Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin, Blows Everyone's Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/mark-zuckerberg-speaks-mandarin-blows-everyones-mind/ <comment><USER2> It comes down to:

(1) Chinese people are blown away when a Westerner speaks Chinese, and (2) Americans are blown away by anyone who speaks Chinese.

I have been taking daily Mandarin lessons for the last few months, since I'm traveling increasingly often to Beijing to teach programming classes (in English), and want to be able to communicate more easily with my students and colleagues. I'm having a super-fun time with it, and definitely feel like I'm making progress. It's slow progress, but it's something.

My friends in the US and Israel seem to think I'm some kind of mutant super genius for being able to learn Chinese. I keep trying to tell them that a billion people have managed to do it, so it can't be _that_ hard, but they are completely surprised that it's possible.

Moreover, even when I say something short and simple (with an undoubtedly very strong American accent and mediocre tones), my Chinese friends and colleagues are blown away, impressed by my ability to learn the language.

Zuckerberg seems to be where I hope to be in about a year or two -- namely, a with good vocabulary, decent but imperfect grammar, and a terrible accent. I can live with that.

The impressive thing here is the time needed to do this. Zuckerberg is a busy guy, and taking a few hours each week to study Mandarin isn't necessarily something that you would expect him to make time for. Then again, he just got married and doesn't yet have children. Hmm, maybe I _am_ a mutant super genius for learning Chinese while married, consulting, and with three children...

Regardless, my wife took this news as proof that I'm doing the right thing. She's convinced that there will be even more people flocking to learn Mandarin, now that Zuckerberg has shown that it's possible.

<comment><USER3> Or maybe "Americans are blown away by anyone who speaks another language?"

<comment><USER4> This is only true in bigoted European stereotypes of Americans. 20% of the country is bilingual. In port cities such as San Francisco or New York the ratio is much, much higher. It's just not that special. Non-Asians learning Chinese is still somewhat special, though much less so than it was in the 90s.

<comment><USER5> Well it's not that strange; in many EU countries most people also only speak their own language. I'm not sure it's more normal in the EU to speak two languages than the US. I'm from the Netherlands so I have a skewed perspective on all it considering all the people I know speak 3-5 languages well enough to hold a non casual conversation. 20% is rather a tiny % for my taste anyway, so not difficult to be an bigoted European as the chances of running into a non 1st / 2nd gen American who speaks two languages is just not very high. And seems tv-shows / films want to push that idea a bit more by, whenever someone blurts out a foreign sentence, making it grammatically wrong and pronunciation wise a complete joke (no-one would recognise it as the target language if they didn't say it explicitly). Not that i'm saying tv shows are a good reflection of how it is, but a lot of people don't know any different... (Same vice versa by the way).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I learned Mandarin as a young adult, living in Taiwan and taking classes for about 10 hours per week. It took about 6 months to get to the level of vocabulary that Mark is using, and another 6 months to get to the point where I could handle a job interview.

Mandarin syntax is surprisingly easy, with no articles or weird things like irregular verbs or messy conjugations. The tones throw people off, and the written characters are extremely difficult to learn (for Westerners; Japanese, who have exposure to Chinese characters, do quite well at reading and writing). Fortunately, there is a Romanization/phonetic system called _pinyin_ that makes it quite easy to get started with pronunciation and tones.

Yes, Mark is speaking with a very heavy accent and needs to work on his tones. But the fact that Mark was able to get to this level without living in China (he says he's only visited 4 times, although it sounds like he's able to practice with family members, including his wife's paternal grandmother) is very impressive. I think it would be fair for many Chinese citizens to ask, if the busy CEO of a major American company who seldom visits China can learn Mandarin, why do many foreign businesspeople who have lived in China for years fail to learn the language?

</comment><comment><USER7> It didn't blow my mind. He learned a language, quite some people do that, even if the language is hard and remote.

Headline disproven.

Edit: it is impressive, as any language skill remote from you mother tongue. But I am not a fan of superlatives, especially if they indicate that I should take part in the appreciation.

FWIW: German headline on the topic: "Facebook CEO [...] impresses students".

[http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/facbeook-chef-mark- zucker...](http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/facbeook-chef-mark-zuckerberg- spricht-chinesisch-a-998828.html)

<comment><USER8> Quite a lot of people don't.

<comment><USER9> Actually context matters here.

If some one from USA/UK/France, for example, learns a new language it definitely is a surprise. May be blows the mind is not the right word.

On the other hand, it is common for people from Southern India to know 4 or 5 languages and it is not surprising.

<comment><USER10> We do learn 2 foreign languages in France during school (English + German/Spanish/Italian/whatever) so I'm not really sure why it would be a surprise to hear a french speak another language. They might suck at it though.

<comment><USER11> Because there's "learning" and learning.

French people "learn" german and english but are terrible at it even after learning it for 10 years.

Scandinavian people learn english and are actually fluent with a good pronunciation after a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://qz.com/285851/the-most-important-things-mark- zuckerbe...](http://qz.com/285851/the-most-important-things-mark-zuckerberg- just-said-in-broken-chinese/)

|But those blown away by Zuck's Chinese chinwag might want to know that though he's clearly memorized a lot of relevant words, those were still shoehorned into a distinctly American grammatical order. Pronunciation is also a problem: He showed a plucky disregard for the tones that Mandarin has—one tonal slip-up had him saying that Facebook boasts eleven mobile users instead of 1 billion—and his enunciation was roughly on par with the clarity possible when someone's stepping on your face.

Still, I'm impressed. Mandarin is (f'n) hard, takes balls to speak a language you don't master in front of a crowd (and subsequently all teh interwebs).

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that everyone saying "I know tons of people that learnt a second language, so what" are missing the point. No, in a human being it is not that exceptional. However, a billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg might be well inclined to not bother, and expect everyone around him to speak his own language. But he went out of his way to learn.

No, we shouldn't give him the Nobel Peace Prize for it, but we can say "nice, good on you", and carry on our day.

</comment><comment><USER14> Buddy of mine told me it was pretty bad, and that when the non-rehearsed questions came up he'd continue in English after a few words. Considering his wife is Chinese, I can't say this is mind-blowing. I'd downvote this as a celebrity-worship post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reposted from here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8496518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8496518)

A review of his Mandarin based on a close listen of the first 5 minutes of the video and listening to the rest in the background while I type this (let me know if it changes later):

tl;dr - Definitely ILR 1+, probably an ILR 2. Pronunciation needs a ton of work, but that's not the only aspect that is measured when analyzing speech. The foreign policy article (linked in another comment) is overly critical, imho.

Detailed:

ILR LEVEL

He's definitely at least an ILR 1+. He shows signs of ILR 2 characteristics (and is probably an ILR 2), but it's hard to tell if he can sustain them in a wide range of contexts. While his pronunciation needs A LOT of work, the language itself is comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener. I strongly disagree with the Foreign Policy article that says it was "terrible". I would say that it's actually kind of amazing given that he's the CEO of a huge company. I would roughly say that he is on par with a good / above average 3rd year student at a school with a really good Chinese program. The original article says 2nd year, but this would be a superstar 2nd year student who was either a heritage speaker or had spent a lot of time in China (e.g., as a homestay or study abroad).

DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AND STYLE

He is able to sustain the dialogue for a long time. He is able to circumlocute decently (this really opens up the ability to communicate), but I would really like to see his range of circumlocution. He is able to string together his sentences in moderately cohesive paragraphs. He does not demonstrate the ability to combine paragraphs cohesively at a high level (signs of an ILR 3), but I don't think the tasks really required it.

His style of answering questions was very American -- very direct. I don't think that a Chinese speaker who has lived exclusively in China (i.e., not educated or trained in the "West") would answer the same questions similarly. In this case, I actually think that it's best for him to answer in an American way even if he could answer in a Chinese style, but that's a different and longer discussion.

Early on when he tells the story of his wife and her grandmother, he really comes across as quite charming.

GRAMMAR

He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener. The sample didn't really demonstrate a wide range of grammar, but the tasks didn't necessarily require a wide range. He is able to say complex sentences (i.e., two independent clauses), and he is able to speak in different timeframes (normally tenses, but Chinese tenses are not like English). This all points to a solid ILR 2, but grammar is definitely not the toughest part of Mandarin.

VOCABULARY

He has a decent vocabulary -- it's solid for the task. I wonder what his vocabulary is like outside of the topics of personal bio information, Facebook, and Facebook business. If he wants to get to ILR 2+ or ILR 3, he will need to work on the accuracy and diversity of his vocabulary.

PRONUNCIATION

This is easily his weakest point. He has a HEAVY American accent. He mispronounces a lot of words. His tones are WAY off. He seems completely unable to say English loan words in Chinese (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.). It's actually kind of hard to listen to. That being said, I would say that it is all comprehensible to a sympathetic native listener.

SUMMARY

Overall, really good for someone who is not studying full time and has a very involved full time job. I wonder how much of it was practiced or rehearsed -- a lot of the questions are ones that he definitely _should_ practice (e.g., the story about why he started studying Chinese), since they are standard questions that would be asked to him and/or the Facebook CEO. Regardless, speaking in a foreign language to a large group of people is not easy, and he came across really well.

