article suggests developing a reputation first. Any other approaches?
  • rawgabbit 5y ago
    Been there and done that. There aren't any silver bullets. Just some random advice. First, pick your battles. You can't fight every one at the same time. Second, DOCs and Email are your friend. Don't bother with Slack/Teams. If you came from an important meeting, reply to everyone who attended the meeting and CC and BCC people, and write your version of meeting notes and focus on what was agreed upon and what questions remained unresolved. After several emails like, this copy/paste them into a Word document that you save. I have shut down the worst offenders by simply re-sending the same email I sent six months ago. Third, be prepared for the blowback. I got screamed/yelled at/for days by executives. Eventually the truth will come out. But it might take years.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Because we have unreasonable expectations. Making things work well is hard, and thus expensive. Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair. You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do you need to swivel? Do you need ergonomics? Do you need to sit in it for 15 hours? Do you need it to cost less than $1,000?
  • jotm 5y ago
  • chii 5y ago
    an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take). The construction is sturdy, so i expect it to last at least 10 years, if not 20 (you take care of it etc). So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years before replacing. I bet that most people would choose an excellent chair, if they could guarantee themselves the 10 yrs of good operation and comfort.
    • pishpash 5y ago
      At $100-200 per year? No, the cushion won't be failing after a year. That would be a $30 chair.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      This is the Sam Vimes economic theory. But there’s a corollary - if you do not need the thing to last, you may be better off with the cheapest one you can find (which may be used - and which may be better than new). This is the “but it from harbor freight, if it breaks now you know you use it enough to make it worth getting a good one”.
      • pjerem 5y ago
        > if you do not need the thing to last, you may be better off with the cheapest one Well, it's not even sure if you take resell value into account. If you need your good chair for one year, just buy it $2000 and sell it used for $1900.
      • hvidgaard 5y ago
        Which is a very good way to cut down the money spend on things.
      • 5y ago
• Ygg2 5y ago
  It's not profitable. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit
  • dragontamer 5y ago
    I think there's a reason why that's a comedy film instead of a serious take on modern consumerism. We have plenty of "indestructible" tools today. Cast Iron skillets, hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, ladders. Most furniture qualifies as well (though MDF-board crap exists, they still have a use. Its more efficient for a college-student to get disposable MDF-based crap for their dorms with a lifespan of ~4 years or less, rather than buy actually quality furniture). These are called the "durable goods market", and plenty of them can be bought and work for years, decades even. ------------ Everything wears out given enough time. But my roof is expected to last 50 years and has a wind rating far in excess of any 50-year storm in my area (Florida roofs are famously shingled with the cheapest crap, because hurricanes hit them so often it doesn't make sense to invest into the roof... no roof can possibly survive a Cat3, Cat4, or Cat5 storm). Because my area doesn't have tornadoes or hurricanes (at least, no notable ones in the past century), it makes sense for me to invest into my roof.
    • titzer 5y ago
      I'm amazed at how they keep trying to reinvent hammers. I have two. One good old one with a wooden handle and a steel head, and one with a super-ergonomic rubber/metal handle and a smaller, treated steel head. They both bang nails and both feel alright. If I need to wield one for hours, I can see the rubber handle being better, but I'll wear gloves if it's an issue with the other. Rubber handle will likely last < 20 years.
      • ehnto 5y ago
        Maintenance is also something worth taking into consideration. If you get a nice thick wooden benchtop, you can keep sanding it down as needed while the years go by. If you opt for a cheaper particle board top or laminate top, you will likely just be replacing it instead of resurfacing it.
• chrisweekly 5y ago
  ... or things that work at all? (eg humidifiers, at various price points, maybe 40% of which are even functional when first unboxed)
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    I'm 2 for 2 on humidifiers (1 ultrasonic, 1 wick evaporative). What fails on them?
    • Firmwarrior 5y ago
      I foolishly bought one off the top of the best-seller list at Amazon a couple years ago. It was like $35 and came with a little card that said "Hey, if you give us a 5 star review and send proof to SHADY_EMAIL_ADDRESS@gmail we'll give you a $25 Amazon gift card!" It did work reasonably well, but if you failed to clean it and fully dry it out within 6 hours of using it, it would get an INSANE mildew smell. Amazon of course didn't bother to do anything about the company when I tried to report them, and they seem to have disappeared/rebranded since then
      • pvillano 5y ago
        not the problem you're trying to solve but there's an additive called "humidifier bacteriostatic treatment" that could help with the smell
      • giantg2 5y ago
        I wonder if the old 10% hydrogen peroxide trick would fix that.
      • sjg007 5y ago
        You have to add bleach or humidistat to evaporative ones or keep them running full time. You also have to replace the media once a month or so. The steam ones are better imho.
        • emodendroket 5y ago
• justbrandon2u 5y ago
  Because china. Things used to be good 20 or 30 years ago. Then china started in with all that cheap crap. Same shit going on with India in the software space. Just look at oracle. Tot shit.
  • traceddd 5y ago
    Every sale has a customer.
    • analog31 5y ago
      Not every customer can assess the quality of a product. I can judge the quality of a violin, but I can't tell you how long the compressor in a refrigerator will last.
      • bombcar 5y ago
        This is why the only signal that customers used to have got removed - a refrigerator that had the same design and components for twenty years is likely well made (if it weren’t people would have found out or changed the parts). But these are rare (one of the few I know of is Speed Queen but I suspect there are others in other industries, mainly commercial/industrial products). Amusingly enough these work best when innovation is basically dead, so that a new one and a twenty year old one is basically the same.
        • tashoecraft 5y ago
          Except being made well isn't the only criteria. From what I understand, speed queen uses so much water compared to a more modern machine that you could buy a new machine on the cost savings. There are a multitude of reasons, companies no longer make products to last. Watch videos where they dissect products, you'll find machines are designed to fail after a certain amount of time. Motors that only contain a certain amount of oil and cannot be serviced.
          • 5y ago
• zabzonk 5y ago
  > Why is it hard to buy things that work well? Asks someone that posts a giant wall of unreadable text.
  • t-writescode 5y ago
    Looks good on my phone. I guess not all writers are poets. What did you think of the content of what they said?
    • thrill 5y ago
      It's hard to appreciate the content when you can't get through the wrapping.
      • mi100hael 5y ago
        You know you can make your window narrower than 4000px, right?
  • OJFord 5y ago
    How much did you pay for that experience that you expected to work better? Even if we say that's an accurate description there's no irony.
    • zabzonk 5y ago
      > How much did you pay for that experience that you expected to work better? What? I expect people to put a little effort into what they are trying to comminicate - I know I try to. Not always succeeding, obviously
      • t-writescode 5y ago
        They've put quite a bit of effort into it. That much text is a lot of work. For what it's worth, their Patreon nets over 3000 / month, so quite a few people think they put in just the right amount of effort, or even above and beyond :)
• black_13 5y ago
  [dead]
• user3939382 5y ago
  Consumers have by and large come to believe that price matters more than anything, so the free market economy of goods has naturally optimized for that priority.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Or through the erosion of real wages over the past 50 years, consumers have been more or less forced into buying lower priced items. And was this not the promise of free trade and globalization - cheap stuff? Edit: why downvote?
    • asdff 5y ago
      Cheap stuff that used to be wood or metal and last for 100 years has turned into plastic cheap stuff that you write a nyt column about if it manages to survive the demands of regular expected usage for 1 year.
