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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

People like that could get by with dial up if people like the ones reading this comment would stop loading 80MB of JS just so they can save a couple lines of code.

Edit: The dailup part was an exaggeration but if your web app doesn't suck 3g and two bars or a 1Mb down DSL pipe should be fine for most CRUD type business tasks that. There's no reason that signing in and signing up for a shift should take more bandwidth than Craigslist.

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... if your web app doesn't suck...

The employee has absolutely no control over that and sure, you could pass regulations - but those regulations are going to be fairly difficult to enforce.

But you know, we could just start trying to make sure everyone has decent internet. Work isn't the only benefits to this.

Or we could try to make the apps we write more efficient AND make sure people have decent internet.

You know, saving data is saving energy.

That is certainly the best solution.

SRSLY!? That's your argument?

Ask me how I know you haven't used dialup recently. First, you can't even get dialup in many places because the pots system has been ripped out and replaced by partial fiber. Second of all, Once you add a phone line and pay for dialup you're looking at a cheap broadband cost.

They could even get by without the Internet if such business were all conducted on the phone. So what?

My point is that the kinds of CRUD and spreadsheet manipulation tasks that most people who don't work at a screen all day need to do on a screen can be done over a trivially tiny pipe if that pipe is used with at least a token amount of efficiency.

But they're not, for many reasons.

I'll preface this with noting it's a little odd to act as though adding 80 MB of unnecessary JS is a popular idea on HN.

They couldn't if they needed to work asynchronously. Or if they couldn't speak or hear well over the phone, the likelihood of which approaches 1 if you have so much as a different accent. Or if you don't want the other person to hear your accent.

It's a bit cliche maybe, but I know people who've benefited from all of those features of IP-based communication, and they're reasons to be happy about the Internet. And since just about any telecommunications system that transmits voice can be bullied into transmitting IP packets, there's really little cost.

I mean, we can all agree, I imagine, that many pages have too much JS. But then what do we cut? My idea of what's "useless" is probably different than the people cutting my checks. Saying pages don't need "unnecessary" JS is tautological but not really illuminating. I do think there is plenty of reason lots of people would benefit in their work from single-page applications, not to mention video and audio that would dwarf the JS anyways.

> if your web app doesn't suck.

This may be the least reasonable assumption I have ever read.

Everything is more important than that... until it's not. People don't know what they really care about until their assumptions are unchecked. When nobody HAS to use their phone for certain online actions, those actions likely won't be optimized for mobile, and people will care much more about popup tooltips, navigation, color scheme, logos and branding, extra random reporting, etc. Once people are forced to use mobile and it's not a couple minute experience once every week or month, then page load speed (and initial page payload size for SPA) become very important to those people.

Assuming I did bring in an 80mb js library into a web app wouldn't there be something in the build process that removes unreachable code? I mostly have backend and mobile experience with only a little frontend experience. But I agree many modern pages are way larger then they really need to be.

IMO most websites are products, and possibly irrational too. Whether or not to prioritize a poor customer is more of a business judgment than an engineering one.

And if we’re talking mobile, wouldn’t an app experience be the best?

> People like that could get by with dial up

Speeds 10x that shouldn't even be an option in 2020 honestly. It's a failure of capitalism that they are.

We shouldn’t blame capitalism for the obvious outcome of government-granted monopolies held by maybe one telco and one cableco if you’re lucky.

How are they monopolies? Competition is allowed. They choose to not compete in markets, either by not entering the market or buying up competitors. America used to have a stronger take on competition law, but for decades it's considered anti-business government regulation.

Google Fiber only launched in a handful of cities where the local bureaucracy had committed to bypassing many longstanding procedural barriers. They found laying new cables to be all but impossible everywhere else.

Do you think consistent campaign contributions to both parties, relentless industry lobbying and this all being perfectly legal may have something to do with it as well?

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