[HN Gopher] Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
Author : davidmckenna
Score : 757 points
Date : 2022-03-14 23:32 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (danluu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (danluu.com)
| rawgabbit wrote:
| 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
| beaconstudios wrote:
| 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.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| billybuckwheat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This article is long but excellent. It is something of a rant
| rather than an article. Still excellent.
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| 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.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| the_jeremy wrote:
| 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.
| impalallama wrote:
| > [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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 [1]
| https://www.walmart.com/ip/Little-People-Sit-With-Me-
| School-...
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Perfectly rational Austrian spherical cows, we are not.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
| mbg721 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Living in a low and deteriorating trust society has many non
| obvious knock on effects that are hard to see from the inside.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > 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/efficientmarkethypothes...
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| Your quote does say its a "cocktail party version" which sort
| of implies its not going to be very good
| [deleted]
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| 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.
| ephbit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| rob_c wrote:
| 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 :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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!
| Strilanc wrote:
| 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| > ...he'll use the same tone for something he's seen
| anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally
| investigating.
|
| A.k.a. "avoiding weasel words". I don't mean to be clever here,
| it's just that it's _far_ more efficient to assume that reader
| can make their own informed decision, and give them citations
| & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way,
| rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of
| your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts.
|
| There are also different expectations for blog posts and
| heavily researched&vetted articles.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I don't think what you're calling weasel words are weasel
| words.
|
| "Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or
| faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like
| it's saying faster.
|
| What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases
| like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been
| part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this"
| help clarify what premises and hypotheses are well-supported
| by prior work/experience and what is the author's
| speculation. IMO It serves a useful purpose!
| klodolph wrote:
| > IMO It serves a useful purpose!
|
| I have to disagree! I simply do not understand what useful
| purpose it serves--IF we are allowed to assume that our
| readers have a proficient level of prose literacy. The
| default assumption, when someone is talking or writing, is
| that they are communicating their own opinions and
| thoughts, experiences, anecdotes.
|
| I don't know about you, but when I think back to taking
| writing classes in school, if I wrote something like "I've
| seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of" in
| my paper, any good writing teacher I've ever had would
| cross it out. Same as "it is my opinion that" or "I have
| recently started to form some beliefs in the matter at hand
| after reviewing some materials that came into my
| possession" or other... filler. It pads out the document
| and only tells us things that we _should_ already know, or
| be able to figure out.
|
| The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual
| claims and evidence is... well... something you'd expect
| from a proficient reader!
| Centigonal wrote:
| I feel like I'm missing something here.
|
| > The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from
| factual claims and evidence is... well... something you'd
| expect from a proficient reader!
|
| How does a proficient reader separate facts from opinions
| if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and opinions?
| Do they just assume?
|
| e.g.: Butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil.
| Arugula is healthier than lettuce.
|
| I can cite a meta-analysis for one of the above
| statements. The other is just my opinion, and I have done
| no research into the topic. How would a proficient reader
| tell them apart if there's no calibrating for
| uncertainty?
|
| Side note: I went through the original blog post again,
| and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly
| what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused
| why the original commenter thinks he's _not_ using a
| different tone based on uncertainty.
|
| Examples:
|
| "I once watched, from the inside, a company undergo this
| cultural shift"
|
| "I've both worked at companies that have tried to
| contract this kind of thing out as well as talked with
| many people who've done that"
| klodolph wrote:
| > How does a proficient reader separate facts from
| opinions if good writing doesn't disambiguate facts and
| opinions? Do they just assume?
|
| Facts and opinions are not different qualities of the
| same claim, but different claims to begin with. "Butter
| is about 18% water, by weight" is a factual claim and
| "butter is about as healthy as vegetable oil" is probably
| opinion because the word "healthy" is, well, often vague
| and not something people agree on, at least in this
| context.
|
| > Side note: I went through the original blog post again,
| and there are lots of examples of Dan Luu doing exactly
| what I'm writing about, to the point where I'm confused
| why the original commenter thinks he's not using a
| different tone based on uncertainty.
|
| Yes, I get a sense that there may be some more cogent
| complaint that the original commenter has, a complaint
| which provoked the comment, but I can't figure out what
| that complaint is from the comment.
|
| Just that people who complain about tone often have
| something else to complain about, but tone is more
| obvious.
| ketzo wrote:
| Nothing in Dan Luu's writing is ever ambiguous. Quite the
| opposite.
|
| He just writes in the same _voice_ for both researched
| facts /studies and personal anecdotes. But it's always
| very clear which is which, and an informed reader should
| (IMO) not have a problem differentiating.
|
| The commenter you're replying to is objecting to
| unnecessary couching and cloaking of opinion/anecdote.
| And I think there's very, very little of that in Dan
| Luu's writing -- and it comes off as a "matter-of-fact
| tone."
| ahel wrote:
| I disagree. it sometimes gives me that feeling as well
| even though I like the guy and his blog. i don't know if
| it's a cultural thing. i'm no native english storage
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| "The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from
| factual claims and evidence is... well... something you'd
| expect from a proficient reader! "
|
| The ability to communicate the level of confidence in a
| statement is something I hope for in proficient
| communicators.
| alecbz wrote:
| People hold beliefs of different levels of confidence. I
| have some opinions I'm very confident in and others that
| are merely vague hunches. My level of confidence in
| something is the signal I'm trying to convey, not merely
| the fact that it is my thought at all.
|
| It can also be useful to communicate brief info about
| _why_ I have a particular confidence level. "I had a
| friend who..." vs "I've seen several times..." vs
| "Several studies have found..."
|
| > when I think back to taking writing classes in school
|
| Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being
| more charitable, they were trying to convey a general
| idea like "don't _overly_ hedge" with a coarse rule like
| "never use hedging language".
|
| I think most writing "rules" tend to be coarse
| approximations at what good writing really is. Another
| example is "give your essays a general structure,
| introduce your main point, etc." => five paragraph
| essays.
| klodolph wrote:
| I hedge a lot in HN comments. Uncharitably, because I'm
| thinking defensively about how people respond to my
| comments. Charitably, because it's more accurate that
| way.
|
| Long-form content suffers from hedging more that HN
| comments do. As a writer, you may think highly of your
| confidence level, and you may want to communicate the
| difference between a claim that you're confident about
| and a claim that you are unsure about, but the right way
| to do that is to provide the information necessary for
| other people to come to the same conclusion. If that's
| not possible, or it's not germane, or you're just busy
| doing something else, then you don't do it, and that's
| okay. It's often just irrelevant for people to understand
| how much you believe something.
|
| The tradeoff I see here is between clarity and precision.
| If you focus too much on precision, the clarity of
| whatever you're trying to say suffers.
| TOMDM wrote:
| I agree some people hide behind uncertainty and "weasel" in
| order to avoid accountability for anything they say.
|
| What that requires though is they caveat everything.
|
| I really respect people who say they are 99% sure and 60%
| sure when appropriate.
|
| It requires a level of honesty not just to the audience but
| to the self to admit openly what you are and aren't sure
| about.
| klodolph wrote:
| Is it more honest? Or is it just more self-centered, or
| more defensive, or more timid? Are you admitting that you
| aren't sure about something, or are you brazenly assuming
| that people care about how confident you are about things,
| or are you defensively trying to say the least possible?
|
| Framing this as a matter of "honesty" is, well reductive.
|
| Your confidence is irrelevant to the discussion, unless
| there's some particular reason which makes it relevant. A
| good reader should not hang much weight on your confidence
| anyway.
| watwut wrote:
| > Is it more honest? Or is it just more self-centered, or
| more defensive, or more timid?
|
| Yes it is more honest. Pretending certainty where you
| don't have none is lying and pretty often has exact that
| effect. It is way more egoistic and self centered to act
| with certainty just so you dont look "defensive" or
| "timid".
|
| Because then you are exchanging truth for feeling good
| from appearing strong.
|
| > are you brazenly assuming that people care about how
| confident you are about things, or are you defensively
| trying to say the least possible?
|
| This does not make any sense as accusation. You are
| expressing level of confidence. You can do that
| independently of whether "people care". It is also
| perfectly OK to defensively say the least possible.
| Literally nothing wrong with that.
|
| Aggressively saying maximum, even if you know it is
| likely half truth at best, is much much worst.
| randallsquared wrote:
| I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here.
| For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and
| presumably many readers...
| klodolph wrote:
| You're going to have to explain more of the argument,
| because I don't follow.
|
| It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend
| more time spelling things out for readers which aren't very
| good at reading comprehension. That doesn't seem very
| efficient--it wastes most people's time, since the writer
| is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and
| avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent reading
| comprehension skills have to spend more time sifting
| through crap that doesn't add value to the text (for them),
| and only the people with lower reading comprehension skills
| get any benefit. People with lower reading comprehension
| skills are less likely to be reading text-heavy blogs in
| the first place!
|
| The following claim may be controversial--generally, there
| is a tradeoff between clarity and precision, and the right
| tradeoff depends on the context and what your goals are.
| The internet, and forums like HN, distort our _perception_
| of where the correct tradeoff is, because the people
| complaining about lack of precision are the loudest. You
| should be aware of who your audience really is... is it
| people capable of interpreting claims in persuasive
| documents? Or is it people who decide to complain on HN?
| lanstin wrote:
| I think the additional clarity benefits smart people too.
| And fast readers can read faster over text with
| redundancy than maximally cryptic prose.
|
| The sweet spot of course is a short, clear and correct
| explanation, but finding that can take a lot of effort.
| Strilanc wrote:
| Giving a confidence level is different from using weasel
| words. Weasel words make statements weaker or even vacuous.
| Confidence levels make statements more precise. Here's an
| example: statement: Alice stole the
| briefcase +weasel_wording: I think it's possible
| Alice could have stolen the briefcase
| +confidence_level: I'd bet 5:1 that Alice stole the briefcase
|
| Also note that I didn't say I wanted Dan to write _less_
| confidently. I wanted him to convey _more varied_ confidence.
| ako wrote:
| If there is any doubt regarding the stealing, then in this
| example i prefer the weasel wording version. The first one
| is incorrect, the last one you're suggesting an accuracy
| that you can't really back up, in order to convince
| someone.
|
| So in this case the weasel wording doesn't make the
| statement weaker as it shows strength to admit you may be
| wrong.
| hffftz wrote:
| balaji1 wrote:
| You are depressed for other reasons. People read the title and
| connected more with the title than the hard-to-read and dense
| article. If anything, call it a click-baity title.
|
| It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look
| at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how
| satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-
| quality stuff.
| wittycardio wrote:
| So not only did you not read the article , you are offended
| at the idea that you should have to read the article at all ?
| [deleted]
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the
| exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't
| make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing
| special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things
| well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make
| crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring
| somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "shipping" over
| quality, you buy crap.
|
| Re: _" getting a worse result even when they pay more than
| doing it internally"_, they either paid the wrong people, or
| they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at
| using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your
| parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap
| car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the
| _chance_ it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and
| assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And
| if you shouldn 't have even used that part because your overall
| design was crap, you also end up with a crap car.
|
| I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will
| _not_ make something well. Not only does it take more skill and
| hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If
| things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make
| them well, or the people who make things well are in higher
| demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors
| and full training for all their staff and holds back products
| until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and
| I 'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably
| charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota,
| because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production
| line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality
| has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases
| production. But this is all Lean 101)
|
| And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in
| the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a
| half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was
| simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make
| something work well.
| fomine3 wrote:
| A bit different. End user/who decide to buy/whose money is
| used/ are often different for B2B products.
| civilized wrote:
| > It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely
| answering the title and not discussing the content of the
| article.
|
| This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline
| invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article
| is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This
| one has both.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Huh? It's not bikeshedding to focus on a particular subtopic.
| Aeolun wrote:
| To be fair, I read it, but not all the way to the end. This
| was almost a novel.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Because I'm a writer, I'm going to be a bit pedantic here.
| Novels start around 50,000 words and usually take several
| hours to read. ;)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Novella then? Guess that's still not quite what the
| article is, but it's a bit hard to get through in one
| sitting.
| YZF wrote:
| I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;)
|
| As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a
| company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts
| of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was
| extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they
| require special expertise and we did have the capability to do
| rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for
| us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that
| we subcontracted.
|
| I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?)
|
| Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's
| plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the
| quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some
| cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure,
| there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software
| that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee
| that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think
| they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just
| don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty
| of solid databases built before he was around (before he was
| born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft.
|
| I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse
| than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain
| of resources due to that.
|
| Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that.
|
| I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You
| can't get great software but you can get great engineers that
| will build the great software in house? I don't think your
| chances of finding the team that can build that are any
| greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you
| think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later.
| Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy
| work...
|
| EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was
| built in-house that was superior might be a case of
| survivorship bias.
|
| EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables,
| connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws,
| etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is
| generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can
| be completely vertically integrated.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've never worked in the automotive industry, but I've worked
| adjacent to it occasionally.
