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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

For anyone curious why this is popping up now:

Last week, someone posted online how Hey (created by DHH, who also created Hotwire and Rails) is slow when opening a modal: https://x.com/noahflk/status/1795758603577545035

It created a bunch of heated conversation (DHH saying the original video was throttled, other people saying Hotwire is too reliant on the network if a modal needs time to load, people defending Rails/Hotwire, people disagreeing with its approach, etc...).

Basically, it's been a big topic on Twitter the past week.

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> DHH saying the original video was throttled

It was. Author said as much: "This is slow on purpose asa demonstration. This isn't meant to show the experience someone in SF on a fancy MacBook with Gigabit internet has. No matter which tech, they're good. It's about the person on a cheap laptop on slow mobile internet." https://x.com/noahflk/status/1795855075526471915

People also pointed out that the Google Calendar SPA is much slower.

And not like "SF Gigabit internet" and "highly throttled 3G" are the only two options...

The original post was highly misleading. Basically just a lie.

Direct link to DHH's response: https://x.com/dhh/status/1796163806650868149

For context, people have been able to reproduce this with gigabit connections too.

I'm checking out Hey and am finding it super zippy on my 600MBit connection, and still pretty usable on "slow 3G". What I'm not impressed by is DHH's snippy response, but having read DHH's outbursts before, neither am I surprised.

I last looked at Hey about a year ago and it seemed pretty snappy even from the the wrong side of the Pacific. The page architecture impressed me specifically ... things like, applying progressive enhancement to a details/summary/anchor element trifecta for a contextual menu overlay, and if you disabled Javascript or assets didn't load or whatever, it gracefully fell back to loading the menu content in a simple layout. There are a bunch of other well-considered uses of the Web APIs in there. I recall that practically all their client code was unobfuscated and source mapped, too, if you wanna take a look. I'm no fan of DHH and have no interest in boning up on his drama of the week, but it seemed to me that 37signals got it right this time.

They've fixed it. You can check out the update here: https://x.com/dhh/status/1797370923391357143

Thx for context!

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