Hacker News Reader

1. Too much free time I guess. I'm a frontend guy, I find frontend stuff interesting.

2. No. Probably none.

3. Are you saying that you are willing to sacrifice the user experience of the bottom 25% of the users of a website?

3) Most of the internet does this now. Even on my Q6600 PC, web sites grind to a halt. Whereas actual applications run just fine, even my 3d animation software. The overhead of the web has become unbearably lazy.

"Generates zero revenue" is silly. Hacker News has certainly generated tens of millions of indirect profits for YC; probably much more. It's tremendous marketing value for the organization and its companies.

>1. It's not your website, why spend so much time and effort on dissecting the issue? If one did this for every webpage they visited it'd be a more than a full time job.

1) This is a community with a lot of web developers and programmers, and people who have a professional or hobby interest in these problems, and are hanging out here anyway clearly with nothing better to do.

2) We have to do it here because they don't take issues and pull requests.

As for your first point, my answer would be because it can be fun to do so.

Fun, interesting, you learn stuff, what's not to like?