RECOMMENDATIONS

He can work on his pronunciation in several ways:

\- Listen more. Even if it's on in the background, it will help. Right now, I don't think he has a good intuitive sense when he is mispronouncing a word.

\- When working with a teacher, do lower level language tasks, and act like a native speaker whose voice/accent he likes. Research suggests that this lowers affective filters for pronunciation.

\- Work with suprasegmentals with a pronunciation program that visualize what he's saying. It can be enlightening.

\- Practice over pronouncing words. If he does what he perceives as a "caricature" of pronouncing the word, he will probably be closer to accurate.

Other than that, listen more, read more, and I think he will become a rock- solid ILR 2 with room for growth if he wants it.

That's my quick-and-dirty. I am very interested in the informed opinions of others.

<comment><USER16> A question if you will: What the hell is an ILR?

Also yay I learned a word - circumlocution.

<comment><USER17> This: [http://www.govtilr.org/skills/ILRscale1.htm](http://www.govtilr.org/skills/ILRscale1.htm) I would imagine.

<comment><USER16> That was the least helpful page ever ... but thanks, it pointed me in the more helpful direction of Wikipedia.

For those wondering, here is a list of what various ILR levels entail: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale)

Although I find the scale rather odd. When it comes to English, you could easily classify me as ILR 5[1], but on account of my heavy accent and the fact that I sometimes grope for words[2] you could put me in ILR 3. Can anyone explain in more detail how this works? Is it subjective on part of whomever is doing the evaluation?[3]

[1] I've published books in English and until people hear my accent they normally mistake me for a native speaker. I also have a terribly tendency to fix native speakers' grammar because it bothers me too much.

[2] I'm used to using two languages at once (Slovenian and English) so when I'm put in a context where I can only use one, I start groping for words. This happens both in English and in my native Slovenian.

[3] I remember doing IELTS tests a few years ago and I got marked down on listening comprehension and speaking fluency because the lady expected me to diss GMO's and I disagreed with her opinion and told her the various benefits they bring. She thought I didn't understand what she was saying, so I had to fake a different opinion to satisfy her expectations.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, any plans to develop your American accent (I assume you're in the USA)?

I'm not saying you don't count as fluent unless you have a perfect accent. But I am surprised how few foreigners, having mastered English grammar and vocabulary, don't take that final step (leaving none the wiser about their foreign origin).

<comment><USER16> I've spent a lot of time in the US recently and it's normalised my accent a lot. It's become undefinable. People back home tell me I don't sound like them when I speak, but that I don't sound quite American either.

Americans make fun of how I pronounce certain words (which actually helps a lot in normalising my accent), but they can't place the accent either. Nobody guesses that I'm slavic, a lot of people ask if I'm Brazilian or from some random European country.

A large part of the confusion probably stems from the fact I use colloquialisms and even colloquial speech patterns, like, correctly.

With prolonged stays in the US my accent is going to normalise further, but I think that getting completely rid of it would require some sort of accent coach. So far the only motivation for doing so is that being told _" Wow your English is so good!"_ is getting annoying. I was proud when people told me that ten years ago, but it feels silly now.

But a big benefit of maintaining my foreigner status is the freedom it affords me. I can use British slang, Aussie slang, East coast slang, West coast slang, even Canadian slang and nobody minds or finds it odd. Whereas if I sounded like somebody who grew up in California and used a British turn of phrase, it would sound hella weird.

And, obviously, I feel a certain level of smugness when I use British words that Americans don't understand because then I get to call them plebes and mock them with my larger vocabulary. (Americans get really upset when a foreigner is better at something than they are, it's funny)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That actually IS impressive, Mandarin is very hard to learn and he should have credit for it.

Though I'm sure he had a really good teacher.

</comment><comment><USER20> He learned a language that's fundamentally different from his mother tongue.

Impressive. In my home country, you can't get your graduate degree without speaking 2 languages besides your mother tongue -- and the difference between English and Hungarian is not really smaller than English vs. Mandarin.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do people find it remarkable that he is able to speak a foreign language? Most people in the world are able to converse in more than one language. Or is it remarkable that a foreigner speaks Chinese?

<comment><USER22> "Remarkable that an American realises a world outside the USA exists at all" would be the stereotype :P

(Not necessarily an accurate one; but as a European, that seems to be how the average American is viewed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did his wife speak it in the home when growing up, or was she put the weekend schools I hear of ABC (American-born Chinese) kids going through? She could certainly help him if so.

</comment><comment><USER24> Everybody should be learning something in their free time, unfortunately watching media with the lowest common denominator( mostly daytime TV and sitcoms ) is the most prevalent and it is the worst at the same time. Youtube is becoming a replacement for that and allows and hosts really educating stuff( lectures, languages with subtitles ), but it is just too easy to switch to it from TV and keep watching crap.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm much more amazed that so many people around the world have managed to learn English at a high enough level that they can work and study in it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very impressive, Mandarin is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn: [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Dif...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers)

<comment><USER4> Mandarin is the easiest of any of the Chinese languages. It only has four tones instead of seven or more, there are a wealth of language teaching materials and a lot of natively-produced media, ranging from children's books to near-hollywood scale move productions.

Cantonese, on the other hand, has a decent amount of media but relatively little in terms of materials aimed at teaching foreigners.

Taiwanese learners have a decent amount of local television and music to lean on if/once they reach a high level of competence, but there isn't even a standardized written language! Instead there are the following horrible options:

1) Use an essentially unworkable system of trying to apply patchy etymological research of Taiwanese going back to middle Chinese to guess which characters modern syllable could be represented by.

2)Picking characters with similar Mandarin pronunciations, using a romanized script. This has the drawback that Taiwanese has several sounds and tones that Mandarin doesn't.

3) Use a well developed and self-consistent romanization (aka our alphabet) system developed by missionaries over a century ago. This is pretty decent but there are competing romanizations.

4) Use a mishmash of characters and roman letters together. This is very common.

One advantage both Cantonese and Taiwanese hold over smaller languages is that it's not too hard to find speaker communities in just about any major world city and many of those speakers are fully fluent only in that one language and find Mandarin to be a painful alternative. If you want to study an American Indian language like Blackfoot, you'll have the additional problem that every speaker of it is bilingual in English.

All in all, I don't think Mandarin ranks anywhere near the most difficult option for English speakers. It's certainly harder than romance languages, but in the big scheme of things it's of medium difficulty at worst.

<comment><USER26> Definitely, learning Mandarin is way easier than any of the dialects. I tried to learn Teochew to communicate with my wife's family but the lack of learning materials and of romanization system similar to pinyin for Teochew makes it very difficult to learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone has some experience with this, i speak Dutch, German, English (Germanic languages) and French (Latin language).

I suppose it would be easier for me to learn Spanish or another language. But would it also help me to learn Mandarin?

<comment><USER28> Similarity in European languages helps. I speak Portuguese natively. It means Spanish is very easy and Italian a bit more difficult, but can be both picked up "by ear" just listening to TV shows. French is the first latin language that really required formal teaching to learn. English is taught at school from an early age, so while I recognize I'd never pick it up autonomously, it is now in the area of "easy languages".

Mandarin is probably so far from European languages that I can't even identify the expected learning roadblocks.

P.S: kudos on speaking Dutch. Amazingly difficult language. Tough pronunciation, strange grammar (for us coming from non-germanic languages at least).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a working translation of the Q&A, if there's not one already. [https://medium.com/unbabel-news/b4cb8f223df2](https://medium.com/unbabel- news/b4cb8f223df2)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this TMZ now?</comment>


Guard-my-mabook-when-i-am-away.sh - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jay3sh/41d5f10293ba2aaa4019ec93766f4fdf <comment><USER2> # When you are working on your macbook sitting in cafe and you have to go pee, # you need some way to guard you machine.

This script is a great idea, but to me the cost/benefit of leaving the machine on the table is simply too high. There is no way I would ever consider leaving the machine unattended in a public place for any length of time.

<comment><USER3> This. I semi-regularly work from cafe's, etc, and I would never in a million years leave my laptop unattended for any length of time either.</comment></comment>


The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install - <AUTHOR> https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/the-web-is-doom <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc.

Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculated for the top N URLs on the web (or perhaps, an estimate based on the top M domain names and other signals) and downloaded to the client (so no privacy issues). People will very quickly learn to associate red URLs with the feeling "ugh, this page is taking _forever_ ". So long as the metric was reasonably robust to gaming, websites would face a greater pressure to cut the bloat. And yet, it's still ultimately feedback determined by a user's revealed preferences, based on what they think is worth waiting how long for, rather than a developer's guess about what's reasonable.

<comment><USER3> I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages."

Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, then there's the devs who have to make native clients for the web apps — just to deliver products that don't have half the power of OS-native software. Everyone has to keep reinventing the wheel, like with WebAssembly, to fix problems that don't have to be there in the first place, not anymore:

Thanks to smartphones, people are already familiar with the modern concept of the standalone app; why not just make downloading an OS-native binary as easy as typing in a web address, on every OS?

Say if I press Cmd+Space on a Mac and type "Facebook" in Spotlight, it immediately begins downloading the native OS X Facebook app. The UI would be described in a format that can be incrementally downloaded, so the experience remains identical to browsing the web, except with full access to the OS's features, like an icon in the Dock and notifications and everything.

