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lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" = 1.4GB precisely)
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
r_lee 18 hours ago [-]
I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work" but performance is often not included in the equation
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
machomaster 17 hours ago [-]
The Grok android app is terrible in that sense. Just writing a question with a normal speed will make half of the characters not appear due to whatever unoptimized shit the app does after each keystroke.
throwuxiytayq 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds quite overengineered. CEOs have basically no idea what they're doing these days. If this were my company, I'd start by cutting 80% of staff and 80% of the code bloat.
userbinator 10 hours ago [-]
Don't know if this is satire, but I do wonder if Musk uses the Grok app himself.
upmind 8 hours ago [-]
As someone who knows xAI employees, he does use it a LOT and reports bugs very often afaik
gspetr 55 minutes ago [-]
The "very often" part is wild to me. You'd think being an engineer himself[0] he'd fix the root cause: the testing process, not work as an IC QA himself.
[0] He holds the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX.
taminka 17 hours ago [-]
it's unironically just react lmao, virtually every popular react app has an insane number of accidental rerenders triggered by virtually everything, causing it to lag a lot
r_lee 16 hours ago [-]
well that's any framework with vdom, the GC of web frameworks, so I'd imagine it's also a problem with vue etc..
I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it properly) is not a consideration with these companies that are valued above $100 billion
like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or something?
vaylian 36 minutes ago [-]
> well that's any framework with vdom
Is it time for vanilla.js to shine again with Element.setHTML()?
It's a bit unfortunate that several calls to .setHTML() can't be batched so that several .setHTML() calls get executed together to minimize page redraws.
yurishimo 12 hours ago [-]
Vue uses signals for reactivity now and has for years. Alien signals was discovered by a Vue contributor. Vue 3.6 (now in alpha/beta?) will ship a version that is essentially a Vue flavored Svelte with extreme fine grained reactivity based on a custom compiler step.
One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.
array_key_first 14 hours ago [-]
It's not a problem with vue or svelte because they are, ironically, reactive. React greedily rerenders.
It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
vscode-rest 16 hours ago [-]
Nobody gets promoted for improving web app performance.
gspetr 50 minutes ago [-]
Yes, they do. OGs remember that Facebook circa 2012 had navigation take like 5-10 seconds.
Ben Horowitz recalled asking Zuck what his engineer onboarding process was when the latter complained to him about how it took them very long to make changes to code. He basically didn't have any.
r_lee 16 hours ago [-]
yep. I think this is the root problem, not the frameworks themselves
cess11 13 hours ago [-]
If it's slow people also stick around for longer if they have something they must accomplish before leaving.
If it's true that nobody is getting promoted for improving web app performance, that seems like an opportunity. Build an org that rewards web app performance gains, and (in theory) enjoy more users and more money.
threetonesun 9 hours ago [-]
They have no real competitors, so anything that makes the user even stickier and more likely to spend money (LinkedIn Premium or whatever LinkedIn sells to businesses) takes priority over any improvements.
rustystump 13 hours ago [-]
I think linkedin is built with emberjs not react last i checked…
The problem with performance in wep apps is often not the omg too much render. But is actually processing and memory use. Chromium loves to eat as much ram as possible and the state management world of web apps loves immutability. What happens when you create new state anytime something changes and v8 then needs to recompile an optimized structure for that state coupled with thrashing the gc? You already know.
I hate the immutable trend in wep apps. I get it but the performance is dogshite. Most web apps i have worked on spend about 10% of their cpu time…garbage collecting and the rest doing complicated deep state comparisons every time you hover on a button.
Rant over.
christophilus 14 hours ago [-]
I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery fast. It wouldn’t be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.
It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.
hobobaggins 13 hours ago [-]
Best Buy is actually one of the worst and slowest websites from any large retailer. I cannot believe how bad it is. It's like they set out to make it pretty and accidentally stepped in molasses.
jimbobimbo 10 hours ago [-]
The irony! My router died literally an hour ago, and I was on bestbuy to buy a new one. Over 5g connection. That was probably the worst shopping experience I had in a while...
RunSet 17 hours ago [-]
> Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps?
It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
lstodd 14 hours ago [-]
Spot on. It's why I quit adtech in 2015. Running realtime auctions server-side is one thing, but building what basically amounts to live-feed screen capture ..
csomar 2 hours ago [-]
I do live-feed screen capture and it doesn't really consume much and is barely unnoticeable. Running 100 live-feed screen capture is a different story though.
maccard 18 hours ago [-]
My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop slack to compile…
raw_anon_1111 11 hours ago [-]
The bug in Slack is that it uses Electron
reddalo 10 hours ago [-]
Electron has been a blessing and a horrible thing at the same time.
hobobaggins 13 hours ago [-]
It's always good to not slack when compiling.
antod 11 hours ago [-]
Just to clarify for other readers, sword fighting while riding office chairs is not slacking.
m132 18 hours ago [-]
I noticed that there's a developing trend of "who manages to use the most CSS filters" among web developers, and it was there even before LLMs. Now that most of the web is slop in one form or another, and LLMs seem to have been trained on the worst of the worst, every other website uses an obscene amount of CSS backdrop-filter blur, which slows down software renderers and systems with older GPUs to a crawl.
When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
susupro1 18 hours ago [-]
Hit this exact wall with desktop wrappers. I was shipping an 800MB Electron binary just to orchestrate a local video processing pipeline.
Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.
ssss11 10 hours ago [-]
So many sites.. they’re all built as web apps these days when they don’t need to be. And they’re all full of tracking and “telemetry”……..
IG_Semmelweiss 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, its sometimes extreme. I often wondered if it was my FF browser, but then i'd switch to Opera or Brave, and i would see the same pattern.
Its quite insane
inaros 18 hours ago [-]
What us this AWS you talk about? :-)
lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
my employer's choice of premium hosting provider
inaros 17 hours ago [-]
I know what AWS is...that is why your statement
>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
Makes no sense to me...
lucb1e 10 hours ago [-]
Ah, now I understand your question (and see others already answered). Yeah, I realized that possible confusion after writing it, but hoped it was clear enough after editing in the bit about this AWS problem being in a browser tab. You may have seen the initial version, or it may still have been too confusing. Whoops
tandr 15 hours ago [-]
I think they are talking about AWS dashboard, but I might be wrong.
QuadmasterXLII 14 hours ago [-]
the web interface
mr_toad 10 hours ago [-]
The official name is the AWS management console. Or just the console.
The ‘dashboard’, the ‘interface’? Reminds me of coworkers who used to refer to desktop PC cases as the hard drive, or people who refer to the web as ‘Google’.
userbinator 10 hours ago [-]
If you're talking about the AWS management UI, I haven't used it recently but can tell you that the Azure one is no better. One of the stupidest things I remember is that it somehow managed to reimplement a file upload form for one of their storage services such that it will attempt to read the whole file into memory before sending it to the server. For a storage service meant for very large files (dozens of gigabytes or more).
myfonj 8 hours ago [-]
That's peanuts. LI's third-party bot prevention service, "protechts.net", took 42 GB RAM on my laptop with 32 GB the other day. Obviously found out because it got suspiciously slow and wheezing, and Firefox swapping like crazy seemed to be the culprit. Looking at its performance, this scare jump happened: [1].
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
beAbU 19 hours ago [-]
I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage with the feed at all though.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
bluedino 18 hours ago [-]
I've also gotten my last few jobs there. It's great for that. Even if it's 90% low effort recruiter spam.
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
rixed 15 minutes ago [-]
Is it really great for that?
In my experience, LinkedIn makes finding a job easier as much as Facebook makes it easy to find friends...
LinkedIn encouraged and made normal gross exagerations and overall dishonest discussions and relationships and recommendations that made it impossible to form any valuable opinion about anyone or anything.
sameerds 16 hours ago [-]
You forgot "I am honoured and humbled to announce <insert mundane recognition>."
le-mark 15 hours ago [-]
The comedy/tragedy of this is; whenever I talk to people outside of engineering at social gatherings, this is what they do. Tell me their resume and accomplishments. I’m like, can we just a have a conversation please?
raw_anon_1111 11 hours ago [-]
I always asks the question “what keeps you busy”? People think my wife and I are retired because of how often we travel. I say I’m not, I work remotely and try to keep the conversation away from work.
torginus 17 hours ago [-]
I think one of the most objectively pathetic things in the world is trying to ride the counterculture wave against a thing, while shilling the exact same thing.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
saadn92 18 hours ago [-]
This. That's the only reason I'm on there too. I completely avoid the news feed, but it does help when you having people reaching out and you need jobs.
matsemann 17 hours ago [-]
It's a difference between "using it" and just having a dormant profile you wake to live when interested, though.
pimeys 14 hours ago [-]
Beeper has LinkedIn integration, so you can chat with recruiters with any Matrix app without ever opening the website.
Still need a LinkedIn account for beeper to connect to though.
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
keeda 12 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, I've noticed a correlation between spikes in LinkedIn social activity and subsequent job changes, after which the activity (typically) subsides again. The activity doesn't even have to be actively posting, just reacting to posts on their feed.
I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
robryan 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah and updating profile image, profile description and description for work history. Almost no one that isn't looking around for a job does this.
estimator7292 16 hours ago [-]
> I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
a4isms 15 hours ago [-]
Hiring can remain irrational longer than you can remain unemployed.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
drfloyd51 14 hours ago [-]
Agreed.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
zugi 14 hours ago [-]
> Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement. Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
MrDarcy 15 hours ago [-]
I have consulted for CEO’s and other executives who think like this. You certainly dodged a bullet.
phillipcarter 13 hours ago [-]
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed. Even fewer post things to it.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
bertylicious 12 hours ago [-]
Could you please name a couple persons who matter in their professional domain, who post on LinkedIn, and who you benefited from by engaging with them on LinkedIn?
toolazytologin 12 hours ago [-]
> engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
How? Legitimate question.
loglog 13 hours ago [-]
I recommend to block the Linkedin feed with uBlock.
josteink 14 hours ago [-]
> Very few people with LinkedIn profiles read the social feed.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
sunaookami 14 hours ago [-]
Same with Pinterest in Germany which seems bizarre to me. It's supposedly more popular than Twitter, Twitch, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Reddit (but below TikTok, Instagram and Facebook).
I dunno if that is really true. I've started posting technical things on LinkedIn because it gets pretty good engagement from real people that I know. I've also seen some great technical posts there.
