Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835417)

<comment><USER3> Can the mods un-dupe this? That was 2 months ago, and it's generated fruitful discussion on a hacker-relevant matter. Certainly more relevant than the Atlas Obscura "look at this quirky history" articles that get upvoted so much.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate re-posts when they receive new insightful comments, but 60ish days is perhaps a bit on the short side? However, this re-post now has 300+ comments and has justified its existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was.

Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.

<comment><USER6> > you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move > blazing fast

Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. [https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

<comment><USER7> "Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...item...was...written...to...the...screen. The OP has good points but the start was WEAK because it is factually inaccurate like your comment.

<comment><USER8> Right, I can recall the first time I saw my friend's parent's 486.

I remember doing 'dir' on a large directory, it scrolled so fast, so fast. I said to my friend, "The next generation will be so fast it will have finished scrolling _before_ you finish typing the command."

Sadly, it was not to be. DOS on a 486 is as fast as computers have ever gotten, perceptually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome and has long since given up on even imagining a better experience.

<comment><USER10> That tendency to rathole and nitpick, while discarding the larger point, is increasingly frustrating.

It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the ratholeing vs. generalizing is an interesting phenomenon. I get the sense that it's largely personality-based. Some people (most computer people) are wired up to get every detail exactly correct and if anything is out of place they break out the tweezers and start tweaking. That's exactly what's required in most engineering work. It can lead to perfecting something that's about to get thrown away.

The other personality deals with abstractions, analogies and top-down thinking. When faced with an issue they'll start by defining goals and values. And it's easy to be blind to the details when you're thinking of the big picture and ask for things counter to the laws of physics.

Even if you're a two-minded kind of person and can deal with both generalities and specifics, it's incredibly hard to deal with both at once and quite a task to switch from the one mindset to the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples.

"This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level."

No. Shit, really? Get out of town.

Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry.

These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured.

Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? I do, and it wasn't fun then, it was a detriment to doing what you wanted. It wasn't a rite of passage, it was a huge pain in the ass.

So yeah, things are slower now, and I wanna go fast. But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened, and while things feel slower, computers are now open to a much wider audience and are much more usable now.

These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.

<comment><USER13> Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter.

It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a _map_. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; it gives almost no affordances for exploration and cross-referencing.

> _Remember when building a computer required work and research and took > hours._

As someone who builds their own PC every couple years: it still does. It's actually worse now, due to the amount of products on the market and price segregation involved. Two PCs ago, I didn't have to use two parts compatibility tools, several benchmarking sites and a couple of friends, and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores, just to be able to assemble a cost-effective PC.

> _But I also don 't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a > printer for my mom anymore either._

You don't? Printer drivers are only slightly less garbage than they were, but now there's also less knobs to turn if things go wrong. When my Windows 10 doesn't want to talk to a printer or a Bluetooth headset, all I get to see is a stuck progress bar.

Bottom line: I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been degrading over the past decades (arguably for business reasons: the easier it is for people to make sense of information, the harder it is for your sales tactics to work).

> _These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as > disappointment._

That I don't get. Is it "elitist" now to point out that the (tech) "elite" _can_ actually handle all this bullshit, but it's the regular Joes and Janes that get the short end of the stick?

<comment><USER14> > It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. > It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for > people who know where they are and where they are going;

As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world.

Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally accounts for users who _only_ know where they are going—thanks to GPS and Google Maps knowing where you are often isn't necessary.

I'm confused by the complaint that the "Maps" app only caters to the 90-percentile use case for maps, but doesn't cover the other uses-cases well.

> I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer > is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been > degrading over the past decades

I just find this not the case at all. For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and still usable. Or you can craft your own!

For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude more accessible than it used to be.

<comment><USER13> > _As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the > world._

There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's _all that they can easily do_. The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on.

FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's a good source of ideas for side projects), so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I do sometimes resort to screenshotting GMaps, or photographing paper maps in the past, just to have a _map_ on my phone. I've seen non-tech people do that as well. So I can be confident that it's not just me and the Twitter thread's author that want this.

> _For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and > still usable. Or you can craft your own!_

The Twitter thread's point (and mine as well) is that expert users can and do work around this degradation. It's a frustrating chore, but it's not all that difficult if you can code a bit and have some spare time. It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves.

> _For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude > more accessible than it used to be._

The way it's accessible, it's almost as if it wasn't. Sure, you can easily Google random trivia. But good luck trying to _compare_ things. That's always a pain, and usually involves hoping that someone else made a dedicated tool for similar comparisons on the topic you're interested in, and that the information hardcoded in that tool are current and accurate. Notably, the tools you use for searching have no support for comparing.

<comment><USER14> > so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can > explore and annotate.

I don't doubt that there _are_ use cases for a map that works this way. Even if Google Maps covers 80-90% of the use-cases for mapping, mapping is an absolutely _massive_ domain. 10-20% of use-cases still represents a huge volume.

But it doesn't have to be Google Maps. It actually seems _worse_ to be for one "maps" app try to handle all possible use-cases for a map.

Why isn't there a separate different tool that handles the use-case you describe?

I guess, going back to the original thesis, what would the "1983" replication of what Google Maps does, but faster. Or, what would the "1983" version of the mapping behavior you wanted.

In the thread they say:

> in 1998 if you were planning a trip you might have gotten out a paper road > map and put marks on it for interesting locations along the way

I'd argue that this use-case still exists. Paper road maps haven't gone away, so this is still an option. People largely don't use this and prefer Google Maps or other digital mapping tools for most of their problems. Why? If you gave me both the 1998 tools and the 2020 tools, for 95% of the options I'm going to use digital tools to solve it _because they let me solve my problems faster and easier_. I know this because I have easy access to paper maps and I never touch them. Because they're largely worse at the job.

> There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use > case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because > it's all that they can easily do. The tools you use shape how you work, and > what you can work on.

Ultimately, my point above is my response to that. None of the old tools are _gone_. Paper maps are still available. And yet they have been largely abandoned by the large majority of the population. I agree that there are limitations to our current digital tools, and I hope in 2030 we have tools that do what the article describes. But the 1983 version of the tools _are worse for solving problems_ than the current tools, for most people.

<comment><USER15> pretty much all games in the early 80's had [so called] pixel perfect scrolling. Each frame showed exactly what was required.

Today it is entirely acceptable for a map to be a jerky stuttering pile of crap. The same goes for the infinite scroll implementations. Its preposterous to start loading things after they are needed.

There is a good analogy with making things in the physical world. The professional doesn't start a job before he has everything he needs to do it, the amateur obtains what he needs after he needs them.

<comment><USER16> Games have huge advantages of constraint of application that mapping applications don't. You can get pixel perfect scrolling when you constrain the max rate the user can pass through the dataset, you deny them random access into the dataset, your dataset isn't trying to represent a space the volume of planet Earth, etc.

There's a huge gulf between the use cases you're comparing here, and I don't believe for one second that loading the Google Maps dataset into Commander Keene's engine would make for a better experience.

(Also, not to be overly pedantic, but "The professional doesn't start a job before he has everything he needs to do it" pretty much classifies all building construction as unprofessional. The professional doesn't magically have everything on-hand, especially bulky or expensive resources; they have a plan for acquiring them at reasonable rates of input and mitigation strategies if that plan can't be followed)

<comment><USER15> Illl ignore the pedantic part since it was just an analogy, if it doesn't work for you there is little to talk about.

> Games have huge advantages of ....

I have thoughts like that but I consider them "making up excuses". You don't _have to_ see it that way but I can't see someone fix a problem by making up excuses for it to exist. For me it is just like you can always come up with an excuse not to do something.

8 gigabytes of memory / 64 kilobytes of memory = 125 000 times as much memory.

14 gigahertz (4 cores x 3.5 GHz) / 1.023 MHz = 13 685 times as much processor power.

4108 gigahertz (2560 Cuda cores / 1605 MHz) / 2 MHz = 2 054 000 times as much video power.

Can I just call 2 Mhz memory bandwidth 16 Mbit/s?

If so, 500 Mbit / 16 Mbit = 31.25 fold the bandwidth

We are not rendering many layers of colorful animated game content. A map is just a bunch of boring lines. The modern screen however is a lot bigger. I see a glimmer of hope for an excuse!