      • jrockway 5y ago
        I think there are plenty of good things made out of plastic. Legos never break, for example. Particle board furniture is annoying. You scuff off the veneer, and the item is essentially ruined. Wood is "self healing" in the sense that scratching it exposes more wood, so it doesn't look as terrible. Personally, I've found software to be the worst thing about modern devices. A long time ago, I bought a terrible Tiertime 3D printer. It doesn't accept gcode from the computer, so you have to slice models using their proprietary app, and it's absolutely horrible. Requires registration before use, doesn't work at all. I used it once, was disgusted with the software (being unable to slice a model more complicated than a cube), and put the thing in the box with the goal to return it. For various reasons that never happened. Three years later, I decided I was tired of looking at the box and can always use another 3D printer, so I did a "brain transplant". I replaced their proprietary logic board with an open source one (Duet 3 Mini 5+). Now the printer works great. (Before the project was done and I was getting my bearings on the internals, I was appalled at the shortcuts they took. Sheet metal instead of extrusions. Heated bed connected to the power supply with flatflex cable, hotend connected with a ribbon cable, 19V power supply instead of 24V just for a tiny bit of extra savings on inductors. But honestly, the design is fine, it was just their software that made it unusable. I learned a lot about cost reduction by taking that thing apart, and I'm impressed how good of a job they did making it cheap without actually making it work badly. The ABS enclosure is also top notch, some of the best injection molding I've ever seen on a $300 product. No way you could make something that good yourself for the price of the whole machine.) I've also had some good repair experience on modern, cheap, made-in-China electronics. I have a Siglent oscilloscope, and one day, one of the knobs locked up. I resigned myself to just never using that channel again, but on a 2 channel oscilloscope there aren't really channels to spare. Knowing I wasn't going to find $10,000 laying around for a proper instrument that would have good encoders, I begrudgingly opened it up. Everything was held together with screws, and I had the front I/O board out in a half hour. Desoldered the broken encoder, soldered on a random encoder from my parts bin, put everything back together, and ... perfectly working oscilloscope. It wasn't unrepairable, it was merely uneconomical to repair. If I was writing software instead of repairing the 'scope, I could have just bought a new one. But it was some Saturday night at 3AM when I was too tired to do anything except watch crappy YouTube videos, which nobody will pay me hundreds of dollars to do. So it ended up being quite economical. I forgot where I was going with this, but basically if you can open something up, today's manufacturing is as good as any manufacturing in the past. Someone that wants to repair or mod, can. (Until you run into glue. Oh how I hate glue.)
• yrral 5y ago
  I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M building, you bet I want to pay extra to assure it will not fall over.
    • massysett 5y ago
      There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though they’re bottled in different facilities with different owners. These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.
      • hodgesrm 5y ago
        Conversely there are lot of things that are expensive and work very badly. "Designer anything" as for example, designer light fixtures. I've had terrible experiences with these.
        • fendy3002 5y ago
          It happens to almost anything creative products, stylish, custom made, and services. I guess because there isn't enough time and money to assess the quality and optimize them.
• jrockway 5y ago
  I always enjoy danluu's blog; one of the few I have bookmarked and go randomly read from time to time. Some random comments on out-of-context snippets: > For example, we tried "buy" instead of "build" for a product that syncs data from Postgres to Snowflake. ... Despite being widely recommended and the leading product in the space, the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work. This is nearly always my experience with buying software, especially software I know I can write myself. I always run into massive pushback if I propose writing such software. It comes across as too risky -- what if I get bored, what if it's actually too hard and I can't do it, etc. What people never think about are the benefits; full knowledge and control over the process. I have bought so much software and it's made me sad every time. You're always promised the world before you sign the contract, and then you sign it and none of the things that were supposed to work work. Support tickets take days to be resolved; passed around like hot potatoes. In the time it took to get someone to reply to my email, I could have just written it myself. Many years ago I was looking at Istio. I wanted some enhanced Kubernetes ingress support, and Istio checked the checkboxes; what I needed now, and room to grow. But it sure had a lot of detractors on the Internet, and a ton of alarming-sounding open bugs. I thought about rewriting the parts I needed from scratch, and went to see what parts of their code I could steal. I looked at the core XDS implementation, and it was completely wrong. It didn't implement the protocol correctly at all, conveniently swallowing crucial errors that probably explain most of the filed bugs. So, I decided to write my own version and a few days + 2000 lines of code later, I had the parts I needed and they worked perfectly. I didn't have to scrutinize the docs, I didn't have to file 30 bugs. I just typed in some code, deployed it to production, and ... it's never bothered me since. It was risky, but it worked out better; I can explain the entire system to anyone with a question and I can add whatever features I want. It was way better than buying. (I'm equally happy with the two version of a single signon system I wrote. It works exactly how I want it to work, and costs $0 month for an Enterprise contract. Savings!) There are counterexamples, of course. Once upon a time, I needed to learn CAD. Instead of writing my own software, I just bought Fusion 360. I didn't know anything about CAD at the time, so there is no way I could have built something better. (I probably could have implemented the "don't crash for no reason" functionality that eludes their developers, but wouldn't have even known to implement sketches or geometric constraints. They just know the domain so much better than me, there is no way in the world I could ever have made something better.) > Since then, many people have changed their opinion to "having ever locked down was stupid, we were always going to end up with endemic covid, all of this economic damage was pointless". This happens all the time, not just with pandemic restrictions. The pattern is that people want to cure X, and suggest remedy Y. People try remedy Y for a while, get bored, and then declare remedy Y a sham. It's universal across fields; "I tried running but didn't lose weight", "We tried writing more tests but it didn't increase reliability", "We tried sheltering in place but the disease didn't die", "I took antibiotics for a few days but the strep throat came back". The problem is not that remedy Y is ineffective (though it certainly can be, that's where this heuristic comes from), but that it wasn't used for long enough. I think changing habits is one of the hardest things humans can do, so we are quick to declare defeat when success can only be measured over a long period of time. > You could imagine services would, like Amazon, request a photo along with "proof of delivery" or perhaps use GPS to check that the driver was plausibly at least in the same neighborhood as the building at the time of delivery, but they generally don't seem to do that? Amazon does this sporadically. Sometimes I get photos, sometimes I don't.
• billybuckwheat 5y ago
  Because more than a few people buy something because of it's (low) price. When something is inexpensive, it often has a shorter lifespan and you tend to replace it more frequently than you would a more expensive item. Admittedly 1) not everyone can afford something pricier, and 2) higher cost doesn't always mean better quality. On top of that, if manufacturers made things that lasted forever, they'd go out of business quickly. Who'd buy a replacement, or something newer, if item X is still going strong after 10 years or more?
• mlanett2 5y ago
  This article is long but excellent. It is something of a rant rather than an article. Still excellent.
