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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

>When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

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Hah! A Jevons Effect[1] in a web site's bandwidth!

[1] When an increase in the efficiency with which a resource is used causes total usage to increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I'm not sure why this gets a special term. It sounds like basic supply and demand. If you decrease the price of something by increasing the efficiency of production, you will obviously capture more of the demand curve. What am I missing?

By giving it a special term, additional commentary/analysis can coalesce around it, such as that "governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising".

Well, if you'd follow the link you'd see that Jevons identified this phenomenon in the mid 1800's with respect to coal usage. It probably wasn't so obvious then.

A lot of people naively assume that if you can use a resource more efficiently, then total use will go down, "because you don't need as much, right?"

See: the entire popular support for efficiency mandates.

(Edit: Also, this very example -- I certainly didn't expect that a faster site would allow that many more users: my model was more "either they want to see your site, or they don't", i.e. inelastic demand.)

The (common) error is to neglect the additional uses people will put a resource to when its cost of use goes down. ("Great news! We get free water now! Wha ... hey, why are you putting in an ultra-thirsty lawn??! You don't need that!")

Also, I wouldn't call it basic supply and demand; depending on the specifics (inelasticiy of demand, mainly), total usage may not actually go up with efficiency.

This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion.

Which, really, can be summed up by my favorite Yogi Berra-ism "No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded."

> This sounds like the reason widening roads doesn't usually ease congestion.

It usually does actually.

What is happening there is that you have different demand levels at different congestion levels. If you alleviate some congestion by widening the road then demand goes up.

That is only a problem if the demand without congestion is higher than what even the wider road can handle. As long as the new road can handle the higher but still finite demand you get when there is no congestion, there is no problem.

In other words, as long as you make the road wide enough for the congestion-free demand level to begin with, that doesn't happen.

That's technically true, but it assumes away the core, ever-present problems:

- It may not be physically possible to add enough lanes to e.g. handle everyone who would ever want to commute into L.A.

- Even if that road was correctly sized, it still has to dump the traffic into the next road, through the next intersection point. If you've increased the capacity of the freeway but none of smaller road networks that the traffic transitions to, you've just moved the bottleneck, not eliminated it. And that too may be physically impossible.

In any practical situation car transportation efficiency does not scale well enough that you can avoid addressing the demand side.

It isn't physically impossible to use eminent domain to seize all the property around the roads and then build 32 lane roads all over Los Angeles.

That is a separate question from how stupid that is in comparison to the alternative of building higher density residential housing closer to where people work and with better mass transit.

But if people don't want to do that either, you have to pick your poison.

And there really are many cases (Los Angeles notwithstanding) where adding one lane isn't enough but adding two is and where that genuinely is the most reasonable option.

The Wired article posted below has a pretty good rebuttal on those ideas.

Also, one thing that's often forgotten is that roads take up space. A lot of it. You make your roads bigger to accommodate more people, and all of your buildings wind up farther apart as a result. When buildings are farther apart you have to drive farther, meaning that everyone's journeys are longer, meaning more traffic... and on and on it goes.

14 percent of LA county (not just city!!) is parking. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/12/parking-los-angeles-m...

I'm trying to find a better source, but at one point supposedly 59 percent of the central business district was car infrastructure (parking, roads, etc.) http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Casestudy/E_...

I mean, at what point do you just build a 400 square mile skid pad with nothing else there just to "alleviate traffic"? Hell, that's practically what Orange County is already.

Gosh, 3.3 parking spaces per car (citilab article). That's be some space to free up when they're self driving.

They're already empty most of the time, for what it's worth.

Assuming "parking spaces" include one's home space (like garage or reserved spot), 3 should be expected, at least: home, work, and wherever you're visiting.

Now assume Uber et al own fleets of self-driving 9-passenger minivans. During peak commuting hours they're completely full because they pick up different passengers who have the same commute, and that way you eliminate the parking space both at home and at work.

The rest of the day they don't actually park anywhere, they just stay on the road operating by carry one or two passengers at a time instead of eight or nine. Or half them stay on the road operating and the other half go off and park in some huge lot out where land is cheaper until demand picks up again.

Then instead of 3.3 spaces per car you can have <1, and most of them can be in low land cost areas.

It's actually kind of like dynamically allocated mass transit.

More likely scenario will be self driving cars cooperating with each other to drive from start to finish without any stops. Whether on freeways or local streets, cooperation amongst vehicles will raise the average speed and the volume of vehicles you can process through a given area. Pools work to a certain degree if everyone is starting and ending at the same location. When they don't, then it actually takes longer than driving by yourself.

Final point, you can certainly build out less parking spaces, but pre-existing spaces won't go away without redevelopment.

You're right -- I should have said "feasibly" rather than "physically" above. It's certainly physically possible, but requires a tradeoff I don't think many people would actually sign off on: blowing 3 years of budget for multi-deck freeway tunnels and having twelve-lane streets for most of the city, a parking garage for every block, and 95% of the city allocated to roads.

> It isn't physically impossible to use eminent domain to seize all the property around the roads and then build 32 lane roads all over Los Angeles.

This might be an extreme example that won't work for other reasons, but generally adding more lanes will increase demand, so you still won't have enough lanes.

No, that is still only the short term new equilibrium. What happens is that roads with unused capacity (or at capacity, but acceptable congestion) get busier as activity increases around those roads, because of the excess capacity/low congestion. Of course it's more complex than just that; it heavily depends on the spatial relationship with job activity centers within commuting distance, social expectations, economic characteristics and many more, but the core tenet remains - adding roads is not a long term solution for congestion, spatial planning is.

all the cars on this new lane are not on another road adding to the traffic tho. Maybe it eases the traffic elsewhere There is a finite amount of cars after all

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

Right, widening roads doesn't increase speeds for existing commuters, it serves more commuters at the same speed.

