This post is so interesting to me, esp. the build-vs-buy spectrum.
As Dan notes, a lot of software is just...not very good. It either isn't upfront with flaws (as in the case of the Postgres -> Snowflake tool), has too much scope, or is abstracted poorly. Finding things to buy/use (as in the case of open source) can often eat a lot more time than you anticipate.
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'd go farther to argue that the larger an ecosystem/market is, the more untrustworthy it behaves as a whole, simply due to the size, and the types of people attracted to it who want to get influence/money. See also: appliances that everyone needs.
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.
it's worse than that: nobody knows! how are we supposed to know if all the investment vendor A made in "reliability" of their appliance will actually work, or if it was just spent wastefully? And oops: past results don't reflect future outcomes, so you can't even really bank on a brand or a reputation: who knows if they just cut all Q/A staff? Welcome to entropy my friends!
Theory (and practice too) says that whatever was used in the proof-of-concept also stays. I mean you are right the initial thinking is to try and evaluate the fitness, but then you're already invested and unless the fitness is abysmal (it rarely is) everything else will be rounded and squared to fit the already implemented hole...
Consumers rely on advertised claims being truthful.
It is not a matter of people badly predicting their own needs in most cases,though there are some that do have problems with this. It is a matter of people being misled by false information and trying to course correct after that information comes to light.
In a world where lies of omission and ambiguity towards borderline malice isn't considered an outright lie, but the sales reps do make those outright lies, and fake reviewers are not punished; there are real problems especially when the presumption is they aren't doing this (when in many markets this is exactly the standard behavior, and even academic studies show these things happen regularly).
Presumptions are just assumptions. Someone will take advantage of the grey unenforced area to push a product that may not be as professionally tested as they claim (or even finished). I've certainly run into a lot of these bait and switch types in my long professional career. The general term to describe this is snake-oil, and with the concentration of the market over time (increasing marketshare less participants), this only gets worse.
You’re giving pmarca too much credit: he’s just lying. Ya know, for personal profit.
Starving for talent my ass. His portfolio companies have infinite appetite for talent at zero cost, the minute one person wants one point of the upside they’re right back to starving for free talent.
Silicon Valley is the ultimate thought experiment in how wealth inequality plays out when resources are effectively inexhaustible. You don’t have to speculate about a post-scarcity world, this is a post-scarcity world. Ballers in SV ship a billion in revenue on a Tuesday. And yet somehow it’s Andreessen who ends up with all the chips at the end of the night.
These talking heads don’t have a plan, they don’t know what their next big payday will be, they don’t code, they don’t design, they don’t sell anything other than their own personal brand, they don’t add value.
They’re just patient and connected like zen spiders sitting on a web: they’ll learn first about a new big thing, they’ll be there immediately, their friends will wire up the deal in their favor, and they’ll do a TED talk a few years later about how making themselves absurdly wealthy with no real effort is somehow the future of humanity.
They openly advertise their glee at the (ridiculous) idea that soon some autoregressive language model will do all the work and the owners of NIDIA cards can just pocket it all.
In the 90s there was this meme of a yuppy couple doing a business from their couch via “The Information Superhighway”: outsource everything, all you need is a laptop, a glass of Chardonnay, and a lot of cheek.
pmarca should spend less time yakking about AI on Lex stream and more time learning AI on geohotz stream.
Most of “the people selling something” have little to no credibility, so their words have no value beyond a very low bar.
It would be different if it’s someone e.g. very high up at a F500 selling something, even with a huge information asymmetry, because it’s still possible to bank on their credibility. (Assuming they offer sufficiently many guarantees signed by sufficiently many people.)
>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
> I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).
I like to explore alternatives to the most popular choice, but more often than not I end up back at the #1 consensus choice.
I have some friends who simply must pick the #2 or #3 choice in every domain. They always have an elaborate justification for why it’s better. From my point of view it seems driven by contrarianism.
Some times they pick some interesting alternatives that I explore. Most of the time they end up with also-ran purchases that die off. I joke that my one friend is the best predictor of impending product line cancellation that I know. He used a Zune when everyone went iPod. He went Windows Phone when iPhone and Android were front runners. He event eschewed Instagram for some other platform that he was sure was going to win the social media wars, but was actually so unnoteworthy that I can’t even remember the name right now.
I have friends who routinely go for #2 or #3 (occasionally even further down). The typical justification they gave is that one's paying a lot of price premium/marketing cost for #1, whereas with #2/3 one gets comparable or slightly worse quality for a lot cheaper.
Part of the problem, though, is that winners of the popularity contest get more support from the rest of the ecosystem, which doesn't take that long to turn into a moat.
This really depends. Some examples where the number one choice is IMO justified:
- ZFS. There are other filesystems that provide checksumming, CoW, etc. but ZFS is a proven solution in this space. I am happy work on BRTFS and bcache continues but they are not yet there.
- Debian. There are distros that do things better and differently but nobody has quite as smooth an experience, hardware support, security, and software availability all in one package. Alternatives are really good so it really says something about Debian that it is as popular as it is.
- ssh. There are some alternatives but when was the last time you heard an argument made in their favor?
I could go on but hopefully I’ve made my point. Sometimes the standard choice is the right now. And yes I know me picking Debian as a good distro can start a flame war :)
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.
