Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically everything Dan posts online is deeply insightful, fearlessly honest, thoroughly footnoted, and dryly humorous.

I think even he is a little averse to straight up saying it out loud (we’ve discussed it many times): software and product outcomes have gone to shit because we don’t enforce anti-trust law already on the books, let alone update it in light of 50 Moore doublings.

You want a smart phone? Here are two vendors with the same App Store vig at payday loan shark rates. You want to rent cloud compute? Here are several vendors where the 4th place vendor charges the same as the first place vendor. You build disruptive encrypted messaging app? You better live on a boat and watch your six like Jason Bourne Mr. Marlinspike.

Is it even a little surprising that everything from Google search to Netflix is a shittier version of itself ten years ago? There’s no incentive to make it compelling!

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

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

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

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

> Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reason why software is crappy compared to physical products is because products come with a warranty and software doesn't. If you buy a blender and it makes some strange noise, you don't think twice about returning it, and maybe buying a different brand. If it breaks later, you can get repaired for free under the warranty, or else get it repaired.

You have none of these recourses with software. Yes, there are trial periods but that's not the same as buying and returning, and they're usually shorter than return windows.

And there's never any guarantee that it will "just work". We have managed to convince consumers to put up with software that "breaks" in a way that they would never do with hardware.

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

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

    > I keep bumping into the fact that using mentally cheap signals of quality (such as stars or DL counts) almost never indicates the quality of the thing itself.

Astro.js, VueUse, Quasar (it's ugly, but amazing).

> When their product attempts to do this and the operation fails, we end up with the sync getting "stuck", needing manual intervention from the vendor's operator and/or data loss. Since our data is still on Postgres, it's possible to recover from this by doing a full resync, but the data sync product tops out at 5MB/s for reasons that appear to be unknown to them, so a full resync can take days even on databases that aren't all that large. Resyncs will also silently drop and corrupt data

I don't know, but it sounds like you skipped over most of the reasons why the author was annoyed by Fivetran. You advertise "Connect data sources to PostgreSQL in minutes using Fivetran" but if Dan Luu -- who is certainly an intelligent and capable engineer -- and his coworkers can't figure out how to use your product correctly, and if your customer support also can't figure out why the sync breaks, then maybe this isn't mere customer 'arrogance'.

I have no idea who is right or wrong as to the capabilities. But I believe his story that he couldn't get it working. And I believe your statement that it can be made to work.

When very smart people can't get your product to work as advertised, that's a problem with either the advertising, or the documentation, or maybe the default settings. Or maybe it needs the source data set up in a very specific way.

That kind of plays into the larger point of the essay that outsourcing this sort of thing still requires significant internal knowledge, and therefore may not be as cheap as it looks at first glance.

> Evidently, he tried our product briefly

> investigated the issue briefly

> coming to snap conclusions

Where exactly is the evidence that he tried your product only briefly and that he investigated briefly? I've read through it and don't see that anywhere.

After reading your comment, I lean towards you being the arrogant, thin-skinned one about your product and coming to snap conclusions about your customers who are paying for your product and having trouble with it and calling them arrogant instead of looking into why they are experiencing frustration with your product.

Perhaps Dan's conclusion was wrong, but the tone and wording of your response is just off putting and devoid of tact, empathy and teachability.

Something like "No, I don't believe it's broken because x, y and z. But I do see how the developer experience here is left wanting. Maybe we can improve it" would have been so much better.

Weird approach chastising your customers lack of expertise in something they’re actively trying to pay you to solve for them. He shouldn’t have to be an expert in it.

I was a longtime customer of fivetran who hit these sync issues constantly. Forced resyncs every other month. Was so thankful when our contract ended.

In 2021, my employer was a major customer of Fivetran. Our Postgres syncs routinely broke and required time-consuming resyncs from scratch.

Dan's essay is dated 2022. It is now 2024, so maybe something has changed since then on the code path between Postgres and Fivetran to allow backtracking.

