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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB.

It feels like the list is pointless, it’s saying “small sites are small” - instead of showcasing well-optimized sites that you would expect to be quite large.

Here’s my submission to usurp first place:

    <p>lelandfe’s site

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I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast.

- https://www.webpagetest.org/ (322kB)

- https://gutenberg.org/ (298kB)

- https://archive.org/ (441kB) [chained JS modules means it's still slow however]

Any others?

https://webperf.xyz maybe?

As a news site Rest of World is fast loading but because of lead image it can exceed 500KB in size depending on article.

https://restofworld.org/

My SaaS landing page (https://healthchecks.io) doesn't do things by itself but it contains screenshots, integration logos, a little bit of JS. It was just over the 512KB threshold, I ran the PNG files through oxipng and got it to qualify :-)

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/healthchecks.io/qHMaqFXb/

You’re responsible for healthchecks.io? I found and started using it a few months ago to monitor some home backup tasks & a couple other simple jobs that I don’t care about unless they stop.

Thank you for the wonderful service & documentation. I wasn’t looking forward to setting up monitoring but your service actually made it a pleasure!

Yep, that's me. Happy to hear it is working well for you!

> I want fastsitesthatdostuff.com. No blogs, no portfolios. Give me sites that actually do things, are quite tidy in size, and are blazing fast.

You want that, but most sites where people just read are big in many MBs. They are slow. That's the point, not sites doing stuff.

https://paint-xp.com/min.html

It's MS Paint from Windows XP, ~700 KB in size in a single HTML file. Source code available here: https://github.com/assemblylanguage/xp-paint

This is really cool, and so is Humble[0]! Thanks for sharing. You're even underselling things by not talking about gzipped sizes – a paltry 311kB. All that chunky base64 compresses pretty well, it seems :)

[0] https://github.com/assemblylanguage/humble

Hey thanks, glad you like these projects! Yeah you're right I was only looking at uncompressed size, add in some gzip and actual size through the network is even smaller.

Also glad you like humble, it's one of those side projects I get a lot of enjoyment out of developing and that I can get pretty creative with. You can do some interesting optimizations and modifications when the entire state of a web page is known in advance, and it's fun to look at some of these edge cases.

my site https://dotfilehub.com is on the list. It's a pretty simple web app but it does do something.

> The majority are text-only portfolios.

Yeah... 512 KB is a lot of bytes for text-only website. For text-only sites the threshold should be much lower. Like ten times lower. 50 KB club anyone?

64k or 128k would be more interesting, I also think that 512k is very generous.

> So few of these are actually good sites. The majority are text-only portfolios. Go figure they’re a paltry few kB.

I agree. I still think the website with one of the highest content-to-form ratio is gnu.org:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

It makes the reader mode unnecessary - as opposed to the old version that wasn't split into columns so reading was slower:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070311064322/https://www.gnu.or...

I do agree with you but I think one of the points being made is that The New York Times is basically a text-only portfolio and sits at 15MB.

That the majority of that NYT homepage weight is in low-priority video does not lend much credence to it being a text-only site. On an iPhone 12, it's also a 14,000px tall site, chock full of content. The HTML document size alone nearly disqualifies it from being on this list.

It feels rather... pointless? to pick on a news organization's homepage for being bloated, and then gesture at some guy's 9kB portfolio saying "see! this is speed!"

NYT is bloated for a news site. That is the point. Even with just the news text, it is bloated. If simply the html is that big it is bloated. Period.

do you really need to load 14,000px worth of content with no interaction? What if I just navigate away to the first article?

The Nytimes website with the exact same look and functionality could be well under 1MB easily.

Just wanted to post and say I enjoyed reading through your website. Very succinct.

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