  • SquibblesRedux 5y ago
    I would like to see the essay revisited in a more cogent way. There are massive differences between local business disappointments and global business disappointments. The essay is too unfocused to draw actionable conclusions and would benefit greatly from concentrating on more specific issues. I would recommend focusing on one specific point of advice and tailoring everything to support that one point.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I tend to write stuff that works well. I'm working on the last two screens of a project that has been underway for a couple of years. It's still a ways off from release, as we have lots of fender-polishing to do, but I'm pretty chuffed with how it works. One of the reasons that it has taken this long, is because I am totally anal about Quality. Constant stopping to fix bugs, or even refactor out bad design decisions. I've found that doesn't always make me popular. [EDITED TO ADD] See what I mean? Advocating for high Quality work is not received well. I've learned to keep it totally to my own work, and even that is often perceived as an attack. Pretty crazy.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Looking through old Sears catalogs and seeing the prizes on older game shows, I think some of our memory is selective. Even in photos and SD video you can see the terrible build quality on many consumer products from those earlier times. This seems to be especially true for furniture and exercise equipment. When you convert into current dollars, this low quality junk often is more expensive than what is available today. There's plenty of junk being sold today too and paying more doesn't guarantee quality but the notion that it's more difficult to find quality today than in the past doesn't seem universal. We have plenty of items that survived earlier eras and are examples of durability but the landfills are full of junk that we don't see.
  • ______-_-______ 5y ago
    In other words, 90% of everything is crap, both then and now. And thanks to Lindy's Law, you're usually better off buying something old than something new. But that's not how most people think :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
    • fouc 5y ago
      > Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy. Makes sense! I was also thinking there's a related rule - something worth buying used has proven itself to not be crap.
      • Galaxeblaffer 5y ago
        People still try to sell their used crap. So how do you define if something is worth buying used ? For some people everything is worth buying used, even crap
      • mpalczewski 5y ago
        Another way to look for non crap, is to check the used value of something. E.g. check swappa. If people are still paying a lot for an item after it is used, usually a good sign. If they are not and you still want it, get it used and save a ton. Another good way, check how much insurance costs. e.g. How much is that extended warranty going to cost on one car vs another. How much is home owners insurance in one neighborhood vs another. Insurance companies that make mistakes here go out of business.
• whoomp12342 5y ago
  survivorship bias is real when people say "they dont make things like they used to". Yeah your armchair from 1960 was built well becuase... it was built well. There were hundreds others that were complete crap
• cwkoss 5y ago
  I think these sorts of failures of 'common sense' are common among people who have studied economic theory. Economic theory often does a decent job at describing steady states: where the asymptote will eventually land, but does a very poor job of describing the chaotic middle steps, IMO. If you chop a 10 huge trees down in a forest, an economist would tell you "There should be 10 300-year old trees here". That may be true in 300 years, but the procession of species in the 300-year interim will be much more interesting, and understanding that tells you much more about ecology than knowing the eventual result. And the forest may not last 300 years before conditions change so significantly that it invalidates the prediction. Similarly, the efficient markets hypothesis really breaks down in the modern era, because market conditions don't ever experience an unperturbed steady state. Technology, politics, availability of expertise, and shifting social norms rearrange the foundations more frequently so equilibrium is never reached. Any long-term theoretical predictions on quality or efficiency of CRT monitors or horseshoes or fondue pots converging to an efficient ideal state were nonsensical and doomed from the start: the market conditions around them changed faster than the market is able to adapt.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    Perfectly rational Austrian spherical cows, we are not.
• Strilanc 5y ago
  It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacles that make these problems difficult to fix or even sometimes perceive. I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.
  • AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.
    • Strilanc 5y ago
      In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?
      • cdogl 5y ago
        Perhaps the strategic decisions of one the largest and one of the most complex organisations in human history cannot be explained by simple reference to undergraduate microeconomics
      • tuatoru 5y ago
        It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, information asymmetries.[1] Over-summarising and over-simplifying:- "Third-party service providers are incentivised to minimise their costs. If their clients cannot assess the quality of their service and/or end-users cannot reward or penalise them based on the quality of the services, then quality is poor, because it is cheaper to not provide services and later argue about it than to provide the service. Third party deficiencies/misbehaviour get so bad sometimes that there are no gains from trade and occasional losses. "Internally, inside companies, the incentives may be to act similarly to third-parties, or they may not. This depends on "culture"." And here the essay would be improved with an analysis of the compnents of "culture" that matter. It talks about trustworthiness of company leadership, but that is only one factor, surely. 1. Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" paper is the seminal one here.
• cyounkins 5y ago
  Great article! As a consumer that cares a lot about buying long-lasting quality products, here are a few resources: Project Farm (youtube.com/projectfarm) - Great independent reviews of tools Mcmaster.com - Higher quality products than you can get at your local hardware store and excellent customer service. When I've gotten the rare incorrect or damaged item, 1 email gets me a refund and a replacement overnighted. Wirecutter - Not as go-to as it used to be in my mind, but great for background ConsumerReports - Check if you can get free access through your local library website ReviewMeta (reviewmeta.com) - Analyzes Amazon reviews for authenticity All of these have problems but they are still good resources. Any others I'm missing?
  • jrockway 5y ago
    McMaster also has the best ecommerce tech stack I've ever seen. It should be the case study. It is incredibly fast. The checkout flow is different from anything I've ever used before, it's so fast, you don't even feel like you should be done. And, if you type plain text in the search box, it will translate that to a parametric search (for example, try '1/4"-20 screws', and you'll see that it takes you to the "screws" page with 1/4"-20 selected as the thread size). If there's a such thing as rockstar software engineers, the people that made McMaster's site are it.
    • elil17 5y ago
      At my workplace, we have what I call "McMaster syndrome" - employees design things around parts available on McMaster because that's the easiest website to order from.
  • elil17 5y ago
    As a frequent business user of McMaster I find it serves a very particular purpose - everything on there works and does not break. However, their markup is massive. I once placed an order large enough that they redirected me to their supplier and found that they had over 100% markup on their orders. You're paying this markup so that McMaster verifies the quality of what you're buying. This makes a lot of sense for a business - you're not wasting employee time on reading Amazon reviews. I doubt it makes much sense for most consumers.
• FanaHOVA 5y ago
  > You might think that, if a single person can create or maintain a tool that's worth millions of dollars a year to the company, our competitors would do the same thing, just like you might think that if you can ship faster and at a lower cost by hiring a person who knows how to crack a wafer open, our competitors would do that, but they mostly didn't. He mentions a small chip startup he worked at for these examples, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Did those companies beat out their competitors and win their market? Seems like his point is that "We did this optimally and competitors didn't even though you'd expect them to", but if that company didn't end up being the best one it's not really proving the overall point
  • voxl 5y ago
    You miss the point though, as the problem is two-sided. The consumer struggles to find a quality product because they simply don't know how. The producer also struggles to produce a quality product, because it's hard to know what the consumer really wants. The cheat is to sell brand instead, to market quality regardless of if it's actually there. I would argue Apple is an example of a company that started with quality, established brand, and has been coasting off brand for a long while. If buying and selling were a chess game, the ELO of the consumers would be very low, but the producers ELO is not much better, as they just learned a tricky opener and nothing else. Of course the real game is not two player and open information, but this only makes it worse for the consumer, and easier to fall into marketing schemes for the producer.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• sumanthvepa 5y ago
  It's looks like this is mostly a case of adverse selection. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
• ck2 5y ago
  Like politics, marketing thrives on "noise" and the loudest voice tends to win, not the best candidate If you have a lesser product, marketing rolls out FUD to combat competitors and then it doesn't matter if you have a better mousetrap, no-one will believe it For example most 5-star products on Amazon got that way because they often secretly give out tons of free product (or even cash) for positive reviews. Amazon and bot analysis can't tell a real human written review was secretly paid for. Noise "wins".
