For me, what this post illustrates most is the cost of information. By making hasty decisions, buyers are trading present time that might be spent shopping and comparing with future time spent struggling with the wrong product. They're discounting future time. But they're also doing something very rational -- they're making a decision to see what happens. That is, they're testing a hypothesis in the only way the market allows them to. Because people are bad at predicting their own future needs and behavior, and products are bundles of features whose importance is often unknown until you have to use them in high-dimensional futures. So buying is an empirical test.

Unfortunately, most consumers, recruiters and sometimes hiring managers are in a position of information assymetry vis a vis the people selling them something. That is, consumers rely on the self-reporting of vendors which purport to be experts.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-expert-layman-problem

I never even look at stars. I hardly have any on my work, and that's fine with me. My stuff is of extremely high Quality, because I use it, myself. I'd actually prefer as few others as possible, use it, because then I'm Responsible to ensure that it works for them, and I can't just go in and do whatever I want.

I also use almost no software that has been written by others. I use two or three external dependencies, in my work. Two PHP ones, and one Swift one. All are ones that I could write, myself, if they got hit by a bus, but they do a great job on it, and, as long as they remain bus-free, I'm happy to use their stuff.

The one exception is an app that I just released, using SwiftUI. I needed an admin tool that displays simple bar charts of app usage data. I was going to write my own UIKit bar chart widget, but SwiftUI has a fairly effective library, so I figured I'd use it, and see how SwiftUI is doing, irt shipping apps.

I think that I'll avoid using SwiftUI for a while longer. It's still not ready, but it has come a long way, since my first abortive attempts at using it. The app works, but I did some customization, like pinch-to-zoom, and that's where SwiftUI kicks you in the 'nads. As long as you stay in your lane, things are sick easy, but start driving on the shoulder, and you are in for some misery.

And that's the biggest problem with relying on someone else's code. They usually punish you for any "off-label" use. Apple has always been like that, but they usually let you get away with it. I go "off-label" all the time, because I don't want my apps to look like Apple Settings App panels. SwiftUI doesn't suffer deviance at all. Just adding pinch-to-zoom was a bit of a misery (but I got it going, after several days of banging my head, and it now works fine). Some frameworks and libraries won't let you deviate at all. You can't have any pudding, if you don't eat yer meat.

>I've been dipping my toes into the JS ecosystem, and I keep bumping into the fact that using mentally cheap signals of quality (such as stars or DL counts) almost never indicates the quality of the thing itself. Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! The only way to assess is to read the code and try integrating it in.

I wish morep people understood the "Kardashian effect" as I like to call it -- the most popular thing is only most popular because it was already popular. I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

A year or two ago on HN I read a short blog post about omitting the word "best" from internet searches and being more specific in your criteria (e.g. "car with best resale value" instead of "best car"), and it has made my life and way of thinking a lot better

It makes me really appreciate tools that DO work. Things like: the Linux kernel, Vim, PostgreSQL, the Golang compiler, etc. Interestingly, the aforementioned tools come from different ecosystems, and levels of financial backing, but all of them have been reliable tools for me for many years, all are complex, and yes... they all have bugs, but of acceptable severity and manageability.

I've seen this same problem with many so-called low-code/no-code application creation tools (e.g. Betty Blocks). In their quest to cover every use case, they cover none of them well, forcing compromises and creating more real-code work for the actual application developers whose systems have to be accessed by these tools.

It would have been quicker and cheaper if the company just hired more actual developers to integrate properly with existing systems (and resulted in more featureful, less buggy applications), but the prospect of paying lower salaries for less qualified people to do the same end result (as promised by the slopware vendors) seems to be a siren song of sorts to management.

Many of the best engineers that I have worked with over the years have a discerning constitution which seems to innately allow them to identify high quality software, which is essentially a matter of taste.

The problem is that this disposition is not the norm for a technician, which is why I tend to prefer hiring and training engineers that are artistic, creative, and obsessive.

> Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost!

Winners are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.

RE: stars and DL counts, I'd say the best measure is checking the creator's other repos, their number of followers and the issue churn rate. Stars can be useful but only as a very rough process of elimination.

If the project appears to have several active contributors that would be good too.

The JS community has no sense of quality. The community doesn't value things that are well abstracted or work well. I dread every moment I have to work in JS because everything is so badly done.

It comes from an economic theory. The problem is that people who say that kind of thing ignore one of the basic assumptions of that theory: that all actors have all the necessary information to make the best choice (and also that they act "rationally"). The problem is that it is very rarely possible to obtain that information, and even if it is possible it might take a lot of time and effort.