TL;DR: Instead of investing resources in browser development, Android/iOS/OSX/Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to deliver native apps instead.

<comment><USER4> > Android/iOS/OSX/Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to > deliver native apps instead

one might imagine that after these competing and incompatible native apps become a headache for crossplatform pursuits, a new platform will emerge that provides a uniform toolset for developing (mostly) native-platform independent applications.

perhaps this toolset will utilize a declarative system for specifying the user interface, and a scripting system that is JIT'd on each platform.

<comment><USER5> Magic! We could even have standardized links between the apps, and companies that specialize in finding content no matter what app it's in.

I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh.

<comment><USER6> > _I think you 're on to something...it could be huge... Heh._

Could be. Sad that it isn't. Think how awesome it would be if app developers actually cared about interoperability instead of trying to grab the whole pie for themselves while giving you a hefty dose of ads in return. This is mostly the fault of developers, but the platform itself could help a lot if it was more end-user programmable. You'd have at least a chance to _force_ different apps to talk to each other.

<comment><USER7> He's being sarcastic. Links are literal web links and the Company he's referring to is Google.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I know. And I'm trying to subtly point out that it doesn't even work on the web, because it got fucked up by cowboy companies who ignore standards and do whatever they like to get easier $$$.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer.

Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game.

My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating.

Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem:

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

Does comparing web pages to Doom help understand or improve the situation? No, not any more than comparing Doom to Apollo memory size helps us understand the difference between a video game and a history-altering exploration.

<comment><USER9> > Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes

What about the question "do web pages work any better than they did in 2007?" when we were using full page reloads and server side logic instead of Javascipt tricks.

I see so much basic brokenness on the web today from the back button not working to horribly overloaded news websites with mystery-meat mobile navigation I find myself wondering what have we really achieved in the last 9 years? This stuff used to work

<comment><USER10> I think you are looking at the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. The web has been a mess for a long time, and we used to have to make sure our computer was set to 800x600 and we were using Internet Explorer 6 in order to even use it.

<comment><USER11> >make sure our computer was set to 800x600

Thaaaaaaaat's nonsense. I had relatively high-res CRTs (1600x1200) in the late 90s and early 2000s.

My father and I were able to get by with Netscape Navigator and Firefox for quite awhile as well.

<comment><USER12> Firefox was released in November 2004.

<comment><USER13> The initial release of Phoenix was in 2002. Many long-time Netscape/Mozilla users (myself included) switched very early on.

<comment><USER11> I remember even relatively computer un-savvy folk in '98 having 1024x768 monitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Before everyone jumps onto the JQuery/Bootstrap/etc sucks bandwagon, just a reminder that the minified jquery from cdnjs is 84.1kb. Bootstrap is 43.1kb.

If you want your page to load fast, the overall "size" of the page shouldn't be at the top of your list of concerns. Try reducing the # of requests, first. Combine and minify your javascript, use image sprites, etc.

<comment><USER15> That's still 84 KB of highly compressed javascript code to parse and execute. Even on a 4.4 GHz CPU core and a cached request, jquery takes upwards of 22ms to parse - that's just parsing - not even executing anything! Now add a bunch of other frameworks and utility scripts and your 100ms budget for feeling "fast" is gone before you even reach the HTML content.

<comment><USER16> How long does it take you to start Word versus loading Google docs?

Has everyone gone insane? The web is absolutely incredible and JavaScript is absolutely killing it as a portable application language. Remember the dark days of flash? Stop complaining.

<comment><USER17> This is disingenuous - he's obviously referring to image and text articles, not complicated web apps. Obviously such a website is going to take longer to load, just as complex native applications take a while to load. But to claim that because Word takes a while that it's okay that A WEBSITE WITH LITERALLY JUST TEXT AND IMAGES is 18 megs big and takes 6000 ms to load is fucking stupid.

<comment><USER6> Also, Word takes a while to _load_ , but then works fast and is responsive - as well-written native apps are by default - and doesn't suck up your system resources. Something which can't be said about many websites "with literally just text and images".

<comment><USER18> You're comparing a well-written native app with a poorly written website. I'm currently working on a web-app that requires an about 600kb (minified, yes I know) app.js file.

It takes a while to load (not really, 100ms + download), but after that it is silky smooth due to client side rendering (faster than downloading more html) and caching.

On the most demanding page, heap usage is a little more than 20mb.

Sure, there are a lot of websites which are slow and huge memory hogs. But that goes for many native apps as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quite happy with my own web page/blog. Pages hover at around 10kb, 30kb if I include some images. I think the page size can be attributed a lot to there being no JS except for GA.

I have taken a lot of inspiration from [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) and [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

Of course the size will differ depending on the site's purpose, but I feel like most web pages could stand to loose a lot of weight.

EDIT: I have a guide to setup a similar blog/site here[0]

0: [https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent- blog.html](https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html)

<comment><USER20> That loaded SOOO fast on mobile with no delays or scrolling problems. Great job!

Note: Might try it with NoScript later. Always a good indicator of... something...

<comment><USER19> Fun story about NoScript. I used to use AMP[0]. But I reverted that for two reasons.

1\. The size of their js is ~170kb roughly 17 times larger than most of my pages.

2\. It loads from a 3d party domain which means that NoScript/uBlock Origin users will see a blank white page.

The project does impose some constraints that will help reduce page weight and increase page speed, but for my page sizes it's ridiculous to use their JS.

0: [https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/)

<comment><USER20> The site certainly loaded fast. Never heard of them before. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting comparison, if a bit arbitrary. It raises a couple of questions though.

1) How do the numbers come out when you exclude images?

It's valid and good to know the total sizes, including images, but that can hide huge discrepancies in the experienced performance of a site.

For example, a page with 150KB of HTML/CSS/JS and a single 2.1MB hero image can feel very different from a page with 2MB of HTML/CSS/JS and a few 50KB images.

If we're just interested in total bandwidth consumption, then sure, total size is a good metric. If we're interested in how a user experiences the web, there's a lot of variability and nuance buried in that.

2) What device and methodology were used to take the measurements?

In this age of responsive design, CSS media queries, and infinite scrolling/deferred loading, it really matters how you measure and what you use to measure.

For example, if I load a page on my large retina screen and scroll to the bottom, many sites will send far more data than if I load them on my phone and don't scroll past the fold.

I only skimmed the article and didn't dig in to the references. These questions may be answered elsewhere.

<comment><USER22> The speed index was invented for benchmarking this: [https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using- webpag...](https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using- webpagetest/metrics/speed-index)

<comment><USER21> Ah, very cool, thanks for sharing. I'm familiar with a lot of the tools for evaluating the performance of a single site (e.g., that I'm developing), but I'm pretty ignorant of the standard approaches for these types of larger scale benchmarking projects.

<comment><USER23> If you're developing you may not be aware of Page Speed Insights, extremely handy for SEO. [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

<comment><USER21> I actually wasn't aware that the site could also perform the test, but the Page Speed Insights Chrome extension is one of my go-to performance tools. The output looks the same, though formatted a little better in some places. The extension is nice though, because it lets you check private sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lots of people are focusing on excessive JavaScript and CSS but these combined are easily dwarfed by a single high quality image.

Try visiting Apple's website for example. I can't see how you can have a small page weight if your page includes several images that are meant to look good on high quality screens. You're not going to convince marketing and page designers to go with imageless pages.

Doom's original resolution was 320x200 = 64K pixels in 8-bit colour mode. Even an Apple Watch has 92K pixels and 24-bit colour (three times more space per pixel) now, and a 15" MacBook display shows 5.2M pixels. The space used for high quality images on newer displays is order of magnitudes higher to what Doom hardware had to show.

<comment><USER25> > Try visiting Apple's website for example.

Indeed, right now on mobile the biggest asset on apple.com is a 1.7 MB picture.

[http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_e...](http://images.apple.com/v/home/cm/images/heros/environment_earth_day_large_2x.jpg)

The total size of the webpage being 2.5 MB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is hardly surprising, considering that a single picture taken with an average smartphone is probably already surpassing that by quite a bit.

Times change, and 20 years in tech is equivalent to several geological ages.

If anything, it cannot really be underestimated how some developers were able to craft such compelling gaming experiences, with the limited resources available at the time.

My personal favorite as "most impressive game for its size":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_Elite_II)

</comment><comment><USER27> Maciej Cegłowski has a great talk/writeup on this very problem:

 _The Website Obesity Crisis_

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

Here's the video of the talk if you prefer to hear him speak: [https://vimeo.com/147806338](https://vimeo.com/147806338)

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh God.

Every discussion about the web will continue to be a mess until we clarify what we're talking about.

Let's try rephrasing the title a couple times.

Rephrase 1: "The average size of a webapp is now the average size of a Doom install".

Response: Interesting, but not bad! Heck, some webapps are games. "The average size of a web game is now the average size of Doom" isn't a sentence that damns the web, it's a sentence that complements the web! (or would if it was true, and it might be for all I know)

Rephrase 2: "The average size of web document is now the average size of a Doom install".

Response: Well this sucks (or would if it was true -- still we don't know). Simple documents should be a few KB, not the size of a game.

