Why is it hard to buy things that work well? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#251

Post by Strilanc » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:50 AM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #118

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. 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…

Giving a confidence level is different from using weasel words. Weasel words make statements weaker or even vacuous. Confidence levels make statements more precise. Here's an example:

    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

Also note that I didn't say I wanted Dan to write less confidently. I wanted him to convey more varied confidence.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#252

Post by Dunedan » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #244

Dunedan wrote: post #230

> Some commonly repeated advice is that firms should focus on their "core competencies" and outsource everything else, but if we look mid-sized tech companies, we can see that they often need to have in-house expertise that's far outside what anyone would consider their core competency unless, e.g., every social media company has kernel expertise as a core competency. I wouldn't call Twitter or any other unicorn a "m…

Twitter is a mid sized tech company though, with a mere 5,500 employees. Facebook and Google are an order of magnitude bigger, and half the size of Uber and Netflix. It’s also a tiny bit smaller than Doordash and AirBnB by comparison.

> Twitter is a mid sized tech company though, with a mere 5,500 employees.

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...

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#253

Post by bjarneh » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

> I valued men and women equally, and found that because other employers did not, good women economists were less expensive than men.

Is this a very nice way of saying that you can hire women economists and underpay them in order to make money?

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#254

Post by lifeplusplus » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:56 AM UTC

My grandma had old stuff that was built like a tank.. AC that worked for 40 years, bulbs that still work, Fridge that has been working for 50 years, sewing machine also 50+, TV (huge bulky) still working, fans, etc..... I bought a coffee grinder from Amazon few days ago, it broke on the first try, like completely obliterated.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#255

Post by quickthrower2 » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:57 AM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #84

I think these sorts of failures of 'common sense' are common among people who have studied economic theory. Economic theory often does a decent job at describing steady states: where the asymptote will eventually land, but does a very poor job of describing the chaotic middle steps, IMO. 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…

Perfectly rational Austrian spherical cows, we are not.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#256

Post by Sniffnoy » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 6:59 AM UTC

jader201 wrote: post #227

Sniffnoy wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article. 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 coul…

Possibly, but I would bet that many people are upvoting these articles based off a combination of the title + the discussions of the title, which would suggest enough people find those two things interesting (which is why it’s at #1 and why most of the comments are around the title vs. the subject). Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a ti…

> Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click the article.

The problem with this is that, frequently -- as is the case here I'd say -- there is no easy way to properly pin down the actual topic in the space of a reasonable title. The title will necessarily be more broad than the actual topic; if you in general take titles as wholly delineating the topic, rather than suggesting the general space they're in, you're making a mistake.

Sticking only to those topics that can be wholly expressed in the space of a brief title is a big limitation on topics; as I said above, taking titles as topics just leads to the same discussions over and over.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#257

Post by resonious » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

bjarneh wrote: post #253

> I valued men and women equally, and found that because other employers did not, good women economists were less expensive than men. Is this a very nice way of saying that you can hire women economists and underpay them in order to make money?

Seems like it, yes. I've seen similar arguments made regarding foreign labor. "I value people of all countries the same - it's just that only seem to be willing to work for that value".

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#258

Post by erosenbe0 » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

I didn't get very far because Silicon Valley is very discriminatory and I can't stomach the denials. There was a long, sordid history of preventing Blacks and other people of color from buying. There were few opportunities to participate in the wealth engine compared to the nominal chances in a place like NYC where the most impoverished tracts in America (Bronx) were just a subway ride to Wall Street.

So yeah, Silicon Valley undercuts itself on talent, quality, ethics, equity and the like and always has.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#259

Post by ako » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:03 AM UTC

YZF wrote: post #160

Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;) 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…

The difference between machinery and software in this example is that one is outsourcing manufacturing and the other design.

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.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#260

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:07 AM UTC

unlikelymordant wrote: post #183

IncRnd wrote: post #177

> There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". 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…

Your quote does say its a "cocktail party version" which sort of implies its not going to be very good

[deleted]