It can be helpful to think of the Econ 101/homo economicus view of the world as something more akin to a secular religion.

And I don't mean that in a particularly bad way; most religions package a bunch of useful concepts (e.g., the golden rule) with some stuff that isn't literally true but does serve social and emotional needs in ways that the useful stuff gets passed down through the generations. As scholar Huston Smith put it, religion gives spirituality historical traction.

The notion that markets can drive efficiency is a valuable insight. But people for whom Econ 101 acts as a religion have a really hard time noticing when that effect gets swamped. This is pretty easy to spot these days because you'll find nominally pro-market people cheering oligopolies and monopolies, or getting upset at regulations that make markets more efficient. One easy test is how they feel about sustained high profits. To people who value markets for their ability to drive improvements through competition, that's a sign of something wrong, like insufficient price competition.

Relevant joke:

Two economists are walking down the street. One of them sees a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk. Just before he picks it up, his colleague says, "There's no money there. If there was, someone else would have picked it up already." Both agree this is the only rational conclusion and walk away.

Think about what it means to be a major inefficiency.

There's going to be some level of friction in the market that competitors must overcome to gain ground on you. If you're a factory, the friction is the cost of the factory plus the opportunity cost of the money used to build it. So any inefficiency less than that is effectively a safe level of inefficiency. Roughly.

We might be developers onsode large corporations witnessing insane amounts of inefficiency, but what are the costs of that next to its actual effect on the business in terms of its ability to fight competitors? Usually relatively small.

"It's so intuitively false that I'd have to wonder about someone who thinks it's true."

This is a wonderful encapsulation. Thank you.

It’s true to an extent, you just need a high threshold for “major.”

First, you have to remember to adjust for company size. You might see some obvious inefficiency that costs millions of dollars, but when the company has twelve figures in annual revenue, that’s insignificant.

We all know (probably work at) some company that tries to save money by skimping on hardware for their developers. Some simple upgrades would probably pay for themselves in a few weeks in increased productivity. But what’s the cost, maybe 10% in developer productivity? That’s a lot, but it’s probably not close to make-or-break.

It’s definitely true at the extreme, and it’s a major difference between government programs and private enterprise: a business can’t go on losing money forever.

In less extreme situations, it’ll be true when the cost of the inefficiency exceeds the company’s moat. Oracle can afford to be tremendously inefficient since they have a certain segment of the enterprise database market so locked up. But if they push it too far, they’ll get eaten alive by some upstart.

I think that most of the people arguing the position do so in bad faith.

They know it's an oversimplification to the point of absurdity, but they want to bog their opponents down in explaining why it's an absurdity, and/or catch them in a minor lack of rigor which can be used to refute every other point they've made, and/or be able to retort with red-baiting along the lines of "why don't you believe markets work? Are you a commie?" It's about controlling the topic of conversation, rather than coming to a mutual understanding about the way the world works.

Efficient markets enforce efficiency. The trouble is that purely efficient markets are very much a spherical cow—they're useful for modeling reality in some simple simulations, but they miss an awful lot of detail and that can lead to very bad conclusions if you take them too seriously.

It's easy to see the bad stuff. The good stuff just disappears into the background. So, it's probably mostly true that major inefficiencies in products/services get arbed away.

It's sort of like the efficient market hypothesis in the stock market - spend enough time in it and you'll see the vast majority of the time the vast majority of stocks are not mispriced to any meaningful level. But it stands out like crazy when you see one and you remember it.

Religious dogma says X and you observe not-X. It’s easier to build up elaborate theories to explain your observation than to question your dogma (see epicycles, politics, etc)

Yeah, there are counter examples everywhere. Actually I think they are way more than the positive examples (like SpaceX), so the world is definitely very, very inefficient. This can be felt by software engineers more acutely because we move fast and hate bureaucracies but sadly humans have to install bureaucracy for itself.

Theories are marketed too.

Intriguing. Does there exist some website that contains curated examples of such things? I realize that my living space is bereft of beauty, and I already struggle to find “thoughtfully designed and aesthetically pleasing” objects. For instance, I’ve held off on buying quality kitchenware for nearly a decade now due to a paradoxical combination of too many choices and lack of discoverability.

If this kind of thing interests you, you might also like John Dewey's Art as Experience. It is among Paul Rand's favorite books, but be warned it is quite dense!

I often find there’s a connection between a thing being aesthetically beautiful and good functioning as well. It’s not a universal signal - cheap knock-off manufacturing makes it hard to tell from pictures - but often I find a genuinely beautiful object, one in which the design displays clear attention to detail, exhibits that same attention to detail in the use.

