21 ms·

Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)

• sl-1 2y ago
  To me this brings to mind Eliezer's Inadequate Equilibria(https://intelligence.org/equilibriabook/ https://intelligence.org/equilibriabook/ ), which goes on explaining how these non-optimal, but stable situations arise all around us in societies. Especially the part how everyone can see the inefficiencies, but there is no (easy, non-coordinated) way to fix them.
• wtcactus 2y ago
  The idea that competition alone solves this problem ignores that this is an incomplete information system. I really, really want to buy products that work well, hassle-free and last a very long time, and I'm willing to pay premium for it. But how? Where do you even get that information? All you get is anecdotal experiences "buy this brand, I have a washing machine from them for 20 years going fine" that just don't apply to your problem. Sometimes I get lucky. I have a Mazda 2 with 16 years now. Very, very little issues, extremely reliable. But if I went to buy a new Mazda 2 model, other than my past good experience, would I even get something similar? You can't trust online reviews. 1st because they are played by the companies, and 2nd, I've noticed that people came to expect so little that they give 5 stars to something even when they specifically write that something was a little off. It's like the all society has accepted that you will only be able to use what you bought for 2 years, and even so, you are expected to face some problems with it.
• deeves 2y ago
  Cause it’s even harder to build them
• eddyzh 2y ago
  What an excellent written article. Thanks Dan Luu!
• notShabu 2y ago
  In trading there is an idea called the "hurdle" which is a measure of inefficiency that any trade has to be above in order to actually make a profit. E.g. if the bid/ask spread for gold chains or options is 2% then any arbitrage has to be better than 2%. For companies this hurdle rate is from political friction. Any improvement that doesn't provide benefits in excess of the political friction generated doesn't get implemented. And in large institutions this friction can be very high. E.g. planes not crashing for Boeing or kids-not-being-shot for the U.S. seem like obvious things-to-fix. But they generate so much destabilizing political friction that they just can't.
• not_your_vase 2y ago
  I am so interested in this submission (based on the title), but that's such a big wall of text, even the LOTR trilogy looks more manageable If you have read it, do you regret the time you spent on it? Just trying to get some "goodreads" reviews, with or without spoilers, before committing to it...
  • intended 2y ago
    It Was worth the time/effort for me.
  • bell-cot 2y ago
    Only skimmed it...but yeah, not worth reading. Unless you're one of today's 10K, it's mostly obvious stuff. And if there's any real structure or "big picture" to the article, I couldn't spot it.
    • PaulHoule 2y ago
      As a crazy fast reader I liked it but now that I think about it, problems with product quality were a major preoccupation of the 1970s. There is a triangle between inflation <-> poor quality <-> shortages in that these all stem from the same root and the proportion in which they manifest depend on the system (e.g. in Soviet Russia they could legislate prices but couldn't legislate availability of products) It was the decade of Ralph Nader. See https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Original/dp/0671635778 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Origin... https://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards-Deming/dp/0521305535 https://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards-Deming/dp/052130... https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishing-Expectations/dp/0393356175 https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishi... A few themes could be broken out, not least "mongo sucks" (I never worked at a company that didn't trust the database they used at all until I worked at one that used mongo) and a meditation on "buy" vs "build" that leans heavily towards build. (When I hear the word "integration" I reach for my keyboard and code up a 15-line python script while management is on hold waiting to hear what the "call us" price is)
      • 2y ago
• code-faster 2y ago
  Will AI change this? If AI can assess who is good for us, then we can get somewhere
  • bmitc 2y ago
    It will undoubtedly make it worse. Products don't work well because of the lack of understanding and time spent on the products. "AI" only widens the gap and increases lack of understanding.
    • jpm_sd 2y ago
      It will make everything even more disposable than it is today. Products will be cheap and they will last a few months before breaking.
  • keybored 2y ago
    I mean, maybe? Why can’t you tell us? Any opinion on it? Sorry about the metacommentary but it’s a bit tiring with every third thread having the same stock question: Is this made irrelevant by AI?/Does AI [magically] solve this problem? They all at the same time strongly hint that yes, AI will <panacea>. But they still don’t take any stance or make any contribution themselves!
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Two years ago, this comment would have asked whether Blockchain will change this. I wonder what it'll say two years from now.
• jefftk 2y ago
  2022, per https://x.com/danluu/status/1503512394126938120 https://x.com/danluu/status/1503512394126938120 I wish Dan would put dates on his posts!
  • Sesse__ 2y ago
    The front page (danluu.com) has MM/YY on every post, at least.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
      I figure Dan would be an ISO-8601 guy. I’ve gained a reputation as a sort of hipster for using YYYY-MM-DD for all dates I record, even outside of computing.
• jpm_sd 2y ago
  I thought this was the most interesting point in the article: >>> People often think that having a high degree of internal distrust is inevitable as a company scales, but people I've talked to who were in upper management or fairly close to the top of Intel and Google said that the companies had an extended time period where leadership enforced trustworthiness and that stamping out dishonesty and "bad politics" was a major reason the company was so successful, under Andy Grove and Eric Schmidt, respectively. When the person at the top changed and a new person who didn't enforce honesty came in, the standard cultural norms that you see at the upper levels of most bi
• spiritplumber 2y ago
  Because most people will buy the $100 thing over the $130 thing even though the $130 thing is better made.
  • chongli 2y ago
    Yes, and then they throw it out 2 years later and buy a new one. The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. — Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
    • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      I always liked the Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness. Thanks for that! I find reading his stuff unpleasant, because of the formatting, but the content is usually worth it, so I can switch on Reader Mode. As far as the subject goes, I used to work for a world-renowned super-high-Quality corporation, and was heavily involved in what it takes to make Really Good Stuff. It is painful. I think most people here (anywhere, really) would refuse to work that way. It takes almost military Discipline. But the end result is usually really good, and expensive. That little bit of extra Quality actually adds a fair amount to the bottom line, and drastically reduces the customer base. Most folks that get really rich, do so, by making acceptable-quality stuff, at a fairly low price, and selling lots of them. Making top-Quality stuff can make you feel good (and maybe arrogant), but it won't make the kind of money that selling dross does.
    • potato3732842 2y ago
      This trope was a slight exaggeration then and is basically false now. It exists in the modern world mostly to validate purchasing decisions of the middle class. In an industrial world where most things made in volume are quite cheap relative to incomes quantifiable results per dollar plateau very quickly and beyond that you're mostly for emotion, brand, signaling, etc. People default to cheap not because they're stupid but because "buy the cheapest thing that will work" delivers very good results when applied to all of one's purchasing. It's the index fund of personal finance. You can do better with specialist knowledge or techniques but that doesn't scale.
• mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  This post is so interesting to me, esp. the build-vs-buy spectrum. As Dan notes, a lot of software is just...not very good. It either isn't upfront with flaws (as in the case of the Postgres -> Snowflake tool), has too much scope, or is abstracted poorly. Finding things to buy/use (as in the case of open source) can often eat a lot more time than you anticipate. I've been dipping my toes into the JS ecosystem, and I keep bumping into the fact that using mentally cheap signals of quality (such as stars or DL counts) almost never indicates the quality of the thing itself. Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! The only way to assess is to read the code and try integrating it in. I'd go farther to argue that the larger an ecosystem/market is, the more untrustworthy it behaves as a whole, simply due to the size, and the types of people attracted to it who want to get influence/money. See also: appliances that everyone needs.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    > Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! Winners are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.
    • mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      Have definitely someone say, "well I tried Drizzle because the creators are good at shitposting on X." I do not understand that at all, but maybe my reality is just substantially less mediated by "the conversation" that I don't get it. (Drizzle is fine BTW)
      • digging 2y ago
        I think that's actually not unusual or even wildly unreasonable shopping behavior in a market where: 1. Many if not most "customers" (JS devs) don't understand how to evaluate quality deeply (thus, quality signals aren't trustworthy, making evaluation more difficult and resulting in further acceptance of using unevaluated products) 2. There's an overwhelming number of choices, with deprecation, replacement, and eclipsing all being fairly common - potentially even year-to-year You kinda just have to try stuff out and work with what you've got.
• peterlada 2y ago
  The most expensive thing in this work is human attention. Ie somebody has to give a shit so the thing works well.
• noelwelsh 2y ago
  By definition most things will be average. You just have to look around to see, for example, poorly designed websites that don't have even a minimum of CSS that would greatly improve readability. That's fine for most things. Most websites don't need to have great design, even if improving the design would be a trivial exercise. Only a few industries are power law industries, where only the best dominate, but even in those industries there are different definitions of what "best" is. Take entertainment, for example. It's a power law market. Taylor Swift and K-pop band de jure make magnitudes more money than the tenth or hundredth best artist. Yet there are people who have never listened to either but will queue around the block for the latest Aphex Twin release. Similarly in written work, if you adopt a particular style, such as aesthetic of an unstyled web site, there are certain people that will resonate with (in this case, people who started using the Internet in the 90s or 2000s) and they will perhaps appreciate your work more for it.
• mojuba 2y ago
  tl;dr information asymmetry. Didn't read the entire text, just skimmed through. I think fundamentally the reason behind info asymmetry in our day and age is that products and services have become so much more complex that there's simply no time to independently assess the qualities such as reliability, durability, and a myriad of other variables in each particular case. I think it's the complexity that is becoming our enemy number one, and too many variables when choosing a product as a consequence of that. Is the air conditioner too noisy? Does it require a WiFi connection and even a mobile app to function? People may omit some of these things even in their Amazon reviews. And then some of the insanely complex products like mobile phones are practically impossible to evaluate objectively. I once stumbled upon an article that explains why Android requires roughly 2x RAM and a slightly larger battery compared to an equivalent iPhone in order to have the same efficiency and performance, supported by some benchmarks (blame garbage collector I guess?). How many technical people or experts are even aware of this? My process of purchasing stuff comes down to two principles: (1) devices that Apple makes are generally OK to buy, they are less likely to disappoint; (2) for everything else: research, read reviews; the time spent on a product is proportionate to the price of the product.
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    Regarding smart phones, iPhones have had a bunch of features which they objectively do better, but these are never considered by reviewers or many buyers, who just look at paper specs and features. Just because these features are never articulated. Things such as user interface lag, long time usability, finger print sensor reliability. These were mayor problems with Android phones in the past (I have no idea how it is now), but since these features are very difficult to advertise, Apple focused their advertising in another direction. And as a consequence people like hackers, Europeans, and such believe that the public are only getting iPhones because it's fashion and a "status symbol".
  • rstuart4133 2y ago
    For me it went a bit deeper. Yes, there is always information asymmetry, but there is a world of difference between that and allowing outright lying and deception. In practice consumers are powerless against outright lying, so if Governments and organisations don't actively intervene it runs rampant. Apparently does that in most organisations. The article gave examples of CEO's that didn't allow it - Gordon More and Eric Schmidt. He claimed both ran very successful organisations as a result. That reflects what I've seen in Australia. Unlike the USA, we have very strong local consumer protection laws. If a firm lies on the box, like saying a plan is unlimited when it is not, and a government will come knocking on their door. But in web market places like ebay the government can't control overseas sellers. Lying about the size of USB Flash drives on Ebay in particular became rampant. While Ebay is much cheaper than local brick and mortar sellers for just about everything, in the end I abandoned Ebay for USB Flash and other items where fraud was rampant. So did everyone else. The market for those things on EBay just collapsed - to the detriment of everyone - buyers and sellers alike. In the end EBay stepped in by siding with the consumer far more often when disputes arose, and those products returned. The USA worships markets. Markets only work well when the buyer and seller are both well informed. Yet, the USA doesn't enforce that. To outsiders, it's weird.
• asveikau 2y ago
  > markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive This just seems totally false on its face. If you've worked at the big guys you know they aren't magically smarter, they do very inefficient things frequently. It's so intuitively false that I'd have to wonder about someone who thinks it's true.
  • sib 2y ago
    "It's so intuitively false that I'd have to wonder about someone who thinks it's true." This is a wonderful encapsulation. Thank you.
  • intended 2y ago
    It’s the Platonic solid of Econ analysis. Sphereical cows.
  • wpietri 2y ago
    It can be helpful to think of the Econ 101/homo economicus view of the world as something more akin to a secular religion. And I don't mean that in a particularly bad way; most religions package a bunch of useful concepts (e.g., the golden rule) with some stuff that isn't literally true but does serve social and emotional needs in ways that the useful stuff gets passed down through the generations. As scholar Huston Smith put it, religion gives spirituality historical traction. The notion that markets can drive efficiency is a valuable insight. But people for whom Econ 101 acts as a religion have a really hard time noticing when that effect gets swamped. This is pretty easy to spot these days because you'll find nominally pro-market people cheering oligopolies and monopolies, or getting upset at regulations that make markets more efficient. One easy test is how they feel about sustained high profits. To people who value markets for their ability to drive improvements through competition, that's a sign of something wrong, like insufficient price competition.
    • rsanek 2y ago
      hard to evaluate sustained high profits without context. is it due to continued innovation by the firm? or just rent seeking? both can be causes of profits but we should only be promoting one of those models
• criddell 2y ago
  I've been thinking about good design lately. Things have to work well, but life is so much better when they are also beautiful. I think Don Norman's essay Emotion and Design started me down this path. The Conan OBrien and Jordan Schlansky podcast talked about this in the context of nose hair trimmers. It was very funny, but it really resonated with me too. Schlansky starts with: > I believe that we can live minimally. But the products that I do buy, I want them to be of a very high quality. I want them to have something special about them, and then I have to buy fewer products going forward because they last longer. A little later he says: > We define ourselves by the objects we interact with every day. I surround myself with beauty, with high levels of aesthetic pleasure, and it's not only putting on beautiful clothes. It's also using a beautiful nose hair trimmer. I'm going to get a trimmer, so I want a thoughtfully designed and well made version of that. This has been my mission around my home since the start of the COVID pandemic. Upgrade all the little things around my home that annoy me or that would make my day a little bit better if they were upgraded.
