Comment by rev_bird | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rev_bird | Hacker News Reader

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I think I see the connection, but I think it jumped over one piece of my argument (if my statement could even be called that): In the burger example, removing sesame seeds is an act that makes the product objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.

I don't think it's analogous to a developer taking advantage of modern consumer hardware to do the work computers were designed to do, because it's not necessarily a worse product you're delivering. If your internet connection is spotty, it's likely a better experience in some ways. It just seems like people have these brilliant machines capable of executing all of this code (more or less) out of the box, but we're treating them as thin clients because... why? Because some people won't upgrade their OS/browser? Because the method of delivery is the same one that's used to inject banner ads and flashy video ad thingies? If that's the case, then it seems like the whole "server-side rendering" option is getting to sound pretty good for advertising, too. Then where are we?

Let me make the connection a little more explicit:

In {the burger case}, {removing sesame seeds} is an act that makes {the product} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.

And in {this case}, {punting things from server-side to client-side} is an act that makes {power usage, wear and tear, security, battery life, bandwidth use} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.

Ah! Now I see, thank you. I think some of this is debatable, though:

* Security: Yes, there's not too much argument that can be made for unquestioningly allowing arbitrary code execution on your computer. I think part of this will improve with browser enhancements, so long as they go more in the direction of sandboxing than in the direction of "Hey let's give Chrome access to everything in your computer right?!" Doing important stuff server-side is probably safer for users. That said, I'm bad at security. I just don't know enough about it, so I can't put up much of a fight.

* Bandwidth use: I'd actually be really interested to see some research on this. Needing to download a different version of jQuery/AngularJS/Backbone for every website you visit is certainly not particularly efficient, but I wonder how long you need to be on a website before they've sent you more HTML data than you would have had to deal with pulling down the Javascript and just pushing JSON data into it. For the mobile web at least, you win.

* Regarding power usage and wear and tear, I don't consider it a crime to make a computer do computing, which may be our main point of disagreement. If I've got a 2+ gHz processor and a few gigs of RAM, what else am I going to be using it for? Almost all of my apps are web-based, and I'd rather hear my fan rev up a little bit while Firefox renders a big graph instead of waiting for a server to generate a picture of one and just send it to me.

> I'd rather hear my fan rev up a little bit while Firefox renders a big graph instead of waiting for a server to generate a picture of one and just send it to me.

You are not me. (Not to mention I am not against doing most things client-side. I am specificially against Turing-complete languages being required on the client side. Things like charts are fine.)

I do not see why things should be done multiple times when they can be done once. You're offloading visible costs to places where they are hidden and then calling it gone.

Thanks for humoring me, this has been really helpful.

> I wonder how long you need to be on a website before they've sent you more HTML data than you would have had to deal with pulling down the Javascript and just pushing JSON data into it. For the mobile web at least, you win.

I was talking to a young person that sometimes buys her mobile data plan in 20MB prepaid chunks, complaining how fast Facebook eats through that data.

Now I don't have Facebook (or a data plan, my ISP has "hotspots" all over town), I was curious and asked her how much Facebook does 20MB buy you, anyway?

She said sometimes when she does a full reload of the page it costs 3-4MB. I told her, did you know that's enough data to fit the entire LotR trilogy, or the bible? (either of them are about 3-5MB, zipped plaintext).

I agree that the things you say could potentially save a lot of bandwidth, but the reality is, in practice they really really do not, not by far :-)

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