YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants high-quality (for the most part), but no-one wants to pay more than necessary. If known brand is no longer an indicator of quality, how do you determine that you want to spend say 2-5x the price on something? Reading reviews and such gets you part of the way, but they often focus on new products and performance or style. And it's not always easy to find a review for the thing you are looking to buy. Besides, who has time to wade through reviews for every purchase? So we end up buying the cheaper options because at least then you will only be out a little bit instead of feeling tricked spending more for the same product.

The overall revealed consumer preference has been "more and cheaper", not "less and higher quality", which still exists as a niche if you are willing to go down the tailoring route, not off the peg.

Which means I now feel obligated to recommend:

https://youtube.com/@theironsnail

https://youtube.com/@shiftfashiongroup

Both have great videos on garment quality. But with the inevitable caveat that they are in the business themselves. I take it as an insiders perspective and watch out for content marketing (while being tainted!).

It seems to be easier to find better clothes if you are a bit of a hipster type. Those kind of stores still care for quality. My friend has such a shop and tells me that even for them it gets harder to source good vendors as it is a continuous race to the bottom.

They still exist, at least here in Europe.

I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.

The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.

I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.

In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.

This tends to happen more when one is young. Growing older usually means that a good old dusty 15 years great quality coat is seen as it being perfectly ok. I guess that's also what provides that feeling that some people when they approach middle age they "always look the same"... It's not cheap to have a large and varied wardrobe and at the same time filled with high quality garments.

The CE mark in Europe and the UL mark in the US is supposed to provide a floor on quality.

That floor can be increased if we as a society decides that this is required.

You might be unwilling to pay for this increased quality, but you don't have a choice.

If end consumers were able to see an exact and measurable bump in prices the next day a new stronger regulation made production more expensive, voters would be more informed and the whole cost of doing things "better" would be clearer.

A good way to see this is in clothing: my wife likes to buy vintage clothes, part because of the style, but also because most of them are actually well made and sturdy.

Nowadays it's almost impossible to get the same quality and finishes, even with the more expensive brands. Due to the mass-production of low quality clothing, (most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like, which further reduces incentives for manufacturers.

For comparison, some niche menswear brands keep the quality stable (as their specific consumer base asks for it). Say Northampton leather shoes for instance (Crockett and Jones et al.), which are still made in the UK (not in an mafia-ran sweatshop in Italia for luxury goods...).

Their products are amazing, and...the price grows 5-10% per year steadily.

That said, it's 2026... if you want quality and only want to pay marginal increment, there's tons of Chinese ODMs turn direct to consumer, i.e. Quince. They'll sell you functionally top quality (spec for spec inputs if not better) with 1x markup vs 10x brand markup/premium.

More specifically, people in PR China have gotten massively richer since the late 1970s. How does that square with your slavery thesis?

I might also add that if anything, goods from China have become better value for money since then. Even as their people have moved further and further away from slave status.

"premium" ? No they've had to lower their prices because otherwise you would never even look at them in the first place (or they don't get a livable amount of work, even if you personally do pay like you say).

And the drop in prices has to come from somewhere. Quality is by far the easiest thing to skimp on.

I do agree that third party certification is one possible avenue.

Maybe idea could be maybe applied to the offering of long-term technical support and backwards-compatibility (in terms of durability of the software) and open source (in terms of reusability of the software).

So what! Until the 20th Century pharmaceuticals/medicines were unregulated (eg: buy laudanum (opium) anywhere without regs and instructions said it was fine to give it to kids). After deaths, disasters and addiction regulations tightened—especially so after birth defects and thalidomide. Now the industry is tightly regulated.

Right, it took over one hundred years for pharma to be regulated. So be it for software. It's time the Wild West came to an end.

There'll always be whingers along the way, especially if they stand to lose profits. The "Good Times" for the software industry ought to be over because consumers are no longer benefiting in the way they should. Want a quintessential example of 'junk' software: Windows 11.

Most quality defects I see are ultimately down to culture, not training and certainly not certification. Getting to excellent quality simply does not require great training nor rigorous certification, and I'm not even sure it really benefits from either all that much. But what it does require is a culture of chasing down all the avoidable risks, to fix not just the immediate bug, but also the process that allowed it to come to be, to pre-emptively look for whole classes of bugs or misfeatures seriously, and to always look deeper than for underlying causes or interactions (i.e. take the 5-why's game seriously).

