Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#221

Post by rhizome »

onion2k wrote: post #78
marricks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

>Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server."

...and if those static files make 100 API calls as soon as they land?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#222

Post by sam0x17 »

callamdelaney wrote: post #156
messo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ... is actually an awesome idea! The condition for getting a domain name should be to have a public consumption and battery status page.

Which anybody could fake - literally pointless tld. What business could benefit from this?

It would be quite entertaining for one to watch the large solar manufacturers have to put their money where their mouth is for their entire public facing websites if they want a .solar domain

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#223

Post by can16358p »

Nextgrid wrote: post #130
RussianCow wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of…

Reddit web is incredibly sluggish. I open the app to browse which is a smooth experience (putng aside dark patterns).

Same for Twitter. Maybe it's intentional to move users into the app, where ads are more likely to be actually seen (e.g. Many web users have ad blockers) and in app purchases are frictionless.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#224

Post by bsagdiyev »

tentacleuno wrote: post #12
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

Hey @dang, you wouldn't happen to know anything about how Hacker News is hosted, would you? Reading this has piqued my curiosity. If time / your position permits, of course.

Last I read it was hosted out of M5 Networks in San Diego. I used to like fairly close to their data center and had considered hosting there at some point, so when I read that Hacker News hosted there it stuck with me.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#225

Post by sam0x17 »

therein wrote: post #203
sam0x17 wrote: post #42

ICANN should make a .solar extension with the caveat that you have to provide evidence yearly that all IPs mapped by the domain were running on solar power

Can't force me to disclose my subdomains. Maybe for the @ A record.

ICANN can do whatever they want, so they could do things differently for this extension. Wouldn't have to publicly disclose either -- just to the auditors at ICANN who would check yearly that all the IPs that have been mapped have a paper trail showing only solar or renewable energy sources, something of that nature. It's not as impossible as it sounds, especially considering the small number of entities that would do it. Analogous to filing your taxes every year, and we do that just fine.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#226

Post by brightball »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #166
tazjin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare really doesn't make much of a difference for HN. The last front page traffic I saw (~a week ago?) was still at most a handful of QPS. Any nginx instance with default configuration serving static files from any modern computer should be able to handle that (given that your link is big enough). Now if you reach the top of a large subreddit, or have a viral tweet with a link to you, that's a different order o…

Then why do people talk about the "HN hug of death"?

If you’ve got a bunch of images and your site is running uncached with a clunky CMS behind it, it will probably strain you.

The traffic is usually about 40k uniques over 24 hours. For reference, my uncached site is running on Elixir which is often better without caching.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#227

Post by brightball »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #36
brightball wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, the top of HN isn’t all that stress. It mostly comes down to disk I/O and efficiency of the language. I’ve been at the top of HN for extended hours a couple of times on just a Heroku hobby dyno with no caching at all, but I had Cloudflare out front absorbing all the traffic that would have come from serving static assets.

Not to be contrary, but if your site is largely static and you're fronting it with Cloudfare, then you're essentially saying Cloudfare can handle load. Not much revelation there, right?

Mine isn’t static fwiw. Just running Elixir w/ Postgres. Elixir usually performs well enough uncached that you need to justify any caching needs.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#228

Post by deanCommie »

obblekk wrote: post #168

*Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art. *Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about page): >> "The entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production with traffic doubling roughly every 2 years" I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on appro…

I feel like it's a very useful metaphor for the work ahead in dealing with energy production, consumption, storage, efficiency, etc.

Layer 1: We must think of clever solutions to reduce our energy footprint where possible and shifting typical energy uses around is one way to do so

Layer 2: But we must also be conscious and aware of economies of scale, and shifting the burden of energy usage from one central server to N clients is ultimately not a good answer for NET energy consumption.

Layer 3: But for some constrained resources, that might be worthwhile, depending on the magnitude: The incremental cost of extra rendering on the client is a rounding error. But on a solar-powered low-energy server, it MIGHT be meaningful, and be the difference between something working and not.

This is a lens we must apply to everything:

* Logging * Battery technology * Buying locally vs economies of scale * International shipping * Container ships * etc.

Post reply on HN