Black Beauty: a shiny, scaly-skinned, 4.4B years old rock from Mars | Hacker News Reader

Black Beauty: a shiny, scaly-skinned, 4.4B years old rock from Mars

sciencemag.org

65 pointsoska9 comments

Off-topic, but this page took almost 10 seconds to load - and from what I can tell, this website is largely focused on text content. How someone considers this acceptable (in 2014) is beyond me. Normally, I dismiss the angry sentiments about "text content sites with megabytes of Javascript that take ages to load" as baseless and strawman-centered; now, however, I'm more inclined to sympathize.

I don't think it's a bandwidth problem. Here's a profile I captured in Firefox:

https://i.imgur.com/RJkD3YC.png

All of those image thumbnails were waiting on a single server response that took 9 seconds. This is repeatable: on each load, one or two requests take 10x longer than the rest. They're not large files, in fact most of them are already in the browser cache, and aren't resent (HTTP 304).

(Not an expert).

nerds

I had a look at this page in WebPageTest to identify the root cause(s). The entire payload including all of the assets is less than a megabyte.

The median result from my tests took 2.5 seconds before the page started to render, due to blocking resources loaded in the head of the document. If they were to concatenate and minify their stylesheets and either load their scripts asynchronously or defer them until the bottom of the document body, this number would be significantly reduced.

They also request many small images which would be better served as image sprites or included in the document as `data:` URIs.

Another improvement they could make is to work on their image compression, they're wasting quite a few bytes down the wire there.

And their static assets are not served with appropriate `Cache-Control` or `Expires` response headers which would enable browser-caching, nor are they served from a CDN which would improve speed depending on your location.

Full results here, in case you're interested:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141129_S0_FVW/8/details/

The fact that it's sedimentary was surprising. I don't know if we've ever acquired sedimentary rock from another world before (but granted I'm not in the planetary-rock-business).

From the article, “What's a meteorite?” Piatek asked him—and an obsession was born. Wait, he was a doctor and didn't know what a meteorite was until then?

He was asking his son. I'm sure it was a father-son like question to help him get interested in the school project.

A question and answer are not an immutable key value pair. Revisiting old questions can sometimes yield new results as other information has been added to one's schema.

Keep questioning?!

Interestingly his last name apparently means "little piece" of something in Polish.

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