Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 542 posts

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

#161

Post by astrange »

renewiltord wrote: post #132

The appendix is interesting because I have noticed that a lot. I think it might be because I'm on mostly American sites but it seems like any sort of "why can't we do this in America?" always has some sort of explanation why not. No one ever considers that the answer is "we could, actually, if someone chooses to do it". For instance, gigabit fibre in San Francisco was this impossible task if you ever asked someone. I…

> In practice, all it took was a dude called Dane Jasper deciding that the barriers were mostly regulatory and he could beat it and boom! Sonic covers so much of the city in $60/mo symmetric fiber. I think people will still explain why it's impossible in SF.

It often is impossible to get past the regulatory burdens in SF, although sometimes it's just because the supervisors ask you for bribes.

https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1375962440303661057

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

#162

Post by klodolph »

Centigonal wrote: post #145
klodolph wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …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…

I don't think what you're calling weasel words are weasel words. "Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like it's saying faster. What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this" help clarify what premises and hypoth…

> IMO It serves a useful purpose!

I have to disagree! I simply do not understand what useful purpose it serves—IF we are allowed to assume that our readers have a proficient level of prose literacy. The default assumption, when someone is talking or writing, is that they are communicating their own opinions and thoughts, experiences, anecdotes.

I don’t know about you, but when I think back to taking writing classes in school, if I wrote something like “I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of” in my paper, any good writing teacher I’ve ever had would cross it out. Same as “it is my opinion that” or “I have recently started to form some beliefs in the matter at hand after reviewing some materials that came into my possession” or other… filler. It pads out the document and only tells us things that we should already know, or be able to figure out.

The ability to sort out opinions and anecdotes from factual claims and evidence is… well… something you’d expect from a proficient reader!

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

#163

Post by AnonC »

samgtx wrote: post #83
massysett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though th…

A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have it.

> A bit of woo woo aside but I’ve been trying to practice more gratitude…

No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking this (and related citations) about research on gratitude and psychological well being:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interv...

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

#164

Post by Jiro »

It's like asking why consumers go for low prices rather than good quality. Similar answer: Because it's easy for companies to hide poor quality, but impossible to hide high prices. (Although companies do their best to hide prices anyway, like airlines charging everything as an addon).

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

#165

Post by makeitdouble »

emtel wrote: post #139

Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think Dan even attempts to answer the titular question! The article, while quite good, is just a very long list of things that suck, and anecdotes about people who tried to make things suck less. I’ve thought about this question very often, and I think the answer does come back to the market efficiency argument that Dan ridicules at the beginning. I think in many cases, what the market…

I went out of it with the conclusion "The world is broken, deal with it"

Just to get caught by that line in the culture part:

> If you read these kinds of discussions, you'll often see people claiming "that's just how the world is" and going further and saying that there is no other way the world could be, so anyone who isn't prepared for that is an idiot.

I'll defend my own claim as not trying to put the blame on the victim, it's nobody's fault most of the time, and we get to see some progress, sometimes. People should enjoy the stuff that actually work and praise those who make real efforts to make it less broken.

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

#166

Post by makeitdouble »

mathieutd wrote: post #125
DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Do you a reference for these statements? I'd be curious to read more about the topic.

I think it's pretty close to Ed Catmull's "Success Hides Problems".

The underlying thesis being that market success is orthogonal to your internal company's state, inefficiencies included.

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

#167

Post by klodolph »

jseliger wrote: post #140
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…

It's like most people don't read carefully or for comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-car... (A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)

Most people can’t. “Read carefully or for comprehension” would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks require you to be able to understand something in the presence of distractors. Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Did they answer both questions? (I’m actually a bit unsure that this falls in level 4.)

(Level 5 includes tasks such as “compare and contrast complex information, or to generate new information making high-level inferences or using specialized background knowledge”.)

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

#168

Post by maxerickson »

porknubbins wrote: post #43
maxerickson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 2 for 2 on humidifiers (1 ultrasonic, 1 wick evaporative). What fails on them?

One of the major issues with humidifier design is that whatever you put into the humidifier gets into the air, which sounds obvious but is an issue. We don't want to use chemicals to keep the paper wick from getting moldy because then we are breathing that. Or with ultrasonic they throw up mineral dust into the air. We end up just buying a lot of paper wicks.

Yeah, but those are functional limitations, not failure to function.

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

#169

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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 will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.

Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas.

However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth.

The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.

The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs.

I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.

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

#170

Post by alecbz »

klodolph wrote: post #162
Centigonal wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think what you're calling weasel words are weasel words. "Up to 50% faster!" is weasel wording. It says "slower or faster, but not more than 50% faster," but it sounds like it's saying faster. What GP is asking for is calibrating for uncertainty. Phrases like "I've seen this tendency in multiple teams I've been part of," or "study[ref] after study[ref] has confirmed this" help clarify what premises and hypoth…

> IMO It serves a useful purpose! I have to disagree! I simply do not understand what useful purpose it serves—IF we are allowed to assume that our readers have a proficient level of prose literacy. The default assumption, when someone is talking or writing, is that they are communicating their own opinions and thoughts, experiences, anecdotes. I don’t know about you, but when I think back to taking writing classes i…

People hold beliefs of different levels of confidence. I have some opinions I’m very confident in and others that are merely vague hunches. My level of confidence in something is the signal I’m trying to convey, not merely the fact that it is my thought at all.

It can also be useful to communicate brief info about why I have a particular confidence level. “I had a friend who…” vs “I’ve seen several times…” vs “Several studies have found…”

> when I think back to taking writing classes in school

Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being more charitable, they were trying to convey a general idea like “don’t overly hedge” with a coarse rule like “never use hedging language”.

I think most writing “rules” tend to be coarse approximations at what good writing really is. Another example is “give your essays a general structure, introduce your main point, etc.” => five paragraph essays.

Post reply on HN