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
projektfu 19 hours ago [-]
Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me, Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no idea what's on it anymore.
kleiba 17 hours ago [-]
+1 I haven't made an account on a new website in years, and god forbid I will ever link my gmail with anything other than g-suite.
aenis 17 hours ago [-]
Easy. That is the only social media site that is so comically bad, that it does not trigger me in any way with the feed. I am using it as a way to reach out to colleagues from the past - a bit like facebook circa 10 years ago.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
neilv 15 hours ago [-]
I doubt many people go to LinkedIn for the cringey and obnoxious feed. It's more write-only than anything.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
neilv 15 hours ago [-]
And be careful with AI elsewhere in the hiring process.
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
Mario9382 35 minutes ago [-]
I got my last 2 jobs from there so I'll come back eventually to find the next one
Spooky23 19 hours ago [-]
It’s a great way to spot phonies if you don’t have a lot of time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but you’re not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
jrm4 16 hours ago [-]
And the converse is true: If you read something with substance, you can know it is VERY important to them; they're likely literally risking their livelihood to do so.
port3000 19 hours ago [-]
It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a social network and none of the upsides (apart from the occasional recruiter message).
andrewl-hn 18 hours ago [-]
> It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
freeAgent 18 hours ago [-]
It depends on your role. People in sales have it open all the time since it's a legitimate research tool for them.
matwood 18 hours ago [-]
Yep. Sales and biz dev people use LI constantly not necessarily for connecting, but learning about contacts.
layer8 16 hours ago [-]
If you’re considered valuable at your current company, instead of being a red flag it can help you get a raise or other benefits.
torginus 17 hours ago [-]
This. I would rather post on any other social media site at work than Linkedin. It's a major signal that the person is looking for work.
kube-system 11 hours ago [-]
I can’t imagine working in a place toxic enough where:
1. That’s the default presumption (rather than someone doing networking for their current role)
2. Where “looking for another job” is a point of contention
Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with others in the industry. And good teams are made up of people with good communication skills who want to be there.
siva7 14 hours ago [-]
Especially the "Let me show you i have a open linkedin tab while screen sharing so you guys know i hate this place" move as if anyone cares.
whatevaa 17 hours ago [-]
No more such thing as commit to the company in western world anymore. Companies are definitely not commited to you.
alsetmusic 19 hours ago [-]
I've not understood why people wanted it to be a social network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this doesn't make sense to me either.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
cjbgkagh 19 hours ago [-]
Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
siva7 14 hours ago [-]
Yammer was probably one of the most bizarre m&a stories ever.
Spooky23 18 hours ago [-]
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
cyanydeez 18 hours ago [-]
eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?
Spooky23 18 hours ago [-]
I actually didn’t know that was a thing. I was trying to cook up something quick and absurd. Truth is stranger than fiction!
user_7832 19 hours ago [-]
> I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
mancerayder 16 hours ago [-]
Is it terrible if your employer finds that you're looking for another job? If they like you, maybe they'll intervene to make your life better?
If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a termination process including severance.
I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
monsieurbanana 19 hours ago [-]
I work remotely so I had no idea. I'd have thought that unless you're in HR you wouldn't scroll a website whose primary purpose is to look for new jobs.
mwexler 17 hours ago [-]
Much like X, it's what you choose to use it for. Papers are posted, approaches are debated, and loose groups form to align. It's easy to scroll past the pandering, but there is useful stuff in the dross.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
edgyquant 17 hours ago [-]
That is not the primary purpose of LinkedIn though. It is used extensively by a class of people who are generally decision makers and those selling services to them.
mancerayder 16 hours ago [-]
You had me almost spit out my coffee. That's hilariously on point.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
andyjohnson0 17 hours ago [-]
I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since: almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
catcowcostume 19 hours ago [-]
It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.
SV_BubbleTime 17 hours ago [-]
Do they not also make posts on Indeed or other non-social sites?
dinkleberg 15 hours ago [-]
The difference is that the recruiters come to you on LinkedIn. This is quite handy when you're currently employed since opportunities come to you that you wouldn't have otherwise looked for.
SV_BubbleTime 10 hours ago [-]
Cool, even more reason to dislike it. I want my people doing their work, not wondering if the grass is greener somewhere else.
catcowcostume 6 hours ago [-]
Your personal opinion does not (and should not) dictate how others behave.
richardstahl 18 hours ago [-]
This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.
That kind of supposedly successful people who you can find on "normal" platforms as well. The difference is that they wrap everything in this weird language.
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
yread 15 hours ago [-]
I work in research and people post their papers there. Signal to noise ratio is getting worse and worse though.. My "favorite" was probably an AI generated post (3 em dashes in one sentence, its not this.its that. And so son) about how bad AI is and how it hallucinates.
jonhohle 15 hours ago [-]
“This wasn’t just AI generated — it was a paragon of hallucinated AI slop.”
inaros 18 hours ago [-]
I always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.
tartoran 13 hours ago [-]
Wait, are you dating on LinkedIn?
trash_cat 15 hours ago [-]
Sales people using it a lot to scout prospects and understand a person's seniority in an organisation, to target better and prepare a strategy to pitch higher up the chain.
xioxox 16 hours ago [-]
A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.
MengerSponge 15 hours ago [-]
Bluesky doesn't push an algorithmic feed, so it looks empty if you aren't following people who are posting.
FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to jumpstart your algorithm.
subscribed 19 hours ago [-]
Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and emails.
This works.
pjmlp 16 hours ago [-]
Because after Stackoverflow Jobs went bust, LinkedIn and Xing (in DACH space), are the best ways to reach out to head hunters.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
le-mark 15 hours ago [-]
I will never understand why SO did not lean into its jobs feature. I got two jobs from it, I thought it was great.
jadbox 19 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public platforms like X.
paoliniluis 19 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn feed now brings dumb posts from AI bots that contacts follow. All social networks tend to follow the same principles now: bring to everyone’s feed what’s most engaging, which is normally clickbaits or posts that use exaggerated words
dagmx 16 hours ago [-]
As a hiring manager, it’s still the best place to try and find people for a given role.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
timokoesters 11 hours ago [-]
Do you have advice for building up this network for graphics development?
I'm a Master's student building a custom rendering stack with wgpu and it's difficult to meet people interested in specific skills like rendering.
dagmx 9 hours ago [-]
If you’re in a big city, there are likely meetups locally for game devs (usually amateurs but a few professionals show up)
If you aren’t in a location with meetups , the best bet is finding online game dev communities.
nottorp 16 hours ago [-]
> Out of all places to doomscroll
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
com2kid 15 hours ago [-]
There are some really funny people who run parody accounts, or who are retired and just don't care. They publish some hilarious posts. If you follow a few of them LI becomes worth visiting!
eitally 20 hours ago [-]
It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping track of professional events.
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
rixed 1 hours ago [-]
Some links?
0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago [-]
It's a social network for employment. If you want to employ, or be employed, that's the social network for that.
wombat-man 19 hours ago [-]
I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.
anonu 17 hours ago [-]
Many people use it.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset.
A daily ritual.
A lifestyle.
A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
jhickok 16 hours ago [-]
"My father died from cancer, and this is what it taught me about B2B SaaS sales..."
quinndupont 19 hours ago [-]
Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.
DaSHacka 17 hours ago [-]
"No one goes there, it's too crowded" type energy
nacozarina 17 hours ago [-]
it’s deteriorated to the point where shit-posting is becoming normalized, so it has that going for it
riffraff 17 hours ago [-]
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
faramarz 14 hours ago [-]
its a professional contact list is all it is, for me anyway. its where I go to gather intel on a person/company or where I go to lookup a contact for an outreac
xantronix 17 hours ago [-]
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
mancerayder 16 hours ago [-]
That's the first I've heard of LinkedIn-driven revolutionary endeavors towards social change. I think that's the point we've all reached given all else has failed.
DeathArrow 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can establish some industry connections and you can find the right people to hire if you need to.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
MegaDeKay 18 hours ago [-]
A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
justin66 16 hours ago [-]
From the online job searcher's point of view, it's one of the least awful circle jerks in a Dante's Inferno-esque series of circle jerks. It is only the first or second circle jerk, at worst.
xeromal 15 hours ago [-]
I've gotten two very good jobs from linkedin.
tyleo 16 hours ago [-]
I use LinkedIn. I’ve posted some blog posts on both Hacker News and LinkedIn and determined that LinkedIn is a bit more evergreen. A post on the HN front page gets thousands or tens of thousands of views in a day but a LinkedIn post has thousands in the long tail.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
dainank 17 hours ago [-]
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
markus_zhang 17 hours ago [-]
The articles are mostly BS, but I got all of my previous jobs from LinkedIn, except for the first one. Which else should I use? I guess networking is better, but I'm not really a networking type of person. LinkedIn at least shows me which companies have openings so I can network with the hiring managers. Those openings could be fake, but hey at least there is some data.
phendrenad2 15 hours ago [-]
> what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
I keep an up-to-date profile so recruiters reach out.
It's useless otherwise.
rirze 16 hours ago [-]
It's great for niche fields or small credentialed network groups. The social media side is complete nonsense, don't use it.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
franktankbank 16 hours ago [-]
Yea, I quit recently, got absolutely nothing positive out.
Henchman21 17 hours ago [-]
It feels important to remember that all the Severed employees were there by choice. Perhaps not the choice of the innie, but hey someone made that choice for their reasons.
itsthecourier 19 hours ago [-]
to investigate people of interest
mft_ 19 hours ago [-]
I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
reactordev 19 hours ago [-]
You have to look at who owns LinkedIn and why building a meetings and calendar was not “part of the plan”
mft_ 18 hours ago [-]
On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
reactordev 18 hours ago [-]
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
mft_ 16 hours ago [-]
I think we're basically in violent agreement. MS sucks, big organisations often suck, misaligned incentives everywhere, etc.
stainablesteel 12 hours ago [-]
completed deleted my linkedin, it's not even the least bit useful. it's full of fake stories and communication that sounds more robotic than human
jmye 19 hours ago [-]
I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
cosmodisk 18 hours ago [-]
I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together.
I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
psalaun 19 hours ago [-]
I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
hatmanstack 17 hours ago [-]
The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.
legitster 15 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn has the most clear para-social relationship. Post and interact to look good for recruiters and future employers.