Scott Alexander has some examples of that in his post:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

For example:

> Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.

Because it's easier to say somename effect than the half paragraph or so that describes it.

This is the basic reason for naming anything after all a car is just a fossil fuel internal combustion kinetic comvertion wheeled people and goods pilotable transportation platform but saying a car is just easier :)

> What am I missing?

The paradox is that they tried to reduce demand to reduce consumption, but accidentally reduced price, so increased consumption.

The bit you're missing is that duality, that an action intended to reduce demand could reduce price instead. Applying rules of supply and demand happens as a step after categorising the action, that the action was miscategorised led to a misprediction.

To put it another way, marginal efficiency increased but total efficiency went down, which is (to some) unintuitive. It's certainly rare to observe!

I saw a similar effect with really fast disks. If you make the kernel faster at passing requests down to the disk, a simple benchmark with one request at a time will be faster. However, with many requests at the same time and less time spent processing then, you now have more time to poll the disk for completed requests. Each time the kernel polls the disk, it will typically see fewer completed request than before your optimizations, and overall this can actually result in decreased throughput.

> I'm not sure why this gets a special term.

It gets a special term because it was coined in 1865, before most of modern economics was codified and this was a cutting edge finding. You may as well ask why Newton's laws get a special term, because they're all just obvious basic equations in physics that high school students are taught.

The supply and demand "law" refers to the observation that the price of a good settles at a point where the available supply (which increases as the price goes up) matches the demand (which decreases as the price goes up).

Jevons Paradox is only tangentially related. It is based on the observation that sometimes using a resource more efficiently results in higher overall consumption. For example, say 40 kg of lithium is needed for the batteries of an electric car. At some point, 4000 tonnes are produced annually, enough for 100,000 electric cars per year. Now a new battery comes on the market that needs only 20 kg of lithium. Should the lithium producers be worried that the lithium demand will drop, since only 2000 t will be needed for the 100,000 electric cars? Maybe. But if Jevons Paradox comes into play, the annual production of electric cars might triple as their cost drops due to lower lithium usage, and the new demand will then settle at 6000 tpa. So, paradoxically, reducing the amount of lithium in each battery could be good news for lithium producers.

Whether or not Jevons Paradox occurs depends on the elasticity of supply-demand curves, in this case the curves for lithium and for electric cars.

Not to mention that reducing the cost of batteries may lead to new classes of devices suddenly making sense as battery-powered (instead of corded or gasoline-powered), leading to increased demand for batteries.

Well, that's because it's often not the case. Take the two cases:

* Engines get more efficient (fewer litres per kilometre traveled). Does the total amount of petrol consumed go down or up?

* Flushes get more efficient (less water / successful flush). Does the total amount of water consumed go down or up?

Both of these have a more efficient use of a consumable quantity. Often, however, more efficient engines lead to more traveling and larger vehicles whereas more efficient flushing leads to reduced total water consumption usually.

The fact that gains from efficiency can be outraced by the induced demand can be seemingly paradoxical. And "seemingly paradoxical" is the only thing that makes anything labelled "Paradox" interesting.

That's like saying 'deadweight loss' "shouldn't be a term, because it's basic supply and demand".

There's a clear and identifiable trend or pattern resultant of the general model, there's no reason not to assign it a shorthand way of being referred to in discussion or study.

Wow, uncanny resemblance to Giffen goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

How so? I don't really see the similarity

Both describe unexpected effects when trying to extrapolate from price and quantity involved in individual use cases.

Jevons: Quantity required per use goes down, so you might expect total demand to decrease. Instead total consumption goes up.

Giffen: Price per use goes up, so you might expect total demand to decrease. Instead, total consumption goes up.

Either could increase consumption by displacing available substitutes, though that's not necessarily the case with Jevons. They are indeed different phenomena, they just have some similarities.

And now with both of those things Baader-Meinhof is going to be triggering every hour for the next month at least

> And now with both of those things Baader-Meinhof is going to be triggering

You know that Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were the main founders of the terrorist organization RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction)) in Germany. RAF was also the reason that grid investigation was used in the 70th (where lots of innocent people were accused wrongfully) after a RAF terror series, after which some constitutional principles were quashed. The German word for this is "Deutscher Herbst" (German Autumn; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn).

These experiences lead (indirectly) to the rise of a completely new party (Die Grünen; The Green Party) and are (besides the experiences with the two dictatorial regimes on German ground in 20th century) one of the reason why data privacy is taken very seriously in Germany.

Thus mentioning RAF, Andreas Baader or Ulrike Meinhof to (in particular older) Germans is perhaps like mentioning Al-Kaida, 9/11, Mohammed Atta etc. to US citizens.

So triggering^2

From the wikipedia article I gather that the only Giffen goods that were actually shown to exist are the Veblen goods and thus disqualify as Giffen goods. It seems to me that Giffen goods are a theoretical thing that has never been actually shown in real world (as the article states, all of the proposed examples were discarded).

The case of website cost going down and demand going up seems pretty standard.

How are you distinguishing between Giffen and Veblen goods? If you define Veblen in such a way that all Giffen goods are Veblen and then say that disqualifies them then of course you'll find there are no Giffen goods.