|
| The amount of effort put into ensuring that suppliers do what
| they need to do and do it well is huge. Companies always have
| two (or more) suppliers and if you keep only to the letter of
| the contract, you get cut.
|
| They can afford to put so much effort into managing suppliers
| because volumes are large and margins are low.
|
| There are also cultural issues at play; he makes the point
| that things that are inevitable in one culture are
| unthinkable in another and different industries have
| different cultures
| ako wrote:
| The difference between machinery and software in this example
| is that one is outsourcing manufacturing and the other
| design.
|
| When you outsource manufacturing you're asking the other
| party to create exact replicas according to very specific
| specs your own engineers created.
|
| With software the outsourcing usually includes outsourcing a
| large part of the design, which is inevitable, as there is no
| significant manufacturing you can outsource. Writing the
| software is creating the detailed specs. In software there is
| only product design, you don't really have to put a lot of
| effort into creating exact copies of the original design.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Linear rails -- THK. Pumps -- Iwaki. Optical glass &
| microscopes -- Kenko, Nikon, Canon. Sensors/Switches/Relays
| -- Omron. Imaging, Passives, Semiconductors -- Toshiba,
| Epson, Panasonic. Chips -- Renesas.
|
| All made in Japan. Few or no Silicon Valley equivalents.
| Makes you wonder.
| [deleted]
| Aeolun wrote:
| > he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally
| and something he's spent a month personally investigating
|
| At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar
| to me. Setting up and integrating something you've bought often
| takes as much or more time than building it yourself.
|
| The best argument for buying is that you'd make all
| stakeholders equally unhappy.
| andrewingram wrote:
| Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers
| to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought
| because you... didn't want to spend engineering time on a
| CRM.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| The new CTO getting drunk on sales Kool aid and deciding to
| move many functions to Salesforce was a strong signal of
| incompetence at a previous workplace.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It is very common to see HN commenters only address the title
| not the contents of the web page, a genuine phenomenon IMO.
|
| Experiment: No titles, just URLs. What would happen.
|
| I have some experience with this as I freqently stream edit
| HTTP response bodies to make customised web pages using only
| simple HTML wrapped around only the data I am interested in, no
| cruft. For example, when I do web searches I process the
| response, i.e., the SERP, into simplified HTML, e.g., <li><a
| href=[url]>[url]</a>. I do not include titles.
|
| Titles can be descriptive and helpful, however I find most
| times they are a distraction. Think about the "clickbait"
| tactic. It is heaviliy reliant on misleading titles.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I'd personally just stop using hacker news. Clickbait is a
| trait of media consumption for decades now, we have to learn
| to live with it.
| jader201 wrote:
| > It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely
| answering the title and not discussing the content of the
| article.
|
| I've said this before on other threads, and it seems to
| resonate with others, so I'll say it here too:
|
| I personally don't care near as much about a single person's
| opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the
| discussion of many people around a particular topic.
|
| And by "topic", in the case of HN, I mean the title of an
| article.
|
| I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN
| folks just have a discussion around that. (Similar to Ask HN,
| but not necessarily in the form of a question.)
|
| I'm a terribly slow reader, so there's no way I could take time
| out of my already busy day to read this (very long, dense)
| article of a single person's opinion of a single topic,
| especially if I don't even know whether this person is an
| expert on said topic.
|
| I guess this is particularly true when it's a subject I'm only
| interested in on the surface, vs. caring more deeply about a
| particular subject.
|
| I get much more ROI reading many people's shorter discussions
| vs. a lengthy single opinion (again, given the time it would
| have taken me to read the article).
| folli wrote:
| Conversely, often it's more interesting to read a single
| person's well researched opinion than a dozen one-off
| comments.
| Moru wrote:
| But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from
| years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining
| why the long well researched opinion missed something so
| important that the whole article is wrong.
| watwut wrote:
| No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something
| you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just
| people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which
| is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not
| produce super educated opinions.
| BongoMcCat wrote:
| I guess it depends on the topic.
|
| If the topic is some change in the latest release of a
| programming language, I usually find the comments here to
| be helpful.
|
| But if the topic is global politics or economy, then
| sure, the quality here isn't much better than some other
| random social media site.
| franzb wrote:
| Sure, but then we're discussing the topic as set by the
| post's title, not the actual topic(s) addressed by the post's
| content, which are quite a bit more complex and nuanced than
| a title of a few characters could ever convey.
|
| What if we want to hold a conversation about the actual post
| content? Should we add a tag such as [please read]?
| jader201 wrote:
| Why not both? There is good discussion being held on both
| topics in this thread.
|
| That's the benefit of nested comments, to allow different
| top-level discussions where others can discuss what is
| being shared by top-level commenters.
|
| My original point was to not be "depressed" by others
| choosing to not take the time to read the article, and have
| a discussion on the topic rather than the subject.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| > And by "topic", in the case of HN, I mean the title of an
| article.
|
| The thing is, the topic of the actual article is generally
| more interesting than the topic suggested by a naive reading
| of the title (as is the case here).
|
| People discussing things based on titles leads to generic
| discussions that recur again and again and go nowhere.
| Whereas the _actual_ topic of the article 's content is
| rather more specific and could lead to an actual _new_ and
| more specific discussion that might actually go somewhere.
| jader201 wrote:
| Possibly, but I would bet that many people are upvoting
| these articles based off a combination of the title + the
| discussions of the title, which would suggest enough people
| find those two things interesting (which is why it's at #1
| and why most of the comments are around the title vs. the
| subject).
|
| Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title,
| then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a
| title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click
| the article.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| > Also, if the subject is more interesting than the
| title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful
| around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure
| people click the article.
|
| The problem with this is that, frequently -- as is the
| case here I'd say -- there is no easy way to properly pin
| down the actual topic in the space of a reasonable title.
| The title will necessarily be more broad than the actual
| topic; if you in general take titles as wholly
| delineating the topic, rather than suggesting the general
| space they're in, you're making a mistake.
|
| Sticking only to those topics that can be wholly
| expressed in the space of a brief title is a big
| limitation on topics; as I said above, taking titles as
| topics just leads to the same discussions over and over.
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| I absolutely understand where you're coming from here,
| but in practice and reality, the point of the title
| really is to make sure people click the article.
| BongoMcCat wrote:
| I agree about the comments here often being the most
| interesting part.
|
| But I think that the best way to start the conversation is
| usually with a well-written article.
|
| If there would only be a title and no article, I'm pretty
| sure that I would find the comments to be less interesting.
|
| But maybe I'm wrong, and since my argument is based on the
| original article being well-written, maybe it isn't true for
| most posts.
|
| But I still think that I would rather try to find the posts
| with good articles, and just ignore the rest, and hopefully,
| that is what the ranking system does (at least help with).
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I have to strongly disagree. The lengthy article has much
| more thought put into it. It's almost always better
| researched and the author usually has relevant experience or
| expertise, and those are usually at least known to the reader
| in some way or easily discovered.
|
| I have seen many, many cases where a big portion of the top
| comments are either saying something similar to what the
| author of the article said, or they are asking a question, or
| raising a rebuttal, that is already addressed in the article.
|
| Comments are short and probably have close to zero research
| on average. Experience may play a part, but people don't
| usually offer up the resume with a comment, so you have no
| idea if they even have credibility. And there are mountains
| of witticisms, anecdotes, or emotional arguments that add
| little to nothing of value to the conversation.
|
| Personally, I almost always read the article and then skim
| the comments to see if anybody has added any thoughts I might
| find interesting.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| A part of the problem here is distinguishing which articles
| are worth reading. I may know that a Dan post is probably
| good, but if I saw this exact same headline taking me to a
| long article on <random tech news site>, I'd probably skip
| it and skim the comments instead, since chances are the
| article itself is near worthless.
| jader201 wrote:
| There's not much to disagree with here.
|
| I simply stated my experience -- I never even said my
| experience was right or that it is wrong to read the
| article, or that others should experience HN the way I do.
|
| I'm a slow reader and don't have time to read lengthy
| articles, and therefore am drawn more to discussion.
|
| You are (likely) a quicker reader and are drawn more to
| articles.
|
| There's room for both of us in the world -- and on HN (I
| hope).
| Kiro wrote:
| You said "I often wish HN would just allow titles to get
| posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that".
| If there's anything I can wholeheartedly say I disagree
| with it's that, so yes there's a lot to disagree with
| here.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I often wish HN would just allow titles to get
| posted and HN folks just have a discussion around
| that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the
| form of a question.)
|
| Sounds like a real recipe for hivemind to me. I mean, _any_
| community struggles with hivemind a bit. But, at least with
| discussions centered around articles that exist outside HN,
| we get a little fresh air. especially if I
| don't even know whether this person is an expert on
| said topic.
|
| He's a pretty respected voice, or at least popular on HN.
|
| I find it very valuable to look into the authors of linked
| articles, see which authors pop up on HN frequently, etc.
|
| Gives you an idea of who the leading voices in the industry
| are, helps you to know which way the winds are blowing.
|
| Especially for somebody with a slower reading speed this may
| be crucial; helps to understand which article may actually be
| worth the time investment.
| johnfn wrote:
| I very much disagree with this. In fact, this article is a
| perfect counterexample to what you're saying, ironically -
| it's a lengthy, well thought out essay that the author
| clearly spent a lot of time thinking about and putting
| together. Quite honestly, it's very unlikely that any number
| of pithy HN comments could match up to it, and I say that
| with a fair amount of respect for the HN community at large.
| It's just very unlikely they're going to have insights on the
| same level: the author of the post had at least a couple of
| weeks of actual concentrated effort to put together thoughts
| on the topic.
|
| Plus I just have a lot of respect for the author. Dan Luu is
| a smart guy.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| And if the market is inefficient, the pricing will be
| irrational (for certain ideas of what "irrational" means).
| Strilanc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I read it but it's a mind dump that's not well structure so
| it's hard to follow. If asked I couldn't give you an answer to
| the title. I still don't know, " Why it's hard to buy things
| that work well." He has a lot of citations and footnotes but if
| it's hard to follow then the essay becomes a bunch or random
| thoughts which get condensed into the title. I suspect that's
| why most of the comments relate only to it.
| jseliger wrote:
| It's like most people don't read carefully or for
| comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-
| dont-read-car...
|
| (A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and
| didn't discuss the content.)
| doelie_ wrote:
| > ... they think I'm going to tell them the secret, and
| instead I tell them there is no real secret, just execution
| and practice.
|
| Ha!
| klodolph wrote:
| Most people can't. "Read carefully or for comprehension"
| would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills
| in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics
| National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts
| this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels
| 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small
| percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks
| require you to be able to understand something in the
| presence of distractors. Just to make up an example, think
| about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two
| questions in it. Did they answer both questions? (I'm
| actually a bit unsure that this falls in level 4.)
|
| (Level 5 includes tasks such as "compare and contrast complex
| information, or to generate new information making high-level
| inferences or using specialized background knowledge".)