  • keane 2y ago
    You might enjoy the book Quintessence : The Quality of Having It by Betty Cornfeld and Owen Edwards. It was recommended by Jerry Seinfeld in his GQ 10 Things interview. https://archive.org/details/quintessence00bett https://archive.org/details/quintessence00bett The things the book lists are: The Martini, The Ace Comb, Wedgwood Plain White Bone China, The Spalding Rubber Ball, Ivory Soap, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, The Timex Mercury 20521 Watch, The Steinway Piano, Camel Cigarettes, Keds High-top Sneakers, The Oreo Cookie, The Mont Blanc Diplomat Pen, Frederick’s of Hollywood Lingerie, The Slinky Toy, The Brown Paper Bag, The Milk-Bone Dog Biscuit, The Cigarette Hawk Speedboat, Silly Putty Toy, Crayola Crayons, The Harley-Davidson ElectraGlide Motorcycle, The Zippo Lighter, The Cartier Santos Watch, Coppertone Suntan Lotion, The Goodyear Blimp, The Bean Maine Hunting Boot, Green Giant Peas, The Frisbee Flying Saucer, The English Bull Terrier, The Louisville Slugger Baseball Bat, Jockey Briefs, Monopoly Board Game, The Ghurka Express Bag No. 2, The Polaroid SX-70 Camera, Ray-Ban Sunglasses, Budweiser Beer, The Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss, The Volkswagen Beetle Car, The American Express Card, M&M’s Chocolate Candies, Bayer Aspirin, Honey Bear, The Faber Mongol #2 Pencil, Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, Lacoste Polo Shirt, Steiff Teddy Bears, Johnson’s Baby Powder, The Swiss Army Knife, Levi’s Jeans, Bass Weejun Loafers, The Hamilton Beach Model 936 Drink Mixer, Coca-Cola Soft Drink, Ohio Blue Tip Kitchen Matches, Kleenex Tissues, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, The Marklin Electric HO Gauge Model Trains, The Stetson Hat, Heinz Ketchup, The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog, The Oil Can, LePage’s Mucilage, Tupperware Containers, El Bubble Bubblegum Cigar, Dom Perignon Champagne, The Checker Cab.
• Sharlin 2y ago
  Does this long-winded article manage to say anything more interesting than "maybe markets aren't actually 100% efficient, just like cows aren't actually spherical and of uniform density"?
  • tonymet 2y ago
    there were a few good points at the bottom, but it could have all been summarized in a tweet
• Havoc 2y ago
  For a lot of fields the answer is much simpler. The buyer is simply not equipped to evaluate it at all. eg I bet north of 50% of people judge their tax accountants by the size of refund not technical and legal accuracy. But they’re still liable so accuracy is an important measure of „good“ Same with say dentist. If he says he needs to do procedure x what am I going to do except ask some layman questions. Or doctor. Even trades often seem simple but have significant accumulated practical learnings that are not obvious to laymen. It’s tempting to boil everything down to an optimization question & just finding the right metrics, especially for those STEM minded but often that’s not how reality works
  • ksec 2y ago
    Exactly this. Even for something that is more relevant to HN, say Computer Hardware. You will already find most people are still doing very high level Spec Comparing without deep understanding within or besides it. As long as you drill deep enough about anything that is when people start calling you nerd. SSD ( Type of NAND ), DRAM, CPU Core, uArch, Board Layout, PSU, Fan etc. There are just insane amount of small variables. And unless you take interest in something. Most people are easily swayed by Marketing or Ads.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Not only is the buyer not able to evaluate the product. The company, doesn't really understand what the buyer wants from the product and why he buys it over other products.
  • myroon5 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution
  • markus_zhang 2y ago
    Yeah, We don't really have the knowledge to ask intelligent questions. I did take some accounting classes so I can have some intelligent discussion with my accountant, but the regulation changes every year so it's difficult to keep up. Even if the accountant misses something, that's quite possible. I mean, two of my previous companies messed up with payroll and many thousands were impacted.
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Shopping without researching goes hand in hand with a fool and his money. For the typical consumer, visiting consumerreports.com and picking one of their top recommendations would solve a majority of these problems.
  • markus_zhang 2y ago
    The thing is, how do you know which research is good or not? Is trusting a website good enough? I really doubt. BTW I do agree that we need to do some research beforehand, but with a lot of products it's difficult or impossible.
    • 1970-01-01 2y ago
      The same way it's always been known: brand reputation and personal experience. Good examples are NFTs and cryptocoins. They have earned their online reputations as jokes and exotic investments. If I offered you a job that paid in NFTs and bonuses in spicecoins, you would be a complete fool to accept it.
  • thrance 2y ago
    Fools aren't the only one buying without research, else advertising and marketing wouldn't exisit. The average consumer's inability to fairly compare products is key in the current economy.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    How different does that work out from just taking the first few results in the storefront or from a generic product search? The problem is the esoteric domain knowledge that things like consumerreports doesn't catch - for example, the way they rank cars has lots to do with minor problems detected after buying a new one, but most people just want to know "if I buy this, will it just work without thought for ten years" and that's much harder to know without waiting ten years. And with things like toilets you may get them ranked based on how well they flush golf balls (even though nobody shits golfballs, if you do you have other problems). And plumbers might rank them on installability, ease of repair, etc, when all you want is one that works and keeps working and doesn't ever back up. https://terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm https://terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm has to be read with an eye to that. The main thing that review searching and research can find is things to avoid - it's much harder to have it find things you should seek out.
• sylware 2y ago
  no bugs or planned obsolescence --> "no business"
• sneed_chucker 2y ago
  Market for lemons. Read it, explains everything.
• DataDive 2y ago
  Reply: things don't work well for the same reason this very post is so hard to read wall of text. I find it deeply ironic that the author can't even produce readable text, while complaining about other, much more complex tasks not working. The author refuses to take minimal, common-sense measures to make the text more readable.
  • f1shy 2y ago
    On the other hand, you can set read mode, and because the page is so basic, it works perfectly...
    • fuzzfactor 2y ago
      Exactly. It's not a wall of text, it's a line of text. Although it is marked up according to HTML guidelines. Technically speaking that's why it also qualifies as a single line of HTML. Similar to a single line (per paragraph) of plain text which can then be pasted into any email window, for better right-nonjustification than average. A single line of HTML will justify according to any user's browser default settings, so you always get what you want in that regard. And this one is so generic that it more closely resembles a clearly typewritten page or newspaper column, depending on how wide you size your browser combined with its default font size. Like it's supposed to do. It's not "quite" a novel, but truly does fit the classic "short-story" layout. Basically about as close as you get to the most readable professionally typeset classic literature. The only thing missing is the traditional indentation to start each paragraph, but it's worth it to retain universality on the web since tabs are so unreliable in browsers. There's just a lot there, almost 52kb of useful text content which takes up the vast majority of this huge 58kb web page. On this page I don't think he is trying to convince people that he is "a man of few words". With the same readily-available one-line of content though, maybe there is a text connoisseur who is enough of an expert to get it down way below 58kb with far better readability on a wider variety of default browsers too. That's an example I'd like to see.