According to the article:

> To be a true Giffen good, the good's price must be the only thing that changes to produce a change in quantity demanded. A Giffen good should not be confused with products bought as status symbols or for conspicuous consumption (Veblen goods)

Veblen goods = Goods for which demand rises with price because they are status symbols Giffen = Goods for which demand rises with price - Veblen Goods

However there are no examples there that hold, to me this signifies that the only goods for which the law of demand does not apply are status symbols.

Isn't a Giffen good then just something where one infers quality from price? I've seen that happen many times with my own eyes, so hard to believe they've never been identified. It's possible to price something so cheap, people assume there's a catch.

> Isn't a Giffen good then just something where one infers quality from price?

No, it's an inferior good (in the economic sense) in which the (negative) income effect of a price increase outweighs the success substitution effect.

What you are describing is a good that has a positive elasticity of demand with respect to income (or, technically, two different goods, because the higher price represents a different good altogether - one with a higher status symbol).

No. The example of a giffen good given is a high calorie food, that's exceptionally low status. Thus, when its price falls, people will demand less of it, as they can afford to replace some of their consumption of that food with more expensive, better food. Workers replacing some proportion of their bread or potato intake with meat, as the price of that bread or potato intake drops, say.

The idea is that the good is the lowest quality way of fulfilling some need - so people buy it because they can't afford anything else.

> It seems to me that Giffen goods are a theoretical thing that has never been actually shown in real world

In practical terms (that may not fill the theoretical definition of the giffen good), spare time in certain circumstances is quite obviously a Giffen good. Once your income increases (which means the opportunity cost of your spare time increases), you are willing to work less, i.e. consume more spare time. Of course, this is not a universal rule, but I think it is obvious that for _many_ people this is the case. If it was _not_ the case, there was no way people in sweatshops work longer hours than western middle class.

Giffen goods are likely to exist only in communities of extreme poverty, where the cheapest things you buy dominate your spending. That's why it was only found in an experiment performed on people living on subsistence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good#cite_note-4

I bet you could find it in some video game economies.

You didn't prove that giffen goods are equivalent with veblen goods, there.

If a package of ribeye steak normally sells for $2.99 and doesn't sell well, but then its price changes to $6.99 (but nothing else changes), and demand increases, that steak is a giffen good. The ribeye steak is not conspicuous consumption (unless your definition of status is really loose and includes posting photos of your food to Instagram). What happened there is straightforward: there's an elastic demand for ribeye steak, people saw the price and assumed quality signaling. When it increased to price parity with higher end brands, people assumed quality parity as well.

Conversely, a mechanical watch is specifically optimized to be good at time keeping in the most functional and cost inefficient ways (e.g. assembled in hand in a white gold case with a hand-decorated guilloche dial and proprietary in-house movement mechanisms, etc). That is precisely conspicuous consumption, and thus it's a veblen good.

One good's demand increases because of quality signaling, the other good's demand increases due to status signaling. The point of there being two of these definitions is the nuance in why consumers would purchase luxury items. Theoretically, people don't buy at Trader Joe's just to brag to their upper class friends that they shop at Trader Joe's (this is not a good example but take away a specific brand and you get the gist).

The steak in your example might not be a veblen good, but it still isn't a giffen one.

The article states that a necessary condition is that "The goods in question must be so inferior that the income effect is greater than the substitution effect". The reason people are buying more when the price rises is not because of the income effect (which would be because they have less money since the price went up, so demand for inferior goods increases), but rather because they now have evidence/reason to believe that the good is quality.

That's not giffen according to the definition given, which includes a causal factor for the demand curve.

IANAEconomist (but I could play one on TV)

It is simply not true that that a good must be "inferior" to be a Giffen good (unless you adopt a special meaning of inferior, which since it's not necessary to do, I won't agree to). The classic example (thought experiment, without regard to whether it actually happened) is potatoes in poverty stricken Ireland: a poor person's diet would be mostly potatoes (inexensive Econ-Utility (compared to steak): calories, fills the belly) with some meat a few meals a week (expensive Econ-Utility: protein, iron, B vities, tasty, "not potato", even a touch Vebleny)

So, arbitrary budget example, let's say $20 at the grocery gets you $15 potatoes every day and $5 of steak 1 days a week. If the price of potatoes goes up, you need to reduce something, but you need to eat every day so you can't reduce potatoes, so you reduce your steak consumption, but now you have some extra money which you spend on even more potatoes. Price of potatoes went up, consumption of potatoes went up. <-- there is already a theoretical problem there, you could reduce steak just enough to keep potatoes equal, so let's just say you can buy a steak or not buy a steak, no half steaks, OK? just trying to make the point "what is a Giffen good", and not trying to prove whether Giffen goods exist or not.

So, potatoes are not "inferior" to steaks, both are requirements for a balanced diet; I supposed a technical econ-definition of inferior could be designed to mean something along the lines of "inferior is defined to rule out your example, aaight"

In any case, while Giffen goods probably can't exist in a market for any length of time, the concept is completely understandable as a short-term reasonable thing that occurs: I go to the store with cash intending to buy an "assemble your own" burrito with guac, the price of beans went up, I don't have the cash at hand now to get the guac, but it's not a burrito at all without the beans, so I leave out the guac... but turns out by leaving out the guac, I can get a larger size burrito: consumption of beans just went up at the same time as the price. This effect happens for sure... does it happen enough to counteract the people who would leave out the beans and keep the guac? Can the "substition of beans for guac" function always be seen seen to be continuous and differentiable? <-- perhaps not, burrito shops like to have overly expensive add-ons for 2nd order price discrimination, so the price of guac might very well be "quantized" at an absurdly high level, and does that make beans not a Giffen good? ...

my point is, the way you guys are arguing this is leaving too much out, can't be answered and wikipedia at this level of analysis is too unreliable.