For me the most interesting case is HeidiSQL. I find it easily the most useful SQL GUI client, but it crashes pretty frequently, but not frequently enough for me to stop using it over the alternatives.
I often wondered how to strike the balance right on these things, since apparently all options can lead to success.
Are you actually applying some objective standard for "works" here? Or are you just deciding that the bugs in things you like are "of acceptable severity and manageability" and the bugs in things you don't like aren't?
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!
this is a tangent for sure but I doubt you can find payday loans that lend for 30% APR (Apple Store takes 30%). People really have no idea what realistic rates are for people with bad credit. If you have a sub 580 credit score the average APR for unsecured loans is 100%.
Anti-trust laws, and their enforcement, are only feasible in the very-large-monopoly space. Even in smaller monopolies, where not a lot of a money is moving around, you'll get a crappy product. Do you see Linda Khan going after Workday?
>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.
None of the examples of crappy software from the OP are Magnificent 7 companies, are they? Those companies seem to be capable of hiring the best talent.
A critical input into the build vs buy decision is whether your company is actually capable of building. Suppose Dan was advising the company that made the crappy Postgres/Snowflake sync software on whether to build vs buy a supporting component. Given that their main product is already crap, can they really be expected to build a better supporting component in-house? Seems like they might as well buy, and focus their energy on fixing the main product.
Dan advocates vertical integration here, and elsewhere says engineers get better compensation from FAANG than startups. This suggests that big companies made up of lots of talented engineers have natural efficiencies, relative to the alternatives.
A natural interpretation of "antitrust" is: break companies up into their smaller business units. That basically replaces an in-house "build" relationship with an inter-business "buy" relationship. So it seems antithetical to the OP.
Dan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to write a reply here on HN tearing me apart, like you did to all the other HN commenters.
One example is Google maps. There are two ecosystems: Google and Apple. Apple is kinda meh but lacks user information (ie: menu photos for a restaurant). Google maps has become simply horrendous but here is the catch: There is no third viable alternative. There used to be Foursquare for finding stuff nearby but that's gone. It's a very legitimate market. Businesses want to be found. Users want to find information and legitimate ratings. Money can be made as Google is monetizing Maps.
Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working.
> Here are several vendors where the 4th place vendor charges the same as the first place vendor.
That, uh, is kind of what you expect in a competitive commodity market, isn't it? I don't think that's the example you want. (No disagreement about app stores).
Luckily both the US and EU are working on breaking Google's app store monopoly. Though the US might stop that if Google manages to convince the new top guy that it's anti-woke.
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 once thought the same thing. Over time I realized those engineers weren’t necessarily good at picking the right thing up front. They were good at making it work despite any deficiencies.
Software will continue to be garbage until we expect more out of it. And that extends to the people writing it. This isn't a profession that is kind to people who want to do things by the book.
We incinerate the book every few years, but the fundamentals remain the same.
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.
You're missing the point of low-code/no-code solutions. Those are intended to sold to executives who don't actually understand software, as proven by a prior history of buying other crap software. Whether it actually works or saves any money is irrelevant.
My utterly cynical take is that the way to win with software is to put as much money and effort into marketing and sales as possible and as little as possible into the actual product. Especially B2B seems to do this a lot in practice because that software is bought based on checklist items and demos by salespeople.
Have definitely someone say, "well I tried Drizzle because the creators are good at shitposting on X."
I do not understand that at all, but maybe my reality is just substantially less mediated by "the conversation" that I don't get it. (Drizzle is fine BTW)
Winners are chosen because they tend to solve a problem easily for the average person. 99% of people don't care if it's written in rust or has the proper abstractions. It's, "I need to do X" and the winner does X easily. People here are very out of touch.
Cost as well. Most people don't want to invest in a high quality product unless it's something that is clearly miles above the competition (e.g. Vitamix, Herman Miller or Leap Chair, etc.)
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.
A lot of people blame the JavaScript language itself but, the longer I'm around in the world of web development, the more I think that the quality of JavaScript applications is dictated by the economics of said applications.
Off the top of my head, the best software I use seems to fall into two categories:
- Closed source software that requires buying a license to use
- Open source software that is specifically made for developers and promises to do one job well
Whatever falls in the middle of those two categories tends to suffer, in my experience.
If you think about it, web based software tend not to fit neatly into either category. Most of them are the following:
- Closed source but are either too cheap or are free
- Open source but promises to do way too many things, and also too cheap or free (describes a lot of frameworks and design tools)
Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. The end users are not given a big enough reason to pay for them adequately or at all, product owners care little about quality and reliability because it's way too easy to get a zillion low quality users to look at ads, and the barrier of entry for new JavaScript programmers is so low that it's full of people who never think philosophically about how code should be written.
I agree that many Frontend libraries are pretty intimidating to step into if you don't have a background in it.
Don't agree that JS community is bad, it is the largest community of any language by far, and it has the most money invested into it by a huge margin. There is a lot of trash but there is some seriously good stuff, and you can find 10+ packages trying to do pretty much anything you can think of.
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.
I'm finding similar results. I used to just write everything myself when a need arose, but in trying to better spend my time I find myself checking what's out there. And inevitably I'll find something that will claim to do exactly what I need.