You would be the best one to evaluate if this applies in your case but in many cases where my users say "it's not possible" I end up finding a gap that's more related to usability than technical. I often still find there's something worth learning from this kind of feedback even if it's "wrong".

I assume Dan Luu was using the old “XMIN” method and not Logical Replication.

https://fivetran.com/docs/connectors/databases/postgresql/tr...

> Evidently, he tried our product briefly, had an issue or thought he had an issue, investigated the issue briefly and came to the conclusion that he understood the technology better than people who have spent years working on it..

This doesn't match this:

> Syncing from Postrgres is the main offering (as in the offering with the most customers) from a leading data sync company, and we found that it would lose data, duplicate data, and corrupt data. After digging into it, it turns out that the product has a design that, among other issues, relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they're consumed, so the Postgres data source can't support this operation. When their product attempts to do this and the operation fails, we end up with the sync getting "stuck", needing manual intervention from the vendor's operator and/or data loss. Since our data is still on Postgres, it's possible to recover from this by doing a full resync, but the data sync product tops out at 5MB/s for reasons that appear to be unknown to them, so a full resync can take days even on databases that aren't all that large. Resyncs will also silently drop and corrupt data, so multiple cycles of full resyncs followed by data integrity checks are sometimes necessary to recover from data corruption, which can take weeks. 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.

That description doesn't sound like _he_ briefly used your product, but that company he was working for used your product, found bugs and despite contacting support couldn't make it work. This doesn't read at all as a minor experiment that he didn't put in the time.

The kind of arrogance this comment displays has ensured that I’ll try my best to never use Fivetran anywhere I work ever again.

I'm not quite following. His argument appears to be: The replication system requires a backwards seek, Postgres does not support that operation, things break when that operation is attempted.

I don't understand why replication would need a backwards seek - are you saying it doesn't and he is mistaken on that?

This is unavoidable if you are at least a bit smarter than the average person, since in many cases their work just is broken.

It’s taken me far too long to internalize that the chances of someone making an (egregious) mistake in something I rely on to be correct are very much nonzero.

> an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken

I see you’ve met my boss.

...how is _this_ the insight that you come away from this post with?

This post is a commentary on product quality issues, the underlying cost models (both goods and services), and the interplay with American culture. There's like 20+ company/product anecdotes in there - a mistake about one detail about one technical detail of one product is wildly uninteresting.

This is the case where you buy from experts instead of doing it yourself. You tried, thought it was impossible, someone else figured it out.

[flagged]

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

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

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

Relevant joke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about what it means to be a major inefficiency.

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

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

To quote a made up quote about a famous made up general:

    The 95% inefficient army crushes the 97% inefficient army.

Or to quote a friend who works at big tech:

    If only I could get my team of three hundred to be as productive as my first team of three.

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

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

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

It's not a bad assumption.

If you buy a bond, it's probably pretty close to it's fair value in large part because my colleagues and I, and our competitors make sure it stays that way.

Markets drive efficiency but there is no major force that makes the process fast.

All the way to the process taking several lifetimes and so it's one dimension of human-scale investing or competition but just as iffy as the rest. So you see plenty of people trying to nudge the process, which is not a bad idea. For example build a file, short, publish and advertise the file.

While I haven’t worked at “the big guys”, I don’t find the statement false at face value. Rather (as you point out) perhaps a bit over simplified. Furthermore, it might be better to say “fair markets demonstrating healthy competition encourage efficiency.” But even in skewed markets, i.e. those with monopolies or heavily entrenched participants, the big guys may have inefficient operations scattered throughout, but can utilize their size to distribute those inefficiencies across other areas where they have above average efficiency. (Orgs like Amazon have perfected this practice). However, I’d argue the original quote is still true at face value, if the net sum of all your practices is in the red (financially) then the company can’t survive forever (although the company decay time-scale may seem long WRT one’s perspective).

