Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
danluu.com
danluu.com
This paragraph from the article reminds me of the recent HN discussion about resilience. In this particular example idling 99% of the time is cheaper, but even if idling 99% of the time is slightly expensive, it might still be a good idea not to outsource due to resilience. What if the vendor goes bankrupt? What if the vendor's vendor is unable to perform their contractual duty due to a disease outbreak? Or a geopolitical risk? You avoid these risks if everything is in-house, so these risks need to be priced in when determining whether to outsource. But more often than not, these risks are priced at exactly zero.
There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them.
Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway.
Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. The outsourced entity also doesn't patch, because there's no business case approval to do so. The problem is usually tech is ran by finance.
Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud provider).
I think the real draw of outsourcing is diffusion of responsibility: when it breaks, you can blame someone else.
IMHO a lot of outsourcing decisions are based on the idea that someone else can do it better than we can. This is demoralizing and will eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the most competent people get frustrated and leave. I suspect it may also be projection from managers that are in over their head or don't understand what their own people are saying. And then of course there are times when it's true that someone else can do it better.
+1 on this
IME the most successful outsourcing arrangements revolve around scale of work, not substituting an entire department. Keeping the amount of in-house experts lean and having them manage outsourced resources. So it is more of a tool for someone internal who has the needs organized rather than a dependency on a 3rd party to know what is best for you
Then you go and fix that as you have the means to do that.
Were it outsourced and you can only wait for the vendor to do it
Same. Where actually, the budget is right there, it's just a matter of choice and priorities: do what's right now or invest 10x in it later because you didn't take care of it when you ought to.
I've been on both sides of the argument: "budget" is a magic word for those who want to skip responsibility for their choices.
This is true in process scaling no matter the process.
Or in some cases it might make sense to become an outsourcing destination. Your otherwise idle equipment & skills become a revenue stream rather than a cost when your need it low, your local equipment and skills are tested & re-enforced which reduces the risk of finding them unexpectedly wanting when you turn to them in those 1% times, and you might end up with a small controlling advantage in your market (you get priority over any competitors that outsource to that part of you). It could become a significant arm of your business & profit. Think Amazon farming out its network resources.
These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.
Wow, imagine that radical concept--a society that functions well without government goons breathing down everyone's neck! Maybe we could even come up with a word to describe this amazing new idea. "Freedom" maybe? "Liberty"?
Enjoy your slavery, serf.
Taking the example of grocery store logistics, the number of times products are unavailable in my local store makes me thing that's a thing that doesn't "just work". It's something that breaks down regularly, and possibly has lots of people working hard to keep it from breaking even more often.
The same is true for lots of things. Stuff like water delivery and silicon manufacturing doesn't break all the time because lots of people are fighting to make it work, and are actively maintaining it all the time.
I think it's possible that most things don't "just work", and we're just fortunate that there are teams of people out there stopping us seeing the effects of all the failures.
> And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics works. Even distribution alone, within a single country ( ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.
Let me tell you supply chain and product availability in store ( especially grocery ) is still an unsolved problem. For a lot of different reasons and market dynamics. But mostly because grocery stores also have their own brand which compete with other products, and sharing sales data for better forecast is still a big no no. Compare to let say Smartphone, your average retail store will have zero chance completing with Apple or Samsung. So every time an iPhone is sold Apple knew instantly and can better manage their supply chain. Both domestic and international.
If we didn't had COVID and Chip Shortage, most of the world still doesn't give any credit or importance to Supply Chain management. Even though it is the basic fabric of our society. And that is speaking with experience working with Fortune Global 500.
For some of these foundations to still be standing and building occupants not to notice anything's wrong ... I can't even imagine how much safety factor is built-in. If we built software with those margins, nothing would ever ship.
Here's a few: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j
https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc
https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0
Sometimes they share pictures of foundations completely detached from anything. And it keeps working!
These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.
The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too tarnished.
The issue is then not just with the item, but with societies that are increasingly accepting low quality: this is a horrible trend, and one side of decadence. You get both, flanked: low quality here for the occasion and decadence around for the trend.
The idea you say of some "distracted" ones "not realizing the failure potential" has a legitimate justification, beyond the simple inattentive, in those (inexperienced) that assume, for a number of reasons (especially including an internal healthy "mindset" of good standards), things are done properly. There is a line in a script for Scorsese that goes like: «I'm the guy doing my job, you must be the other one».
At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of productivity.
Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's something structurally not working
Really? I've not seen this to be the case unless they are never maintained (ie: a year goes by and ignored dependencies change)
Foundations are such, 70s-80s had certain style which now has been found to lead to issues like mold if done even slightly imperfectly.