Basically our terminology is shot to crap. Imagine if 19th century engineers used the same word for "hand crank" and "steam engine". "Hand crank prices are skyrocketing! What's causing this massive bloat!" Whelp, that could mean anything.

The best solution: web browsers should enforce a clear distinction between "web documents" and "web apps". These are two different things and should be treated separately. This won't happen though, which leaves us (the rest of the tech community) to explore other options . . .

<comment><USER29> Web apps/documents both look pretty good compared to modern games, those things are 100s of MB at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the late 00s I remember turning on an old computer with a 650 MHz Athlon CPU and being surprised that web browsing performance in Firefox wasn't bad. Now if I try that with a 1 GHz Pentium 3, performance is absolutely horrible. Is this why?

<comment><USER31> This, and Javascript, and browser bloat.

<comment><USER32> Unless the browser ends up swapping a lot I doubt that browser bloat would cause significant perceptible performance regressions compared to the quite significant amount of optimization that has happened in the meanwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The average data plan here is 10GB :

1,000,000 * 10 / 2250 = 4444 web pages a month

4444 / 31 = 143 web pages a day at most on mobile.

While it is somehow acceptable, I don't see data plans getting cheaper yet the size of the average webpage is raising fast.

It doesn't seem like most websites have heavily invested in using HTML5 offline capabilities or actual mobile first design either, something easy to check with chrome dev tools.

Also let's talk about ads : Polygon.com a site I visit often , first article on the homepage with an Iphone 5 :

\- with ads/trackers 1.5mb \- without ads 623kb

More than half of the load is ad/tracking related. This isn't normal.

</comment><comment><USER33> With the majority of users moving towards mobile, I really think this is an issue, and I've been consciously building projects as lean as possible. Removing bloated jquery libraries was a big one. With native calls like document.querySelectorAll document.querySelector I've found I can 90% get by without it. For the rest, using something like vue.js, and I've taken care of all the dom manipulation, data binding, etc.

<comment><USER34> I lived in $nowheresville, TN for a bit. This drove me insane. Sure, your webapp works great in downtown SF, but try loading it with the spotty connection the rest of the country has, not to mention the rest of the world.

One of the places I worked at had a computer hooked up to a ~800 kbps modem, and would test all their web-pages on that. It was really eye-opening, and I wish more companies would benchmark like that

<comment><USER35> Chrome network tools has throttling that can simulate really shitty networks, I use that a fair bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oh, you just want to add a class to the element? \ _adds whole jQuery\_ That's what's wrong with the web.

Oh, and you need a loop? \ _adds underscore.js\_

<comment><USER37> Imagine how fast the web would be if browser manufacturers could "approve" frameworks, and store them as a "standard library" of sorts. A global cache. Then you have ONE copy of jQuery for all sites on your machine.

Wanting to use a framework shouldn't be discouraged. The issue here isn't developers trying to save time, the issue is the shitty tools.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, javascript historically lacks a stdlib and now it's so big that nobody could probably agree on one. Chalk another one for "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wanted to see how one of my personal projects compared, so I looked at Groove Basin.

Groove Basin [1] is an open source music player server. It has a sophisticated web-based client with the ability to retag, label, create playlists, stream, browse the library, chat with other users, upload new music, and import music by URL.

I just checked the payload size of a cold load, and it's 68 KB.

I'll just keep doing my thing over here.

[1]: [https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin](https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin)

</comment><comment><USER40> Not too long ago Medium pushed an "invisible" 1MB image to clients

[https://binarypassion.net/digital- decadence-6ea59251d64d](https://binarypassion.net/digital- decadence-6ea59251d64d)

and the video it refers to [https://vimeo.com/147806338](https://vimeo.com/147806338)

<comment><USER41> At my frst job I once had to fix a wordpress site that was 'too slow' which loaded a 12MB 4k by 4k favicon. I kid you not. It also loaded jquery 4 times, had about 20 unminified stylesheets linked in the header. When I told this to my manager he told me 'oh but you only need to load that stuff once and then its cached, so that can't be an issue'. I did not last long in that place. The backend was even more of a wasteland.

<comment><USER40> A 16 megapixel favicon does sound scary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If web bloat is a problem, I don't think that looking at whether <insert buzzword framework of CURRENT_YEAR> can be removed is the answer.

I suggest that at the moment, we have basically two camps of website, with rough, fuzzy boundaries.

1\. A place where someone sticks up an insight, or posts a wiki page, or whatever, to share some thought to others (if anyone actually cares). The blogs of many users of HN. Hacker News itself. Wikipedia. The Arch Linux Wiki. lwn.net. Etc. The sites are very roughly concerned with 'this is what I care about, if you do, great, this is useful to you'.

2\. Commercial web sites that employ sophisticated means to try and enlarge market share and retain users. AB testing. 'Seamless' experiences which are aimed at getting more views, with user experience as an afterthought (a sort of evolutionary pressure, but not the only one).

Complaining that camp #2 exists is strange. It's a bit like lamenting the fact that chocolate bars aren't just chocolate bars, they have flashy wrappers, clever ingredients, optimized sugar ratio, crunchy bit and non crunchy bit, etc.

It works! A snickers bar is a global blockbuster, and 'Tesco chocolate bar' is the functional chocolate bar that just does the job, but will never attain that level of commercial success, it serves a different role.

\-----

My personal view:

Fundamentally what I want when we click a link from an aggregator, is an 'article.txt' with perhaps a relevant image or two. Something like [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) maybe.

But if a site actually does that, a website like The Guardian, I'd fire up wget, strip all the advertising, strip the fact it's even The Guardian, and read it like a book. If everyone does it then no-one makes any money, site dies.

So what we actually have is this constant DRM-style race to try and fight for our brains to get us to look at adverts. It's not about jQuery, it's about advertising, branding, 'self vs other' (the integrity of a company as a coherent thing), etc.

I don't know what the answer is here. I think this is why I find concepts like UBI so appealing - I find it kind of alarming that we seem doomed to infect more and more of the commons with commercialization because we haven't found a solution to keep each other alive otherwise.

<comment><USER43> I dig that you tie this domain-specific problem with that much larger social issue.

<comment><USER42> Thanks. I've been struggling a lot with life in general lately (depression, etc), and it's nice to have some glimpse that someone else shares the view, maybe.

I think we have a real issue at the moment with people funneling their efforts into ways of dealing with issues at the micro level, rather than the macro level. Local optima. Something like that.

It makes me happy to see the sort of political revolutions that the Internet can bring about, but sad to see that we're still thinking so small. e.g. "Get x into tech" rather than "Make it so that you don't need to be in tech to live a decent life". That sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How about browser bloat? Each chromium tab on linux takes an extra ~50-150mb depending on the site -- and I still have no idea what they need all of that memory for...

<comment><USER15> Mostly Javascript and caches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I once bought a pre-made landing page template with all kinds of whizz bang Javascript libraries built in. The demo page was 4 MB. In the time it took to strip all the trash out of the template I could have designed the page myself. I'll never do that again.

I wonder how much of the problem is due to bloated templates.

</comment><comment><USER46> Looks like most of the discussion here is on network traffic.

Minifying JS and CSS, compression, CDNs and caching won't keep your browser from having to render all the stuff.

\---

The stewardess on a new jet airliner:

\- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard of our new airplane. On the second deck you'll find a couple of bars and a restaurant. The golf course is on the third deck. You're also welcome to visit the swimming pool on the fourth deck. Now - ladies and gentlemen - please fasten your seatbelts. With all this sh*t we'll try to take off.

</comment><comment><USER47> Just to clarify, since I was confused (I remembered that Doom 2 was about 30 megs uncompressed, which websites are still a long ways from), this metric appears to refer to the compressed size of the Doom 1 shareware distribution.

[http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&Conten...](http://www.doomarchive.com/ListFiles.asp?FolderId=216&ContentsFolderId=216)

</comment><comment><USER48> > Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an > advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, > sprites and sound effects.

Doom isn't in true 3D, its an advanced raycasting engine. The levels are all 2D, there are no polygons, you can't look up and down. Doom has been ported to a TI Calculator. Lets maintain some perspective here.

<comment><USER49> > _Lets maintain some perspective here._

I see what you did here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Visited a website a few days ago, which used 2048x1365 jpegs for 190x125 buttons. They had multiple buttons like this on multiple pages. I sent them an e-mail about this, but I don't expect them to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Send "models" rather than code. Low-level code is relatively unexpressive, contains considerable redundancy, and as a result, is relatively large. By sending high-level models instead, which are then expanded on the client to working code, application download size can be greatly decreased. Models typically provide one to two orders of magnitude of compression over code.

This video shows how we do it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ)

This document gives some results (like a GMail client that is 100X smaller): [https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE7...](https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/1Kuw6_sMCKE72Ut0EsoPNFr9YKDkaw6DIfCDgExYkS2k/pub)

</comment><comment><USER52> I remember thinking years ago, that my CV in Word took up more memory than my first computer (Acorn Electron 32kb ram). It amazes me that I used to play Elete on that machine.

</comment><comment><USER53> > The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if > you want to be a top website).

Wow. That's nice to see actually.