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This explains so much about our ambient media environment
| and misinformation.
| watwut wrote:
| > Just to make up an example, think about the last time you
| sent an email to someone that had two questions in it.
|
| Pretty often they are answering easy question and leaving
| the harder one sleep. Pretty often, the goal is to get rid
| of you email as fast as possible so that they can go back
| to what they actually want to be doing.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Twelve percent?? That is scary.
| Mezzie wrote:
| In Marketing/Outreach, we're encouraged to write at a 9-10
| year old reading level.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's
| obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in
| specific areas.
|
| However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a
| tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as
| the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and
| logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think
| his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one
| person's perspective rather than the absolute truth.
|
| The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about
| his tendency to fail interviews (
| https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He
| spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers,
| dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how
| he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs
| an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising
| that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but
| he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something
| wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he
| applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the
| interviewers are simply _wrong_ , and that they're making a
| mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.
|
| The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming
| the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of
| developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even
| more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's
| well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons
| about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet
| instead he uses his platform to further demonize his
| interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he
| didn't get these jobs.
|
| I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to
| remember that the author is just another person with another
| set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there,
| as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to
| other lines of reasoning.
| rjh29 wrote:
| The most popular writers on this site (and others) have this
| habit of presenting their opinion as the ground truth and it
| annoys the heck out of me. There are VERY few things I can be
| confident about, I don't pretend to be that smart. Then you
| get people like Jordan Peterson who present a mix of truth
| and unsourced, unverifiable nonsense with the same confidence
| and charisma, who become thought leaders. Nobody is going to
| listen to the person saying "I'm not sure" or "I don't know".
| civilized wrote:
| > He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with
| interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide
| answers, and how he's never written production code that
| talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API.
|
| I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is
| fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest,
| regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to
| work in environments where that trait will be perceived
| positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it
| off.
|
| I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily
| as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more
| elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he
| can get away with because of his technical skill.
|
| It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed
| as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit.
|
| > he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing
| something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the
| jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that
| the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a
| mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline
| him.
|
| In the thread you linked, he links another thread
| (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where
| his interviewer _was_ wrong. And what 's fun about Dan Luu
| is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly
| more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the
| game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the
| viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they
| like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency
| is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't.
|
| Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I
| admire him for doing so. Sometimes there _is_ nothing wrong
| with you; it _is_ the world that 's wrong.
|
| You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that
| doesn't make the observation incorrect.
| scaramanga wrote:
| I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his
| priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers
| expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which
| case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has
| most likely internalised a different world-view and set of
| values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his
| interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted
| time to that, instead of to something "more useful".
|
| I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
|
| So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu
| or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider
| how your interview process might interact with such a person.
| If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the
| hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to
| simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to
| be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."
|
| Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to
| hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a
| large number of developers with attitudes and experience that
| lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions
| with tech interview processes because those processes may be
| fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance
| rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer
| and whether that would be useful when added to the existing
| team. It could be that such developers would be as good or
| better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-
| winning interview performances.
| dreeple15 wrote:
| I used to work with Dan Luu, and he's a far better social
| media writer than he is an engineer.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This would be more meaningful if we knew what you think
| makes a rockstar engineer.
|
| Some people value extreme speed.
|
| Others are impressed by somebody who will dive down a
| rabbit hole and follow however deep it leads, discovering
| the linker bug or kernel driver interaction that causes a
| failure, and patching it.
|
| Or maybe you are impressed that they go away for a month,
| talking to nobody, and come back with a complete system
| all ready to ship.
|
| Or they write libraries that everybody uses because they
| are so exactly what people need.
|
| Or they are always available to explain things to junior
| people and get them going in the right direction.
|
| Each of those would be unusually valuable, at some
| places, and would have trouble getting any recognition,
| at others.
| solveit wrote:
| Not sure how I feel about an anon account presumably
| created for the sole purpose of denigrating someone's
| ability.
| silisili wrote:
| A kid showing their age.
|
| When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of
| 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I
| could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.
|
| FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly
| business relations, relations with product, proper
| testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just
| thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write.
| Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| Really trying to keep this in mind lately. The code is
| the easy part.
| dreeple15 wrote:
| The dude is a good writer, but not a rockstar engineer.
| rendall wrote:
| What do you mean when you say "hiring a guy like Dan Luu"?
| If I were to be on a team with a guy like Dan Luu, what
| might I expect?
|
| Im asking as someone who does not generally read his blog.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his
| priorities to do a performative display of what
| interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job
| interview.
|
| This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight:
| It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the
| _correct_ answers to the interview questions, but he also
| deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they 're
| _wrong_.
|
| The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know
| what they're doing when they decline him, even when he
| answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more
| than just reciting the correct answers to the questions,
| but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz
| where the candidate is supposed to guess what the
| interviewer wants to hear.
|
| My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring
| manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him
| out the door despite correctly answering the questions as
| fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens
| when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but
| isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews,
| you eventually come across people far more brilliant and
| successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not
| really see fitting into your company's work culture.
| Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions
| and debating interviewers because they think they can read
| the interviewer's mind (and they are _wrong_ ) fits this
| description. You know they'll do fantastic things
| somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're
| looking for to fill the open position on your team.
|
| > I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
|
| Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted
| the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so
| it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up
| as an example of his writing style, not his career.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I've not gotten the job offer from some interviews in
| which I aced the tech but in which I did not 'fit' (how
| do I know, well recruiters and people from company told
| me but also I knew, I often either breeze through
| interviews or I fail miserably and these I breezed)
|
| In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't
| the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech
| lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some
| technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that?
| Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I
| would have been submissive.
|
| Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the
| interview process is geared towards hiring someone who
| needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots
| of interviews take place with someone who already has a
| job and the new place wants to attract. But for some
| reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and
| not honey, contra the old adage.
|
| on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it
| because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have
| pointed out when they were wrong.
| everyone wrote:
| Comments here are often more interesting than the linked
| articles. I think the 'comment on title' phenomenon is
| acceptable and possibly good here.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| 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?
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| Dunedan wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Mid sized compared to essentially mega corps... I wouldn't
| consider them mid sized on any reasonable metric.
| Dunedan wrote:
| > 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/s...
| jhoechtl wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > what Apple PR snafus is that?
|
| I suspect this is it
|
| https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
|
| Which it seems they abandoned or paused
|
| https://www.macworld.com/article/559731/apple-csam-icloud-ph...
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
| 0xedd wrote:
| Nokia.
| mattferderer wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| 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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| > 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.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| "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
|
| 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.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.
|
| 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.
| cyounkins wrote:
| 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?
| elil17 wrote:
| 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.
| jrockway wrote:
| I'm continually disappointed with the quality of fasteners
| bought from Amazon. What you get from McMaster is much
| better. The problem, I guess is that Amazon is too low
| quality and McMaster is too high quality.
|
| I also don't think they mark everything up 100%. I have built
| a lot of stuff out of T-slot extrusion ("80/20") and their
| price seems exactly the same as buying from 80/20 directly. I
| guess there is probably some Aliexpress vendor cheaper than
| the brand name, though.
| jrockway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Watch out - there's evidence of Wirecutter soliciting bribes
| and suspiciously changing their reviews when their attempt
| turns out to be unsuccessful. See
| https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-
| to....
| Uptrenda wrote:
| >black micro-text blocks of tl; dr spanning the entire width of
| the page
|
| 0/10 web design, didn't read.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| jotm wrote:
| moron4hire wrote:
| To the featured article's point, it's gotten so hard to be able
| to judge which products will be any good at all that buying
| expensive things expecting lasting quality becomes a huge
| gamble.
|
| There's also the huge mental barrier of getting over the sunk
| cost fallacy. If you buy an expensive thing and a part of it
| breaks in such a way that it still remains mostly functional,
| it's really, really hard to admit that it should be replaced.
| You end up living with a broken thing for a long time, just
| because you're mentally depreciating the thing.
|
| I've been through this with a lot of furniture. It doesn't seem
| to matter whether I pay $100 or $500 for a bookshelf, it's a
| crapshoot whether or not the listing lied about it being made
| of solid wood and not particle board, or whether the screw
| holes will align correctly, or been tapped correctly for the
| screws to actually engage without crossthreading, or even use
| proper screws and not those damn "lock"-bolts (that never
| actually lock, so given enough time they always work themselves
| loose).
|
| My wife and I built our children's bunk bed. It was an
| expensive, time-intensive, physically painful endeavor, partly
| because this was the first time we were building something so
| large. It's not great. But it easily matches or exceeds the
| quality of any of the other furniture we've bought. I'm very
| proud of the work we did, but at the same time, I'm furious
| that I can't count on just buying things.
|
| It's also gotten hard to trust people's recommendations on
| things, which goes back to the featured article's comments on
| cultural expectations. Most of the people I know just live with
| broken furniture. They think IKEA is great stuff. It's not.
| It's just that it's so impossible to find anything better that
| you might as well buy IKEA.
|
| I might switch to only buying antique furniture, i.e. use
| survivorship bias to my advantage. Find the stuff that has
| survived taking a beating already.
| chii wrote:
| 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.
| xeromal wrote:
| As a random anecdote, I own a steelcase gesture that runs
| about $1,100. I also own a 70$ chair from costco and I can
| "barely" feel the difference. I have all my settings
| configured correctly. I really don't buy into the the
| expensive officechair hype. I think it's a level of
| diminishing returns. I think a $200 office chairs is about
| what anyone needs. That'll get you 90%+ of the way.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| Where would you say you sit on the physical-dimensions bell
| curve?
|
| I'd hope that the more expensive chair has better
| adjustability to suit a wider range of critical dimensions
| than the cheaper chair. But that may not matter for a lot
| of people.
| xeromal wrote:
| My favorite part about my steelcase is the adjustable
| lumbar but really all I need is the seat to go up and
| down.
| WWLink wrote:
| I have a more expensive herman miller embody. It...
| doesn't really have much to adjust. Just the shape of the
| back. That's kind of an irritating aspect of it to me.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yes, I wish I could replace the seat cushion in my chair.
| That's literally the only thing wrong with it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Don't forget, not everyone can afford $200 for a chair, the
| initial outlay costs I mean.
|
| I'm looking at an Aeron and while I have a decent salary,
| it's still a massive commitment for me to pay that much for
| something I put my ass on.
| rascul wrote:
| My $60 office chair from Walmart has lasted five years so
| far.
| xmprt wrote:
| Same for my $70 IKEA chair (which also survived 4 moves). I
| only stopped using it because my job let us take home the
| office chairs once work from home started a few years ago.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Which is a very good way to cut down the money spend on
| things.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, personally, I have a lot of durable chairs, but I love
| my Aeron because the adjustability got me out of RSI. I don't
| mind replacing the chair every year if it would help me avoid
| RSI. I haven't had to, but I wouldn't mind. Durability in
| chairs seems to be easy.
| dazc wrote:
| I've been out of action due to RSI a couple of times in the
| past 7 or 8 years. I haven't worked out what the cost was
| but, sure, it was multiple times the price of a premium
| chair.
| asdfaoeu wrote:
| An Aeron is nice but plenty of other chairs last way longer
| than a year and are maybe a fifth of the price of an Aeron.
| You also have to consider for a lot of people there are other
| products that will give them a much better pay off.
| dlp211 wrote:
| My Aeron is 10 years old. It literally is as good as the
| day it was delivered and I use it every day.
| radley wrote:
| > an aeron chair costs about $2000 dollars (give or take).
|
| Some people buy that $2000 chair when it's $350 and can still
| use it for years. The key is to learn what products remain
| quality products.
|
| (And it's not about it being expensive. It's because it keeps
| your butt cool all year.)
| michaelt wrote:
| If you expect a $2000 chair to last a mere 10 years, unless
| the user is 300 lbs or something IMHO your standards are
| pretty low.
| pishpash wrote:
| At $100-200 per year? No, the cushion won't be failing after
| a year. That would be a $30 chair.
| mperham wrote:
| The entire premise of the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
| Maintenance" is "Can we define 'quality'?"
|
| At the end of the day you can specify a dozen different metrics
| but someone will game it to cut corners. There's no replacement
| for _caring_.
| [deleted]
| Ygg2 wrote:
| It's not profitable.
|
| See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Take it from a former pro, get a wood handle. Steel lasts
| forever, but your arm won't. Fiberglass is a lot better
| than steel and will last a almost forever, but wood is
| cheap and the best for your joints.
| bombcar wrote:
| The hammer thing mainly comes from Home Depot and friends
| selling to "prosumers" - people who don't know enough to
| know why the more expensive hammer might be better for a
| particular use but buy it anyway.
|
| When doing roofing the experienced guys would have three or
| four hammers of various types and switch between them as
| necessary. Me? I couldn't tell the difference.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > I think there's a reason why that's a comedy film instead
| of a serious take on modern consumerism.
|
| Yeah, because corporations/people wouldn't conspire to limit
| say life of lightbulbs or reduce competition, right? Right?!
| Right?!
|
| Just because something is a comedy doesn't mean someone in
| real world didn't do it/ is doing it/ won't do it.
| pojzon wrote:
| Its not profitable in current iteration of laws. If we had laws
| that forced manufacturers to create stuff that lasts two
| decades -> everything would look differently.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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]
| chrisweekly wrote:
| ... or things that work at all? (eg humidifiers, at various price
| points, maybe 40% of which are even functional when first
| unboxed)
| [deleted]
| jotm wrote:
| Boil water on a stove - boom, humidity increased!
| elil17 wrote:
| Unless you have a gas stove, in which case prolonged boiling
| could lead to indoor air quality issues (unless you turn your
| fan on - but then you're drawing in cold air.
|
| If you have an electric stove, boiling water will be less
| efficient than evaporating water and letting your heating
| system make up for the loss in sensible heat unless you have
| an electric furnace.
| jotm wrote:
| Yes, obviously. I'm just surprised that OP had trouble
| getting a good humidifier given the simple process. Though
| maybe they went for a Dyson model.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Or just get a hot mist humidifier, which does this except:
|
| 1. Electronically (ex: you can do this in your bedroom
| directly, or anywhere you need the warm-mist)
|
| 2. With safety measures (its still dangerous, but they
| minimize the amount of boiling water to minimize the possible
| harm. Better than an entire pot of boiling water, but still
| half-a-cup of boiling water can severely burn you still)
|
| 3. Probably as cheap as the pot you were using to boil water
| anyway. Warm mist humidifiers are like $35.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I'm 2 for 2 on humidifiers (1 ultrasonic, 1 wick evaporative).
|
| What fails on them?