Or water pipes from certain age that have already in 20-30s have started to leak, these being copper pipes...
After the fall of the Soviet Union, UK experts flew in to help with the transition, and one of the apparatchiks asked: "We are eager to try this capitalism thing; now tell us: who is in charge of the daily delivery of bread to London?"
To take IKEA as an example, their table were really bad 20 years ago, and the only option was to either buy from another flatpack company, that was often worse (assembly would need like 50 screws for a single table...wtf), or a hand made "old fashion" table that would last a lifetime but cost 10 times more. Current IKEA tables will last a lifetime for the same price as the crap from 20 years ago.
Another example is French and Italian cars. They were really bad decades ago, reliability issues were only compensated by the ease to repair and cheap local maintenance. But industrial process are so much better now that production quality and reliability is at a level way above what would be expected for cars of roughly the same production cost.
Makes sense!
I was also thinking there's a related rule - something worth buying used has proven itself to not be crap.
Now there are a hundred, most of them below the cut, with top ranked = SEO junk.
It’s standard practice to reduce safety margins when build quality increases. If you think in terms of expected lifespan, when the company has little control over how long things last and wants a minimum of say 1 year then some fail at 1 year and some fail after 20. As their process improves the minimum stays the same, but maximum lifespan decreases.
There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that markets should be efficient at all.
Instead, we have the sort of equivalent of Galileo - people really badly want markets to be efficient. They feel like they should be, because intuitively, it seems like it should work that way (much in the "god does not play dice" sense). People who suggest they aren't, even when math backs them up, are ridiculed. Eventually, as Max Planck said, science will advance funeral by funeral, and we'll stop pretending markets should be efficient based on "the efficient market hypothesis". Or we'll discover P=NP! Which would be much cooler.
When people usually say that markets aren't efficient, they don't mean that optimal resource allocation is a computationally intractable problem. They're saying that they see, clear as day, obvious inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. They're saying that there are easily noticeable inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. And finding easily noticeable inefficiencies isn't NP-hard, by definition of easily noticeable.
A better version of the efficient market hypothesis would be that markets are inexploitable. There is no easy action I can take that corrects a market inefficiency and makes me money. This is the version that comes up in cocktail party conversations and it's also the one that Dan Luu is talking about. "If XXX is systemically undervalued by the market, why can't I start a company that specialises in using XXX?" The discussion following this question is much more relevant and interesting than encoding 3SAT into economic models.
No, that's absolutely not true and relies on what I think is the most perniciously false assumption behind market economics: that all market participants only make moves within the market itself.
If you're trying to win at chess then learning to master the rules and strategy of chess is where you focus your attention. But if you're trying to defeat your opponent (or not get defeated by them), you'll probably do better to bring a gun and/or body armor. If you focus 100% of your attention on the chessboard, you are completely opening yourself up for exploitation by an opponent who is willing to play the metagame.
And, indeed, in market economics, actors invariably do play the metagame. This is why we get cabals, trusts, rent seeking, regulatory capture, monopolies, price fixing, price dumping, lobbying, etc.
The ultimate goal of market actors is not to be maximally efficient. It's not even to win the market game. It's to make the most money. And often the best way to make the most money is to rig the game, cheat, or get the rules changed in your favor.
As I said, there is no reason those efficiencies should be easily correctable - because markets aren't efficient! That's the whole point. It's only in an efficient market that they would be correctable. This is the same as lots of computational and other problems. Lots of instances are easy and heuristics can often work very well. But you will still come up with situations where obviously broken things happen and are hard to make algorithms work.
It's sort of like having a cocktail party conversation about why you can't exceed the speed of light. Except because it's economics, you get stuck because there often isn't any real rigor behind it that you can push on. Just the empirical. Which I get why it's fun to talk about (really!) - without any meaningful rigor, anyone can participate and have fun - got a crazy empirical story? Awesome, that's all you need to prove something in economics! It makes for fun discussions where most people can participate and feel like it's not too hard.
I have no issue with that - my issue is of course that the cocktail party is not distinguishable from the field ;)
Beyond that, arguing they are inexploitable/unpredictable seems equivalent to whether they are efficient (and in most papers is considered equivalent to the efficiency hypothesis). I'm really unsure how you are trying to distinguish it. Maybe you could formulate it for real and show how it is not equivalent to the efficiency question?
Hard to deflate asset-price bubbles are a fact of finance.
For strong form efficiency (which requires markets perfectly reflect all available information) - You would have trouble finding people who still believe in strong form efficiency. The weak form paper above cites several papers that go into why strong form efficiency is impossible. There are formal proof versions around. In practice, even empirical studies of strong form efficiency haven't supported it either - it's just very easy to find practical counterexamples.
