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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

(Denim head) Anecdata - buying Levis from Amazon (or any other store), pick up at least a couple of pairs in the same size. It's likely different people/factories making them, but often you'll find variation in size/denim even when the labelling in the same. One pair of 32/32 might feel 'off' and the next is the best pair you've ever owned. Completely agree with going 'smaller' brand if you want consistency though (and that's a whole different world).

But better tip - (if you're not looking for 'smart' denim) buy from eBay. Only buy pairs where everything has been measured properly (waist, inside leg, rise, etc) so you can get close to what you know you fits. You can find 20+ year old Levis for less than $20 - the denim is heavier, the quality is good and they have that perfect 'broken in' feel that makes the jeans feel like your best friend. Plus you can afford to try a few pairs to find ones you love.

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Same experience ordering Lucky brand jeans… from Lucky themselves! Same exact model would result in different material composition / origin country. It could be 0-2% spandex/100-98% cotton or something. I wound up making a little spreadsheet to try to figure out which ones I liked the best (origin country, materials)

It’s crazy.

It's not really the style anymore (and they were wildly expensive), but some of the best jeans I've had were True Religions. I could go to the store, try on a ton of pairs, and then get the length tailored. I used to power lift, and at the time, finding jeans that had 32" waist while still being bigger in the butt/thighs was a huge challenge. Only TR seemed to have them.

Same here, especially for taller sizes they were great.

Ha, glad to know I'm not not alone doing that re: country of origin.

I only wear Oxfords and casual button down shirts, and found that I only ever like the ones made in Bangladesh because of fit and material. I could talk your ear off for 20 minutes about how clothes from X feel cheap, clothes from Y have nice materials but don't fit right, etc.

I just checked my closet, and every single shirt I regularly wear across three brands is made in Bangladesh!

Supply chains matter. There may be a good mill in whatever the textile producing region of Bangladesh is that is the preferred supplier for those making that style of shirt.

I wear button downs nearly every day. What brands or stores do you buy from?

Well, I'm relegated to tall sizes so my options are probably a bit more limited.

The brands I typically wear are Izod, RL Chaps, US Polo(not RL Polo), and lately some from Kingsize. The latter fit nicely but I find a lot of styles a bit wonky or dated.

I'm still a fan of J. Crew. They fit me very well.

Is wearing button downs every day not a buttload of ironing?

Most of mine are the 'wrinkle free' variety that actually work pretty well. I have a few 'nicer' shirts that aren't and you learn the tricks of the trade - hanging it near your shower, wiping with a hot wash cloth, not drying completely, etc. Irons are a hassle and I rarely use them.

Still, I rarely wear those for that reason. They also look like crap at the end of the day from sitting in cars or padded chairs.

I would love to wear more shirts, but I’m not a fan of wearing cloths that contain a significant amount of plastic. Cotton shirts are a pita, but I’ll try these tips, thanks!

I worked at the Gap and Banana Republic all through high school and college. This was well known amongst the sales staff. There's a small amount of variation between each pair of jeans because of how they're cut and how the material stretches during cutting. Also just different people on different sewing machines makes a difference. We always advised customers to try on a few pairs of the size they were looking for to get one that fit best.

Here's a quick shot of what the cutting machine looks like: https://youtu.be/oBt85Jgjvng?si=UAU0Jj4q_Vztmi5K&t=680

I'm surprised they even get as good of results as they do with those cutting methods. Aligning the direction of the threads (called the grainline) before cutting is extremely important. To the point that the approach they are taking almost seems like making a knowingly defective product.

I once took a pair of jeans back to Gap (UK) because they didn't fit. After trying on pairs for fifteen minutes I ended up on a pair that fitted perfectly, but which were the exact same size, style and fit. Weirdest experience exchanging an item for the exact same item.

I had the same experience when buying from Macy's, which I felt would avoid any possible shennanigans from Amazon. Same story. 4 pair of the same style and size, but different colors. All fit differently.

Physical products are HARD. Programmers take for granted our digital assembly line, where it's possible to generate millions of byte-identical products with ease. As a software "engineer" I do not envy real engineers one bit.

Wait but then why is one physical iPhone identical to another physical iPhone of the same model?