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
phendrenad2 15 hours ago [-]
There's a long tail of users who still visit out of habit. The last useful thing there was job listings, but between LinkedIn doing nothing to combat bots clicking apply on every job, the "fake job listings" phenomenon, and the job market being atrocious, you're better off playing the lottery.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
gnarlouse 12 hours ago [-]
You can actually permanently reclaim that memory and prevent this bug in the future!
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
NelsonMinar 9 hours ago [-]
I've got one weird trick to lessen your email load, too.
hansvm 3 hours ago [-]
I'm listening
noitpmeder 20 hours ago [-]
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
kjkjadksj 15 hours ago [-]
Scroll down through jobs, hit next page. Page reloads at bottom of list on next page. Have to scroll up then scroll down, every page.
Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.
Banditoz 9 hours ago [-]
I recently found a bypass for this. Put this in your ublock origin custom rules:
Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled Microslop engineering right there.
thunky 19 hours ago [-]
It's the user's fault. They vote for this crap with their attention. Junk sites like this shouldn't exist but they do amd aren't going anywhere until people stop using them.
kalaksi 18 hours ago [-]
Some users might enable these kind of features with their attention, but I don't think users actually want these features and any kind of "voting" is likely unintentional. It's manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there's friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark patterns (depending on user). And I don't think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.
Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
shimman 14 hours ago [-]
Is it really the users fault when the apps are literally designed by neuroscientists that explicitly design it to be addictive toward humans all of which is being funded by monopolists companies whose leadership tend to have antidemocratic views about humanity?
Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the dangerous substances they are.
philistine 16 hours ago [-]
Users are not perfect agents. How can you expect the average non-technical person to figure out what is happening? For most people, if they don't see visually see something happening on the screen, it doesn't exist. They simply have no frame of reference to figure out that LinkedIN is hijacking their scroll speed.
baal80spam 18 hours ago [-]
Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.
koinedad 13 hours ago [-]
The scroll jacking drives me nuts
hrmtst93837 14 hours ago [-]
Scroll hijacking like that feels like product brain rot.
You can see the trade in plain sight they slow the user down so feed metrics look better, and the side effect is that keyboard nav, accessibility tools, and UI automation all get wierd in ways the people shipping it probably never have to touch.
Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn.
Adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car.
denysvitali 14 hours ago [-]
The juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
wontopos 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Voyager 1 doesn't have to render 47 "congratulate your connection" notifications at the same time.
OptionOfT 3 hours ago [-]
With autosuggestions to click so you don't even have to type anymore!
thomasgeelens 9 hours ago [-]
This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.
bluedino 10 hours ago [-]
That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?
zirkonit 7 hours ago [-]
In consumer space, 69 KB of RAM (138 x 4 kbit chips) would cost around $1700 70s dollars for the entire package, ~$10k in modern dollars.
Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.
Finnucane 6 hours ago [-]
consumer space and space space chips.
saltyoldman 6 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't they just put a lead plate around the computer? That can't cost 100k in 70s
kulahan 6 hours ago [-]
Lead makes things worse, not better. High-energy particles go straight through a couple mm of lead no problem, and lead itself is radioactive anyways. The problem is when a particle punches straight through a chip, leaving some energetic charge behind. You won't stop that with a paper-thin layer of lead.
Also, lead is extremely dense.
hunterpayne 5 hours ago [-]
"and lead itself is radioactive anyways"
Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard.
However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material
"Also, lead is extremely dense."
This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).
kulahan 50 minutes ago [-]
No, the real reason it isn't used is because coating your chips in something doesn't really work
edit: ...when you don't have the protection of the atmosphere to begin with*
tliltocatl 2 hours ago [-]
Because lead turns a single high-energy particle (that would disturb a single bit and punch through) into a shower of many low-energy particles (that would disturb many bits AND induce lattice damage over a wide area).
mysterydip 6 hours ago [-]
lead being heavy, I wonder if that tradeoff wasn’t worth it?
nshelia 13 hours ago [-]
We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
denysvitali 13 hours ago [-]
A probe collecting data in space takes <70 kB of memory. I fail to see how this statement should make me feel happy
ozim 12 hours ago [-]
Space is mostly empty there is not much interesting stuff to collect and who’s going to buy that data
LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
>Space is mostly empty
Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
ozim 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly and people on LinkedIn think they are smarter than everyone and definitely smarter than dolphins, because what dolphins do? They muck in the water all day having good time whereas humans built important profiles on LinkedIn having good time berating each other.
mattmanser 13 hours ago [-]
As someone was pointing out in a thread the other day about memory usage, a lot is fonts and images.
EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
cosmicgadget 11 hours ago [-]
How much? You typically don't want more than a few different fonts on a given document. And neither fonts nor web images should be bigger than hundreds of kilobytes. How do we get to gigs?
stateofinquiry 3 hours ago [-]
I don't see mention of this in the discussion, so I will add: I think people also don't close tabs. And probably these LI tabs have been up for a long time. Maybe weeks or months.
I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.
conductr 9 hours ago [-]
> How do we get to gigs?
Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?
While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
cosmicgadget 6 hours ago [-]
Can you be more specific? Yes I am familiar with LinkedIn.
heyethan 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stackghost 9 hours ago [-]
>How do we get to gigs?
Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.
What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.
So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
jasonfarnon 8 hours ago [-]
"What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies"
I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?
computomatic 5 hours ago [-]
I only have my own observations of their products and secondhand info but my understanding is Microsoft simply doesn’t care about engineering. They have a sales pitch (product idea), then they build and ship the MVP that can earn money. If something sells, they figure they can solve scaling by throwing enough money at it. Classic b-tier tech company (and startup) garbage. They never work out the unit economics, etc.
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
alain94040 7 hours ago [-]
Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.
If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
ben-schaaf 9 hours ago [-]
The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
littlestymaar 4 hours ago [-]
> The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
11 hours ago [-]
weare138 1 hours ago [-]
I remember when your computer had 128MB of ram and could still run an entire desktop OS, web browser and chat app at the same time.
thephyber 11 hours ago [-]
I’m guessing you mean “does” in the sense of a user-facing feature.
I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.
charcircuit 10 hours ago [-]
Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.
7 hours ago [-]
eximius 16 hours ago [-]
Let's be real, LinkedIn is full of LinkedIn Lunatics but pretty much all mainstream social media is pretty shit. They're just different flavors of shit. LinkedIn: bad. Facebook: bad. Twitter: I literally think it contributed to the collapse of discourse and rise of shallow thought / rejection of expertise. I'm not going to list more because the theme is, you guessed it, they're bad.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
mahirsaid 15 hours ago [-]
Im pretty sure that is the current sentiment amongst the judicial body at the moment, Meta and Google have been taking blows left and right. They are also not allowing else to take shape that might make their business model obsolete. With all that we have more and more laws that are redistricting the use of social media by their own bad doing. So if another company wants to offer something innovative, now they have an unfair playing ground due to the enormous amount of regulation that are NOW being implemented. Another words the longer these large tech companies are able to keep their business the harder it is for innovation in this sector from other players. The spill over to polotics is dangerous and counter-productive to innovating technology.
salawat 14 hours ago [-]
When your definition of innovation includes "move fast, break things, ignore regulations until you can scale big enough for the lawyers hopefully to outpace the legal system" it is arguable that any of that should be allowed at all. There's room for leniency for innovation sake, then there's building the wrong damn thing and not taking no for an answer when you should. Tech is beyond that point by leaps and bounds.
hunterpayne 5 hours ago [-]
Counterpoint, Meta just shutdown its VR project. And with all the data gathering, you aren't the customer, you are the product. You just don't realize that the market (marketing departments) said yes. Your vote is to either use a specific service or not. And if enough people vote yes, it stays even if you or me don't like/use it.
estebank 15 hours ago [-]
Social media being bad is partly because of shady business practices, and partly because a lot of people suck (in different ways, at different times, including us).
Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
eximius 15 hours ago [-]
Mastodon, Bluesky, etc are neat - both in what they're trying to be and their technology. But ultimately these days I reject them in favor of more local socialization (again, not geographically). What this looks like is a constellation of private (or pseudo private) discord communities. If I make friends in one, I often get invited to another. I recognize the merit in broader social forums like Mastodon, but it is not worth the drawbacks to me.
As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).
deanishe 14 hours ago [-]
A large part of the problem, imo, is that people haven't used the ability to talk to the entire planet as an opportunity to broaden their horizons, but to build themselves a transnational bubble of like-minded individuals.
Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.
That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
rglover 10 hours ago [-]
> That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad faith.
tombert 14 hours ago [-]
I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.
I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.
So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.
kelnos 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so fake. They're putting their best professional face on, heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit genuine.
tombert 9 hours ago [-]
I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help their careers could it?
AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.
userbinator 10 hours ago [-]
now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.
What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
joombaga 6 hours ago [-]
Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).
tombert 4 hours ago [-]
Do any of the workarounds ever result in interviews?
About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.
There are tons though.
Yhippa 4 hours ago [-]
This reminds me. Google Reader had comments enabled from your friends on posts you shared. This was the best form of social media I have ever experienced.
fritzo 14 hours ago [-]
Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?
zero-st4rs 12 hours ago [-]
I think the distinction is pretty easy imo. HN is topic centered, Social Media is person-centered. Before MySpace there was a pretty big proliferation of forums and other topic centered discourse. The profile was such a minor part of those tools.
When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.
Karrot_Kream 9 hours ago [-]
There's a somewhat silly sense of superiority on this site over itself along with a deeply held belief that social media is bad, which makes commenters here try IMO in vain to distinguish HN from other forms of social media. After all, if you are the bad thing, how can you not fall prey to the same problems of the bad thing?
I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.
It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.
pndy 14 hours ago [-]
That'd be the thing indeed.
hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.
A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.
kelnos 9 hours ago [-]
I would say yes, that's a good way to make the distinction. It's even more than that: the feed is different for every single user.
With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.
HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.
kingstnap 14 hours ago [-]
A big difference is that its culture comes from shared public experience. Everyone sees the same front page not a curated one.
hunterpayne 5 hours ago [-]
In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts. I do think it is an important distinction but I understand if others don't. At least we are all in the same reality on a forum board when we post. On a social media site, we see different sets of posts.
jjude 4 hours ago [-]
> In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts.
Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.
serf 14 hours ago [-]
well moderation is ubiquitous , but yeah -- personalization/targeting/social graph are essentially the things that people expect out of a social media platform.
I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.
