I'm actually a huge fan of "unlimited slow speeds" as a falloff, instead of a cliff.
Aside from the fact it allows you to work with Starlink to buy more fast speed, it also allows core stuff to continue to function (e.g. basic notifications, non-streaming web traffic, etc).
> I'm actually a huge fan of "unlimited slow speeds" as a falloff, instead of a cliff.
When on cellular, I like to call that "HN-only mode." It is one of the few web properties that is entirely usable at 2G speeds.
I would kill for a web renaissance to return to this format of webpages, as least as an option. Not only loading improves, but also navigation and accessibility.
Indeed. That's why, when they finally kill old.reddit, I may legitimately stop using it entirely. They've already banned most of the good apps, forcing the pretty terrible official one.
I've got a pet theory that old.reddit is actually codified in legal language somewhere as "must always exist."
Otherwise, I can't believe Reddit is actually keeping it around out of the goodness in their cold, dead corporate heart.
Let's try this one: Reddit is selling "we'll let your AI training scrape our data" and have lazily implemented it by just pointing at old.reddit.com.
Possibly, but doesn't old.reddit predate the LLM craze?
New reddit is a travesty. It feels a satirical mockery of modern webdev
My favorite feature is how you click a reply notification and it takes you to a page that doesn’t show the reply half the time.
And 6 years later it's still as terrible.
RedReader is a lovely, lightweight Android app for Reddit.
Development is slow, but I've been happily using it since RiF was killed.
Recently the old reddit szopped working for me even after going to account settings and opting out of new design again (it was already marked as being opt out) across all my devices. Even after manually navigating to old.reddit.com, clicking any link would take me to new again. I had to install special extensions to reroute to old reddit everywhere.
Same thing happened to me, this fixed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1odehgj/is_old_reddit...
Had that happen a few times but switching the use old reddit box off and back on fixes it.
CBC News has a lite version of their news site that they tend to promote around times of natural disaster.
NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org
The dutch news (NOS) has their Teletext available via ssh on teletekst.nl.
no lite version as far as I know.
> but also navigation and accessibility
Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).
But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).
I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.
Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.
Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.
It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.
Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.
HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!
I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.
The uptoot and downtoot buttons are a liiiiitle too close to eachother tho
I find it works perfectly on Safari on iPhone.
> Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile
No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.
It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.
Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.
> How about bigger touch targets?
And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.
There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.
Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)
There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.
The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.
This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.
The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.
But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.
Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.
You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.
I'm using the "Glider" app for Android to access HN and its pretty awesome
Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!
Maybe someone can build a service that translates webpages into "reader mode" format, which you can then consume on mobile devices with low bitrates.
That's effectively what Opera Mini did. (And apparently still does, I had no idea it was still functional.)
This is a pretty promising vector for man in the middle attacks.
So is Manifest v2 ad blocking and plenty of people are screaming about killing that one.
For a proper HN technical-solutions-only response, have the rewrite functionality reside in a WASM module cached locally and run in the browser, with a transparency ledger proving everyone sees the same WASM modules. This way any MitM attempts by the service are reproducible and undeniable.
v2 is not a MitM concern (but it is a malicious code concern). Before quibbling about this consider that if v2 qualifies as a MitM concern then pretty much every other piece of software also does. That isn't in keeping with the spirit of the term.
The outrage is threefold, because there is no viable alternative, because it infantilizes users, trampling their agency, and because it clearly serves corporate interests at the expense of the user.
As to your proposed solution - the rewriting needs to happen on a separate device in order to avoid pushing extra data across the network. If you're already self hosting that service then there's no need for a transparency ledger.
It's auto updating JavaScript maintained by some unknown that can rewrite html on any page, how is that not an MitM risk?
The html itself is rarely a lot of data, most things in this space remove or resize images etc.
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If only we could make that conducive to resume-driven development for web developers.
NoScript gets you part way there.
One more realistic option could be to have an "LLM browsing proxy" where you chat with an LLM via text, and it does the browsing and parsing and extracting, with links etc.
lol. It’s called Gemini.
2G speeds are awful, and cell companies clearly want it that way since 3G plans throttled to "2G speeds" and 5G plans still usually throttle to "2G speeds".
Starlink is offering 1Mbps here, which is enough for a normal internet experience. It's enough to stream video at 480p or 720p depending on the exact content and encoding settings.
I've been listening to 32kbit radio streams while on a 64k falloff. It used to be an important feature for me, the 64k up and down. Sounds like nothing, but is usable.