I’m not asking to criticize. I’m genuinely curious.

Not even all electronic products always feel the same in one’s hands like iPhones of the same model do. For example I remember back in the day my Xbox controllers would feel different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

Well, partially its that for all of Apple's faults, this is one thing that they're neurotic about. But the xbox controller comparison isn't really good because controllers have moving parts. An iPhone, except for the side-buttons, doesn't.

> why is one physical iPhone identical to another physical iPhone

Apple is willing to pay the cost to minimize the margin-of-error at every step.

Another approach to keeping yield high (at the possible risk of hurting your brand) is to do what Intel did with their Celeron line. The equivalent for Apple would be a "value iPhone" which would not come with the same set of expectations from customers.

It's worth noting Apple (likely) do this with the SOCs - the bucketed variants with fewer operational GPU cores are the output. They just don't do it with the packaging.

Fabric vs metal/glass/plastic

It is also easy to make thousands of identical items when your build material is solid and can’t be stretched

It's much easier to get molded plastic into the same shape repeatedly, than it is to get fabric stitched together exactly the same way every time.

As for the Xbox controllers, it could be a lot of differences. Microsoft does not feel the need to keep different runs exactly the same. They may be more willing to buy different types of plastic depending on what's cheapest this quarter.

Or it could be much simpler, maybe iPhones do feel different. How much time do you actually spend interacting with someone else's phone (Have you ever even actually touched another person's phone, or just their case?), vs how much time did you spend with your buddy's Xbox controllers?

why is one physical iPhone identical to another physical iPhone of the same model?

It probably wouldn't be if human beings had to drill holes in the PCB by hand, place and solder components by hand, and hand-machine the case.

different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

This could be things like slight changes in the sourcing of, say, springs for an analog stick, composition of rubber used under other buttons, and actual wear on components of the assembly line, like the molds used for injection molding of something with a pebble texture. Not to mention, obviously, that each controller will break down differently over time depending on use.

> Wait but then why is one physical iPhone identical to another physical iPhone of the same model?

Hard materials are easier than soft materials in some ways. If you lay a soft fabric out before cutting, is it slightly folded, perfectly flat, taut? It will all make a difference.

Moulding plastic or cutting a hard material like aluminium is more amenable to tight tolerances since you can use the same mould over and over, use the same cutter and the material doesn't flex, stretch or change in any significant way.

Clothing is handmade. It doesn't matter if it's luxury or from Shein; it's all handmade. Artisans can work tirelessly to make sure everything is stitched the exact same way but anything below that is made for the mass market. Those tend to be people paid nothing to work as fast as possible to make as many items as possible. In that environment, you're going to get a lot of inconsistency. The only tech that helps here is the sewing machine and using lasers to cut the pieces. Compare that to iPhones where there are a lot of industrial machines that are used to create each of the pieces paired with highly trained individuals helping assemble it. The iPhone is also a "luxury" good so they have a lot of QC whereas a shirt from Old Navy is cheap and as long as it "looks" correct then they'll sell it for $8.

As to the iPhones: Apple does some really neat stuff with respect to tolerance stacking. As an example, they had a video from the iPhone X showing how they would measure the camera module, and then pair that to a cover that fit it best.

> As a software "engineer" I do not envy real engineers one bit.

Obligatory link to Hillel Wayne's Crossover Project [0]. The short version is that of 17 "real" engineers he interviewed who switched to software engineering, 15 said they consider software engineering to be an engineering discipline. Over the three blog posts he reviews the supposed differences between fields and finds that the crossovers don't agree with most of the stereotypical differences software people believe are there.

There are real differences that they identify, but they're not any more significant than the differences between traditional engineering fields, which are vast. But yes, one of the differences that they do point out is that software is not constrained by the physical world in any meaningful way.

[0] https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

I know a few civil engineers and have been surprised at how many similarities that work has to software engineering. Some of the poor practices that people gripe about in tech are similar in that world, and the same goes for many good practices.

Fascinating, thanks for posting that, I know what I'm reading this weekend!

I mean that seems like a methodology that would run a heavy risk of sampling bias. This is literally people who have chosen to switch to software engineering, and who are currently software engineers.