Again, it’s not a universal signal, but good, and particularly well-executed design, can often be a signal the maker put the same attention to detail into how the device works and its internals.

> I'm going to get a trimmer, so I want a thoughtfully designed and well made version of that.

Human fingers. Just pull the nose hairs out.

> I'm going to get a trimmer, so I want a thoughtfully designed and well made version of that. This has been my mission around my home since the start of the COVID pandemic. Upgrade all the little things around my home that annoy me or that would make my day a little bit better if they were upgraded.

The problem I have is that many things don't have a well made or thoughtfully designed version. They just have a more expensive version.

There's nothing more disappoint then spending good money on a "quality" product only to have it fall apart as fast or faster than a cheap version.

This is where the value of a second or third opinion can become apparent.

Particularly interesting that quality seems to be dropping in an age where reviews are easier to find than ever.

But there has always been an inherent conflict of interest in the place selling the wares (e.g. Amazon) also being the place hosting the reviews. Similarly for AirBNB - it cannot tolerate all of its own hosts being 2 stars.

The world has become a very complex place. Every single thing from houses to cars to medical services is provided by a team of people with years of training in some esoteric field.

Buyers are going to have a difficult time, and it can only continue to get worse.

Yeah, We don't really have the knowledge to ask intelligent questions. I did take some accounting classes so I can have some intelligent discussion with my accountant, but the regulation changes every year so it's difficult to keep up. Even if the accountant misses something, that's quite possible.

I mean, two of my previous companies messed up with payroll and many thousands were impacted.

> Same with say dentist.

Now you're dealing with a person, not a product. And in that case you have to follow your intuition, your gut feeling, regarding whether this individual is somebody to trust. There is no way around this.

The front page (danluu.com) has MM/YY on every post, at least.

His stuff is usually quite interesting, but in dire need of an editor. I often get lost in the details and tangents of the piece and lose the point.

Part of the challenge is how wide his text column is. It makes the lines hard to scan; your eye can't fall on a line just once or twice to scan it, but must keep falling, which makes the text feel more tedious. Easily fixed by narrowing the browser window, of course.

Agreed - the edge-to-edge text can seem daunting and be a bit of a pain to read, depending on your display. I used reader mode to make it a bit more managable. Also worth noting the last ~30% of the page is two appendixes.

I think the article is worth a read, but doesn't necessarily introduce a new concept. Its basically stating that there are many broken products that you can buy, and they simply do not work. Typical wisdom says you should buy something you're not specifically good at building, or something that you're not "supposed to" build yourself because you specialize in something else. This article basically says that wisdom can be wrong and that there is value in building yourself. There are some good examples, but its definitely a position that you'd have to push to management at some companies because its a very bottom up position that many managers would not agree with.

>I am so interested in this submission (based on the title), but that's such a big wall of text, even the LOTR trilogy looks more manageable

I came here before clicking the link and was all set to be like "just read it" but it really does seem designed to be as unreadable as possible, both the layout and colors and the writing itself. I'm sure he's probably writing for an existing audience, but even the writing doesn't seem to be design to draw the reader in or be particularly accessible for people who aren't already primed to read it.

Yes it's worth it. Dan Luu has always been worth to read whenever I read it.

But I get it. I too have the Instagram disease and balk at long walls of text. It's just that we do need to fight that...

I respect committing to zero formatting but just one "max-width: 600px" would make this so much easier to read.

It's not long. Excluding the footnotes, it's ~5000 words, a 10-20 minute read.

Complex ideas are inherently hard to read. If you shy away from anything that's complex, you're just limiting yourself to consuming only the most simplistic thought.

Case in point: the LotR trilogy is an absurdly low bar for manageability. Literally millions of people have read those books. There are certainly different levels of comprehension, but I'd venture most people who read these books were able to at least follow the plot well enough to be entertained by it. I read them when I was maybe 12, and that's not me claiming to be some sort of prodigy--they are very easy to read. If that level of reading is unapproachable to you, I would suggest that's a problem with you that you would benefit from working on.

The original link is a bit dry but otherwise not a challenging read.

Dan's website is the only one where I have to use Safari's Reader mode

this dude's MO is long ass essays

I've read about 50% and really like it so far.

Also, limiting width and centering text from JS console greatly improved the readability:

  $('main').style.width = '600px';
  $('main').style.margin = '0 auto';

upvotes tell you that people find it useful. we have ai now to effectively summarize the text if you want to avoid reading the whole thing.

this is a solved problem

Firefox Reader mode makes it much nicer to read. The quality of the actual article is somewhat "meh", passed the time but nothing surprising or that interesting.

It's quite good, I used my browser's "Reader Mode" to be able to read it though.