320x200 px = 64000 px

1920x1080 px = 2073600 px

2073600 / 64000 = 32.4 times the screen size

meh?

We must applaud everyone involved in making all this hardware progress. It truly blows the mind and defies belief. No one could have imagined this.

Then came weee the software people and... and.....

I'm cringing to hard to continue writing this post.

The numbers don't lie, we suck. Lets leave it at that.

<comment><USER16> I'm still happy with the configuration we have where my map is a little slower than maybe I'd like it to be (though honestly, I just loaded maps.google.com and moused around randomly and... it's fine? Certainly not so slow I'm bothered by it) but the mapping app also can't crash my computer due to the three layers of abstraction it's running on top of. Because _that_ would suck.

If you're curious where the time goes, btw... Most of the visible delay in Google Maps can be seen by popping the browser inspector and watching the network tab. Maps fetches many thin slices of data (over 1,000 in my test), which is a sub-optimal way to do networking that adds a ton of overhead. So if they wanted to improve maps significantly, switching out for one of the other protocols Google has that allows batching over a single long-lived connection and changing the client and server logic to batch more intelligently could do it. I doubt they will because most users are fine with the sub-three-second load times (and engineering time not spent on solving a problem most users don't care about is time spent on solving problems users do care about). You're seeking perfection in a realm where users don't care and claiming the engineers who don't pursue it "suck;" I'd say those engineers are just busy solving the right problem and you're more interested in the wrong problem. By all means, make your mapping application perfect, as long as you understand why the one put out by a company with a thousand irons in the fire didn't.

Also, I think the analogy was great, but you reached the wrong conclusion. ;) That _is_ how large-scale engineering works. Scheduling becomes the dominant phenomenon in end-to-end performance. Games have huge advantages on constraining the scheduling problem. General-purpose apps do not. Hell, to see this in action in a game: Second Life's performance is crap because the whole world is hyper-malleable, so the game engine cannot predict or pre-schedule anything.

<comment><USER15> > If you're curious where the time goes, btw...

Since it is software nothing is set in stone, everything can be changed, we know how to do it really really fast and really really efficiently.

People did incredible things to improve almost everything.

To me this means all of the performance loss is there for no reason. All we need is for people to stop making excuses. I for one know how to get out of the way when better men are trying to get work done.

You are the engineer if not the artist, impress me! Impress the hardware people! Impress the people who know your field. Some attention to consumers wishes is good but Gustave Eiffel didn't build his tower because consumers wanted that from him.

Why would you even have tap water if the well is down the street? A horse and carriage is just fine, it is good enough for what people need. no? What if our doctors measured their effort in "good enough's" and living up to consumer expectation only?

The hardware folk build a warp capable star ship and we are using it to do shopping on the corner store because that was what mum wanted. Of course there is no need to even go to Mars. It's missing the point entirely you see?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 > .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. > search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an > AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your > results are erased

So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague anecdotal reference to something modern. I've seen POOR performances in places, but the majority of experiences I see now are faster than in 1998 and definitely than 1983. Faster AND more convenient.

> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in > a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.

Um....no. It's less convenient than a mouse, but way better than the function key-based commands than the author lists.

I think there is a lot of room available to complain about terrible interfaces today, and in particular how choked everything is by the need to track and add advertising, but there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia.

<comment><USER18> Also the amount of data we query in most cases is many orders of magnitude larger.

Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast.

Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range.

Lastly, we have to make them secure,especially against malformed data attempting to attack the app, which eats a lot of CPU cycles.

<comment><USER13> > _Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and > be insanely fast._

They couldn't then. They had to fit it in RAM.

> _Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range._

That still is in "fits in RAM on a typical PC" to "fits in SSD on a PC, fits in RAM on a server" range.

There's little excuse for the slowness of the current searching interfaces, even if your data is in gigabytes-to-terabytes. That's where the whole "a bunch of Unix tools on a single server will be an order of magnitude more efficient than your Hadoop cluster" articles came from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When an area of engineering is new we make products better than the market will eventually pay for. Over time, we learn how to make them just good enough to reach an equilibrium in a market. This is an idea that is explored in _The World Without Us_ by Alan Wiesman. The Roman Colosseum still stands, but buildings today don't need to be that durable. It would cost significantly more to make them that way, so we don't. The same could be said about supersonic travel. We could do it again, but enough of us are happy to not pay the premium, so that product has disappeared.

<comment><USER13> The problem is, the market equilibrium is usually the worst possible garbage that's still fit enough for purpose that it won't break (on average) before the warranty period ends. Some of the money you save on this isn't really saved, you just pay for it in having to replace the product sooner, or being constantly stressed and irritated with the quality and fragility of your tooling (it's essentially death by a thousand cuts for your psyche).

So there is a reason to add some extra pressures to the market to raise the floor.

<comment><USER20> Is that true or does it just seem that way?

Cars today are pretty reliable. Random other stuff seems pretty decent as long as you don't buy the absolute cheapest stuff around. I'm working on a solid wood desk with no nails or screws (it's called a "puzzle" desk because it fits together in a stable configuration without any connectors). I'm looking at a backpack, which I assume is nylon, and it seems pretty tough and has lasted through a few adventures. I'm looking at my metal-framed bookcase, which has fake-wood shelves but it still seems pretty sturdy.

There are certainly some things that seem worse. Furniture is probably worse overall, but that's because good wood is so much more scarce now. If you buy metal/glass furniture than it's fine. There are also some worrisome practices that are pretty widespread, like using plastic-threaded screw holes rather than metal; or just using really cheap metal that can be stripped or cross- threaded easily.

On balance, where are we? I have a feeling that we're basically better off. We remember the old stuff that lasts, and forget about the stuff that breaks (unless it's still celebrated/historical, like the Liberty Bell).

<comment><USER13> > _Is that true or does it just seem that way?_

Definitely seems that way, but I don't think it's just an illusion.

Cheapest stuff is absolute garbage, arguably to the point you could consider it a waste of natural resources (for a few cents here and there, you could make things not break halfway their first use). What worries me though is that price isn't a reliable quality signal anymore - there's profit being made in selling cheap garbage at high prices, because many people are fooled into believing a more expensive good must be quality. Brands are no longer a quality signal either. Even ignoring that the market is currently DDoSed by throwaway "brands", even the proper ones don't mean much anymore. For instance, witness any discussion about white goods. Next to the people telling you which brands are historically quality ones, you'll find people reporting that recently, those quality brands started to cheap out on hardware and their products are no longer reliable or repairable.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the market equilibrium for price- sensitive customers is complete garbage; some companies can survive on less price-sensitive customers, but I see a trend towards converting quality into better margins even there. It's true that we have more of everything now, but it also seems most of those things are short-lived, and increasingly shorter- lived. It would be fine if matter and energy were too cheap to meter, but they aren't - especially not if you factor in the environmental costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are indeed a lot of curious examples of computers seeming to go slower today than 20,30,40 years ago. But on the whole, I completely disagree with the summary. My laptop today is faster than anything I've ever used before today. It boots faster, it loads files faster, it responds faster, it does more simultaneous things, it crashes far less often.

My first computer was an IBM PC jr, and using it was an exercise in patience _at all times_. Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was _sooooo_ slow. The exact same was true of the computers my friends had, C-64, Atari 800, IBM PC. It probably took a full minute to boot. Maybe the author never saw the memory test PCs used to do before even starting to boot, or how slow floppy drives were. My first modem was 110 baud... that's a whopping 15 7-bit bytes per second. Downloading a 40x40 character image (picture made out of keyboard characters) took a minute and a half. Downloading games routinely took hours. The PCjr hard crashed and needed reboots all the time. Even my later 486 would do the same thing. Rebooting was something you just did constantly, multiple times per hour. Today, almost never.

One thing this article completely avoids acknowledging is the general difference in functionality we have today than with computers in 1983. The database lookups and maps that were faster were faster precisely because they are 7 orders of magnitude smaller data. The article is comparing DBs and maps that fit in the main memory of a computer at the time to databases and maps that are out on the internet and don't fit on any single computer. It's amazing that we get the results as fast as we do.

<comment><USER22> "Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow."

You nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps" Not perhaps 100% but sure, in the modern age of web apps for everything I miss having proper desktop apps.