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Yeah but it's all links to the other places.
TBH I read comments first and in 9/10 can
Except the comments, but who even bothers with those?
Yeah I know. I think it's becoming somewhat of a problem though, people commenting without reading, or only skimming.
My thinking is that we're getting tons of bad articles now that it's so easy to make a bad article that, when skimmed, looks good, and is a good jumping off point for comments.
I think in the past it was somewhat high effort to make such an article, so most articles that look good when skimmed actually WERE pretty good. But now it's trivially easy to make an article that looks good when skimmed, and so we're getting a lot of articles whose only value is a jumping off point for comments.
My mobile data plan is like this. It’s funny because when I’m “out of data” my provider sends an SMS suggesting I upgrade to more gigabytes, but then it still continues to work. And yes I checked my bills to make sure that they are not charging me for any usage excess of what’s included in the plan. It’s not even particularly slow. I can still browse the web, send and receive WhatsApp messages, images and videos, watch videos on TikTok etc.
My current plan is 2GB with rollover. Last month I used 2.5GB, and somehow this month has 2GB included + 2GB rollover = 4 GB available which by itself is also weird. Maybe most of the 2.5 GB I used last month was rollover from the month before that or something.
In total I have used 4.6 GB of mobile data so far this month, which is more than the 4 GB (2+2) I have available for this month and it’s still working.
There are still telcos offering 2GB plans. Wow. I’m on the cheapest plan and it comes with 400GB.
I always think by law any ISP that advertises speed and a has a cap must express the cap in terms of the advertised speed.
So telcos can advertise "Up to 200Mbps" for their package.
But then if they have a 2GB cap, they also need to say, "Caps at 80 seconds of usage".
Because that's what you're paying for at that speed, 80 seconds of usage per month.
Sure, you're not always (or indeed never) doing 200Mbps, but then you're not getting the speed you paid for.
i don't think that makes sense, most connections you make never reach 200Mbps because they don't need to
That's kind of my point, ISPs use that max speed in their advertising when it isn't really relevant, especially if it hits your cap in a minute or two.
It is relevant, though. I have 1.2 Gbps down with a 2 TB monthly cap. I've never hit the monthly cap even once, but by your standard I have "1.2 Gbps down for 3 hours, 42 minutes".
But that doesn't change the reality that it matters to me that a 20 GB video that a friend took at my wedding downloads in just 2 minutes rather than the ~30 minutes it would take if I had a 100 Mbps connection.
1.2Gbps down but only 2TB cap? I hope that's really cheap since if I pay for that I'd expect to do stuff like downloading LLMs, etc, all the time.
Right, but 3+ hours of top speed per month is a lot, 80 seconds isn't.
Your cap is over 150 times that equivalent. If you had an 80 second hard cap, you couldn't even download that 20GB video.
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Shockingly to some, the level of network development, especially wireless network, is not the same everywhere. Even population density varies greatly. I just checked our operators, the cheapest mobile plan comes at 1 GiB of data per month. Prices climb really fast after that, making 10-15 GiB (or more) too expensive for many, though you can get 5 GiB/mo subsidized for cheap if you have some sort of disability.
Where are you and how much do you pay?
Cheapest plan here in Romania is 75 GB for 2 euro/month, then the speed is limited to 1 Mbps.
Speed isn’t great, but that’s about 25% of “full speed” use over the course of a month, 600k seconds. Considering sleep is about 30% of a month as well, and assuming you’re not on a phone all day while working, it might be hard to hit that cap. Speed isn’t great, to reiterate. The cost is 30x cheaper than what I pay, and my speed, at my house, is 10mbps. No cap, but I use like 5gb/month.
Or am I way off and you hit the cap every month?
I believe parent meant that 1 mbps is the speed AFTER you hit 75 GB per month.
Yes, that what I meant. The 75 GB are unlimited, "best effort". When the 75 GB are consumed, speed is limited to 1 Mbps with no other limit or cost.
Oh wow, that's an insane deal.
More datapoints in USD (Chile) from checking various companies:
150GB-200GB ~15 USD
400GB-450GB ~19-20 USD
Unlimited (without throttling) ~21-27 USD
This is the price after the new client ~20% discount expires (generally 6 months). The unlimited and higher tier usually include stuff like Amazon Prime Videos subscriptions, local IPTV or roaming gigs. All plans obviously include calls and texting.
