Hacker News Reader

Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

I like the concept but since it's open to the public it will suffer from ignorance.

For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they're good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.

The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It's a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn't full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.

This is a common issue with "BIFL" discussions. People overrate something because they don't understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn't repairable, or they don't have experience with a higher quality item.

Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?

View on HN

Op can't avoid this problem if following the reviews-masquerading-as-affiliate-marketing pattern.

What's needed is to turn it all upside down: rather than reviewing new products, review broken products.

Make a site about how things break -- review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that haven't broken, and look at why they haven't.

Repairability also comes to mind. Everything breaks eventually -- can't cheat entropy -- but when it does, can you easily repair it? Right-to-repair movement would get in on the action.

I like that idea. Include a spot for "how do I fix it" or "repair guide".

Damn, I love this! Sort of a crowd-sourced ifixit for anything broken. It would be hard as hell to get good content, but if you could I think it would be gold.

It would be so hard to maintain repair guides with how frequently products update these days. Everything from vacuums to laptops to shoes go through frequent enough revisions that guides might be invalidated often.

I went to repair my vacuum last month and discovered most of the guides out there cover an revision which uses a totally different latching mechanism for the door to my intake filter. The doors look identical, but the internal latch works differently. Overall that would have been fine, but I got blocked on the door part because the procedure didn't work and I assumed I was going to break it if I tried something else, haha. Turned out I just needed to push in and slide down.

It’s be great to tackle for smartphones. And an experienced repair shop tech could probably write it all!

Ifixit actually has a pretty stellar site for most common phones - at least, every phone I’ve owned so far.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide

I’m realizing now that they’ve actually got way more content than I thought. It isn’t review format, but they rate how difficult different components are to repair on most items which is a step towards what I want.

Weird that I thought they only did phones/tablets/computers.

Funny you call out the Fibrox. I don't think full-tang is a prerequisite for BIFL. Why? Because I have my grandmother's kitchen knife from Ireland from the 1910's and it isn't full tang and is still a workhorse despite having the handle replaced sometime in the 70's.

So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?

For this existential dilemma, it would be helpful if the top DIMENSIONS of quality were explored. In this case with a knife: tang, bolster, handle material, riveting, metal type, hardness, grind angle, etc are all variables that have either a PREFERENCE scale or a DURABILITY scale. I don't think a simple NoSQL-comment-style database is sufficient to define what elements need to be considered to rank a product as high quality vs. low quality.

You must know about AvE's YouTube channel, yes? He's an engineer who deeply understands metallurgy and machining and industrial design, so he can explore these vectors of quality for power tools:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA

This kind of professional analysis is needed FIRST, to determine what the key metrics are. Then the rating system should grade based on this, rather than 5-stars.

Five star reviews are dead. Long live multiple variables!

That would be great but also very time consuming to do and manage.

> So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?

Objective vs subjective is something that's hard to overcome without a complex system like you suggest. I agree it's at the heart of the problem I described and I don't know if there's a practical solution, especially for a side project.

Another thing is product revisions. Version 1 might be an actual BIFL product. Version 2 might have a small yet significant revision impacting quality. Even process revisions like offloading part of the manufacturing process or a different part supplier can impact the longevity of a product.

...or be bought by a private equity firm with a spreadsheet that says the craft-built premium reputation can be gutted and slapped onto cheaply-made versions for x years before the market notices the shift but by then enough profit will have been extracted that acquiring and gutting the brand will have made net positive financial returns.

There's a famous story that I believe Henry Ford scavenged junk yards for broken Model T's. Every time he found one, he recorded what was broken. After finding enough of them, he figured out the part that was never broken was something like the front axle assembly. So he went to his axle engineers, told them they built it too strong, and find ways to cut costs.

I sold computers and computer accessories at a big box store, and there was an HP rep that would sometimes hang out in the printer aisle to answer questions and evangelize HP printers. I remember he told me a story of how, when HP printers were built really solidly, the CEO had a meeting where he demonstrated this by standing on the printer, and it didn't budge. The takeaway to this wasn't, "Hey, we make a great product. Look at this!" It was, "Hey, we make too durable of a product. We should cut costs because this is costing too much!"

Not to nitpick, and I dont know those boots in particular, but the wildfire hiking boots owned by myself and friends have glued soles and local cobbler has resoled at least a couple pairs.