I also know that's a naive view.
glitchc 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
KellyCriterion 13 hours ago [-]
To me LinkedIn always seems like a coporate ad newsfeed for adults who subscribe voluntarily to get the stuff? :-)
hatsix 13 hours ago [-]
nah, their feed became algo driven just like FB... im constantly seeing things that I have no relation to
pks016 14 hours ago [-]
I think Google closed Google+ because it worked as social media and they couldn't find better ways to exploit users.
IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but that didn't work either
pks016 7 hours ago [-]
That's true. I was much younger back then to notice about privacy.
Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.
raphar 13 hours ago [-]
Fools, they lost a source of very valuable training data.
nelsonic 12 hours ago [-]
Nope. Google+ was a ghost town. They made the right call to shut it down and focus their efforts on YouTube.
The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.
In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies.
Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.
freehorse 12 hours ago [-]
> comments on YT are superb training data
This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.
pks016 12 hours ago [-]
Ghost town was the best part, for users like me. I didn't want another fb or insta. The circles and community were great.
shwaj 12 hours ago [-]
The videos are good training data, but the comments? The comment UX is so non-conducive to discussion, and the general quality is very low compared to what used to be on Google+ (to be fair, the self-selected users of Google+ were not representative of the general population).
xnx 7 hours ago [-]
> Google+ had promise
No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.
xenator 3 hours ago [-]
If you don't have adv from platform itself it doesn't mean that site content is not flooded by endless spammers content. LinkedIn is great example where you have both.
Hobadee 6 hours ago [-]
Facebook didn't have ads when it started either.
johanneskanybal 13 hours ago [-]
I kind of love Linkedin tbh. It's where you get jobs. They created Kafka. Definitly don't spend a lot of time there though just more if you need a new job.
the_af 11 hours ago [-]
How often do people get jobs via LinkedIn? I have never.
Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or sucking up to whoever just hired them.
Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you that.
13 hours ago [-]
ojr 11 hours ago [-]
hackernews has a good signal to noise ratio, noise is bad
AussieWog93 11 hours ago [-]
Honestly, HN has a lot of people getting infuriated by storms in teacups and spouting shit. Definitely an order of magnitude better than Reddit or Facebook but still not the same as IRL.
wolvoleo 13 hours ago [-]
Linkedin is a special kind of shit. It even constantly scans for thousands of plugins.
kube-system 11 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn has aggressive anti-bot features. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of that 2.4G is that
wolvoleo 10 hours ago [-]
I know but I think it's more of a 'feature' to prevent recruiters and advertisers from avoiding their overpriced subscriptions and scrape data.
Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do whatever you want' kinda thing.
snackerblues 12 hours ago [-]
>Twitter
X*
spike021 14 hours ago [-]
social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're looking at. most the platforms these days have features to block posts containing certain words or hashtags.
i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.
blharr 10 hours ago [-]
Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.
spike021 9 hours ago [-]
The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it doesn't serve me anything toxic.
For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.
pndy 9 hours ago [-]
Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there.
Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.
Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.
Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.
So there's this "curation" for me.
spike021 9 hours ago [-]
It seems like a lot of your issues with the major platforms are from years ago?
Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.
Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.
LtWorf 14 hours ago [-]
It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.
spike021 13 hours ago [-]
I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.
alyandon 16 hours ago [-]
Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
Goes with the territory of allowing remote code execution arbitrarily and all the time otherwise you won't be able to..
* checks notes *
read text on the internet.
15 hours ago [-]
amarant 3 hours ago [-]
When I first saw the headline, I thought it was referring to the servers and thought, damn, that is impressive!
Then I realised that it was a bit too impressive.
The possibility that a website would use 2.4gb ram did not even occur to me. What is it even doing with all that memory?
For reference civilisation 4 is runnable with 2gb ram.
galleywest200 9 hours ago [-]
I remember touring a chemistry lab in college and one student asked the panel of chemists how much LinkedIn mattered in their industry and they paused until one chemist asks “what is LinkedIn?”
eclipticplane 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
That code is minimal. It’s definitely not the source.
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
SilasX 15 hours ago [-]
Really? Then why else do adblockers seem to take up so much memory, other than an arms race with countermeasures that sites take?
torginus 12 hours ago [-]
While awful I would like for someone to explain what's in that 1.3GB.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
h4kunamata 9 hours ago [-]
All the data harvesting requires a lot of resources.
LinkedIn in 2026 means a social media full of slope AI posts where folks interact with it without noticing it.
Relationship posts, and even OF alike posts that you only see on Instagram/X
Linkedin is not longer a platform focused into work and networking.
starkeeper 48 minutes ago [-]
It is so abusive appropriation of our resources but at least we can close the tabs! It's sloppy.
nickdothutton 10 hours ago [-]
I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good. That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1 success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and there is nothing.[1]
The only reason to ever use LinkedIn is if you're in the process of finding a job. Other than that, it's a cesspit.
Even for that though, I've never used it, and I don't feel like I'm missing out.
apatheticonion 6 hours ago [-]
This is the part about the "wasm won't replace JavaScript" argument I see being slept on and why I am so disheartened about how practically no progress has been made on it.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think;
- vscode
- facebook
- jira
- linkedin
- reddit
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
AlOwain 2 hours ago [-]
I realize this is not an orthodox view, but WASM won't make the typical user have a better experience.
I think it could improve Photopea, the various office suite programs, and perhaps unknown unknowns.
But, much more important than the uncertain is the current Web which will become less accessible and closed.
The ease in reverse engineering JavaScript has more than once shown negligence and malice by Website developers (one example is the recent Google scandal, where they were diminishing the user experience on competing browsers).
If I wanted to run trusted programs, I would have used native binaries.
djmips 5 hours ago [-]
Geez. if you need Wasm to solve this then I just don't know...
apatheticonion 4 hours ago [-]
1) Try to use multi-threading on the web
2) It's not just me, all of the apps listed have the same issues. I know that in addition to Atlassian, Meta and Canva have sunk millions of dollars into writing custom bundlers.
hollerith 6 hours ago [-]
I'm going to resist wasm as much as practical. At least that is my current intention based on what I have learned from being a web user for the last 33.5 years.
First of all, wasm won't run in my browser (I determined that by evaluating `typeof WebAssembly` in the console tab of Developer Tools), a choice made not by me, but by the maintainer of my browser (Trivalent) -- probably for security reasons. I trust the maintainer of my browser about security-related decisions.
Besides security, another reason I am going to resist wasm is that it gives the site owner more power at my expense. The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions. For example, for years, I ran an extension that deletes "fixed elements" from web page (which didn't work on 100% of sites with fixed elements, but was still a welcome assistance to me because it worked on about 70% of sites). Wasm would make it more difficult for an extension to modify a site in ways that users with various preferences and various disabilities might want -- because code is more difficult to modify than data is, and the way web pages are now, there is a lot of data in a web page stored in 'locations' that an extension can programmatically find and modify.
In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and authors of software such as a browser extension acting on my behalf), and wasm would give them even more control.
It would be one thing if I used the web mainly to run sophisticated applications. I do not: I use it mainly to find simple data resources, mostly text and URLs, written by ordinary people such as yourself. When anyone anywhere wants to get some information out to the world and consider how best to do that, 99% percent of the time, the first thought that comes to mind is to put some text or maybe a video or some other kind of data on the web. I see sentiments like the one you expressed just now as interfering with the flow of this text or other kind of data to me -- by making the process more complicated, less customizable by the user and giving "middlemen" like advertiser more ways to profit from this flow.
Again: I never wanted or asked for a platform for the delivery of sophisticated applications over the internet (using web protocols) to get all mixed up and combined with the world's most important and most convenient platform that ordinary users (i.e., not site owners or professional technologists for the most part) use to publish and consume simple data objects like text and URLs and such.
apatheticonion 5 hours ago [-]
1) Wasm wouldn't prevent you from running those client scripts (e.g. remove fixed elements). That would still just be a script that modifies the DOM from an extension after the page is rendered/dom mutations occur.
2) wasm makes serving static content practical as server side rendering is economical. My previous employer, for instance, spends tens of millions of dollars every year running SSR servers - almost all of that would be eliminated if the backend could just run the client as wasm.
3) Scrapers (think puppeteer) would be faster and more resource efficient because they wouldn't need to start a JavaScript runtime to load a page.
4) You don't use Electron apps?
5) You may not, but everyone else uses rich interactive web applications. Think of the energy usage and cost savings there would be to the world.
hollerith 5 hours ago [-]
>You don't use Electron apps?
I've tentatively concluded the I should stay away from them for security reasons. That is what the Secureblue project recommends. I like vscode, but have no current need for it, so I did not install it the last time I installed an OS. If I ever start coding full time, I'd need something vscode-like and would try to make do with Github Codespaces. I've already made sure Codespaces runs in my browser (Trivalent with wasm, webgl and webgpu disabled) and have found a way to use it without a browser's tab bar and location bar taking up valuable screen real estate.
MintPaw 6 hours ago [-]
> The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions
This isn't related too directly to WASM, what you want is DOM rendering only, you would theoretically reject canvas and WebGL rendering I imagine. But you could create DOM nodes with WASM. The only difference is that WASM is not as easy to decompile, but I can't imagine you're really unminifiying and patching Javascript are you?
hollerith 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, I disabled WebGL many years ago (and Flash many years before that) when I was running Google Chrome. These months, I run Trivalent, which has it and WebGPU disabled by default.
I'm not a web dev, so maybe directing my hatred and resentment at wasm like I did in my first comment is a mistake. I don't like the idea of a site that draws its whole UI to a canvas (for reasons you can probably understand) and I have been assuming that that is impractical in just Javascript and that in practice, wasm is needed for that.
According to one of those services that gives fast answers to questions, Vanadium (the browser of the GrapheneOS project, which I also trust to give security recommendations) has wasm enabled, but that is a new development. Before late 2025, wasm worked only when JavaScript JIT was enabled, and the default was to have it disabled, which is how most users left it. It was possible for the user to enable it only on a few sites chosen by the user (per-site configurability).
