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"However, it’s only 829kb, and that includes every single non-image asset (fonts, css, all libraries and dependencies, and js)."

Only 829KB? ONLY?

This[1] is a (dynamic) on-line course for all beginner sport shooters in Poland, each page takes about 15KB. And i still sometimes want to rewrite the CSS, as it's now 3 requests. It shouldn't make a difference on HTTP/2, but that's a lame excuse.

It's not very fast (100-200ms) and maybe i should get a faster server -- there's room for improvement. But in my view, if it's static, it's supposed to be as fast as a native app on your smartphone. 1MB of bullshit js that nobody wants is not "ONLY".

Btw, maybe mine is lame and ugly. But i couldn't sleep if i made people load 1MB of fonts, javascript and CSS. It's just a shameful waste.

[1] https://patentstrzelecki.eu/ (polish)


Agreed. I tried taking this to the extreme with my personal site. It's down to ~30ms on free Netlify for first and subsequent loads, always <10kb including content, with one HTTPS request per page load. No external dependencies, reasonably readable, 100% passing in Lighthouse. The highest leverage things are usually to delete anything font related, reduce or remove media and GZIP/minify. More obscure approaches include base64ing a fake favicon to get rid of the extra call, eliminate media, eliminate all requests but the core HTML static resource, inline everything, move to a faster host with lots of CDN edges, test aggressively with slow connections and eliminate until <100ms. Mostly because it's fun, also useful though if you serve a user base in developing world.


I also moved to netlify (from a gh-pages/cloudflare setup). And while I'm a huge fan, and loved the process, I am interested that google crawler seems to have found it a lot slower.

https://i.imgur.com/RUssvAA.png

I've SSL enabled (as well as HSTS) And yes, the initial redirect seems to take a while. But equally the very first page request from a site is actually quite slow I feel. Considering it's a static page of less than 4kB, I'd expect it to be a bit snappier...

I've other reasons for trying netlify, and I'm not too bothered about the slowdown (my site has bugger all traffic tbh), but I would like to get to the bottom of it.


Could you link your personal site if it's not too personal?


I had a similar reaction. I was hoping the article would touch on less obvious things, and I even read it as 829 bytes the first time (then was confused for a second). Hard to take it seriously after that.


You're right of course. One can even create a simple single-page application without using frameworks and external libraries and fit it in 5% of the mentioned size. I built verbatim [1] in 24KB, JS, CSS, all image assets included. It is a an SPA and works pretty fast, scoring 100/100 on both desktop and mobile Google PageSpeed tests.

The issue is when trivial applications grow in complexity. Any custom approach is seldom scalable. Especially when more people are brought on to work on a project and have to get up to speed. There is a strong argument to using popular frameworks (react, angular), which comes at a cost of massive app bundles. It is not, however, reasonable to use for static sites in any case.

[1] http://verbatim.link/


Original author here - thanks for your feedback, just updated the article. I kind of settled at ~1mb because I thought it was good enough. I got it down to ~90kb (which still isn't great, but is fine for these purposes) by just stripping out font awesome.

Thanks!


Jon, I run a few sites in a similar space. I feel 1MB is fine for my customer base. If HN isn't your customer, don't worry about them. If HN is your customer, you have the hardest job in the world because none of us will ever pay you anything you can build a business off of.

Go forth and prosper amongst the people who will pay you for the value you provide. Ignore us.


That's exactly what I thought before. I was starting to think that it was shared as a kind of joke or sarcasm towards web development in general.


Tarsnap is great. I love supporting it.


I think demand is far greater than what is currently visible, but the price is still way to high.

I'd move to electric heat in a heartbeat, but it's 2-3 times more expensive than coal, natural gas or oil (those are the most popular choices in Poland). If the price was 1/3rd of current, tens of percent of all citizens would move to a different heat source, using a lot more energy than they do now.

So it's just a price problem. Make it cheaper (maybe renewables will) and the demand will come quickly.


This is very true.

In Seattle, the local utility raised rates too aggressively, which caused many people to conserve more energy or switch to gas for heating. Then, the utility had to raise rates again to make up for falling revenue. This, obviously, will cause further conservation by consumers.

This is the start of a death cycle.

http://mynorthwest.com/647139/seattle-city-light-lost-revenu...

