Why Is Web Performance Undervalued? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#81

Post by graemep » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

WJW wrote: post #39

mlinhares wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its always the same reason, the business just doesn't hire people qualified to do the job. If in 2025 you're not a content farm, your business is to get people to buy stuff from you, you don't have a team tracking every millisecond change in your p99 latency and page load speed across multiple devices, you're just incompetent.

Most businesses are indeed incompetent, but that's OK as it is usually not required to be all that competent to still make a lot of profit.

That is not how a free market economy is supposed to work. Anyone incompetent is supposed to be driven out of business by those who are competent.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#82

Post by WJW » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #81

WJW wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most businesses are indeed incompetent, but that's OK as it is usually not required to be all that competent to still make a lot of profit.

That is not how a free market economy is supposed to work. Anyone incompetent is supposed to be driven out of business by those who are competent.

On the margin, that is true. But it also needs a situation where there are many competitors in any market, where consumers will choose only the best product at the best price instead of paying attention to politics/religion/location/etc, where switching costs are low and where the consumers can accurately determine quality in the first place.

The free market is an interesting idea, but it assumes many preconditions that are not always true in practice. It's an approximation at best.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#83

Post by B56c » Wed, Aug 13, 2025, 1:47 AM UTC

nchmy wrote: post #72

ben_w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think they made a mistake, but it doesn't look like a huge one? 4 MB ~= 4000 kB, (4000 kB - 450 kB) * $100,000/kB/year = $355,000,000/year (With a bit of fiddling to get the same answer as them, I think they may have done this: (4000 kB + 350 kB) * $100,000/kB, though I wouldn't want to guess why this error happened).

Hmm. But the JS is only 2.4mb, so not sure why the 4mb is probably being used. Whatever the case, it's still immense numbers. So large, in fact, that I was skeptical about it. But Kroger has 150 billion in revenues and 2.5 billion in profits. I have to figure the loss is revenues, not profits - that would, indeed, be too high.

Author here, good catch! This was an error from a previous draft that I forgot to update. I'll update the post to reflect the correct figures.