Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the analysis. The cost of the perceived problem is just not there. And the cost of fixing it is dis-proportionally high.

Banks are a good example. I don't think they are losing much money with their software experience. There are of course some under performers that are losing customers. But it's mostly to other banks that are delivering a good enough experience. Overall, they aren't losing any business here. If anything, they probably spend too much on their software teams. The results are mediocre and it's taking them too long.

Corporate websites (also mentioned in the article) is another thing that just doesn't matter that much. They are good enough mostly. It's fine.

Measuring frames per second is a thing for web developers that suffer from OCD. It's not a real world metric that matters at all.

Now a point that might be a bit painful to hear for the author. These slides are a bit ugly, unsophisticated, and bland. And it looks like a hand crafted thing and I assume that the author is very proud of the skill level and craft involved. I'm sure the FPS metrics are awesome. But if you are looking to wow your audience with arguments, it helps if you can back that up with a slide deck that re-enforces that argument. Browsers can do better than that 1997 unstyled power point look.

And that points maybe to a thing in our industry where the people complaining the loudest are doing the least to solve their issues. Open source is fine. If you don't like it, make it better. That's how it works. Being an innocent bystander is a choice, not a necessity. If you believe the web is so bloated, make it better. And if these slides are the best you can do on that front, then you'll probably struggle to convince a lot of people.

You may want to review the author's background before dismissing their points for not being in a shiny deck.

I guess your point about it feeling handcrafted holds, if you count the character encoding.

> I guess your point about it feeling handcrafted holds, if you count the character encoding.

Magnificent!

> You may want to review the author's background before dismissing their points for not being in a shiny deck.

Well, Wikipedia presents him as the author of Go, so the OP might have a point. /s

OTOH not knowing about Rob Pike and programming in UNIX, sounds strange.

The argument should hold regardless of who a person is or what they did. I commented being ignorant of this person's reputation and achievements. But so what? It shouldn't matter. I'm targeting the argument, not the person.

I still think his slides aren't great. I wasn't dismissing his weak analysis because of the deck but making the point that he's weakening his own argument with it. And since his points specifically include a lot of comments about the modern web, complete with a rant about frames per second, I think it's a fair point to make.

> These slides are a bit ugly, unsophisticated, and bland.

Woosh.

They irony of asking for shiny, bubbly interactive slides that would add absolutely nothing to the point being conveyed, when that is exactly part of the argument being made.

The author is the co-creator of Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and the first Unix windowing system.

Whatever you may think of his arguments or slide templates, I don't think "innocent bystander" is an accurate label.

Even in the absence of other work/history, these are literally slides from a talk they gave on the topic, promoting a tool (https://deps.dev) to help more people understand and approach the problem.

These slides are optimised for signal to noise ratio. Many slides are optimised for entertaining the easily distracted. I'd rather see more like this set.

> Banks are a good example. I don't think they are losing much money with their software experience. > Corporate websites (also mentioned in the article) is another thing that just doesn't matter that much.

The opening point is that these sites are stupid slow. And I agree with the author: there is no reason this far into the 21st century a bank's web page should take several seconds to load. It should load in under a second or two.

As a counterpoint, it would be somewhat ironic if the author of a presentation on bloat added middleware to his slides...

If you care more about the format of the slides than the message then it’s fair to say you’re not the target audience and I would be extremely surprised if Rob Pike cares much about your opinion. The dude wrote books[1] with Brian Kernighan for goodness sake.

[1] Which are awesome btw

You probably should have a look here. I think you can safely say he’s done his part to make things better. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

> Now a point that might be a bit painful to hear for the author. These slides are a bit ugly, unsophisticated, and bland.

Here [0] is HAProxy's website. Well, one of them [1]. The first one contains documentation in glorious plain HTML, and packs more information into it you can imagine. It is, after all, an incredibly high-performance piece of software that's been around for over two decades. The second one is, I imagine, for people like you. Perhaps that's what's needed for a company to be successful anymore - a site with the information necessary to get the thing running and to maintain it, and a second that's flashy and glitzy and doesn't scare the suits.

[0]: https://www.haproxy.org

[1]: https://www.haproxy.com

A few months ago I closed a long-standing account with a bank because they made their app unusable with pop-ups, unwanted "AI" chatbots, a painful start-up time (or timeout). Maybe they don't lose a lot of business but as long as alternatives exist with less enshittification companies might want to take more care about user experience.

You should read up on Rob Pike, he's not some loon screaming for attention. He's put out more -- and more useful -- open source than almost everyone reading HN.

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