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Comment by goodmythical | Hacker News Reader

no but...why are you passing 40mb from your server to my device in a lump like that?

All I'm getting from your serve is a title, a sentence, and an image.

Why not give me say the first 20 and start loading the next 20 when I reach the 10th?

That way you're not getting hit with 40mb for every single click but only a couple of mb per click and a couple more per scroll for users that are actually using the service?

Look at your logs. How many people only ever got the first 40 and clicked off because you're getting ddosed? Every single time that's happened (which is more than a few times based on HN posts), you've not only lost a user but weakened the experience of someone that's chosen to wait by increasing their load time by insisting that they wait for the entire 40MB download.

I am just having trouble understanding why you've decided to make me and your server sit through a 40MB transfer for text and images...

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> no but...why are you passing 40mb from your server to my device in a lump like that?

Because you need all of the cross-article link data, which is the majority of the 40mb, to run the algorithm. The algorithm does not run on the server, because I care about both user privacy and internet preservation.

Once the 40MB is downloaded, you can go offline, and the algorithm will still work. If you save the index.html and the 40MB file, you can run the entire thing locally.

> actually using the service

This is a fun website, it is not a "service".

> you've not only lost a user but weakened the experience of someone that's chosen to wait by increasing their load time

I make websites for fun. Losing a user doesn't particularly affect me, I don't plan on monetizing this, I just want people to have fun.

Yes, it is annoying that people have to wait a bit for the page to load, but that is only because the project has hundreds of thousands of more eyes on it than I expected it to within the first few hours. I expected this project to get a few hundred visits within the first few hours, in which case the bandwidth wouldn't have been an issue whatsoever.

> I am just having trouble understanding why you've decided to make me and your server sit through a 40MB transfer for text and images...

Running the algorithm locally, privacy, stability, preservation, ability to look at and play with the code, ability to go offline, easy to maintain and host etc.

Besides, sites like Twitter use up like a quarter of that for the JavaScript alone.

I believe in privacy but generally people are fine with rec algorithms running on a server if it's transparent enough/self hostable. Mastodon/DuckDuckGo/HN/etc all don't need to download a huge blob locally. (If you do want it to run locally, hosting the blob on a CDN or packaging this as an app and letting someone else host it would probably improve the experience a lot)

Mastodon/HN do not have a personalized weighted algorithm. On HN you see what everyone else sees, and on Mastodon the feed is chronological. DuckDuckGo offers some privacy, but still sends your search queries to Bing.

Also, all three of the examples are projects that have years of dev effort and hosting infrastructure behind them - Xikipedia is a project I threw together in less than a day for fun, I don't want to put effort into server-side maintenance and upkeep for such a small project. I just want a static index.html I can throw in /var/www/ and forget.

And re: hosting, my bare metal box is fine. It's just slow right now because it's getting a huge spike of attention. I don't want to pay for a CDN, and I doubt I could host a file getting multiple gigabits per second of traffic for free.

I really like how you have done things. Didn’t mind the waiting time.

Thank you for making my day a little brighter.

Seconding this—I had to wait a little bit to download it and play around and have some fun with it. I didn't mind.

What I appreciate the most about this string of comments (from OP) is that digging into "doing it for fun", hosting on your own machine, wanting simplicity for you as the maintainer and builder. This has been a big focus for me over a number of years, and it leads to things being not efficient, or scalable or even usable by others—but they bring me joy and that is more than enough for most things.

The reality is that there are of course ways to make this more efficient AND it simply doesn't need to be.

Good job on making something that people are clearly interested in, it brought me some joy clicking around and learning some things.

If you want it to be more than just this, of course you'll have to make it faster or have it be a different interface—installable offline typa thing so we can expect a bundle download and be fine with waiting. For example I can see this as a native app being kinda nice.

If you don't want it to be more than this, that's okay too.

Regardless, well done

Yeah, that's fair, though I'd think you can get a CDN/someone else to host the blob this for fairly cheap/free.

Having too many users is a pretty good problem to have anyway!

(Could have the client download the blob from where the repo is hosted on GitHub, which takes under a second for me to download: https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia/raw/refs/heads/mane/...)

I'd need to implement a js brotli decompressor, or make you download a file that's 5x bigger, to use that.

It's incredible how rude and entitled people are about a toy site. It's like they are looking for any reason to take a shit all over it.

You did a great job and I love hearing that you did it all by hand in a day rather than having AI make it for you.

Who made you do anything? It's a fun website. If you don't like it, move along or make one yourself. I could understand if you were paying for something, but this is free.

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