Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebane2001 | Hacker News Reader

rebane2001

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com