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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

I think the opposite direction is actually more telling. Developers tolerate bloat and BS up to the level of seconds.

So there is plenty of computation being done that only requires milli or microseconds, but due to development practices now stretches just out into the annoying time frame.

(Prime example: the growth of web pages to match increases in processing, RAM, and internet speeds, means that the web is actually slower to use these days.)

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When the web was young and most people were on dialup, having access to a T1 meant that everything happened nearly instantaneously. All the sites were optimized for dialup levels of complexity. Now that everyone has broadband there is no equivalent. The slowness is either because the page is so heavyweight in terms of memory or processing power (note that more money does not buy much single-threaded performance), or because it's making so many network requests that everyone faces at a similar latency.

Even the fastest computer and the highest-end Internet access can't get you such a huge advantage in performance that it can make the web feel snappy again.

All programs grow to outstrip available computing resources?

> Even the fastest computer and the highest-end Internet access can't get you such a huge advantage in performance that it can make the web feel snappy again.

Until you install an adblocker and disable javascript. An enormous amount of modern-web overhead is adtech and user tracking cancer.

If you don't believe me, install privacy badger/ghostery and ublock origin, visit any popular news/entertainment website, and look at the number of blocked elements/requests as you load a few articles. All of those take time and suck up resources.

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