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Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

I have a suspicion that APFS is partly to blame. When I saw benchmarks of APFS vs. HFS+ [0, 1], it appeared that Apple had managed to transition to a filesystem that is markedly slower at reads and writes than the 20 year old one it was replacing.

[0] https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_...

[1] https://malcont.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/apfs_hfsplus_...

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As I wrote in the article, I already accounted for this. The raw combined performance degradation was 4x. APFS itself seems to be around 20%. Now that is somewhat rough, as APFS degradation may itself by non-linear. However, others have measured the pure APFS costs and they seem to be roughly what I saw:

https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-performance-lags-h...

That’s weird because the article states it works better on spinning media but it is only offered automatically on SSD.

Could you please disable that annoying behavior where scrolling slightly left or right swaps to a different article? It’s hard so imagine anyone actually uses that and it is extremely annoying.

That's a problem with the Blogger platform, it might not be possible to disable that behaviour without switching to something else entirely.

Have you ever heard of the expression "How do you know someone disables javascript on the internet through an add-on? They'll tell you"?

No? Well, anyway, one draconic way to fix this is installing something like uMatrix or NoScript. This particular website works fine without JS.

The web is better as a whole without js

It would suck if you had to refresh the page here on HN for every upvote.

Nah, we'd just have check boxes and a submit at the bottom of the page and we'd call it UX.

Kind of a cool hack: I believe HN used to record upvotes through a CSS rule that (when clicked) caused an empty image to load. No JS required.

Upvoting adds nothing but the capacity for groupthink. See what voting has done to the level of discourse on reddit. The larger the community, the worse the problem.

If we couldn't vote on comments asyncrhonously (or, IMHO at all), nothing of value would be lost.

Likewise you can just turn on reader mode or whatever the mobile browsers call it. Should pull just the text out.

I wonder if we couldn't just make an "open in reader mode" add-on

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42254577/how-to-remove-s...

Hmm...I can't even reproduce it. Now on Safari, I do have a JavaScript blocker on, but I also tried on Chrome and still nothing.

Probably a mobile-only behavior.

My favorite wrinkle of that "feature" (on mobile) is when there's an embedded video in a post that's wider than the viewport. Swiping very slightly left or right scrolls the page, but a tiny bit moar and it switches articles. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Yet also transitioning to a filesystem with actual checks for integrity and many features which improve performance for, f.x. Time Machine.

Even if that is the case, you also have to account for situations where APFS requires far fewer writes entirely (such as, apparently, duplication of files).

In a typical aggregate workflow it’s entirely possible that it’s still a better design.

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