From there, I find two problems rather often. One, it doesn't actually do what it claims. Googling is fruitless because I must have been the first one to actually try it. Gotta love Googling an error and finding exactly one result - the source code. I sometimes open a bug report depending on how the project seems, and that gets anything from deaf ears to "oh thanks, we'll fix it in the April release" which is of little use to me now.
The other is something you touched on briefly, that the API or contract changes in unexpected ways over time. You can stave this off for a little while by pinning, but then you're missing out on bug fixes and new features. Which, especially for a middleware type thing, is usually a death sentence by bitrot.
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.
Also there's no ceiling to the debt that can accrue from integrating a certain software with a product, and when that debt stalls for a while then it'll just become accepted as part of the process. Whereas a blender has a debt ceiling of 1 blender, and the labor time of maintenance boils down to placing an order for a new one occasionally.
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'm a star inflater and I feel a little bad about it. AFAIK GitHub does not have a good "bookmark" mechanism besides stars. So when I come across an interesting/useful project I'll start it to be able to find it later. My browser bookmarks have become a bit of a black hole where URLs go to get lost.
So hopefully I didn't bookmark a project someone else is trying to judge the quality of based on stars. Who knows how much technical debt or damage I've caused because GitHub doesn't have a bookmark feature that isn't gamified.
> 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.
I find that docs are typically a really good proxy for quality. Solid docs with clear expression of intent (design, usage, features) is usually a good sign.
Astro.js, VueUse, Quasar (it's ugly, but amazing).
I have some insight into this because this claim is about my company Fivetran:
“…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”
Dan’s understanding is incorrect, Postgres logical replication allows each consumer to maintain a bookmark in the WAL, and it will retain the WAL until you acknowledge receipt of a portion and advance the bookmark. 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.
Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely possible for the experts to be wrong and one smart guy to be right. But at least part of what’s going on in this post is an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken.
> 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'.
> 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'.
Dan Luu claims, among other things, to experience hundreds of software bugs per week. If you believe the things he writes then he's not at all representative of a normal customer.
Fivetran works perfectly fine for syncing Postgres databases into Snowflake. My company syncs dozens of them without problems. I can only assume their Postgres database has a non standard set up.
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.
In general, I absolutely agree with you. It’s basically an instance of “the customer is always right”: if a smart customer can’t get our product working, there is a problem with the product. But this post made a much bolder (and wrong) claim: “the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work”.
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.
The evidence is that he didn't read the postgres manual section on log-based replication[1] which would have told him how to configure a postgres master server so that it doesn't delete logs until all consumers have processed them.
It's not a five minute setup, but Dan doesn't write that the setup takes longer than five minutes - he writes that the design is fundamentally broken. Which it isn't, if you read the postgres manual. We're not even talking about the manual of the product he tried out for five minutes - we're talking about the manual of the database he's responsible for administering!
The overall point of the article is fine though. Original Commenter was nitpicking.
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".
> 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.
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.
...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.
> markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive
This just seems totally false on its face. If you've worked at the big guys you know they aren't magically smarter, they do very inefficient things frequently.
It's so intuitively false that I'd have to wonder about someone who thinks it's true.
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.
> 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.
US businesses, though, do not. The desired state is monopoly, or, failing that, oligopoly with three or less major players. The US is there in cellular communications, web search, banking, drugstores, social networks, movies...
Lately I've been wondering if the efficient market hypothesis was actually more true a century ago than it is now.
Not because anything fundamental has changed about economics, but because baselines have shifted to the point that what we expect an efficient market to look like may be very different from what what people expected it to look like in the early 20th century. So, basically, people's definition of "efficient" has subtly changed.
A century or so ago market economies hadn't caught on to the same extent. In the 1950s you had Khrushchev coming to visit Iowa to learn about US agricultural productivity. He visited family farms, talked to people about how they did things, and then went back home to tell the USSR's farmers that they needed to plant corn everywhere, including in places where the climate is not even remotely suitable for growing corn. All this time talking to family farmers about how they make their own decisions about the best use of their own land, and he somehow still failed to pick up on the idea that maybe the secret ingredient in the sauce was that the USA generally let farmers run their own farms.
Sure, the USA's capitalist economy still had charlatans, including agricultural charlatans, and wasteful fads for bad ideas, rent-seeking behavior, pork barrel politics, etc. But maybe it was still easy to see that situation as efficient at the time, because one's reference for comparison included being able to see the greater amount of damage that a planned economy allowed a charlatan like Lysenko to do from his position of power within the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
> It can be helpful to think of the Econ 101/homo economicus view of the world as something more akin to a secular religion.
I find it much more common for people to dismiss Econ 101 principles religiously (e.g. less strict zoning will just create more luxury apartments that will actually make housing more expensive; demand subsidies to college education, an inelastic good, will make it more affordable).
Econ 101 is the first semester of a multi year degree. By necessity it focuses on idealistic concepts. Nothing wrong with that—of course N-order effects, psychology, and information disparity, etc need to be taken into account in the real world.
Without this understanding one ends up in such a debate.
hard to evaluate sustained high profits without context. is it due to continued innovation by the firm? or just rent seeking? both can be causes of profits but we should only be promoting one of those models
> 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.
We'd need more context. Those sustained profits are "money on the table". There may be real advantages to the company earning them, like sustained innovation or other quality, that others have trouble competing with. But if those profits are coincident with lots of lobbying and various shenanigans (controversially maybe including patents and copyright)... you'll get more sympathy.