  • dasil003 2y ago
    No, the reason is because there are different tradeoffs, and things that work well often trade off other things. For instance, Dan is one of the best writers for illustrating a general point with dozens of rapid fire small examples. This gives the point credibility in a way that a writer who might craft an easier-to-digest narrative doesn't have, but can be tiresome for those don't like the style.
• swayvil 2y ago
  Can-openers. 99% of them are utter trash. The one that works is a copy of a 60 year old model.
  • Suppafly 2y ago
    > The one that works is a copy of a 60 year old model. This, we were going through one every 6-months or so, I finally bought the swing-a-way clone, the ez-duz-it for like $30 thanks to the /r/buyitforlife sub-reddit and it's been going strong for several years now.
    • swayvil 2y ago
      You are me.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Best can opener is the classic Danish style. No moving parts at all, basically indestructible. https://img1.etsystatic.com/169/1/10660606/il_570xN.1221618697_t6ew.jpg https://img1.etsystatic.com/169/1/10660606/il_570xN.12216186...
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Because making things that work well is not what modern markets are optimizing for. They're efficiently pursuing other agendas because they can get away with making things that work sorta.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  Generally speaking, if a corporation is controlled by the finance and sales people, instead of buy the engineering people, the products it makes will suffer from things like planned obsolescence. Monopolistic control of markets makes this worse, as there's little if any competition to turn to. Boeing is the poster child for this problem in the USA - Boeing relied on monopolistic control of the airplane market, and cut R & D to increase shareholder and executive profits, and was then blindsided by Airbus developments in fuel efficiency, and their response was to try to rush a low-cost development project with disastrous results. Investment capitalism naturally gravitates towards such behavior; this is why the most disastrous thing SpaceX (compare to Boeing) could do is go public and let big shareholder conglomerates like Vanguard/Blackrock/StateStreet/FMR etc. control the makeup of the corporate board and thus, engineering decisions.
• uludag 2y ago
  Reading this, I realized a reason why I try to move as much of my computing life into Emacs as possible: because having full control over a, perhaps inferior, Elisp application does result in a better experience, as I have full control over everything. At times I would think that my motive to do this was purely superficial (for fun, masochism, idealistic purity, etc.), but perhaps the software world is such a market for lemons that the best one can do is put all the watermELons they can get ahold of in their Emacs cart and go their way.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  I have reached the age (40+) and I need much fewer than I thought I'd need. I think the best way to reduce the number of lower quality buys is just to buy less, way less, while keep a large amount of $$ float in the market. Yes the CAD or USD also de-value in time but IMO they devalue a lot slower than most of the products on the market. And when I buy I only buy second hand stuffs with a deep discount. I'm glad that a used workstation lives for 2+ years (in fact, all of my second handed workstations live for 2+ years for just $500 and less).
  • bombcar 2y ago
    The other advantage to buying used is you avoid cradle-death along with the discount. Then, if it works great, you might consider buying that one new when the time comes.
    • markus_zhang 2y ago
      Yeah exactly. Although personally I'd be hesitant to buy a completely new Dell 32GB mobile workstation :P $Wifie is going to hate me. But I do need one with > 16GB because I will need to emulate some OS.
• _1tem 2y ago
  This is not just about information asymmetry. If you want to do something well, you have to find someone that truly cares about doing it well. Price is almost irrelevant, in fact, it may actually be a negative signal, because the best performers are often not motivated by money alone. > So, in Korea, there's some service like Amazon where you can order an item and, an hour or two later, you'll hear a knock at your door. When you get to the door, you'll see an unlabeled box or bag and the item is in the unlabeled container. If you want to return the item, you "tell" the app that you want to return the item, put it back into its container, put it in front of your door, and they'll take it back. After seeing this shipping setup, which is wildly different from what you see in the U.S., he asked someone "how is it possible that they don't lose track of which box is which?". The answer he got was, "why would they lose track of which box is which?". His other stories have a similar feel, where he describes something quite alien, asks a local how things can work in this alien way, who can't imagine things working any other way and response with "why would X not work?" This gem near the end of the article ties in with Marc Andreeson’s quote at the beginning of the article. The fact that he thinks hiring can’t be more efficient sounds to me like typical American head-in-sand insular thinking. He’s stuck in a cognitive frame, and in a particular system where people can’t imagine doing things differently, because they simply haven’t seen anything else. Try living somewhere else for an extended period of time, and you’ll realize that a lot of things you didn’t even think about could actually be better. The author gives the example of deliveries in Korea. I say the same about many things in Eastern Europe, including deliveries, payment systems, and just everyday services like dentists - a LOT of things work better than they do in the West, not because of monetary incentives, but because things are simply done differently here, and some things are done better.
  • Suppafly 2y ago
    >a LOT of things work better than they do in the West, not because of monetary incentives, but because things are simply done differently here, and some things are done better. I'm not totally convinced though, because a lot of times when you investigate these "simply works better" claims, it's because the end users, either through culture or training, have been taught to accept bad service and not complain about it, which glosses over a lot of the real problems with some of these systems that we're told work better.
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  A massive unmentioned bullet point in this rant is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence Stuff is literally designed to stop working while also being financially unrealistic to even salvage and sell for parts.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    There is absolutely nothing wrong with planned obsolescence. There are exactly two alternatives to planned obsolescence. Planned infinity, which is an impossible engineering constraint. And unplanned obsolescence, which you know from temu products, which break after days of use, as they are designed with massive flaws. If you are engineering a product you absolutely need to plan how long the product will last. The "alternatives" are significantly worse, especially for the consumer. The Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 are planned for obsolescence, the parts they are made up of are designed to last a specific amount of time and use and are discarded afterwards. This is not some nefarious greedy management/engineering decision, but a reasonable tradeoff to make aviation possible, cost effective and safe. Of course this is distinct from malicious engineering, which is the totally unrelated practice of building things which have specific negative properties. E.g. intentional design flaws.
    • 1970-01-01 2y ago
      That's not the definition of planned obsolescence
  • stronglikedan 2y ago
    I'm not sure that belongs as a bullet point in an article about things working well. A lot of products built with planned obsolescence in mind work very well, until they don't.
    • bombcar 2y ago
      Planned obsolescence is usually taken as a "bad thing" but it isn't necessarily - when considered as "there's no reason to spend money on making a part of this outlast the useful lifespan of the whole." A cruise missile doesn't need to fix a bug that can only occur months after it has detonated, after all. The real problem comes from the manufacturer's idea of "useful lifespan" and the customer's. For most people, an appliance's useful lifespan is "as long as it keeps working" and they don't care to ever upgrade it if it doesn't fail. Manufacturer's aren't incentivized to make those, however, and only accidentally do so (something designed to last 10 years is likely to last much longer on average).
• mrngm 2y ago
  Earlier notable thread in 2022, 518 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30679935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30679935 The title could use a [2022], as that seems the year it was originally posted.
• micromacrofoot 2y ago
  Because it's easy to lie about things that don't work well half the time after we buy something, we're willing to lie about how well it works to ourselves
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• buryat 2y ago
  We need a system based on verifiable proofs that will help the society to streamline selection of long running working products that will push the businesses to optimize their processes and fight for the economy share. Long working products will signal that producers can not just sell the same inferior products and reap profits. As a cause-effect it will make available many elements of the society to explore new economic models and embark on a journey in search of their application. And since everyone wants to keep consuming it will give a healthy economically-based incentive for the majority of the population to start producing tangible value.
