Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

One of the problem is that a lot of devs have very good connections at home. I've got 600 MBit/s symmetric (optic fiber). Spain, France, now Belgium... It's fiber nearly everywhere. Heck, Andorra has 100% fiber coverage. Japan: my brother has got 2 Gbit/s at home.

My home connection is smoking some of my dedicated servers: the cheap ones are still on 100 MBit/s in datacenter and they're totally the bottleneck. That's how fast home connections are, for some.

I used to browse on a 28.8 modem, then 33.6, then ISDN, then ADSL.

The problem is: people who get fiber are probably not going back. We're going towards faster and faster connections.

It's easy, when you're on fiber since years and years now, to forget what it was. To me it's at least part of the problem.

Joel is not loading his own site on a 28.8 modem. It's the unevenly distributed future.

View on HN

I think the problem is the vast majority of web developers don't care. It's true. Sure, having nice connection helps. In the sense that having a meal helps you forget about world hunger... if you cared about it in the first place.

Sans multimedia consumption, the modern web is fine on a reasonable connection provided you're using noscript or something like that. If you're not, then well, you're already screwed either way.

What's crazy to me is not that regular users put up with a ton of bullshit - they have to. It's that lots of fellow developers do and they most certainly don't have to. They simply don't care.

> What's crazy to me is not that regular users put up with a ton of bullshit - they have to

Honestly, the number of people working in tech, not using an adblock (and not even knowing that things like this exist) is making me sad.

I think the same thing whenever I pair with my colleagues

> What's crazy to me is not that regular users put up with a ton of bullshit

The cynic would view society is an optimization problem between bullshitters and those willing to tolerate bullshit. I say introduce a little anarchy into the equation, using the clean and pristine.

I guess most of the times it's not about a a dev not caring about the issue - it's about not being paid to address this scenarios.

The default for most of the tools/frameworks is to generate this bloat without a nice fallback for slow connections. Because the industry is focused on people with good connections, because that's where the money is.

Whenever I develop a webapp whose users won't be having a good Internet connection, there's a requirement to support that use case, and I spend time making sure the thing is usable on bad connections, and it's OK to sacrifice some UX to get there.

But on most cases, customers (both end-users and companies that pay me to code something for them) prefer shiny & cheap rather than "works OK for faceless people I don't know they still live like I did 15 years ago".

TL;DR: it's an economics issue, as usual.

----

PD: I've spent five hours yesterday to avoid a 70% packet loss to the router in the place I've recently moved to. There's a (top) 6Mbps connection on the other side of the router. I'm suffering not being on a top-class connection - but that's _my_ issue, not my customer's, nor my customer's customers.

On the other hand go to a Pret in central London and use the cafe's wifi. It's a bit like the old dial up days. Due to historic buildings and stuff they don't have fiber many places so you get 8mb adsl shared between like 20 customers when it's busy.

> Joel is not loading its own site on a 28.8 modem. It's the unevenly distributed future.

I hope that no one are... and at least using 56k

Preferbly the dual mode versions then.

" Dualmode faxmodems provide high-quality voice mail when used with a soundcard. They also have both Class 1 14.4 Kbps send/receive fax for convenient printer-quality faxing to any faxmodem or fax machine. You can even "broadcast" your faxes to multiple recipients, schedule fax transmission, or forward them to another number. "

I don't see the advantages

That isn't correct.

What happens is that it is basically two modems into one, so it can go double the speed at the expense of using two phone lines.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00000JBAI/?shop28-20

Reply on news.ycombinator.com