• angarg12 5y ago
  I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling. To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another unit for us. The online system simply didn't work, so we reached out and they informed us it was fix. But the system just marked the unit as rented rather than reserved, so we had to reach out again... As Dan says defendants of the efficient market hypothesis will say that it isn't possible to provide a better service, or otherwise this letting agency would have been upended by competitors. Only that our experience with other agencies has been similarly poor, and our experience abroad is generally less so. And is not only renting, most of our interactions here have been similarly shoddy. Which makes me think that either we have been incredibly unlucky or there is some common pattern. Here are some ideas for our particular case: * Barrier to entry: Businesses like real estate require large capital and tend to be crowded already, so it is difficult for a disruptor to appear. * Liquidity: While in theory we could *shop around* if we don't like a let agent, in practice there is a very reduced number of units that satisfy our requirements. It's easier to put up with a poor experience that compromise on the property. * Corner cases: As new immigrants we had to go through some processes that most people don't experience. Probably is not worth for companies to optimize for these situations. * Cultural normalization?: This is the most intriguing point for me. Maybe this level of shoddy service has been normalized and accepted in America - or at least the area we live in. Maybe people just don't know better and hence don't ask for more, and therefore companies can carry on providing what would be considered a sub-par service elsewhere.
  • bombela 5y ago
    Same experience coming from France. Everything in the USA is just lower quality. Be it goods or services. And Americans seem ok with it. There is a lot of overhead everywhere. Dentists have an army of assistants. Any product to order requires it's sale agent. Even if you already know what you want. You must deal with the agent. Car dealership have so many sales but good luck getting an appointment for fixing the shit they sold you. Look to by a house, and be ready to deal with insane fees and agents. All this overhead has to be paid somehow I guess.
• cowpig 5y ago
  Reading this I get the feeling that Dan is missing a major selection bias: he has extremely high standards and is very competent, and tends to be friends with people who also have very high standards and who are competent. It stands to reason that he and the people he interacts with are going to build things of higher quality than whatever is commonly available.
• DannyBee 5y ago
  The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that markets should be efficient at all. Instead, we have the sort of equivalent of Galileo - people really badly want markets to be efficient. They feel like they should be, because intuitively, it seems like it should work that way (much in the "god does not play dice" sense). People who suggest they aren't, even when math backs them up, are ridiculed. Eventually, as Max Planck said, science will advance funeral by funeral, and we'll stop pretending markets should be efficient based on "the efficient market hypothesis". Or we'll discover P=NP! Which would be much cooler.
  • mathieutd 5y ago
    Do you a reference for these statements? I'd be curious to read more about the topic.
    • DannyBee 5y ago
      Weak form efficiency - https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284 https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284 is one such proof. For strong form efficiency (which requires markets perfectly reflect all available information) - You would have trouble finding people who still believe in strong form efficiency. The weak form paper above cites several papers that go into why strong form efficiency is impossible. There are formal proof versions around. In practice, even empirical studies of strong form efficiency haven't supported it either - it's just very easy to find practical counterexamples.
      • emtel 5y ago
        I skimmed this paper and it seems to be exceptionally bad. The proof sketch offered is that a winning strategy can be verified quickly, but finding a winning strategy requires searching over 3^n possible strategies. But this assumes that brute force is the only possible way to find a winning strategy, and thus proves far too much. A similar argument would prove that sorting is NP hard, if you start by the assumption that the only way to sort data is by trying every possible permutation. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure any time you claim to have a proof that a problem is NP complete, but your proof doesn't include a reduction, you're doing it wrong. (The paper does offer what it calls a reduction to 3-sat , but it's completely hand-wavy, and I can't even understand the intuition behind it at all.)
• Talinx 5y ago
  One effect that might also be at play here is, assuming that excellence follows a Pareto distribution: If your team is very good, i.e. on one end of the distribution, most products will be made by teams that are average, i.e. not that good. In that case it is easy to notice flaws. If you are smart and knowledgeable enough so that you could design/create/implement the products you use easily, you will see room for improvements.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  The appendix is interesting because I have noticed that a lot. I think it might be because I'm on mostly American sites but it seems like any sort of "why can't we do this in America?" always has some sort of explanation why not. No one ever considers that the answer is "we could, actually, if someone chooses to do it". For instance, gigabit fibre in San Francisco was this impossible task if you ever asked someone. It would cost too much, SF is too old a city to trench, America is too big, etc. In practice, all it took was a dude called Dane Jasper deciding that the barriers were mostly regulatory and he could beat it and boom! Sonic covers so much of the city in $60/mo symmetric fiber. I think people will still explain why it's impossible in SF. Occasionally, and I am saddened that I haven't bookmarked these for later amusement, someone will ask "Why can't we do X here?" and people will come up with an explanation for why X would never work in America, etc. while I'll be sitting experiencing X here. Perhaps that's the thing. Human beings have a very natural status quo bias and we have a very quick explain-why-this-is bias. So if you tell someone that Y is the case, they can come up with a posteriori explanations. But that's why good science is hard: you have to make a priori claims and then subject to hypothesis testing. And in normal conversation that is really hard. I don't claim to be immune to this. But knowing it is a flaw is a better position than not knowing, I hope.
  • astrange 5y ago
    > In practice, all it took was a dude called Dane Jasper deciding that the barriers were mostly regulatory and he could beat it and boom! Sonic covers so much of the city in $60/mo symmetric fiber. I think people will still explain why it's impossible in SF. It often is impossible to get past the regulatory burdens in SF, although sometimes it's just because the supervisors ask you for bribes. https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1375962440303661057 https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1375962440303661057
• citizenpaul 5y ago
  Six Sigma.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  I think people build custom homes for this reason. Customize it to work the way you want it, and usually use better quality materials and finishes than you get from the typical builder.
  • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    New-build housing in the UK is complete shit[1]: flimsy, shaky construction, no acoustic insulation, little storage, tiny windows, every dimension slimmed down to the minimum, inside and out and slapped together with only the most cursory quality checks. I'd never buy a new build unless it was custom (not that I could afford that compared to the same older house). But, considering the developers aren't going to charge their ways, I'll remain grateful that there are people who do want to buy the "new" houses (they won't stay new for long, they'll be wrecked after a few years of being lived in) at a premium rather than compete for livable housing. [1] https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-10258569/amp/Our-new-build-nightmare-New-homes-average-157-defects.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-10... but if you've ever been in one, you'll know what I mean.
• emtel 5y ago
  Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think Dan even attempts to answer the titular question! The article, while quite good, is just a very long list of things that suck, and anecdotes about people who tried to make things suck less. I’ve thought about this question very often, and I think the answer does come back to the market efficiency argument that Dan ridicules at the beginning. I think in many cases, what the market provides is actually about as good as what the market can sustain. Sure, most products have obvious flaws, and maybe you could fix them. But could you build a successful company solely on the basis of addressing those flaws? Sometimes, yes. Some products do get displaced by better alternatives. But can you expect that process to happen reliably, for all types of products, at all times? When you put it that way, I think it seems silly to expect the answer would be yes.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    I went out of it with the conclusion "The world is broken, deal with it" Just to get caught by that line in the culture part: > If you read these kinds of discussions, you'll often see people claiming "that's just how the world is" and going further and saying that there is no other way the world could be, so anyone who isn't prepared for that is an idiot. I'll defend my own claim as not trying to put the blame on the victim, it's nobody's fault most of the time, and we get to see some progress, sometimes. People should enjoy the stuff that actually work and praise those who make real efforts to make it less broken.
  • wittycardio 5y ago
    The title should probably be something like , "Why are so many successful products so bad ?"