The only way to make the sample better would be to also sample people who moved the other direction, but there haven't been nearly as many of those because software engineering jobs have been in much higher demand than other engineering positions.

What you certainly cannot do is sample people who have only experienced one field.

But yes, it's not meant to be a quantitative study, but there are a lot of very valuable insights in the blog posts.

You have to consider, most engineering disciplines learn how to program, but almost no one in a software engineering program learns how to design stuff.

And the jump from building academic programs in C/Matlab to building commercial software products is much smaller than the jump from having never used Fusion 360 to designing a commercial product.

Plus, there are many more resources out there for switching careers into software engineering. With CAD, you're kind of stuck with YouTube videos and the odd online course for foundational material.

As I like to say, if the construction world could tweak a $CEILING_HEIGHT parameter and hit the big "REBUILD HOTEL" button, and the entire hotel would systematically tear itself down and rebuild itself from scratch in about 5 minutes for a net cost of $5, and then run a large set of automated checks for code compliance, making sure the doors don't conflict with each other, etc. in the next five minutes, and spit out a report of all the results, you'd expect them to operate differently. VERY differently.

Coding is 100% an engineering endeavor. And just like any other one, a particular project may not be following engineering best practices and that project may be producing some dangerous garbage as a result, but I'm actually fairly satisfied with my engineering practices, as engineering practices, what with my automated testing, automated acceptance criteria, automated security checking, automated style checking, integrated peer-review practices, performance testing practices, engineering for redundancy and resiliance. If $YOU're thinking the coding world is awfully cowboy maybe that's a sign that $YOU need to up your game with the already-existing and well-documented best practices in our industry. To be honest most other "real engineers" would be green with envy at what we have available to us!

There are meaningful ways in which software interacts with the physical world.

Latency is the first to come to mind. The realities of how systems are designed and how permanent the storage in question is translate to latency and thus frequently performance bottlenecks.

Data durability is another thing to consider. Though frequently that's mostly abstracted away in the lower layers of hardware, system composition, and operating system / file system / libraries generally.

Limitations also exist in raw hardware performance (state machine speed, how parallel the computation can be, how parallel the desired process can be made) and capacity, for processing, temporary memory (RAM), and long term storage. Thermal considerations might also be a factor, but those are usually managed by lower layers and present as capacity limitations to typical software.

Software as a domain for achieving goals does offer an unusually wide degree of flexibility in approach. Today we also stand on the shoulders of many giants, with relatively easy access to extremely powerful systems that can obscure many sins for 'reasonable' workloads.

I envy real engineers. There's something quite satisfying about being able to touch a thing you made.

Software engineers can engineer ways to engineer more than certified engineers apply existing ways of engineering.

Feels like there's similarity to CPU and GPU binning.

Make a bunch of them with the same process then bin them based on the variability.

> One pair of 32/32 might feel 'off' and the next is the best pair you've ever owned

My understanding is that this isn't tied to Amazon or any specific retailer. But rather the cutting process for the fabric. They'll cut large stacks of denim cloth in a single go, and that's not an exact process. And that's why you can buy multiple supposedly identical pairs and notice differences.

> One pair of 32/32 might feel 'off' and the next is the best pair you've ever owned.

Honestly, even in the store, that's been a thing forever. You'd have to go to the department or mall store and try on a whole bunch.

Lately I've switched to a brand that has stretchier fabric (so small variations in size matter less) and more long-leg sizes (my size is 31 or 32/34 and difficult to find in department stores) and been content.

What are some good, high-quality alternatives for someone who is a fan of the original Levi's 501 (button fly) jeans?

The Unbranded UB301 is probably a good place to start.

I like Unbranded a lot, but I wish they sold their jeans with an inseam shorter than 34"...I don't like rolling mine up.

Uniqlo's selvedge jeans I've found are pretty good, although not button fly.

Last time I bought jeans I accidentally got the 501s because I didn't realize they were button fly. I thought I was going to return them but I ended up giving them a shot and now I love them. They're way less trouble to do up than I was expecting. (And because you work from the bottom up, I've never forgotten to close my fly... something that I managed far too often with zip flys)

I like button flys because they’re less prone to the “zipper boner” when you sit down.