| porknubbins wrote:
| One of the major issues with humidifier design is that
| whatever you put into the humidifier gets into the air, which
| sounds obvious but is an issue. We don't want to use
| chemicals to keep the paper wick from getting moldy because
| then we are breathing that. Or with ultrasonic they throw up
| mineral dust into the air. We end up just buying a lot of
| paper wicks.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, but those are functional limitations, not failure to
| function.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Ultrasonic is fail by definition. It's not hygienic and emits
| minerals.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| 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
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wonder if the old 10% hydrogen peroxide trick would fix
| that.
| sjg007 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I prefer steam for less cleaning too, but they're power
| hungry.
| emodendroket wrote:
| What were you expecting? They can't fundamentally change
| what happens when you leave things wet for hours.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Ours just runs until dry. Pretty sure it's ultrasonic but
| it's cheap and there's never been a smell. Those are the
| joys of living someplace you really need a humidifier.
| Water just disappears.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| My teakettle is moist for hours, some of my dishes are
| moist for hours, they don't smell like mildew. I'm in the
| bone dry south bay in a warm house
|
| My guess is water is getting trapped somewhere in the
| device's Chinesium crevices, or maybe they found a way to
| make plastic cheaper by making it susceptible to mold.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Every cool-mist humidifier has this problem. Use one of
| the Vicks vaporizers that boils the water if you don't
| want to deal with it.
| pvillano wrote:
| not the problem you're trying to solve but there's an
| additive called "humidifier bacteriostatic treatment" that
| could help with the smell
| germinalphrase wrote:
| While expensive, I have been pleased with my Venta humidifier.
| Cold evaporation. No wicks. Everything but the motor can be put
| in the dishwasher.
| cheschire wrote:
| Were your humidifiers just not good at making air moist? Or
| were they completely non-functional?
|
| Technology Connections had a good video on the quality of
| humidifiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeehYYgl28
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| I bought the one he didn't like (the electrode boiler) after
| watching that video (and his tear-down video [1]). (I have
| hard water and have had trouble with ultrasonic humidifiers.)
| It works great! You do have to descale it regularly to keep
| it going.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC9-t47tKts
| emodendroket wrote:
| You don't really need to. It will keep working regardless,
| just toss some salt in the water.
| overton wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Could be the proliferation of Minimum Viable Products taking
| their toll and having their influence.
| uhtred wrote:
| This site would be much nicer to read with some max-width
| applied. Maybe a nicer font.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| 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
| fouc wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Price is not a very good indicator of quality
| Loughla wrote:
| Especially for older 'thing' you might be looking for. If
| it is at all collectable, the price will be higher,
| regardless of quality.
|
| Ice cream makers are one thing I have found that for.
| White Mountain made a really high quality product, but
| the used market is obscene, because people collect them
| apparently (at least in my part of the country).
| WWLink wrote:
| That's also seen as survival bias!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| In personal experience things were more crappy then than now.
| The explaining factor could be that production techniques
| have evolved as a whole, and less manual steps harmonizes the
| quality of cheap goods.
|
| To take IKEA as an example, their table were really bad 20
| years ago, and the only option was to either buy from another
| flatpack company, that was often worse (assembly would need
| like 50 screws for a single table...wtf), or a hand made "old
| fashion" table that would last a lifetime but cost 10 times
| more. Current IKEA tables will last a lifetime for the same
| price as the crap from 20 years ago.
|
| Another example is French and Italian cars. They were really
| bad decades ago, reliability issues were only compensated by
| the ease to repair and cheap local maintenance. But
| industrial process are so much better now that production
| quality and reliability is at a level way above what would be
| expected for cars of roughly the same production cost.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| IKEA always have had a range of different quality products.
| You could buy cheap stuff that didn't last or you could
| more expensive stuff that last 20 or 30 years ago as well
| as today.
| mjevans wrote:
| IKEA at least was, the last time I shopped there, willing
| to sell at different levels of build quality. Some products
| cut every corner possible in the name of cost, but also
| passed a noticeable portion of that savings to the
| consumer. Others used some slightly better materials in
| places where the results mattered with predictably good
| results. As long as the consumer made an informed choice
| the result was as desired.
| blacklivsmatr wrote:
| Ikea is a bad example in IMO. I moved countries 3 times in
| the last 10 years and bought many of the same exact Ikea
| items all 3 times. The quality went down each time. Things
| that were previously metal became plastic. Things that were
| previously reenforced in 4 positions were now only 3.
| etc....
|
| Also, several of the more sturdy things they had they no
| longer sell and what they have now in the same category are
| vastly less sturdy.
|
| I agree though, they do still have some good, quality,
| sturdy kitchen tables and a few pretty good sturdy sofas.
| Retric wrote:
| Looking like crap says very little about utility.
|
| It's standard practice to reduce safety margins when build
| quality increases. If you think in terms of expected lifespan,
| when the company has little control over how long things last
| and wants a minimum of say 1 year then some fail at 1 year and
| some fail after 20. As their process improves the minimum stays
| the same, but maximum lifespan decreases.
| hobs wrote:
| "Value Engineering" - make the same thing, but at half the
| cost, eventually you get chip bags filled with air and
| reduced by 1.5 oz margins until the profit matches what's
| needed.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The idea behind the article is not that everyone is making junk
| these days. The idea is that we often have no way to find out
| which products and services are junk and which are good
| quality. How are you going to find a contractor to remodel your
| bathroom? How will you even know if they did a good job?
| narag wrote:
| I remember a time when there was the good, the bad and the
| ugly. You knew which was each with a cursory glance.
|
| Now there are a hundred, most of them below the cut, with top
| ranked = SEO junk.
| bjterry wrote:
| > 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Six Sigma.
| grodes wrote:
| Why is it hard to find websites that limit the content width?
| turkishlurker wrote:
| 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.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > 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.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| 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
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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]
| carlineng wrote:
| "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."
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
|
| Asks someone that posts a giant wall of unreadable text.
| jotm wrote:
| Haha, yeah, but actually it reminded me of old Web pages. Just
| text, format it however you want (make the product good
| yourself!), nothing in the way, just the content.
|
| I'm surprised how much I've gotten used to fancy websites,
| colors and formatting.
| kroltan wrote:
| The website has basically no CSS, so it's up to your user agent
| to decide on its default presentation.
|
| Just so happens that modern user agents don't really care about
| bare HTML, just CSS and JavaScript, so your default
| presentation is optimized to 1990s hardware at 800x600.
|
| I guess "reader mode" is slang for "what the user-agent should
| be doing to make documents reasonable for modern displays", so
| press that button in your user-agent.
| compilerone wrote:
| I'm usually just in reading mode, but occasionally I turn it
| off to see a/the blogs design because I feel it gives just a
| little bit more context to any post of text (for example, the
| author has a playful design and it gives me a small idea of
| their character). Unfortunate it's hardly readable, but it
| still says something about the author. HN is fun :)
| t-writescode wrote:
| Looks good on my phone. I guess not all writers are poets.
|
| What did you think of the content of what they said?
| thrill wrote:
| It's hard to appreciate the content when you can't get
| through the wrapping.
| mi100hael wrote:
| You know you can make your window narrower than 4000px,
| right?
| OJFord wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| WithinReason wrote:
| In Firefox press F9
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| With Chrome Desktop, and a fairly wide browser window (1475px
| in my case, required by many web applications), the text is
| small with minimal margins, and practically illegible. If I
| shrink the browser width considerably (to a minimum width) then
| the text does look good, like an ebook.
|
| Typesetting matters.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
| omegote wrote:
| Good luck reading an article with lines that span the entire
| 2560px of the width of my screen.
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| Firefox reader view to the rescue
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
| black_13 wrote:
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-10...
| but if you've ever been in one, you'll know what I mean.
| Jiro wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| twothamendment wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| Or in some cases it might make sense to become an outsourcing
| destination. Your otherwise idle equipment & skills become a
| revenue stream rather than a cost when your need it low, your
| local equipment and skills are tested & re-enforced which
| reduces the risk of finding them unexpectedly wanting when you
| turn to them in those 1% times, and you might end up with a
| small controlling advantage in your market (you get priority
| over any competitors that outsource to that part of you). It
| could become a significant arm of your business & profit. Think
| Amazon farming out its network resources.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| If you go through all this trouble, you have essentially
| added another business line to your company. This may or may
| not be where a company wants to spend their resources.
| Rolling your own XYZ will always be cheaper than paying a 3rd
| party vendor, _if_ you have the time, experience, money, and
| competitive advantage to do it correctly, which are pretty
| big iffs.
| dspillett wrote:
| Aye. It certainly seems like a commit to it or don't do it
| at all decision, half measures will be more trouble than
| they are worth.
| ownagefool wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| This. For every short-sighted decision made by the finance
| overlords, I've seen ten failures on the tech wizards' part
| to plan for their own future well-being. Laziness keeps
| them from even making a case.
| ownagefool wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Sometimes the budget is yours sometimes you're sitting in
| meetings upon meetings with someone else deciding there's
| no immediate ROI so no budget for you.
|
| So sure, the company is always to blame, but unless we're
| arguing the individual was not convincing enough, the
| person citing budget may not be choosing alone where to
| allocate it.
|
| On the bright side, inefficient companies leave the market
| open for the rest of us. :)
| josh2600 wrote:
| As someone employing a lot of engineers right now, one of the
| problems is that engineering will just keep requesting
| resources ad infinitum if there's no budgetary limit. The
| constraints of the business are actually always financial,
| and without proper financial modeling you'll cease to have a
| business.
|
| This is true in process scaling no matter the process.
| hamsamrma wrote:
| ime the primary reason to outsource is to get rid of the
| responsibility and the long-tail due-diligence that comes
| with it.
| thaeli wrote:
| Also the blame. On prem outage? IT management is in the hot
| seat for a fix. AWS outage? Well, major us-east-1 outages
| make the news so the blame is more diffuse. And even
| outside of that, it's much harder for anyone internally to
| blame IT management for the outsourcing, so long as they
| were smart and got the CFO to take credit for the cost
| savings of going cloud or something.
|
| HN often underestimates how much of enterprise IT, and
| large business generally, is about making sure that upsides
| are concentrated enough your management chain can take
| responsibility, and downsides are either diffuse enough or
| deflectable enough that your management chain can avoid
| responsibility.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to
| use the saw leaves?
|
| Then you go and fix that as you have the means to do that.
|
| Were it outsourced and you can only wait for the vendor to do
| it
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise
| of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy.
|
| Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is
| going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw
| that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a
| lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your
| own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud
| provider).
|
| I think the real draw of outsourcing is diffusion of
| responsibility: when it breaks, you can blame someone else.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule
| because it just works: can have view only links, and it
| handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got
| asked "well what if google goes down?", so back to our
| problematic system of excel sheets it is :(
| Radim wrote:
| That may have been a wise person! _" What if Google takes
| us down"_ (rather than goes down itself) is a valid
| business risk to at least consider.
|
| Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves
| from a rational person's critical path. They're too big,
| you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you
| have no recourse.
| andreyf wrote:
| if someone had told me that "full of AI" was going to be
| an insult one day, I would have said they were too
| cynical about the glorious AI future, but in hindsight
| perhaps you are right
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I experienced the opposite when Google actually went down
| and all of our email, docs and information went away for
| the day. Then one day our Internet went down and then the
| company bought a Microwave internet link and an off site
| server.
| derefr wrote:
| > You will actually experience a lot less downtime by
| investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers)
| rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud provider).
|
| Analogy doesn't work; "in-sourcing" of previously-IaaS
| resources as a cost-cutting measure, is used almost
| exclusively for "base load" (vs. elastic load, which is the
| comparative advantage of IaaSes); and so your in-house
| servers are usually running pinned at 100%. So the hardware
| components will wear out just as fast, if not faster, than
| the IaaS's servers will; and when they do, your ops team
| won't have as many spare parts on hand as the IaaS does;
| nor the ability to live-migrate the enforced VM to another
| exactly-equivalent substrate host in the fleet (which was
| already warm) to avoid downtime altogether.
|
| Also, apart from that, there are economies of scale in
| reliability. Your in-house backups are probably just a ZFS
| pool or a RAID5+1 array or something. They're certainly
| _not_ hosted within a 17+-copies Dynamo-ish system, the way
| most IaaS object storage (incl. archival storage) is,
| because the costs of doing that in-house are ridiculous.
| darkarmani wrote:
| What do you think about external core dependencies? For
| example, people are starting to use Okta/Auth0 for the
| authentication core of their apps.
|
| Obviously, this puts them at the mercy of the okta if
| anything goes wrong with IdM. But then again, people are
| very bad at doing auth.
| cupofpython wrote:
| > you often have to have your own experts anyway.
|
| +1 on this
|
| IME the most successful outsourcing arrangements revolve
| around scale of work, not substituting an entire department.
| Keeping the amount of in-house experts lean and having them
| manage outsourced resources. So it is more of a tool for
| someone internal who has the needs organized rather than a
| dependency on a 3rd party to know what is best for you
| buescher wrote:
| Then you go out of house until the saw can be repaired or you
| can recruit a new employee to run it. If it's really to your
| advantage to have the capability in-house, no one will bat an
| eye.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| IMHO a lot of outsourcing decisions are based on the idea
| that someone else can do it better than we can. This is
| demoralizing and will eventually become a self-fulfilling
| prophecy as the most competent people get frustrated and
| leave. I suspect it may also be projection from managers that
| are in over their head or don't understand what their own
| people are saying. And then of course there are times when
| it's true that someone else can do it better.
| gadders wrote:
| Can someone remind me what the CSS is to make the site readable
| please?