<comment><USER54> I suspect that the top ten sites are lighter because they must perform under load rather than being a top ten site because they load quickly, but it is nice to see. Imagine the billions of man hours that would be wasted by humanity waiting for the top ten sites to load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I just watched [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dYwEyjZcY) this video about the early HTML standardization process, and it seems to explain all the ills of HTML.

So indeed, there is a huge optimization opportunity of having a stricter error model.

Also, I'm really wondering how much battery could be saved when surfing such pages.

Also I'm sure there is a lot of potential going in the pre-parsed document model. But that's a next level kind of engineering I guess.

</comment><comment><USER56> Yesterday I discovered that Twitter's HTTP headers alone are ~3500 bytes long (25 tweets!) with several long cookies, custom headers and the Content Security Policy[1] containing ~90 records. Is this considered normal nowadays?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy)

</comment><comment><USER57> For the last project I built the initial page load with the absolutely minimal JS that was embedded into the page. Then it loaded the rest whenever it needed it. My coworkers were shocked how quickly the page loaded.

It's actually better to show the user some progress bar, than the standard browser's "Waiting for yoursite.com".

You can get away with a lot without jQuery, while still having clean-ish code.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm genuinely excited by ensuring great response times and minimal load on a website.

Locally I see so many companies building good looking but horrendously optimized websites for their clientele who don't know enough to ask for it.

The last company I worked at were building a local search engine and were displaying thumbnails whilst loading full size pictures which were hot linked from businesses websites. With an auto loading feature at the bottom of the page by the php backend, an initial 5-6 Mb page load could turn into 30+ Mb within a few seconds of scrolling. Add to this no gzipping and caching was not properly configured either.

I tried my best to get some changes going but the senior (and only other) dev wouldn't allow any modifications to the current system "for the moment". It was a bit frustrating to see so many easy fixes ignored.

</comment><comment><USER59> So, were can I play Doom in the browser?

<comment><USER60> Here: [http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on- earth.html](http://playdosgamesonline.com/doom-ii-hell-on-earth.html) (yes, it's Doom 2, and yes it requires a fast machine since it emulates a DOS PC in the browser)

<comment><USER20> I can't help but add that it's a DOS PC + a game that _still_ loads faster than some web pages. At some point, even the apples to oranges comparisons start saying something because it's glaringly obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The only real solution is a search engine that allows the end user to clip the results based on the maximum size of the total page. I've often wondered why Duck Duck Go doesn't do this as well as filter search results based on number of ad networks used, etc...

</comment><comment><USER62> Enable Ghostery and load cnn.com and you will see why the web pages are so heavy these days.

</comment><comment><USER34> disclaimer: my own blog - [https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads](https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads)

I kept looking for a "minimal" blogging platform, but they all had too much bloat/JS/etc. I guess minimal means different things to different people. I ended up just writing my own. The biggest post I have is 7.41 KB.

I used to be interested in front-end design, but since it's the industry standard to use $latest_framework, instead of tried and proven practices, I've given up on that idea.

<comment><USER63> One extreme end of the scale ;)

I feel like investing a few hundred extra bytes on _some_ styling might be worth it, a la [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/) vs [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER34> I'm of the mindset that our browsers are built backwards. For "content- oriented" sites, we should present text, and give the users tools in their browsers to present them as the user sees fit. Instead, we expect the site to design it. Something like Firefox Reader View.

Some people may like bettermotherfuckingwebsite better, but I personally don.t

"presentation-oriented" sites are a different story, of course

<comment><USER63> Basic styles don't mess with Reader View or other customization, so I don't see a large downside to include them, they just make it nicer for people not using such tools.

Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?

<comment><USER34> > Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?

Kind of. I dream of an Internet where people have their own CSS/styles, and they can make it look how they want, rather than how the website wants it. I think of it like this: I'm a linux guy. I want my tools to output plainly to stdout. If I want to format them, I'll pipe them into my own formatting tools. I wish websites worked that way as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> > The top ten sites are significantly lighter than the rest (worth noting if > you want to be a top website)

Isn't that that the top websites have a lot more ressources available to improve asset management, cleanup and refactor?

<comment><USER65> This set of benchmarks is often helpful:

[http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united- states/](http://www.dynatrace.com/en/benchmarks/united-states/)

Particularly the "last mile" or "Chrome Homepage" tabs.

They cover the top websites, grouped into categories like "Retail", "Travel", "Media", etc.

The disparity across competitors is pretty stunning, with some websites getting close to 1 second to download/render a page, and others taking 6, 7, 8 , even 10 seconds. And these are all big, well known, companies.

And, for the most part, it all correlates very well to total page weight, and total number of artifacts on the page (js/css/images/etc). There are some exceptions, but it's a pretty strong correlation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This all comes down to cost. It is much cheaper to have "bloat" than it is to pay devs to fix it. And customers find it much cheaper to deal with "bloat" than to find smaller alternatives. Sure the average webpage is bigger than doom, but the CPU in my phone is approximately 100x (times multicore too?) than the 486 that ran Doom.

Sure, if man hours were free, we could trim it all down to (my rough guess) about 1/10th the size. But at $100 or even $10 an hour its just not worth it. Pay the GBs to your carrier, spend $50 more on a better phone.

<comment><USER67> It would cost no extra time if devs made websites from scratch with performance in mind. Save optimized images, minify code as a build task, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> From this title; maybe hacker news needs a twitter?

Also: You can't use average page weight when you are just looking at the top ten. That downturn could represent a single website; all others could be increasing in size.

</comment><comment><USER69> Wondering if an idea like this would work:

Bundlers like Webpack already import JS in a modular structure. I'm wondering if we could do some profiling into popular npm module combinations (I know many people using React + Lodash + Redux Router, etc), bundle them up, and have Webpack load in those combos from a CDN via <script>?

Now this would probably require some work on webpack's end (the __webpack_require__(n) would have to be some sort of consistent hash), but at least everyone who blindly require('lodash') will see an improvement?

<comment><USER70> Web pages shouldn't need JS at all, except for the basic eye candy it was originally used for, and most importantly shouldn't break without it. A web page that doesn't work without JS is broken.

Web apps are another deal though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> and the .kkreiger beta only uses 96k! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger)

</comment><comment><USER72> It's also about 2 times bigger than a lot of SNES and Mega Drive games. Or about 4 times bigger than Super Mario World (512KB).

As for why it's getting so insane, probably either:

1\. Frameworks, since most people don't remove the code they're not using. For Bootstrap or Foundation, that can be a lot of extra code.

2\. Content Management Systems, since stuff like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, any forum or social network script, tend to add a lot of extra code (more so if you've added plugins).

3\. The aforementioned tracking codes, ads, etc.

</comment><comment><USER73> I also recommend [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445)

</comment><comment><USER74> The only conclusion I can legitimately draw from this article is that in twenty years a single web page will be larger than the 65GB Grand Theft Auto V install.

</comment><comment><USER75> Amazon isn't what I'd call "light" at 4.7 MB, but looking at my companies market all the bigger players are way lighter than us.

</comment><comment><USER76> Arguably sites have been increasing in size for one simple reason: It directly results in increased sales.

Everything is sales.

If cleaner, 'purer' sites made more money you bet the average web page would be 10kb.

It's all about what translates to more sales. As such, you won't ever see a return to more traditional websites. Look at Amazon with it's virtual dress models, heavy as hell, but they most certainly land more sales.

<comment><USER67> Quite opposite. It is proved that longer page loading time is less conversion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> What happened to semantic markups? In the name of rendering optimizations, many web sites use css background image instead of <img>

</comment><comment><USER78> This page clocks in at 935kb in my browser. According to this same page, that is roughly the size of Sim City 2000.

</comment><comment><USER79> The publishers really have no incentive to address this until a critical mass of users install adblock software.

</comment><comment><USER80> I would argue two things:

1) This is an irrelevant statistic.

2) Even if this were true it's not that big of a deal.

This is irrelevant because most people don't browse the average web page. They browse the top few sites on the internet and that's it. A more relevant statistic would be what have the sizes of the top 50 sites been over the last 15 years. I imagine they still may have grown on average, but download speeds have also grown over that time. Especially on mobile.

Even if we accept the premise that web sites as a whole, including the most popular ones are all growing and are now an average of 2.2MB each. Who cares? 2.2MB is nothing in 2016. Even on an LTE connection that's probably between 4 and 1.5 seconds to download the full page. And a lot of that size is probably in ads, which nobody minds if they load last or not at all.

Lastly, this is a self fixing problem. If a site is too bloated, users will stop going to it.

But I would propose that a lot of this increase in size is due to users (especially mobile) having higher and higher resolution displays, which necessitates higher resolution content, which of course is bigger.

<comment> Ruud-v-A I care. I know a lot of people (here in western Europe) who are on a 1 GiB/month data plan. 2.2 MiB per page means that you can visit 15 pages per day. Better think twice before you click a link.

