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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

Faster speeds for some do not equate to faster speeds for all. This applies doubly so when bandwidth is metered and may cost the end user more money.

Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.

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I disagree. I think Ruby/Rails is a good example of this. They maximize on developer happiness but that doesn’t stop users from using a bloated rails app. Take a look at GitHub/GitLab as an example of a Rails app I guess?

I don't see how end users suffer from using Rails. Server side rerponse time is a very small component of page load time for most websites. It's different from being forced to download and parse megabytes of JS, which consumes CPU, battery and time.

There's more CPU time across 1000 users' browsers than on the server. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize your load at both ends.

The difference is who pays for the load.

And now that developers make the visitors pay for the load (through their electricity bill, and also through their mental state), they don't give a shit about how much the users will have to pay - and thus how much electricity will be unnecessarily wasted on a global scale.

No offense, but you sound like Verizon charging Netflix for what users are pulling down.

Not to mention your data plan

I haven’t used rails in about a decade. Is the bloat of a typical rails app on the user’s machine?

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