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Comment by inapis | Hacker News Reader

>Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done.

I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out.

OTOH, if the argument is to make software smaller, I can get behind that since it will simply lead to more efficient usage of existing resources and thus reduce the environmental impact.

But we live in a capitalist world and there needs to be external pressure for change to occur. The current RAM shortage, if it lasts, might be one of them. Otherwise, we're only day dreaming for a utopia.

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Time saved to increased productivity or happiness or whatever is not linear but a step function. Saving one second doesn’t help much, but there is a threshold (depending on the individual) where faster workflows lead to a better experience. It does make a difference whether a task takes a minute or half a second, at least for me.

But there isn't just one company deciding externalizing cost on the rest of us is a great way to boost profit since it costs them very little. Especially for a monopoly like YouTube that can decide that eating up your battery is fine if it saves them a few cents in bandwidth costs.

Not all of those externalizing companies abuse your time but whatever they abuse can be expressed in a $ amount and $ can be converted to a median's person time via median wage. Hell, free time is more valuable than whatever you produce during work.

Say all that boils down to companies collectively stealing 20 minutes of your time each day. 140 minutes each week. 7280 (!) minutes each year, which is 5.05 days, which makes it almost a year over the course of 70 years.

So yeah, don't do what you do and sweettalk the fact that companies externalize costs (private the profits, socialize the losses). They're sucking your blood.

One second is long enough that it can put a user off from using your app though. Take notifications on phones for example. I know several people who would benefit from a habitual use of phone notifications, but they never stick to using them because the process of opening (or switching over to) the notification app and navigating its UI to leave a notification takes too long. Instead they write a physical sticky note, because it has a faster "startup time".

All depends on the type of interaction.

A high usage one, absolutely improve the time of it.

Loading the profile page? Isn't done often so not really worth it unless it's a known and vocal issue.

https://xkcd.com/1205/ gives a good estimate.

This is very true, but I think some of it has to do with expectations too. Editing a profile page is a complex thing, therefore people are more willing to put up with loading times on it, whereas checking out someone's profile is a simple task and the brain has already moved on, so any delay feels bad.

> I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out.

I’d see this differently from a user perspective. If the average operations takes one second less, I’d spend a lot of time less waiting for my computer. I’d also have less idle moments where my mind wanders while waiting for some operation to complete too.

Just because one individual second is small, it still adds up.

Even if all you do with it is just stretching, there's a chance it will prevent you pulling a muscle. Or lower your stress and prevent a stroke. Or any number of other beneficial outcomes.

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