101–110 of 396 posts
If it is, it isn’t by much. The difference between $200 paid now versus 7 times $35 = $245 over a period of ten years is about 5 years of interest over $200. At 4% interest, that’s about $40.
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks. That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was already a hole in the bottom of the bag. My MP3 player (a creative zen micro) had slipped out of the bag, and someone had already picked up my MP3 player and walked away with it. Adjusted for inflation I spent over $500 on that MP3 player. Even as an avid backpacker, I have not spent that much on fairly nice packs.
In 2007 I splurged and paid $100 for a backpack from Deuter, and I also felt a lot of guilt as that was a huge amount of money for me at the time for something like a backpack. It's been nearly 20 years, it's not just that the backpack is still working, it still functions virtually like new. None of the seams are stretching, even though it's been through incredible overstuffing and abuse. All of the zippers are smooth as silk, and even the cushioning on the straps and airflow offsets on the back are still supple and supportive.
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I don't see which of those he violated? Also from the guidelines: "HN is for conversation between humans." Granted, it's under comment guidelines, but I think it's acting in the spirit of the rule to point out AI output.
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How can you tell?
Its got this ... cadence: > Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct. > That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is t…
While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if i…
Perhaps it's gotten harder to determine by eye, but Google will still point you towards trustworthy brands in 2 minutes. The problem is people don't care or can't be bothered to Google.
If you don't know a reviewer who is trustworthy, how can you find one? There's enormous amounts of slop (both human and generated -- this was already a problem before the last couple years), and when some channel has signal, it attracts more noise generators. The subreddit or review site is only useful until it's well known, and then there's increasing pressure on mods or owners to cash in.
The immediately obvious path here is paying for the reviews or recommendations directly, like Consumer Reports, but there are two major problems with that:
first, the amount consumers can afford to pay doesn't support the additional cost of actually buying all the units and exhaustively testing them, when CR and similar sites are competing against supplier-supported sites, and
second, if you care about specific features or aspects of a product, it's unlikely that the reviewer tested that specifically.
I wish I knew of a good solution. In reality, what's probably going to mitigate in the short term is having your agent scour all the available information and make recommendations, at comparatively great expense.
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Thank you. By the end of 2026, the same snarky "This article was written by LLM" comment is going to be posted on every single article on HN. It's becoming pointless to point out.
There's still plenty of human authored content out there. No need to post slop on HN. My rule is: If you can't be bothered writing an article, don't expect me to read it.
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Its got this ... cadence: > Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct. > That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is t…
I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM. It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
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If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?
The article hints that they are dying - the holding company is looking to offload them because profits are down.
The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."
That's a long time.
That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."
And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.
On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.
It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?
So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.
I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks. That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.
Good lightweight backpacks are not that durable. I have 12 years old 1.5 pound osprey, still in use, but age really shows.
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If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?
They are - the article finishes with them being for sale because they no longer generate money. They are not dead yet, but they are clearly out.