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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that I only ever hear those complaints on HN and never elsewhere... Are you all still using Pentium 3 PCs and 56k modems?

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Maybe it’s the same reason why you hear professional designers complain when they see Comic Sans used for body text, but laypersons rarely will mention it.

A pro will notice things about implementation that interfere with the content, while the layperson often can’t articulate it even if they sense it’s not quite right.

Parent comment is why I tell everyone to read Pragmatic Programmer, especially the "broken-window theory" section.

For those unaware, an empty house can go untouched for decades in NYC, but once it develops a broken window, it is ransacked and squatted within hours. Small failures invite large failures.

"Javascript bloat isn't too bad, just another 10KB" turns into (VERY quickly) slow + terrible code that is trash. Small amounts of apathy about code invites other developers to sink to lower (more sh*tty) standards until there is nothing good left.

I'm not saying we should all code in assembly and c and make sure our arrays are memory aligned and pointers efficiently used, etc. etc., but we should also not just stop caring about code quality for "productivity" sake.

A lot of people don't even realize that better is possible.

I've had plenty of friends and acquaintances observe that browsing the web on my computer is very zippy compared to doing it on theirs, and ask what I do. I hate to then have to explain to them that it's because of a fairly hard-won set of JavaScript-blocking rules and suchlike.

I especially hate it because the best alternative I can suggest to someone who doesn't understand tech well enough to manage such a thing is to just keep on trying to keep up with whatever fancy kit Web developers are working with these days. Which invariably means sending ever more money to Comcast. And regularly giving money to Best Buy to replace a computer that isn't really broken; it just can't keep up with the latest fashions among ad networks and reactjs developers.

> I've had plenty of friends and acquaintances observe that browsing the web on my computer is very zippy

Wait, how often are people peering over your shoulder to even notice? Have been a programmer for 30+ years and no one has ever made an observation either way about my screen responsiveness...

sometimes people in a social context will share my laptop to change the spotify song or settle a google-able debate.

You can suggest uBlock Origin and they'll be halfway there just with that.

Try using a "modern" site on a spotty 2g connection.

Then realize that level of a connection is more common than you think. You never hear it elsewhere because those users just don't use your site, because they can't.

A lot of sites are even bad on a 3 or 4 megabit connection, if it's prime time and the Internet is being clogged by Netflix.

That's not a particularly uncommon speed, either. If you pay too much attention to statistics about "average" home internet speed, you're likely to be optimizing for only the top quartile, because the distribution of home Internet speeds is highly skewed.

Yep, that's been my life for a couple weeks when I went over my "unlimited data" cap and have been stuck in 2g land.

The modern interwebs is a bloated mess...1 minute plus loading times is more common than not.

It's the engineering sloppiness that is annoying, as much as the on-screen end-result.

Super Mario for NES, a full commercial video-game, weighs in at 32KB.

The JavaScript on a Medium page takes almost quadruple that space to achieve.... nothing at all, roughly speaking.

> Are you all still using Pentium 3 PCs and 56k modems?

Half of humanity has intermittent and very slow Internet access and old hardware.

No some of us use smartphones and travel to places where 3G connections are the only thing available.

In rural Scotland, supposedly a developed country, even 2G is dropping regularly.

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