alt.hn

8/1/2026 at 10:17:06 AM

200 Milliseconds

 https://200ms.thenodebook.com

by dimitarpanov

8/3/2026 at 10:09:08 PM

> Violet marks the data as it moves, always top to bottom. Nothing else on the page uses that color.

I'm seeing 3 violet elements on my screen. "ms" in the top left, the dot next to that text, and a dot on a horizontal timeline at the lower edge of the screen. Scrolling down I see yet more violet UI elements, I assume the one on the vertical timeline represents the data, while all the others represent... other things.

It seems violet is just the accent colour used for everything, which makes it an especially perplexing comment. I can only assume the "author" never even read the LLM's output before posting it.

by Retr0id

8/3/2026 at 10:18:52 PM

Yeah this smells like the type of comment an LLM leaves when it gets a really specific instruction. “use one consistent color for the data timeline. Right now we’re using multiple which is confusing.” Then the LLM writes some comment that’s a mini retrospective on what happened to justify itself.

by anon7000

8/3/2026 at 10:25:04 PM

Claude seems to do this all the time. That, the empty words and the increased self initiative of claude were all reasons I decided to just use codex (now merged into GPT).

by foolswisdom

8/3/2026 at 11:04:33 PM

Claude using documentation and comments as its personal diary is one of the most infuriating behaviors it exhibits.

Half the time it’ll record some temporary implementation quirk, which later sessions interpret as infallible product design requirements. Absolutely unsustainable.

by pennomi

8/3/2026 at 10:49:10 PM

is it bad that while this does look like a really cool method to explain a complex topic, my instinct on reading mic-droppy, RLHF AI prose is to be dismissive? there's just something about the persistent mic drops and this-not-that writing that feels so cheap

I think it's because the explainer is passive, there's no interiority, it tells and doesn't show. plus, stylistically, if this were rewritten in second person (like most explainers are) it would make it a heck of a lot more readable:

'You order a coffee on your coffee shop's tablet. 211.4 ms later you see 'Order Confirmed'.

There's a world of complexity behind that status confirmation. Let's see how it all works.' etc

by paimapi

8/3/2026 at 8:08:29 PM

> The person who clicked noticed no delay.

Just to be the "actually..." guy: People notice 200ms delay. It's just that in cases it doesn't cause any bad feelings."

by felooboolooomba

8/3/2026 at 8:16:24 PM

I learned three thresholds over the years. Well, one of them decades ago and the others recently. Basically:

At 50ms, you notice.

At 400ms, you care.

At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.)

by zahlman

8/3/2026 at 8:24:59 PM

> At 2000ms, without output, you wonder if it crashed. (That was the old one.)

That must have been a really, really long time ago indeed, because there are very few websites now that take less than 2000ms to load. The linked site didn’t even come close on my phone (probably 3-4 seconds), and I most certainly didn’t wonder whether it had crashed.

by p-e-w

8/3/2026 at 8:40:12 PM

The timing refers to feeling like the device acknowledged your request with some response.

Not seeing the final completion of the request.

Your phone probably showed something after you clicked the link but before the page rendered: Link highlight change, a progress bar, etc.

If your phone had crashed and the browser was non-responsive, you would have recognized it quickly. More quickly than the page load time.

by Aurornis

8/3/2026 at 9:40:33 PM

I dunno man, i am In China.. everything outside of it takes at least 2000-5000 ms to even start responding on a good day

by thenthenthen

8/3/2026 at 11:02:49 PM

That is your government trying to block you

by inigyou

8/3/2026 at 8:26:29 PM

GitHub

by bloppe

8/3/2026 at 8:39:44 PM

[dead]

by hobonation

8/3/2026 at 9:12:23 PM

I'm finding more and more web sites that won't load at all until I request them a second time.

by Crunchified

8/3/2026 at 10:39:11 PM

maybe the site's debouncing logic on the buttons isn't working well

by dylan604

8/3/2026 at 8:48:39 PM

Am I crazy if for something like an online purchase, I kind of expect it to take a second or two to process the payment, so I would assume something went wrong if it was 200ms?

by jonahrd

8/3/2026 at 9:27:56 PM

I’ve definitely had in the UX side a situation where the PM/Owner types asked me to introduce a delay in the “disabled button with loading spinner” such that the user sees it for a visible amount of time because our API was too fast for their taste.

by antonymoose

8/3/2026 at 10:18:29 PM

Yes similar here, async operation that could be quick enough not to warrant a busy state, but not all the time. So rather than show a flash of busy state, that makes the ui look janky when the operation is quick, show the busy state for a minimum amount of time

by mrloop

8/3/2026 at 9:10:28 PM

Your comment reminded me of when Google introduced "Instant Search" in 2010. Here's an old HN thread from the launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391

by blue_sauce_bean

8/3/2026 at 9:33:51 PM

That was terrible, I used to always turn it off. It's like speaking one word and the person interrupting you based on the prefix you had uttered so far... every single darn word. Imagine writing "how do I kill" and having it assume you meant a living being rather than a program.

by dataflow

8/3/2026 at 9:16:36 PM

No-one mourned when that one went to the Google Graveyard.

by eterm

8/3/2026 at 8:58:02 PM

Same, I call it the perception of work.

by JoeBOFH

8/3/2026 at 9:02:20 PM

I remember prior de AI era, it was a common pattern to for some delay in the answers to make it feel more "human"

by dagi3d

8/3/2026 at 9:28:47 PM

IIRC TurboTax has a bunch of loaders / spinners like this, similar idea.

by 1986

8/3/2026 at 10:41:56 PM

reticulating spines...

kicking llama's ass...

by dylan604

8/3/2026 at 10:07:28 PM

[dead]

by bob1029

8/3/2026 at 8:16:15 PM

This is magnificent!

