Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

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> Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?"

Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play.

More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

More generally, I find myself moving in the opposite direction. I find that many SaaS services' interests don't align with mine, so I'm going back to local applications. I don't trust others with most of my data, so the only service that sees much of it only sees encrypted blobs (for offsite backup). I've always run my own mail, and have slowly been expanding the services I host as I bring more of this stuff in-house. And so on. But I realize I'm in a minority.

But the nice thing is that it gives me an intranet and "other" grouping that is very straightforward, so that the browser instances that touch untrusted (not-mine) services can run in "bastion" VM, locked down nicely and reset to a pristine state at will, not to mention allowing some stupid networking tricks that are sometimes useful.

> I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router.

To be pedantic, if you have a threaded server (thread per connection) slow clients can cause problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowloris_(computer_security)

> Horses on highways would cause accidents.

You are right, they are not the best, but people make do: http://www.mapministry.org/news-and-stories/amish-buggy-acci...

> More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.

Doesn't affect the vast majority of users.

> But I realize I'm in a minority.

Yes, your statements are pretty anecdotal and don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

I'm sure your setup works great for you, but it sounds like a ton of overhead, none of which is required if you have fast internet and don't give a shit about what's going on (like nearly everyone who uses the internet.)

I don't think your claim that it doesn't affect the vast majority of users is correct. There's well over a billion people in India alone. You might argue that you were only making claims about US users, but a lot of sites have no reason not to be global.

> don't really relate to the vast majority of internet users.

It's not that they don't. It's that you don't care.

Because why should you care about something that doesn't meaningfully increase ad revenue or sales? Why should you care that the 2 extra seconds of pageload on a fat pipe, and a fraction of a cent of extra electricity burned, when multiplied by a million of your US users add to over 500 man-hours and few kilograms of coal wasted. Not to mention the site being unreliable or unusable in trains, rural areas and larger buildings in which an user doesn't have Wi-Fi access.

And the problem wouldn't be as big if it was just you. The problem is, everyone else thinks the same way, so all the waste mentioned above adds up. All because people are too lazy to not put useless gunk - which often requires more work to add to your site than to refrain from using it in the first place.

And the funny thing is that it's even been shown that increasing speed increases usage and revenue/sales, so there's not even that excuse. Slow pages break flow, which cause people to realize that they've already wasted too much time on your site, and were supposed to have done xyz 15 minutes ago.

If you've ever traveled internationally, you'll know that a lot of English-language sites become unbearably slow to use over mediocre hotel wifi, let alone cellular. Lightweight sites like HN become relatively MUCH more pleasant to use.

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