I did not mean to broadcast misinformation, and will be more careful in the future. I do know that when the web gets new capabilites to make it a better application-delivery platform, my experience of the web strongly tends to get worse. The introduction of HTML5 and other technologies circa 2006 for example was a very salient example of that.
neeeeeeal 17 hours ago [-]
Is it not possible to collar the amount of RAM a browser tab is able to use? If not, would love for someone to develop this!
bvan 17 hours ago [-]
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
xantronix 17 hours ago [-]
Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely believe there is a better way to exist and work without being beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at the cost of everything else.
debesyla 17 hours ago [-]
For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts. It may be our local language specifics.)
mwkaufma 14 hours ago [-]
What does that have to do with RAM?
bvan 13 hours ago [-]
Absolutely nothing, as 99% of comments to the post. But it is the norm on HN it seems.
mwkaufma 10 hours ago [-]
bootlicker commentariat
sgustard 13 hours ago [-]
Yep, I've co-founded several companies and sold them for near $1B in aggregate. My investors and customers are on there, sometimes posting nice things about us. So I give it a thumbs-up and move on. Nothing worth rage-bating about. Mostly I go there to play linkedin.com/games.
jnovek 17 hours ago [-]
I think I’ve legitimately taken career hits because I cannot stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to me.
graysonk 17 hours ago [-]
“What trying to protect the feelings of a group of people who will never care about me taught me about b2b sales”
Aurornis 16 hours ago [-]
The VCs I know think the LinkedIn feed is a joke, too.
Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
isatty 17 hours ago [-]
I give 0 fucks about it.
throwuxiytayq 14 hours ago [-]
I know a lot of people who use LinkedIn, and I don't think any of them are happy with their job. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
phyzome 15 hours ago [-]
I sell my labor. I don't sell my respect.
aquir 17 hours ago [-]
Web developers of HN: how is this possible? What can use 1.2GB RAM for a website? Preloaded all videos?
lkbm 16 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind this is memory used by a browser tab, not "how bug the website is". Probably a memory leak as the feed is scrolled or something, but it is a massive download when you first load the page.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
unselect5917 7 hours ago [-]
You got me curious so I checked latest release Brave: new "blank" tab. 47.8MB
socalgal2 15 hours ago [-]
Honestly, while I'm sure Linked is bloated, HN in Chrome is taking 204meg for the front page on my MBP. That's with no images, no videos, a minimal amount of css. `document.body.textContent.length` says 4278
Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.
xantronix 16 hours ago [-]
That's the sort of question a reasonable person would ask. To answer this correctly, you need to occupy the mind of a madman. Now, we've got a boatload of KPIs to optimise or our necks are on the chopping block!
jackkinsella 16 hours ago [-]
Probably a memory leak
But other ideas:
- all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed
- FE indexed search engine
- bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
SilasX 15 hours ago [-]
Then why does pretty much every site seem to have a "memory leak" of this type (besides unicorns like HN that try to be minimal)?
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
Nearly all the top level comments are about the value of Linkedin at all rather than the technical reasons that 2.4G of RAM for a website is atrocious.
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
himata4113 9 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare has the same issue with their new horrible dashboard, 2.1 GB across ONE tab.
sheepscreek 7 hours ago [-]
In a RAM starved world — LinkedIn deserves fewer users. In fact, no users. This service is sadly one of the most useless things out there, right next to Facebook.
kristopolous 19 hours ago [-]
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
kjkjadksj 15 hours ago [-]
Most of the heavies in my industry don’t even bother with linkedin. They get plenty of applications on their career pages already I guess. Only really startups (which aren’t really hiring at all) and the occasional blast from a middle weight company. There are more jobs for ai trainer than real jobs on linkedin right now.
dzonga 19 hours ago [-]
for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
mrweasel 17 hours ago [-]
It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the past.
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
kjkjadksj 15 hours ago [-]
I think before linkedin people were doing this with email and phone. Literally cold calling your old coworkers. Not sure linkedin really created anything that didn’t exist previously especially if you live in some major hub of industry as you indicate.
mrweasel 15 hours ago [-]
It did make it easier though. I don't have to keep a list of potentially outdated phone numbers and email adresses. LinkedIn makes it much simpler to broadcast your availability.
Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you somehow connected with social-media people or marketing people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't form coherent sentences and they can't even sell themselves.
You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume, availability status and your email address and it would be fine.
sp1982 18 hours ago [-]
try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job search platform, has good coverage of startups and public companies but I’d still recommend to use LI for network tho
catcowcostume 19 hours ago [-]
??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment) even use Slack?
zffr 9 hours ago [-]
The performance of both the website and the iOS app is also not great. On the iOS app, I frequently see frames dropped and scrolling is sometimes blocked for up to a second or more at a time.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
Bender 11 hours ago [-]
It's not just memory. I've never been able to scroll back more than about 6 days in the LinkedIn feed. I slows to a crawl and this was on a gaming machine with 64GB of ram. I tried raising all the limits in the browser with only marginal gains. If they had an option to instead use pagination with say 100 items per page I think it might get a little better.
enesozt 17 hours ago [-]
I rarely use Linkedin but for my new app that I'm building the Linkedin is good platform to find out & engage possible customers so last few weeks I'm using it more. But man.. so sorry for people using it daily. Such a bad experience. I didn't surprise it takes that amount of RAM because every component in the page is laggy, you feel very unsafe. You're getting some error but you have no idea what it is. Don't wanna mention about the content at all. But like many people mentioned in the comments it's still the number one place for their work
SlightlyLeftPad 15 hours ago [-]
I was searching for jobs using it a while ago and it consumed 80 percent of my iphone’s battery in under 40 minutes. It’s quite impressive. Not even highest end mobile games can do that.
throwatdem12311 18 hours ago [-]
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
namegulf 13 hours ago [-]
We're back in the IE era (now with chrome and other browsers) where websites are bloated with ton of js, css, websockets, background services hogging memory.
May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background service, websockets, etc.,
With option to disable background service workers.
tim333 12 hours ago [-]
The behaviour is a bit weird - I just opened mine and in Chrome task manager it showed the ram use climbing to 2.8GB, but in the network console it only shows a few 10s of mb download. I wonder what the discrepancy is? The site seemed to notice the console was open and behaved differently also.
throwaway_19sz 12 hours ago [-]
I think that’s normal, I would expect RAM use to dwarf network transfer on most modern JS-heavy sites.
If a page downloads 1MB JSON, that could easily take 10MB (maybe much more?) RAM when parsed into an object. And JS code itself probably has a similar increase in size just by getting parsed into an AST. And all that is before really executing anything - once the dozens of shitty third party scripts start whirring, they will generate tons of uncollectible garbage because they are written by miserable people who don’t give a shit, understandably. And I bet LinkedIn has a hell of a lot of junk third party scripts injected by random spies I working in various corporate departments who need to spy on users to collect data to persuade their boss to let them do some dumb project to prove they deserve their job.
Tabs also render a bunch of compositor layers as bitmaps stored in VRAM, or just RAM, for smooth scrolling. Oh and there’s the DOM, I bet that adds up. I’m probably only scratching the surface. There’s so much going on in a browser tab. The front end is a marvel of engineering. Sites like LinkedIn of course exploit this for banal evil, sadly.
tim333 8 hours ago [-]
It's quite impressive though. I'd estimate the content on my screen is about 1MB if you'd just sent it as images and html so that's quite a junk to content ratio.
arikrahman 7 hours ago [-]
Add the fact that dark reader bricks the website, I'm surprised it's not eating even more RAM.
astrospective 16 hours ago [-]
I keep my profile updated as a consultant because it lets clients and others in my company get a fuller gauge than my one pager. I’ve also got my most recent and prior job from having a price and responding to the right recruiter, I’ve also had a handful of interviews as well, which is honestly more than I’ve gotten from trying to apply to random job board postings.
inetknght 17 hours ago [-]
It also constantly uses about 50% of my CPU.
I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's it. Fuck LinkedIn.
__natty__ 18 hours ago [-]
And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.
rollulus 16 hours ago [-]
They do other unholy things. I don’t know what, but consistently while playing music on my HomePod opening that site makes it stutter within a few minutes, fully stop working shortly afterwards and it needs a reboot to work again.
01jonny01 10 hours ago [-]
Notably mentions should be given to Stripe (dashboard) at ~900 MB and Youtube.com at ~1 GB on watch pages.
I know I'm old, but I now find LinkedIn to be my favorite social media site, and I'll explain why.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
podgorniy 16 hours ago [-]
> destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD
Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
My postings on LinkedIn have definitely had direct consequences in my professional life.
I consider them all good because ultimately if you get upset by the way I behave then that's probably going to be true if we work together also.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find out later that it's because I hurt their feelings inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web development as largely being inefficient in resources or something.
jrm4 13 hours ago [-]
Love this response, and as some one who does perhaps a bit too much spending/wasting time on other types of social media, including here, I've made a conscious decision to post on LinkedIn more.
And it's such a difference. It forces me to slow down and think about a lot of things. The most important being: Is this even worth posting AT ALL?
And then, okay -- how can I say this in a future-proof way that both appeals to normies and tech folk like myself. I feel like I'll be doing better the more I post to places like that, and maybe less here?
phyzome 15 hours ago [-]
There was a bit of a scandal at my employer some years back and IIRC it was kicked off by someone posting/boosting some really questionable stuff on LinkedIn.
Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
jrm4 13 hours ago [-]
No, but as I've said below, this isn't about what will actually strongly happen, but what I think people think. I could be wrong here.
kmijyiyxfbklao 13 hours ago [-]
Well if that gets us LinkedIn, we should move as far away from that as possible, and not listen to the people who want real names everywhere.
adi_pradhan 16 hours ago [-]
LOL you've nailed LinkedinSpeak here
jrm4 16 hours ago [-]
Let me try again, then
If you fuck up badly on here, no one cares at all
If you fuck up badly on Twitter, maybe someone cares
If you fuck up badly on Facebook, people you know find out, maybe no one else.
If you fuck up badly on LinkedIn, you have to find a new job and you've stained yourself in this market.
Thus, anyone posting to LinkedIn is subconsciously saying -- I'm aware that this might STRONGLY hinder my ability to eat but I'm posting it anyway because I think it is that important for some reason. (now that REASON may be fluffy, but still.)
ramon156 16 hours ago [-]
Oh, you were not joking.
No, people do not care. You're not a celeb. This is textbook spotlight effect.
Your life becomes a lot more enjoyable if you don't take yourself so serious, try it sometime
jrm4 16 hours ago [-]
I generally agree with what you're saying here -- I don't mean that "other people ACTUALLY care."
I suppose -- I'm trying to explain why I believe the choice, and thus the material itself, to post LinkedIn might be special in a way that the rest might not?
