思考与写作danluu.com编辑精选
为什么买到好用的东西这么难？
Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
2022 — 2024，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
Dan Luu 在这篇文章中探讨一个反直觉的现象：为什么在市场上很难买到真正好用的产品。他通过芯片、软件等多个行业的实例分析，指出市场并没有把质量作为有效的定价信号，很多低效现象长期存在。
为什么经久不衰：它用扎实的行业实例解释了'好产品难买'背后的市场机制，两次登上 HN 首页说明其洞察历久弥新，对消费者和从业者都有启发。
HN 评论精选
外包决策常常忽略了供应链中断等韧性风险，这些风险通常被定价为零。
文章中提到一家小型芯片创业公司自建了端到端的芯片处理能力（除流片外），新晶圆一下线就空运回来，自己切割测试。这在业内被视为荒谬，就像小软件创业公司自管机房一样——毕竟切割设备和相关专长 99% 的时间都在闲置。这让我想到韧性话题：即使自建略贵，也可能值得，因为外包存在供应商破产、疫情、地缘政治等风险。这些风险在决策时往往被定价为零。
kccqzy查看英文原文
> An example from another industry: when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a commercial flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips so we could start testing ASAP. This was often considered absurd in the same way that it would be considered absurd for a small software startup to manage its own on-prem hardware. After all, the wafer saw and the expertise necessary to go from a wafer to a working chip will be idle over 99% of the time. This paragraph from the article reminds me of the recent HN discussion about resilience. In this particular example idling 99% of the time is cheaper, but even if idling 99% of the time is slightly expensive, it might still be a good idea not to outsource due to resilience. What if the vendor goes bankrupt? What if the vendor's vendor is unable to perform their contractual duty due to a disease outbreak? Or a geopolitical risk? You avoid these risks if everything is in-house, so these risks need to be priced in when determining whether to outsource. But more often than not, these risks are priced at exactly zero.
好用的东西因为'默默工作'而不被察觉，这解释了为什么质量难以成为卖点。
我觉得是因为运转良好的东西不会被注意到：房屋地基、电灯开关、文件系统、硅制造、供水、超市物流等等。大多数人从未注意过它们，因为它们就是能用，人们甚至不会想到这些东西也可能出问题。
yrral查看英文原文
I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.
'今不如昔'是幸存者偏差造成的错觉，过去同样充满劣质产品。
翻看老式 Sears 目录和老游戏节目里的奖品，我觉得我们的记忆是有选择性的。即使在照片和标清视频里，也能看到早年许多消费品糟糕的做工，尤其是家具和健身器材。换算成今天的物价，那些劣质品往往比现在的东西还贵。今天当然也有垃圾货，但'过去更容易买到好东西'的说法并不普遍——我们只看到了幸存下来的老物件，垃圾场里堆满的是我们看不见的劣质品。
Mountain_Skies查看英文原文
Looking through old Sears catalogs and seeing the prizes on older game shows, I think some of our memory is selective. Even in photos and SD video you can see the terrible build quality on many consumer products from those earlier times. This seems to be especially true for furniture and exercise equipment. When you convert into current dollars, this low quality junk often is more expensive than what is available today. There's plenty of junk being sold today too and paying more doesn't guarantee quality but the notion that it's more difficult to find quality today than in the past doesn't seem universal. We have plenty of items that survived earlier eras and are examples of durability but the landfills are full of junk that we don't see.
市场效率缺乏理论依据，低效可以长期存在，这是'好产品难买'的根本原因。
问题其实很基本：市场并不保证效率，有效市场假说就是错的。强式有效性早已被正式证伪，弱式有效性只有在 P=NP 时才成立。其实不需要深究低效为何能持续，因为根本不存在证明市场应当有效的理论。人们只是非常希望市场是有效的，就像伽利略时代一样，指出这一点的人即使有数学支撑也会被嘲笑。正如普朗克所说，科学是靠一场场葬礼前进的。
DannyBee查看英文原文
The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that markets should be efficient at all. Instead, we have the sort of equivalent of Galileo - people really badly want markets to be efficient. They feel like they should be, because intuitively, it seems like it should work that way (much in the "god does not play dice" sense). People who suggest they aren't, even when math backs them up, are ridiculed. Eventually, as Max Planck said, science will advance funeral by funeral, and we'll stop pretending markets should be efficient based on "the efficient market hypothesis". Or we'll discover P=NP! Which would be much cooler.
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