Besides, 2.2 MiB for a page is pure bloat. Unless the page is heavy on images, you can usually fit all of the content that matters in a tenth of the size. In 300 KiB you can fit a 500-word article with 160 KiB picture, a few webfonts, headers/footers and stylesheets. Using a factor ten more is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER67> I would recommend using Opera Mini or GDrives Web Light ([http://gdriv.es/l/](http://gdriv.es/l/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> It's initially cheaper to make larger web pages, you don't have to optimize for size (most of the time it would probably execute faster if it was smaller but probably not always). Some others make it larger on purpose for obfuscation (like Google).

</comment><comment><USER82> Google developed SPDY, an efficient binary representation of HTTP messages. Maybe they will do the same thing but for HTML. It would be much more efficient if one could design a binary representation of HTML that can only express well-formed HTML.

<comment><USER83> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_XML)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why can't all these frameworks just be cached? If a cross site request to cdn.com/react-v1.0.js is cached under cdn.com, at most one download will trigger. That seems to solve the problem, but maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER7> I've seen people mention that caching is broken since it only works when the name and version are the same; however, I don't see how this is any different than two packages of the same functionality being uploaded to an APT repo with different names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Isn't the answer to just create a reasonable standard library for javascript so people don't need to link in megabytes of frameworks

</comment><comment><USER85> ...and my first computer had 128 _bytes_ of RAM. And a 300-baud modem.

<comment><USER86> That's amazing, what was it? My first computer had 5K of RAM.

<comment><USER85> Altair 8800, kit from MITS. And I wrote a game on it, using keyboard and screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> GTA 5 is ~65GB in size. One day, web pages will be bigger than that.

</comment><comment><USER88> > The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

It's not really surprising in a world where a graphical driver is > 100 MB (Nvidia driver for Windows).

<comment><USER89> They mean the original Doom, which ran with a software renderer anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Is there a Chrome extenson that shows the size of a web page? There's a good one for page load time that I use, but I want kilobytes with and without cache.

</comment><comment><USER91> Doom is not a good measure, when web pages become bigger and more bloated than your average printer or scanner driver, then it will be alarming :)

</comment><comment><USER92> Great, another kooky unit of measure.

"This new re-design gets us down to 0.4 Doom installs without sacrificing any of the visual elements."

</comment><comment><USER93> There's a reason that the economics of web development mostly work and the economics of games development mostly do not.

<comment><USER94> This probably requires more explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Too bad we can not measure it football fields

</comment><comment><USER96> But they load faster than Doom used to.

</comment><comment><USER97> In 20 years the average size of web pages will be the size of a Quake 3 install. This is progress.

</comment><comment><USER98> This is one of the reasons why I love a simple website without too many whistles and bells.

</comment><comment><USER99> For Internet 3 we should call John Carmack and put all of the internet in a MegaTexture.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are we really complaining about webpage size when fully 30% of web traffic is Netflix? This might be an unpopular opinion but websites are no longer just html, css and js. They're full on applications with rich interaction and data visualization. Call me when they're larger than an average modern native app install.

</comment><comment><USER100> ronan has an account here, commented on this as it was developing a few months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981707)

</comment><comment><USER101> Can anyone explain why a simple web page is so much bigger now than a whole game?

<comment><USER14> Because we can! Games were slim back then because they had to be. Webpages are fat now because our computers are fast.

Now, if a webpage were to approach the size of a contemporary game...

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> and here I remember that the PDF of the Turbo Pascal manual was so many multiples of the compiler's size I needed a calculator to figure it out

</comment><comment><USER103> what is the average size of a native mobile app?

</comment><comment><USER104> Doom would have been the superior solution to the World Wide Web.

</comment><comment><USER105> The average Web page now does more than the average Doom install, I don't see the relevance of this.

Although I get really annoyed when I visit a blog post whose page is 100x larger than Dostoevsky's novels in .txt format. On my blog ([https://pljns.com/blog/](https://pljns.com/blog/)), JQuery and genericons are often my largest file transfers, but I still clock under 500kb.

<comment><USER106> [https://pljns.com/](https://pljns.com/)

> 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally > has box-shadow

[x] check

> You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." > at 100px height at the beginning of your site?

[x] assuming 404'ed fontawesome as shitty webfont, check

> You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no

[x] check

> Your site has three bylines and link to your dribbble account, but you > spread it over 7 full screens and make me click some bobbing button to show > me how cool the jQuery ScrollTo plugin is

[x] check

Still pretty good site, but it's funny how accurately creator of [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) has described the situation with the modern web :)

<comment><USER105> These are all good points that I knew when I hastily pushed the site last week. Still way under 1000kb!

Also, I said my _blog_ , but serves me right I guess ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Are Matt and James anti-psychic? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrEECYAXRjs <comment><AUTHOR> Posted in part because I get a name-check, but mostly because it's a great puzzle to work out how they can do this.</comment>


Sun has gone blank twice this month, this is what it means - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/the-sun-has-gone-blank-twice-this-month-this-is-what-it-means/news-story/d775ecf894ab68415ed0108ced31a4e2 <comment><USER2> Those two example pictures aren't imaged in the same spectrum, I think.

<comment><USER3> Agreed but NASA's pictures are also pretty interesting for 6/30/16 ([http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_1600....](http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_1600.jpg)) vs other days.

I think this is the exact picture they were using from that site : [http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_HMIIC...](http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_HMIIC.jpg)</comment></comment>


UCLA Surgeons Live Vine Brain Surgery - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/05/24/instagram-vine-live-brain-surgery/

<comment><USER2> Neat. Does anybody know what the neck/shoulder brace looking orange things the docs are wearing under their gowns are?

<comment><USER3> Is a thyroid shield - they're wearing lead because the c shaped arm around the guys head is a mobile OR X ray - they will use that to confirm placement of the wires of the pacemaker once they insert it</comment></comment>


Startups bet that lonely freelancers crave company - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-23/startups-bet-that-lonely-freelancers-crave-company <comment><USER2> I'm in a co-working space, and the primary reason I took it was loneliness.

But I think that, for me, a social app wouldn't be able to replace a physical work space. It's not just the interaction with co-workers, but also the separation of work and home. The routine of riding my bike to and from the office is like a mental barrier, helping me to switch between work and leisure.

By going to my office, I effectively switch to work mode. I'm less inclined to get distracted (HN, YT, Reddit, etc) while I'm at the office. Then, during the ride back home I have time to reflect on the day. By the time I'm back home my mind is clear and I can relax.

My findings are that (at least in the Netherlands) there is plenty of opportunity for new co-working spaces. Currently it's hard for small or solo businesses to find a suitable office. All offices I found are either geared towards larger groups (10+), or had ridiculous requirements to be eligible. All the 'innovation' spaces are hard to get in when you just make a software product. They require some 'impactful' business to be accepted, which basically means you can choose between creating yet another replacement for plastic straws, or blockchain.

I don't need foosball tables, I don't need eco-vegan food, I don't want to attend blockchain disruption events. I just want a desk to sit at, and do my work.

<comment><USER3> I have thought about starting a little website where people open up their living rooms every once in a while to create an ad-hoc coworking space. It could even be the kitchen or the dining table, as long as you're sharing ideas, learning, and getting to know what other people are working on. From a business perspective, I'd rather make use of the plentiful libraries in Amsterdam than pay for a coworking space.

<comment><USER4> Safety becomes a big issue for this kind of thing. It might make sense to start by leverage a platform like couchsurfing which has a personal review system.

<comment><USER3> Good point; I think it would initially involve some personal vetting as well as starting at a local level. This could be made part of the listing process where the only way to get verified as a member is to allow a designated photographer if you're hosting, and some kind of social proof (LinkedIn?) if you're looking for a space. I think this is a bigger concern in remote towns and the countryside, though. For a city like Amsterdam, safety might not be that big of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought that these type of arguments are stupid, like why would I need to hang out with people in an office, I've got my buddies for that after work. Later I moved to another country where I knew no one beside my wife, and then I realized that mingling with office crowd is actually the easiest way to expand your social circle when you're in a new environment. Yes, you can do that on conferences or in a gym or clubs, but it all takes more effort for introverts like me.

<comment><USER6> Even if you don't talk to others, being around people is very comforting. It meets a basic need we have as humans.

<comment><USER7> I think this is a generalization about the type of person you are. For me, I much prefer to work in a space where I am completely alone. I like to have music blasting without headphones, drink a smelly tea, or eat a stinky meal at my desk.

I can't do any of those things in an office with others around me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The primary reason why I would want to be a freelancer is because I DON'T crave company.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried freelancing alone, and of you have for how long?

After working at a company, initially it felt quite nice but after some months/years I started feeling different. I have been working intensively at a companies, and then as a freelancer/solopreneur, alternating both modes along the years. Currently working mostly alone I have to admit that I crave the workplace - kind of the place where you go work and meet other people and share some kind of mission.

<comment><USER10> I think this is very personal. I've been doing freelance, solo (from home) since 2014 and I couldn't be happier. Workplaces drain energy from me for some reason.

I do have a fair amount of good friends and other social activities, so I'm definitely not lonely.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, varies from person to person for sure. Nothing wrong with different preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked remotely for almost 8 years. Even managed a team of 10 developers remotely. I loved it as it gave me 2-3 hours each day for exercise and meditation. The only issue was I could not establish a clear work start and end time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't vouch for people that are single but I get plenty of human interaction around my family. Still I like to work out of the house one day per week and work with different people in an office. I guess what's also important is professionally mingling with people, what tools and frameworks people use and so on. A change of scenery.