Like I'm guessing a lot of people do fall into the "spotlight effect" and that affects what is posted.
booleandilemma 14 hours ago [-]
I disagree completely. If you post something racist on LinkedIn you're probably going to lose your job. Try it, if you don't believe me. If you post something racist here you're going to get downvoted.
mancerayder 16 hours ago [-]
This can be read as why to avoid LinkedIn. Job searching is already hard, if you manage to land an interview you still have to spend time, as an old dude, studying Leetcode like you're a kid with five years experience instead of twenty. Then it's competitive. Etc.
So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones, or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and ties, with Leader next to their names.
jrm4 16 hours ago [-]
I agree with you generally; what I am saying here right now is that how people behave on LinkedIn creates an interesting filter for content in this way in the present, without saying necessarily SHOULD people behave this way.
gitaarik 3 hours ago [-]
Can't you delete your LinkedIn posts anymore after you posted them?
djmips 5 hours ago [-]
"and I'll explain why."
p_ing 16 hours ago [-]
This isn't all that accurate. Unless Chrome only presents the private working set, this will include shared or sharable memory.
barbegal 18 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.
lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
Or another process will die at random instead, which might be your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10% chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image you were working on in Gimp...
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
Pannoniae 15 hours ago [-]
I dunno I have 96GB of RAM and I still get the whole "system dies due to resource exhaustion" thing. Yesterday I managed to somehow crash DWM from handle exhaustion. Man, people really waste resources....
surajrmal 18 hours ago [-]
That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.
lucb1e 18 hours ago [-]
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
surajrmal 17 hours ago [-]
This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.
g947o 14 hours ago [-]
Reclaiming memory is not free.
It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares about user experience.
itopaloglu83 18 hours ago [-]
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
progval 18 hours ago [-]
It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.
surajrmal 18 hours ago [-]
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
progval 14 hours ago [-]
Linux supports it too through madvise():
MADV_FREE (since Linux 4.5)
The application no longer requires the pages in the range
specified by addr and size. The kernel can thus free these
pages, but the freeing could be delayed until memory
pressure occurs.
and
MADV_DONTNEED
Do not expect access in the near future. (For the time
being, the application is finished with the given range, so
the kernel can free resources associated with it.)
After a successful MADV_DONTNEED operation, the semantics
of memory access in the specified region are changed:
subsequent accesses of pages in the range will succeed, but
will result in either repopulating the memory contents from
the up-to-date contents of the underlying mapped file (for
shared file mappings, shared anonymous mappings, and shmem-
based techniques such as System V shared memory segments)
or zero-fill-on-demand pages for anonymous private
mappings.
Does Chrome use it, though?
maccard 18 hours ago [-]
I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not LinkedIn
djmips 5 hours ago [-]
Nope - I have to close Chrome in order to compile.
general_reveal 18 hours ago [-]
Um.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
lucasfin000 18 hours ago [-]
uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs automatically. You should try out both.
temp0826 17 hours ago [-]
Step 0- don't use a browser created by an ad company
kalleboo 17 hours ago [-]
I use a Mac which has really good memory management but still seeing that 10 GB of my SSD is clogged up with useless crap just because modern development systems are complete and utter crap feels bad.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
That’s nothing. I’ve seen the Azure portal using >5gb in a single chrome tab.
CrzyLngPwd 16 hours ago [-]
Closed mine ages ago, along with most of my social media. No need for it, never was a need for it.
reboot81 10 hours ago [-]
Its owned by Microsoft. They sell RAM.
platevoltage 4 hours ago [-]
All of those totally real "Well said!!" comments really bog down the system.
ianberdin 12 hours ago [-]
Are they affiliated with RAM sellers?
rixed 17 hours ago [-]
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
steveharing1 18 hours ago [-]
For sure there is more to what they just show
Uptrenda 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder how we might avoid this. It seems like often on this site we talk about matters of taste: like examples of good and bad systems. I wonder if there's a book focused on developing taste as an engineer, designer, etc in systems.
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
user070223 18 hours ago [-]
Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
hk1337 8 hours ago [-]
What browser?
fredgrott 18 hours ago [-]
LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it....
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
itopaloglu83 18 hours ago [-]
And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with interacting with one more ad.
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
WhereIsTheTruth 1 hours ago [-]
Another W for Microslop
We truly should be proud of that joke of a company
system2 12 hours ago [-]
I think it is an accomplishment to bloat a website to a point where the user needs to download 40-100mb per page. Even if I try, I can't find the right JS files to make it that large. How do they even make JS files this big?
gamblor956 13 hours ago [-]
As someone pointed out below, the problem is not entirely (or even mostly) LinkedIn. HN, a text-only website, consumes several hundred MB of RAM on his Mac. On Firefox on my Windows computer, each HN tab I have open consumes at least 30 MB of RAM...for pure text...
The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very resource efficient because the programmers behind them have powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful computers for their development, which hides all of the inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few minutes of scrolling).
It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities. Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
The solution: make browser and website developers use slower and less powerful computers than their average user/visitor will use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed immediately.
cmiles8 17 hours ago [-]
Beyond being useful for a quick check on someone’s career history, LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters pretending to be experts in things while the actual experts never post about the subject on LinkedIn.
18 hours ago [-]
delduca 17 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get recruiters visibility.
arun6582 20 hours ago [-]
linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
ghywertelling 18 hours ago [-]
If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make use of Zipf’s Law to promote good content. Also through graph analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might engage with.
porise 20 hours ago [-]
It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more useful than LinkedIn.
maccard 18 hours ago [-]
Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.
That and its dog slow, of course.
eddyg 17 hours ago [-]
Jira (hasn’t been JIRA for a long time) is great when you have proper Jira governance in place, with admins who say “no, you can’t have a new custom field, use this one with a new context”, configure good workflow transitions with validators and conditions, design appropriate create, view and edit screens (instead of using the same one for three separate operations), etc. The problem is always crappy administration, not Jira. Jira can be fantastic when properly managed.
tom1337 19 hours ago [-]
kinda offtopic but as somehow currently outgrowing trellos capabilities, do you have any good suggestions instead of Jira?
maccard 18 hours ago [-]
The answer is unfortunately jira.
menno-dot-ai 17 hours ago [-]
Gitlab has pretty good Kanban functionality. People tend to hate Jira but there aren't a lot of great alternatives
calderwoodra 18 hours ago [-]
Linear
hsbauauvhabzb 11 hours ago [-]
Ironically if you use jira you probably should be using LinkedIn to escape it.
Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
mckirk 19 hours ago [-]
I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling a virtual leaderboard in front of it.
gessha 18 hours ago [-]
But there’s so many good games out there. Check out Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books. Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own puzzle game!
z3ratul163071 17 hours ago [-]
well it is a microslop product, what do you expect?
b8 17 hours ago [-]
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
[0] He holds the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX.
I don't understand though why performance (I.e. using it properly) is not a consideration with these companies that are valued above $100 billion
like, do these poor pitiful big tech companies only have the resources to do so when they hit the 2 trillion mark or something?
Is it time for vanilla.js to shine again with Element.setHTML()?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...
It's a bit unfortunate that several calls to .setHTML() can't be batched so that several .setHTML() calls get executed together to minimize page redraws.
One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.
It's also not a problem with the react compiler.
Ben Horowitz recalled asking Zuck what his engineer onboarding process was when the latter complained to him about how it took them very long to make changes to code. He basically didn't have any.
> Faster sites lead to better user engagement.
> Faster sites lead to better user retention.
> Faster sites lead to higher conversions.
If it's true that nobody is getting promoted for improving web app performance, that seems like an opportunity. Build an org that rewards web app performance gains, and (in theory) enjoy more users and more money.
The problem with performance in wep apps is often not the omg too much render. But is actually processing and memory use. Chromium loves to eat as much ram as possible and the state management world of web apps loves immutability. What happens when you create new state anytime something changes and v8 then needs to recompile an optimized structure for that state coupled with thrashing the gc? You already know.
I hate the immutable trend in wep apps. I get it but the performance is dogshite. Most web apps i have worked on spend about 10% of their cpu time…garbage collecting and the rest doing complicated deep state comparisons every time you hover on a button.
Rant over.
It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.
It is to do with websites essentially baking in their own browser written in javascript to track as much user behavior as possible.
When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
Moved the backend to Tauri v2 and decoupled heavy dependencies (like ffmpeg) so they hydrate via Rust at launch. The macOS payload dropped to 30MB, and idle RAM settled under 80MB.
Skipping the default Chromium bundle saves an absurd amount of overhead.
Its quite insane
>> AWS has a similar RAM consumption.
Makes no sense to me...
The ‘dashboard’, the ‘interface’? Reminds me of coworkers who used to refer to desktop PC cases as the hard drive, or people who refer to the web as ‘Google’.
I have to say I haven't spotted anything at this brutality scale neither before, not after this incident. Also, I had no third-party adblocking software deployed, just Firefox's native defaults. (I use quite a few other extensions, userscripts and userstyles, though, so I cannot rule out some clash induced by them.)
I see LI is using protechts.net stuff in hidden iframes with charming id="humanThirdPartyIframe" and even nicer id="humanSecurityEnforcerIframe". Lovely!
[1] https://pasteboard.co/9eDQ84szy3d9.jpg
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
I believe the same applies to many others as well
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
https://www.beeper.com/
The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
How? Legitimate question.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
1. That’s the default presumption (rather than someone doing networking for their current role)
2. Where “looking for another job” is a point of contention
Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with others in the industry. And good teams are made up of people with good communication skills who want to be there.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a termination process including severance.
I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
https://www.cringebot3000.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to jumpstart your algorithm.
This works.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
If you aren’t in a location with meetups , the best bet is finding online game dev communities.
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
It's useless otherwise.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?
Just close the tabs and never open LinkedIn again.
Baffles me ui like this exists in 2026.
Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
Maybe we should finally regulate these addict boxes as the dangerous substances they are.
Older laptops already choke on LinkedIn. Adding fake drag on top of a heavy page is like putting a speed bump in front of a stalled car.
Radioationed hardened for space though — $50k-$100k in 70s dollars, roughly the price of a Silicon Valley house back then - $300k-$600k in today's money.
Also, lead is extremely dense.
Um, I guess in that there are naturally occurring isotopes of lead that are unstable. But those are very rare and can be removed. By this standard, the chips themselves are radioactive since they are made of silicon. By this standard, you, everything you eat, every plant and animal is radioactive since there are trace isotopes of carbon that are radioactive (that's how carbon dating works). And sunlight is very radioactive by this standard.