The underlying thesis being that market success is orthogonal to your internal company's state, inefficiencies included.
Also, more specifically - as a Samsung user for my preferences they offer as good or better products than Apple while operating on a smaller budget.
To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another unit for us. The online system simply didn't work, so we reached out and they informed us it was fix. But the system just marked the unit as rented rather than reserved, so we had to reach out again...
As Dan says defendants of the efficient market hypothesis will say that it isn't possible to provide a better service, or otherwise this letting agency would have been upended by competitors. Only that our experience with other agencies has been similarly poor, and our experience abroad is generally less so.
And is not only renting, most of our interactions here have been similarly shoddy. Which makes me think that either we have been incredibly unlucky or there is some common pattern. Here are some ideas for our particular case:
* Barrier to entry: Businesses like real estate require large capital and tend to be crowded already, so it is difficult for a disruptor to appear.
* Liquidity: While in theory we could *shop around* if we don't like a let agent, in practice there is a very reduced number of units that satisfy our requirements. It's easier to put up with a poor experience that compromise on the property.
* Corner cases: As new immigrants we had to go through some processes that most people don't experience. Probably is not worth for companies to optimize for these situations.
* Cultural normalization?: This is the most intriguing point for me. Maybe this level of shoddy service has been normalized and accepted in America - or at least the area we live in. Maybe people just don't know better and hence don't ask for more, and therefore companies can carry on providing what would be considered a sub-par service elsewhere.
There is a lot of overhead everywhere. Dentists have an army of assistants. Any product to order requires it's sale agent. Even if you already know what you want. You must deal with the agent. Car dealership have so many sales but good luck getting an appointment for fixing the shit they sold you. Look to by a house, and be ready to deal with insane fees and agents. All this overhead has to be paid somehow I guess.
I agree with you on housing. The agents charge commission and closing costs and closing companies do charge quite a bit.
+ A fridge I purchased was delivered with a 2 weeks delay, at 10:30PM (!!) on a Saturday (only because I kept calling every other day).
+ I've ordered a new broadband connection for an apartment I was renting. After several months (!) of waiting and calls, I found out that the former tenant had unpaid bills with the provider and they therefore refused to establish the connection (I was only informed about this after 5-6 weeks of wait during which I was told everything's ok and pending execution).
Here's a story about how my laptop was broken and I was calling a repair shop:
Me: "Good morning, my laptop doesn't seem to display anything, looks like it's a problem with the screen, how does the pricing work in this situation?"
Shop: "Ugh...", the guy is annoyed.
Shop: "This is like saying you have a headache, and asking a doctor what needs to be done!", He shouts.
Me: "No need to get angry, I was just wondering-"
Shop: "Just bring it to the store!" - hangs up.
This is a perfectly normal experience dealing with customer service in Germany.
It's so hard to hire good help these days. And in the case of apartment building management, it sounds like they're renting out just fine despite the bugs and process fuckups. Hell, even you havent walked away for a competitor.
> Barrier to entry: Businesses like real estate require large capital and tend to be crowded already, so it is difficult for a disruptor to appear.
In a sense, there are startups in the "long term rental" space providing a better frontend to shitty landlords. Even airbnb is moving into that market. Whether they can successfully out UX Prometheus while relying on prometheus as a landlord I cannot say, but its one path out of capital requirements.
> Cultural normalization?: This is the most intriguing point for me. Maybe this level of shoddy service has been normalized and accepted in America - or at least the area we live in. Maybe people just don't know better and hence don't ask for more, and therefore companies can carry on providing what would be considered a sub-par service elsewhere.
Lots of people own housing instead of rent here. But you'll find plenty of similar angst about mortgage processing.
The fact that they don’t feel ashamed of mistreating a non-customer is however cultural.
Moving from state to state can almost feel like moving to an entirely different country.
I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.
I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too:
I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic.
And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article.
I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the form of a question.)
I’m a terribly slow reader, so there’s no way I could take time out of my already busy day to read this (very long, dense) article of a single person’s opinion of a single topic, especially if I don’t even know whether this person is an expert on said topic.
I guess this is particularly true when it’s a subject I’m only interested in on the surface, vs. caring more deeply about a particular subject.
I get much more ROI reading many people’s shorter discussions vs. a lengthy single opinion (again, given the time it would have taken me to read the article).
I have seen many, many cases where a big portion of the top comments are either saying something similar to what the author of the article said, or they are asking a question, or raising a rebuttal, that is already addressed in the article.
Comments are short and probably have close to zero research on average. Experience may play a part, but people don't usually offer up the resume with a comment, so you have no idea if they even have credibility. And there are mountains of witticisms, anecdotes, or emotional arguments that add little to nothing of value to the conversation.