Inferior good just means that demand increases as income goes down. Potatoes in your hypothetical are inferior, since if you have less money you can't afford steak and so buy more potatoes instead.

so that's what I mean, that term-of-art definition is intertwined with dependent variables of the definition of Giffen goods, so it would be no wonder if the ideas get tied together even if the concepts are not facially.

Terms of art annoy me (the legal profession and philosophy are full of them, overloaded (OOP definition) on preexisting words) because IANALinguist but I could play one on TV without rehearsing, so my point is, if you want to have a narrow morphology for a word, don't recycle a word that has broad meanings, invent a new word that is precise, like econ-inferior. Then at least when a person doesn't understand what you say, they will think to themselves "maybe I should look up the definition" as opposed to actually believing you said something different than you did.

Nobody can live on potatoes alone, you'd die. Nor can anybody live on steak alone. Neither good can be said to be precisely econ-inferior to another, only econ-inferior over some delta range of prices and/or time (and assuming demand, etc). But the whole question of Giffen goods is also valid only over some delta, so as long as they are different deltas, the definitions would not be in conflict (and vice versa all the variations of that).

Fair enough, but this is a standard term taught in Econ 101 (at least, I was taught the econ meaning of inferior good in my first econ class).

I've studied econ at the graduate level at MIT after having taken it as an undergrad as well, and I have a degree in Finance, so I didn't mean to imply that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I know a lot of other topics as well and I've always objected to terms of art in one field being easily confused with terms from other areas, and hell if I can remember what an inferior good is 20 yrs later. My point was not that you didn't know what you were talking about; I joined in because between the two of you I replied to, I didn't think your discussion was benefiting the rest of HN as much as it could because many of those people have not taken any econ at all. I was trying to Econ 100 the discussion, without losing the flavor of what is interesting about Giffen goods; and I think that if researchers are going to "prove" that Giffen goods don't exist in aggregate (<-- not Macro term of art), they need to also address the obvious short term circumstances (as I tried to describe) where it's clear that the underlying principle is actually operating, whether it has an effect on market clearing or not, because people can go one extra week without meat, just can't do it forever.

Not trying to argue, just trying to clarify what I came upon. Econ theory I think is sound but requires many simplifying assumptions to teach and learn, and then when we talk about whether Giffen good actually exist or not it's easy to lose track of simplifying assumptions like "long term" or "substitution".

cheers.

Is there a negative counterpart for that ?

I remember turning an algorithm upside down, making it so fast, it went from "number crunching wonder" to "users saw nothing, this software is meh".

Microsoft UX research found that with row adding in Excel. It was instant, so users weren't quite sure if it happened or if it happened correctly. Now it animates for that reason.

I believe that this is partly for ergonomic reasons, it's hard to track a grid changing instantaneously, animation allow for "analogous" traceability.

Yep. I see the commonality as being "it's so fast it's hard to tell any work was done" - whether the user is trying to gauge whether their actions had any effect or whether something is worth paying for.

I've tried using Google products from Africa (Ethiopia ... last time this January), and generally, it is right out unusable. JS-heavy apps like GMail will never load properly at all.

This while the connection in itself is not THAT bad. I use to use a 3G/4G mobile connection and it generally works excellent, with pretty quick load times, for everything else than javascript-heavy web apps.

I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

[1] https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Ethiopia-Telecoms-Mobile-a...

It's not only about connection speed but also about infrastructure. If you look at this map https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/ you'll see that your packets have a looong way to reach their data center. AWS is no better than Google on this point. Guess it's not bankable

That only adds about 200-300ms RTT I'd guess. I live in India and use many websites which are hosted in the US, and they work fine.

(Hello from Kenya)

There are usually CDN nodes in India. Cloudfront has edge nodes there, google's cdn does.

There's also a Mumbai AWS datacentre.

When you get far away from the common edges, it gets real noticeable.

~$ ping imgur.com

PING imgur.com (151.101.40.193) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 151.101.40.193 (151.101.40.193): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=342 ms

imgur.com works fine

~$ ping python.org

PING python.org (23.253.135.79) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 23.253.135.79 (23.253.135.79): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=267 ms

python.org works fine

news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com also works fine even though I'm logged in (there's about a 300ms, 700ms delay in the Network tab of Chrome's devtools for news.ycombinator.com and reddit.com)

PING imgur.com (151.101.12.193): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=499.633 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=65 ttl=51 time=330.021 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=66 ttl=51 time=557.491 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=67 ttl=51 time=478.380 ms 64 bytes from 151.101.12.193: icmp_seq=68 ttl=51 time=400.365 ms Request timeout for icmp_seq 69

PING python.org (23.253.135.79): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=615.871 ms 64 bytes from 23.253.135.79: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=539.681 ms

I'm on an island lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But ping weren't that different (50 ms more or less) on the continent (I went to RSA and Namibia)

Gmail worked surprisingly well from Antarctica

In Ethiopia's case, it's not so much the connection speed in Addis. There's a great deal of interference from the national Deep Packet Inspection filters that leads to timed-out requests, reset TCP connections, etc.

JS-heavy apps make a lot of requests to background servers and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang. It's quite frustrating and I would often load pages with the console open to see which requests have failed so I'm not left wondering what happened.

That's good to know, Thanks!