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.
You can look around and see vast gulfs in income or profit per employee in some industries. Sometimes it's hard to explain, except as them being inefficient.
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.
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)
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 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.
For a lot of fields the answer is much simpler. The buyer is simply not equipped to evaluate it at all.
eg I bet north of 50% of people judge their tax accountants by the size of refund not technical and legal accuracy. But they’re still liable so accuracy is an important measure of „good“
Same with say dentist. If he says he needs to do procedure x what am I going to do except ask some layman questions. Or doctor. Even trades often seem simple but have significant accumulated practical learnings that are not obvious to laymen.
It’s tempting to boil everything down to an optimization question & just finding the right metrics, especially for those STEM minded but often that’s not how reality works
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.
I disagree that reviews are easy to find. Things that look like reviews are easy to find.
Actual reviews, where somebody experienced in the domain of the product carefully uses it with a critical eye and accurately reports their findings are surprisingly difficult to find for a great many product categories.
I think this has many causes, one of which are things that look like reviews drowning out actual reviews, making the haystack in which the needle is kept bigger. Part of it is those things reducing the market value of reviews, so that there is less budget available for reviewers to do a good job. Part of it is the peddlers of things not supporting reviewers as much as they used to, because a real reviewer might give them a bad review, where they can easily seek out a thing that looks like a review, but has a much higher likelihood of putting their product in a favorable light.
Even when you find a good review, there are complexities of manufacturing (and some intentional obfuscation) that make it hard to compare products or know that you are buying the exact same thing that was reviewed.
If you buy the same item a year after the review, it may have changed. This could change performance but be something totally innocent, like the factory changing suppliers for a key component.
Another pattern is this: Large retailers buying in volume are able to customize what they buy, so the "same" product can differ depending on where you buy it. Differences can range from harmless things like "exclusive" colors all the up to changes in functionality, cheaper internal components, and so on. Sometimes the model numbers are not changed.
Another approach manufacturers use is to use slightly different model numbers everywhere which makes it hard to make exact comparisons. This is common with mattresses and appliances.
Nowadays reviews are just a paid marketing. Try to find a true review for a new car. Impossible! Everyone will talk about their feelings, not about the car.
Many even not opening the hood to check the motor. Suspension? No info. I'm interested in how complex is the maintenance, how comfortable is everyday trip. Real gas mileage, etc.
> Particularly interesting that quality seems to be dropping in an age where reviews are easier to find than ever.
I disagree, the world has decided that everyone is able to give out a review when it clearly isn't the case. We are distrustful of experts now, because they can be bought (which is true), and are relying on laymen that are much, much worse.
The old days of buying a magazine with experts reviewing something are gone, sadly.
There's more signal than ever but there's more noise than ever too, and you have to be genuinely savvy / expend a non-negligible amount of time to filter the signal out from the noise, because there's a really strong incentive and norm for any platform with a wide reach to be used as a marketing vector.
You can find a review but how do you know it isn't sponsored content or a paid placement? Most likely whatever information you find independently of the product itself will either be a total random person you found on eg reddit (who could be shilling or ignorant) or a "personality" who may have some degree of credibility and knowledge on the subject but who is increasingly incentivized to cash in on that credibility the more they are trusted to advise on purchasing decisions. We're also starting to experience the effects of over a decade of accumulation of dark patterns, increasingly sophisticated and pervasive marketing, SEO and Google's capitulation by clearly designating trusted "winner" websites, and "growth hacks" which individually may not have been noticeable but cumulatively evoke a general sense of enshittification and inability to find genuine information.
I can't trust Google to give me good search results for a search with commercial intent (too many people working too hard to skew the results away from quality), I can't trust blogs or videos from moderately credible sources to be genuinely impartial (not paid with affiliate links, directly for the review, or indirectly by a steady supply of free stuff from the manufacturer), I can't trust that RedditUser1234's comments on the matter (could be guerilla marketing or just stupid), I can't trust reviews on Amazon/equivalent (my own bad reviews have been removed, Amazon lets sellers get away with all other sorts of review trickery).
I'm often pressured to give incorrect quality ratings for unobvious reasons: I give Uber drivers either 5stars or no rating (after speaking with Uber drivers on the effects of ratings).
AirBnB in particular I noticed has little incentives for me to rate truthfully and a variety of incentives for me to lie (e.g. I wanted to downvote the management but I didn't want the staff member to be affected). Enough so that I bought booking.com shares because the AirBnB experience was too often hideous.
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.
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.
I've been thinking about good design lately. Things have to work well, but life is so much better when they are also beautiful. I think Don Norman's essay Emotion and Design started me down this path.
The Conan OBrien and Jordan Schlansky podcast talked about this in the context of nose hair trimmers. It was very funny, but it really resonated with me too. Schlansky starts with:
> I believe that we can live minimally. But the products that I do buy, I want them to be of a very high quality. I want them to have something special about them, and then I have to buy fewer products going forward because they last longer.
A little later he says:
> We define ourselves by the objects we interact with every day. I surround myself with beauty, with high levels of aesthetic pleasure, and it's not only putting on beautiful clothes. It's also using a beautiful nose hair trimmer.
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.
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 get what you are saying and have done that myself. I bought a cheap tile saw at Harbor Freight, retiled a couple rooms in my home, then gave the saw to a neighbor who did the same. Spending more on that would have been a waste especially since it's not something I was keeping.