• secabeen 2y ago
  > The good accountants are typically somewhat expensive, but they're generally not charging the highest rates and only a small percentage of somewhat expensive accountants are good. This is an interesting observation that I see a lot of value in. Not everyone is money-driven in the same way, and there's a lot of talent that is willing to turn down additional money or additional work because they are happy enough. They have reached a local maxima, and while there may be other maxima, those are not guaranteed, and going for them could result in overall loss.
• camgunz 2y ago
  Super enjoyed reading this post as usual. I want to make a small leap. It takes extraordinary effort and resources to gather data, whether that's on your ETL SaaS, your health insurance, your congressional candidates' policies, or who's right about vaccines on Twitter. If "a market for lemons" is one "where information asymmetry means that buyers can't tell the difference between good products and 'lemons'", literally every market is a lemon market. Since we know the incentives there reward marketing over performance, we have to have some kind of countervailing force if we don't want that (I don't). Luu cites "unusually unresonable" people for companies here, in traditional markets those are regulators, on social media those are content moderators, in politics those are political parties and the press, etc. Jump from here to wherever you want: - unregulated markets quickly become back alleys stuffed with lemons - (therefore) regulation greatly increases market efficiency - competing definitions of "lemon" undermine the entire system - regulator corruption is inevitable--successful systems account for this - regulation does stack--intuitively one would think no one will buy "sure, the car regulators are corrupt, but the car regulator regulators are on the up and up, so it's fine", but synonyms for "car regulator regulators" include "FBI" and "journalists" - if you wanted to succeed as a person of style over substance you have a strong incentive to assail the regulators
• dsego 2y ago
  > where the notice falsely indicates that the person wasn't home and correctly indicates that, to get the package, the person has to go to some pick-up location to get the package. Didn't know this was a universal experience with package delivery and the post office. I always thought it was just my national postal service that does this.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    Once you realize that a metric the employee is tracked on is "on time delivery" and he has a button he can press that makes it report he did it right, you realize the incentives. It starts by slipping a bit, and then more and more ... Amazon et al are fighting back by requiring a photo on delivery now, but that has it's own limitations.
    • mrguyorama 2y ago
      >Amazon et al are fighting back by requiring a photo on delivery now And yet they are perfectly happy for that "photo of delivery" to be a picture of the box still in the truck. They aren't fighting back. Fighting back would be removing the negative incentives that encourage drivers to fake metrics.
      • Dylan16807 2y ago
        It makes things worse when they have unreasonable expectations, but there's always going to be an incentive to skip doing part of the work
• eviks 2y ago
  > Talking purely abstractly, it's hard to settle the debate, Hm, the mistake in the abstract is pretty obvious and is acknowledge in the theoretical discussions of all the "perfect efficiencies" theories - real life is never perfect! So sure, at the superficial/cocktail party level, you'll always have a lot of folks ignoring the obvious and repeating this silly mistakes. But then it's just as easy to do the same when looking at the specifics. I mean, the original example came from defending a specific obvious error? It's also not hard to find flaws in the specifics: like with the air conditioner friend "missing expertise", you don't need to have any expertise to look for such a directly measurable (even wihout instruments) stuff such as noise level! I mean, your friend could've gone and listened to different units working if this information is not covered anywhere online. Even though the fundamental issue of the challenge to find relevant reliable information is indeed very hard, there are so many force working against a poor guy at any level of actual expertise of said guy (so the post is right on the money here)!
• cs702 2y ago
  This is a thought-provoking essay by Dan Luu, whose essays I always find thought-provoking. I'm surprised Dan didn't make the connection that the webs of mistrust between fiefdoms that form inside organizations as they grow are... Nash equilibria.[a] Organizational webs of mistrust are nothing more than complicated versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma.[b] Unless you have a CEO actively enforcing trust and collaboration, different fiefdoms naturally evolve behaviors that ensure they can survive and thrive in the face of possible betrayal by any other untrustworthy fiefdoms in the organization. We see similar behavior in natural ecosystems, which tend to evolve toward suboptimal equilibria that is robust to betrayal between groups, instead of global optima that requires perpetual honesty between them.[c] In many settings, robustness against betrayal is an evolutionary advantage. --- [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
  • mixmastamyk 2y ago
    His stuff is usually quite interesting, but in dire need of an editor. I often get lost in the details and tangents of the piece and lose the point.
    • cs702 2y ago
      Maybe. I'm not so sure. My take is, he's trying to be thorough. The lack the formatting sometimes makes his posts feel like a wall of uninterrupted text. When reading his stuff, I find it helpful to put my browser in "reader" mode, which narrows text width.
• everdrive 2y ago
  One thing I’ll say is that I’ve _never_ seen a company properly understand a product, properly staff a product they purchase, or spend much time ensuring that their product is properly configured. But despite this, companies are shocked over and over again when the services or softwares they purchase do not live up to expectations.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Because people like Mark Andreeson only care about money. That guy is a one trick pony who just has money and part of the problem. He’s a pump and dump bozo no better than some banker on Wall Street
• throwaway_20357 2y ago
  A lot of it comes down to the attitude that product quality (at least when it comes to a product's longevity aspect) is less and less valued because the low quality alternatives became so cheap. Or, as someone put it here once: "I don't want to have to think really hard about which trivial household item I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'd rather pick a random cheap one and then not feel too bad about replacing it, if necessary." It seems the negative externalities of this trend are not effectively priced at the moment.
  • tristor 2y ago
    I feel exactly the opposite. It's somewhat ironic as well, because socially I have and have had a reputation as someone who is both 'gadget obsessed' and 'bougie', but I don't think you can really be both. I have much much less 'stuff' than almost anyone I know, but almost everything I own I spent at least a few months researching before buying it and I plan to keep it as long as possible (and repair it if possible when it breaks). As a tech guy, the most obvious place this exists is in my desk setup, which currently (laptop and USB chargers not included) has an average age of around 5 years for everything on it. The oldest item I acquired 12 years ago and have no intention to ever replace if possible. The newest item was acquired as part of a move 2 years ago and pulls the average down. It's a constant struggle though, because even when I find something of high quality (recently pants and shirts), this doesn't prevent the company from discontinuing the product or changing it. I've had to since switch pants and shirts, and rotate my wardrobe because of button and zipper failures on a brand I previously relied on heavily and recommended to others. They likely made this choice as a company to cut materials costs to not move their price point, but I would have happily absorbed a 20-30% price increase to maintain quality and not need to spend another 3 months figuring out which pants to start buying. Instead, they've lost a customer entirely that previously directed them additional customers. I wish consistency of quality was more of a thing, so even when you find something you always have to keep an eye on it.