Personally, I almost always read the article and then skim the comments to see if anybody has added any thoughts I might find interesting.
Plus I just have a lot of respect for the author. Dan Luu is a smart guy.
The thing is, the topic of the actual article is generally more interesting than the topic suggested by a naive reading of the title (as is the case here).
People discussing things based on titles leads to generic discussions that recur again and again and go nowhere. Whereas the actual topic of the article's content is rather more specific and could lead to an actual new and more specific discussion that might actually go somewhere.
But I think that the best way to start the conversation is usually with a well-written article.
If there would only be a title and no article, I'm pretty sure that I would find the comments to be less interesting.
But maybe I'm wrong, and since my argument is based on the original article being well-written, maybe it isn't true for most posts.
But I still think that I would rather try to find the posts with good articles, and just ignore the rest, and hopefully, that is what the ranking system does (at least help with).
I often wish HN would just allow titles to get
posted and HN folks just have a discussion around
that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the
form of a question.)
especially if I don’t even know whether
this person is an expert on said topic.
I find it very valuable to look into the authors of linked articles, see which authors pop up on HN frequently, etc.
Gives you an idea of who the leading voices in the industry are, helps you to know which way the winds are blowing.
Especially for somebody with a slower reading speed this may be crucial; helps to understand which article may actually be worth the time investment.
What if we want to hold a conversation about the actual post content? Should we add a tag such as [please read]?
Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas.
However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth.
The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.
The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs.
I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.
I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."
Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.
I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest, regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to work in environments where that trait will be perceived positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it off.
I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he can get away with because of his technical skill.
It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit.
> he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.
In the thread you linked, he links another thread (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where his interviewer was wrong. And what's fun about Dan Luu is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't.
Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I admire him for doing so. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you; it is the world that's wrong.
You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that doesn't make the observation incorrect.
As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they require special expertise and we did have the capability to do rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that we subcontracted.
I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?)
Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure, there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty of solid databases built before he was around (before he was born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft.
I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain of resources due to that.
Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that.
I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You can't get great software but you can get great engineers that will build the great software in house? I don't think your chances of finding the team that can build that are any greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later. Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy work...
EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was built in-house that was superior might be a case of survivorship bias.
EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables, connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws, etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can be completely vertically integrated.
The amount of effort put into ensuring that suppliers do what they need to do and do it well is huge. Companies always have two (or more) suppliers and if you keep only to the letter of the contract, you get cut.
They can afford to put so much effort into managing suppliers because volumes are large and margins are low.
There are also cultural issues at play; he makes the point that things that are inevitable in one culture are unthinkable in another and different industries have different cultures
When you outsource manufacturing you're asking the other party to create exact replicas according to very specific specs your own engineers created.
With software the outsourcing usually includes outsourcing a large part of the design, which is inevitable, as there is no significant manufacturing you can outsource. Writing the software is creating the detailed specs. In software there is only product design, you don't really have to put a lot of effort into creating exact copies of the original design.
All made in Japan. Few or no Silicon Valley equivalents. Makes you wonder.
(A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)
(Level 5 includes tasks such as “compare and contrast complex information, or to generate new information making high-level inferences or using specialized background knowledge”.)
Ha!
A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts.
There are also different expectations for blog posts and heavily researched&vetted articles.
"Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like it's saying faster.
What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this" help clarify what premises and hypotheses are well-supported by prior work/experience and what is the author's speculation. IMO It serves a useful purpose!
statement: Alice stole the briefcase
+weasel_wording: I think it's possible Alice could have stolen the briefcase
+confidence_level: I'd bet 5:1 that Alice stole the briefcase
What that requires though is they caveat everything.
I really respect people who say they are 99% sure and 60% sure when appropriate.
It requires a level of honesty not just to the audience but to the self to admit openly what you are and aren't sure about.
At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself.
The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.
Experiment: No titles, just URLs. What would happen.
I have some experience with this as I freqently stream edit HTTP response bodies to make customised web pages using only simple HTML wrapped around only the data I am interested in, no cruft. For example, when I do web searches I process the response, i.e., the SERP, into simplified HTML, e.g., <li><a href=[url]>[url]</a>. I do not include titles.
Titles can be descriptive and helpful, however I find most times they are a distraction. Think about the "clickbait" tactic. It is heaviliy reliant on misleading titles.
This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.
It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-quality stuff.
Re: "getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally", they either paid the wrong people, or they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the chance it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And if you shouldn't have even used that part because your overall design was crap, you also end up with a crap car.
