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Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

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752 points dceddia | 1 comments | 23 Jun 23 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:32 UTC] No.36447314[source]▶
It blows my mind how unresponsive modern tech is, and it frustrates me constantly. What makes it even worse is how unpredictable the lags are so you can't even train yourself around it.

I was watching Halt and Catch Fire and in the first season the engineering team makes a great effort to meet something called the "Doherty Threshold" to keep the responsiveness of the machine so the user doesn't get frustrated and lose interest. I guess that is lost to time!

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sidewndr46 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:35 UTC] No.36447344[source]▶
Even worse is the new trend of web pages optimizing for page load time. You wind up with a page that loads "instantly" but has almost none of the data you need displayed. Instead there are 2 or 3 AJAX requests to load the data & populate the DOM. Each one results in a repaint, wasting CPU and causing the page content to move around.
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leidenfrost ◴[23 Jun 23 14:40 UTC] No.36447430[source]▶
There was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.
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amaccuish ◴[23 Jun 23 14:46 UTC] No.36447524[source]▶
The one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?
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yomlica8 ◴[23 Jun 23 14:54 UTC] No.36447648[source]▶
I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.
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michaelt ◴[23 Jun 23 14:59 UTC] No.36447734[source]▶
We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s
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TeMPOraL ◴[23 Jun 23 15:33 UTC] No.36448307[source]▶
You jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.
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p_l ◴[23 Jun 23 19:58 UTC] No.36451520[source]▶
Worse, sometimes the people who do it are completely unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's superior to what they think.
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1. TeMPOraL ◴[23 Jun 23 21:58 UTC] No.36452692[source]▶
The ultimate version of this was done by Optimizely some years ago, where - let's assume here unintentional - bad UI design encouraged people to terminate their A/B tests early when the metrics favored the new version, leading to people without good understanding of statistics implementing dark patterns (or just stupid patterns), blissfully unaware that they've biased their own A/B tests so strongly that they could just as well be replaced by a piece of paper with words "NEW THING WORKS BETTER" written on it.