A trimmer, on the other hand, is something that I handle every week. It's something that takes up space inside my home. The trimmer they are talking about is around $35 and the cheap version is probably $10. There are times when going for the nicer option is money well spent if using it is a nicer experience even if it does exactly the same thing as the cheap version.
Now if the trimmer were $350, that would probably be a hard pass. But $35? That's fine.
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.
One purchase we made 25ish years ago was some Global knives[1]. They have held up extraordinarily well and if somebody stole ours, I'd buy them again the next day. I think they look great, they feel really good, and they are very nice to use. They might be my favorite thing in the kitchen.
I don't know where our flatware is from. It doesn't have any branding on it, but the pieces are all pretty heavy. IMHO, a little heft feels pretty good.
If I had to buy new bowls and plates today, I'd probably get them from a smaller maker. I learned about East Fork Pottery[2] in North Carolina after they were hit hard by hurricane Helene and have been contemplating an upgrade ever since. I like their stuff, I like how it's made in the USA. Some of it is pretty expensive, but with care it should last a long time and it looks like it would be nice to use and live with.
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.
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.
Even more infuriating is when the more expensive version is the same object but with extra unnecessary features added via software, to the detriment of usability.
One heuristic I use is to find out where the item was manufactured. If it's China or some other place where they probably chose because of cost, it's a signal that they may have made other concessions as well. That podcast talked about this a bit. The good trimmer is made in Japan. The crappy ones are "made in a country that is arguably known for some lower quality production methods". I was guessing China, but I really don't know for certain.
That said, China can make some great things as well. For example, millions of iPhones and Macbooks are manufactured in China.
This is a thought-provoking essay by Dan Luu, whose essays I always find thought-provoking.
I'm surprised Dan didn't make the connection that the webs of mistrust between fiefdoms that form inside organizations as they grow are... Nash equilibria.[a]
Organizational webs of mistrust are nothing more than complicated versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma.[b]
Unless you have a CEO actively enforcing trust and collaboration, different fiefdoms naturally evolve behaviors that ensure they can survive and thrive in the face of possible betrayal by any other untrustworthy fiefdoms in the organization. We see similar behavior in natural ecosystems, which tend to evolve toward suboptimal equilibria that is robust to betrayal between groups, instead of global optima that requires perpetual honesty between them.[c] In many settings, robustness against betrayal is an evolutionary advantage.
For some reason this makes me think about cooking stock. Like the liquid you use to make gravy, soups, sauces, etc. most people I know will use either a box or jar of stock or a bouillon cube. There’s nothing wrong with this. It will produce a satisfactory meal. However you can easily make stock if you cook for yourself. Simply take all the parts of vegetables and meats you would throw away (think bones and onion paper) and cover it with water in a pot and add salt and pepper if you want and boil for an hour or so. You can do it while you cook other stuff. This stock can be frozen for later. But also, it’s obviously better than the stuff from a jar or a cube. Maybe it’s because you put some effort into it, maybe it’s because there’s a complexity to all the flavors that’s removed by industrialization. But it’s a stock that works very well. And I think it’s simply it requires time. Time we often think we don’t have. Perhaps this is all an unrelated thought but I do recommend that if you enjoy cooking at home making your own stock.
Readit News
As Dan notes, a lot of software is just...not very good. It either isn't upfront with flaws (as in the case of the Postgres -> Snowflake tool), has too much scope, or is abstracted poorly. Finding things to buy/use (as in the case of open source) can often eat a lot more time than you anticipate.
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'd go farther to argue that the larger an ecosystem/market is, the more untrustworthy it behaves as a whole, simply due to the size, and the types of people attracted to it who want to get influence/money. See also: appliances that everyone needs.
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
Consumers rely on advertised claims being truthful.
It is not a matter of people badly predicting their own needs in most cases,though there are some that do have problems with this. It is a matter of people being misled by false information and trying to course correct after that information comes to light.
In a world where lies of omission and ambiguity towards borderline malice isn't considered an outright lie, but the sales reps do make those outright lies, and fake reviewers are not punished; there are real problems especially when the presumption is they aren't doing this (when in many markets this is exactly the standard behavior, and even academic studies show these things happen regularly).
Presumptions are just assumptions. Someone will take advantage of the grey unenforced area to push a product that may not be as professionally tested as they claim (or even finished). I've certainly run into a lot of these bait and switch types in my long professional career. The general term to describe this is snake-oil, and with the concentration of the market over time (increasing marketshare less participants), this only gets worse.
Starving for talent my ass. His portfolio companies have infinite appetite for talent at zero cost, the minute one person wants one point of the upside they’re right back to starving for free talent.
Silicon Valley is the ultimate thought experiment in how wealth inequality plays out when resources are effectively inexhaustible. You don’t have to speculate about a post-scarcity world, this is a post-scarcity world. Ballers in SV ship a billion in revenue on a Tuesday. And yet somehow it’s Andreessen who ends up with all the chips at the end of the night.
These talking heads don’t have a plan, they don’t know what their next big payday will be, they don’t code, they don’t design, they don’t sell anything other than their own personal brand, they don’t add value.
