I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a time. Congrats dearest Solar Witch engineer, you have sealed all our doom. When the historians look back at when it all started...it started right here.
Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
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Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#32There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png
HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge.
People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", presumably because more people read HN than post on HN so most will just never have tried, and even fewer people try without some preparation (you don't know for sure that it was unnecessary if nothing went wrong).
If one's pages don't require a lot of (pre)computation and you're not a huge destination on the web, things like load balancers, server clusters, etc. are a waste of time and money. But not using fancy tech is not what people here like to geek out on so...
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#33I like the idea of websites which _aren't_ constantly available. Websites which have to sleep too.
I'm with you. It reminds people that the internet is made up in people, not robots.
Being a little more human hasn't hurt B&H Photo, whose web site doesn't take orders on the sabbath.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#34There's no better stress test than Show HN, and unsurprisingly, that's revealed that Solar Witch has a buffer overrun bug somewhere which I'm investigating! If Solar Witch is currently offline, here's a screenshot of what it might look like: https://ttm.sh/ix3.png
HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge. People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", p…
Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN was the first time it experienced that many. Something is clearly amiss!
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#35With solar powered servers like this, I wonder if plain HTTP could make more sense than HTTPS. With a long cache expiration, the website could be served by public HTTP caches even when the origin server is asleep.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#36I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a…
We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#37I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a…
In you future I can see humanity living always during winter near a pole, and slowly migrating during nights from one to another when spring starts.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN may be a good stress test for Arduinos and WordPress, but it's really not that much load. I've recently had my site high on the front page and the page specifically recommended reloading if you didn't see the effect the first time. This is hosted on a ten year old laptop and a home Internet connection. The load average didn't budge. People hugely overestimate the amount of firepower you need when you "go viral", p…
Well, granted, no doubt, but my poor little server routinely crashes after a few dozen connections, and exposing it to HN was the first time it experienced that many. Something is clearly amiss!
Sure, I didn't mean to dismiss that it's a good test for custom software on embedded hardware :). More of a general remark that it seems most people's perception is that HN does some good "hugging" and that I think this is a misconception - unless, of course, you run ultra low power. Kudos for doing exactly that!
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#39With solar powered servers like this, I wonder if plain HTTP could make more sense than HTTPS. With a long cache expiration, the website could be served by public HTTP caches even when the origin server is asleep.
That's a really interesting point and one I hadn't considered! I'm reverse proxying it through a larger server on the home network which is public-facing, and that server automatically slaps HTTPS on whatever it sends out.
Re: Show HN: A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day
#40I can see how this is all going to play out. When the robots finally turn on us they'll have a few hours of daylight to hunt and kill us before their power runs out. Perhaps a bit longer if you live in the desert. We will have to scurry about at night scrounging for food like roaches and rats until 7am when their solar batteries have enough juice to power them back online. Progress marches forward one baby step at a…
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