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.

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).

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

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.

It's looks like this is mostly a case of adverse selection. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Weird that this article makes no mention of the law of lemons. Information asymmetry between buyer and seller is well studied.

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.

It requires a lot of testing-feedback-correction iterations. This is expensive no matter how it’s done.

Could be the proliferation of Minimum Viable Products taking their toll and having their influence.

This site would be much nicer to read with some max-width applied. Maybe a nicer font.

Can someone remind me what the CSS is to make the site readable please?

Why is it hard to find websites that limit the content width?

Why programs terminate? Best things in life are free?

It's not profitable.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit

Annotated article: https://smort.io/feb48ca0-d996-486e-af55-d232a54e1553

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.

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?

>black micro-text blocks of tl; dr spanning the entire width of the page

0/10 web design, didn't read.

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.

This article is amazing. I'll probably read it again twice. Its ambition is sprawling (is it a takedown of capitalism, or a takedown of American culture, no it's both!) and it's somehow successful. I get this is a superfluous comment, but goddamn.

Six Sigma.

Nokia.

> Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

Asks someone that posts a giant wall of unreadable text.

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.

Looks good on my phone. I guess not all writers are poets.

What did you think of the content of what they said?

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.

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.

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.

In Firefox press F9

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 :)

You know you can make your window narrower than 4000px, right?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

> 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

Holy wall of text. I'm normally ok with these things but that site could use some CSS.

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 :)

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

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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... or things that work at all? (eg humidifiers, at various price points, maybe 40% of which are even functional when first unboxed)

So i guess some of the reasons are:

1. Inability for the buyer to assess quality:

  1.1 Lack of buyers' expertise (tfa goes into this a lot)

  1.2 Long timescale to assess quality:

that is, a lot of types of 'poor quality' aren't apparent until long after the sale; so even if you polled every buyer once a week, if sales were growing, the unhappy poll results due to poor quality would be overshadowed by the happy poll results from new buyers

  1.3 Dishonest reviews:

even if buyers are able to assess quality after the fact, it's hard for old buyers to communicate this to potential buyers due to honest reviews being buried in dishonest reviews

2. Peter principal (experts are promoted, so at any one time most of the people doing a job haven't achieved mastery):

This is especially a problem for services, where someone who has achieved mastery at providing the service can make more money by becoming a manager. For example, in business consulting or in construction, often there is a person with a lot of experience at the top but the people actually doing the work don't have a lot of experience.

3. Market won't pay for quality:

Even if buyers can tell that one product/service is of higher quality than another, often they would choose the cheaper one over the high quality one, either because the product/service at issue just isn't that important to them relative to the money they could save, or because they have a hard budgetary constraint and they are forced to compromise somewhere.

4. Cultural factors: Some people report that, for example, quality in the U.S. seems to tend to be worse than quality in Germany or Japan. If this is real, i don't know what it is specifically about US/German/Japanese culture (or workplace culture/structure) that causes this.

Living in a low and deteriorating trust society has many non obvious knock on effects that are hard to see from the inside.

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.

This article is long but excellent. It is something of a rant rather than an article. Still excellent.

Good luck reading an article with lines that span the entire 2560px of the width of my screen.

> 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!

> 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...

>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.

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.

> 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.

Dunno which it's more of, tragic or hilarious -- probably both, about fifty-fifty -- how they usually don't realise that they're just as stuck with their SaaS supplier.

Yeah, but those are functional limitations, not failure to function.

You don't really need to. It will keep working regardless, just toss some salt in the water.

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.

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.

What were you expecting? They can't fundamentally change what happens when you leave things wet for hours.

not the problem you're trying to solve but there's an additive called "humidifier bacteriostatic treatment" that could help with the smell

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.

I wonder if the old 10% hydrogen peroxide trick would fix that.

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

Productizing every operation is critical to how Amazon became a $trillion company.

That's interesting too. I can definitely see that from personal observances, but what is driving it?

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.

How profitable do you think it is to make special non-regulatory-compliant faucets and light switches just for the Alabama market? Probably not very, so manufacturers just sell the same regulations-proof equipment there that they sell to the rest of the US. In effect, you're freeloading on the regulatory work of non-Alabamians.

Enjoy your working non-lethal infrastructure, parasite.

A) Have you really been everywhere to check?

B) There are regulations almost everywhere (especially, almost everywhere that has a profitable market to sell into), so it's probably easiest to just sell regulation-compliant equipment in the rest of them, too.

So it's not at all "preposterous" that the regulations actually work even in most places where they're not legally in force, and that you've just not noticed the few where they don't.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

In Marketing/Outreach, we're encouraged to write at a 9-10 year old reading level.

Twelve percent?? That is scary.

This explains so much about our ambient media environment and misinformation.

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.

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.

My Aeron is 10 years old. It literally is as good as the day it was delivered and I use it every day.

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 :(

> 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.

Rarely using a tool risks it rusting/rotting/obsoleting on the shelf, and if it is expensive you are paying a lot of depreciation. You buy a chraler consumer version that breaks, or an expensive professional model that depreciates. The time share model makes sense.

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.

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.

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

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.

> This is the Sam Vimes economic theory.

I consciously adopted the "poor young constable Vimes" strategy for footwear last year. I like, and would probably prefer, quality shoes -- but it's such a crapshoot what those are nowadays that I just can't be bothered to buy a pig in a poke yet again. I mean, brands that used to be OK when I was younger... Mostly aren't any more.

So last year when Lidl had trainers for sale at 30 € (or was it 20? 25? 15?) I bought five pairs. Still on the first ones, so definitely financially ahead -- "better" brands haven't lasted any longer than that in my recent experience.

> 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.

Which is a very good way to cut down the money spend on things.

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

Well we also ended up with BTRFS raid5/6

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.

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).

File systems are very expensive. Not up front, but instead on failure. Bad/cheap file systems don't last long.

The imgur account name is the business name, Alpha Structural: https://www.yelp.com/biz/alpha-structural-los-angeles-8

You’ll love https://structuretech.com/category/newconstruction/ them where issues are found at new construction.

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.

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.

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?

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. ;)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

That's also seen as survival bias!

Then couldn't you reframe things to include the entirety of human civilization as a kind of market, and still show that there are unexploitable inefficiencies?

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).

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.

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.

house foundations, water delivery off the top of my head, logistics in general possibly if I'm wanting to stretch the term.

> 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!

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I don't even know how I would identify a good toaster to buy, nowadays. Electric kettles are a problem, too.

I imagine that makes the slow Denise of Sears/Craftsman particularly unfortunate then.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Past performance is unfortunately not a safe marker for future performance.

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

Maybe a good move, as we will be facing resource problems sooner than we like?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

They can do it with your exact rice cooker, no problem.

I grew up with Zojirushi rice cookers. They always worked. The last one I bought sputtered starch water all over the counter. Stuff you can buy in the US today is not the same as what we could buy even 20 years ago.

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.

  > 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.

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.

I'm curious about it, but let's see how far the uptake goes.

Where are you located?

Don't get me started on transmissions! A failing transmission the month after a Model 3 test drive / joy ride is what really pushed me into making the jump to electric.

Thank you for the advice, I will research the service intervals on the Tesla.