Even more so, programming web apps is nowhere near as convenient as developing desktop apps in late 90's with tools like Delphi.

<comment><USER24> I remember that. It was very easy.. I sort of have that same feeling with .NET, but I wonder if it's still going to be a layer on top of windows C system functions which might just be wrappers for system calls, which require an expensive context switch.

One big difference between win95 and now is the security aspect. Another big difference is the tons of services running on Windows 10 now that is always there (such as YourPhone). On Android for some vendors you are forced to use FaceBook and it can't easily be removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am just stepping away from web topic as it is irelevant. Slow VM, huge text files, lasignas of code stacked one on another. Comparison here just isnt fair, I do understand that people who never expirienced MFC 6 application cant compare it to browser. As they know only browser/electron/...

But just last weekend I have installed Windows 7 on modern i7 computer (with SSD). Sure, half of drivers didnt work etc. but it did boot. Everything I have started was instantanious. The dreaded decompressing stage at end of installation? 5-10 seconds. Then I have installed Windows 10 with office, I am so sorry I didnt install Office 97 (I didnt have installation) to the Windows 7, as I did install 356 to the machine, so I cant compare here (and for my usage they are both more than enough). But. The Windows 7 was much faster in everything while not offering major improvement in features.

Bottom line. The software was optimized for what the hardware speed was at that time. On new computers it is lightning fast. When the hardware become faster, no one cared to optimize anything and layers of bloat added to it. Sure, the production of software is cheaper, everyone could code today ("omg, i need to free allocated memory, the horror").

Instead of improving on features, performance, we have optimized on production costs. And major improvements on hardware processing power are lost in more bloat in code and adding endless layers of abstractions, virtual machines, wastefull protocols, languages. It is sad.

<comment><USER26> I think if something is possible to do given better hardware, no matter how bloated or useless, developers at large will end up doing it. I don't think RAM usage or performance are concerns for the people that go straight to Electron because in the present it's easy develop for and nobody has the right to force them to chose otherwise. Electron isn't going away; the only ways it improves are Chrome getting more performant or computers getting even faster. Either one is nontrivial to work on as an outsider - there are only two significant browser engines in the present age because they've become so complex and accumulated so many features that they require the support of well-funded corporations to maintain them, and computer processors can only become so small.

Browsers on the whole will not lose features. The web is ubiqutous and cutting down the number of features to maintain would break existing webpages. The resulting web standard establishes a hard baseline on the amount of complexity needed to engineer a standards-compliant browser. That in turn means a hard baseline on the amount of processing power required to run it acceptably, save for more performance gains that will surely be buried immediately under even more features.

I once tried using Firefox 1.0 and found it was impossible since it has no understanding of modern security protocols. The web as viewed by Firefox 1.0 in 2003 no longer exists. You can't practically divorce the features necessary to use the web such as new protocol compatibility with the extra features like Pocket in the code changes. And trying to do so anyway leads to Pale Moon where a scant few contributors are responsible for merging in dozens of security patches - which themselves come about due to the growing complexity of the web platform. Numerous people have called using it irresponsible from a security standpoint. In the end the endless growth of web standards and the code needed to support them has made that fact a necessary one.

For all practical purposes, you either use one of the two major browsers or get left behind by coders and organizations that have orders of magnitude more resources than you.

Society and the economy don't incentivize creators with being happy with a modest amount of features if there's a glaring increment in performance that ought to be seized on. It's about growth and innovation. Finding new ways to reinvent the wheel and get further away from the hardware, because it's now easy to.

Sometimes I wish we could undo growth. It would be nice if Electron and the like fall out of favor and we have a renaissance of software like it was designed in 2004. But enough developers have decided that the performance tradeoff is worth it, and average users have become desensitized to SPAs and their expectations are low enough that they would rather put up with it all in order to do what they need to instead of demanding better.

I feel like it can only keep growing. That's one thing the collaborative nature of software pushes forward. More features. It's just that some are better at limiting the scope of projects than others.

<comment><USER25> I have explicitly said that I will refrain myself from browser as it is uncomparable. The whole browser based infrastructure is so bloated (from browser which can be treated as vm, to bloated, text based, human readable language (thank god for someone to push webasm - I said it is necessaty in 2001 but everyone was fine in hacking together js for next ~20 years, now it came to the electron absurdity of 100mb+ applications that run js on packaged browser on operating sytem that runs on cpu, the overhead is just incredible) to text based protocols (http! rest!). Nodejs? I wont even start. The waste of cpu power, electricity, hardware,... is just fantastic.

On the other side, android sdk/framework/whatever looks like bunch of academics pouring their frustrations into one library - if you want to learn all patterns just dig in. MFC 6 in 1998 was more organized ([https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/11781B244C45903F42](https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/11781B244C45903F42) please try to draw this one for android! No vision, just chaos. Oh you loose context with orientation? How nice...). Android development environment catched what Windows Mobile had in 2000 barely when they pulled in IntelliJ (which is copy of visual studio) while for machine code they still lack behind. Please, DONT believe any of this, DO check VS 6.0 and Windows Mobile. Everyone is reinventing everything without/ignoring past and its mistakes, repeating them over and over again. Loosing 20 years for the sake of another corporation gaining monopoly is so crazy that you need to see it with your own eyes.

Cloud. We had mainframes. Enough said. We are moving to those again, for short term profit for users and long term profit for providers. I wonder when affordable server hardware will dissapear from market.

While I think that hardware industry is moving forward, the development is racing backwards or barely catching what we had 20 years back. Drowning itself in lasignas and stacks of different overheads, from overdesigned interfaces to VMs. IoT is still sane (due to lack of resources to waste) but the common software development just went crazy.

I do suspect that at some point, hardware will stop supporting bloating due to physics limitations and optimized code will come back, but I wonder who will still remember how to write it? Ah, we will reinvent it again?!

But nevermind the rant of an old fart. He just doesn't understand waiting on cpu 1000 times faster than what we had at 50% while loading megabytes of web based software doing what he would implement in 100kb. With 0.0015% of cpu load. It is just him. He doesn't understand the hype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The author bemoans how everything has gotten (perceptually) slower, and then proceeds to communicate this not through a single letter or blog post, but instead through ninety-five (95) tweets.

C'mon.

<comment><USER28> Allow me to reply to your complaint about tweet threads with a tweet thread. [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The experience of the 80s was really slowness, things were so slow that now It's unimaginable now. So unimaginable that we don't remember any more common actions by 1983.

The experience was so slow, that you can play another game while loading [1]. Namco even patented "playing games during load" by 1987 [2].

As an example, I have fond memories of my C64 tape loading Hunchback [3] ... while watching "V". A single tape can take one hour if it fails in the middle and you need retries. All those waiting times were order of magnitude of what a common toddler will expect today. We were so relieved when the fast loaders appears [4] or when a 1541 arrived home [5]. And then we were so frustrated when the 1541 was only 300bytes/s instead of the 300bits/s of the Datasette.

The scenario in Xenix or PC-DOS loading from 8" floppies was similar.

I'm not arguing that now are better times, I'm arguing that in the 80s we have the best for the time, and those were good times to remember.

[1] Mini Games: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a- Load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load)

[2] Nanco patent: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunchback_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunchback_\(video_game\))

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541)

(edited link formats)

<comment><USER29> Links formatted as code sorta defeat the point, right?

<comment><USER22> Right, edited

<comment><USER29> All good :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are wrong - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome.

<comment><USER30> >I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome.

Oh believe me, as much as I love being on the computer for the sake of it, I don't enjoy having that screen time utterly wasted by shit software. There's only so many hours in a day after all.

I work w/ ERP software, so I see people still using text-mode UIs on a daily basis (hell I track my time w/ one), and I also support a "modern" ERP that is GUI based and can "run inside a browser." (Which nobody actually does, because it sucks, doesn't support all features, and swallows up tons of keyboard shortcuts.) One of these packages can be run comfortably from a $5 Linux VPS. The other package asks for two _very fast_ SAS storage arrays, 32GB of RAM, minimum of 6 CPU cores, etc. Of course you've gotta license Windows for all of that, which thankfully is not my job. (That or you spin it up in "the cloud" I guess, and pay thousands of dollars annually to rent somebody else's computer, since this software is not "cloud native" at all, no matter what their sales people say.)

