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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Amen to this. And give them a mobile cell plan with 1GB of data per month.

I've seen some web sites with 250MB payloads on the home page due to ads and pre-loading videos.

I work with parolees who get free government cell phones and then burn through the 3GB/mo of data within three days. Then they can't apply for jobs, get bus times, rent a bike, top up their subway card, get directions.

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"But all the cheap front-end talent is in thick client frameworks, telemetry indicates most revenue conversions are from users on 5G, our MVP works for 80% of our target user base, and all we need to do is make back our VC's investment plus enough to cash out on our IPO exit strategy, plus other reasons not to care" — self-identified serial entrepreneur, probably

Having an adblocker (firefox mobile works with uBlock origin) and completely deactivate loading of images and videos can get you quite far with limited connection.

You're 100% right. uBlock Origin can reduce page weight by an astronomical amount.

uMatrix (unsupported but still works) reduces page weight and compute even more

How so?

it allows javascript on the original site domain, but turns it off for external domains, buts then lets you selectively turn it back on, and remembers what you've selected. Turning off javascript turns off a lot of both addtional downloading and cpu cycles. for impatient people it's tedious, but for minimalists it's heaven.

If you enable the Advanced Features mode of Ublock Origin you get access to just about all the things uMatrix does

Except for a usable UI.

And disabling JavaScript

I strongly suspect that the venn diagram of people that know how to minimize data usage, and indigent people being given free cell phones with limited data has precious little overlap.

Yes, but "qingcharles" said he works with them, so he can show it to them.

Yeah and then give them thousands upon thousands of paying customers with these constraints worth caring about

This is probably a deliberate decision on the part of the government. A lot of the justice system is designed to keep people in prison.

That makes little sense. If it was a deliberate plan, it would be much more effective (and cheaper) to not provide the cellphones and data plan in the first place.

You see this all the time. Need to keep up appearances but the actually implementation is poor.

Exactly. It's easy to attribute malice where incompetence is the answer. The root problem is that there is no feedback loop so that the government agency funding the program isn't properly looking at the product being delivered at the other end and putting measures in place to stop the contractors from taking advantage of the program to only deliver the barest minimum without tracking the effects on the end customer.

It's not deliberate by the government. And the situation is getting better. Basically some of the telcos being a bit greedy and only giving 3GB/mo data to the users and spending all their profits on paying people in the hoods $20 a pop to sign people up.

Recently I've started to see some contracts with vastly more data, including some unlimiteds.

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