Gave me roller-coaster ride across 40 years of gathering knowledge about computers and networks.

I'm very jealous of whoever created that. Well done!

by beders

8/3/2026 at 9:11:55 PM

You are not jealous. You are envious.

Homer explains it best https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA

by LeBit

8/3/2026 at 10:28:43 PM

I can always rely on hacker news to improve my English

by beders

8/3/2026 at 9:57:11 PM

thanks for posting this, I just shared this with everyone in the room here and nobody knew the difference.

by mittermayr

8/3/2026 at 8:47:28 PM

While I also enjoyed it very much, some thing are strangely ordered and not how I would expect someone with such knowledge of all the moving parts in a request, would build such a site. So for me it feels like an LLM has build it and the human with the prompt saw it and said "eh, good enough".

by ahofmann

8/3/2026 at 8:56:12 PM

Agreed. This reeks LLM writing with no human oversight, or at least a human with no writing experience. The text underneath “The Click” is an immediate giveaway:

> Five milliseconds of hardware and browser bookkeeping before a single byte leaves the laptop.

I don’t even know how to describe it, but the “[…] before X” sentence style stands out to me.

by mimischi

8/3/2026 at 11:02:41 PM 

  > A problem repeatedly occurred on "https://200ms.thenodebook.com/#act-O-prologue”
I find this usually is caused by being too clever with layouts.

by semiquaver

8/3/2026 at 10:24:03 PM

I'd be impressed with a touchpad and OS that can go from an actuation to a userspace process receiving a click event in 1.2ms. I'd expect something more like 10x that. My understanding is that most hardware samples between 90-130Hz, and even premium hardware only samples at 250Hz which would average 2ms before the kernel is aware.

by rictic

8/3/2026 at 10:25:44 PM

So why does it take 5-10 seconds from card presented to accepted at Starbucks and CVS?

by Animats

8/3/2026 at 10:53:23 PM

Usually the dominant time is from POS to acceptor. These are frequently still on high latency links.

Also a lot of times in person payment flows allow a lot more in their latency budget because it won’t impact the sale, you won’t walk out because of a second here or there, unlike online.

So systems aren’t as optimized, they route to older systems, marketing or further risk checks are added, and a broader range of accepted services that have higher latency (ent/snap processors and the like).

by kasey_junk

8/3/2026 at 9:38:10 PM

This is very nice and for me especially because I've tried to think about it before your post. I think you can write a very long book if you go really into detail such as the underlying physics for wifi starting from maxwell's equations, how specific CPU architectures execute one instruction at a hardware level and maybe more in depth discussion about the math and cryptography within TLS.

by Cabbache

8/3/2026 at 9:43:14 PM

> Violet marks the data as it moves, always top to bottom. Nothing else on the page uses that color.

Proceeds to use that color for tooltips, text color, headers, and more

This was a really cool visualization but that ^ bothered me way more than it should have.

by joshstrange

8/3/2026 at 8:44:16 PM

Back in the day "what happens when the user types a url in the address bar and press enter" used to be an interview question, and I remember nobody has ever mentioned the hardware and keyboard keys and interrupts. This post does! Pretty awesome detailed view of a request lifecycle.

by inerte

8/3/2026 at 10:19:31 PM

I once got that question, started with the keyboard switches and the interrupts, and the interviewer sighed and asked me to get to the stuff in the browser.

by Sesse__

8/3/2026 at 8:47:29 PM

I still like this question because of exactly what you mentioned. What the interviewee does and does not mention can give you a fair bit of insight into their priors.

by Carrok

8/3/2026 at 8:27:01 PM

Wonderful page, congratulations! navigating to the end takes time but the contents and the presentation are great

by viggio24

8/3/2026 at 8:57:23 PM

Wow, input lag is a lot lower than I thought. I thought it was a polling-based flow at some 120 Hz roughly. Good to update these numbers.

by arjie

8/3/2026 at 9:58:23 PM

If it was 200ms, then it had already charged the card...

by dangoodmanUT

8/3/2026 at 8:15:33 PM

200ms is insane, 50ms is the goal.

But really, great page.

Someone new could learn from it the basics of what to check when debugging web.

by 3dedb728-3f77

8/3/2026 at 8:50:47 PM

The US is so big, that 50 ms is physically not possible for everyone. This is something that not everybody is aware of. When I as a German build something for germans, everyone who needs to wait longer than 100 ms for a request, is rightfully mad. But when I want to serve the same stuff to americans at the same speed, I have to build something completely different and much more complex.

by ahofmann

8/3/2026 at 10:30:00 PM

Not for everyone, but most people are located in population centers with nearby PoPs.

by fragmede

8/3/2026 at 9:34:25 PM

> When I as a German build something for germans, everyone who needs to wait longer than 100 ms for a request, is rightfully mad.

Somewhat ironic, given how many contracts here seem to come with 3 months notice periods.

by ben_w

8/3/2026 at 8:53:50 PM

The CSS animation of the encrypted message overwriting the plain is utterly cool.

by eterm