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| It's looks like this is mostly a case of adverse selection. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
| ck2 wrote:
| 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".
| ouid wrote:
| Weird that this article makes no mention of the law of lemons.
| Information asymmetry between buyer and seller is well studied.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| 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
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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.
| justbrandon2u wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Every sale has a customer.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You wind up double and triple washing things with the new
| machine in order to get equivalent cleanliness to an old
| style machine.
| [deleted]
| andrepd wrote:
| >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.
| emtel wrote:
| 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.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The title should probably be something like , "Why are so many
| successful products so bad ?"
| polskibus wrote:
| It requires a lot of testing-feedback-correction iterations. This
| is expensive no matter how it's done.
| btrettel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The wood or metal stuff was _not_ cheap, by and large. It
| was the cheapest available at the time, but still very
| expensive by current standards.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, but I have tools from my grandfather that are 100
| years old. 3 generations of use should be an excellent
| value
| astrange wrote:
| I don't have any plastic stuff that breaks. My supposedly
| bad Ikea furniture has all survived 3 moves, none of my
| kitchen tools break, car's about to last 10+ years. I think
| my worst problem with something I own is my PC fans are too
| loud.
| wheybags wrote:
| Presuming it's a desktop, and you haven't done so already
| - try replacing the fans with some noctua ones
| astrange wrote:
| It turns out anytime you update the Gigabyte BIOS it
| loses all its settings including the custom fan
| curves/undervolting I built from the advice on random
| reddit posts.
|
| Do need to replace the fans and maybe PSU though.
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.)
| astrange wrote:
| "erosion of real wages" isn't actually calculable since the
| price of your house doesn't really have anything to do with
| how many electronics you can own, but it's most likely not
| true - houses are much bigger and higher quality than 1970,
| cars are incredibly safer, you can buy infinitely more
| computing power, most importantly you don't have lead
| poisoning now.
| elil17 wrote:
| Economists (imperfectly) take this into account when
| calculating inflation. In cars, for example, economists
| estimate the price of individual features (e.g. a power
| steering wheel, ABS, a cup holder) so that they can
| accurately account for increases in quality.
| astrange wrote:
| Those calculations are the ones that make it look like
| American factory workers were automated out of their
| jobs, because a 2010 computer is a zillion times faster
| than a 1970 computer, therefore each factory worker is
| now producing a zillion times as many computers.
|
| Basically, it works better a year at a time.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The jobs were mostly shipped over seas. The ones that
| were left had to compete with the lower prices that were
| the product of third world cost of living/labor.
| Management took advantage of the fact that most of their
| workers don't understand/pay attention to inflation.
| astrange wrote:
| Liz Warren and Andrew Yang both used these numbers to run
| campaigns about specifically automation taking away
| everyone's jobs. I do think they know how outsourcing
| works, but the automation thing turned out to not be
| real.
| nullc wrote:
| If you can't know that it'll be good or even if it'll work (at
| least more than the minimum time) -- then it darn well better
| be inexpensive.
|
| Inexpensive and having a snazzy name are pretty much the only
| properties that products have that you can reliably compare.
| sabr wrote:
| Annotated article:
| https://smort.io/feb48ca0-d996-486e-af55-d232a54e1553
| angarg12 wrote:
| 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.
| mattferderer wrote:
| As with many countries, the USA can be very different depending
| on where you live, even if you move from one part of a state to
| another part.
|
| Moving from state to state can almost feel like moving to an
| entirely different country.
| bombela wrote:
| 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.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Where in the USA are you? I haven't bought a new house in a
| while but most car dealerships (at least mine) gets me an
| online booking appointment for the same day or next day.
| Doctors sick appointment - mostly same day. I've never
| interacted with a sales agent for buying stuff.
|
| I agree with you on housing. The agents charge commission and
| closing costs and closing companies do charge quite a bit.
| jldugger wrote:
| > To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment
| let.
|
| It's so hard to hire good help these days. And in the case of
| apartment building management, it sounds like they're renting
| out just fine despite the bugs and process fuckups. Hell, even
| you havent walked away for a competitor.
|
| > 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.
|
| In a sense, there are startups in the "long term rental" space
| providing a better frontend to shitty landlords. Even airbnb is
| moving into that market. Whether they can successfully out UX
| Prometheus while relying on prometheus as a landlord I cannot
| say, but its one path out of capital requirements.
|
| > 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.
|
| Lots of people own housing instead of rent here. But you'll
| find plenty of similar angst about mortgage processing.
| kidsil wrote:
| Having lived in Germany, I must say the quality of customer
| service there is the worst I have ever seen.
|
| + A fridge I purchased was delivered with a 2 weeks delay, at
| 10:30PM (!!) on a Saturday (only because I kept calling every
| other day).
|
| + I've ordered a new broadband connection for an apartment I
| was renting. After several months (!) of waiting and calls, I
| found out that the former tenant had unpaid bills with the
| provider and they therefore refused to establish the connection
| (I was only informed about this after 5-6 weeks of wait during
| which I was told everything's ok and pending execution).
|
| Here's a story about how my laptop was broken and I was calling
| a repair shop:
|
| Me: "Good morning, my laptop doesn't seem to display anything,
| looks like it's a problem with the screen, how does the pricing
| work in this situation?"
|
| Shop: "Ugh...", the guy is annoyed.
|
| Shop: "This is like saying you have a headache, and asking a
| doctor what needs to be done!", He shouts.
|
| Me: "No need to get angry, I was just wondering-"
|
| Shop: "Just bring it to the store!" - hangs up.
|
| This is a perfectly normal experience dealing with customer
| service in Germany.
| Tor3 wrote:
| The shop guy was right though, even if he expressed it
| bluntly. How could anyone come up with a useful answer to
| that question? It's actually worse than the headache
| question. And yes there's not much of beating around the bush
| in Germany, which can be somewhat shocking to those not used
| to it.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| We charge N/hr, plus parts. Or, we charge N for an initial
| diagnosis.
|
| My uncle runs a computer repair business and is doing very
| well because he works late hours, is in a college town, and
| has flat pricing when possible. This means he spends Sunday
| night reinstalling OSes on student's laptops at $75/each.
| lepton wrote:
| But the question was "how does the pricing work in this
| situation?" and I would expect a repair shop to know how
| their pricing works.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yes, quality is going to hell in the US. It usually helps to
| book help from people who are from other countries, even places
| that don't have a good reputation. They left, right? And,
| managed to come here. However bad it is here, it is anyway hard
| to get and stay here.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Whereabouts do you live in the United States?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Your letting experience is missing one key factor; you're not
| the customer to the letting agency. The building owner is the
| customer, not you. As long as the apartment gets rented out and
| maintenance gets done well enough, the owner doesn't really
| care if you have a bad experience. And the letting agency
| doesn't have to care about you either, since their treatment of
| you has no effect on their bottom line.
|
| The fact that they don't feel ashamed of mistreating a non-
| customer is however cultural.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| This is on point. It is not that the service is not replaced
| by a service serving the customer better. The customer is
| already being served perfectly fine.
| yrral wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jules wrote:
| The coke bottles themselves are amazing too. I used to go
| to school with a reusable bottle filled with milk. Those
| cylindrical lunch bottles for kids were absolutely
| horrible. They leaked half the time, spoiling my bag and
| notebook. If you dropped them they would break because they
| were hard plastic. The rubber ring that was supposed to
| stop it from leaking would degrade quickly and start to
| smell funny. Those things cost as much as 20 bottles of
| coke, and an empty coke bottle is a vastly superior product
| in almost every way!
| samgtx wrote:
| A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice
| more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery
| store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have
| it.
| Aunche wrote:
| Relevant video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNpk_OGEGlA
|
| Grocery stores are a marvel for sure. It's a miracle that
| we can get a season fruit like grapes 365 days a year.
| Psyladine wrote:
| I'm a believer that the largest part of what led Yeltsin
| to fundamentally change what it was, and thus cause the
| dissolution of the USSR, was his impromptu grocery store
| visit in the US.
| AnonC wrote:
| > A bit of woo woo aside but I've been trying to practice
| more gratitude...
|
| No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking
| this (and related citations) about research on gratitude
| and psychological well being:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_int
| erv...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Practicing gratitude is probably the single easiest way
| to increase one's happiness, and yet it's so easy to
| forget to do it even if you know that. At least for me.
|
| One thing we can do is keep a gratitude journal where we
| write down things we're grateful for. Can literally be
| grateful for the sun shining, or not experiencing an
| earthquake, for having the ability to write in a journal
| in the first place, etc.
|
| It's so, so powerful.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Exactly. I can't imagine how expensive a computer chip
| should be if the process isn't optimized / streamlined.
|
| And for kitchenware and dinningware, we still get decent
| quality for a still rather cheap price. Of course as the
| article stated it's not easy to determine which one with
| decent quality, however if customers only aim for the
| cheapest one of course it won't be good.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Coke and potato chips are not at all inexpensive if you
| include the health costs.
|
| They're pretty good examples of things that are cheap and
| don't work very well, if your goal is health and not
| distraction/entertainment.
| WWLink wrote:
| > There's a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even
| though it's cheap.
|
| Even light switches are pretty cheap. You can get a basic
| single light switch for around $2. Sure there's decora
| switches, dimmer switches, and all kinds of other great
| things for $50+ but the basic $2 ones will still last
| decades.
| NavinF wrote:
| If you replaced the contacts with a triac and replaced
| the switch mechanism with a thick bistable flexure, it
| would likely last centuries and have a BoM cost around
| $2.
|
| I've had 2 switches fail over the last 2 years out of the
| ~40 switches installed in the house. One failed by
| welding itself closed and another failed by caving into
| the electrical box when I hit it too hard. Even though
| the 40 year life expectancy of a single switch sounds
| good, the reality is that one fails catastrophically
| every year. I'd love to get more reliable switches that
| last well over a century, but I'm not aware of anyone
| that measures this sort of thing.
| et-al wrote:
| I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are
| shells of their former selves as they've been bought,
| bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name
| with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam
| was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap.
| Same with Braun.
|
| The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious
| looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is
| full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days
| are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility
| to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too
| tarnished.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I imagine that makes the slow Denise of Sears/Craftsman
| particularly unfortunate then.
| ncmncm wrote:
| What?
| JoachimSchipper wrote:
| Your parent comment has an autocorrect error, and meant
| to write demise (death).
| ncmncm wrote:
| I don't even know how I would identify a good toaster to
| buy, nowadays. Electric kettles are a problem, too.
| bgentry wrote:
| After purchasing the top two Wirecutter picks for
| electric kettles (Cuisinart and some gooseneck kettle)
| both died within a year. The gooseneck one was rusted on
| arrival, clearly awful build quality.
|
| I decided to try paying much more for a Fellow Stagg EKG,
| and it was a great decision. It's lasted over 3 years and
| has been an absolute joy to use compared to the prior
| mass market garbage.
|
| I often wish for a Wirecutter-like site that prioritizes
| quality and especially longevity above all else.
| Wirecutter always focused too much on cost, and even
| their "upgrade picks" tend to suffer awful quality
| issues. For years their top blender pick was an Oster
| that had hundreds of angry reviews about dying within
| months. Wirecutter ignored the feedback for years despite
| so many people streaming into their own comments section
| to vent about it.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Honestly, I had spent 20 years in the US and we
| consistently bought the cheapest appliances ever.
|
| When I bought my house I finally said "screw it, let's
| see what decent appliances look like".
|
| Japanese rice cooker set me back $95 and I thought I
| would never hear the end of it, and after 4 years, it had
| already paid itself off (we were doing $14 rice cookers
| every 6 months). Air fryer was $70 but the previous $40
| only lasted 13 months. Basic coffee maker was like $60
| but made non-burnt coffee. A little combo oven/toaster is
| what I ended up on since we had one in the last apartment
| since we never used a full oven.
|
| The ones that are honestly pretty difficult to find were
| dishwasher but one of our friends suggested bosch because
| we wanted a quiet appliance.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| There's also just a... man, I don't know how to describe
| it. Kind of a mental benefit to using slightly nicer
| things.
|
| When I was young, almost everything I owned was the
| cheapest possible version of that thing. Everything just
| kind of sucked, brutally cost-optimized to the point of
| being somewhat nasty to use and barely functional.
