>This machine is 10x what we were running web servers on in the '90s.

Kind of irrelevant since operating systems and web pages in the 90's were significantly smaller in footprints, as the web was mostly plain text back then. Windows XP with its GUI would run Max Payne on 128MB of RAM. You could do a lot more back then that You can't do modern stuff like that today with 128MB of RAM.

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huijzer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can host such sites perfectly well nowadays. I’ve often served hand-written HTML pages of only few lines

	▲	lq9AJ8yrfs an hour ago \| parent [-]
		LLMs, including open ones, are really good at this it turns out. It stands to reason, there is tons of training material out there no doubt they have consumed and are ready to regurgitate. Yesterday I one-shotted several interactive pages, that Qwen built out of straight HTML and Javascript. I handed it my API (source code, not even a swagger, via an MCP that Qwen wrote for me), asked for a frontend, and it delivered. One page at a time to keep context down, and mightve gotten lucky on the first draw but after the first one I told it to make the next ones like the first. Can't say I've had that experience with backend languages & frameworks, incl writing that same API, but perhaps I'm off the beaten path with those, or perhaps there's greater breadth of things to do vs a narrower set of acceptance criteria? IDK. Here I was sweating that I'd have to research and learn a current-day frontend framework. It felt like a magic wand using consumer-grade AI. HTML and plain old Javascript was plenty. Tangent but apropos of other contemporary threads on HN, it puts a spin on supply chain threats. There's no NPM or anything, except perhaps whatever mysteries are baked into the model.

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j45 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The contents of webpages are largely the same.

HTML code, CSS, Javascript, Images.

In this case, they are static elements, which can even be cached locally to share more easily.

If someone wants a massive build system to render a static HTML page, that's on them, and their personal interpretation. Increasingly, and maybe more often than not, there is more than one way to get the same outcome.

The fact that there's hundreds of downloads for a single web page is up to the constructor of that page. Still, these things can be reasonably cached. For example, host it on the Pi, then put a cloudflare in front of it or something.

The Pi Zero might not be for you, or easy to try to undermine. Which criticisms would go away if it was on a regular pi?

	▲	tracker1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Even then... it's usually built before it's deployed n the server.. the server is still delivering text, css, js, images and images have always been pretty large. So your connection is tied up for a little bit longer... and as content was smaller in the 90's, connections themselves are much faster today... in the 90's you were lucky to be hosting on a T1 or faster and clients on modems. Today, you've likely got between 100mb to 2gb uplink on your home connections, let alone business connections that generally start at 1gb. 600x the bandwidth for the server from a T1