I try to leave the software better/faster/more usable than I found it, but it's hard when the upstream vendor is just piling shit on the fire so they can pitch their half-implemented features on the sales brochure: with absolute no regard for the added operational overhead of the garbage code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A tweet thread where you complain about AJAX popups and other Javascript-based slow downs seems utterly ironic. Whatever happened to having your own blog? Even better is that these tweets were from 2017.

This makes me yearn for building an ncurses-rooted non-GUI flavour of Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago. And it's usually a losing battle wherever a terminal isn't available, most painfully on the phone.

Online stores have less and less useful categories and filters. Ubuntu's take on Gnome is a weak version of their Unity DE and much less efficient on smaller screens. Google Maps mentioned in the OP in addition to all these problems slowed down significantly.

And yes, others have it worse because they don't even have the escape hatches like command line apps and are cast to the webshit wasteland looking for a webapp to unlock their pdf or extract images or whatever.

 _Joe should be offered incredible power by software that encourages him to use it with purpose-built interfaces optimized for him._

 _I am upset by the way that computers disenfranchise non-nerds. I wish it was better for me; I wish it WORKED AT ALL for everyone else._

[https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927621687952076800](https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927621687952076800)

<comment><USER33> _Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I 'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago._

I blame the advent of the "mobile era" and the much smaller screens, and differing I/O capabilities, of mobile devices. And the fact that, at some point, everybody decided "we need one UI that is applied for both desktop and mobile, despite them being completely different types of devices." And now UI design is all muddled up and nobody can (or will) optimize for large screens, keyboards, and mice, because "not everybody has a large screen, a keyboard, and a mouse." But on mobile, the pull remains to keep a UI metaphor that is basically a slight variation of the WIMP interface that originated on desktop. In the end, nobody wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Original source: [https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296](https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296)

Threader version (if you'd like to read the compiled version without ads & fake news recommendations): [https://threader.app/thread/927593460642615296](https://threader.app/thread/927593460642615296)

<comment><USER21> OH, thank you! This explains why the article is a wall of one-sentence paragraphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wouldn't generalise. Behind the scenes modern computer systems are of course processing _billions_ of times more instructions than computers of old. Some portions of the UX do have noticeable delay and sometimes even inordinate delay. This is usually due to poor choice of algorithms and program logic, but sometimes it is the case that blazing speeds of modern hardware has trained most of us to expect _every_ computation to be almost instant, but some algorithms are still pretty slow, no matter how fast the hardware and they are likely to remain that way. Of course the UI in particular doesn't fit into this algorithmic complexity constraint and there is little excuse for their perceptible slowness in recent years except for poor coding and feature creep.

</comment><comment><USER36> Almost everything on computers is perceptually more rich, useful, and intuitive than it was in 1983.

<comment><USER37> Disagree. It looks prettier but its often not more intuitive.

Not 1983, but Windows 95 all the icons had text underneath them, so you knew what they did.

More recently it took me a couple of years of seeing hamburger menus to make the connection "it's an icon to give you a menu". Those are everywhere but are in no way intuitive.

<comment><USER38> Google has been dropping the hamburger menu, now it's your face, lol. (Google Maps 10.34.4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A problem with a lot of web apps today is that they are designed by visual designers that put a lot of emphasis into aesthetics and animations to make it 'stand out' rather focusing on user experience and keeping it dead plain and simple. This is why I love TUIs because they make use of all the screen real estate and all the possible actions are laid out on the screen to easily navigate.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have a lot of sympathy for this article.

(And all the comments about how much faster computers are today: I interpreted the article to be talking about the ease of UI, in other words how fast the interface lets _you_ do things, not how fast the _computer_ does things.)

I have a private Rails app I've used as a freelancer for 7-8 years for time tracking, invoicing, expenses, and financial reports, and I've tried to make it very keyboard-focused, so that I can enter info without clicking around. I've always wanted to polish it enough to share and charge money for, and I've thought a nice niche would be to double down on the "keyboard productivity" theme. But making that work well in a browser is tricky.

Do you mostly rely on browser-native functionality for keyboard nav/input? That's how it is today. It's fine for me, but it's not really "enough" I think. There are lots of other navigation moves I wish had keyboard shortcuts. But a lot of taste is required here. Usually when people override browser behavior it makes things worse (e.g. scrolling). But there are still things that would be actual improvements.

So a couple years ago I rewrote the Invoices section in React+Redux, hoping that would make it easier to do some custom UI behavior. It made a couple small things better, but it's a _lot_ more code, and it breaks some things the browser used to give me for free. For example if you add a new invoice and see it at the bottom of the list, then you click to a non-React part of the site, then click Back, the new invoice disappears from the list! I'm not even sure how to fix that, unless I want to add a spinner and Ajax call on page load. (Right now I pass the initial state as JSON in the rendered HTML.) Maybe I could use local storage, but then somehow when you click Back I have to decide whether to trust local storage or make an Ajax call. . . .

Anyway, rather than complaining about the article, I'd be more interested in a conversation about how to build webapps with a keyboard focus, so that you can complete entire tasks without touching the mouse. What native browser features would you leverage? What frontend tech would help you? Can you imagine "standard" patterns you could encode in a JS lib, both for DRY code and for a more predictable UI? A "Bootstrap for keyboard-first webapps" would be really cool. In fact Bootstrap already does a lot for accessibility.

<comment><USER41> Stop. Making. Web. "Apps".

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The web is lightning fast when I turn off javascript.

<comment><USER43> I heard people saying this a lot so I decided I'd give it a try. My experience is that this quote is actually, "The web is lightning fast when we don't use most of it." The number of features and websites that just wouldn't work was significant.

However, some sites I visited that were informational only did get a bit faster which for some people with bad Internet connections might make a difference.

This probably already exists, but what I want is an AdBlocker-style plugin that executes a community-curated list of "websites that need JavaScript to work." I can then get the best of both worlds: faster websites with less unnecessary JavaScript, but without crippling a large portion of the Internet for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Said this already but worth repeating:

the best computer application I interacted with was an AS400 era tax filling system.

It was a superb tool in the prettiest meaning. It was a care free, lag free, pedagogy free thing. Fill out data as it comes (the only smart key you needed was tab and shift-tab), smarter than the average web app form validation checks and suggestions. Think instant Elm typecheck where you enjoy the computer assisting work.

I was in 4th year in college and blown away how this thing beat anything we'd see or studied in school yet it was antique pre-OO pre-UML (maybe an ancestor of modeling hygiene though). I wish I could have a talk with the team who wrote that.

Of course it was about to be replaced by a web2.0 variant which was a resource hog, required constant scrolling, didn't do half of the old work but was full colored css.

</comment><comment><USER45> The problem is human memory! People forget all the features, and dependencies software has.

Since the natural direction of the Universe is entropy. As time goes on, software is developed, dependencies are broken, and features quietly stop working.

When you look into fixing it, you notice that its this giant hairball of dependencies which nobody can unwind. So then the next best thing is to put another layer of abstraction on the hairball, and you build on. The price of this is things will get slower.

My Commodore 64 had a more responsive terminal than my macbook, since it was thin layer over hardware, only one or two abstractions deep.

HTML/CSS and Javascript are garbage technologies for making responsive UI, they are so so many levels deep, with so many dependencies and constraints.

The way forward is start fresh with something new, but no idea what it is.

<comment><USER41> Rust/Vulkan?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Vaguely related, someone measured keyboard latency and it does seem slower

[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern- computer...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers- struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie)

</comment><comment><USER47> Computers of the past were undoubtably slower on average; both in terms of physical performance as well as their UX. The software of now, when compared to the software of then, is slow relative to the hardware that it runs on. Before we used to strive to do more with less. Today we strive to do more with more. In an attempt to do more, faster and easier; we've made trade offs.

I wish we would circle back and remember the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy).

Not every app needs every feature rolled out by FAANG in the last decade.

JavaScript is not the best choice for every part of every application stack.

It seems important to me that programs become focused and composable again.

</comment><comment><USER48>
      LOAD"*",8,1

Go get a snack and a drink, walk back to the computer

      bzz bzzzztttzzzt bzzzz

Oh, great, I recognize that noise from the disk drive, it means the game is almost loaded. Just another 30 more seconds.

