 Hardy's integral inequality for an interval indicator

Take the indicator function $f=1_{(0,1)}$. Direct integration givesAlthough the function vanishes beyond one, its average remembers the unit area accumulated before one. Squaring and integrating both portions givesThus the tail accounts for half of the squared L2 norm. Averaging does not always decrease the L2 norm with this Lebesgue measure on the half-line. The same indicator function also explains the restriction $p>1$: ${\int }_1^{\infty }{x}^{-1}dx=\infty$, so its average is not in L1 space.