I can't read it because he made the website unreadable. Kind of interesting considering his subject matter.

It's on the front page with a little over 100 votes. Up votes are basically saying it's worth it...

If it wasn't worth reading it wouldn't have been up voted

Reader mode.

I mean, yes? It certainly beats reading social media posts and outlines particular instantiations of a cultural blindspot.

AI-summarize that shit!

Only skimmed it...but yeah, not worth reading. Unless you're one of today's 10K, it's mostly obvious stuff. And if there's any real structure or "big picture" to the article, I couldn't spot it.

You could dump it into an LLM and ask for a summary.

I gave it to gemini 2 and asked for a bullet point summary. People don't like this, but it got me through meat of the article in 2 minutes.

The other advantage to buying used is you avoid cradle-death along with the discount. Then, if it works great, you might consider buying that one new when the time comes.

Another big benefit of these older devices is customizability and repairability. I am working to refurbish an MPC1000 right now (drum machine) and the fact that it is repairable at all was a big factor in choosing to sell a newer, nicer device in favor of an older one that wasn't fully working.

Not everything can be treated that way, like a phone or a laptop I would prefer to be no more than 5 years old. But so many things don't need to be terribly modern in order to work well.

How different does that work out from just taking the first few results in the storefront or from a generic product search?

The problem is the esoteric domain knowledge that things like consumerreports doesn't catch - for example, the way they rank cars has lots to do with minor problems detected after buying a new one, but most people just want to know "if I buy this, will it just work without thought for ten years" and that's much harder to know without waiting ten years.

And with things like toilets you may get them ranked based on how well they flush golf balls (even though nobody shits golfballs, if you do you have other problems).

And plumbers might rank them on installability, ease of repair, etc, when all you want is one that works and keeps working and doesn't ever back up. https://terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm has to be read with an eye to that.

The main thing that review searching and research can find is things to avoid - it's much harder to have it find things you should seek out.

The thing is, how do you know which research is good or not? Is trusting a website good enough? I really doubt. BTW I do agree that we need to do some research beforehand, but with a lot of products it's difficult or impossible.

Fools aren't the only one buying without research, else advertising and marketing wouldn't exisit. The average consumer's inability to fairly compare products is key in the current economy.

The average life of a consumer good anymore is sometimes measured in months. By the time you know the compressor on a particular fridge model is junk that model is no longer sold.

I have found with the exception of very expensive brands, 20k dollar fridges etc. they are all junk and paying more just gets you useless features like wifi connectivity or a tablet in the door that will be part of a botnet in 3 months.

Once you realize that a metric the employee is tracked on is "on time delivery" and he has a button he can press that makes it report he did it right, you realize the incentives.

It starts by slipping a bit, and then more and more ...

Amazon et al are fighting back by requiring a photo on delivery now, but that has it's own limitations.

I feel exactly the opposite. It's somewhat ironic as well, because socially I have and have had a reputation as someone who is both 'gadget obsessed' and 'bougie', but I don't think you can really be both. I have much much less 'stuff' than almost anyone I know, but almost everything I own I spent at least a few months researching before buying it and I plan to keep it as long as possible (and repair it if possible when it breaks). As a tech guy, the most obvious place this exists is in my desk setup, which currently (laptop and USB chargers not included) has an average age of around 5 years for everything on it. The oldest item I acquired 12 years ago and have no intention to ever replace if possible. The newest item was acquired as part of a move 2 years ago and pulls the average down.

It's a constant struggle though, because even when I find something of high quality (recently pants and shirts), this doesn't prevent the company from discontinuing the product or changing it. I've had to since switch pants and shirts, and rotate my wardrobe because of button and zipper failures on a brand I previously relied on heavily and recommended to others. They likely made this choice as a company to cut materials costs to not move their price point, but I would have happily absorbed a 20-30% price increase to maintain quality and not need to spend another 3 months figuring out which pants to start buying. Instead, they've lost a customer entirely that previously directed them additional customers. I wish consistency of quality was more of a thing, so even when you find something you always have to keep an eye on it.

I'm not sure that belongs as a bullet point in an article about things working well. A lot of products built with planned obsolescence in mind work very well, until they don't.

For many products I think it's incorrect to say they're designed to stop working after a maximum duration. That would be a very expensive thing to actually design and implement. You can test a component and understand its MTBF but it's much harder to design a "die after X days" without explicitly putting in way fuses that a burnt after some counter expires.

Instead it's more accurate to realize things are made to survive at least a minimum period of time. Components get engineered such their MTBF is longer than some mandated warranty period.