<comment><USER22> Right... or it can be even slooooower, you can watch a full "V" episode if you have a Datasette.

As you point out, the waiting times were not in the seconds but in the two digit minutes.

<comment><USER48> Yep.

      PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

Might as well go walk the dog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a major source of dissatisfaction for me as well. Especially latency related to keyboard input and program startup. Are there any resources out there specifically intended to help you speed up your (Mac) with these things?

</comment><comment><USER50> It boggles my mind how terrible the web is becoming on lower end connections. I have about 200ms of delay to most servers and about 5Mbit of bandwidth, and many major web pages take over 30 seconds to load if I don't block most of the assets.

It's insane that webpages are now loading megabytes of data across hundreds of http requests before the images even start downloading.

I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the way I need to. It's just unusable. It's a platform that just flat out doesn't work anymore for lots of people in remote areas.

<comment><USER51> > I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the > way I need to.

Can't you just use uBlock Origin with Firefox Mobile and run it behind a localhost VPN like Blokada? It's not perfect but it seems enough for me. A different localhost VPN will probably give you even better results, if you customise it to your specific purpose.

<comment><USER52> Not on iOS, I got one recently for while my Android phone's being repaired, and it was an unwelcome surprise that A) FF (or anything) can't be set as default browser instead of Safari; B) 'content blockers' only work in Safari, even though all browsers are forced to use it to render anyway.

<comment><USER53> You shouldn't be trying to set anything besides Safari as your default browser in iOS: Apple doesn't want you to. Your desires are not important if you're using an iOS device, and you're thinking wrongly to be wanting to do anything differently. If you want to do things your own way, Apple products are simply not for you; they've made this abundantly clear for decades now.

<comment><USER52> I thought I'd try it out while my usual phone's being repaired (plus I'm sceptical it can even be repaired, so that two weeks might turn into four if a replacement isn't forthcoming) - since Android has its issues too.

But yeah, I don't think it's for me. It may be a step forward on first-party privacy, but it's two steps back on third-party. And 20 steps back on 'platform freedom', no changing defaults, no file access for running apps like Syncthing, extremely limited customisation of the home screen (I like a simple alphabetical list of apps, nope, can't have that) or 'control centre' (not possible to put hotspot toggle there? Come on...) etc.

Plus fonts and UI elements feel massive, on the lowest text size. The Slack 'sidebar' takes up almost the full width, and about five channel names fill the height. (On an SE. Larger models of course have more space, but it's the size of things that irritates me, that presumably wouldn't change, there's just be a few more of them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is just totally untrue. Even my Windows 10 computer boots from BIOS screen to login screen in under 8 seconds.

I remember what it was like running windows in 1994, even after waiting 40 seconds for windows to start up, I'd wait upwards of an additional 3 minutes before the computer was actually usable. I remember with keen frustration waiting for the churning disk noise to die down as a signal that the computer was no usable. Since the mid 2000s or so this has just never been a problem.

</comment><comment><USER55> Google Maps is great for A to B. I love it. Use it even if I know the route since traffic can be a pain. It appears fast for me. I'm very much disconnected from what the post says. I've used DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and so on. Now I'm on Mac and Fedora. Never will look back.

Let's remember here that most operations were executed against a cache of data on the local system. That cache is way too big to store on the local system nowadays, so of course we are going contact a server to perform the operations and we will experience network latency that will vary. US internet speed has stagnated. Some time in the future, if typical ISPs don't get their way and we get faster and faster connection speed then these latency complaints will be irrelevant.

Developers could do better in sending less data in general, but that will take more time. Does product management care much about latency if they are not given the mandate? We seem to all want features and more features, but less of the cruft that follows as a result of development, which is weird. Best way to vote in the end is to just build your own application however you can. Waze's features would have never made it into Google Maps if users were not using them instead of Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER56> I use Haiku which is a fast responding OS. Yet I was able to double the speed of the text search program by writing a custom version of GREP, however I also knew the type of searches I did and got rid of a lot of the matching options that were in the original code.

Result a far faster program, but far less options available to the user. I think you will find many of the older systems that are faster are also more limited in what options they offer to the users.

</comment><comment><USER57> Even if true, our computers are able to access many, many, many orders of magnitude of information than my computer could in 1983. What my computer can do for me today is probably 1,000 times more valuable to me than what my computer could do in 1983.

If it takes being slower, I'll take that tradeoff in a heartbeat.

(But I also remember it taking up to a couple minutes to load a program from a floppy, so there's also that.)

</comment><comment><USER58> Related to this, is there a native desktop application for kanban?

Essentially, a local version of Trello without input lag. I'm tired of web apps.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wasn't around computing in 1983 but phone and web app latency are still way behind the average early 2000s office or line-of-business app.

Also ironic is the act that the most significant improvement in responsiveness during the last 20 years was afforded not by better software or even faster CPUs but by the move to SSDs for OS, data and swap space.

</comment><comment><USER60> I would say it doesn't have to be like this. I have made a whole thing out of stripping complexity out of things, which includes favoring cli tools over gui counterparts, etc, and most of my daily stack is nice and fast and not suffering from this. Webpages with good adblocking and scriptblocking start to seem functional again, but are still the main sticking point since I am doing a whitelist approach (and sometimes forget to commit my rule changes).

If a program is written in electron it's an automatic "won't install" for example. The same for npm. If one can learn to be more discerning in their tooling they can avoid many of these pitfalls.

I would also say; go on a pid hunt sometime. Does that process really need to be running? No, like really?

      systemctl list-units --all --type=service

      systemctl disable $service.service

      systemctl mask $service.service

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm old enough to have done applications that were meant to run on IBM 3270 terminals.

Applications that dealt with text and filling out forms were probably better on the 3270-style interface than they are on most web applications, for no good reason. Several times a week I get bitten by a bad form. Forget to put in my Country, hit submit, and the entire form gets erased with an error message, etc.

That being said, for graphical applications his hated mouse is better than what we had in the late 70s. Doing CAD on Tektronics 4010 light-pen terminals wasn't fun. People still went back to T-squares and drafting tables because of this.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Computer...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Computervision_piping.agr.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER62> I think it has something to do with the 30M lines of code problem.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER63> people went with HTTP and other shitty models. now we live with the pain. good for selling new hardware tho, so who really cares!

There could be tons done to still have our modern looks, but have old skool performance. issue is mainly in how we store and subsequently use data.

tons of people still use DOS era softwares just due to this very fact. their old programs they can perform the same work 1000 times faster due to how data is stored / presented. It generally doesn't go through 1000 layers of processing each click, and a lot of data is stored as a 'view', not some raw binary blob to be parsed out again on demand..

</comment><comment><USER64> This may be related to my bad hardware (which is, albeit, not bad on paper).

However, there used to be a time when websites were fast. Like HN is now.

Now, most "apps" and websites are slow. Some are downright sluggish and unusable.

Maybe I am doing something wrong.

<comment><USER29> I wish all websites were as lightweight and fast as HN.

I sorta want to use New Reddit (because I like having smaller windows for multitasking and responsiveness makes that much more convenient) but boy is it painfully slow even on a 100+ mbps connection

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse. It has its place. Especially in a generation of PC gamers that came up with optical mice. Me personally the muscle memory I have from PC gaming for some reasons or other seem to have made navigating ui with a mouse that much more intuitive to me over the last 2 decades and some odd years. To the point it actually feels really good and extremely proficient to me. I feel like I'm faster using a mouse than just pure kb shortcuts. Although I do use a combination of keyboard short cuts and my mouse. Guess it just depends on the task/work flow.

<comment><USER66> "Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse."

Did you actually read the article?

<comment><USER65> I think I responded to the wrong comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Opening a web browser is way faster now. In 1983 it took ten years.

</comment><comment><USER68> I hate when games do something like have their main menu be a webpage. All I care about is the start button and it takes a good 10 seconds some time just for it to pop up.

</comment><comment><USER69> One of the things that drew me to Linux in '93 was running 'find /' on the console. This was blindingly fast versus the same on a SparcStation 4 (a far more expensive and generally superior platform).

This was sort of an accident, in that SparcStation consoles were slow partly because they weren't meant to be used. But still, it was impressive as hell at the time.

