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Comment by badorg | Hacker News Reader

> Made using SvelteKit + MongoDB and deployed to Vercel (frontend) and AWS (backend).

Sounds (over)complicated. Isn't just a static html webpage on php/js backend with sqlite or even without, just grepping logs via cron, do the trick?

Having Nginx as a front-end, with static file caching enabled, would handle just fine the load from HN front page even on a RPi.

Nobody's teaching the far superior old ways, all anybody is learning any more is overcomplicated Javascript stack garbage. And most of these "show HN" type posts seem to be someone trying to show off a learning project

Don't forget to docker that puppy!

don't forget to run that docker container inside a xen or KVM VM first

that wouldn't be scalable or cloud-native. you need to deploy the KVM VMs that run the docker containers with k8s.

And if you take all that and abstract it out by running it inside another VM, then you can just pack up your infra and move it to wherever, whenever you want!

I can't tell if this is parody or not, hosting on vercel is the easiest fastest way to prod I can think of, AWS if fairly complicated if you're not used to it but honestly if you're just setting up and DB and getting a connection string is very easy. Also PHP sucks. If this is parody, I apologize.

I don’t think it’s parody. I’ve never heard of vercel. If I wanted to build this, I’d:

(1) turn on an ec2 host

(2) write a Python script to serve the image (degrading it on every call)

(3) configure nginx to ffi to the script.

Meanwhile vercel is literally “now”. Like all you need to do is cd to the directory and type “now” and press enter.

https://docs.ycombinator.lol has been running for years without fail. It’ll probably shut off someday and be lost to history, but I’d bet on it lasting a lot longer than that ec2 instance. Free, too.

I'm not sure how you are getting past the writing a python script part...

Vercel looks to be some service that deploys pre-built apps (geared towards nodejs/react, hard pass).

Your hate towards nodejs/react is making you blind to opportunities.

I used nodejs for over five years. It is not blindness...

When?

I don't think this is a parody either, this is like saying the easiest way to format text is to use Word, then poo-ing html...

Maybe to someone who only knows "modern web dev" it seems like a parody, most people don't start with "let's learn 10 overcomplex frameworks and use a template generator which only takes one step".

For generating horrible bloated apps as fast as possible you may have something "easy", I will probably never use vercel, I'm much more likely to write a script and expose it on a port somewhere.

Unless I've misgauged vercel and you can feed it a python script or something...

If you’re developing long term in node.js and js/ts, why would you use python?

You already have shared code, utils, infrastructure to deploy.

Personally I like to have all projects in the same language.

You have to admit that it scales pretty well though. Most people that set this up with PHP with nginx wouldn’t be able to do it in a way that happily handles the tens of requests per second.

Well... but does it really needs to scale, if it is designed properly?

For instance the distorted image is being loaded as base64 data blob within the html. The size of that page is 401kB, most of which is in that base64 data. The actual jpeg is just 97kB (the non-distorted image is about 300kB). If the image is served separately, browsers will cache it for those who just reload the page (there is no need to update it anyway, since it is updated on the server every 400 requests only).

So with a 100Mbps connection you can easily (assuming unique users, thus no caching in the browsers) serve not just tens requests/s, but over a hundred requests/s. Put image on CDN, pre-degrade it to have many levels, and with the same server just serving html, you can do thousands request/s.

Tens? Pretty sure I've seen nodes (code-golfed to be fair) doing millions, on ec2.

The dev experience with SvelteKit/Remix/Next is very uncomplicated. The deploy & serve experience is completely uncomplicated with Vercel.

Your way sounds more complicated.

Specifically the image degradation algorithm lives at https://github.com/kumpmati/crowd-jpeg/blob/main/api/src/ser.... I'm not sure what's causing the zebra-stripe artifacts, presumably it's a combination of resizing interpolation, lossy WebP/JPEG artifacts, and sharpening?

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