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

"*Major" inefficiency is doing a lot of work there. If something that can clearly be improved upon, the market should be able to fill the hole. If its just the usual inefficiencies of day to day humanity, that exists in some form or another at every company and most likely won't be solved without a paradigm shift (like automation or a major process change).

There's also things like barrier to entry and sticky economic forces that means small inefficiencies are not enough to force change.

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

It’s the Platonic solid of Econ analysis. Sphereical cows.

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

I feel the same about the clowns who point to the stock market as some well-oiled capital allocation machine.

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

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

Theories are marketed too.

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

This is a wonderful encapsulation. Thank you.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution

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

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

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

Not only is the buyer not able to evaluate the product. The company, doesn't really understand what the buyer wants from the product and why he buys it over other products.

Exactly this. Even for something that is more relevant to HN, say Computer Hardware. You will already find most people are still doing very high level Spec Comparing without deep understanding within or besides it.

As long as you drill deep enough about anything that is when people start calling you nerd.

SSD ( Type of NAND ), DRAM, CPU Core, uArch, Board Layout, PSU, Fan etc. There are just insane amount of small variables. And unless you take interest in something. Most people are easily swayed by Marketing or Ads.

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

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

> Same with say dentist.

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

Many dentists are money hungry psychopaths and some of them are highly incompetent.

This is probably true for all doctors, but I don't think there is any other essential specialty that can pull as much money out of your pockets via personal persuasion, besides hair transplant and plastic surgeons.

https://www.rd.com/article/how-honest-are-dentists/

Both OBrien and Schlansky are worth millions, they can afford to buy the highest quality, most expensive option of just about whatever everyday item they happen to be buying because the price range is from zero to zero in relative terms.

There's a better rule to follow. If you think you need something, buy the cheapest possible version that gets the job done first. If you end up using it enough to wear it out, then buy the best option you can afford. Otherwise you're throwing away cash for something you might not ever end up using. Mostly goes for tools, but also other non-necessities.

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

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

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

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

You might enjoy the book Quintessence : The Quality of Having It by Betty Cornfeld and Owen Edwards. It was recommended by Jerry Seinfeld in his GQ 10 Things interview.

https://archive.org/details/quintessence00bett

The things the book lists are: The Martini, The Ace Comb, Wedgwood Plain White Bone China, The Spalding Rubber Ball, Ivory Soap, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, The Timex Mercury 20521 Watch, The Steinway Piano, Camel Cigarettes, Keds High-top Sneakers, The Oreo Cookie, The Mont Blanc Diplomat Pen, Frederick’s of Hollywood Lingerie, The Slinky Toy, The Brown Paper Bag, The Milk-Bone Dog Biscuit, The Cigarette Hawk Speedboat, Silly Putty Toy, Crayola Crayons, The Harley-Davidson ElectraGlide Motorcycle, The Zippo Lighter, The Cartier Santos Watch, Coppertone Suntan Lotion, The Goodyear Blimp, The Bean Maine Hunting Boot, Green Giant Peas, The Frisbee Flying Saucer, The English Bull Terrier, The Louisville Slugger Baseball Bat, Jockey Briefs, Monopoly Board Game, The Ghurka Express Bag No. 2, The Polaroid SX-70 Camera, Ray-Ban Sunglasses, Budweiser Beer, The Hershey’s Chocolate Kiss, The Volkswagen Beetle Car, The American Express Card, M&M’s Chocolate Candies, Bayer Aspirin, Honey Bear, The Faber Mongol #2 Pencil, Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, Lacoste Polo Shirt, Steiff Teddy Bears, Johnson’s Baby Powder, The Swiss Army Knife, Levi’s Jeans, Bass Weejun Loafers, The Hamilton Beach Model 936 Drink Mixer, Coca-Cola Soft Drink, Ohio Blue Tip Kitchen Matches, Kleenex Tissues, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, The Marklin Electric HO Gauge Model Trains, The Stetson Hat, Heinz Ketchup, The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog, The Oil Can, LePage’s Mucilage, Tupperware Containers, El Bubble Bubblegum Cigar, Dom Perignon Champagne, The Checker Cab.