Actually it was nicer when my wife was working mornings, that would gave me a solid quiet 5 hours to work in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes and no.

Coworking spaces exist but there's nothing like not being interrupted to supposedly "watch someone's laptop"* when you're trying to get things done.

* You should take a picture of it and list it for sale on Craiglist as part of a joke.

<comment><USER14> > "watch someone's laptop"

I'm that guy. Whenever I need to work in a coffee shop, I ask this of a coworker. Do you really feel like it's too intrusive? I never thought it would be a problem.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, just go. No one's going to steal your stuff, and if they did, some stranger isn't going to stop them.

<comment><USER14> You don't back up your assertion that, even after asking, some stranger isn't going to stop them. But I distinctly remember a scientific experiment that said otherwise. I googled and found this popular reporting: [https://abcnews.go.com/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=7091942](https://abcnews.go.com/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=7091942)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shameless plug -- my company is working on solving this problem also, but unfortunately we weren't mentioned in the article.

We talk with a lot of remote workers, freelancers, consultants, and self- employed workers, and the common theme behind all our conversations is that it's lonely working from home or on the road.

We hold Work Clubs in coffee shops to give people an opportunity to work together for a few hours while getting to know other people and get out of the house. We support local small businesses and are building an IRL community for remote workers. Mental health is a major problem with working remote and we've found this is a good way to help break the loneliness.

Feel free to reach out to me (my email is on my profile) with any questions or comments, or check us out at [https://outofoffice.app/](https://outofoffice.app/)

<comment><USER17> This looks good, but I'm reluctant to sign up without seeing information about what regions you're active in/have participants in. It would be frustrating to go through the process only to find that there's nothing in my region.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the feedback, and I don't blame you. Right now we've got communities in Portland, San Diego, and the SF Bay Area. We'ree planning to expand to a few new cities soon and are always open to people who want to host Work Clubs in their own cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have not found co-working spaces (I've tried a few in different cities) to enhance my productivity or my community. I have only been able to build community around shared hobbies or interests outside of work. I HAVE wished that there was a way to figure out who at a workplace shares my interests. For instance when I start with a new client with a large workforce, if I could quickly connect with who at that workplace is into BJJ, climbing, drones or w/e, that would be useful.

This may be my individual personality - just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER19> And here I am craving work from home. It's like another planet.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I think there's a balance somewhere and for me it's not 40 hours a week in an office. Maybe 20 hours in an office and 20 at home would be more reasonable. I would imagine different people will have a different preferred balance from 0 to 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You don't need to work remote to feel miserably lonely.

I moved to Canada with my wife, I consider myself lucky because I have two couples of friends who also moved here. Apart from that, nothing.

People where I work don't even say bye when they leave. This is insanely different from the country I came from, to say people there make a point of striking up conversations and caring about you doesn't make justice, it is just part of life. The worst part is that I am basically surrounded by fellow countrymen (1/3 of the team) but they already conformed to the norm here.

This has affected our marriage since we don't have that healthy time away with friends that heals any bad mood between us.

<comment><USER22> Where are you from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work remote from home ~80% of the time and love the quiet solitude. But I live with my my wife, three kids and a dog, so those hours of alone time feel precious. If I lived by myself I think I'd go crazy.

</comment><comment><USER24> If this is what startups are working on and if this is startup news, then it just might mean the tech world is awash in too much money with too few ideas. Or the news has to sell ads and has publish something. I wonder where Brady will end up? Oh that's sports "news".

Also, I'm willing to bet more 9-5 workers crave privacy and alone time than freelancers want company.

Besides, if you crave company, isn't there something called family ( parents, siblings, spouse, children, etc ) or friends or even pets that a better suited for that role? Or why not take up a hobby like hiking, biking, etc for company? Isn't there something inherently sad and pathetic about trying to find company at work? Maybe it's modern society. I just don't get it.

<comment><USER25> I don't understand the claim that work relationships are inherently non- personal or inauthentic. I have legitimately good friends at work who do favors for each other, look out for each other, hang out outside of work sometimes, etc. I keep in touch with friends from past jobs.

We spend a very large percentage of waking hours at work and see a lot of faces. I really enjoy being friendly with those people and having legitimate, authentic, relationships with them.

<comment><USER26> Yes, I have found that this approach <surprise!> makes the workplace much more enjoyable. It feels like many HN commenters hate their work, workplace, coworkers, etc. This mindset seems to be more problematic than the actual working situation itself. Interacting with people is hard but necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is it you WeWork?

</comment><comment><USER28> As a freelancer I never missed a company. Going freelance was a clear and deliberate decision to not be a part of one.

</comment><comment><USER29> The next step might be to connect like-minded freelancers offline. Kind of Couchsurfing way.

</comment><comment><USER30> Paywall bypass:

[http://archive.is/cfbW6](http://archive.is/cfbW6)

</comment><comment><USER31> As a freelancer I dont want a startups "company". Yes, a fridge full of kombucha is not really interesting. Nor is a bunch of people bragging about spending VC money for no reason or working on useless garbage pseudo-product. And Im not lonely. So, why dont we kick it old school, and you just pay me money. As you have done for the last 20 years and will continue to do until Im bored of you.

<comment><USER32> > So, why don't we kick it old school, and you just pay me money.

That's the whole point of all these extra "benefits": so that they can pay you less money.

<comment><USER33> If the FAANG companies set any precedent, this isn't really true.

<comment><USER32> Partially, but for those there's another catch.

They have the campuses with game rooms, food, daycare, etc. all in order for you to spend as much time there as possible. They are literally building company towns.

<comment><USER34> This is also really overplayed.

I know many people who work at big tech companies and I've spent some time at a megacorp or two in my day. The on-campus amenities may keep you at work longer (willingly!) but seem pretty orthogonal to how much time people really spend working. Low-amenity Amazon has long hours, High-amenity Google has pretty normal/reasonable hours, high-amenity Facebook has high-ish hours, low- amenity Microsoft has normal/reasonable hours.

<comment><USER35> Yea, I just see it as an added benefit that may or may not have value to me. My current job has a happy-hour on Fridays with beer/snacks, but I'm usually not around late enough in the day to attend. That said, once a month or so, it's a free meal and a couple drinks, so it's an extra $10-20 a month I get to save.

Things like free food are gimmicky, but it's also a non-trivial financial and time benefit to not have to prep a fresh meal a few days a week. I'd take a small salary cut to work somewhere where I got a healthy breakfast/lunch every day for free. It's only $100 or so in actual food cost savings, but it's a lot of mental overhead that you get to pass on. Lot less stress on my life to make sure I prep enough for the week, and left to myself, I may not pick as healthy of food as they'd prep for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Unreadable.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it legal to start a business that requires 0 customers? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently developing a trading system that is only utilizing my personal funds. I'm considering starting a business who's sole purpose is to utilize those funds to keep making money.<p>I'm not interested in starting a hedge fund at this point of time. <comment><USER2> Yes, you can create a business that requires no customers. Many people do this to enable them the ability to conduct B2B transactions as it is much easier to do so (e.g. buying several homes, automobiles, buildings, cities, yachts, other businesses, land, property, for financing, legal groups, owner of a single website or network of sites, software, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome!

Yeah I'm thinking there will be more tax benefits if I traded via the business than personally.

<comment><USER3> Not usually. Wholly owned proprietorships are treated just as the individual would be for tax (not liability) purposes I believe. NOT a lawyer.

<comment><USER4> Also not a lawyer, but: in the US you can create an LLC that is treated as a pass-through entity for tax purposes, but not other corporate structures (B-corp, C-corp, S-corp, LLP).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not clear what you are up to, but you might want to read up on what Warren Buffet did in his youth. He kept investors in his fund below some cut off point that would have required him to register it or something. I think the cut off was around 100 people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Didn't know about this. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like you're describing a _mutual_ fund, instead of a hedge fund?

If your system is profitable though-or more importantly: _consistent_ , you may realize more personal revenue by selling that system to traders; failing that-if you have any programming skills create an EA (Executive Advisor) for the MetaTrader platform that uses your trading system and sell _that_.

But good luck to you regardless, trading systems fascinate me.

(I'm personally curious to learn about your system though, as a hobbyist forex trader. My twitter handle is in the profile, if you'd like to DM me there. My personal system combines MACD, RSI and Bollinger Bands)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh I see thanks!

The strategy I'm utilizing is an order flow based momentum strategy .. no need for all the common indicators most retail traders use.

I initially started with a dual divergence strategy that utilized divergence on macd and rsi, but this order flow strategy is way more accurate. 90%+ out of 100 trades.

I'm not really interested in selling the system, maybe at some point down the road I'll start some kind of fund; ofcourse then I'd need more than a couple strategies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is absolutely legal, I have been doing it for years, talk to your accountant and lawyer on how to minimize your income taxes... do not sell your idea, it will be arbitraged away if too many people/ money are trading the same way...</comment>


Dissent - Dining-Cryptographers, Shuffled-Send Network - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DeDiS/Dissent

<comment><AUTHOR> This protocol is developed for anonymous message transmissions in a small private group of members.

