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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Heartily concur. It's a classic of an essay written by one of those tortured souls who cannot understand why everyone so blithely moves past the incisive, obvious, truths they share.

With a topping of how this is all just solved by "giving a toss about the user", followed by a cloying apology for being vulgar

I'm not in web and am amenable to a good web dev hot take but this simply isn't worth the time, it's an array of generic wisdom delivered as if it's specific, written with the effort of someone who is proud of themselves when you disagree.

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I mean the graph in the article of Amazon vs Target vs Wayfair is pretty damning. And honestly you don't even need the graph, just go to their sites. Target is dog slow while Amazon loads instantly.

> And honestly you don't even need the graph, just go to their sites. Target is dog slow while Amazon loads instantly.

I was not able to notice any difference between them

Were you using a ~$2000 laptop on a broadband connection?

Out of curiosity I checked on iPhone 14/4g and 2018 Intel MBP.

I don't get what the point of these comments is ? If you're using RPI with a 2g connection you'll have a bad experience shopping at the site ? And somehow that's supposed to factor in to my tech stack decisions ?

Alex's position is that the average consumer is on a cheap Android phone, which has severe CPU weaknesses compared to any iPhone from the last ~five years: https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-...

Software engineers tend not to experience the web on the same class of device as most of their users.

But is the average Target shopper on a cheap Android phone accessing over non-broadband? Wayfair?

It's a fair point to note devs and users might have different devices, but in some cases they don't and the decision to use React might be well-founded with that fact.

Do you not care about most of your potential customers, or do you only cater to high net worth people? If so, then sure, substandard devices and connections can be ignored. If you’re Target, on the other hand, you probably shouldn’t ignore them.

I find it extremely odd that this was even a question on this site. Do you think the problem you’re solving should impact your tech stack at all, or is your tech stack more important than the problem?

You're making the same mistake as the author. I get unnecessarily aggro too, but a plain reading of their comment isn't "they only cater to high net worth people" or they're advocating for such. Its "hey we're talking about 3G connections at this point, which are mostly shut down, and we don't cover developing markets"

Note most of this is nonsensical too.

His primary thing is "you don't need client side code because JS = (HTML + CSS) * x, where X >= 1"

We can start sneering about not caring about users there, too, having a one time client side download of that magnitude can certainly be much better on the poors than 10 page loads with SSR.

I keep hearing the "SPA is actually lightweight" argument but it's never materialized for me, the fastest sites are SSRs that are mostly static. The saving from HTML vs JSON just isn't that much over the wire and mobile CPUs and memory are a bottleneck.

I have a newer iPhone and Safari is still full-refreshing pages constantly due to memory.

> "SPA is actually lightweight"

With utmost respect, that's not what I'm saying :)

I hold no hot take position on anything web dev, or any firm declarative position.

What I'm trying to get at is, indicia of an article being half-baked includes things like asserting all that's required to agree is to care about the user.

This feels good to say, but doesn't say anything, other than there's been at least some short-circuiting of thought. We can come up with many trivial cases where "caring about users" involves requiring client-side logic during rendering.

And it doesn’t even have to be that. Just someone at the wrong end from a cell phone tower or in a clogged one from a sports event or something.

Yep! Made me remember my bad target experiences as well. Love how that’s all ignored by some.

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