Sure, start with 501s in Levi's LVC line. You'll get better quality, selvedge denim and they'll be based on 501s from different eras (so slimmer legs, wider hem, etc etc). If you're lucky you can find some with Japanese or Cone Mills (USA) denim. LVC are often in the sale, shop around.

Then look at the Japanese brands. Most of them are reproducing 501s from various eras. FWIW, I like TCB (https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/) - the price/value ratio is superb, the quality is better than LVC and retail is cheaper. Their 40s and 50s jeans are both brilliant and they age amazingly.

Hope that helps!

Where do you buy TCB? I've seen sites like Denimio and Bears Tokyo that sell them - do you have any experience with such sites?

You can buy TCB right off Shopify via the link above.

Yeah, this. Email them for help, send your measurements etc and they'll absolutely do their best to help you get something that fits!

It does, thanks! I know what I like, but at the same time I know very little about the Japanese selvedge denim scene. I'm fascinated by how Japan successfully copies and, in many ways improves upon, American designs. The paradigm I'm most familiar with is Japanese Fender electric guitar copies.

> buying Levis from Amazon (or any other store), pick up at least a couple of pairs in the same size.

At least for Amazon, keep in mind that they’re likely not put back into normal circulation if you return them so you’re creating waste where there doesn’t have to be.

I'm skeptical of this. Used sales are a thing, plus I've gotten "new" products that had definitely been previously opened. Throwing away returned products seems to go against the ethos of squeezing every drop of profit out of things.

You're right it will make its way to to a consumer one way or another, even if it's the raw materials. It's still a lot of "waste" I think.

This is not true. You can even see in tons of product listings where you can buy from "Amazon Resale". The prices are cheaper because they were returned from customers and are missing packaging, tags, etc.

Amazon absolutely resells returned items when possible. And if it's not through Amazon Resale, it's by reselling them in bulk lots to people who then make money listing the items on eBay.

Yes some of the absolute cheapest stuff gets tossed because it's not profitable to resell. But in many cases you're not even asked to return -- just keep it and get refunded. (As long as you don't have a history of abusing that.)

Levi's are absolutely going to be resold. Amazon is a business. They're not going to eat a loss when they don't have to.

What do you mean by "This is not true"?

Amazon routinely destroy returned items, see the investigation for yourself: https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millio...

> Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”.

And you think they'll keep a pair of shoddy trousers? I'm sorry to disappoint you but that's unlikely...

I mean it is not true.

And I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the very article you linked to clearly states it has nothing to do with returns. Rather:

> Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses. But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock.

It is about vendors who remove their merchandise from stock because nobody will buy it.

And what are you talking about "shoddy trousers"? It's a pair of Levi's. Why wouldn't they resell them? They already sell them in the first place. It's profit. Amazon isn't exactly in the business of not making profit.

weird thing is every pair of 32/32 I try are too tight and too short.

Any advice on how to shop for older jeans? I have >10-year old Lee jeans that are much better quality than what I can buy now. I didn't think it was possible to find such old stock of clothes but I'm willing to try.

I will never buy, let alone wear clothes previously worn by another person that I don't know (but even then I likely wouldn't)

I am talking about in normal, everyday (for me) circumstances, this would likely not apply in dire circumstances

For what it's worth: Wearing hand me down clothes has been the norm throughout most of modern human history. To the point that it's been a major influence on fashion. For example, a lot of the ribbons and trim on Victorian clothing was a way to cover up where the clothing had been altered or repaired after being handed down (often from an employer to their servants).

I don't say that to be critical if wearing previously worn clothing bothers you. I just bring it up because sometimes things stop bothering me once I realize that they are fairly common experiences.

I know that wearing hand me downs was common in history. I've worn plenty of hand me down clothes when I was a baby/growing up. But currently, where circumstances aren't pressing, I refuse to wear clothes worn by somebody else. I can be a bit of a germaphobe, so that probably explains most of it

Do you bring your own silverware when you go to restaurants? Washing the clothes should suffce

No. But I never claimed to be self-consistent or rational, did I now?

It's an odd hill to die on - I doubt the production line in Bangladesh or India would any less "dirty" than the person wearing clothes before you.

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