The root problem is named "Dining cryptographers problem" [1] proposed by David Chaum. Its classical solution works well for only 3 members, so researchers are working to develop other protocols which will overcome the shortcomings of the "coins" solution. And the result is the "Accountable Anonymous Group Messaging" [2] paper released by Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Bryan Ford. The Dissent protocol [3] is based on the ideas of that paper.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_cryptographers_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_cryptographers_problem)

[2] - [http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3057](http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.3057)

[3] - [http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/2010/anon/](http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/2010/anon/)</comment>


Simplest way to build apps for Windows Phone - <AUTHOR> http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/06/27/simplest-way-to-build-apps-for-windows-phone/

<comment><USER3> I know it's not quite the same thing, but PhoneGap does Windows Phone too: <http://phonegap.com/about/features>

</comment><comment><USER4> </comment><comment>= Boo-hoo! This video can't be played with your current setup. Please switch to a browser that provides native H.264 support or install Adobe Flash Player. </comment><comment>=

Well... I might build apps for any phone, cool, but I cannot play your screencast on my android. The codec is not available on Android 2.2.

<comment><USER5> <video> tag _only_ supports h264 in android 2.2, it should work fine. their site's incorrectly detecting your browser or your Android vendor screwed up bigtime... or both. Galaxy S for example has some browser quirks[1].

[1] [http://www.broken-links.com/2010/07/08/making-html5-video- wo...](http://www.broken-links.com/2010/07/08/making-html5-video-work-on- android-phones/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> $299 / month? Doesn't seem worth it to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd rather click one button instead of typing 3 lines but that's just me

<comment><AUTHOR> That's coming with our UI toolkit :) <https://trigger.io/forge/toolkit/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will this let me do Windows Phone development on a Mac? I seem to remember reading about Trigger.io letting you do iPhone development on a PC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, we'll work on that... though of course you can install a Windows 7 partition on your Mac which is how I did the screencast

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I love about PhoneGap that I kind of hate about all of these different "compile in the cloud" platforms, is I like have the actual source and being able to compile on my local machine.

If your cloud compile infrastructure is down or I don't have a net connection, I can't compile my app and test on device. To me that is actually worse.

I'm a developer and I can figure out how to setup an xcode or Android or WP7 app. It's not hard, especially if the app just has a single web view.

I realize these features only exist to appease Windows only shops who want to make iOS apps, but don't want to buy Macs, but if you want to build iOS apps, buy a mac. You want to make Windows Phone apps, buy a PC.

Trigger.io looks cool and all, but give me local compile and the actual project code. Otherwise, you've made my dev experience worse, not better.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair enough: part of our design philosophy is to not require setup for local compiles since our goal is to appeal to devs who value that.

That comes with trade-offs as you mention, the requirement to have a network connection to interact with a cloud build service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> amirnathoo: the trigger.io website mentions a cloud build service to compete with the PhoneGap Build API, but I can't seem to find any more details. Could you point me in the right direction please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely!

You interact with our cloud build service via our command line tools - <USER2> at <https://trigger.io/forge> to download that

Or our UI Toolkit: <https://trigger.io/forge/toolkit/>

Devs seem to prefer those methods than uploading code into some kind of web form. If you want information about how our cloud build service works, here's an overview: [http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development- blo...](http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development- blog/2012/01/26/how-forge-works-and-why-were-proud-of-it/)

<comment><USER10> Thank you</comment></comment></comment>


Europe still burns witches – if they're named Monsanto - <AUTHOR> https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/europe-still-burns-witches-%E2%80%94-if-they%E2%80%99re-named-monsanto <comment><USER2> This article reads like a political agenda providing few verifiable facts, and many broad, unsubstantiated claims. If one is going to make bold claims, they should be substantiated by fact, not by other bold claims.

I am no expert on glyphosates, but that article has left me less than convinced that they are "safe".

<comment><USER3> I came here to write a very similar thing.

While activists exaggerate to persuade people it's not safe because it might be carcinogenic, the author is on the other extreme: it's safe until proven otherwise.

It also sports a fair share of whataboutism: "what about bacon, that's also considered carcinogenic!?".

<comment><USER4> I recall my chemist teacher repeating the age old phrase "the dosage makes the poison" so often that I'm basically immune to anyone crying "X is poison".

It's all about "how much?" and "over which time period?" and "where did you put it into your body?" to determine if something will kill you or cause cancer.

<comment><USER5> I haven't yet had time to properly investigate, but I have heard that wheat crops are sprayed liberally with glyphosate directly before harvest as a desiccant to make harvesting easier. (perhaps also increasing yield, I don't know) So the dose may be quite a bit higher than you'd generally expect.

Also note that glyphosate is Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) by the FDA, which means that it can be used in any quantity. With that designation, arguments about dosage carry less weight for me. If a regulatory agency were concerned with dosages in final food products, I'd feel a lot more comfortable.

<comment><USER4> I live in Europe so things are different. As such the maximum dosage that is allowed in food is 0.1mg per kg of body weight and per day.

Thusly my argument on dosages in final food products hold and I feel fairly comfortable. I suggest either petitioning the FDA to introduce food safety standards or moving to another country with food safety standards.

<comment><USER5> Moving is a rather drastic step. Instead, I buy USDA Organic wheat, which doesn't allow the use of glyphosate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We will gladly burn them in multiple fires, I like to eat healthy food, without influence of greedy multinationals that even impose patent suits into farmers.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article raises some valid points. If anything, it makes me want to learn more on glyphosates and have an informed opinion. I'd like to hate Monsanto, but for valid reasons! Many commenters here criticise the article without providing any argument other than "you are brainwashed/paid by the lobbies". Not the standard of argumentation one expect on HN!

</comment><comment><USER8> Guess who is paid by Monsanto...

<comment><USER9> Good ol' shill gambit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > You can still burn the witch in Europe — if the witch is called Monsanto.

Wait, so Monsanto is a person, not a company? And they've been murdered by a mob?

Oh, wait, no, just their product was licensed for 5 years instead of 15. Yeah, I guess how that's similar to a mob grabbing women and murdering them by fire.

</comment><comment><USER11> Whatever the brainwash of lobbies, I am sure an herbicide can not be effective and healthy at the same time.

<comment><USER12> Any herbicide whether natural or artificial that prevents other organisms from eating your crop cannot be effective and healthy at the same time. This applies also for vegetables that are naturally resistant to pests (e.g. Vegetable strains that are Much more bitter than the wild type ).

The solution is to not to have an expectation that vegetables should be free of any insect or animal contact. But not everybody likes caterpillar bite marks on their vegetables.

<comment><USER13> Herbicides aren't intended to keep animals from eating crops. That would be an insecticide, in the case of insects. Herbicides are designed to kill plants, and Glyphosate in particular really only does that.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the clarification i was not clear with my words

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "I don't want to over-hype it, but it felt a little like mob rule. You can still burn the witch in Europe — if the witch is called Monsanto."

The author may not want to over-hype it, but successfully did so.

Using the same argument, the FDA ban is a witch-burning mob because of its ban on sodium cyclamate, despite its approval in the vast majority of other countries and despite the continued lack of evidence that it's a carcinogen.

</comment><comment><USER15> What a sad piece of propaganda. If they want to white-wash poison, they should try harder.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author is really not doing himself any favours with the comparisons.

Would anyone dispute that bacon and sun exposure are risk factors in cancer? Contrary to his assertion, Australia also ran a pretty well-funded campaign against sun exposure in the 80s and 90s.

The reasons why bacon and the sun aren't banned are simply that the former is that eating bacon is a decision people can take individually, and banning it would intrude on peoples' lives and culture much more strongly than banning a pesticide. As for the sun, it is really hard to ban, and has been shown to have benefits that counterweight the cancer risk.

Mocking the risk designation of "working as a hairdresser" is similarly hair- raising: Hair-dressers handle all sorts of chemicals, such as colouring agents. I wonder how easily the author could be convinced to expose himself to the lifetime exposure of a typical hairdresser.

<comment><USER17> Literally everything you said could go both ways:

The reason glyphosate isn't banned is simply that the decision to use is it is one people take individually, and banning it would intrude on people's lives and culture - for argument sake I assume farmers also count as people.

As for glyphosate, it is really hard to ban, and has been shown to have benefits the counterweight the cancer risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, the real problem with burning witches was that they were actually Human! I dont see whats the problem with a market illogically choosing to boycott a product, if the market wants a less efficient solution, so be it!

</comment><comment><USER19> The article mentions that Glyphosates are cancerous, but so is bacon, which people eat in large amounts. But this is only a qualitative measure. How much exposure are we getting? How much exposure gives an equivalent risk factor to eating one portion of bacon a week? Lazy comparisons like this raise a red flag for me. A scientific look at the harm caused by Glyphosates this is not.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't say Glyphosates are cancerous, it says the same international group (IARC) considers them to be cancerous, even at a higher risk level.

Also the authority and integrity of IARC is at question in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even if the author is right, and Monsanto is treated unfairly: It borders on immoral to compare the plight of women who were burned alive to environmental concerns hurting a multinational's ability to earn a profit.

I know it's used metaphorically, but it's just the wrong metaphor.</comment>