They’re just patient and connected like zen spiders sitting on a web: they’ll learn first about a new big thing, they’ll be there immediately, their friends will wire up the deal in their favor, and they’ll do a TED talk a few years later about how making themselves absurdly wealthy with no real effort is somehow the future of humanity.
They openly advertise their glee at the (ridiculous) idea that soon some autoregressive language model will do all the work and the owners of NIDIA cards can just pocket it all.
In the 90s there was this meme of a yuppy couple doing a business from their couch via “The Information Superhighway”: outsource everything, all you need is a laptop, a glass of Chardonnay, and a lot of cheek.
pmarca should spend less time yakking about AI on Lex stream and more time learning AI on geohotz stream.
It would be different if it’s someone e.g. very high up at a F500 selling something, even with a huge information asymmetry, because it’s still possible to bank on their credibility. (Assuming they offer sufficiently many guarantees signed by sufficiently many people.)
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
I like to explore alternatives to the most popular choice, but more often than not I end up back at the #1 consensus choice.
I have some friends who simply must pick the #2 or #3 choice in every domain. They always have an elaborate justification for why it’s better. From my point of view it seems driven by contrarianism.
Some times they pick some interesting alternatives that I explore. Most of the time they end up with also-ran purchases that die off. I joke that my one friend is the best predictor of impending product line cancellation that I know. He used a Zune when everyone went iPod. He went Windows Phone when iPhone and Android were front runners. He event eschewed Instagram for some other platform that he was sure was going to win the social media wars, but was actually so unnoteworthy that I can’t even remember the name right now.
Depending on the domain, there's a good chance #1 may also be a sponsored result.
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Alternatively, the Mickey Mouse effect.
- ZFS. There are other filesystems that provide checksumming, CoW, etc. but ZFS is a proven solution in this space. I am happy work on BRTFS and bcache continues but they are not yet there.
- Debian. There are distros that do things better and differently but nobody has quite as smooth an experience, hardware support, security, and software availability all in one package. Alternatives are really good so it really says something about Debian that it is as popular as it is.
- ssh. There are some alternatives but when was the last time you heard an argument made in their favor?
I could go on but hopefully I’ve made my point. Sometimes the standard choice is the right now. And yes I know me picking Debian as a good distro can start a flame war :)
I often wondered how to strike the balance right on these things, since apparently all options can lead to success.
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!
> payday loan shark rates
Do you know what the retail markup on things you buy in your local shop?
If a product costs $1 from the producer, the distributer sells it to the retail shop at $2. And the retailer sells it at $4.
None of the examples of crappy software from the OP are Magnificent 7 companies, are they? Those companies seem to be capable of hiring the best talent.
A critical input into the build vs buy decision is whether your company is actually capable of building. Suppose Dan was advising the company that made the crappy Postgres/Snowflake sync software on whether to build vs buy a supporting component. Given that their main product is already crap, can they really be expected to build a better supporting component in-house? Seems like they might as well buy, and focus their energy on fixing the main product.
Dan advocates vertical integration here, and elsewhere says engineers get better compensation from FAANG than startups. This suggests that big companies made up of lots of talented engineers have natural efficiencies, relative to the alternatives.
A natural interpretation of "antitrust" is: break companies up into their smaller business units. That basically replaces an in-house "build" relationship with an inter-business "buy" relationship. So it seems antithetical to the OP.
Dan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to write a reply here on HN tearing me apart, like you did to all the other HN commenters.
Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working.
That, uh, is kind of what you expect in a competitive commodity market, isn't it? I don't think that's the example you want. (No disagreement about app stores).
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.
We incinerate the book every few years, but the fundamentals remain the same.
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 are mostly chosen by effort put into marketing, not product quality.
I do not understand that at all, but maybe my reality is just substantially less mediated by "the conversation" that I don't get it. (Drizzle is fine BTW)
Off the top of my head, the best software I use seems to fall into two categories:
- Closed source software that requires buying a license to use
- Open source software that is specifically made for developers and promises to do one job well
Whatever falls in the middle of those two categories tends to suffer, in my experience.
If you think about it, web based software tend not to fit neatly into either category. Most of them are the following:
- Closed source but are either too cheap or are free
- Open source but promises to do way too many things, and also too cheap or free (describes a lot of frameworks and design tools)
Web technology and JavaScript became the dumpster slut of software ecosystems. The end users are not given a big enough reason to pay for them adequately or at all, product owners care little about quality and reliability because it's way too easy to get a zillion low quality users to look at ads, and the barrier of entry for new JavaScript programmers is so low that it's full of people who never think philosophically about how code should be written.
Don't agree that JS community is bad, it is the largest community of any language by far, and it has the most money invested into it by a huge margin. There is a lot of trash but there is some seriously good stuff, and you can find 10+ packages trying to do pretty much anything you can think of.
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.
From there, I find two problems rather often. One, it doesn't actually do what it claims. Googling is fruitless because I must have been the first one to actually try it. Gotta love Googling an error and finding exactly one result - the source code. I sometimes open a bug report depending on how the project seems, and that gets anything from deaf ears to "oh thanks, we'll fix it in the April release" which is of little use to me now.
The other is something you touched on briefly, that the API or contract changes in unexpected ways over time. You can stave this off for a little while by pinning, but then you're missing out on bug fixes and new features. Which, especially for a middleware type thing, is usually a death sentence by bitrot.
Dead Comment
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.