</comment><comment><USER70> My problem is that I remember hard drives randomly and audibly grinding for several seconds, making me unable to do anything else.

I remember old word processors lagging behind my typing.

I remember waiting for greenscreen systems to pull down results from a search on a remote server.

When everything was great and optimized (and optimal), many things could be instant, back in the day. Funnily enough, the same is true now.

</comment><comment><USER71> The only slowness I feel running off an NVMe SSD is iTunes on Windows. For some reason Apple made every basic click in iTunes have a built in delay. Doing almost anything has 300-5000ms of delay. Playing video and seeking ahead or back freezes for about 5 seconds for me, while VLC, MPC-BE or Power DVD are nearly instant for 60GB 4K UHD files played off a NAS.

</comment><comment><USER72> A use case where I see this issue very often and would love to see pure text based interfaces is healthcare. Half of providers' and nurses' time is spent clicking on tiny things in drop down boxes before scanning a barcode, which to me is pretty silly. Hitting F4 or something and entering whatever, and then scanning would make it so much faster.

</comment><comment><USER8> This _kills_ me. Everything from waiting for the machine to boot (WTF ARE YOU DOING IN THERE???) to waiting for the machine to shut down.

 _Oberon_ on a twenty-year-old thinkpad is a better _faster_ OS.

Go try it for yourself:

[https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=Ful...](https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/emu.html?image=FullDiskImageWithSource&width=1024&height=576)

This is faster in your browser than your whole computer can run the current bloated crap. Click "reset" in the gear menu and watch it reboot. OOoooo so fast.

Oberon OS plus "Gadgets" has never yet been equaled or exceeded by any other UI, anywhere. If you haven't used it you can't know.

Just the separation of selection and (text, not mouse) cursor is so useful, let alone the built-in cut/copy/paste with mouse chords. Don't get me started on the Gadgets system...

But enough about the greatest OS+UI ever made...

(And my computer freezes for a full second when I scrolled down to the _broken_ (on my machine) image. The fuck Firefox Y U so slow!? Junk. It's all junk. Made out of junk, fractal dimensions of over-wrought crap. Redundant computations that burn energy to do nothing but fail to be better than decades-old versions of itself, the fires of a digital hell.)

</comment><comment><USER73> > When you're all done, you go back to your plotted trip and start laying out > the chosen locations and optimizing your path. > You can do this with a > paper map. You can't do this with gmaps. So you just don't do it.

Has this guy never used Google Maps? You can definitely plot out a trip with multiple points and pick specific routes for each leg along the way. I know because I take a lot of road trips.

Anyhow, computers might be perceptually slower but do so, so much more and are more pleasant to use. Being able to save all my documents to the cloud and use them from any browser is massive. Google Maps has changed the way I travel. The fact I can control my TV from my browser while using HN and planning a route on Gmaps at the same time. The fact I can plug anything into my laptop and have it just work (even my Linux laptop!). And if you really, really miss that 80's era text-only interface, well, you can still have that.

Again though, the sheer amount of data you have access to nowadays and the way computers can visualise it is mind-boggling. Staying on the maps theme, the fact you can find any location on earth, get a satellite image of it and a whole bunch of info in it just by dragging a map around is insane, and I grew up in the early internet era.

</comment><comment><USER74> For the web users if a user spends more time clicking and browsing, this contributes to the interactive usage statistics of the web app.

Apps like facebook, twitter, linkedin, instagram often feel like your wading through mud.

The drive to have users spend more time in your web app overrides and has a higher priority over efficiency of the user experience.

</comment><comment><USER75> I remember when all of this was trees.

</comment><comment><USER76> Some 50 years old developer is angry because he must use "the web".. I'm 40, I was using PC XT/AT in 1988, and no, clipper, reading from floppy disk A and rendering it, Wordstar and Lotus weren't faster. You are just older.

</comment><comment><USER77> I found recently that dragging the middle half of the screen on mobile street view now scrolls up and down the street instead of rotating the view. I don't know why companies obsessively break things that worked fine for years.

</comment><comment><USER78> Dan Luu's post on computer latency is my favorite data driven approach to this topic: [https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Useful to know: the 'past' link underneath a headline on HN will show you past instances of the same URL being shared as news.

This is our 6th time discussing this topic, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

</comment><comment><USER79> Is a 1982 Commodore 64 faster than a new MacBook Pro? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3C9yLVsVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3C9yLVsVE)

</comment><comment><USER80> What about color-grading video? Photos? Backing up all of your family slides, negatives, and portraits? Learning to program for free on your own time?

Get out of here with this spotlight-y maga-esque ridiculousness.

<comment><USER4> > Learning to program for free on your own time?

We have been doing this for many decades.

<comment><USER80> Maybe a small select group have been. Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? Come on.

<comment><USER4> > Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the > same category as the current ones?

No, I never wrote anything remotely close to suggest so, if by "in the same category" you mean volume. If you implied quality, well, that is another matter. There is so much low-quality content online; you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content. The first search results are rarely the best.

However, people should stop disseminating distorted realities. People learned things before the Internet. I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet. You did not need a superficial Medium blog post on a subject or a hand-holding tutorial. You reverse engineered the binary. Besides, there's been a ton of books on programming for a long time. I have a great one from '78, The C Programming Language.

<comment><USER80> > you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content

> I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet.

Ok Boomer.

<comment><USER4> Your response contributes nothing of value and is better suited to Reddit.

Anyway: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=internet+attention+span](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=internet+attention+span)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I remember my BBS days, waiting minutes for stuff that happens instantly now.

That being said, it is a bit of a shame that the faster computers get the more time the computer spends on fancy UI elements, etc.

<comment><USER82> "That being said, it is a bit of a shame that the faster computers get the more time the computer spends on fancy UI elements, etc."

Isn't that the point of faster computers? ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Google maps is a bad example in tours rant. Used it to explore many cities, not only turn by turn direction. It worked get although personally like openstreet maps, because I feel one company s shouldn't control so many aspects of life and like open source nature of it.

Indeed able to discover a onsen built by community in Hokkaido. That's based on a lake I saw by just zoom in out of the map to do exploration and saw it built by Ainu community living there. In that turn by turn map helped quite a lot to reach there subsequently just by click and dropping a pin there. Submitted a text describing it and subsequently visited by many people.

Took a journey through treacherous mountain and went up to 2500 meters high and crossed it via a tiny off-road designed for motorcycles. That too did based on exploration of map on phone.

Paper maps didn't provide such convenience. Yes POS is slow, but then it has different expectations today. Try integrating old POS with 10 payment network working under milliseconds to authorise transactions. Worked enough since 1990 with dos based POS and also wrote IBM MQ C++ code for integration. Don't want to go back there.

I think today is a step forward. Like always there will be good and bad as it was in 1980 or 1990. But largely today we do much more with computers than we ever did in those days.

So not everything is perceptually slow on computers. Apple Watch, iphone, androids are responsive and usually fast. Windows 10 for certain tasks might be slow but then overall it's not that bad either.

As far as exploration goes you can do the same or even more today than before. I can discover planets. Built3D model in physical form, use CNC on desktop, do laser cutting in my home.

Built a computer like BBC micro, raspberry pi, fly a computer using fly by wire and test it using real physical model plane. Can do farming on a small scale using hydroponics at home. Can just go on and on about it. All possible thanks to advancement in speed and reduction of size in computing devices and peripherals.

So I feel it's not slow, just the work we do with old computers is very different from what we do with modern one's.

</comment><comment><USER84> Google maps is actually bloody good at just being a map. It's extremely convenient to zoom in and out, click around, view locations, add them to your route, etc. Yes you can up the productivity by using more tabs and that is the standard nowadays because we humans are being trained to be multitasking monsters. Forgive me for ending my read there because to me it just sounds like a rant from a bitter old person that doesn't understand this brave new world any more.

</comment><comment><USER85> I hate to be this guy but there are good points in here so _why_ is there a newline after every sentence? This is not how written english is supposed to work :(

EDIT: Apparently its output from a twitter thread unroller. My point still stands and, ironically, its another example of how randomly smashing a bunch of applications together is broadly a degradation on the status quo.

<comment><USER86> The original content was a series of tweets and the link is a website that summarizes long twitter threads, so each newline indicates a follow-up tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> mice become worse when they switched from ps/2 to usb. ask the quake community.