Data point: I'm in the US on an old pre-paid plan that gets me 5GB per month at fast speed, dropping down to unlimited "2G" speed after that cap is hit, which I've done only twice in the past 12 years. $30 per month, and I always "bring my own device" (ie, I only buy unlocked phones, not through the carrier). I haven't shopped around for a while.
You should shop around! Some of the MVNOs are offering unlimited fast data at a similar price these days, and something similar to what you have now for cheaper.
Yeah I'm on Verizon (via their Visible MVNO) and its ~$23/mo for unlimited data. Zero complaints on coverage or speeds.
Visible here, as well. I've been paying $25.00 per month, flat (no extra fees/taxes) for years.
It's perhaps worth noting for others that there are 3 different tiers of service with Visible, ranging from $25 to $45 -- although all 3 are "unlimited."
(I can't tell the difference between them, myself, with my phone in my use.)
I second this! I switched to mint recently. They are offering unlimited data including hotspot for $15/mo for up to a year if you prepay. I think then it goes to their standard rate which is $30/mo for unlimited, or $15/mo for 5gb.
Not sponsored or anything, just a happy customer.
MVNO's for life. Weird how they haven't cannibalize their providers yet with such pricing.
Yeah, I feel like the major providers must be coasting on people who just dont bother looking into it and ares till on the same $100 plan they've been on forever (this was me until recently) and people who really want new flagship phones all the time but can't afford them outright, so they finance with a postpaid plan.
They are often owned by the providers themselves.
I'm in WA - I pay $20/mo for 15GB on Mint Mobile. I used to do $15/mo for 5GB but kept sometimes bumping into it (tethering and stuff) so I just bit the bullet and upgraded.
USA, paying $15/month for the cheapest T-Mobile plan. I only use a few hundred MB per month typically.
I got Connect by T-Mobile a few years ago when it was $10/mo prepaid ($11.03 with tax), and I am grandfathered in. It has a hard cap of 1GB/mo, then nothing. Then I got Hello Helium with a physical SIM on my exercise phone (out in the rain, at the gym) and it is completely free with ... wait for it ... 3GB/mo of data. Go figure. The Hello Helium app used to require location permission on at all times, but they eliminated that.
I imagine they are not from USA. But it's a surprisingly low plan, even considering that
They'd rather you keep paying monthly than start price comparing options.
Even ChatGPT struggles to compare prices between local power providers. Partly because TOU differences, but a lot of time because providers straight up won't provide kWH rate. Add solar, battery and ability to shift patterns (solar charging EV, hot water automation) and it's a huge mess.
Where do you live?
And are you poor?
My 40GB plan is 12$ a month.
I spend 90% of my time at home working (WFH) or relaxing or doing hobbies or sleeping, so most of my Internet use is via the WiFi. I chose one of the cheapest mobile data plans because I don’t need all that much mobile data when I already have Internet at home.
As long as I can still browse a little bit on the go, use WhatsApp to send and receive messages, photos, and videos, and I can watch a few TikTok and YouTube videos on the go, I’m happy.
My 2GB/month mobile data plan costs 179 NOK per month (~17.71 USD/month), plus I pay an extra monthly charge to use eSIM instead of physical SIM.
And I thought Swedish prices was bad. I got in on Fello (Telia MVNO) triple data offer, for like 1 weekend only, that's why it's so cheap.
Chilimobil seems to be the cheapest in Norway looking around, 1GB for 119, 2GB for 139, 6GB for 199 20GB for 249. Also unlimited plans capped on speed.
I have been using 5-10GB a month on my plan. (Cant use WIFI at work)
Anyway =￣ω￣=
Years ago, I picked cell carrier because of this. When I ran out, it switched to O(200kbps), which is fine for email, basic web search, etc.
It was actually a bit ironic that, at the time, you could burn through the whole high-speed quota in seconds or minutes, if you went to the wrong web page. Most carriers would stop or bill you an arm-and-a-leg after.
5G data roaming is hilarious for this. Verizon offered 500MB of high speed data roaming per day in Canada before throttling down to ~128kbps. I ran one single speedtest in the middle of Ottawa on Rogers 5G, didn't even finish the speedtest (hitting an error at the end that it failed), and got the text message going "You've run out of high speed data today. Do you want to buy another 500MB for $5?"
At least it's 2GB/day now. And my 5G roaming is off...
Roaming in some countries is like $10,000/gigabyte...
At that price, I dunno why they offer it at all. Are they just hoping to sue someone to get their whole house because they once watched some netflix overseas and forgot to use wifi?