It's sad from an environmental standpoint, because in Seattle most of our power is hydro, which is much better for the environment than natural gas -- but that's what people are moving to.


Electric heat in the form of heat pumps is fairly competitive (certainly not 2-3x). You are correct that running an electric current through a resistive wire is not an economical solution.


Certainly. I heat a small flat (~35 m2) using just a AC unit and it works great: low costs, very comfortable. The only problem is increased dryness of the air.

But for a bigger place the setup is costly: you either need a couple units or a proper design, otherwise you'll end up with a only a portion of your home warm. Plus, AC units are still significantly more expensive than just a "trash-burner" type of furnace that is the most popular.

Electric heat should be the cheapest form. That would end a lot of air pollution that is a very serious health risk in Poland.


Look for the most efficient heat pump. As I understand, the co-efficient of our heat pump is 2. (Geo-thermal is 4.) Electric heat is 100% efficient, wood up to 75%, gas heat up to 70%.


Modern gas furnaces can achieve over 90% fuel efficiency.

So for resistive heating (where electric tops out at 100%), it's likely that a home furnace is converting more of the fuel into heat in the home than the combination of the power plant and electric heater.

An easy gut check for this is how much cheaper natural gas is to heat with than resistive electric. As a sibling comment says, a heat pump really improves the numbers for electric.


Right, a coefficient of performance (COP) of 1 is equal to 100% efficiency. A heat pump typically exceeds that, so your COP 2 heat pump is 200% efficient (useful heat divided by work required). If an electrical joule cost the same as a natural gas joule, the heat pump would definitely be more economical; but in real life it's not so straightforward.


If you're running your electric heating from a natural gas-fuelled power station, which has an efficiency somewhere along the lines of 40% (if you're lucky), then using a heat pump with a COP of 2 means you are heating your home with 80% efficiency. Modern gas central heating systems can be >90% efficient.

Alternatively, if you go by the relative price of electricity compared to natural gas, typically electricity has three times the price for the same amount of energy. In that case, you would need a heat pump with a COP of >2.7 to make heating cheaper than using a gas burner.

Such heat pumps do exist now. The benefit is that if/when the electricity grid transitions to renewables, you are sorted.


you can go as high as 4 in most heat pumps. Obviously, it strongly depends on the outside temperature. But if it's above 4 degrees C, you should be fine.


We have electric heating in our house, I'd never buy a house with it again. Not only is it expensive but it doesn't work very well, I need to adjust the temperature on it for tomorrow, not today.


I'm not sure. In a big city owning a car is a headache. Parking, insurance, traffic jams.

I would switch to a per-mile-rent if it was affordable. Electric, self driving cars will be cheaper than people.


I had to send more than 500 emails / day. So i switched over to FastMail.

It works well, and i like having unlimited aliases that i can kill at any moment. But there's no way of disabling deleting messages. I wanted to be extra sure i wouldn't loose any messages and what support said was basically "just don't delete them and you are all set".

What is worse, they accept the default deleting of messages of some email clients. Gmail won't allow deleting from a POP email client, which is much saner in my view.


I'm using ouicards[0] in my project (example: [1]). First thing i did was writing a 'thank you' email to the author. They saved me many hours and gave me a jump start with design, which is always the most difficult thing for me personally. I did change many parts, but it was a breeze.

Based on this work i maintain a basic gun knowledge course, which sees more than 5k trainees a year. Now in Poland a lot more people can pass the official exam (it has two parts: theory, taken care of by my course, and shooting, which requires additional classes at a gun range), since learning is faster, simpler and more thorough.

[0] https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouicards

[1] https://patentstrzelecki.eu/testy/uobia-pozwolenie


You cannot cheat biology with feminism or education. Some things are impossible to change overnight, regardless of the social pressure or guilt.

Men are attracted to fit, young females. Maybe because women in the past tended to pick not the youngest but the most powerful (in this particular social circle?). Thus humans learned that both parties are ok with age difference.

It seems a bit gross, a 70yo with a 25yo girl. It happens less often now (a wild guess), so maybe social pressure helps a little bit. But i believe that men still prefer fitness over education in women. Not 100% of the time, not in edge cases, but in general. Even in the press, a guy is more often smart, funny, successful and a girl is beautiful, elegant, and so on. Not always, but more often than not.