However, the materials we actually use in chips is highly processed and radioactive isotopes will likely be removed if a centrifuge was used in any step in concentration process. Likewise the lead used in a space shield will probably have similar processing of the material
"Also, lead is extremely dense."
This is the real reason lead isn't used. There are plenty of other elements that shield ionizing radiation quite well and are less dense. However, they are also more expensive than lead which is why we use lead on earth for shielding (its cheap) and use something else in space (where density is more important than price).
edit: ...when you don't have the protection of the atmosphere to begin with*
LinkedIn on the other hand has user behavior, computer details etc. that’s a lot of interesting data.
Yes, but Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
EDIT: Just mind boggling to get d/v'ed for pointing out voyager doesn't have to render fonts or images...
I completely exit my web browser(s) at least 1x per day, and use bookmarks to get back to pages I need. As a result, I don't have issues with memory leaks or unbounded growth of RAM use. For me, its just the "proper" way to use a program like a web browser, but I'm old enough to be from the era that restarting programs and the OS could fix issues. I recognize that most people feel it is unreasonable to quit the browser, pretty much ever.
Are you aware of what LinkedIn is? How the app behaves?
While it’s obscene, I am not surprised at all.
Microsoft, who has owned LinkedIn since 2016, has recently been making headlines because recently they fired a lot of their engineers and QA staff and are now essentially vibecoding huge chunks of their enterprise.
What's more, Microsoft never paid the really big bucks like the FAANG companies, and so it's more or less an open secret that at the height of the tech hiring frenzy Microsoft had to fight for B-tier engineers that weren't good enough to work at e.g. Apple.
So, it's been 10 years, which is long enough for that trademark Microsoft mediocrity to seep into LinkedIn. And they're probably vibe coding everything. That's how you get to gigs.
I never knew this open secret. In my day msft was very glamorous and I guess something like oracle played the role you're ascribing to msft now. I wonder what their strategy was? (I tend to doubt this was a careless/unexamined decision.) Maybe they figured that paying extra for individuals doesn't get you much if you have enough structure in place? A Bill Bellichik approach to hiring. Is the relationship you're making (FAANG salaries == better products) accepted as true?
FAANG (at least the few I’m familiar with) tend to be engineering companies. They hire talented engineers who can work from first principles and build products with profitable unit economics that solve interesting new problems. I don’t think Microsoft even knows what software engineering would mean.
:)
If you have significantly more images loaded in RAM than what fits on your screen, something wrong is going on. (Not counting the filesystem cache here, because it works in a best effort way).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.
I’ve heard that LinkedIn searches for several hundred known browser plugins to identify potential abusive users. If the “simple chat apps” aren’t doing that, then it’s apples-to-oranges.
Google+ had promise in that the many problems of the other platforms could be curtailed with tooling to make your social experience effectively local (not necessarily geographically).
Having said that all of that, have you tried mastodon?
As an aside, I'm not happy with Discord as a platform so I'm working on my own clone with some common identity stuff but with community servers run independently. That is, there are some "federated" identity providers so community servers can agree on identity across servers, then each community server runs its own thing. The trust model is based on the community server - private channels in a community server are not E2E encrypted, you must trust the server. But DMs and DM groups are E2E encrypted and use mutual community servers as relays (with a special class of relay server for people who want to DM but don't have an actual mutual server). I'm having fun with it. Now if only I could figure out why my video has such high latency (even locally!).
Once upon a time, shouting "WTF are they thinking?" into the void was kinda understandable, but these days you can literally just ask them by changing a URL. Don't even have to go to a dodgy pub in an iffy part of town.
That said, assuming bad faith is so common these days, many people assume you're lying if your stated motives don't match their preconceptions.
A brutal reality to navigate if you're not acting in bad faith.
I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.
So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.
AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.
What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.
There are tons though.
When MySpace came out, the profile was the home page for a lot of people, and the content orbited around that. Coupled with the mass movement to represent oneself faithfully online as in the real world, (maybe for banking, maybe for surveillance), I think social media sort of operates as a trap. On facebook, you are encouraged to upload your real photos of drunken night out, family vacation, or whatever IDs you in life. On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self. I have a lot to say on this, but I think I'll just leave it at topic vs profile.
I think in reality "social media" is a set of properties all of which lead to different effects in the discourse on the site. This site may not have individualized ranking algorithms but it has open registration and crowdsourced ranking which gives it a lot of the same benefits and failure modes of Reddit. Unlike Reddit, HN has a professional (meaning: paid) mod staff, which leads to different behaviors than Reddit.
It's all just a spectrum and I think it's more rigorous to think of these things as a spectrum rather than trying to play this silly intellectual game of defitinioneering to make the social media you don't like sound bad and the ones you like sound good. Focusing on cause and effect can be a more effective way to craft intentional social spaces rather than finger pointing.
hn is largely a technology oriented link aggregator with discussions, and probably some would also classify it as a forum. Or as social news site as goes on wikipedia among fark, slashdot and reddit. But beside a voting system, simple profiles there's nothing else - this is nearly an experience unlike anything large social network services offer.
A typical social media platform mainly exists around main stream/feed, sharing content and building profile or groups dedicated to particular topics or around known brands. That's of course the perfect unstained image because everything falls apart when we start getting into the details, such as algorithms in the work, content quality and moderation and so on.
With a site like HN, everyone sees the same front page at a given time. What makes it to the front page is primarily determined by all users voting up articles or moderating them. Yes, there's some algorithmic sauce behind it that weights votes and flags differently based on some other criteria, but the dominating factor is user votes and flags. And, again, everyone sees the same ordering of articles if they load the page at the same time.
HN is centered around topics and articles. Social media is centered around individuals and what they personally choose to post and promote.
Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.
I do personally think the karma thing is an aspect , because it's gamed everywhere to huge advantage -- but the altruistic view is that its a branch of moderation, an effort to democratize the removal of obviously bad actors while still facilitating dissenting or contrary speech.
I also know that's a naive view.
IIRC they tried at some point incorporating G+ on youtube but that didn't work either
Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.
The videos and comments on YT are superb training data, every bit as good as Google+ was.
In 2025, YouTube’s total revenue (advertising + subscriptions like YouTube Premium and TV) surpassed $60 billion. If they spun out YT it would have a market cap $500-600bn putting it in the top 20 companies. Google+ would never have been worth much as the 7th most popular social network.
This I find hard to believe. Most YT comments are just noise. Even the UX of writing comments in YT is just terrible. Comments randomly appear and disappear, and you are never sure if it is some yt algorithm, a technical issue or specific moderation practice. I am pretty sure if they valued yt comments as data, they would have put a bit more effort into that side of their platform.
No ads was a huge plus. Take away the financial incentive and you get rid of most of the worst behavior.
Their "social media" aspect sucks. LinkedIn is 99% bullshit posts about people hyping up they have "learned lessons" or sucking up to whoever just hired them.
Kafka is a neat piece of engineering though, I'll grant you that.
Knowing that doesn't make LinkedIn a better platform in my eyes, on the contrary. It's more an 'if you pay you can do whatever you want' kinda thing.
X*
i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.
For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.
Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.
Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.
Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.
So there's this "curation" for me.
Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.
Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.
It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.
* checks notes *
read text on the internet.
Then I realised that it was a bit too impressive.
The possibility that a website would use 2.4gb ram did not even occur to me. What is it even doing with all that memory?
For reference civilisation 4 is runnable with 2gb ram.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
Given all the sales and recruiting spam I get, I think it’s a good thing that LinkedIn is making efforts to detect people using garbage plugins that scrape data and send it to their servers or prepare it for mass spamming.
In fact it's one of my major sources of unsatisfied curiousity is for someone to show a breakdown of a memory dump of a browser, to see, what happens to those gigabytes of memory consumed.
I have heard an explanation that browsers just use free ram, because unused ram is wasted, but that feels flimsy to me. It's not the browsers job to hog ram on the off chance it might need it, just ask the OS when you actually do.
LinkedIn in 2026 means a social media full of slope AI posts where folks interact with it without noticing it.
Relationship posts, and even OF alike posts that you only see on Instagram/X
Linkedin is not longer a platform focused into work and networking.
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
Even for that though, I've never used it, and I don't feel like I'm missing out.
Most trivial apps don't need to be optimized, and for them, JavaScript is fine.
But for complex interactive web applications - it really fuggin matters.
Think; - vscode
- facebook
- jira
- linkedin
- reddit
There's no reason these applications should be slow, single threaded, and consume gigabytes of memory - but that's a limitation of the technology.
I know first hand that Atlassian has spent millions of dollars building bundlers in different forms just to save a few milliseconds of load time.
Just let me write the front end in Rust and if the browser detects that no JavaScript is running - don't start a JavaScript engine.
While you're at it, improve the SharedWorker story so I can effectively share data between tabs (enables cross tab sync, great for chat apps and local caching). I recently tried to make an offline-only application with a wasm-based sqlite implementation in a SharedWorker and the API just doesn't work.
I think it could improve Photopea, the various office suite programs, and perhaps unknown unknowns.
But, much more important than the uncertain is the current Web which will become less accessible and closed.
The ease in reverse engineering JavaScript has more than once shown negligence and malice by Website developers (one example is the recent Google scandal, where they were diminishing the user experience on competing browsers).
If I wanted to run trusted programs, I would have used native binaries.
2) It's not just me, all of the apps listed have the same issues. I know that in addition to Atlassian, Meta and Canva have sunk millions of dollars into writing custom bundlers.
First of all, wasm won't run in my browser (I determined that by evaluating `typeof WebAssembly` in the console tab of Developer Tools), a choice made not by me, but by the maintainer of my browser (Trivalent) -- probably for security reasons. I trust the maintainer of my browser about security-related decisions.
Besides security, another reason I am going to resist wasm is that it gives the site owner more power at my expense. The way it is now, I can modify web sites using extensions. For example, for years, I ran an extension that deletes "fixed elements" from web page (which didn't work on 100% of sites with fixed elements, but was still a welcome assistance to me because it worked on about 70% of sites). Wasm would make it more difficult for an extension to modify a site in ways that users with various preferences and various disabilities might want -- because code is more difficult to modify than data is, and the way web pages are now, there is a lot of data in a web page stored in 'locations' that an extension can programmatically find and modify.
In summary, site owners already have too much control over my experience (relative to me and authors of software such as a browser extension acting on my behalf), and wasm would give them even more control.