• _yb2s 2y ago
  I'm very much into buying things that work well... to me the trick is to ruthlessly research what actually works well, and not be biased by what is new or more expensive. Most often these end up being older, cheaper, things built with a simple timeless design and no extra complexity that leads to unreliability. Some examples: Maytag 575 commercial grade residential washer and dryer 1980-early 90s Mercedes W124 or W201 diesels 1980s Volvos (mentioned in article) IBM Model M keyboard Military/commercial security marketed heavy nylon and wool clothing Vintage Yamaha solid state electrical devices (or anything 1970s ish with real hardwood cases, and discrete components you can test and replace) 1970s professional grade Pioneer studio monitor headphones (e.g. Monitor 10s, etc.) I've often had people accuse me of being a 'hipster' into vintage stuff that is impractical because of the aesthetic. In such cases I usually could not convince them that I just had what worked best- I didn't care about the age or aesthetic, but some good stuff happens to be old. For services, companies, and products I recommend reading every 1 star review you can before choosing. For actual good stuff, the 1 star reviews will all be petty: they got what they paid for and it was perfect but are mad or confused about something else, or they just had random bad luck. I keep forgetting to do this, and everytime I have an awful experience, someone else had it before me and warned everyone but I didn't remember to look.
  • kvmet 2y ago
    Another big benefit of these older devices is customizability and repairability. I am working to refurbish an MPC1000 right now (drum machine) and the fact that it is repairable at all was a big factor in choosing to sell a newer, nicer device in favor of an older one that wasn't fully working. Not everything can be treated that way, like a phone or a laptop I would prefer to be no more than 5 years old. But so many things don't need to be terribly modern in order to work well.
  • TacticalCoder 2y ago
    One issue is: for new stuff, you cannot know yet if it's actually good. It's only once it has withstood the test of time that you can be reasonably sure. > Vintage Yamaha solid state electrical devices Yamaha are still producing modern amps that are very good quality wise compared to their price point: the "ToP-ART" (that's how they call it) basis they use in many amp is actually good stuff and has been tested and analyzed by many objective metrics. They may not be simple but they sure as heck do sound very good (and they've got a "loundess" control, which basically only Yamaha or $$$$$ Macintosh amps or preamps do have and nothing beats that for people who also need to listen at lower volumes later at night when everybody, including the neighbors, do sleep). Overall I'd say Japanese companies still know how to build quality stuff: cars, amps, digital pianos, laser printers (even if even Brother and Epson can be criticized on some points, we're far from the turds companies like HP or Lexmark have become), tools (I love all the Makita tools and power tools), etc. When it comes to music there are objective measurements and there are companies out there still building amazing stuff, punching way above their pricepoint. One could lament about the cost cutting on the material (like plastic knobs) on entry level Yamaha amps, but the innards is actually good stuff. They also come with long warranties (two years but you can register your stuff online and get 2 to 3 additional years of warranty). I have maybe 15 IBM Model keyboards but... I'm using since many years a HHKB Pro JP. And HHBK are, well, japanese keyboards (it took the japanese to create the amazing Topre switches). That's the thing: sadly by only using older tech you're giving up on something. Amps from the 70s are not competing with modern stuff. Speakers from the 70s and 80s do age. Cars are going to be less secure and consume more fuel (I know: I've got two "youngtimers" cars from the late 80s). Kitchen knifes? Japanese. But I agree that quality overall has gone down a lot and that it takes time to find quality brands / models. FWIW I paired DALI (a little Danish brand) loudspeakers with a modern Yamaha amp and I couldn't be happier. P.S: although I do have family in Japan I'm not japanese ;)
• dehrmann 2y ago
  > every social media company has kernel expertise as a core competency It gets even more interesting when you're someone like Google who has both search and Android. There's a case for having two kernel teams so server teams aren't directly competing with mobile teams for resources.
• bombcar 2y ago
  One thing not mentioned, but I've seen time and time again, is if you buy something, you buy what you think you need/want. You make a decision and live with it. But if you build it, you can learn that what you wanted wasn't what you thought you needed, and the build can adapt and change to meet that actual need. A bought item/tool will do what it is designed to do, and can sometimes be shoehorned into what you needed, but often what you needed wasn't what you thought you needed.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• t0bia_s 2y ago
  Why is it so hard to format text that is readable well? Reading it on UHD monitor is almost impossible with full width of paragraphs.
  • pschoeps 2y ago
    The first thing I did when I loaded this page was add 3 css rules (margin, line height, font size). Like I get purity, but c'mon.
  • cptskippy 2y ago
    It's ironic given the amount of effort that was invested in writing that post with absolutely zero effort put into making it readable.
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      > absolutely zero effort put into making it readable. Not true on several fronts: https://danluu.com/slow-device/ https://danluu.com/slow-device/ - "I certainly wouldn't claim that the design on this site is optimal. I just removed the CSS from the most popular blogging platform for programmers at the time because that CSS seemed objectively bad for people with low-end connections and, as a side effect, got more traffic and engagement overall" and "I get quite a bit of hate mail about the styling on this page .. I know people who run sites that are complex enough that they're unusable by a significant fraction of people in the world. How come people are so incensed about the styling of this site and, proportionally, basically don't care at all that the web is unusable for so many people?" and "On the data, when I switched from Octopress styling (at the time, the most popular styling for programming bloggers) to the current styling, I got what appeared to be a causal increase in traffic and engagement, so it appears that not only do people who write me appreciation mail about the styling like the styling, the overall feeling of people who don't write to me appears to be that the site is fine and apparently more appealing than standard programmer blog styling." https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ - "Speeding up this site by 50x" - "I found it too hard to futz around with trimming down the massive CSS file that comes with Octopress, so I removed all of the CSS and then added a few lines to allow for a nav bar. This makes almost no difference on the desktop benchmark above, but it's a noticable improvement for slow connections" https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/ https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/ - "The "improve writing" goal is because I found my writing annoyingly awkward and wanted to fix that. I frequently wrote sentences or paragraphs that seemed clunky to me .. so I hired a professional editor whose writing I respect with the instruction "My writing is clunky and awkward and I'd like to fix it. I don't really care about spelling and grammar issues. Can you edit my writing with that in mind?". I got detailed feedback on a lot of my posts. I tried to fix the issues brought up in the feedback but, more importantly, tried to write my next post without it having the same or other previously mentioned issues. I can be a bit of a slow learner, so it sometimes took a few posts to iron out an issue but, over time, my writing improved a lot."
• pixelpoet 2y ago
  Fabian Giesen's name jumped out at me on the page, not sure why but that was pretty surprising to me (he's normally writing about compression / graphics / maths).
• RicoElectrico 2y ago
  Oh, the appendix part is such a poignant description of the US society. It is perfectly acceptable to be enriched at someone's cost because they should have known better If it's not both parties benefitting from a transaction then let's name it straight - it's a scam.
• spankalee 2y ago
  Physician, heal thyself This page is almost impossible to read at default browser settings. A couple of lines of CSS would go a long way to make the site work well.
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    And yet when he took the CSS away, accessibility increased, engagement increased, and appreciation emails increased. Citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42458683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42458683
• fatbird 2y ago
  Markets are only as efficient as their information is good. At this point, we should all have a very healthy appreciation for how warped the infosphere is for everyone, and that will of course have deep applications to the "efficiency" of the market.
• milesward 2y ago
  It's because buying things allows you to see the price of the thing, which means that will be the first and last thing you evaluate: quality is radically harder to quantify, so we resort to evaluating on the thing that comes in an easy quantity. Sellers are thus always incentivized to figure out how to make the price low, since basically all other factors can't be rigorously evaluated until after the sale...