There can be whole lot of reason for this and it kind of make sense. What doesn't make sense is that for such a big company, such a big product thats the best Google/gmail can do. I can understand if scaling the gmail backend can be tough. I can appreciate gmails feature set of spam filtering, tagging but on the UI feature-set I don't see anything that revolutionary that makes it (according the chrome task manager) the heaviest tab in my browser ~500MB. I think thats to the point of shameful.

I think the standard of whats considered slow, bloated, complex has become absurd. I think if the processor companies today release processors that say improves the single thread performance 10 times in two years gmails and facebooks of the world will eat all that up with marginal improvement in functionality. I'm talking about the client side, in the server side yeah they may make 10 times more complex analysis though most likely 80% will go to feeding us more accurate ad.

That's why fastmail is such a breath of fresh air. It has lots of features and is wicked fast.

Agreed. I'm actually really impressed at how fast and responsive the UI is. As a user, it's probably one of the most responsive and functional UX's I've used in years.

>and should one of those requests fail, apps will hang

That also happens on 'good' connections, when some crappy isp router drops the packet without any icmp. The request fails only after a tcp timeout, which is large enough to be noticed. I cannot understand why asynchronous js requests do not involve smart adaptive human-oriented timeouts and why this problem is still not solved in general. TCP timeouts are simply insane nowadays.

I may get flamed for pointing this out either by people who are offended by the viewpoint, or by those who find it so bleeding obvious as to not be worth stating, but those page hangs (and I know exactly what you mean) are really down to poorly architected and implemented front-ends rather than an inherent flaw with JavaScript-heavy apps and pages.

Any time you do an XHR you can supply both a success and a failure callback and, if you care at all about your users, the failure callback can come in handy for error recovery, handing off to a retry mechanism, etc.

Modern web apps can be a lot more like fat client apps, just running in a browser. Even there, there's no inherent need for them to be unusable, even over relatively slow connections. A lot of it comes down to latency, and the number of requests going back and forth between client and server, often caused by the sheer quantity of assets many sites load (I'm looking at YOU, almost every media site on the Internet).

I seem to spend my life citing this paper, from 1996, but "It's the latency, stupid" is still relevant today: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html.

Nothing controversial here, it's common sense. Most web stuff is built by total amateurs figuring things out as they go.

I'd like to complement: most _stuff_ is built by total amateurs winging it.

Nonsense, email is an impressively well designed and logical protocol ;)

From

> I have a hard time understanding why this issue is not paid more attention. Ethiopia alone has some 99 million inhabitants, with smart phone usage growing by the hour. Some sources say "the country could have some 103 million mobile subscribers by 2020, as well as 56 million internet subscribers" [1].

How much disposable income will they have though? Most web products like those you describe are produced by businesses looking to make money.

You may be surprised. Certainly the number of people with disposable income will be less than in many other places but those that have disposable income often pay more.

Tax on cars is upward of 200% and traffic is becoming a major issue. When it comes to services, another major challenge is that there are no widely accepted payment mechanisms besides cash and checks. Debit cards only work with ATMs and some very select retailers.

GMail has a HTML-only version that is much more lightweight and usable on slow / flaky connections.

It's worth it to memorize or bookmark the address, in case you ever need it:

http://mail.google.com/mail/h/

(on mobile browsers you need to "request desktop version" and then paste the address again, before you can see it)

Thank you for sharing this link. Here is a related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513388

My problem with accessing the low-bandwidth Google tools with archaic browsers (http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/, etc.) is that Google still requires the high-bandwith login.

Are you aware of any alternative login URLs or authentication mechanisms?

I just tried the two-year old 3.4-dev copy of NetSurf I had buried on this computer, and was able to login to Gmail's Basic HTML.

This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

A nice chart showing how many users are in each bucket of load time would be far more useful. One that you could easily change the bucketsize from 0.1ms to 1 second and these types of 'digging' wouldn't even be a second thought.

>This is a perfect example of why "average" metrics for such values aren't that great and are often overused as vanity metrics.

The average human has, on average, one testicle and one ovary, but there aren't many humans who can actually fit this description.

Funny anecdote about the freeway system of southern California.

When they were initially planning the system in 1930s, 40s, they were planning to have the system in use for next 100 years. So they built over sized roads (like 10 lane freeway, without having to stop for traffic lights, that go THROUGH center of a major city).

When the system proved so car friendly, more and more people moved in and bought cars. Within in a short period of time (much shorter than 100), the system is completely jammed.

Always look for unintended consequences...

Braess' Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox

I always wonder about this. You have to reach saturation eventually, right?

This isn't an example of Braess' paradox.

Isn't that a good unintended consequence? They built out infrastructure which attracted lots of people & jobs. Today, SoCal is home to world-leading firms in entertainment & aerospace. They also have top-tier research and educational institutions.

Which is why, when discussing infrastructure upgrades in our Hackerspace, I keep reminding that infrastructure is an enabler - it should not be built to support current needs, it needs a healthy margin to enable people to do more. People always find interesting ways to use up extra capacity.

There is a limit to that. People point out all the growth that overbuilt freeways caused argue we need to build more freeways. Nobody every asks if the trend will continue. They want to bring that same growth to small middle of nowhere towns, but it isn't clear if that will happen.

Also lost in the conversation is opportunity cost: sure people drove more and that drove growth to those areas. However what if the roads had not been built - what would have happened instead? We don't know, but it is fun to speculate. (maybe railroads would still be the most common mode of transport?)

The unintended consequence I'm talking about is they expected it will take 100 years for the system to be utilized at full capacity but in reality it took just 20-30 years...

The original designers of the interstates didn't want the roads to go through the downtown areas. The idea was for the high-speed roads to go near cities, and have spur roads (3-digit interstate numbers that start with an odd number) connect them - like the design of the original Autobahn.

