I've seen this too often recently; recaptcha seems to always time out loading on dialup now, so I can't register on web sites.

The rest of the page loaded fine and worked fine. And asked me to "prove you're not a robot" every time I reloaded it and re-filled the registration information form. Defenstration territory.

Since I temporarily have HN's attention with this side blog of mine, can I suggest one simple tweak:

Please, please, if your site requires AJAX to work at all, then retry failed AJAX queries. Use exponential backoff or whatever but don't let the AJAX query fail once and the page be unusable.

This happens all the freaking time when I'm on dialup, and there's nothing more annoying than having filled out a form or series of forms only to have the submit button break because it used AJAX to do a sanity check and threw an exception because the server timed out after some absurdly short (dialup-wise) period of time.

-- Joey Hess

Until javascript loads, you can read the forumulae behind their business logic.

I've been noticing more of this kind of broken unicode box spinning gently on the screen lately. This one was still spinning after around 15 minutes.

The combination of the "Amish time" title and the spinning broken unicode box seems to want to say something profound about .. something.

Site that displays only 3 lines of an article in a tiny scrolling sub-window, presumably until the CSS for the huge amount of navigation cruft above it has finished loading.

Followed by equally gigantic twitter, youtube, google+ icons..

The icons of the web giants we worship, rendered actual size?

(Ok, probably really some CSS stylesheet load fail.)

The big rss image is mocking me. If only they really used rss, I'd not need to wait for their pointless images, web fonts, etc, to see the 100 word puff peice that ignores the existence of pump.io.

Presumably at some point in the next 10 minutes or so, a scrap of text will finally appear on this page. I'll read it in about 1 minute, and move on.

But until then, I get to spend many minutes staring at over-designed social network share buttons and gratuitous images!

Special bonus points: The text turns out to be loaded by javascript, so view source doesn't even let me bypass the crud.

Entire page is completely loaded and functional ... except for the only thing on it I want to read.

More web fonts. It was really better 2 seconds before this screenshot, when the fixed width font had not yet loaded either, and I was looking at an abstract design of boxes, reminiscent of a 80's video game.

Attack of the web fonts. It's not worth being able to see text unless it's displayed just right.

This is actually a good day for Google Plus; more than 50% of the time trying to load a page results in some kind of SSL timeout problem.

I see a lot of this effect where while the page is half way loaded, the wrong styling is in effect. In this case, at least the text is not black on black while this happens.

AFAIK, no sane use of CSS can lead to this effect. You have to go out of your way to arrange for part of the CSS to load late.

The benchmark for a reasonable site.Other than the image still loading, everything is visible and works.

BTW, the image took about 1 minute to upload.