|
| I was still very fortunate: I had food to eat, clothes,
| etc. A lot of kids in the world would have traded places
| with me.
|
| Now that I'm older, I have no interest in "luxury" goods,
| but there's that subtle intangible benefit to using e.g.
| the $95 rice cooker vs. the $14 rice cooker. You feel
| like somebody who's worth more than the cheapest possible
| piece of disposable shit, I guess. Or at least I do.
|
| It makes better rice, too, of course. And there's the
| ecological benefit of not tossing a $14 rice cooker into
| the landfill every couple of months. But there's also a
| bit of self worth involved, or something.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I'm not a super stingy guy and we're a Cuban family so
| rice is an every day dish.
|
| It's not super fancy or anything but it fills that rice
| craving and is a multi-use device.
| ncmncm wrote:
| In the US, the $95 cooker lasts no longer, and works no
| better, than the $25 unit. (There is no $14 one.) You
| _might_ be able to do better with a Japanese brand, but
| it is vanishingly unlikely you will get the same one as
| they would have sold in Japan, unless you actually get it
| shipped from there.
|
| I make rice in a saucepan on the range top. I have to
| come back and turn it off when it's done. Otherwise, it
| is the same. If you care about how good your rice is, you
| are starting with short-grain rice. Or red, or black, or
| arborio for risotto.
| ebruchez wrote:
| > one of our friends suggested bosch because we wanted a
| quiet appliance
|
| We've been very happy with our Bosch. Don't ever buy a
| cheap dishwasher.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You can spend as much as you like on a dishwasher. $200,
| $300, $400, $500, $700, $900, $1200.
|
| The only real difference above $400 is how loud it is. In
| a silent room you can't tell whether the $1200 dishwasher
| is running at all.
|
| That does not matter to everybody.
| chronogram wrote:
| I bought a store brand 9A kettle and it's fine [1].
| They're simple products and shouldn't break unless you
| have very hard water, in which case a round of vinegar
| should clean that. What are you running into?
|
| 1: https://www.blokker.nl/blokker-waterkoker-bl-10202---
| rvs---1...
| ncmncm wrote:
| In the US, kettles are carefully designed to last one
| year and no more. Same for a $20 or $100 unit.
|
| I have not discovered a way to find one that is not so
| designed. Regular reviews are useless.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Last Yule I bought a toaster for my brother. All of them
| felt kinda like crap, flimsy cheap, scratchy action... I
| was not even looking at cheapest but something I imagine
| to be reasonably mid-range that is around 50EUR mark.
| After all it is a moving platform, some heating elements
| and case. Not at all complicated.
| ncmncm wrote:
| At issue is whether spending more gets you a better
| toaster, or just the same toaster but for more money. It
| is hard to find out.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It's been mentioned on HN before, but in case you haven't
| seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Commercial toasters (and, I imagine, commercial electric
| kettles) are 'good' in the sense of being well-built and
| long-lasting. I've got a 1980s Dualit toaster which is
| essentially bomb-proof (the clockwork timer will
| eventually stop working but is easily replaced; even the
| elements can be readily changed out if they get damaged).
|
| Of course, the downside is that new ones start at PS150
| or so. So it's difficult to make a financial case (as
| opposed to an aesthetic, or a principled one) over a PS10
| special from Tesco.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| The problem with 'commercial' kitchen equipment is that
| most of it is just up branded domestic equipment.
|
| When you do buy 'commercial' kitchen equipment you'll
| notice lots of things that are just downright worse.
| Energy efficiency, safety features, and noise reduction
| are all things that are _way_ worse than with their
| domestic counterparts.
| michaelt wrote:
| "Real" commercial kitchen equipment is often totally
| different.
|
| Commercial fridges will stay cool even if their door is
| opened 20 times an hour. Commercial glass washers take a
| tenth of the time a home dishwasher takes. And if they're
| noisy, ugly and they need to be cleaned every day without
| fail, that's just normal commercial equipment.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the
| time. For closed source and open source project. Just like
| this, it worked in the last commit and in the new commit it
| fails despite the test suite passing. The ultimate reason is
| routine tasks pulling in a ton of complexity of which only a
| tiny fraction is being used.
|
| At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat
| up insane amounts of productivity.
|
| Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't
| work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired
| backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody
| really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to
| completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur
| everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's
| something structurally not working
| darkarmani wrote:
| > just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the
| time.
|
| Really? I've not seen this to be the case unless they are
| never maintained (ie: a year goes by and ignored dependencies
| change)
| analog31 wrote:
| House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along
| with the professions that install them, are all regulated and
| licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those
| things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in
| places that have historically had weak code enforcement and
| weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those
| things more expensive.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| The filesystems example given by OP is an interesting
| counterpoint - Linux filesystems are the opposite of
| regulated, regionally varied, and expensive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| File systems are very expensive. Not up front, but instead
| on failure. Bad/cheap file systems don't last long.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's also true. Filesystems do have an advantage of being
| testable by millions of people, relatively stable from one
| user to another over the medium term, and at least the
| experts share their experiences. Also, there are no gaps in
| the regions that benefit from good filesystems. Regional
| enforcement means spotty enforcement.
|
| As for expense, the reliability of the filesystem is free
| up to a certain point. There are system failure modes that
| have to be covered by hardware and admin expenses, such as
| decentralized backups (just one example off the top of my
| head).
| PixelOfDeath wrote:
| Well we also ended up with BTRFS raid5/6
| [deleted]
| q1w2 wrote:
| I think "mature" is the more correct term. It's not the
| regulation, it's just that it's been vetted and repeated so
| many times that it has become rock solid.
|
| This is why I never select cutting edge tech for our
| company - unless it's part of our area of
| expertise/innovation.
| roland35 wrote:
| Maybe more expensive up front but probably cheaper in the
| long run!
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| If I could buy products that just work and don't break,
| even if they cost 3x as much, they would pay for themselves
| with longer lifespans and less wasted productivity.
| andi999 wrote:
| Historically you shd buy Miele then.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| For some products. Even they have some crap (in-wall
| espresso...)
| Tor3 wrote:
| I replaced my 21 year old Miele washing machine recently.
| The solenoid-driven water intake valve broke. It wasn't a
| part of the machine itself, it was on the water intake
| tube. But the replacement part was nearly half the price
| of the brand new replacement Miele washing machine I
| ended up buying instead. The new one is slightly larger
| and has higher capacity, and doesn't suffer from a little
| design problem the original had, so I was ok with getting
| a new one. But yes, the original washing machine worked
| _exactly_ as when it was brand new - it was just that
| intake valve on the tube.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Ha. I just recently cleaned all hoses of our 10 year old
| one (all were quite ok to reach) and hope to have it
| another 10 years.
| bjoli wrote:
| I have two things in my possession that are wonders of
| engineering. One hair trimmer and one restaurant kitchen
| blender/kitchen multifunction machine. Both made in 1987 in
| East Germany.
|
| The blender I bought second hand, and it came with a box of
| original replacement parts and specifications so detailed
| that I believe I could probably replace the motor if it
| ever fails (almost 6hp! Take that, Vitamix!). It makes nut
| butter in no time.
|
| The trimmer could probably be used to cut down trees.
|
| I love these machines, and if they ever fail I don't thing
| I could ever replace them with anything of similar quality.
| They are 35 years old. The electronics in the kitchen
| machine still look pristine. I keep all bearings well
| lubed. It runs like a Swiss watch. Only very loud.
| dijit wrote:
| is this not the very definition of survivorship bias
| though?
|
| I have things from the 80s that, obviously, have lasted a
| long time. But I have owned things from that era that
| have failed and been forgotten about.
|
| Incidentally I bought some boots this year that are
| expected to last (at a minimum) 10 years, and I suspect
| they would, but I can't know that until 10 years from
| now.
|
| Heirloom quality is probably still a thing, but only
| discoverable when an item actually becomes an heirloom.
| bjoli wrote:
| Probably. I don't have ten of these machines, so it is
| hard to make a general statement.
|
| I mostly meant it as a comment on what the parent said; I
| could pay four times the price for something and have it
| last 35 years (which is 15x longer than the blender I had
| before it) I gladly would.
|
| The fact that I can repair most of it is also a thing I
| miss in the things I buy today.
| torginus wrote:
| Not necessarily. I also have an East German blender,
| that's like 40 years old, and looks like hell, but works
| perfectly. I bought another one, since the old one was
| kinda hard to look at. It was a highly recommended
| somewhat upmarket type from a _supposedly_ reputable
| brand.
|
| It broke within 2 years..
|
| I took it apart and discovered it was full of plastic
| gears on load bearing components which predictably got
| annihilated by wear and tear. The old one had metal ones.
|
| I echo the article's sentiment that while cheap usually
| means bad, expensive stuff is usually indistinguishable
| in quality from mass-market stuff nowadays.
| PinguTS wrote:
| The above author mentions that these machines are from
| Eastern Germany. As I am from Eastern Germany myself, I
| can tell you that we had regulations in place, that
| machines had to last and had to be repairable. Those
| regulations came into place, because we had heavily
| resource problems.
|
| Funfact: Those type of regulations are heavily discussed
| even these times again, when I look at EU right to be
| repair, or the discussions specifically around John Deere
| and the right to be repair.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Maybe a good move, as we will be facing resource problems
| sooner than we like?
| The-Bus wrote:
| A nice trivia fact I learned is that East Germany made
| the world's best selling digger. There's a fun
| documentary (in German) that covers this. The machine
| from the DDR is discussed starting at 27:53
|
| Link = https://youtu.be/4TqJu0RS32w?t=1674
| benlivengood wrote:
| > is this not the very definition of survivorship bias
| though?
|
| Not necessarily; it's also sufficient to consider the
| overall distribution of blenders and hair trimmers from
| the 80s that are still working compared to the
| distribution of items sold, which means it's also fairly
| easy to spot because people use their kitchen/bathroom
| appliances frequently and notice when exceptionally old
| ones still work.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Just like a quality automobile, to bring the discussion
| closer to the article. For example, a Tesla Model 3 might
| cost more than a Hyundai I10, but after three years of
| ownership you've not had to change the oil, fill it with
| gas, get the tailpipe emissions inspected, possibly see the
| catalytic converter stolen, etc. And the difference in
| maintenance only grows from there, when the plugs and
| timing belt and seals and transmission and other items
| wear.
|
| Lots of products have more expensive buy-in buy are cheaper
| in the long run.
| nly wrote:
| My partner leases a petrol car, and except for pumping up
| the tyres every now and then we've never done anything to
| it.
|
| Servicing is fully covered and the garage keeps track of
| when things need changing.
|
| It wasn't so long ago that leasing was actually cheaper
| option than buying (on credit).
| dotancohen wrote:
| Even if you're not paying for the service, you still need
| to take the time to do it or get it done for you.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I drive another manufacturer's equivalent of the Hyundai
| you mention, their lowest end car that they actually quit
| manufacturing, and I am sure the Hyundai is in the same
| ballpark.
|
| I change the oil about twice a year. Over the past eight
| years, that has cost me about $480.
|
| I have changed the transmission fluid three times. That
| has cost me about $140.
|
| I've changed the air filter a couple times...not very
| often. Let's be generous and call it $40.
|
| Around 120k I replaced the spark plugs. They were weirdly
| expensive, costing about $100.
|
| I have performed no other maintenance.
|
| I have filled it with gas about once a week. It's a
| pretty small tank. I'd estimate about $6000-$8000.
|
| Add all that up, pretend electricity is free, and I have
| still come out way, way, way ahead versus buying a Model
| 3. I've still spent less than half of what I would have
| on a Model 3.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you for the counterpoint. I concede that my idea of
| what a modern motor vehicle is is outdated. I'm actually
| happy to see that things have improved so much.
| gigaflop wrote:
| I hate to sound like I'm advocating for Sunk Cost, but
| this helps put numbers to a feeling I've had:
|
| The current cost-over-time of my (and apparently your)
| ICE car is not meaningfully high enough to want to
| 'upgrade' to an all-electric. Plus, when mechanical
| problems eventually arise, there's already a somewhat-
| independent parts and labor infrastructure to lean on to
| get it back on the road.
|
| On a personal level, I'm also opposed to giving Elon more
| money, and opposed to the idea that my car may brick
| itself with an auto-update. I also got a promotional 0%
| loan on my car, have zero intention of paying that off
| early, and can see this car lasting until 2028 or 2030.
| Unless I have kids, this car should be fine for my needs
| until then.
| sneed wrote:
| It all catches back up to you when the battery
| replacement cost nearly totals the car though.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I've got a 10 year warranty on the battery pack. And at
| the rate that independent battery servicing is expanding,
| there is a very good chance that independent pack
| refurbishment or replacement will be affordable by March
| 2032.