But there was a coalition of mayors and municipal associations that pressured Congress to have the roads pass through their towns (jobs! progress!). President Eisenhower was not amused, but he found out too late to change the design.

A consequence of this was the bulldozing of historically black-owned property to make way for the new roads.

They didn't really NEED cars to move people around because Los Angeles area already had a GREAT light rail system called the Red Line. The current walkway on Venice Beach was what's left of that line. Can you imagine? An above ground light rail system running parallel to a beach in LA?

They RIPPED it out thanks to lobbying by car companies and tire companies. Yay to lobbyists.

Now, it takes a billion to build a few miles of a subway/lightrail system that practically goes no where...

The Red Line is the new Metro system (which was destroyed in 1997's Volcano). The electrified light-rail from the 1930's was the LA Railway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway

GM, Firestone, and several other companies were indicted in 1949 for attempting to form a monopoly over local transit. The semi-urban legend part (it was never definitively proved there was a plot behind it all) was the ripping out of the streetcars, replacing them with GM-made bus networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

> A consequence of this was the bulldozing of historically black-owned property to make way for the new roads.

Indeed. A couple years ago, the city of St Paul actually formally apologized for exactly this, destroying the primarily black Rondo neighborhood with freeway I-94.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2015/07/17/rondo-ap...

Sorry for saying the same thing in two comments, but that (like the Google case) looks like a Jevons effect (where induced demand is a special case):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Reading through some early texts on the coal and oil industry. One notes that at then-current rates of consumption, the coal reserves of the United States would supply over one million years' consumption.[1]

The current North American coal proven reserve is less than 300 years of current utilisation rates: http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...

It's amazing what a constant increase in growth rate can accomplish. Also the overwhelming tendency for lowered costs to induce an increased demand -- the Jevons paradox.

If you want people to use less of something, increase the cost, not the efficiency.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Henri Erni, Coal Oil and Petroleum: Their origin, history, geology, and chemistry, 1865. p. 15.

https://archive.org/stream/coaloilpetroleum00erni#page/14/mo...

This is known as induced demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

One way to plan for the next 100 years when building roads but not cause people to buy cars is to have a 10-lane wide verge on one side of the road. Have a row of 30-storey buildings on one side of a 5 lanes each way road, but on the other side the buildings are all set back at least a 10-lane width which is used for car parking, 1-storey buildings, public spaces, etc.

If there's ever a need to widen the road, it can be done without demolishing any tall buildings. I see this in new road layouts in China all the time. Of course, under the road will be a new subway system -- another disincentive for people to buy cars.

I think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

One wonders how a user that takes 2 minutes to load 98KB is actually able to watch a video.

Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.

You would probably be able to browse (slowly), read comments, but not actually do much else.

In my observation (of people who still use dial-up here in the US), they usually just do something else (like make dinner or watch TV) while the video loads.

They don't watch videos (speaking from experience). But you do not and have never needed to watch TV to be well educated. The same is true of the internet. The tragedy that the post points out is that text and diagrams are being artificially weighed down with video-like anchors for no good reason.

if you have that kind of speed you watch Youtube in 144p !

I have done that many times and it's doable for most things that don't have hard-coded subs.

This was the baseline experience everywhere in the 90s: people would just do something else while they waited for things to download over dialup. Clients for things like email, Usenet, browsers, etc. commonly had batch modes where you could queue large downloads so you could basically see what's new, select a bunch of large things, and then let it download while you got a cup of coffee / dinner / slept.

Not sure what your comment has to do with mine.

I used Internet in the 90s and dial-up specifically as recently as 2004 - and have quite a good memory of the experience. Internet at dial-up speed was an extremely valuable commodity, to the point of disabling images in the browser and only downloading the most essential things (which is about as far from a youtube video you can get) - like documents and zipped installers (after researching that it was what you actually needed) and checking email.

Internet "videos" didn't really even exist as content before ~2005 and Youtube. The biggest player before them was Break.com, which posted a whopping 10-15 videos a day.

While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To illustrate my point even further, the speed we're talking about isn't even dial-up speed. It's 6.5kbit/second, which makes it almost an order of magnitude slower than a 56k modem! 10 times slower!

And people are actually suggesting that someone would spend that valuable bandwidth to spend days to load a video...

> almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.

Umm. Porn?

RealPlayer video rips of my favorite TV shows for me, all in wonderful 160p!

A year or two ago, I went through some old files that had somehow followed me all through highschool. Among them were a handful of music and video files I got from friends passing around burned CDs. I was quite amused to play some random episode of Dragonball Z and have it pop up a postage-stamp sized video on my relatively high-res modern screen!

Or to have your kid say "Dad, why are there video thumbnails in the archive directory and where are the actual videos?"

> While someone may have spent several hours waiting for a key software installer to download, almost no one would do the same for a video of dubious quality and content, certainly not in the 90s.

I vividly remember waiting hours to download a video in the '90s. The Spirit of Christmas short that spawned South Park, and that news story about the exploding whale, were viral videos that predated modern video sites by many years. You'd download it off of an FTP server somewhere. At one point, the majority of my hard drive was devoted to half a dozen videos that I'd show to everyone who came over.

Basically, watching a video on your computer felt new and exciting and worth waiting for. I'd never do that today even if I were stuck on a slow pipe, but at the time it was oddly compelling.

Or that stupid dancing baby CGI that blew up in the late nineties for some reason.

It was a demo of Autodesk's Biped bone-animation software. It really took off when the producers of Ally McBeal licensed the baby to appear on their show.