Your overall point, however, is important. I find reviews of outdoors gear (even professional reviews) especially tilted toward light-use buyers, which is frustrating.

That's interesting. I didn't realize there were cobblers who resoled glued hiking boots. I guess it depends on the sole being available for purchase?

It’s a very common practice for climbing shoes, whether for mountaineering

https://www.scarpa.com/mountaineering

or rock climbing

https://www.lasportiva.com/en/man/footwear/climbing

The former cost in the ball park of 200 USD to resole, the latter about 30 USD. Unfortunately, I don’t think sneakers, running or approach shoes can be resoled.

"BIFL" footwear; genuinely curious, does such a product even exist?

https://nicksboots.com/ or something similar — if you get footwear that's handmade and custom, it can last you for 20-30 years which is enough to warrant the BIFL tag in my book.

But pretty much anything off-the-shelf I would have to see some extraordinary evidence.

You raise a good point, which makes this even harder to do right. What is the "life" of a particular product? Sure I could buy a pair of hiking boots that would last me for my literal lifetime, except that I'm already 50, and I "hike" a short public trail about once a year.

My dad, however, always carries a pocket knife (for fishing purposes), and I've seen them get so much wear, the inside of the blade starts getting worn away from being sharpened so often. What's a "lifetime" for someone who sharpens a knife every other week? That's going to wear out even a "BIFL" pocket knife much sooner than "life" would lead you to believe.

There needs to be a way to incorporate the duty cycle of the thing being reviewed, and length of time owned, but then you're just back to the problem of people gaming a review system, and the commercial internet has ruined everything.

Older Dr Martens were said to be virtually indestructible (at least according to some older friends of mine).

Dr Martens also had, at some point, sold a "for life" line that came with an extensive guarantee:

> The guarantee covers the failure of any component, such as upper leather, stitched seams, eyelets, soles, welts, linings and reinforcements which has been subjected to normal wear and tear from non-industrial abuse and not unreasonably abused. The guarantee will be active from the day on which the original owner activates their guarantee, to the end of that person's natural life.

I have had Red Wings last for a decade+ without showing any signs of letting up, beyond re-soling from time to time. And I wear them every day.

You could certainly buy Danner's for life. https://www.danner.com/boot-recrafting

https://en.trippen.com/products/derby-m

I have had several of these that I still wear after 20 years. They have been refurbished.

You can certainly buy shoes that will last for decades, if you're diligent with maintenance.

BUT, you're still going to need (probably) multiple resoles, patching, and what not.

Take a look at the shoes Prince Charles is wearing - they're bespoke shoes from the 50s.

But you need to ask yourself - at what point do you just scrap them, and buy a new pair?

Some people love the vintage "relic" look - but every resole and patching is going to cost you money. Purchasing a pair of $1000 shoes, and then spending $1000-$2000 on maintenance the next 50 years will make sense for some, but not for others.

I personally, would much rather just buy a new pair of $500-$1000 shoes every 10-15 years, and discard the old ones when they start to look too shabby.

I live my guitars old and reliced, but shoes ? No thanks. When / if my shoes need patching, I'm throwing them.

I like the BIFL concept.

The problem is I find BIFL communities often can't distinguish between just more expensive, or rando add on features / durability ... from actual utility / quality.

I feel like the website needs a way to enter how long the person has owned the product and if it was light/heavy use.

The ratings could then be weighted by that.

Years of ownership and frequency of usage are fields in the product submission form. It's not yet included in the rating itself, but that's definitely the plan.

Similar to floatrock's proposol [1] of turning reviews upside down... Imagine being able to track broken-ness (when, how, why) in the field across all products of the same model. And doing so for each product you own. "Default reviews" [2] is one way to do it. Pull requests welcome.

1 upside down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710832

2 default reviews - https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...

Yeah, BIFL takes a while to sink in as a concept for a good chunk of people. Lots still think it’s just buying a high quality product and don’t consider that it’s about lifetime longevity.

I think a lot of the BIFL folks out there find it really hard to distinguish between 'oh it has better materials' and 'lifetime longevity'. They're not the same... and they fall for a lot of luxury brands that just look nice / provide some sense of better workmanship / materials, but reality doesn't match up.

"how long have you owned the product" Sort by oldest?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com