|
| In any case, the wife's 1996 Hyundai was worth more to
| the breaking yard than it was to the second hand market
| when it's transmission failed in summer of 1997. So even
| if the battery pack fails immediately after the warranty
| period and that totals the car, I've still come out ahead
| in total cost of ownership.
| namdnay wrote:
| How many miles are you putting on that i10?! An oil
| change is every 2 years or 15k km. I think it's a bad
| example btw, it's a famously reliable car (the taxi of
| choice in Bogota fwiw)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thanks, I updated the post. I had no idea that oil
| changes are now once every two years. On the wife's
| Subaru I still change the oil every six months, and I
| remember when the standard was actually every three
| months. She puts about 10 km on the car during those six
| months, we live in a hilltop village half an hour drive
| from a city.
| thaeli wrote:
| Time based oil changes (as a backup to mileage) in
| gasoline vehicles are mostly to address oil contamination
| from the engine not getting hot enough to boil off fuel
| and combustion byproducts in the oil. It's a rough
| heuristic for drive type - more advanced oil life
| monitors know the actual drive cycles an engine is seeing
| and will adjust appropriately, but for a basic time-
| and/or-mileage schedule, it's more about picking some
| interval that gets the oil changed before the additive
| package is destroyed by combustion acids. If the car is
| driven only short distances and never gets a chance to
| fully warm up, six months is probably a reasonable
| interval. If it gets a monthly spin on the highway for an
| hour, two years is probably fine. Ideally, you'd be
| measuring total base and total acid levels and
| calculating change points based on that; this is common
| practice for large truck engines but for a gasoline car
| engine, an oil change can be cheaper than the lab tests.
| (I'm still in favor of having oil testing done on at
| least some changes, it's basically "routine bloodwork"
| for your car and can detect many problems early.)
|
| Another upshot of this is that with rarely driven
| vehicles, you might as well use the cheapest oil which
| meets appropriate specs, because your oil changes are
| driven by additive depletion and oil contamination rather
| than breakdown of the oil itself.
| PinguTS wrote:
| What? Oil change every three month? WTF is wrong with the
| US industry?
|
| The very same cars in Europe will have an oil change
| every 2 years or so. My Volvo S60 Model 2000 has an oil
| change every 3 years.
|
| There must be something that you get sold on by marketing
| that is so wrong. BTW. Also a Tesla has oil in their
| gearbox, even if it is just a single gear integrated into
| the single unit combined with motor and inverter. For a
| Model S it is recommend to replace it every 12.5k miles,
| which is exactly the very same recommendation as with
| other car model.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm not in the US, but I have lived there and I did learn
| that frequency there. Like I mentioned in another thread,
| I worked as a service technician at Ford and that was the
| recommendation then (1990s).
|
| As for the Model S fluid change, thank you for mentioning
| it, I did not know that. I believe that there is no fluid
| change interval defined on the Model 3, which I just
| recently bought.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are many gasoline vehicles that specify no fluid
| changes for certain parts, infamously, transmissions.
| Longer lasting synthetic fluids allow them to advertise
| lower maintenance costs, but they still do wear out.
| They'd rather the transmission wears out after 150k miles
| anyway.
| criddell wrote:
| Volvo recommends an oil change every 16,000 km.
|
| Because everybody drives differently, mileage and time
| based recommendations aren't the best. Some places will
| offer to test your used motor oil during a change and
| will tell you if you waited too long or changed it to
| early.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Both my cars (late model, US spec, Honda and BMW) have
| oil change intervals "as indicated" OR every year,
| whichever is shorter.
|
| The "as indicated" ends up being around 8-10k miles in
| practice, with start/stop cycles, short trips, and other
| factors swinging it higher/lower.
|
| These days, we average <4k miles year per car, so use the
| annual interval.
| vel0city wrote:
| > For a Model S it is recommend to replace it every 12.5k
| miles
|
| There was a recommendation to change the gear oil
| previously, but newer versions of the S removed those.
| Even then I seem to recall it was _way_ longer than
| 12,500 miles.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-E95D
| AAD...
|
| Your vehicle should generally be serviced on an as-needed
| basis. However, Tesla recommends the following
| maintenance items and intervals, as applicable to your
| vehicle, to ensure continued reliability and efficiency
| of your Model S.
|
| Brake fluid health check every 2 years (replace if
| necessary). A/C desiccant bag replacement every 3 years.
| Cabin air filter replacement every 3 years. Clean and
| lubricate brake calipers every year or 12,500 miles
| (20,000 km) if in an area where roads are salted during
| winter Rotate tires every 6,250 miles (10,000 km) or if
| tread depth difference is 2/32 in (1.5 mm) or greater,
| whichever comes first
|
| Seeing as how the recommended cleaning and lubrication of
| the brakes is 12,500mi, I'm wondering if you heard that
| and got confused about the lubrication needs. As
| mentioned in their manual, this is really only
| recommended for places where they salt the roads in the
| winter. Since the brakes don't get used as much its even
| worse than a regular car with the corrosion. If you're
| not in a high road salt area, its not a problem.
|
| The recommended service interval on other EVs also have
| extremely extended oil change intervals. The service life
| of the Mach E's gear oil is 150,000mi and the coolant
| change is at 200,000mi.
|
| https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/Catalog/o
| wne... (warning: PDF document)
|
| If you're changing your EV's oil every 12,500 miles
| you're either doing it way too often, you bought a
| defective EV, or you should repair the leaks.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Without meaning to argue that it is necessary, it
| persists because it just isn't that big a cost. Gas isn't
| the largest cost of ownership and 5,000 miles of cheap US
| gas is still ~10x the cost of an oil change.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Even in Finland it is one oil change a year, and that
| includes proper winters...
|
| The price difference buys lot of maintenance. And gas...
| Retric wrote:
| The i10 is a rather low end car, but the upgrade could be
| worth it. Finland gas prices are 8.464 USD/gallon right
| now. That's unusually high but assuming 200k miles at say
| 35 mpg that adds up to 48,000 USD in gas over the
| lifetime of the vehicle.
|
| Not that electricity is free or that we have long term
| cost data, but I suspect the EV / plug in hybrid premium
| is a very easy choice in Finland.
| oblio wrote:
| I was curious so I did some math about this.
|
| The average car life in Finland seems to be 15.6 years
| (let's round that to 16, helping the case for EVs).
|
| The average distance traveled by Finnish cars, based on
| 2018 data, is about 13600km per year (let's make that
| 14000km per year, also helping the case for EVs).
|
| That works out to 224k km over the lifetime of a car.
| That's only 140k miles.
|
| Regarding your 35mpg (was 30mpg before the edit), that's
| 6.7l per 100km (7.8 before edit), let's make that 7l per
| 100km (and 8 before edit), further helping the case for
| EVs.
|
| But in reality a small car such as the i10 probably uses
| more like 5-5.5l per 100km (40-45mpg).
|
| Then the gas price is super high due to the Covid
| economic bounceback coupled with the supply chain issues
| plus the latest conflict.
|
| I'd say your numbers are too optimistic plus they're for
| the entire lifetime of the car. The average owner
| probably has the car for half that duration, at best. So
| they don't really care about the entire lifetime.
|
| Still, things seem to be getting closer than 10 years
| ago, for example.
|
| The really bad thing is the upfront price. There's no
| comparable EV in the i10 price range, which is a very
| cheap car (we're talking about a car around EUR12k).
| Retric wrote:
| I actually looked it up. 35 MPG is perhaps generous when
| their 2021 cars are averaging 30.9MPG, but it's a low
| sample size.
|
| https://www.fuelly.com/car/hyundai/grand_i10
|
| Finland imports a lot of used cars but: "An average car
| in the fleet 12.6 years of age" that suggest the car
| actually lasts to ~25.2 years. It's not that simple
| because again they are importing and exporting used cars.
|
| https://www.aut.fi/files/2524/Annual_statistics_of_car_ma
| rke...
| bluedino wrote:
| Many Americans drive 15k (9,000 miles) in 6 months
| pja wrote:
| For some reason people in the US are obsessed with
| changing the oil in their vehicle.
|
| Modern engines & oils don't need the oil changing every
| 3000 miles, but the folklore belief in the necessity of
| doing so rolls on unstoppably in the USA.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have both, two modern cars with services all 30k km and
| one from the 80s with motor oil changes every 5k, gearbox
| oil every 10k and axles every 10k as well. Not to mention
| that modern gearboxes and exles tend to be greased for
| life.
| city41 wrote:
| A factor is oil change shops still put a sticker on the
| windshield that says to come back in 3000 miles. It's of
| course in their interest for people to change their oil
| too often.
| JoachimSchipper wrote:
| Ehm, doesn't Tesla have famously bad quality control in
| several areas, e.g. fit of body panels? EVs, as a
| category, need less maintenance - but Tesla's are not an
| example of a trouble-free product!
|
| (They are legitimately cool though!)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Sure, the early Model 3's had body panel fit problems. I
| actually bought one last week, and the fit is amazing,
| both interior and exterior. I don't know why that point
| keeps coming up. For what it's worth, I used to be a tech
| at a Ford dealer, so I know what bad fitment looks like!
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Initial news always spreads further and faster than
| updates. This is normal and should have been expected by
| the company. They took the risk of rushing and get to
| suffer the consequences.
| kreddor wrote:
| Also, I've driven a Hyundai i10 for the last 10 years and
| it's been very reliable. Maybe because I don't drive that
| much to begin with, but still.
| Swizec wrote:
| Look up "Things seen this week during structural inspections!"
| on imgur. Some truly horrifying stuff from that person.
|
| For some of these foundations to still be standing and building
| occupants not to notice anything's wrong ... I can't even
| imagine how much safety factor is built-in. If we built
| software with those margins, nothing would ever ship.
|
| Here's a few: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0
|
| Sometimes they share pictures of foundations completely
| detached from anything. And it keeps working!
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I'm planning to buy a house in the next year or two. I would
| 100% hire this guy as the inspector if I knew who he was.
| Those photos are more effective than any marketing.
| bombcar wrote:
| You'll love
| https://structuretech.com/category/newconstruction/ them
| where issues are found at _new_ construction.
| ryanchants wrote:
| The imgur account name is the business name, Alpha
| Structural: https://www.yelp.com/biz/alpha-structural-los-
| angeles-8
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| For some reason I thought it was a throwaway account
| name. Thanks for pointing out the obvious!
| giantg2 wrote:
| Many of those things mentioned have changed very little in
| decades. Some have also been under continuous improvement for
| hundreds or thousands of years.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Which?
| throwaway111023 wrote:
| house foundations, water delivery off the top of my head,
| logistics in general possibly if I'm wanting to stretch the
| term.
| kortilla wrote:
| Foundations change (tensioned slab, etc) and water inside
| of houses (copper vs pvc vs PEX vs lead). Electrical is
| even in frequent flux under those timescales. Insulation
| as well.
|
| Very little stays consistent...
| giantg2 wrote:
| But the concept of water being fed through pipe, from a
| reservoir, chlorination, etc have been around a long
| time. Sure implementation details change, but they and
| the concepts they build off of have been around. You
| mention pvc, copper, and pex (lead is over 50 years old
| and many have been replaced). Those are just materials.
| How do they affect end user on a daily basis?
|
| How long has electrical be 120v AC? How long has auto
| voltage been 12v vs 5v?
|
| Details, materials, and implementation change (building
| off of prior versions), concepts and overarching system
| designs are slow to change.
| [deleted]
| emodendroket wrote:
| That feels like we're stretching the claim a whole lot.
| The "basic concept" of a Tesla isn't that different than
| a Model T but I think most people would reject the claim
| that cars haven't really changed much.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Road design and laws have mostly stayed the same in the
| past 50 years. How about controls (pedals, wheel, etc) -
| more or less the same as well (subject to regulations).
|
| There are similarities in your example. The fact that
| Tesla has autopilot and is an EV represent two of the
| biggest moves away from traditional car concepts. If you
| used an ICE car I would say the concepts haven't changed
| much.
| asdfaoeu wrote:
| I think that just shows that these things take time but the
| process does work.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's counterexamples for each of those though; just thinking
| of Flint, Michigan, or the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020.
| Also I had to replace a light switch in my shed the other day.
| servytor wrote:
| I read somewhere, and this guy was talking about how if you
| want your house to sell for more, invest in everything you
| physically touch. High quality doorknobs, faucets, and light
| switches have a marked impact on our unconscious valuation of a
| house.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think you put too much confidence in other engineering
| fields. They go wrong all the time (you might notice some when
| purchasing a house) and changes are extremely slow and
| expensive.
| isolli wrote:
| It reminds me of this anecdote (probably a joke):
|
| After the fall of the Soviet Union, UK experts flew in to help
| with the transition, and one of the apparatchiks asked: "We are
| eager to try this capitalism thing; now tell us: who is in
| charge of the daily delivery of bread to London?"