That always reminds me: Earlier that decade, a major plot arc of Beverly Hills 90210 featured a nightclub called Peach Pit After Dark. The door of the club had a flying toaster, from the PC screensaver After Dark.

I spent like a week downloading individual music videos over 28K. People will do a lot of things

> Not sure what your comment has to do with mine.

Someone doesn't agree with your comment, but rather than come back with a refutation they voted you down instead :)

And someone else don't agree with my comment .. modded down -4

If I cared about karma or being modded down, I wouldn't post on the Internet, at all.

If people chose to download porn over 28.8k modems, that's their choice. Just seems like a waste of time, that's all. Probably quicker just to take your dad's nudie mags rather than wait 6 hours for a 400x300 jpeg.

Likely because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation, and the guidelines ask not to comment on downvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hmm, either your experience, or memory, of the nineties / dial-up, is different than mine and all of my (quickly polled friends). We all built a library of painfully-obtained 320x200 horrible overcompressed video... ahh, the memories of RealPlayer. Some video was down to 180p... heck, I still have videos that were one or two megabytes in size in my archives - that I darn tootin' well waited hours to download :)

Please don't mention RealPlayer again. I feel ill and queasy thinking of that piece of software, its million rewrites and the CPU hog they released for Linux (at least on my lame hardware).

I remember using "download accelerators" to try and grab files faster back in the day. Who knew they were just doing 4 simultaneous downloads of ranges of the same file eh?

Ah I feel old

As I recall, the download managers were primarily useful because they could resume files that didn't finish.

Incredibly useful for enormous files like visual basic 6, which I spent like...a month or so downloading in the late 90s.

TIL the RealPlayer brand still exists... http://www.real.com

Can confirm, I remember downloading anime clips at 6 or so hours apiece! Not even full episodes, clips! And it was amazing!

And before there was YouTube there was flash videos/animations on Newgrounds. The people I hung with back then were into animutations.

We drink ritalin!

IIRC in 1997 (was it 1996?) this thing called webcasting made lifecasting possible, Jennicam and Amandacam come to mind. Then there was stileproject and its treasure trove of videos, Not mentioning internet porn videos that people burned onto CDs to sell to people without internet.

Internet video has been a thing a while before youtube got released hoping to capture enough of this thing through offering to host it for free in the hope to be bought later by one of the big players.

Two minor points: GPRS is 36-112Kbps and EDGE is faster still, so the 90s modem comparison seems apt to me. Latency is terrible so the player page loading slowly but the actual video playing is entirely plausible since that's the best case network traffic profile. Other technological improvements help, too: H.264 is much better than the codecs like MPEG-1 used for things like the infamous exploding whale video.

The bigger point was simply that people will wait for things they want. Not being able to load instantly changed the style of interaction but not the desire to listen to or watch things and there's far more content available than there used to be. Tell teenagers that the cool music video is available and you'll find a lot of slow downloads over their entire day at school, work, etc.

There was a time when Netflix was young, and I had slow internet, that if you queued up a movie and then paused it, it would continue to load. So you'd pick a movie, queue it up (literally) and then go make snacks and get situated. When the bar looked long enough you'd start watching. Then if it stalled (which it would do like clockwork every evening around 8 pm) you'd take an intermission.

By the time I got stuck with slow internet again (boycotting Comcast), they had removed that feature and it really sucked. Now I have fiber and the only drama is around Netflix only allowing you to stream a couple movies at once.

Of course, you could spring for the high capacity Netflix plan.

Alas, I bought a new TV just before 4K was a thing. It saved me the temptation of buying one while they were so expensive. The HD level is good enough for me.

Yes, back when things actually buffered properly on the internet. The way YouTube buffers now: not actually loading more than a few seconds of the video ahead of where I'm watching, even when it KNOWS my internet is spotty, really frustrates me.

You could install the YouTube Plus browser extension and check "disable DASH playback" in the settings. Then if you start playing a video for a second or two and pause it, it will buffer the entire thing. The only downside is I think it reduces the maximum video quality for all videos to 720p.

I have a 1920x1200 monitor, so yeah I don't think so lol.

So do I and it's what I do. I can't really see much difference between 720p and 1080p on YouTube.

This drives me INSANE.

I'd rather let it buffer for 10 min, then watch it in 360p because you guys can't figure out your buffering. The same goes for netflix!

They try to match the resolution to your bandwidth. Sometimes that's the right solution, but not always. When the playback stalls right at the big reveal it can be painful, but that doesn't mean I want to watch the minecraft edition of the movie the whole time

And, as most things, I'd rather have the choice. If you want to default to auto-configured resolution, that's fine. But give me the choice to override if I want!

The sense I get is that it's an elaborate way to soften people up for abandoning their ISPs and going with Google Fiber. There's a whole system of alerts and pages for basically saying 'LOL ur internetz sux', and it's plausible to me that they'd get that in place in markets they've not currently entered yet.

Oh yes, I remember my teenager days of happily waking up in the morning knowing that our ISDN connection surely has finished the download of that album or live recording I started last night via Soulseek / DC++ / Audiogalaxy.

I live in the first world and I rarely watch videos at 480p. I have 100gb of bandwidth a month, and typically view YouTube at 360.

> it'll take them OVER THREE HOURS

I remember frequently spending three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s. Mostly software, not videos+, but it really just felt like a regular thing back then.

+ Computers nearly didn't have the power to decode video—or even audio—in realtime back then, unless it was the entirely uncompressed kind. I recall ripping a CD to WAV and finding out half-way that my 2GB hard drive was now 100% full.

