Monetizing the Final Frontier | Hacker News Reader

Monetizing the Final Frontier

newrepublic.com

31 pointsHooke11 comments

I rarely stumble upon such well-written articles, it was a joy to read.

I didn't know the author before but after a bit of research… well, I'd expect nothing less from someone who has been awarded the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.

It really bothers me that this website is 10mb.

Count in the Podcast an you're at a smooth 100mb. It doesn't bother me at all. I have a 250mbps connection. It's 2020.

Count yourself lucky, I'm reading through a 100kpbs geostationary satelitte link. Size matters, still.

You’re using lynx right? It works pretty well on a lot of sites. Sometimes turning newspaper and magazine website into quick loading “boring walls of text”.

There’s some good console Reddit clients out there too.

I'm reading on a 4-year-old smartphone that struggles to process sites that heavy, much less download. I should not have to throw away a perfectly functional device because developers can't be bothered to cut back on dependencies for their plain-text site.

Developers think that because they're separated from the waste they're causing, they're not causing waste. Bloated sites accelerate the obsolescence of perfectly good devices, leading to people discarding them long before they actually have reached the end of their life.

(The reason I get by is because I have uBlock origin blocking large media elements. Most people don't know how to do that.)

Hello, fellow high-income person in a first-world country on a hard-wired link! You’ll be surprised to know that even in 2020 many, if not most, do not have the bandwidth or computing power that you do. But don’t let that stop you from slurping in another 5MB framework so that you can have drop caps!

> It's 2020.

And still, here in rural USA, there is exactly one affordable plan ($70/mo) in this area that doesn't have bandwidth caps and the best sustained speed I can get is 170 Kb/s. That's small b for bit, not big B for bytes, btw.

I've been on the list for Starlink beta but they don't seem to be rolling it out for the region yet.

Web page bloat bothers me quite a bit. 100 mb? There are smaller Linux distros.

Edit: definitely will be going back to using the Lynx text mode browser in the near future, I had no idea it had regained functinality for casual browsing.

> And still, here in rural USA, there is exactly one affordable plan ($70/mo) in this area that doesn't have bandwidth caps and the best sustained speed I can get is 170 Kb/s.

God damn, I can vividly picture the bald 'free-market' eagle screaming "freedom" in the impressive voice of a red-tailed hawk.

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//new... ;p

> I rarely stumble upon such well-written articles, it was a joy to read.

What? It's your run of the mill article you find in any publication. What about it struck you as being so special that you just had to sing its praises?

> I didn't know the author before but after a bit of research… well, I'd expect nothing less from someone who has been awarded the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.

What? Is this a real comment? Your comment reads like a mother thinking her child is the next picasso after seeing her child's first drawing. Feels like you are advertising/evangelizing for the author. Are you sure you don't know the author?

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