I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will not make something well. Not only does it take more skill and hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make them well, or the people who make things well are in higher demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors and full training for all their staff and holds back products until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and I'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota, because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases production. But this is all Lean 101)
And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make something work well.
If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.
Reminds me of the old joke -- an Economist walks past a $100 bill on the sidewalk, but doesn't bother to pick it up. He turns to his friend and declares smugly: "If it were real, someone would have taken it already."
Take a chair, for example. Anyone can make a chair: just get a bucket, turn it over, and sit on it. Boom; backless chair. Want a backrest, arms? Get a 2x4, a saw, a drill, and some bolts. An hour later: Boom; chair.
You want a chair that works well? How do you even define works well for a chair? Do you need cushioning? Do you need to swivel? Do you need ergonomics? Do you need to sit in it for 15 hours? Do you need it to cost less than $1,000?
At the end of the day you can specify a dozen different metrics but someone will game it to cut corners. There’s no replacement for caring.
There's also the huge mental barrier of getting over the sunk cost fallacy. If you buy an expensive thing and a part of it breaks in such a way that it still remains mostly functional, it's really, really hard to admit that it should be replaced. You end up living with a broken thing for a long time, just because you're mentally depreciating the thing.
I've been through this with a lot of furniture. It doesn't seem to matter whether I pay $100 or $500 for a bookshelf, it's a crapshoot whether or not the listing lied about it being made of solid wood and not particle board, or whether the screw holes will align correctly, or been tapped correctly for the screws to actually engage without crossthreading, or even use proper screws and not those damn "lock"-bolts (that never actually lock, so given enough time they always work themselves loose).
My wife and I built our children's bunk bed. It was an expensive, time-intensive, physically painful endeavor, partly because this was the first time we were building something so large. It's not great. But it easily matches or exceeds the quality of any of the other furniture we've bought. I'm very proud of the work we did, but at the same time, I'm furious that I can't count on just buying things.
It's also gotten hard to trust people's recommendations on things, which goes back to the featured article's comments on cultural expectations. Most of the people I know just live with broken furniture. They think IKEA is great stuff. It's not. It's just that it's so impossible to find anything better that you might as well buy IKEA.
I might switch to only buying antique furniture, i.e. use survivorship bias to my advantage. Find the stuff that has survived taking a beating already.
So the amortized cost is some 100-200 dollars a year for an excellent chair. If you buy a crappy chair, i bet that the cushion starts failing after a year or so of constant sitting. So you'd probably replace it yearly, or suffer a bad chair for a few years before replacing.
I bet that most people would choose an excellent chair, if they could guarantee themselves the 10 yrs of good operation and comfort.
But there’s a corollary - if you do not need the thing to last, you may be better off with the cheapest one you can find (which may be used - and which may be better than new).
This is the “but it from harbor freight, if it breaks now you know you use it enough to make it worth getting a good one”.
Some people buy that $2000 chair when it's $350 and can still use it for years. The key is to learn what products remain quality products.
(And it's not about it being expensive. It's because it keeps your butt cool all year.)
I'm looking at an Aeron and while I have a decent salary, it's still a massive commitment for me to pay that much for something I put my ass on.
I would like to favor places with more women in tech jobs, but generally just don't find any at all, anywhere. Everywhere I have worked they were always trying to hire more women but never got any applicants, or couldn't hire the ones they found.
And there are so many MtFs in tech. I'd love to see statistics, but it feels skewed.
This is one of those things I Can't Say in most places, but (unless you transitioned in elementary school) the MtF experience in tech and the cis female experience are totally different, and they (the MtFs) know it, because so much of our work is done online where you can be whatever gender/sex you want. I know how people reacted to me when they thought I was male vs. female.
Age plays into it, too. Everything was fine before I went through puberty, but a lot of young techie men have a really hard time with their sexuality and take that out on their female colleagues in various ways. (I've also seen some gross reversals in female-dominated professions re: issues with men, so...) Now that I'm in my 30s and the men in that insecure/figuring things out age range aren't interested, it's better again.
I have a feeling this guy doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to COVID. From Wikipedia: "No lockdowns have been imposed in Taiwan". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Asia
And there's a huge difference between quarantining a small island and quarantining a large country whose leaders purposely don't enforce the borders and actually allowed in people who tested positive for COVID with no enforced quarantining: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.ht...
You can also read in Wikipedia how the lockdowns in Vietnam ultimately failed, while also heavily disrupting their economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Vietnam.
The people who said lockdowns would be pointless were right. History has proven it. It's time for people like Dan Luu to move on. There was never any way the world at large was going to be able to organize a meaningful lockdown policy. The lockdowns were a waste and likely caused more deaths than they saved lives.