A Pentium II can play a DVD back at 24 fps back no problems.

That's because the pentium 2 chip isn't decoding the video. Try it with a software decoder some time. It hardly works. I had to disable video scaling before my 366 would stop dropping frames.

> three hours downloading 5MB files over dial-up in the late 90s

Ah Napster.

Yes, my point was specifically about videos, and I've elaborated on it further in the post above.

I, too, remember quite vividly waiting 30-40 minutes to download a 5MB installer for WinAmp and ICQ.

I honestly wouldn't even know where to look for videos in the 90s internet. Most people probably didn't have the upload speed to even consider sharing them online.

I think shockwave.com hosted Flash animated videos. Also, I remember downloading Troops from TheForce.net, seems like they had several other fan made videos. I also remember watching the Star Wars Episode I trailer on StarWars.com (I beleive it required the QuickTime plugin); so anyway, those are some sites hosting video content in the 90s.

I got some from Sony's BBS system where fan groups shared (links to) music videos.

I think your memory of the late 90's is actually from the early 90's ;)

I remember the first realtime mp3 player on Windows, Fraunhofer IIS' WinPlay3, which launched in '95. Then Winamp came out in '97 and blew our minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

You needed about a 100mhz CPU to playback mp3s without skipping. Seemed to hold both on my PPC mac and pentium windows machine.

I used a Pentium at 133 MHz at the time, and it struggled to play MP3. The tracks would stutter.

My intel box may have been a 166Mhz machine. Either way this assumed you weren't trying to do anything else. The PPC mac was definitely 100mhz though - maybe Apple marketing wasn't a lying about perf/clock back in those days.

I used a Pentium 100 MHz and it would play just fine. Encoding them would take real-time (i.e. a 3 minute song would encode in 3 minutes), but playing back was fine. I even listened to music while doing other things. This was with Winamp.

Yes I remember using mods and xm files instead as attempting to play a low bitrate MP3 on a Pentium 100 (I think?) Elonex laptop meant 100% CPU.

Even tried it on mpg123 and mpg321 on RedHat on a 486 DX66 - I was poor. Didn't fare any better.

You would have much better chances with Opus and its integer decoder today.

I played MP3's on a 486 DX4/100mhz. There was a setting in winamp I had to turn on (I think it was quality related) otherwise it would stutter and be generally unlistenable. Even with that setting turned on it pegged the CPU at about 100% the computer was unusable for anything else while the mp3 was playing. Trying to seek in the track would sometimes crash winamp.

My Pentium 166 on the other hand was much more capable I could multitask while playing Mp3's (I used to play mp3's and Quake at the same time).

I think somewhere in that timeframe, standard soundcards adopted support for hardware playback of mp3 files.

I had a Soundblaster 16 in the 486

That would be interesting to hear more about.

AFAIK all sound drivers in Windows accepted standard PCM data.

I'm not sure about that, but 'mmx' did come to fruition with early pentiums.

Wait a sec guys.. are you sure you had the turbo button on your machine active?

I used a Pentium 150MHz to play mp3s and do other stuff at the same time. It worked just fine. This was with Winamp in around 1997 I believe.

Seems about right; I could play mp3s on my Libretto 30, but only with the Fraunhofer decoder, Winamp wasn't quite optimised enough.

I remember my family's pre-PPC Mac could play MP2, but not MP3.

I'm guessing you've never downloaded porn from usenet over a 2400 baud modem.

I have not. That was a little bit before my time. The first modem I've had the luxury of using was a 33.6K.

Perhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place.

I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)

Erotic literature?

Literature? alt.binaries.

ascii art.

When I had a slow connection I loved tools like youtube-dl because they didn't expect to be used interactively. Network tools like browsers that just assume they can monopolize your time are probably the most frustating things in these situations.

YouTube-dl helped a lot when I was living in a rural town a few years ago. I would download a bunch of tutorials over the weekend when I visited my parents in the city and watch them course of the week. Seems strange to say now, because this was the case only 3-4 years ago and only a few hundred km from where I currently live. Today I can't imagine watching in anything less than HD.

I save the links to download later at some other place and view offline. Before I had ssh access to a server from a friend who copied what I downloaded (he also copies whole debian repositories for me).

3 hours is so low in the grand scheme of things. It used to take 3 hours to download a jpg over dialup ...

I used to rely on PC Plus and cover CDs for all of my software needs. I remember needing Qt for Linux (it was all new to me) and spending hours downloading a 16MB file, only to be grabbing the non-devel RPM.
We take file sizes for granted these days.

Why do you need 480p? 144p/240p was the standard YouTube less than 10 years ago.

> Even by the most optimistic estimations, a video that is a few minutes long at 480p will weigh in at 10 megabytes, meaning it'll take them OVER 3 HOURS to download the entire thing.
Right there in the same link, it says that the video page was a megabyte. It's the sentence directly after the 'two minutes' but. The sentence even has some 'all caps' words in it - even skimming, your eye is drawn to it. Why on earth did you stop reading halfway through the penultimate paragraph?

YouTube still has 240p mode for that very reason, they just do not advertise it in the UI.
The modern codecs make these super compressed video and sound relatively watchable.

As someone who lives in Africa, hoorah! More of this please. For me the best feeling is visiting a web page that is almost entirely text based. It loads in a few seconds which feels like quite a rare feeling these days.

Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

this was in relation to Project Feather of the Youtube - the Youtube website did not even load before for them and when it did, they started watching more videos even though it took more than 20 seconds to load!

Read somewhere it was YouTube

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