If the project appears to have several active contributors that would be good too.
So hopefully I didn't bookmark a project someone else is trying to judge the quality of based on stars. Who knows how much technical debt or damage I've caused because GitHub doesn't have a bookmark feature that isn't gamified.
Astro.js, VueUse, Quasar (it's ugly, but amazing).
It seems like a pretty niche project with am enthusiastic following. Like Elm, but even more niche.
Deleted Comment
“…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”
Dan’s understanding is incorrect, Postgres logical replication allows each consumer to maintain a bookmark in the WAL, and it will retain the WAL until you acknowledge receipt of a portion and advance the bookmark. 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.
Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely possible for the experts to be wrong and one smart guy to be right. But at least part of what’s going on in this post is an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken.
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'.
Dan Luu claims, among other things, to experience hundreds of software bugs per week. If you believe the things he writes then he's not at all representative of a normal customer.
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.
> 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.
It's not a five minute setup, but Dan doesn't write that the setup takes longer than five minutes - he writes that the design is fundamentally broken. Which it isn't, if you read the postgres manual. We're not even talking about the manual of the product he tried out for five minutes - we're talking about the manual of the database he's responsible for administering!
The overall point of the article is fine though. Original Commenter was nitpicking.
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/warm-standby.html
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.
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.
https://fivetran.com/docs/connectors/databases/postgresql/tr...
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.
I don't understand why replication would need a backwards seek - are you saying it doesn't and he is mistaken on that?
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.
I see you’ve met my boss.
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.
Dead Comment
This just seems totally false on its face. If you've worked at the big guys you know they aren't magically smarter, they do very inefficient things frequently.
It's so intuitively false that I'd have to wonder about someone who thinks it's true.
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.
US businesses, though, do not. The desired state is monopoly, or, failing that, oligopoly with three or less major players. The US is there in cellular communications, web search, banking, drugstores, social networks, movies...
"Competition is for losers" - Thiel.
Not because anything fundamental has changed about economics, but because baselines have shifted to the point that what we expect an efficient market to look like may be very different from what what people expected it to look like in the early 20th century. So, basically, people's definition of "efficient" has subtly changed.
A century or so ago market economies hadn't caught on to the same extent. In the 1950s you had Khrushchev coming to visit Iowa to learn about US agricultural productivity. He visited family farms, talked to people about how they did things, and then went back home to tell the USSR's farmers that they needed to plant corn everywhere, including in places where the climate is not even remotely suitable for growing corn. All this time talking to family farmers about how they make their own decisions about the best use of their own land, and he somehow still failed to pick up on the idea that maybe the secret ingredient in the sauce was that the USA generally let farmers run their own farms.
Sure, the USA's capitalist economy still had charlatans, including agricultural charlatans, and wasteful fads for bad ideas, rent-seeking behavior, pork barrel politics, etc. But maybe it was still easy to see that situation as efficient at the time, because one's reference for comparison included being able to see the greater amount of damage that a planned economy allowed a charlatan like Lysenko to do from his position of power within the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
I find it much more common for people to dismiss Econ 101 principles religiously (e.g. less strict zoning will just create more luxury apartments that will actually make housing more expensive; demand subsidies to college education, an inelastic good, will make it more affordable).
Without this understanding one ends up in such a debate.
We'd need more context. Those sustained profits are "money on the table". There may be real advantages to the company earning them, like sustained innovation or other quality, that others have trouble competing with. But if those profits are coincident with lots of lobbying and various shenanigans (controversially maybe including patents and copyright)... you'll get more sympathy.
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oqXe4WVnAz4
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.
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.
Or to quote a friend who works at big tech:
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.
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.
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.
There's also things like barrier to entry and sticky economic forces that means small inefficiencies are not enough to force change.
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.
This is a wonderful encapsulation. Thank you.
eg I bet north of 50% of people judge their tax accountants by the size of refund not technical and legal accuracy. But they’re still liable so accuracy is an important measure of „good“
Same with say dentist. If he says he needs to do procedure x what am I going to do except ask some layman questions. Or doctor. Even trades often seem simple but have significant accumulated practical learnings that are not obvious to laymen.
It’s tempting to boil everything down to an optimization question & just finding the right metrics, especially for those STEM minded but often that’s not how reality works
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.
Actual reviews, where somebody experienced in the domain of the product carefully uses it with a critical eye and accurately reports their findings are surprisingly difficult to find for a great many product categories.
I think this has many causes, one of which are things that look like reviews drowning out actual reviews, making the haystack in which the needle is kept bigger. Part of it is those things reducing the market value of reviews, so that there is less budget available for reviewers to do a good job. Part of it is the peddlers of things not supporting reviewers as much as they used to, because a real reviewer might give them a bad review, where they can easily seek out a thing that looks like a review, but has a much higher likelihood of putting their product in a favorable light.
If you buy the same item a year after the review, it may have changed. This could change performance but be something totally innocent, like the factory changing suppliers for a key component.
Another pattern is this: Large retailers buying in volume are able to customize what they buy, so the "same" product can differ depending on where you buy it. Differences can range from harmless things like "exclusive" colors all the up to changes in functionality, cheaper internal components, and so on. Sometimes the model numbers are not changed.
Another approach manufacturers use is to use slightly different model numbers everywhere which makes it hard to make exact comparisons. This is common with mattresses and appliances.