  • mitchdoogle 5y ago
    I've seen lots of products and services that are materially similar, if not identical, with vastly different prices, and the companies selling them are equally successful. Sometimes it's the company charging more that seems to be doing much better. I don't think there's any particular efficiency advantage. I think it's just a matter of marketing.
• earthboundkid 5y ago
  Why is it so hard to put a date on your posts so that when you revisit a topic, readers can tell if they’ve seen it before or not?
• Jiro 5y ago
  It's like asking why consumers go for low prices rather than good quality. Similar answer: Because it's easy for companies to hide poor quality, but impossible to hide high prices. (Although companies do their best to hide prices anyway, like airlines charging everything as an addon).
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    In many domains, higher prices fail to deliver better quality. You just pay more. People learn to optimize for less anger over being cheated: it doesn't work well, but you didn't pay much. If you had paid more, you would (probably) be equally dissatisfied, but also feel like you got suckered.
• rawgabbit 5y ago
  What Dan is describing is the triumph of politics over everything else. Deng Xiao Peng diagnosed Chinese society during the Mao era and said the very real inability to contradict the party line was what ailed China. People were not allowed to believe in reality but had to swallow every line from the central committee. This is the Seek Truth from Facts speech that marked the opening of China to the modern world. Corporate America is its own Potemkin village where political lobbyists and legal protections keep them alive despite massive corruption and the harm done to customers. http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol2/text/b1260.html http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol2/text/b1260.html
• the_jeremy 5y ago
  He talks a lot about how other companies are incompetent or inefficient and says that this is why it is often better to build in-house. I think the reason this doesn't happen to the degree that would be most efficient is people assume the counterparty business is acting in long-term self-interest as a single unit (i.e., a business with a reputation to maintain). In-house, there's almost always someone you can get in touch with has the ability to enforce this behavior on your counterparty - when you're buying something externally, that's not the case. There are so many examples of large, well-known brands that made a name in quality and then sacrificed their reputation to cash in.
• IncRnd 5y ago
  > There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". That's not the efficient market hypothesis but a complete misunderstanding. The hypothesis is that the market (not products as you assume) are efficient, leading to the optimization of share prices to reflect reality. [1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothesis.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothes...
  • unlikelymordant 5y ago
    Your quote does say its a "cocktail party version" which sort of implies its not going to be very good
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• turkishlurker 5y ago
  One explanation would be that if you are an "extreme" user, you are bound to find fault with all the offerings on the market. The need to tweak/customize/adapt naturally arises when you have reached a certain level of sophistication and when it does, you can only be satisfied by a product/service appropriately tweaked/customized/adapted.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  The bit about being unable assess expertise reminds me of Dunning-Kruger, and also The Prince: > A prince who is not wise can never get good counsel, unless he puts himself completely in the hands of a wise man; but such a man will soon take over his state. What do you do? Become expert at everything? Form a coalition of experts, who share their assessments? Or... somehow... acquire the ability to assess "expertise" in general, regardless of specific field?
  • fallingfrog 5y ago
    I think Elon Musk's big advantage over his competitors is that he has a high enough level of engineering skill to identify talent. Elon himself isn't the best engineer ever born, but he's good enough to know when someone's ideas or designs or plans make plausible sense. Most CEO's of large corporations, even engineering companies, can't do this, and it shows. So they run the company on the basis of making numbers bigger, and making sure that they cut costs enough to turn a profit each quarter, which eventually runs the company into the ground. They don't pay attention to the ground reality of what the company is actually doing, and only govern on the basis of what the stock price is doing, because the ground level reality is inscrutable and meaningless to them.
• carlineng 5y ago
  "Variants of this idea that I frequently hear engineers and VCs repeat involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would've outcompeted them and done it already" Reminds me of the old joke -- an Economist walks past a $100 bill on the sidewalk, but doesn't bother to pick it up. He turns to his friend and declares smugly: "If it were real, someone would have taken it already."
• twothamendment 5y ago
  Before getting into software I did fair amount of construction. Once you know how a job should be done you never look at the resulting product the same way. From drywall to sidewalks, everywhere I look I see that someone rushed or didn't care. I wish it wasn't hard to find quality craftsmanship, but it is. Ignorance is bliss, but I lost that long ago.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  When I interview, I like to look around and see how many short people work there. A place that picks up the short people other companies don't must be recognizing their value. I would like to favor places with more women in tech jobs, but generally just don't find any at all, anywhere. Everywhere I have worked they were always trying to hire more women but never got any applicants, or couldn't hire the ones they found.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    Huh, interesting. I would second MtF transgender. I've worked at places that will interview so they can appear what you might now call "woke", but then not hire based on their dislike, not skills or personality. And there are so many MtFs in tech. I'd love to see statistics, but it feels skewed.
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      It is skewed. This is one of those things I Can't Say in most places, but (unless you transitioned in elementary school) the MtF experience in tech and the cis female experience are totally different, and they (the MtFs) know it, because so much of our work is done online where you can be whatever gender/sex you want. I know how people reacted to me when they thought I was male vs. female. Age plays into it, too. Everything was fine before I went through puberty, but a lot of young techie men have a really hard time with their sexuality and take that out on their female colleagues in various ways. (I've also seen some gross reversals in female-dominated professions re: issues with men, so...) Now that I'm in my 30s and the men in that insecure/figuring things out age range aren't interested, it's better again.
      • kingcharles 5y ago
        I don't know what it's like now as I've not worked in an office for 15 years, but back in the day being a woman in a tech company must have been horrible. Most tech guys I knew had zero experience with interacting with women and therefore would unconsciously act in the most creepy manner towards any and all women. Also, the women would get no respect as they were automatically assumed to have inferior technical skills.
• tiltwindmill 5y ago
  Why programs terminate? Best things in life are free?
• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  Living in a low and deteriorating trust society has many non obvious knock on effects that are hard to see from the inside.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• Dunedan 5y ago
  > Some commonly repeated advice is that firms should focus on their "core competencies" and outsource everything else, but if we look mid-sized tech companies, we can see that they often need to have in-house expertise that's far outside what anyone would consider their core competency unless, e.g., every social media company has kernel expertise as a core competency. I wouldn't call Twitter or any other unicorn a "mid-sized tech company". I believe the larger a company is the more it makes sense to do stuff in-house. You need a certain amount of people to focus on your core competencies, but once you have that and still have more money than you can ever spend, it makes sense to spend it on doing stuff in-house, as that might lead to better quality and/or lower costs and removes the risk that an external supplier might not be there next month anymore.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    Twitter is a mid sized tech company though, with a mere 5,500 employees. Facebook and Google are an order of magnitude bigger, and half the size of Uber and Netflix. It’s also a tiny bit smaller than Doordash and AirBnB by comparison.
    • Dunedan 5y ago
      > Twitter is a mid sized tech company though, with a mere 5,500 employees. I guess that depends on the definition of mid sized company. I don't know if there is a fundamentally different/better definition, but Gartner defines a mid sized company to have up to 999 employees and $1 billion of annual revenue [1]. Twitter has way more employees and revenue than that. [1]: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/smbs-small-and-midsize-businesses https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/s...
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      Mid sized compared to essentially mega corps... I wouldn't consider them mid sized on any reasonable metric.