While it seems like only a semantic difference I've found thinking this way really helps me price things. If you look at an item and assume it's been engineered to have a MTBF just a bit longer than its warranty/support period you can calculate its amortized price, including an evaluation of extended warranties or service contracts.

This is instead of assuming I can buy something and it will last a decade. If something lasts me longer than my estimate that's awesome and I'll likely favor that brand on my next purchase.

>a LOT of things work better than they do in the West, not because of monetary incentives, but because things are simply done differently here, and some things are done better.

I'm not totally convinced though, because a lot of times when you investigate these "simply works better" claims, it's because the end users, either through culture or training, have been taught to accept bad service and not complain about it, which glosses over a lot of the real problems with some of these systems that we're told work better.

The first thing I did when I loaded this page was add 3 css rules (margin, line height, font size). Like I get purity, but c'mon.

there were a few good points at the bottom, but it could have all been summarized in a tweet

No, the reason is because there are different tradeoffs, and things that work well often trade off other things.

For instance, Dan is one of the best writers for illustrating a general point with dozens of rapid fire small examples. This gives the point credibility in a way that a writer who might craft an easier-to-digest narrative doesn't have, but can be tiresome for those don't like the style.

On the other hand, you can set read mode, and because the page is so basic, it works perfectly...

Yes, and then they throw it out 2 years later and buy a new one.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

How do I know the $130 version is any better? Formally good brands have been cost cut to death and can be just as bad or worse as the cheap version. Only difference is the manufacturer collects a higher margin on the perceived product superiority.

There was a time where you knew a Craftsman tool was worth a premium price.

Expands beyond that really, people assume they need more than they do.

A TV stuffed with features sounds great even if they'd prefer a TV that does the bare minimum but takes less than a minute to start up

An SUV because of the one time every year or two where they may need a bigger vehicle (and would be better off renting a van)

A smartphone they can't use with one hand that doesn't fit in their pocket

If only $130 thing is better made, not with better marketing!

You never know if more pricey thing is actually better and will last more. It can have a feeling to last more, but not the actual quality.

Nowadays almost everything is a crap with fake positive reviews.

but is that true? you're standing in target, looking at air fryers. they're all priced differently. how do you know which is the good one? is it really the more expensive one? highly doubt it. and it's the same almost with everything now. price carries a very low signal.

Sometimes the $130 thing is not better.

Take barbecue gloves. Yes, you can buy all sorts of varieties. Pitt Boss, Crate and Barrel, and others sell gloves in the $30 range. These gloves have enough heat resistance that you can pull a steel handled pan right out of the oven.

Know what works even better and is more durable for half the cost? Welding gloves. You can buy gloves rated to over 1K Fahrenheit for less than $20. Now you've cut your cost but also have the added ability if you wish to rearrange burning coals BY HAND.

I think that one of the things we do in this consumerist society is to buy things that look good instead of things that are functional. You aren't going to find much tupperware in a professional kitchen. What you WILL find are Cambro containers, heating dishes, and a variety of generic food storage containers. They are cooking their food in heavy walled pots and stainless steel pans with metal implements. Most people could throw out about 80% of their cooking pots and pans and never miss any of them. At least baking vessels are far more task-dependent.

Is a Le Creuset dutch oven pretty? Sure. Is it functionally better than a generic cast iron dutch oven? No. And of the two, the cast iron dutch oven is the one where you can buy once and have your great-great grandkids fight about who gets to keep it, because the Le Creuset will almost certainly have developed defects in the ceramic by then. On the flip side, a $300 refurbished Vitamix will beat the pants off of any off-the-shelf blender and last longer, too. But then, that's a professional product.

Then explain luxury goods?

PS can we please discourage windbags

Best can opener is the classic Danish style. No moving parts at all, basically indestructible.

https://img1.etsystatic.com/169/1/10660606/il_570xN.12216186...

> The one that works is a copy of a 60 year old model.

This, we were going through one every 6-months or so, I finally bought the swing-a-way clone, the ez-duz-it for like $30 thanks to the /r/buyitforlife sub-reddit and it's been going strong for several years now.

It will undoubtedly make it worse. Products don't work well because of the lack of understanding and time spent on the products. "AI" only widens the gap and increases lack of understanding.

Two years ago, this comment would have asked whether Blockchain will change this.

I wonder what it'll say two years from now.

I mean, maybe? Why can’t you tell us? Any opinion on it?

Sorry about the metacommentary but it’s a bit tiring with every third thread having the same stock question: Is this made irrelevant by AI?/Does AI [magically] solve this problem?

They all at the same time strongly hint that yes, AI will <panacea>. But they still don’t take any stance or make any contribution themselves!