If you chop a 10 huge trees down in a forest, an economist would tell you "There should be 10 300-year old trees here". That may be true in 300 years, but the procession of species in the 300-year interim will be much more interesting, and understanding that tells you much more about ecology than knowing the eventual result. And the forest may not last 300 years before conditions change so significantly that it invalidates the prediction.
Similarly, the efficient markets hypothesis really breaks down in the modern era, because market conditions don't ever experience an unperturbed steady state. Technology, politics, availability of expertise, and shifting social norms rearrange the foundations more frequently so equilibrium is never reached.
Any long-term theoretical predictions on quality or efficiency of CRT monitors or horseshoes or fondue pots converging to an efficient ideal state were nonsensical and doomed from the start: the market conditions around them changed faster than the market is able to adapt.
I’ve thought about this question very often, and I think the answer does come back to the market efficiency argument that Dan ridicules at the beginning. I think in many cases, what the market provides is actually about as good as what the market can sustain.
Sure, most products have obvious flaws, and maybe you could fix them. But could you build a successful company solely on the basis of addressing those flaws? Sometimes, yes. Some products do get displaced by better alternatives. But can you expect that process to happen reliably, for all types of products, at all times? When you put it that way, I think it seems silly to expect the answer would be yes.
Just to get caught by that line in the culture part:
> If you read these kinds of discussions, you'll often see people claiming "that's just how the world is" and going further and saying that there is no other way the world could be, so anyone who isn't prepared for that is an idiot.
I'll defend my own claim as not trying to put the blame on the victim, it's nobody's fault most of the time, and we get to see some progress, sometimes. People should enjoy the stuff that actually work and praise those who make real efforts to make it less broken.
It's funny, I have actually observed the phenomenon he described in the same company. Safeway in San Francisco either uses their own delivery drivers, or they subcontract to DoorDash depending on the time of day of delivery. If I order with Safeway delivery drivers, they will happily deliver all the way to my apartment door inside the building. If I get a DoorDash driver, the intercom will magically be broken 100% of the time. It's a perfect comparison.
Must be a generational thing but I don't think anyone i know (ie under 30) genuinely believes this anymore.
It's also worth noting that "as good as possible" and "as good as profitably possible" aren't just two flavors of the same principle w/ regards to quality--they're directly at odds. I'll prove this (with scientific finality) via an anecdote about toys.
My kiddo was gifted a little Fisher-Price school bus that was made in 2005.[0] It's pretty neat! As you roll the bus forward, some internal mechanism causes the driver to turn left and right (making it look like they're turning the steering wheel back and forth), and the passenger seats to move up and down (a dope allusion to the classic kid's song, 'The Wheels on the Bus', in which, as the wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round, the people on the bus go up and down). It's clear that this product was lovingly designed, with playful curves and playful details, like the face of the bus. The wheels not only have hub caps, but the shape of the tires even mimic a pneumatic bulge! The space inside of the bus is even big enough to accommodate human hands!
More recently, she was gifted a newer version of the same toy.[1] It's smaller in every dimension, and flimsier. The slick design is gone, replaced by simple, boxy one. The little things that I loved about the old bus are gone--the wheels are now a single piece of plain molded plastic. While the wheels of the bus still go round and round, the people on the bus, alas, do not go up and down.
It's fine, as far as toys go--the kid probably doesn't notice a difference. But it's clear that the guiding principle in the evolution of this product is not only not quality, but something that is directly in conflict with quality.
[0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/304338207633 [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Little-People-Sit-With-Me-School-...
Project Farm (youtube.com/projectfarm) - Great independent reviews of tools
Mcmaster.com - Higher quality products than you can get at your local hardware store and excellent customer service. When I've gotten the rare incorrect or damaged item, 1 email gets me a refund and a replacement overnighted.
Wirecutter - Not as go-to as it used to be in my mind, but great for background
ConsumerReports - Check if you can get free access through your local library website
ReviewMeta (reviewmeta.com) - Analyzes Amazon reviews for authenticity
All of these have problems but they are still good resources. Any others I'm missing?
If there's a such thing as rockstar software engineers, the people that made McMaster's site are it.
I also don't think they mark everything up 100%. I have built a lot of stuff out of T-slot extrusion ("80/20") and their price seems exactly the same as buying from 80/20 directly. I guess there is probably some Aliexpress vendor cheaper than the brand name, though.
Is this a very nice way of saying that you can hire women economists and underpay them in order to make money?
Because they were women?
I wouldn't call Twitter or any other unicorn a "mid-sized tech company".