• kccqzy 5y ago
  > An example from another industry: when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a commercial flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips so we could start testing ASAP. This was often considered absurd in the same way that it would be considered absurd for a small software startup to manage its own on-prem hardware. After all, the wafer saw and the expertise necessary to go from a wafer to a working chip will be idle over 99% of the time. This paragraph from the article reminds me of the recent HN discussion about resilience. In this particular example idling 99% of the time is cheaper, but even if idling 99% of the time is slightly expensive, it might still be a good idea not to outsource due to resilience. What if the vendor goes bankrupt? What if the vendor's vendor is unable to perform their contractual duty due to a disease outbreak? Or a geopolitical risk? You avoid these risks if everything is in-house, so these risks need to be priced in when determining whether to outsource. But more often than not, these risks are priced at exactly zero.
  • ownagefool 5y ago
    What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. The outsourced entity also doesn't patch, because there's no business case approval to do so. The problem is usually tech is ran by finance.
    • Juliate 5y ago
      > Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. [...] The problem is usually tech is ran by finance. Same. Where actually, the budget is right there, it's just a matter of choice and priorities: do what's right now or invest 10x in it later because you didn't take care of it when you ought to. I've been on both sides of the argument: "budget" is a magic word for those who want to skip responsibility for their choices.
• sabr 5y ago
  Annotated article: https://smort.io/feb48ca0-d996-486e-af55-d232a54e1553 https://smort.io/feb48ca0-d996-486e-af55-d232a54e1553
• bjarneh 5y ago
  > I valued men and women equally, and found that because other employers did not, good women economists were less expensive than men. Is this a very nice way of saying that you can hire women economists and underpay them in order to make money?
  • resonious 5y ago
    Seems like it, yes. I've seen similar arguments made regarding foreign labor. "I value people of all countries the same - it's just that only <some nationality> seem to be willing to work for that value".
  • Double_a_92 5y ago
    Not because they are women though, but because they had trouble finding work somewhere else. So the company had a bigger negotiation power. That's just capitalism, supply and demand...
    • bjarneh 5y ago
      > Not because they are women though, but because they had trouble finding work somewhere else Because they were women?
      • Double_a_92 5y ago
        Originally yes, of course. But that's not the fault of the person that actually hires them. If you are the only company that hires everyone without any discrimination, you just have a bigger supply of people.
        • ksec 5y ago
          This argument is not going to end well on HN.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    You can paint it negatively but hiring them when others don't also improves their salaries - if everyone else followed their lead there'll be no inefficiency and they won't be underpaid.
• lifeplusplus 5y ago
  My grandma had old stuff that was built like a tank.. AC that worked for 40 years, bulbs that still work, Fridge that has been working for 50 years, sewing machine also 50+, TV (huge bulky) still working, fans, etc..... I bought a coffee grinder from Amazon few days ago, it broke on the first try, like completely obliterated.
  • adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    From an energy perspective, a 50 year old fridge is likely not great and probably a new one at some point would have paid for itself (and it's carbon footprint). There was a story[1] about a guy who kept the same heating boiler for nearly 50 years. Can you imagine how much more he spent on fuel in that thing for 50 years compared to changing to a combi at some point? Condensing boilers are 90+% efficient, who knows what that is. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-50733890 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-50733890
    • lifeplusplus 5y ago
      true, but reliability is undeniable
• erosenbe0 5y ago
  I didn't get very far because Silicon Valley is very discriminatory and I can't stomach the denials. There was a long, sordid history of preventing Blacks and other people of color from buying. There were few opportunities to participate in the wealth engine compared to the nominal chances in a place like NYC where the most impoverished tracts in America (Bronx) were just a subway ride to Wall Street. So yeah, Silicon Valley undercuts itself on talent, quality, ethics, equity and the like and always has.
• phist_mcgee 5y ago
  Sparing the contents of the article and the great discussion around it, as an aside: who in this day and age has website text that spans 100% width of the viewport? On my 32 inch monitor it's completely unreadable. I get the low/no style aesthetic, but the wall of text is quite unreadable to me.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    If you can't get a browser with a reading mode, try an OS with resizable windows.
• grodes 5y ago
  Why is it hard to find websites that limit the content width?
• lordnacho 5y ago
  It comes down to information having a cost. Noise is everywhere in the market. For instance the lawyer who spends the most money on advertising on the radio might not be the best guy to do your case. Information also decays. Yesterday's best burger in town may not be today's. EMH is basically wrong. Like the pre-relativity concept of absolute time and space, it sounds like it should be right under certain conditions, but unlike the physical analogy we live in the inefficient information world mostly.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 0xedd 5y ago
  Nokia.
• tedunangst 5y ago
  > Often, people will say things like "I would never get into that situation in the first place", which, in the circumstance where someone is driving past a parked car, results in absurd statements like "I would never pass a vehicle at more than 10mph", as if the person making the comment slows down to 10mph on every street that has parked or stopped cars on it. One could write an entire series of posts on the topic of situations you would not have avoided.
• crabmusket 5y ago
  > It's considered normal to have unattended property stolen in public spaces and not in private spaces, but that's more of a cultural distinction than a technical distinction. Surely it's also a legal distinction? In Australia at least, I believe there can be significant jail time given for breaking and entering.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    So it's legal in Australia to steal stuff just because it's unattended?
    • crabmusket 5y ago
      Yeah we all do it!
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  This article is just so rich it could become a book. It reminds me of Applied Systemantics by Gall. It's really a list of psychopathologies, misunderstandings, erroneous thinking and gotchas that lead to poor quality. Among them are economic fallacies, biases, abusive power relations, cultural malaise, and FOMO. In the end I think what the author is saying boils down to Sturgeons Law, that 99% of everything is rubbish and that it's our fault. We get the quality we deserve, because we are lazy, entitled and much more stupid than we think we are. Such is the nature of mass culture and everything else is an outlier.
• Dave3of5 5y ago
  Holy wall of text. I'm normally ok with these things but that site could use some CSS.
  • shantnutiwari 5y ago
    yeah. Dan Luu's site is the only one where I turn on reading mode just to make it readable( as opposed to hide distracting elements)
    • Dave3of5 5y ago
      I use chrome and you have to enable the special flag for that and I'm not doing that for a single site. I think it's only needs a really small amount of css i.e. some padding/margins a slight change in the background colour and some better spacing that's all probably. Five minutes worth of work and would add virtually nothing to the page weight. I suspect whomever Dan Luu is they don't really give a f about my opinion so I'll stop now.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      Looks quite OK as-is on a phone, though.
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  >black micro-text blocks of tl; dr spanning the entire width of the page 0/10 web design, didn't read.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > 0/10 web design, didn't read. Didn't press F9 for reading mode. Didn't resize browser window to comfortable proportions. 0/10 online media consumption skills, didn't deserve to read.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jhoechtl 5y ago
  Because the Internet brought us things that can be patched OTA so enterprises went from good when purchased to the user is the beta-tester.
• omegote 5y ago
  Good luck reading an article with lines that span the entire 2560px of the width of my screen.
  • hrnnnnnn 5y ago
    Firefox reader view to the rescue https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    1) Reader Mode 2) Most OSes nowadays have resizable windows. Drag the borders of your browser window in from the edges of your screen. 3) One of the few advantages of reading HN (and therefore the sites it links to) on a phone.
