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Comment by gerash | Hacker News Reader

Your extension sounds cool but what I'd love is a system to suggest if I should go premium or cheap on an expense.

For example I'd go super cheap on wired earbuds but premium on a set of knives. Or super cheap on knives but premium on an electric knife sharpener

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My (highly imperfect) solution to that problem is usually to go find the niche internet forum/subreddit for whatever thing I'm looking to buy and try to see what people there are interested in in my price range.

I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs.

Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.

> Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.

Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.

Same here. Seems like there's a subreddit for just about everything (for instance, I consulted r/backpacks recently). Good advice, but unreliable in terms of finding an active community.

you want to look at /r/onebag

Now that has some potential to cause pain to my wallet. Gonna have to force myself to forget about it now...

Same, although I'm starting to suspect that companies have started to catch on to this trick over the last few months, sadly

It says a lot that so much of the "genuine" opinions on products are all siloed in Reddit. They call themselves "the front page of the Internet", which speaks of arrogance to me, but it might slowly be starting to come true. But if it works, I don't see it as a completely bad thing, I guess.

One thing I'll tack onto this in case someone with the right knowledge comes by: anyone know a site for good reviews of charging accessories?

We ask a lot of our chargers these days (e.g. 100w USB-C PD), and the price-quality curve seems to be very jumpy. Have had good experiences with companies like Anker or Aukey, but also seen tear-downs of failed units one price tier down that had zero isolation between mains voltage and what's going to the device. Would love to find some better guidance on buying such things.

Just stick with name brands. They go on sale regularly, aren't that pricey, and will prevent fried devices or a burnt down house

I generally agree, but with charging especially it seems to be hard to figure out what exactly "name brand" means. Obviously you've got companies like Anker that've been around for a good while, but, in my opinion at least, it can be tough to distinguish up-and-coming brands pumping out great products from not-so-great brands producing junk.

For instance, I've bought stuff from Aukey and Ravpower that's worked well so far, but I wouldn't necessarily call those name brands yet in the US, unlike Anker.

If you buy it in store, it should follow your local regulations. It's generally the cheap stuff on eBay that is the problem.

I mean, at least in the US, you can buy utter crap in the store at crazy prices. Plenty of stuff that just barely hits the regulatory requirements but doesn't do any good engineering work beyond that.

Local regulation is basic so they can still sell badly implemented USB Type-C charger, non-MFi Lightning cable, and so on.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/google-engineer-leav...

https://medium.com/@leung.benson

Wish someone would do teardowns/testing of these cables/chargers on a wide basis (or that I had the skills to do it myself). I've seen a few people doing such things for computer PSUs, multimeters, and the like, but not for charging devices. Too bad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ is an interesting stop for that kind of thing. I'm cheap and usually inclined to pick the cheapest 4-star option on Amazon (with the trick of &sort=review-count-rank). Browsing /r/BuyItForLife usually helps provide some pre-emptive buyer's remorse.

I subscribe to Consumer Reports and always check there first to see if they have rated items in the category I’m shopping.

In the last year I’ve bought a great garbage disposal, some all weather tires, a pellet grill, and a dishwasher based off their recommendations. Often times instead of getting the very best rates of something I’ll buy the second best which is often 1/2 the price. Sometimes the best of an item is really cheap compared to other brands that are shinier but objectively worse at the core function of the product.

This is an interesting idea. If people know they should not buy a trashy set of knives that they'll throw away in a year that would indeed reduce consumption. I'll think more on this. Thanks for the idea!

They shouldn't buy it, yes, but this is fundamentally a privilege to even consider. That's what I struggle with, that I'm in this privileged position to discern to what degree do I want to be complicit in my presumably negative impact on the sustainability of Earth and Life.

Manufacturing ridiculously cheap shit at scale to where more and more people click a button and have anything they want delivered to their door in a fucking day... is absolutely disgusting to me. But that's me, in my privilege. This machine adds ever more people up to the "consumer" class from out of abject poverty and welp that is a good thing.

I'm just conflicted because I feel like that has to be so doesn't it? We get to pontificate about "post consumerism" and derive meaning and such and such and such. Meanwhile that literally-worth-2-cents-t-shirt actually happens to be a good thing, at history scale, to all the people that have not being able to clothe themselves =/

sigh, I don't know what my point is, your comment just compelled me to share.

Thanks for your response. The extension itself won't solve global overconsumption, poverty or climate change in the same way that any one individual won't. I do believe that by being more mindful of our purchases it can influence other parts of our lives though - we start to consider "the machine", consider more closely our impulses against the negative impacts our choices have and perhaps then we begin to demand something more from "the machine". Maybe if enough people become mindful they will vote for politicians that represent an interest in saving the environment, drastically increase environmental protections and incentivize sustainable manufacturing which I hope in the long run benefits all.

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