• K0nserv 2y ago
  Core properties of well functioning markets is information symmetry and transparency. I don't think this describes a lot of consumer goods. Even consumers who want to do their research will find that there isn't enough information available. Personally, I feel the responsibility of government in a capitalist system, is ensuring the free market is actually a free market. I'd love it if there was a government agency charged with improving the above mentioned problem of information asymmetry and lacking transparency. For example, when I buy a fridge I'm happy to spend more now, if it means I spend less over the lifetime of the item, but determining the cost per year for every fridge on the market is a huge task for an individual.
  • tempest_ 2y ago
    The average life of a consumer good anymore is sometimes measured in months. By the time you know the compressor on a particular fridge model is junk that model is no longer sold. I have found with the exception of very expensive brands, 20k dollar fridges etc. they are all junk and paying more just gets you useless features like wifi connectivity or a tablet in the door that will be part of a botnet in 3 months.
• kransky 2y ago
  Because it’s all made in china and the Chinese just copy crap and don’t work it. Such is the communist economy. Suck it, libs, that’s your utopia.
• switch007 2y ago
  I swear a lot of people buy the cheapest thing knowing it won't last because they are addicted to shopping
  • guzik 2y ago
    Don’t even get me started. We’re in wearable electronics, and somehow, we have to compete with devices priced under $15. I know there are people who say, “Why pay more?” but honestly, at that price, you’re not just missing out on quality materials that have been thoroughly tested. You’re also missing proper support, reliable updates, and the peace of mind that comes with a product designed to actually last.
    • carlosjobim 2y ago
      You should be glad that those products are steering away the worst customers from you.
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      If I pay more, I'm often still missing proper support, reliable updates, quality materials, tested working devices, designed to last, and peace of mind. Solve that problem and you'll become very wealthy.
• tonymet 2y ago
  1. people lack good taste . (aka bad aesthetics) 2. it's easier to agree (follow consensus) than disagree 3. (corollary to #2) Products are "sticky" and good selling products tend to sell well, despite their faults.
  • tonymet 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • jodrellblank 2y ago
      Your summaries are exactly what he doesn't want to write: https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/ https://danluu.com/writing-non-advice/ - "confident, unqualified, statements, works (gets people readers). People like confidence. I view optimizing for other goals to be more important than optimizing for popularity. On length, I frequently cover topics that can't be covered in brief easily, or perhaps at all. One example of this is... other versions of the post that could ... probably be written in 1000 words. That post, written well, would have a wider audience, be more popular, but that's not what I want to write." "I often have long, meandering, sentences, not for any particular literary purpose, but just because it reflects how I think. .. I try to have a structured argument and, when possible, evidence, with caveats for cases where the evidence isn't applicable. Although not presenting evidence makes something read cleanly, that's not my choice because I don't like that the reader basically has to take or leave it with respect to bare assertions, such as "what nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling" and would prefer if readers know why I think something so they can agree or disagree based on the underlying reasons." "I have an analogous opinion on style because I frequently want to discuss things in a level of detail and with a level of precision that precludes writing cleanly in the classic style. A specific, small, example is..." "A more general thing is that Paul [Graham] writes about a lot of "big ideas" at a high level. That's something that's amenable to writing in a clean, simple style; what Paul calls an elegant style. But I'm not interested in writing about big ideas that are disconnected from low-level details and it's difficult to effectively discuss low-level details without writing in a style Paul would call inelegant."
• backtoyoujim 2y ago
  People with large swathes of equity in a company want people with near zero equity to act like they will be getting C-level rich off of their wage/salary if the company's business plan hits. Founders are not desperate for talent. They are desperate for labor will shoulder vastly unequal labor for vastly underpaid compensation. Capital always pushes for slaves. Labor can only push for using their smart phone during their bathroom break and not giving a shit about the final product as its success does not offer labor truly valued compensation. Minimum wage is a thing but maximum wage is not in a civilization run by capital.
• reginald78 2y ago
  Things that work well are hard to identify, it takes time and effort. Worse, companies are constantly changing products (either they stop making models or change the way they are made) so even if you successfully identify one thing the knowledge will rapidly become obsolete. So rapidly that you'll often not even have an opportunity to reuse that knowledge a single time.
• pphysch 2y ago
  If a product is straightforward, works well, has no lock-in, then customers don't spend on support or switch to a competitor. So don't make good products. That's the message for most of the SaaS world.
• georgewfraser 2y ago
  I have some insight into this because this claim is about my company Fivetran: “…relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they're consumed, so the Postgres data source can't support this operation” Dan’s understanding is incorrect, Postgres logical replication allows each consumer to maintain a bookmark in the WAL, and it will retain the WAL until you acknowledge receipt of a portion and advance the bookmark. Evidently, he tried our product briefly, had an issue or thought he had an issue, investigated the issue briefly and came to the conclusion that he understood the technology better than people who have spent years working on it. Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely possible for the experts to be wrong and one smart guy to be right. But at least part of what’s going on in this post is an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken.
  • zanellato19 2y ago
    > Evidently, he tried our product briefly, had an issue or thought he had an issue, investigated the issue briefly and came to the conclusion that he understood the technology better than people who have spent years working on it.. This doesn't match this: > Syncing from Postrgres is the main offering (as in the offering with the most customers) from a leading data sync company, and we found that it would lose data, duplicate data, and corrupt data. After digging into it, it turns out that the product has a design that, among other issues, relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they're consumed, so the Postgres data source can't support this operation. When their product attempts to do this and the operation fails, we end up with the sync getting "stuck", needing manual intervention from the vendor's operator and/or data loss. Since our data is still on Postgres, it's possible to recover from this by doing a full resync, but the data sync product tops out at 5MB/s for reasons that appear to be unknown to them, so a full resync can take days even on databases that aren't all that large. Resyncs will also silently drop and corrupt data, so multiple cycles of full resyncs followed by data integrity checks are sometimes necessary to recover from data corruption, which can take weeks. 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. That description doesn't sound like _he_ briefly used your product, but that company he was working for used your product, found bugs and despite contacting support couldn't make it work. This doesn't read at all as a minor experiment that he didn't put in the time.
• mnky9800n 2y ago
  For some reason this makes me think about cooking stock. Like the liquid you use to make gravy, soups, sauces, etc. most people I know will use either a box or jar of stock or a bouillon cube. There’s nothing wrong with this. It will produce a satisfactory meal. However you can easily make stock if you cook for yourself. Simply take all the parts of vegetables and meats you would throw away (think bones and onion paper) and cover it with water in a pot and add salt and pepper if you want and boil for an hour or so. You can do it while you cook other stuff. This stock can be frozen for later. But also, it’s obviously better than the stuff from a jar or a cube. Maybe it’s because you put some effort into it, maybe it’s because there’s a complexity to all the flavors that’s removed by industrialization. But it’s a stock that works very well. And I think it’s simply it requires time. Time we often think we don’t have. Perhaps this is all an unrelated thought but I do recommend that if you enjoy cooking at home making your own stock.