• beaconstudios 5y ago
  one thing you quickly learn from pursuing an academic topic more deeply than surface level is that you often can't trust your perfect-model-based intuition to be correct. I think this is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from: people who haven't learned about how their intuitive reasoning is wrong in a specific field, taking a look at it and just saying "oh, it's obvious". For some reason (not sure if it's systemic or just my perception) this seems especially common among STEM-oriented people, and especially directed towards soft sciences and the humanities. The efficient market hypothesis seems like a perfect example of this over-reliance on assuming paper-thin idealised models actually reflect reality.
• polskibus 5y ago
  It requires a lot of testing-feedback-correction iterations. This is expensive no matter how it’s done.
• amelius 5y ago
  Because there is a power-relationship between the manufacturer and the consumer. Initially, a small amount of power is with the consumer, but at the moment of purchase the power shifts to the manufacturer. Since the power concentrates at the manufacturer, the latter will end up with massive amounts of power. This results in products that are in many ways shitty for the consumer.
• rob_c 5y ago
  Lack of professionalism and following through with promises at scale sound like massive reasons for this. I say think of ant colonies, especially in the work from home era (I'll have some grace to beg the sensible people lets ignore covid rather than the authors ranting). Ant colonies are hugely successful yet estimates are only about 1/3 of workers actually work. There is no 'ant-police' there is no 'don't work no food', this is just the way that it ends up. In human situations I can count from experience being one of that 1/3 that work a lot even out of hours or when left un-monitored I know I'm in a minority because I'll throw up an experimental full stack deployment in a week with new toys/tooling/features and run into meetings to listen to someone winge about having difficulty in deploying a new ssl cert on an nginx box entirely because the instructions are only 3-4 months out of date. This used to drive me nuts but I've come to accept humans at scale are mote like ants. This even applies to the good ones. They're normally only working 1/3 of their time, hence why project management needs to more accurately account for this rather than thinking they can encourage the average person to be the super-geek who has fun turning on the light using https-over-dns-over-shoe-string one weekend because they simply wondered if they can. People unfortunately then take this as an insult that I'm comparing to them as ants. My response is, if you understand this correctly you've identified you're a normal rounded human being, congrats, enjoy this and go contribute to society in the way that makes you special. If you are insulted that I've identified you're working 1/3 of your time, either a) you're striving to be a super-nerd when you're not, please consider changing, this isn't healthy for you, or b) you are actually one of these super-worker people and get annoyed at the rest of the system like me, try moving into a career where you enjoy your work rather than trying to be the next millionaire, unless you love working in the markets, in which case, go for it and have fun :)
• jokoon 5y ago
  Because most consumers don't know how tech products work, so they're unable to make the best choice for them. They end up forcing "tech-literate" people to use crappy products, by the force of the market. That's why marketing beats product quality. Liars can win as long as there are enough gullible people, and as long the government doesn't enact laws to protect the public's interest. There is no way to improve product quality other by regulations. The "invisible hand of the market" was misinterpreted. You can win in any competition if the rules don't prevent bad faith players. Libertarians and other silicon valley start up bros will downvote me.
• andrepd 5y ago
  >But, when people are mostly making decisions off of marketing and PR and don't have access to good information, there's no particular reason to think that a product being generally better or even strictly superior will result in that winning and the worse product losing. Absolutely hit the nail on the head. Advertising distorts the market, meaning what would be a good idea in theory becomes a completely different thing in practice.
• fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Could be the proliferation of Minimum Viable Products taking their toll and having their influence.
• Ensorceled 5y ago
  This is a really good essay, but kind of depressing. Re: professional services ... I think there is some kind of sweet spot where professionals stop focusing on delivering a good service and start focusing on their brand. Also, some people realize they are not actually a very good accountant/developer/lawyer and focus almost entirely on their brand. Trying to discern if your potential professional is one of those two types of professionals is the hardest part.
• PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  "Meanwhile, in some Asian countries, like Taiwan and Vietnam, people mostly complied with lockdowns when they were instituted, which means that they were able to squash covid in the country when outbreaks happened". I have a feeling this guy doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to COVID. From Wikipedia: "No lockdowns have been imposed in Taiwan". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Asia And there's a huge difference between quarantining a small island and quarantining a large country whose leaders purposely don't enforce the borders and actually allowed in people who tested positive for COVID with no enforced quarantining: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.html https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.ht... You can also read in Wikipedia how the lockdowns in Vietnam ultimately failed, while also heavily disrupting their economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Vietnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Vietnam. The people who said lockdowns would be pointless were right. History has proven it. It's time for people like Dan Luu to move on. There was never any way the world at large was going to be able to organize a meaningful lockdown policy. The lockdowns were a waste and likely caused more deaths than they saved lives.
• mbg721 5y ago
  My theory is that it's because the end-user is less familiar with how household goods and machines work than in prior generations. With chips in everything, it's hard to tell at a glance what's good and what's rubbish; you can't kick the tires. Even if you could, there have been a couple generations where buying stuff new has been cheaper than repairing it, so knowing how to sew or fix a dishwasher isn't the value proposition that it once was--and that stuff has become as cheaply made as possible as a result.
  • gchamonlive 5y ago
    Companies also actively make their products obscure or withhold replacement parts to force new purchases. This has a lot to do with right to repair.
    • mbg721 5y ago
      They can only get away with it because they know most of their customers wouldn't do their own repairs anyway. In 1950, they'd say "Screw you then, I'll make the part in my garage."
• ksec 5y ago
  Haven't seen anyone discussing it yet. > For example, in my social circles, there have been two waves of people migrating from iPhones to Android phones over the past few years. Both waves happened due to Apple PR snafus which caused a lot of people to think that iPhones were terrible at something when, in fact, they were better at that thing than Android phones. I wonder what Apple PR snafus is that? >Amazon eventually solved this problem by having their own delivery people (and Apple has done this as well for same-day delivery) Apple employs they own people for delivery ? That is news to me. And I cant seems to find anything on Google to confirm this. Otherwise the article sums up, The world is largely run by Pepla, people who cant tell the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola. And the Market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
  • vishnugupta 5y ago
    > what Apple PR snafus is that? I suspect this is it https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ Which it seems they abandoned or paused https://www.macworld.com/article/559731/apple-csam-icloud-photo-scanning-removed.html https://www.macworld.com/article/559731/apple-csam-icloud-ph...
    • ksec 5y ago
      Arh... Thank You. I keep thinking about all the PR disaster with Mac and completely forgotten about iPhone CSAM. Imagine what Russia would do with CSAM now.
• mattferderer 5y ago
  I want to give a shout out to the Roomba designers. That is my favorite gadget. I have a very old one. The quality is awesome. The ability to clean & replace parts is easy.
• overton 5y ago
  Modern western society has not built the social capital necessary to cope with its material complexity. It's built on an ethic of grifting, in the large or in the small. See the part of the piece where people think you deserve what's coming to you if you aren't assuming everybody's out to f* you.
• gadders 5y ago
  Can someone remind me what the CSS is to make the site readable please?
• impalallama 5y ago
  > [It] involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would've outcompeted them and done it already. Must be a generational thing but I don't think anyone i know (ie under 30) genuinely believes this anymore.
  • cosmojg 5y ago
    I think the more correct statement is that products are as good as profitably possible and no better. If the margins on a better product aren't large enough to justify spinning up a new business just to sell it, the existing product will remain as it is indefinitely. To top it all off, consumer expectations can be surprisingly low. It's often the case that no one even wants or knows to want a better product, let alone being willing to pay for one.