Companies should be required by law to nominate an explicit "credit limit" for every account, and customers should be allowed to reduce it to whatever they want. Morally there's no difference between a credit card with a $5,000 credit limit, and a cell phone plan where you can rack up $5,000 in charges if you do the wrong thing.
They were deals that were made back in the WAP days where spending $1 a few times a day to check your business email made some semblance of sense, that then got neglected.
Thing is, the heaviest users are often the ones with some malware on their machine using up 100% of the bandwidth. When you limit that to 512kbps, thats still 129 gigabytes a month, on top of the 100 gigabytes a month you let the user use at high speed. When a typical user might use just 10 gigabytes a month, it seems dumb to let one user use 23x what everyone else is paying for/using, especially when that user is most likely just malware infected and not even personally benefiting!
A better limit I think is to limit the user to 10 kbps over a rolling 24h window, 100 kbps over a rolling 1h window, 1Mbits over a rolling 1 minute window, and 10 Mbits over a 1 second window. That way they can quickly check an email or load a web page... But it quickly slows down if they try to (ab)use it for hours on end.
It's not like 100GB is some huge amount of data. It's easy to hit, so if we're judging the overage amount we should be comparing it to the full 100GB, not some made up guy that only uses 10GB. There are users on unlimited consuming many terabytes, and they're not paying all that much more. It's not unfair to anyone if the cheaper plan is able to slowly reach 200GB or 300GB in a minimal-impact way.
Also dropping all the way to 10kbps with enough use would just suck. It's effectively unusable and it would be extreme penny-pinching to make sure the maximum 24/7 user can't squeak out more than 3GB extra on their 100GB plan. You get more variance than that from different month lengths.
> it seems dumb to let one user use 23x what everyone else is paying for/using
Bandwidth is use-it-or-lose-it. If nobody else was using it, then it doesn't hurt anything. And during high demand traffic shaping hopefully gives their traffic even lower priority.
> If nobody else was using it, then it doesn't hurt anything.
On networks I manage, there are clients who pay for large quantities of super low priority capacity - eg. for moving scientific data around, or backing up stuff that only needs to complete sometime in the next 30 days.
That means there is no such thing as unused bandwidth - almost every link is 100% full of paying customers data, and anyone using more displaces one of those low priority customers.
Starlink’s plans vary between markets, but in Australia they have a dirt cheap ($8 AUD per month or something) standby plan that gives you unlimited data capped at something like 500Kbps. If you’re going on a trip and need faster data, you can upgrade to a bigger plan for the rest of the billing month, charged on a pro rata basis, and then revert to the standby plan afterwards.
I used to use Inmarsat BGAN. BGAN would top out at around 250Kbps on a good day, and cost a few bucks per MB on a terminal that cost almost ten times as much as a Starlink Mini.
I tried this and it's actually even enough to play YouTube at 1080p after some initial buffering. Calls definitely work
I leave my Starlink Mini in Standby Mode, which is $5/mo and is capped at 500KB/sec. I got the dish for free because I'm already a subscriber at home, so adding the $5/mo really isn't a big deal. It's perfect to go camping, because I might want to let my friends know that I had to move campsites, but I don't want to sit there and surf all day long and watch YouTube. Though 500KB/sec is more than enough to do all of that...
As a residential customer Starlink gave me the unlimited slow speed with a free mini for $60/year, as a tease to promote the full speed at $300/year. But it does everything I need it to, so I'm not incentivized to upgrade. I can listen to YouTube audio, make voip calls, download map tiles or talk with a chatbot without limitations. It's a large quality of life improvement for me because in my rural area there is no cellular connection during most of my driving.
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I do think it's vastly superior to preferential treatment for some traffic, which seems to be the most popular alternative. The one caveat is that ISPs need to be forced to be transparent about this. Often, with cell providers, it's "Unlimited 5G" advertised, with a tiny asterisk pointing to even tinier disclaimer text at the bottom explaining that they throttle your rates once you hit a (fairly low) cutoff. That type of misleading marketing undercuts the fairness of the offer.
My internet providers (both home wifi and cellular) do this. The problem with unlimited slow speed is that it's too slow. I am sometimes unable to open the carrier's own app and pay for a recharge. Either the app just doesn't open or the transaction in the payments app fails.
Mobile has been like this for me for like a decade or so. But in the before times it was just barbaric and ridiculous to either be cut off or absolutely ravaged by fees.
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Have they quantified the slow speed? Because when I had Viasat the slow speed so so unbelievably slow it had a hard time loading a regular SPA page in 2-3 minutes.