It's perhaps almost a trope by this point, but it's still a great reminder and example - sqlite. About a month ago Richard Hipp, one of the primary authors, gave a great presentation "Reliability Lessons From SQLite" (https://youtu.be/V_qzqY1bb7I) - and notably, I'm not seeing even _echos_ of training and certification in their clearly world-class process. I don't think you can even seriously claim it's all that expensive, if you consider how tiny that team is, and yet how much they've achieved.

If larger organizations fail to achieve high quality - well, _why?_ It's not due to lack of training, certifications or smart people. Perhaps its intrinsic about larger for-profit corporations, but I suspect we could do better with better incentives, and a more serious attitude about dealing with mis-aligned incentives throughout our culture. Is it really a flaw for a corporation to prioritize short term cost reduction even over long term self-harm if that's what they're judged by? Is it a flaw for a profit seeking corporation to largely ignore costs their low quality imposes on others? Is it a flaw for a for-profit organization to take huge risks when the upside is unbounded but the downside is mere bankruptcy without any further liability?

I don't know how to solve these problems, and don't want to claim it's even remotely reasonable to throw out the capitalist baby with the corporate bathwater, but surely we can do better than the status quo even without a revolution. Misaligned incentives and tragedies of the commons aren't new issues, nor ones without potential mitigations. We're just choosing to ignore those inefficiencies, and have for decades. And at this point, even small changes in incentives might have truly wrenching consequences; the ingrained and by now deeply embedded carelessness in our huge software and other engineering stack is corroded at every level.

TLDR: I don't have the answer, but I'm pretty positive it's not an issue of cost, training or certification.

A related concept is Jugaad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad Often interpreted as "good enough" with no connection to Quality at all. Even when the context/environment changes to afford better quality (both manufacturing and cost) quality is never pursued unless mandated by National/ISO standards etc.

One way to maybe understand this is through Robert Axelrod's books; The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation

But the actors are never fully rational, there is always a clique which manipulates/influences and therefore there is never a "fair" market. Human motivations and behaviour are always the key and so you need Behavioral Game Theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_game_theory (see book of the same name by Colin Camerer)

Finally, Nassim Taleb's ideas are also very relevant here. Markets work on "Trial and Error" and "Chance", there is no "fair/efficient invisible guiding hand" but only a guiding hand by cliques which have no "skin in the game" when it comes to downsides and "asymmetric risk" benefiting corporate capitalism. But the system as a whole functions because it is somewhat "Antifragile" i.e. the chaotic interactions and successes/failures within the system somehow strengthens the whole.

You still renting the old Xbox? Try renting this new Xbox instead, the verification cans come in additional flavors!

Long warranty is better as there is no other incentive who has to pay if the product breaks down. Cars should have a 7 years warranty by default for instance.

I imagine you're looking at it from the avenue of "if those goods last longer, they can be rented for longer", but having to manage and store more durable goods after consumers have moved on to newer and better things is a considerable cost. A good that has to be returned is often better discarded, from the company's point of view.

For the company yes, not for the executive bonuses.

It is quite notable how the long-lasting companies that are household names somehow managed to resist this urge. Most of them are private.

People need to compartmentalize things in order to make sense of the universe, but doing so for companies (and governments) is just counterproductive.

Whenever you think about a company to draw any good conclusions you always need to think about all the people who work there, from the factory worker to the executive.

That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.

That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.

Punishment is never a good long term solution. Because punishment is related to revenge. And revenge reinforces the punishment - but on the other side.

Perhaps questioning the underlying assumptions we make about products, money and capitalism is an alternative approach:

- money is just a means, not an end. Allowing faceless investors to pump money into brands and then have them force companies to turn a profit at any price (i.e. by decreased quality at higher prices - it's a brand after all). The euphemism for this is "increasing shareholder value". The only value being increased is money.

- why does advertising build on our fears of being "different" (not belonging to our assumed peer group) or "not being happy" (if you buy this product, you'll be as happy as the person shown here in the advertising). Or missing out on something. The euphemism here is "increasing brand awareness". They that shout the loudness will remain memorable.

- why has everything and everyone become a product to be sold and repackage to fit into the latest trends. Intelligence is now also become a product in the form of AI with folks outsourcing their intelligence to a machine "oh AI can do this better than I could so I won't even bother".

Unfortunately we make too many assumptions that it has to be this way. Science and nature have yet found the unifying law of capitalism or brandism, let allow law of influencism.

So until the next bubble bursts and much time is spent saving large bloated inefficient corporations from bankruptcy because interested parties have their fingers in the pie, the game will continue.

The whole thing is becoming a giant game of monopoly with no end. At least monopoly eventually ends with the winner gloating over their success and everyone else quietly walking away.