    • banannaise 5y ago
      And then the operative problem there is that there are entire industries devoted to creating knock-offs that are slightly cheaper, much better marketed, and don't work, which end up replacing the good-as-profitably-possible product because they're more profitable and marketing subsumes consumer feedback.
    • marcusverus 5y ago
      I think you're right--particularly w/ regards to consumer expectations being low. I'm a part of this problem as well--when making purchases, price is almost always the deciding factor. It's also worth noting that "as good as possible" and "as good as profitably possible" aren't just two flavors of the same principle w/ regards to quality--they're directly at odds. I'll prove this (with scientific finality) via an anecdote about toys. My kiddo was gifted a little Fisher-Price school bus that was made in 2005.[0] It's pretty neat! As you roll the bus forward, some internal mechanism causes the driver to turn left and right (making it look like they're turning the steering wheel back and forth), and the passenger seats to move up and down (a dope allusion to the classic kid's song, 'The Wheels on the Bus', in which, as the wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round, the people on the bus go up and down). It's clear that this product was lovingly designed, with playful curves and playful details, like the face of the bus. The wheels not only have hub caps, but the shape of the tires even mimic a pneumatic bulge! The space inside of the bus is even big enough to accommodate human hands! More recently, she was gifted a newer version of the same toy.[1] It's smaller in every dimension, and flimsier. The slick design is gone, replaced by simple, boxy one. The little things that I loved about the old bus are gone--the wheels are now a single piece of plain molded plastic. While the wheels of the bus still go round and round, the people on the bus, alas, do not go up and down. It's fine, as far as toys go--the kid probably doesn't notice a difference. But it's clear that the guiding principle in the evolution of this product is not only not quality, but something that is directly in conflict with quality. [0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/304338207633 https://www.ebay.com/itm/304338207633 [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Little-People-Sit-With-Me-School-Bus-with-Lights-Sounds-Songs-Bus-Play-Vehicle/809247617 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Little-People-Sit-With-Me-School-...
• ephbit 5y ago
  Just picking a passage from the top of the article: > There's a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it's a debate I've often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it's so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would've come along and won based on being more efficient or better. --- This sounds like the question whether the market mechanism that ought to remove grave inefficiencies is actually working because there appear to be many examples where it looks like it's not. My explanation for why the market actually works and we can _still_ see those inefficiencies: Complexity. The reason why - even though the mechanism of the market making efficiency a necessity (to not be replaced) is working correctly - we often see inefficiency, is that a complex world enables niches for inefficient unnecessary complexities to exist, where they can consume resources without being easy to remove. The more complex the environment, the higher the number of possible/existing additional overhead and inefficiencies.
  • snarf21 5y ago
    I think complexity is definitely part of it but it is also mis-aligned incentives. The person running an assembly line has a vested interest in changing nothing. Everyone knows how it works and consistency sometimes is more important than raw efficiency. If they change something and if breaks the machine or they have a month of lower productivity, they don't get a promotion and/or bonus. Why would they risk it? Plus, people generally hate change. You actually have to have someone whose job it is to look for inefficiencies. Someone who goes and talks to everyone on the line because they are the ones that really know. Someone who also recognizes that a 5% improvement in one area may not be worth the risk but a 1% improvement somewhere else may be. Just like staff scheduling: do you schedule the bare minimum of staff? What happens when 3 people next to each other all get the flu? Now where are you? Are you better off normally over-staffed and constantly cross-training? Most companies make money despite their operations. This is where Amazon has taken over the world, they have that as a core goal and corporate focus.
    • ephbit 5y ago
      > I think complexity is definitely part of it but it is also mis-aligned incentives. The person running an assembly line has a vested interest in changing nothing. Is this really a case of mis-aligned incentives though? The person running the assembly line has an interest in the business model of the company not being destroyed, because their salary depends upon it working. So they'll try to prevent the worst (to the business model) from happening. Risking to break some important production process for a lousy low percentage potential gain in efficiency sure doesn't seem to be in the interest of neither the individual person, nor the company, nor the customer. As you write: the risks and benefits need to be carefully weighed perpetually .. simply an ongoing optimisation.
• uhtred 5y ago
  This site would be much nicer to read with some max-width applied. Maybe a nicer font.
• ricardobayes 5y ago
  The author uses a lot of examples of industries they seem to have only passing knowledge, e.g. geely's involvement in Volvo's daily management. I can tell you, it's non-existant. Same for Tata in JLR.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Amazon knew that the courier service they were using didn't really even try to deliver packages4 promptly and the only short-term mitigation available to them was to tell support to tell people that they shouldn't expect that packages have arrived when they've been marked as delivered. Well, that's partially the fault of Amazon for paying absolute shit on parcel contracts that literally cannot support a parcel business. When the incentive for the parcel delivery service is to mark a package as delivered to get money from Amazon and at the same time hold the packages for one to three days to group them by recipient, of course this is what will result!
• bjterry 5y ago
  > Amazon eventually solved this problem by having their own delivery people (and Apple has done this as well for same-day delivery). At scale, there's no commercial service you can pay for that will reliably attempt to deliver packages. It's funny, I have actually observed the phenomenon he described in the same company. Safeway in San Francisco either uses their own delivery drivers, or they subcontract to DoorDash depending on the time of day of delivery. If I order with Safeway delivery drivers, they will happily deliver all the way to my apartment door inside the building. If I get a DoorDash driver, the intercom will magically be broken 100% of the time. It's a perfect comparison.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  It isn't hard, just more expensive. Things that meet MIL-SPEC work very well (your taxes already paid someone to verify it) and can be easily purchased while sitting on a toilet.
• ouid 5y ago
  Weird that this article makes no mention of the law of lemons. Information asymmetry between buyer and seller is well studied.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    I think it does mention that. At least it talks about "lemon markets" and how the term "lemon" comes from the car market, and IIRC it links to the Wikipedia article on lemon market theory.
• bshanks 5y ago
  So i guess some of the reasons are: 1. Inability for the buyer to assess quality: 1.1 Lack of buyers' expertise (tfa goes into this a lot) 1.2 Long timescale to assess quality: that is, a lot of types of 'poor quality' aren't apparent until long after the sale; so even if you polled every buyer once a week, if sales were growing, the unhappy poll results due to poor quality would be overshadowed by the happy poll results from new buyers 1.3 Dishonest reviews: even if buyers are able to assess quality after the fact, it's hard for old buyers to communicate this to potential buyers due to honest reviews being buried in dishonest reviews 2. Peter principal (experts are promoted, so at any one time most of the people doing a job haven't achieved mastery): This is especially a problem for services, where someone who has achieved mastery at providing the service can make more money by becoming a manager. For example, in business consulting or in construction, often there is a person with a lot of experience at the top but the people actually doing the work don't have a lot of experience. 3. Market won't pay for quality: Even if buyers can tell that one product/service is of higher quality than another, often they would choose the cheaper one over the high quality one, either because the product/service at issue just isn't that important to them relative to the money they could save, or because they have a hard budgetary constraint and they are forced to compromise somewhere. 4. Cultural factors: Some people report that, for example, quality in the U.S. seems to tend to be worse than quality in Germany or Japan. If this is real, i don't know what it is specifically about US/German/Japanese culture (or workplace culture/structure) that causes this.
• camgunz 5y ago
  This article is amazing. I'll probably read it again twice. Its ambition is sprawling (is it a takedown of capitalism, or a takedown of American culture, no it's both!) and it's somehow successful. I get this is a superfluous comment, but goddamn.