</comment><comment><USER82> I just wish the author used actual paragraphs. I find a string of 1-2 sentence "paragraphs" to be difficult to read. I glanced through it, thought "he's got a good point here and there but its not THAT big of a deal" and then closed it.

</comment><comment><USER88> The author does not own a smartphone apparently.

</comment><comment><USER89> It was really nice of this guy to take time out of his busy day at the retirement home to write this.

</comment><comment><USER90> To me, this the major paradigm shift is away from native clients to a model that, at the very least, _allows_ for the entire client to be re-downloaded every time the application is loaded, which is the case in the current web app landscape.

Even if the entire application is stored locally, the goal is frequently on code reuse with systems like React, so it is still baked into the design.

We talk about function keys being missed--but the fact is, one of the main issues is that your web browser already makes use of many of these keys. This is not a problem with the web app you are using, but with the fact that you are using a web app, which is a client running within your browser, itself a native client.

Simply returning to native desktop clients for productivity software would be a huge step in the right direction. There are economic incentives _not_ to accommodate this user need, however. Developers need to offer cloud-based, app-based access to their services in order to remain competitive. For many companies, it is built into their SaaS business model! If you develop a productivity application professionally, you would need to believe that the existence of the native client (and all of the resources and man hours it consumes) will give you a meaningful competitive edge. The benefits to users are obvious to developers who have time to reflect on it, and to the users running a POS system, but not to the people several levels above the POS operator who are making decisions. For them, a cloud system that centralizes access, control, and supervision works better for _them_.

I had a job recently where I had to do data entry for a lot of invoices into a intranet cloud system. The system was slow; fields had bugs that literally caused the text to be entered backwards for some reason (seriously)... and it sucked for me. But for our business partner who was a majority owner of our main asset, it affords them control, centralization, and remote administration.

I actually agree with the OP aesthetically, but it dwells on the POS operator and forgets the hidden user-- POS operator's managers and business ownership.

I will also say that to those of you who feel anti-javascript--an SPA is _much_ better at managing stateful applications than dynamically pages generated by the server, and I'd much prefer to minimize chat between client and server where possible, which SPA frameworks do afford.

I think the whole thing could be improved by better support for native-style applications in the browser, possibly running in some "native mode".

The last thing all say is that windows are nice for multitasking, but they do represent a significant cognitive load to manage, and you can't usually do it from muscle memory. I remember teaching my grandparents to use AOL in around ~2000, and I literally had to make exercises for them to try to establish "object permanence" with windows that were hidden. The interface appeared flat to them, and they didn't intuitively grasp that another window jutting out behind another was a part of a separate interface altogether. They got it eventually, but it is the type of thing that is easy to forget when we live our lives enmeshed in window based operating systems. But look at phones--they don't have window-like functionality even after all this time, with bigger and better screens, multi-core processors, etc. Why? Because we still consider a phone to be a "device". It's capable of multitasking, but we subdue that aspect of the interface in favor of focus and usability. Terminal applications are similar in that respect, and I think that's why people find them attractive in some contexts.

To anyone who feels strongly about this, I'd say: Develop a beautiful productivity app for native desktop usage. Market it. Make people fall in love with it. A deluge of such apps may promote a reversal of this trend.

</comment><comment><USER91> thanks for writing what I've been thinking for so long

</comment><comment><USER92> TeX is faster.

<comment><USER41> It tends to be compiled into PDF these days, which is computer-hostile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Caffeine be messing with your head boy

</comment><comment><USER94> rofl. no its not.

</comment><comment><USER95> This post must be 5 year old, nobody says "AJAX" in 2020

<comment><USER96> Yes, we now have a few layers of abstractions on top of this. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Sorry this seemed like a terrible article to me. Pure bs.

</comment><comment><USER98> Another version of "back in those days everything was so good"

</comment><comment><USER99> An article like this get posted every so often and it is normally absolute trite.

When I was a kid I had a hand me down computer. Generally it took 20-30 minutes to load a game from cassette. There was no interchangeability between computer manufacturers. I had the choice of BASIC of Assembly to program in and the whole interface was BASIC.

Today I can load up a web browser in a second or two, transfer files between machines with ease (for the most part) and I can download in minutes any language I want to program in.

</comment><comment><USER100> I remember programming culture in the 2000s and it was so stupid. Every programmer whining 24/7 about 'bloat', they were complaining about Java though not electron. Thank God the whiners never got anything they wanted.

<comment><USER101> It's even worse now. JavaScript, originally intended for form validation and image preloading, took over. And they decided to compile it (sorry, transpile), thus making front end work as tedious as back end.</comment></comment>


My Animated HTML/JS Resume (Full-Stack Engineer) - <AUTHOR> http://ivanca.work/html5/your+company.html <comment><USER2> the site stepped out for a bit :)</comment>


McDonald's delivery to be available in 3,500 restaurants by the end of June - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/mcdonalds-delivery-to-be-available-in-3500-restaurants-by-june.html <comment><USER2> McDonalds isn't doing delivery. Third parties are doing delivery.

Doordash delivers KFC, Jack in the Box, and Panda Express in Silicon Valley as their fast food choices. With Doordash, don't order anything you can't reheat when it shows up. That's the trouble with these low-end delivery services. They're not using a vehicle with hot and cold storage. It's just some sucker's car.

<comment><USER2> Robot delivery is coming along. Here's a Starship Technologies delivery robot in downtown Redwood City.[1] It's in front of Box.net HQ. Notice the guy in shorts following the thing around. When I see that robot, it usually has a minder. The minder isn't driving it, just watching over it.

[1] [https://s12.postimg.org/9gs8v03j1/robotatbox.jpg](https://s12.postimg.org/9gs8v03j1/robotatbox.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I live in Scandinavia and love McDonalds, but it's pretty expensive so I don't eat it so often and healthy food is much cheaper. In the U.S. it seems to be opposite, McDonalds and fastfood in general is cheap, while healthy food is expensive.

<comment><USER4> As an Australian living in the US, I noticed that difference too, in addition to some others.

The staff didn't seem nearly as miserable (I was one of them for a while) or apathetic in Australian restaurants. I noticed when I went back that the food wasn't nearly as greasy in Australia (I've actually noticed that about meat in general, US meat tends to seem greasier for some reason) and it usually seemed prepared with a little more care (the burgers weren't falling apart for example). Also the restaurants were consistently cleaner, better maintained and more up-to-date than their US counterparts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they are adding delivery options due to pressure from franchisees. McDonald's is really a real estate company[0], so I would've thought it's better for corporate if people are coming into the stores. That keeps the real estate valuable and means they can charge higher rent.

[0] [https://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a- real-e...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-estate- company)

</comment><comment><USER6> McDonalds in Thailand delivered when I was there a couple years ago. You just ordered off the McDonald's website. (And one time when we were somehow too drunk to make that work, by calling the store and getting a cashier's Line SN, lol.)

They had branded heat-retaining bags (like pizza places) and delivered via scooter. The cost of labor being somewhat lower in Thailand and the quality of the food being somewhat higher (a large double-BigMac meal was ~$10 while delivery was ~$1), it actually worked pretty well for drunk food at night -- or even if you just didn't want to go out to eat. (They usually were faster and warmer than, say, FoodPanda.)

I somehow think it's not going to translate as well to the US market (cost of labor; lower quality food; double BigMacs aren't a thing), but I _do_ miss it.

Of course, Thai McDonalds is dead to me now that they no longer have wasabi sauce. (I suppose it's my schezwan sauce, now.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I once used McDonald's delivery for a board game event in Japan - we were playing Food Chain Magnate and just got in the mood.

It was late (took almost an hour) and I live in the Tokyo 23-ward area. I wasn't very impressed; I could have walked to the closest station and picked up the food with far less hassle, and no delivery charge.

(YMMV)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ultimately, McDonalds will have to transition to being a full-service vending machine.

Realistically, in an automated world, their flesh-and-blood employees provide negative value.

I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places

<comment><USER9> That seems to be the direction they're moving. Several flagship McDonalds have popped up around NYC with fully self-serve computer ordering kiosks. I haven't been yet, but people are talking about them -- people who I've never heard talk about McDonalds before.