> Men are attracted to fit, young females

Until they open their mouths. Seriously. I have seen 10/10 bodies lose all advantage in one sentence. I have seen ugly women that after a few minutes talking with I would spend the night with without problem.

You fantasize about perfect bodies until you get to fuck one. Then you realize sensuality is something else altogether.

And once you reach 35, you realize how sexy it is for a girl to be financially independent...


>Even in the press, a guy is more often smart, funny, successful and a girl is beautiful, elegant, and so on. Not always, but more often than not.

You present this as though it supports your point, that you "cannot cheat biology with feminism". To me it's actually more evidence that there is this complicated system running, with multiple feedback loops on multiple levels.

I'm not saying that there is nothing here in terms of biology, of course there is, but the relationship between biology and culture is subtle and complicated. Little in life (maybe nothing) is as pure and simple as many people seem think this issue is.


I'm looking for the 18-year old girl with a 40-year old mentality. It will never happen.


I don't really agree with that. I lost my love for youth but that's because I found someone that kept my most innocent feelings lively. I'm sure that when men end up dating far younger women, it's partly for cheap fun, and partly to relive dear feelings they're missing.


statistics doesn't always apply on a personal level, it's statistics :)


I know, we know. But I'm talking because I rarely see this. Also I believe I have a limit case life.


From my personal experience it's more because they want a partner that will be in a good biological condition to have multiple kids and be willing to do so.


God, i love human ingenuity. You are real engineers. I only have experience doing real high level stuff -- the easy parts, so i didn't follow most of the text. It's impressive that there are people who understand the boxes we all take for granted and can fine tune them.

It's also awesome how it all isn't a huge, inexplicable mess. I cannot make a CRUD php app without dirty hacks, you mess with 40 years of programming effort by thousands of people and it still behaves sanely.

When the AI comes, will it appreciate how hard we tried? I sure hope so.

Sorry for being off topic. IT is great and it's stuff like this that reminds me of it.


If it helps you at all, I just wrote this up for a guy I work with who hasn't done kernel programming. I started learning how to wack on the kernel about 30 years ago but I still remember the horror of being stuck at an adb prompt and having absolutely no clue what to do next :)

I'm reading through the zfs code and I can see why the kernel is intimidating, all this state you have to gather up to make sense of it. One thing that helps is there are patterns. Just like device drivers, file systems all lock mostly the same way, have a certain pattern. You can blindly follow that and get stuff done. Eventually you have to understand what you are doing but you'd be amazed at how far you can go faking it. That's what I did while I was learning and I did tons of useful work sort of "blind". Eventually stuff comes into focus, the architecture comes first, then the arcane details (usually). And even though I was working in the file system code, there was some stuff (the whole hat_ layer) that I never bothered to learn/memorize, it just worked, I wasn't changing it, shrug. I have a pretty good idea what it was doing at the general level but would have to go learn the details if I wanted to change it.

Kernel hacking is fun and apparently isn't that common a skill any more, people like the comfort of userland. I'm no rocket scientist and I got pretty comfortable in SunOS, IRIX, Sys III, Sys V, etc. Unless you are trying to rewrite the whole thing in a clean room, it's really not that hard. It's hard to know all the details about everything but it is rare that you need to (and even more rare to find someone who knows all that stuff).

If this sort of thing seems interesting, you should grab a kernel and figure out how to build and install it, make a new syscall called im_a_stud() that does some random thing, add it, call it. Off you go :)


This is fabulous, you need to post it somewhere more permanent :)


If one guy does what I suggested I'll start a blog. But people mostly just read, they don't do. I'll do if they do, I'd love to be helping people do more, I'm old, it's the kids that need to take on the task. So to be clear, I'll blog if someone adds a syscall and figures out how to call it. FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, hell, Windows (but I'll need to be educated enough to know that they did it), whatever OS makes you happy.


BTW, I was being sort of bitch on that. If someone wants to add a syscall and figure out how to call it, I'll help. I'll have to look up the details but I've done before, it's not that hard. So hit me up if you want to do it and/or make me blog.


When AI comes it will do things with cellular hardware in a massively distributed way which has almost nothing to do with CPUs and code as you know them.

Provably optimal classical computing substrate is a hardware cellular automaton. We know this, we've known this for 50 years at least, we still don't go there directly.


Well, i can see a point in continuous R&D. Maybe they could improve something else beside efficiency? Like size, weight, cost?

Let them study all the things!


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