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

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

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

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

Human fingers. Just pull the nose hairs out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

try this alt stylesheet https://ddanluu.com/nothing-works

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

this dude's MO is long ass essays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this is a solved problem

It Was worth the time/effort for me.

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

Reader mode.

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

AI-summarize that shit!

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

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

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

>Vintage Yamaha solid state electrical devices (or anything 1970s ish with real hardwood cases, and discrete components you can test and replace)

Too bad active (especially active digital, for anechoic factory calibration and room correction) is definitely the way to go these days. But as I said in other posts, Genelec is the brand to go for in this space; ME Geithain might be a good contender if you're in Germany.

Some other examples to complement your list:

A modern Mazda (from after Ford sold its shares back, i.e. made in Hiroshima) after a lot of research; including the software vulnerabilities side, quality of its engines and manual transmissions.

Been buying AMD for almost 15 years now, ever since I learned of Intel's ubiquitous anti-competitive shenanigans and consumer disdain (in the form of locked non-K CPUs, constant socket changes or switching to non-solder TIM with Ivy Bridge).

Rocking an Eizo CG, one of the last with a Panasonic panel with polarizing filter and generally rock solid build quality.

Key is knowing the rare good technically minded reviewers: TFTCentral for monitors, https://www.spinorama.org ASR/Erin, AudioXpress, Fidelity Online/Sound&Recording for audio (as long as you know your theory and the various physical/psychoacoustic limits), JonnyGuru (RIP) for PSUs, Chips&Cheese (and before it RealWorldTech) for CPUs, notebookcheck.net for laptops, etc...

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

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

One issue is: for new stuff, you cannot know yet if it's actually good. It's only once it has withstood the test of time that you can be reasonably sure.

> Vintage Yamaha solid state electrical devices

Yamaha are still producing modern amps that are very good quality wise compared to their price point: the "ToP-ART" (that's how they call it) basis they use in many amp is actually good stuff and has been tested and analyzed by many objective metrics. They may not be simple but they sure as heck do sound very good (and they've got a "loundess" control, which basically only Yamaha or $$$$$ Macintosh amps or preamps do have and nothing beats that for people who also need to listen at lower volumes later at night when everybody, including the neighbors, do sleep).

Overall I'd say Japanese companies still know how to build quality stuff: cars, amps, digital pianos, laser printers (even if even Brother and Epson can be criticized on some points, we're far from the turds companies like HP or Lexmark have become), tools (I love all the Makita tools and power tools), etc.

When it comes to music there are objective measurements and there are companies out there still building amazing stuff, punching way above their pricepoint.

One could lament about the cost cutting on the material (like plastic knobs) on entry level Yamaha amps, but the innards is actually good stuff. They also come with long warranties (two years but you can register your stuff online and get 2 to 3 additional years of warranty).

I have maybe 15 IBM Model keyboards but... I'm using since many years a HHKB Pro JP. And HHBK are, well, japanese keyboards (it took the japanese to create the amazing Topre switches).

That's the thing: sadly by only using older tech you're giving up on something. Amps from the 70s are not competing with modern stuff. Speakers from the 70s and 80s do age. Cars are going to be less secure and consume more fuel (I know: I've got two "youngtimers" cars from the late 80s).

Kitchen knifes? Japanese.

But I agree that quality overall has gone down a lot and that it takes time to find quality brands / models.

FWIW I paired DALI (a little Danish brand) loudspeakers with a modern Yamaha amp and I couldn't be happier.

P.S: although I do have family in Japan I'm not japanese ;)

I’m curious about the specifics here— what were the PR snafus? And what was better about the Androids?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the $130 thing is not better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowadays almost everything is a crap with fake positive reviews.

The problem is that evaluating quality is nigh impossible these days.

So right over me right now I have this big LED light/ceiling fan combination. I've owned I think 4 of them so far, in 3 different kinds.