I believe the larger a company is the more it makes sense to do stuff in-house. You need a certain amount of people to focus on your core competencies, but once you have that and still have more money than you can ever spend, it makes sense to spend it on doing stuff in-house, as that might lead to better quality and/or lower costs and removes the risk that an external supplier might not be there next month anymore.
I guess that depends on the definition of mid sized company. I don't know if there is a fundamentally different/better definition, but Gartner defines a mid sized company to have up to 999 employees and $1 billion of annual revenue [1]. Twitter has way more employees and revenue than that.
[1]: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/s...
In practice, all it took was a dude called Dane Jasper deciding that the barriers were mostly regulatory and he could beat it and boom! Sonic covers so much of the city in $60/mo symmetric fiber. I think people will still explain why it's impossible in SF.
Occasionally, and I am saddened that I haven't bookmarked these for later amusement, someone will ask "Why can't we do X here?" and people will come up with an explanation for why X would never work in America, etc. while I'll be sitting experiencing X here.
Perhaps that's the thing. Human beings have a very natural status quo bias and we have a very quick explain-why-this-is bias. So if you tell someone that Y is the case, they can come up with a posteriori explanations. But that's why good science is hard: you have to make a priori claims and then subject to hypothesis testing. And in normal conversation that is really hard.
I don't claim to be immune to this. But knowing it is a flaw is a better position than not knowing, I hope.
It often is impossible to get past the regulatory burdens in SF, although sometimes it's just because the supervisors ask you for bribes.
Re: professional services ... I think there is some kind of sweet spot where professionals stop focusing on delivering a good service and start focusing on their brand. Also, some people realize they are not actually a very good accountant/developer/lawyer and focus almost entirely on their brand. Trying to discern if your potential professional is one of those two types of professionals is the hardest part.
One could write an entire series of posts on the topic of situations you would not have avoided.
> There's a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it's a debate I've often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it's so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would've come along and won based on being more efficient or better.
---
This sounds like the question whether the market mechanism that ought to remove grave inefficiencies is actually working because there appear to be many examples where it looks like it's not.
My explanation for why the market actually works and we can _still_ see those inefficiencies:
Complexity.
The reason why - even though the mechanism of the market making efficiency a necessity (to not be replaced) is working correctly - we often see inefficiency, is that a complex world enables niches for inefficient unnecessary complexities to exist, where they can consume resources without being easy to remove.
The more complex the environment, the higher the number of possible/existing additional overhead and inefficiencies.
You actually have to have someone whose job it is to look for inefficiencies. Someone who goes and talks to everyone on the line because they are the ones that really know. Someone who also recognizes that a 5% improvement in one area may not be worth the risk but a 1% improvement somewhere else may be. Just like staff scheduling: do you schedule the bare minimum of staff? What happens when 3 people next to each other all get the flu? Now where are you? Are you better off normally over-staffed and constantly cross-training? Most companies make money despite their operations. This is where Amazon has taken over the world, they have that as a core goal and corporate focus.
Is this really a case of mis-aligned incentives though?
The person running the assembly line has an interest in the business model of the company not being destroyed, because their salary depends upon it working. So they'll try to prevent the worst (to the business model) from happening. Risking to break some important production process for a lousy low percentage potential gain in efficiency sure doesn't seem to be in the interest of neither the individual person, nor the company, nor the customer.
As you write: the risks and benefits need to be carefully weighed perpetually .. simply an ongoing optimisation.
It stands to reason that he and the people he interacts with are going to build things of higher quality than whatever is commonly available.
> 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.
I suspect this is it
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
Which it seems they abandoned or paused
https://www.macworld.com/article/559731/apple-csam-icloud-ph...
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
I would argue Apple is an example of a company that started with quality, established brand, and has been coasting off brand for a long while.
If buying and selling were a chess game, the ELO of the consumers would be very low, but the producers ELO is not much better, as they just learned a tricky opener and nothing else. Of course the real game is not two player and open information, but this only makes it worse for the consumer, and easier to fall into marketing schemes for the producer.
I think it's only needs a really small amount of css i.e. some padding/margins a slight change in the background colour and some better spacing that's all probably. Five minutes worth of work and would add virtually nothing to the page weight.
I suspect whomever Dan Luu is they don't really give a f about my opinion so I'll stop now.
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 :)
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?
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".
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.
> 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.
COVID lock down/shelter in place orders were never intended to avoid endemic disease altogether. They were about slowing down its spread just enough that the healthcare system would remain functional while the disease became endemic. And they mostly worked OK for that.
It was the public health equivalent of "take two asprin and call in the morning". While there were successes for sure, clear and consistent communication was not among them.
But most enterprise software is plumbing - that you figure out how to use “well enough” and mostly leave it alone to do its thing. That software has little pressure and often ends up being basically bypassed.