It would be one thing if I used the web mainly to run sophisticated applications. I do not: I use it mainly to find simple data resources, mostly text and URLs, written by ordinary people such as yourself. When anyone anywhere wants to get some information out to the world and consider how best to do that, 99% percent of the time, the first thought that comes to mind is to put some text or maybe a video or some other kind of data on the web. I see sentiments like the one you expressed just now as interfering with the flow of this text or other kind of data to me -- by making the process more complicated, less customizable by the user and giving "middlemen" like advertiser more ways to profit from this flow.
Again: I never wanted or asked for a platform for the delivery of sophisticated applications over the internet (using web protocols) to get all mixed up and combined with the world's most important and most convenient platform that ordinary users (i.e., not site owners or professional technologists for the most part) use to publish and consume simple data objects like text and URLs and such.
2) wasm makes serving static content practical as server side rendering is economical. My previous employer, for instance, spends tens of millions of dollars every year running SSR servers - almost all of that would be eliminated if the backend could just run the client as wasm.
3) Scrapers (think puppeteer) would be faster and more resource efficient because they wouldn't need to start a JavaScript runtime to load a page.
4) You don't use Electron apps?
5) You may not, but everyone else uses rich interactive web applications. Think of the energy usage and cost savings there would be to the world.
I've tentatively concluded the I should stay away from them for security reasons. That is what the Secureblue project recommends. I like vscode, but have no current need for it, so I did not install it the last time I installed an OS. If I ever start coding full time, I'd need something vscode-like and would try to make do with Github Codespaces. I've already made sure Codespaces runs in my browser (Trivalent with wasm, webgl and webgpu disabled) and have found a way to use it without a browser's tab bar and location bar taking up valuable screen real estate.
This isn't related too directly to WASM, what you want is DOM rendering only, you would theoretically reject canvas and WebGL rendering I imagine. But you could create DOM nodes with WASM. The only difference is that WASM is not as easy to decompile, but I can't imagine you're really unminifiying and patching Javascript are you?
I'm not a web dev, so maybe directing my hatred and resentment at wasm like I did in my first comment is a mistake. I don't like the idea of a site that draws its whole UI to a canvas (for reasons you can probably understand) and I have been assuming that that is impractical in just Javascript and that in practice, wasm is needed for that.
According to one of those services that gives fast answers to questions, Vanadium (the browser of the GrapheneOS project, which I also trust to give security recommendations) has wasm enabled, but that is a new development. Before late 2025, wasm worked only when JavaScript JIT was enabled, and the default was to have it disabled, which is how most users left it. It was possible for the user to enable it only on a few sites chosen by the user (per-site configurability).
I did not mean to broadcast misinformation, and will be more careful in the future. I do know that when the web gets new capabilites to make it a better application-delivery platform, my experience of the web strongly tends to get worse. The introduction of HTML5 and other technologies circa 2006 for example was a very salient example of that.
Most people use it for messaging and keeping contacts. The feed and the posturing that occurs on it is a weird sideshow.
I'm seeing 72MB in the network tab (7MB transferred--that's due to compression). An incredible 10MB is HTML (800K transferred), a more incredible 11MB of CSS (500K transferred), 25MB of JS (3MB transferred), 16MB XHR (1MB), 17MB images (1.7MB transferred).
A lot of the HTML is inline JS in `window.__como_rehydration__` -- letting a server-side rendered be dynamic as if it were fully client-side rendered.
The size of the CSS also presents in bloated HTML. Why not have 18 classes on your button? `<button class="_5732bd68 _4cbf0195 _00dac29f _737a8a8c b241f848 _9572431e _56fd9a8a ff367c5b f7a6e63a aa661bbd b1e8a5cc d6e0deb3 _0582e059 f7e4b8f0 f9d5d3fb e037a5e8 _340d09d4 fbc7d17b" ...`
Checking again it went down to 78meg. Still 78MEG!!! Thats over 1200 Apple IIs, Commodore 64s. I use to run Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, and in it run Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, on machines with 4meg. Now, a simple page of text is taking 78
I get why to some degree. It's highres 32bit display, multi-layered. The screen itself requires 36meg (40bit RGBA, 40bit because it's an HDR display). Each window itself is a texture. If the window is the same size as the screen then that's 36meg. Font Glpyhs are high-res antialias.
Compare that to my Windows 3.1 machine. OSes didn't use textures then and didn't anti-alias. GPUs didn't exist and the screen was 1024x768 or something small like that. Software rendering from fonts that were 1 bit per pixel.
I'm not saying that excuses browsers nor LinkedIn. Rather, if you go add up the basic pieces you'll find that part of the reason these things take lots of memory is because these things take lots of memory.
But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)
Can we talk about how it's possible that any application short of video editing can require so much RAM?
In fact, I've done video editing on computers with 1GiB of RAM back in 2004 and it worked fine, (for the 1024x768 resolution which was en vogue at the time)..
Is linkedin doing something complex? Is there a reason that it requires more resources than my entire computer from 20 years ago, or my entire operating system, text editor and compiler today?
Why not?
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
Most of LinkedIn is just garbage though, especially if you somehow connected with social-media people or marketing people. Marketing people on LinkedIn are weird, they can't form coherent sentences and they can't even sell themselves.
You could strip down LinkedIn down to your resume, availability status and your email address and it would be fine.
LinkedIn's feed is certainly not simple, but modern iPhones should be more than capable of rendering it at 60fps.
May be its time for browser vendors to show the consumption (right now they show memory usage) by features i.e background service, websockets, etc.,
With option to disable background service workers.
If a page downloads 1MB JSON, that could easily take 10MB (maybe much more?) RAM when parsed into an object. And JS code itself probably has a similar increase in size just by getting parsed into an AST. And all that is before really executing anything - once the dozens of shitty third party scripts start whirring, they will generate tons of uncollectible garbage because they are written by miserable people who don’t give a shit, understandably. And I bet LinkedIn has a hell of a lot of junk third party scripts injected by random spies I working in various corporate departments who need to spy on users to collect data to persuade their boss to let them do some dumb project to prove they deserve their job.
Tabs also render a bunch of compositor layers as bitmaps stored in VRAM, or just RAM, for smooth scrolling. Oh and there’s the DOM, I bet that adds up. I’m probably only scratching the surface. There’s so much going on in a browser tab. The front end is a marvel of engineering. Sites like LinkedIn of course exploit this for banal evil, sadly.
I only open LinkedIn... very rarely. When done, I just close it.
Don't scroll. Don't read stories. Don't do anything except message recruiters. Get them into email or a phone call. That's it. Fuck LinkedIn.
Skin in the game. Yes, it's full of fluffy sounding things, but with a little patience and reading between lines, it's extremely valuable and here's why:
Overwhelmingly most of the time -- when someone posts anything there -- it has the potential to directly quickly improve, or more importantly destroy, their own LIVELIHOOD. It feels like the opposite, but making the choice to post there is a huge risk.
Now, that might come with fluff, of course -- but in a way you could reasonably argue it is the REALEST social media site of them all.
Do you have examples of such occasions when the linkedin post was actually the cause?
I consider them all good because ultimately if you get upset by the way I behave then that's probably going to be true if we work together also.
Sometimes people like to tell me that I'm very authentic and it's clear that I'm not trying to suck up to anyone, which they respect. Some people quietly retreat from me and I find out later that it's because I hurt their feelings inadvertently by shitting on AI or calling out web development as largely being inefficient in resources or something.
And it's such a difference. It forces me to slow down and think about a lot of things. The most important being: Is this even worth posting AT ALL?
And then, okay -- how can I say this in a future-proof way that both appeals to normies and tech folk like myself. I feel like I'll be doing better the more I post to places like that, and maybe less here?
Amusingly, this was someone high up in HR.
If you fuck up badly on here, no one cares at all
If you fuck up badly on Twitter, maybe someone cares
If you fuck up badly on Facebook, people you know find out, maybe no one else.
If you fuck up badly on LinkedIn, you have to find a new job and you've stained yourself in this market.
Thus, anyone posting to LinkedIn is subconsciously saying -- I'm aware that this might STRONGLY hinder my ability to eat but I'm posting it anyway because I think it is that important for some reason. (now that REASON may be fluffy, but still.)
No, people do not care. You're not a celeb. This is textbook spotlight effect.
Your life becomes a lot more enjoyable if you don't take yourself so serious, try it sometime
I suppose -- I'm trying to explain why I believe the choice, and thus the material itself, to post LinkedIn might be special in a way that the rest might not?
Like I'm guessing a lot of people do fall into the "spotlight effect" and that affects what is posted.
So to this you wish to add the increased risk of negative exposure by saying a bad thing? Or that someone, someones, or people five years from today consider a bad thing?
I love writing and posting and engaging (you can tell from my history here alone), but I'm not crazy enough to risk spilling my feelings on a site full of people in suits and ties, with Leader next to their names.
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
It's better not to use 2.4G RAM in the first place. Imagine LinkedIn isn't so hostile to users and instead actually cares about user experience.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
March is "MARCHintosh" month for retro Macintosh computing, for fun I wrote a networked chat client. It has some creature comfort features like loading in chat history from the server, mentions, user info, background notifications, multiple session. It runs in 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Automatic garbage collection memory management was a mistake. The memory leaks we had when people forgot to free memory was nothing compares to the memory leaks we have now when people don't even consider what memory is.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
I've noticed that most books on software engineering are overly academic or focus too much on process. I feel like if you wanted to avoid something like the LinkedIn example you would need to make a meme book that was so simple, pervasive, and widely known that it could even reach an executive (for them to know whether or not work was actually good.)
That is probably like ... naive of me to say though.
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
We truly should be proud of that joke of a company
The bigger problem is that browsers these days are not very resource efficient because the programmers behind them have powerful top-of-the-line computers that hide all the inefficiencies (or at the very least, computers significantly more powerful than what their users use). This is compounded by the web developers of most websites also using similarly powerful computers for their development, which hides all of the inefficiencies in the website code. This leads to the clusterfuck of LinkedIn using up 2.4GB of RAM across two tabs (though on my computer 2 tabs only uses up about 600 MB even after a few minutes of scrolling).
It turns out that focusing on developer productivity to the exclusion of the user experience has huge negative externalities. Who would have known? (Answer: Literally everybody who was a programmer before the developer-first mentality took over tech.)
The solution: make browser and website developers use slower and less powerful computers than their average user/visitor will use. The performance issues would be identified and addressed immediately.
That and its dog slow, of course.
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