| Volrath89 wrote:
| As someone who writes software for a big grocery store chain in
| Germany I'm surprised the logistics work at all. It's a s*show
| inside once you know the details, but somehow, yes it kind of
| works well enough as for the customers to not even realize is
| there.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Check the deltas, the derivative. There exist long lists from
| personal experiences of things that worked very well and now
| are of comparatively terrible quality.
|
| The issue is then not just with the item, but with societies
| that are increasingly accepting low quality: this is a horrible
| trend, and one side of decadence. You get both, flanked: low
| quality here for the occasion and decadence around for the
| trend.
|
| The idea you say of some "distracted" ones "not realizing the
| failure potential" has a legitimate justification, beyond the
| simple inattentive, in those (inexperienced) that assume, for a
| number of reasons (especially including an internal healthy
| "mindset" of good standards), things are done properly. There
| is a line in a script for Scorsese that goes like: <<I'm the
| guy doing my job, you must be the other one>>.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Society has always been accepting of low quality cheap stuff.
| It's just that there's a ton more of it available now.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| No, it's not a matter of <<low-quality cheap>>:
|
| things that twenty, ten, five years ago were of high
| quality - same brand, update of same model - now you buy at
| a comparatively abysmal quality for a very similar price.
| It is today easy to find products which are cheap in
| manufacturing and expensive as a price tag.
|
| This means that, in some way, people in some/many societies
| are tolerating quality degradation. And a decrease of
| alternatives is contributing. That, in some areas, it was
| once not necessary to spend time investigating which
| product was high or just decent quality (already the price
| could have been a good indicator), while now it is part of
| your task, shows that tolerance for low quality has
| increased. That is not for the 1 dollar item, but for whole
| range up to many figures.
|
| And, a staggeringly increased inability to perceive
| degradation in general is evident today visiting some
| territories (and see what is tolerated now and was not
| before).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or they just take longish time to fail and then cause lot of
| issues.
|
| Foundations are such, 70s-80s had certain style which now has
| been found to lead to issues like mold if done even slightly
| imperfectly.
|
| Or water pipes from certain age that have already in 20-30s
| have started to leak, these being copper pipes...
| onion2k wrote:
| _These are all things that most people never notice because
| they just work._
|
| Taking the example of grocery store logistics, the number of
| times products are unavailable in my local store makes me thing
| that's a thing that doesn't "just work". It's something that
| breaks down regularly, and possibly has lots of people working
| hard to keep it from breaking even more often.
|
| The same is true for lots of things. Stuff like water delivery
| and silicon manufacturing doesn't break all the time because
| lots of people are fighting to make it work, and are actively
| maintaining it all the time.
|
| I think it's possible that most things don't "just work", and
| we're just fortunate that there are teams of people out there
| stopping us seeing the effects of all the failures.
| ksec wrote:
| As I wrote recently, [1]
|
| > And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech
| have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics
| works. Even distribution alone, within a single country (
| ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.
|
| Let me tell you supply chain and product availability in
| store ( especially grocery ) is still an unsolved problem.
| For a lot of different reasons and market dynamics. But
| mostly because grocery stores also have their own brand which
| compete with other products, and sharing sales data for
| better forecast is still a big no no. Compare to let say
| Smartphone, your average retail store will have zero chance
| completing with Apple or Samsung. So every time an iPhone is
| sold Apple knew instantly and can better manage their supply
| chain. Both domestic and international.
|
| If we didn't had COVID and Chip Shortage, most of the world
| still doesn't give any credit or importance to Supply Chain
| management. Even though it is the basic fabric of our
| society. And that is speaking with experience working with
| Fortune Global 500.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662680
| hef19898 wrote:
| That's no contradiction. Logistics and manufacturing works
| because people are spending their professional lives
| maintaining them. It's the outside that doesn't see these
| efforts, for them it "just works". Like electricity.
| orzig wrote:
| Are those people optimizing for having every product
| available at every time? They have to balance against the
| very real cost of spoilage, so I don't think they consider
| the occasional out-of-stock as the system breaking
| lozenge wrote:
| Yes they are. Product availability is the most important
| factor in choosing a grocery store, as unavailability makes
| people need to visit additional stores or change
| recipes/plans on the fly. Some spoilage is factored in and
| is just a minor bit of negative PR. However, the supply
| chain disruptions since 2020 are too big for any grocery
| chain to "solve".
|
| https://hbr.org/2004/05/stock-outs-cause-walkouts
| michaelt wrote:
| The answer is actually "It depends"
|
| For some products like pasta and canned tomatoes, you can
| hold enough stock to deal with a 99th-percentile day
| without any wastage at all; if it doesn't sell today,
| it'll sell tomorrow.
|
| But for those little packaged sushi snacks with a one-day
| shelf life? Any overstock is going in the trash at the
| end of the day.
|
| And sushi snacks mostly sell to workers on their lunch
| breaks. You'll see big fluctuations in demand if a nearby
| office changes their work-from-home policy, or has a big
| all-hands meeting that gets everyone in. Even the
| greatest demand modelling can't predict such things, as
| nearby office meetings aren't available as a model input.
|
| Some products are also easily more easily substitutable
| than others: If the 1kg pack of mid-priced spaghetti is
| out of stock, maybe I buy the low-priced brand, the
| premium brand, the 500g packet, the wholewheat version
| and so on.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Product availability is the most important factor in
| choosing a grocery store
|
| For many people, price is almost certainly at least as
| big a factor. Many, perhaps even most, people are willing
| to accept things being out of stock now and then for 10%
| lower prices.
| [deleted]
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| To be precise, that depends on the actual filesystem. But ext4
| works really well.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I don't have statistics at hand, but folks on the autism
| spectrum are more likely to be queer or otherwise gender non-
| conforming. So if there are more autistic people in tech this
| certainly makes sense.
| kingcharles wrote:
| That's interesting too. I can definitely see that from
| personal observances, but what is driving it?
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Decker87 wrote:
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Shhh men and women are exactly the same, have the same
| desires and strong points, men that decided at 25 that they
| are not men can magically become women, there should be a
| 50/50 split in prestigious jobs (but not construction or
| underwater welding), and if you disagree with any of the
| above you don't believe in equality and are practically a
| Nazi.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
| tiltwindmill wrote:
| Why programs terminate? Best things in life are free?
| cowpig wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you a reference for these statements? I'd be curious to read
| more about the topic.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Weak form efficiency - 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think it's pretty close to Ed Catmull's "Success Hides
| Problems".
|
| The underlying thesis being that market success is orthogonal
| to your internal company's state, inefficiencies included.
| solveit wrote:
| Sure, sure, you can encode difficult computational problems
| into markets in convoluted ways, but this is uninteresting
| unless you're into that kind of thing.
|
| When people usually say that markets aren't efficient, they
| don't mean that optimal resource allocation is a
| computationally intractable problem. They're saying that they
| see, clear as day, obvious inefficiencies that aren't being
| corrected. They're saying that there are easily noticeable
| inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. And finding easily
| noticeable inefficiencies isn't NP-hard, by definition of
| easily noticeable.
|
| A better version of the efficient market hypothesis would be
| that markets are _inexploitable_. There is no easy action I can
| take that corrects a market inefficiency and makes me money.
| This is the version that comes up in cocktail party
| conversations and it 's also the one that Dan Luu is talking
| about. "If XXX is systemically undervalued by the market, why
| can't I start a company that specialises in using XXX?" The
| discussion following this question is much more relevant and
| interesting than encoding 3SAT into economic models.
| munificent wrote:
| _> A better version of the efficient market hypothesis would
| be that markets are inexploitable._
|
| No, that's absolutely not true and relies on what I think is
| the most perniciously false assumption behind market
| economics: that all market participants only make moves
| _within the market itself_.
|
| If you're trying to win _at chess_ then learning to master
| the rules and strategy of chess is where you focus your
| attention. But if you 're trying to _defeat your opponent_
| (or _not_ get defeated _by them_ ), you'll probably do better
| to bring a gun and/or body armor. If you focus 100% of your
| attention on the chessboard, you are completely opening
| yourself up for exploitation by an opponent who is willing to
| play the metagame.
|
| And, indeed, in market economics, actors invariably _do_ play
| the metagame. This is why we get cabals, trusts, rent
| seeking, regulatory capture, monopolies, price fixing, price
| dumping, lobbying, etc.
|
| The ultimate goal of market actors is _not_ to be maximally
| efficient. It 's not even to win the market game. It's to
| make the most money. And often the best way to make the most
| money is to rig the game, cheat, or get the rules changed in
| your favor.
| chalst wrote:
| Inexploitability is not efficiency. Back in the 2000s, plenty
| of financiers knew the subprime market was overpricing assets
| for years before anyone figured out how to profitably short
| the market.
|
| Hard to deflate asset-price bubbles are a fact of finance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short
| DannyBee wrote:
| It's only uninteresting because economics refuses to be based
| on anything but the empirical (leading us into the situation
| we are in now), and so considers things like "math" to be
| mostly uninteresting "unless you are into that kind of
| thing". I looked at markets for a while, this is what i saw.
| Therefore, it's true.
|
| As I said, there is no reason those efficiencies should be
| easily correctable - because markets aren't efficient! That's
| the whole point. It's only in an efficient market that they
| _would_ be correctable. This is the same as lots of
| computational and other problems. Lots of instances are easy
| and heuristics can often work very well. But you will still
| come up with situations where obviously broken things happen
| and are hard to make algorithms work.
|
| It's sort of like having a cocktail party conversation about
| why you can't exceed the speed of light. Except because it's
| economics, you get stuck because there often isn't any real
| rigor behind it that you can push on. Just the empirical.
| Which I get why it's fun to talk about (really!) - without
| any meaningful rigor, anyone can participate and have fun -
| got a crazy empirical story? Awesome, that's all you need to
| _prove_ something in economics! It makes for fun discussions
| where most people can participate and feel like it 's not too
| hard.
|
| I have no issue with that - my issue is of course that the
| cocktail party is not distinguishable from the field ;)
|
| Beyond that, arguing they are inexploitable/unpredictable
| seems equivalent to whether they are efficient (and in most
| papers is considered equivalent to the efficiency
| hypothesis). I'm really unsure how you are trying to
| distinguish it. Maybe you could formulate it for real and
| show how it is not equivalent to the efficiency question?
| Jensson wrote:
| It isn't about market efficiency at all, people are just
| incompetent. If people could create good products they would
| and they would become rich, but they can't. If Samsung suddenly
| started delivering the same quality as Apple they would make a
| lot of money long term, everyone knows this and even if it
| isn't true the people who manage Samsung actually believes it
| and they try to get there. The reason they can't isn't that
| they aren't trying but that they don't have competent enough
| people to get it done. Leaders are a part of "people" btw, so
| if you say it is structural or organizational bloat, well you
| fix structural and organizational bloat issues by having
| competent leaders, so those problems are caused by lack of
| competent people.
| ElephantsMyAnus wrote:
| It's about what kind of competence is favored by the market -
| it favors people who can get funding, which is not
| necessarily related to the ability to get the job done.
| Tenoke wrote:
| The argument isn't about a specific company having the
| competency but that someone would and they would rise above.
|
| Also, more specifically - as a Samsung user for my
| preferences they offer as good or better products than Apple
| while operating on a smaller budget.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > having ever locked down was stupid, we were always going to
| end up with endemic covid
|
| COVID lock down/shelter in place orders were never intended to
| avoid endemic disease altogether. They were about slowing down
| its spread just enough that the healthcare system would remain
| functional while the disease became endemic. And they mostly
| worked OK for that.
| syntheweave wrote:
| One of the issues with how it was handled was the handwavy
| and contradictory information that many governments and
| public health czars circulated: that handwashing is most
| important, that masks are effective or not effective or only
| some kinds are, that the lockdown will be "two weeks to slow
| the spread" and so forth.
|
| It was the public health equivalent of "take two asprin and
| call in the morning". While there were successes for sure,
| clear and consistent communication was not among them.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| A lot of that came right from the top. In the UK we had a
| prime minister who said he was shaking peoples hands in
| hospital and attending his mothers birthday party to nearly
| dying within a couple of weeks.
| wavesquid wrote:
| They were in some countries.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a difference between "plumbing" software and "user"
| software. If photoshop or autocad become crap something _will_
| replace them (the pressure Dan talks about).
|
| But most enterprise software is plumbing - that you figure out
| how to use "well enough" and mostly leave it alone to do its
| thing. That software has little pressure and often ends up
| being basically bypassed.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The users of enterprise software are captive, they can't
| choose another solution or supplier without changing jobs.
| Mostly they hate it and IT in general which I think is at
| least partially the reason for the success of SaaS.
| bjarneh wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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".
| Tenoke wrote:
| 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.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Not because they are women though, but because they had
| trouble finding work somewhere else
|
| Because they were women?
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This argument is not going to end well on HN.
| Talinx wrote:
| 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.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Holy wall of text. I'm normally ok with these things but that
| site could use some CSS.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-15 23:02 UTC)