They've got a pretty big gulf of social-class-stigma to get past, but it seems like McDonalds is at the beginning of a comeback.

Delivery might be a guilty pleasure gateway.

<comment><USER10> There is a McDonalds with a kiosk on my drive to work. The drive-through gets backed up out on to the street, so I started parking to go in. There's often a short line at the counter, but if you use the kiosk you can literally place your order within 20 seconds of stepping through the door.

Maybe it's because I grew up within a couple miles of the headquarters of McDonalds, but the only people I know that don't go to McDonalds are health nuts. That being said, the stores around here are way nicer than the ones I've gone to in other parts of the country. I think proximity to the HQ probably keeps the franchisees in line, plus there are a bunch of corporate owned stores which are _amazing_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure why there are a bunch of people being negative to delivery to McDonalds. Sometimes I just want a burger instead of a Sandwhich or a pizza. I think it adds variety to be honest.

<comment><USER12> how about fat and sugar diabet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Considering the cost of UberEats delivery (5$ in Canada, 40 pesos in Mexico) Doesn't seem like it's worth ordering food the quality of McDonalds

<comment><USER14> McDonalds may not be bespoke, but it's consistent. A Big Mac tastes the same from downtown Manhattan to rural Podunk.

There's a definite market for people who want that and don't/can't/won't make the drive.

<comment><USER15> Not to mention drunk 20-somethings that are responsible enough to not get behind the wheel.

<comment><USER14> Its anecdata with a small sample size, but I can confirm you don't have to be aged 20-29 to be drunk and want to eat McD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The two McDonalds restaurants that are on Seattle's 15th Ave NW (at Market and Mary Ave NW) are both doing this via Uber Eats. I suppose they almost had to get in on the game considering it seems like basically _every other_ food- selling establishment north of the ship canal has signed up with at least two food delivery outlets.

I don't really see the attractiveness but, hey, options are options.

<comment><USER17> How about: if you are lazy and want that style of food?

I like to eat mexican a lot, but taqueria cantina (amazing mexican place in seattle) is not always delivering, such as tonight. Thus, If I am really craving mexican, I will order qdoba as a backup.

Same goes for burger places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The classism and lack of respect on display here at HN, when you simply mention a popular restaurant chain, is pretty astounding.

</comment><comment><USER19> So what happens when they put pickles on a burger ordered without them /s

The big issue with fast food is cost. It's usually eaten by those in a rush and the poor. It just seems ridiculous how complicated and expensive the menus gotten.

Even with the coffee, which they seem to be pushing hard. Is now obfuscated under 100 unnecessary drinks.

<comment><USER20> Poor person here. Inflation has made it so it's not even really an option. Everyone has removed their dollar menu and jacked up the price which is what I order off of if I was in a hurry. It's cheaper and effective for me to the burrito hole in the wall and get a massive burrito for 4 bucks than go to any fast food place.

<comment><USER21> > It's cheaper and effective for me to the burrito hole in the wall and get a > massive burrito for 4 bucks than go to any fast food place.

The burrito place is also fast food.

<comment><USER22> I assume he means the fuzzy sense of the term that includes being part of a large chain. Most people's usage ofthe term doesn't include holes in the wall and language is obviously determined by usage.

<comment><USER23> I believe the commenter you responded is aware of the colloquial distinction, and is gently asserting a point that this distinction is not to be believed.

Regardless of the cultural zeitgeist about food preparation by large chains, food from McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants that try to market themselves as above fast food.

<comment><USER22> > and is gently asserting a point that this distinction is not to be believed.

> McDonald's is qualitatively the same as food from many fast food restaurants > that try to market themselves as above fast food.

This assumes incorrectly that the only use of the distinction is a one- dimensional measure of quality. A couple of uses for the distinction that have nothing to do with "quality":

1) I don't tend to eat at chain restaurants much because I don't tend to eat at the same restaurants much (ie, I really like variety). This was pretty much true even for the few years that I ate every single weekend meal at restaurants (or takeout).

2) Part of chain restaurants' explicit goal is mass appeal and consistency of taste. Practically by definition, you're less likely to find the niche of flavor that appeals to you the most directly, or even as high a level of novelty and diversity of flavor as you would if going to holes in the wall.

3) I'm cheating a little bit making this a separate bullet pt, but #2 works the other way as well, since some people explicitly prefer consistency of flavor and knowing exactly what to expect to being adventurous about flavors and tastes. This isn't a value judgment: I had a girlfriend who described her taste as preferring bland food and there's no real basis for me to claim that I had "better" taste than her.

It occurs to me that these examples are all pretty tightly related to the notion of chain restaurants providing consistency and mass appeal, but that doesn't really change my point at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if they'll follow delivery with breakfast subscriptions. (Do people really eat any McDonald's food besides Egg McMuffins and coffee?)

</comment><comment><USER25> McDonald's been doing delivery for years in my country. I guess it all depends on the lifestyle and competition.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yeah... a lack of delivery WAS the reason I had been avoiding McDonalds.

<comment><USER27> This.

The people eating McDonalds and the people paying for food delivery are not the same people. I'm pretty sure their intersection is statistically insignificant.

<comment><USER28> McDonalds probably has better research on their own business than you do. They wouldn't do this unless they believed it would be worthwhile.

<comment><USER29> "McDonalds probably has better research on their own business than you do."

This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management. Those companies have people investing in all kinds of BS all the time everywhere from top to store level. That includes McDonalds which is easy to verify by just listening to the employees talk about management and company politics.

Now, it may be a good idea that might have come from someone thinking well. A big company investing in it across the stores isn't proof of that in any way, though. One needs more details.

<comment><USER23> _> "McDonalds probably has better research on their own business than you do."

This is never something you should believe in a major, for-profit company heavy on management._

It takes an astonishing amount of hubris for any single individual to believe they can really have market research superior to a company's when it comes to the company's _core competency._ Even where it's true, I expect such an individual to have a far more reasoned claim than, "for-profit companies with lots of managers suck!"

Just because companies try things and fail all the time doesn't mean they're not well-thought out and often even well-executed. Do you honestly believe "management heavy" companies are full of people who don't know what they're doing? How do you know what their research teams do or don't do, and know or don't know?

On what basis can you even begin to assert an absolute statement like the one you just claimed? You didn't provide a substantive argument, all you said was companies try things that fail all the time, and implicitly repeated the meme that managers are just vapid drones in the aggregate.

<comment><USER29> "It takes an astonishing amount of hubris"

It really doesn't. All it takes is a person to listen to people that work at these Fortune 500 companies talk about how big decisions get made. I did that most of my day for years. I also read what many say on online forums. I believe there's plenty of smart people in them including excellent marketers at McDonalds. There's even plenty of well-informed decisions and sensible projects.

However, years of empirical data says what makes most of these companies run amounts to political skill of managers and the Peter Principle. Again, that's not my guess so much as what people in the middle and on the ground tell me. The low-level employees of big, food chains also gripe about corporate visitors saying they're worthless by adding nothing to what's going on or things they say are hugely disconnected from how the place runs day-to-day. As if they're managing a different, better-run company with more staff. Those people come and go with high turnover but a fraction of them move up into the positions making bigger decisions despite adding about nothing to the effectiveness of their restaurants. Gotta be politics and authoritarianism instead of performance given the data.

<comment><USER28> Anecdotes and asserting that empirical data exists without providing it isn't very convincing.

<comment><USER29> Attempted some quick Googling for you. As expected, it's mostly noise about what managers think of their _workers_ instead of other way around. However, I did find this Gallup piece studying a huge number of workers and companies that supports my hypothesis about management competency in average case.

[http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/167975/why-great- manag...](http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/167975/why-great-managers- rare.aspx)

<comment><USER30> It's not clear that you understand the majority of the ~36K MCD restaurants are franchised, so the employees do not work for MCD, they work for small local franchisees businesses. MCD only owns ~7k locations (i.e. ~16%).

<comment><USER29> My comments apply to what majority of US workers tell me regardless of owners. I'd love to see a survey on competence covering both franchisees and corporate stores.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How we moved to leaflet and openstreetmap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trackprofiler.com/2014/04/moving-to-leaflet-and-openstreetmap.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> This is more of a 'we moved to leaflet and openstreetmap' than a 'how we did it'.</comment>