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.
What fails on them?
It did work reasonably well, but if you failed to clean it and fully dry it out within 6 hours of using it, it would get an INSANE mildew smell.
Amazon of course didn't bother to do anything about the company when I tried to report them, and they seem to have disappeared/rebranded since then
Technology Connections had a good video on the quality of humidifiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeehYYgl28
1. Electronically (ex: you can do this in your bedroom directly, or anywhere you need the warm-mist)
2. With safety measures (its still dangerous, but they minimize the amount of boiling water to minimize the possible harm. Better than an entire pot of boiling water, but still half-a-cup of boiling water can severely burn you still)
3. Probably as cheap as the pot you were using to boil water anyway. Warm mist humidifiers are like $35.
If you have an electric stove, boiling water will be less efficient than evaporating water and letting your heating system make up for the loss in sensible heat unless you have an electric furnace.
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: 1.3 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.
There was a story[1] about a guy who kept the same heating boiler for nearly 50 years. Can you imagine how much more he spent on fuel in that thing for 50 years compared to changing to a combi at some point? Condensing boilers are 90+% efficient, who knows what that is.
2) Most OSes nowadays have resizable windows. Drag the borders of your browser window in from the edges of your screen.
3) One of the few advantages of reading HN (and therefore the sites it links to) on a phone.
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!
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...
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.
Surely it's also a legal distinction? In Australia at least, I believe there can be significant jail time given for breaking and entering.
People learn to optimize for less anger over being cheated: it doesn't work well, but you didn't pay much. If you had paid more, you would (probably) be equally dissatisfied, but also feel like you got suckered.
Edit: why downvote?
Inexpensive and having a snazzy name are pretty much the only properties that products have that you can reliably compare.
The Yossi Kreinin link in the article suggests developing a reputation first. Any other approaches?
First, pick your battles. You can't fight every one at the same time.
Second, DOCs and Email are your friend. Don't bother with Slack/Teams. If you came from an important meeting, reply to everyone who attended the meeting and CC and BCC people, and write your version of meeting notes and focus on what was agreed upon and what questions remained unresolved. After several emails like, this copy/paste them into a Word document that you save. I have shut down the worst offenders by simply re-sending the same email I sent six months ago.
Third, be prepared for the blowback. I got screamed/yelled at/for days by executives. Eventually the truth will come out. But it might take years.
But, considering the developers aren't going to charge their ways, I'll remain grateful that there are people who do want to buy the "new" houses (they won't stay new for long, they'll be wrecked after a few years of being lived in) at a premium rather than compete for livable housing.
[1] https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-10... but if you've ever been in one, you'll know what I mean.
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.
So yeah, Silicon Valley undercuts itself on talent, quality, ethics, equity and the like and always has.
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.
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.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_White_Suit
We have plenty of "indestructible" tools today. Cast Iron skillets, hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, ladders. Most furniture qualifies as well (though MDF-board crap exists, they still have a use. Its more efficient for a college-student to get disposable MDF-based crap for their dorms with a lifespan of ~4 years or less, rather than buy actually quality furniture).
These are called the "durable goods market", and plenty of them can be bought and work for years, decades even.
------------
Everything wears out given enough time. But my roof is expected to last 50 years and has a wind rating far in excess of any 50-year storm in my area (Florida roofs are famously shingled with the cheapest crap, because hurricanes hit them so often it doesn't make sense to invest into the roof... no roof can possibly survive a Cat3, Cat4, or Cat5 storm).
Because my area doesn't have tornadoes or hurricanes (at least, no notable ones in the past century), it makes sense for me to invest into my roof.
Yeah, because corporations/people wouldn't conspire to limit say life of lightbulbs or reduce competition, right? Right?! Right?!
Just because something is a comedy doesn't mean someone in real world didn't do it/ is doing it/ won't do it.
> 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?
0/10 web design, didn't read.
Didn't press F9 for reading mode.
Didn't resize browser window to comfortable proportions.
0/10 online media consumption skills, didn't deserve to read.
The efficient market hypothesis seems like a perfect example of this over-reliance on assuming paper-thin idealised models actually reflect reality.
Asks someone that posts a giant wall of unreadable text.
Just so happens that modern user agents don't really care about bare HTML, just CSS and JavaScript, so your default presentation is optimized to 1990s hardware at 800x600.
I guess "reader mode" is slang for "what the user-agent should be doing to make documents reasonable for modern displays", so press that button in your user-agent.
What did you think of the content of what they said?
I'm surprised how much I've gotten used to fancy websites, colors and formatting.
I'm more dismayed.
Typesetting matters.