All 3 kinds look somewhat different yet are built obviously from the same base for the electronics, though those vary somewhat. One model didn't reverse, one does. One model has RGB lighting. Some go by RF and some go by IR. But overall the electronics seem to come from the same place in slightly different flavors.

They're all random chinese brands, old ones tend to disappear and get replaced with a slightly newer ones.

And the problem is that at some point, something in the LED driver of the first 3 died. I tried replacing the chip, but it's some particular weird model that can't be found anywhere online.

At this point I'm half-seriously considering doing my own LED/fan driver board, because it's getting ridiculous. The 4th one is holding up so far though.

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

Then explain luxury goods?

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

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

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

There is absolutely nothing wrong with planned obsolescence.

There are exactly two alternatives to planned obsolescence. Planned infinity, which is an impossible engineering constraint. And unplanned obsolescence, which you know from temu products, which break after days of use, as they are designed with massive flaws.

If you are engineering a product you absolutely need to plan how long the product will last. The "alternatives" are significantly worse, especially for the consumer.

The Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 are planned for obsolescence, the parts they are made up of are designed to last a specific amount of time and use and are discarded afterwards. This is not some nefarious greedy management/engineering decision, but a reasonable tradeoff to make aviation possible, cost effective and safe.

Of course this is distinct from malicious engineering, which is the totally unrelated practice of building things which have specific negative properties. E.g. intentional design flaws.

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding smart phones, iPhones have had a bunch of features which they objectively do better, but these are never considered by reviewers or many buyers, who just look at paper specs and features. Just because these features are never articulated. Things such as user interface lag, long time usability, finger print sensor reliability. These were mayor problems with Android phones in the past (I have no idea how it is now), but since these features are very difficult to advertise, Apple focused their advertising in another direction.

And as a consequence people like hackers, Europeans, and such believe that the public are only getting iPhones because it's fashion and a "status symbol".

For me it went a bit deeper. Yes, there is always information asymmetry, but there is a world of difference between that and allowing outright lying and deception. In practice consumers are powerless against outright lying, so if Governments and organisations don't actively intervene it runs rampant. Apparently does that in most organisations. The article gave examples of CEO's that didn't allow it - Gordon More and Eric Schmidt. He claimed both ran very successful organisations as a result.

That reflects what I've seen in Australia. Unlike the USA, we have very strong local consumer protection laws. If a firm lies on the box, like saying a plan is unlimited when it is not, and a government will come knocking on their door. But in web market places like ebay the government can't control overseas sellers. Lying about the size of USB Flash drives on Ebay in particular became rampant. While Ebay is much cheaper than local brick and mortar sellers for just about everything, in the end I abandoned Ebay for USB Flash and other items where fraud was rampant. So did everyone else. The market for those things on EBay just collapsed - to the detriment of everyone - buyers and sellers alike. In the end EBay stepped in by siding with the consumer far more often when disputes arose, and those products returned.

The USA worships markets. Markets only work well when the buyer and seller are both well informed. Yet, the USA doesn't enforce that. To outsiders, it's weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t even get me started. We’re in wearable electronics, and somehow, we have to compete with devices priced under $15.

I know there are people who say, “Why pay more?” but honestly, at that price, you’re not just missing out on quality materials that have been thoroughly tested. You’re also missing proper support, reliable updates, and the peace of mind that comes with a product designed to actually last.

PS can we please discourage windbags

And yet when he took the CSS away, accessibility increased, engagement increased, and appreciation emails increased.

Citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42458683

It's ironic given the amount of effort that was invested in writing that post with absolutely zero effort put into making it readable.

PSA: your browser window is resizable.

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

This is an explicit anti-example in the article:

> For example, if you observe that it's silly for people to move from iPhones to Android phones because they think that Apple is engaging in nefarious planned obsolescence when Android devices generally become obsolete more quickly, due to a combination of iPhones getting updates for longer and iPhones being faster at every price point they compete at, allowing the phone to be used on bloated sites for longer, you can't really make money off of this observation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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