• throwway120385 2y ago
  I think on the point of build vs buy, what a lot of "buy" people neglect is that you can often cut a ton of use cases out of the product that you're paying for, and when you cut those use cases out then build becomes a really cheap proposition versus buying. Plus, when you buy you still have to maintain internal staff to manage the product. If you build, those people can also work on other things that advance the plot for whatever you're building elsewhere in the company. If you have to make payroll and you're not interested in handling payroll business cases in your core business, absolutely buy payroll software. But if you need to spin up containers incidentally to your core business, maybe consider wrapping the same stuff Podman or Docker wraps if it makes sense. Going down a level of abstraction in this way can allow you to work more efficiently than if you just used those tools off-the-shelf.
• dukeofdoom 2y ago
  One strategy is after you buy reinforce possible failure points
• larsrc 2y ago
  And here I thought here would take about how new models come out so frequently that any information about long-term quality is long obsolete.
• increscent 2y ago
  A notable exception to the trend of poor/unknown quality in consumer products is the outdoor product market. I buy a lot of gear for skiing, canyoneering, climbing, cycling, backpacking, and other sports. In these sports, the safety and functionality of gear is critical. And you spend enough time using and evaluating the gear that many (if not most) users become experts. Perhaps this type of market is the exception that proves the rule.
• fHr 2y ago
  we need to enshitify our supply chains with grifters
• ed_balls 2y ago
  > “Find the dependencies — and eliminate them.” When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time. Does anyone have a feeling that this has never been further from the truth?
• Funes- 2y ago
  Because of "profitabilism", that's what. Profit margin over all--including, of course, product quality.
• pluc 2y ago
  Doesn't everyone know and acknowledge that in a capitalist system, there is more money to be made when products have a finite operational window? It's a lot more profitable to sell you a phone/fridge/car every few years than it is to make one that lasts 10, 15, 20 years...
• creer 2y ago
  Customer reviews and professional advice are still not solved - and still a huge opportunity in my mind. 1) Customer reviews would in theory help people choose better and fast. There will always be the issue of difference of opinions but we are far from a point where this would be the only problem. 2) Professional advice is great but as anyone who has been around the hiring of consultants can tell you, if you are not competent in a field then it's hard to choose someone who is. And beyond that, diligence and listening are not uniformly distributed. Until these are solved, the goal of the firm is to "sell something that people buy" instead of "sell something great". It's interesting that in a large part, Amazon makes its distribution business out of this. If you watch what you buy and for the most part, you can reliably and easily return duds. There is some, poor customer feedback on the site, AND there is very easy returns. And that still does not solve the issue of items that are difficult to test good or dud such as a battery or an electronic device where it might be a while until the problem appears. Costco is also in this strategy with a very long return window that mostly will give you time to notice whether the item does the job or not.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Better recurring revenue if you need to say buy a new iPhone every year
  • bspammer 2y ago
    This is an explicit anti-example in the article: > For example, if you observe that it's silly for people to move from iPhones to Android phones because they think that Apple is engaging in nefarious planned obsolescence when Android devices generally become obsolete more quickly, due to a combination of iPhones getting updates for longer and iPhones being faster at every price point they compete at, allowing the phone to be used on bloated sites for longer, you can't really make money off of this observation.
• madrox 2y ago
  Market efficiency follows a lot of the same laws as evolution, and I think the author identifies the same fallacy many do about evolution: that there is some implied natural progression to perfection or negentropy. You don't need to be perfectly efficient to survive; you don't even need to be the most efficient. You just need to be efficient enough in your niche to make it another day. As environments/markets change, the measure for efficiency does as well. Adapt or die. The problem with build vs buy in general is that evaluating software is hard and there are a ton of variables whose values are often only clear in hindsight. Not only does the thing have to work, it has to work in a way that will scale with how you use it. Also, when comparing it to build, you have to know whether you have the right expertise (and interest) in-house to do what you want. There's also straight up timing considerations. There's really no formula to this, but at the end of the day you have to acknowledge that there's always going to be a slight misalignment of incentives between you and your vendor. You need a working product; the vendor wants your money. People want to believe these end up being the same thing, but especially for startups that aren't thinking past their next sales cycle this simply isn't true.
• chias 2y ago
  > 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 I think there's two kind of people at any tech company. There's the kind of person who has removed an unused piece of cloud infrastructure that nobody remembered existed but whose spend was north of $50k / month, and there's the kind of person who does not believe such a thing could possibly happen.
• aidenn0 2y ago
  I no longer trust Amazon with near certainty to send me the product I ordered, so the efficiency of me obtaining things for which it is very important I get the product I ordered has gone way down.
• tempestn 2y ago
  > 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. Luckily, iPhones aren't strictly superior to Android phones and many people who switched got a device that was better for them because they were previously using an iPhone due to good Apple PR, causing their errors to cancel out. Uncomfortably reminiscent of politics.
  • relaxing 2y ago
    I’m curious about the specifics here— what were the PR snafus? And what was better about the Androids?
• numitus 2y ago
  in my opinion, the problem here is optimization. It is not difficult to make a courier service that will work like clockwork. It is difficult to make one where illiterate couriers will deliver parcels on time for a minimum wage, and the price will be comparable with competitors. The processes are simplified until the buyers of your product or service start suing you.
• jamessbutler322 2y ago
  [dead]
• dsjoerg 2y ago
  Coase's "Theory of the Firm" is the more serious, less straw-man exposition of these issues. === What’s New (If Anything)? While the article restates familiar Coasian concepts, it adds: Modern Examples: It applies Coase’s framework to contemporary issues like software outsourcing, tech hiring, and cultural differences in trust and service delivery. Focus on Culture and "Unreasonable" Actors: It emphasizes how outliers (individuals or firms) push against systemic inefficiencies, which isn’t central to Coase’s theory. Bottom Line: The article revisits Coase’s foundational ideas without explicitly connecting to them. It’s less a groundbreaking insight and more a modern illustration of why transaction costs and organizational trust matter, consistent with Coase’s theory of the firm.
• yapyap 2y ago
  a guess before having read it: corporate greed?
• imgabe 2y ago
  I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about both evolution and markets, which is that either one "optimizes" something. Neither needs to create a perfect outcome. An organism doesn't have to be the best, most efficient possible at getting food, it only has to be good enough to survive long enough to reproduce. A cheetah does not need to be the fastest cheetah on the plains to survive, it only has to be faster than the slowest antelope. A company does not need to make a perfect product, it only has to be just good enough to turn a profit, any profit, in order to survive. Once you realize this everything starts to make sense. Why can accountant have errors? Because they aren't bad enough to lose customers. Why can a product be made shoddily? Because it isn't quite shoddy enough that people stop buying it. Indeed, the most optimal thing for a company, profit-wise, is to be just as shitty as possible without going out of business. Any additional resources spent on increasing quality that is not demanded by the market are, in a sense, wasted. This hurts from an engineering perspective because we want to make things that are good, but too often customers don't actually care about how good it is, just that it is cheap and just barely good enough to be worth purchasing.
• scotty79 2y ago
  Quality is multidimensional. Local maxima exist in any non-trivial optimization process.