Nowadays reviews are just a paid marketing. Try to find a true review for a new car. Impossible! Everyone will talk about their feelings, not about the car.
Many even not opening the hood to check the motor. Suspension? No info. I'm interested in how complex is the maintenance, how comfortable is everyday trip. Real gas mileage, etc.
I disagree, the world has decided that everyone is able to give out a review when it clearly isn't the case. We are distrustful of experts now, because they can be bought (which is true), and are relying on laymen that are much, much worse.
The old days of buying a magazine with experts reviewing something are gone, sadly.
You can find a review but how do you know it isn't sponsored content or a paid placement? Most likely whatever information you find independently of the product itself will either be a total random person you found on eg reddit (who could be shilling or ignorant) or a "personality" who may have some degree of credibility and knowledge on the subject but who is increasingly incentivized to cash in on that credibility the more they are trusted to advise on purchasing decisions. We're also starting to experience the effects of over a decade of accumulation of dark patterns, increasingly sophisticated and pervasive marketing, SEO and Google's capitulation by clearly designating trusted "winner" websites, and "growth hacks" which individually may not have been noticeable but cumulatively evoke a general sense of enshittification and inability to find genuine information.
I can't trust Google to give me good search results for a search with commercial intent (too many people working too hard to skew the results away from quality), I can't trust blogs or videos from moderately credible sources to be genuinely impartial (not paid with affiliate links, directly for the review, or indirectly by a steady supply of free stuff from the manufacturer), I can't trust that RedditUser1234's comments on the matter (could be guerilla marketing or just stupid), I can't trust reviews on Amazon/equivalent (my own bad reviews have been removed, Amazon lets sellers get away with all other sorts of review trickery).
AirBnB in particular I noticed has little incentives for me to rate truthfully and a variety of incentives for me to lie (e.g. I wanted to downvote the management but I didn't want the staff member to be affected). Enough so that I bought booking.com shares because the AirBnB experience was too often hideous.
Buyers are going to have a difficult time, and it can only continue to get worse.
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.
I mean, two of my previous companies messed up with payroll and many thousands were impacted.
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.
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/
The Conan OBrien and Jordan Schlansky podcast talked about this in the context of nose hair trimmers. It was very funny, but it really resonated with me too. Schlansky starts with:
> I believe that we can live minimally. But the products that I do buy, I want them to be of a very high quality. I want them to have something special about them, and then I have to buy fewer products going forward because they last longer.
A little later he says:
> We define ourselves by the objects we interact with every day. I surround myself with beauty, with high levels of aesthetic pleasure, and it's not only putting on beautiful clothes. It's also using a beautiful nose hair trimmer.
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.
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.
A trimmer, on the other hand, is something that I handle every week. It's something that takes up space inside my home. The trimmer they are talking about is around $35 and the cheap version is probably $10. There are times when going for the nicer option is money well spent if using it is a nicer experience even if it does exactly the same thing as the cheap version.
Now if the trimmer were $350, that would probably be a hard pass. But $35? That's fine.
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.
One purchase we made 25ish years ago was some Global knives[1]. They have held up extraordinarily well and if somebody stole ours, I'd buy them again the next day. I think they look great, they feel really good, and they are very nice to use. They might be my favorite thing in the kitchen.
I don't know where our flatware is from. It doesn't have any branding on it, but the pieces are all pretty heavy. IMHO, a little heft feels pretty good.
If I had to buy new bowls and plates today, I'd probably get them from a smaller maker. I learned about East Fork Pottery[2] in North Carolina after they were hit hard by hurricane Helene and have been contemplating an upgrade ever since. I like their stuff, I like how it's made in the USA. Some of it is pretty expensive, but with care it should last a long time and it looks like it would be nice to use and live with.
[1]: https://www.globalcutleryusa.com/knives/collections/classic-...
[2]: https://www.eastfork.com/
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.
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.
One heuristic I use is to find out where the item was manufactured. If it's China or some other place where they probably chose because of cost, it's a signal that they may have made other concessions as well. That podcast talked about this a bit. The good trimmer is made in Japan. The crappy ones are "made in a country that is arguably known for some lower quality production methods". I was guessing China, but I really don't know for certain.
That said, China can make some great things as well. For example, millions of iPhones and Macbooks are manufactured in China.
Human fingers. Just pull the nose hairs out.
I'm surprised Dan didn't make the connection that the webs of mistrust between fiefdoms that form inside organizations as they grow are... Nash equilibria.[a]
Organizational webs of mistrust are nothing more than complicated versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma.[b]
Unless you have a CEO actively enforcing trust and collaboration, different fiefdoms naturally evolve behaviors that ensure they can survive and thrive in the face of possible betrayal by any other untrustworthy fiefdoms in the organization. We see similar behavior in natural ecosystems, which tend to evolve toward suboptimal equilibria that is robust to betrayal between groups, instead of global optima that requires perpetual honesty between them.[c] In many settings, robustness against betrayal is an evolutionary advantage.
---
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
The lack the formatting sometimes makes his posts feel like a wall of uninterrupted text.
When reading his stuff, I find it helpful to put my browser in "reader" mode, which narrows text width.
I wish Dan would put dates on his posts!
I’ve gained a reputation as a sort of hipster for using YYYY-MM-DD for all dates I record, even outside of computing.