[HN Gopher] I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything ...
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I'm more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I've built
since
Author : mikehall314
Score : 91 points
Date : 2025-07-11 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| garbuhj wrote:
| Ironic that simplified accessibility view doesn't work on this
| page
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Firefox reader mode works ok for me. Chromium tells me there
| was 2.5mB of downstream traffic to load the page, rising to 4.3
| if I scroll to the _Recommended from Medium_ spam at the bottom
| of the page. That would be appalling if the bar weren 't so
| low.
|
| I'm reminded of _The Website Obesity Crisis_ , [0] where the
| author mentions reading an article about web bloat, then
| noticing that page was not exactly a shining example of
| lightweight design. He even calls out Medium specifically.
|
| [0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm , discussed
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34466910
| garbuhj wrote:
| On an Android chrome based browser when you open a webpage
| that's able to be viewed in the accessibility simplified
| view, it pops up a dialog asking if you want to use
| simplified view. On non-accessible pages (like this one) that
| dialog box doesn't appear
| gmuslera wrote:
| The main thing I remember from an usability book by Jakob Nielsen
| is that web pages should fit in 50kb, including all elements.
| Managing to do this in only 2x that size today, considering that
| his book was from 1999, may be considered a merit.
|
| To put this into another context, today there was a post about
| Slack's 404 page weighting 50Mb.
| toss1 wrote:
| There used to be a contest to fit a good web page into 5kB [0].
| Seems it stopped running in 2002, to be replaced by a 10kB
| contest.
|
| Evidently, the entire concept of size & communications
| efficiency has been abandoned
|
| [0] https://www.the5k.org/about.php
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I
| am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have
| thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of
| 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all means the generous
| hardware capabilities let us do amazing things, like have a video
| library, or run massive climate computations, but mostly those
| resources are piddled away in giant libraries that provide little
| or no actual functional value.
|
| I don't really pine for the days of the PDP-8, when programmers
| had to make sure that almost every routine took fewer than 128
| words, or the days of System/360, when you had to decide whether
| the fastest way to clear a register was to subtract it from
| itself or exclusive-or it with itself. We wasted a lot of time
| trying to get around stringent limitations of the technology just
| to do anything at all.
|
| I just looked at the Activity Monitor on my Macbook. Emacs is
| using 115MB, Thunderbird is at 900MB, Chrome is at something like
| 2GB (I lost track of all the Renderer processes), and a Freecell
| game is using 164MB. Freecell, which ran just fine on Windows 95
| in 8MB!
|
| I'm quite happy with a video game taking a few gigabytes of
| memory, with all the art and sound assets it wants to keep
| loaded. But I really wonder whether we've lost something by not
| making more of an effort to use resources more frugally.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| An addendum...Back in the 1960s, IBM didn't grok time-sharing.
| When MIT/Bell Labs looked for a machine with address
| translation, IBM wasn't interested, so GE got the contract. IBM
| suddenly realized that they had lost an opportunity, and
| developed their address translation, which ended up in the IBM
| 360/67. They also announced an operating system, TSS/360, for
| this machine. IBM practice was to define memory constraints for
| their software. So Assembler F would run on a 64K machine,
| Fortran G on a 128K machine, and so on. The TSS engineers asked
| how much memory their components were given. They were told
| "It's virtual memory, use as much as you need." When the first
| beta of TSS/360 appeared, an attempt to log in produced the
| message LOGON IN PROGRESS...for 20 minutes. Eventually, IBM
| made TSS/360 usable, but by then it was too late. 360/67s ended
| up running VM/CMS, or 3rd party systems: I had many happy years
| using the Michigan Terminal System.
|
| Remember, there's a gigabit pathway between server and browser,
| so use as much of the bandwidth as you need.
| kassner wrote:
| At my deathbed, I'm not sure if I'll be able to forgive our
| industry for that. I grew up in the 3rd world where resources
| where extremely expensive, so my early career was all about
| doing the most with the resources I had. It was a skill that I
| had honed so well and now it feels useless and unappreciated.
| With higher interest rates we see a small degree of it again,
| but I'm doubtful that hiring managers without that experience
| will be able to identify it on the wild to pick me.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > I really wonder whether we've lost something by not making
| more of an effort to use resources more frugally
|
| I'll bite. What do you think we've lost? What would the benefit
| be of using resources more frugally?
|
| Disclosure: I'm an embedded systems programmer. I frequently
| find myself in the position where I have to be very careful
| with my usage of CPU cycles and memory resources. I still think
| we'd all be better off with infinitely fast, infinitely
| resourced computers. IMO, austerity offers no benefit.
| andrepd wrote:
| > As I often point out to teams I'm working with, the original
| 1993 release of DOOM weighed in at under 3MB, while today we
| routinely ship tens of megabytes of JavaScript just to render a
| login form. _Perhaps we can rediscover the power of constraints,
| not because we have to, but because the results are better when
| we do._
|
| Emphasis mine, and tying with how it opened with the story about
| the designer who believed accessibility and "good design" are at
| odds (I'm screaming inside).
| mft_ wrote:
| Nice example of a fundamental rule: constraints drive innovation.
| analog31 wrote:
| "The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in
| a tight straitjacket."
|
| -- Feynman
| nmilo wrote:
| Please don't publish on Medium
| ge96 wrote:
| Curious why, paywall? Genuinely asking as I have a blog on
| there, guess it's lazy not to host it myself. It is funny when
| your mostly un-read blog suddenly is graced by medium and it
| out of nowhere gets thousands of hits.
| 38 wrote:
| because it is absolute garbage - I have uBlock Origin WITH a
| whitelist, and I STILL get a Google sign in popup, AND and
| half screen Medium popup
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Let me show you the light
|
| https://noscript.net/
| ziml77 wrote:
| What filter lists do you have enabled? I don't get any
| popups or overlays on Medium with this set of lists:
|
| uBlock Filters EasyList EasyPrivacy Online Malicious URL
| Blocklist Peter Lowe's Ad and tracking server list EasyList
| - Annoyances
| hooverd wrote:
| I agree, and I would like to know what the alternatives are,
| plus the pathways off Medium so that I can recommend them.
| xeonmc wrote:
| For non-tech writers: Bearblog or Neocities
|
| For tech-inclined: Codeberg/GitLab/GitHub Pages or Cloudflare
| Pages
| hooverd wrote:
| Thanks!
| winrid wrote:
| This page flashed and refreshed several times trying to view it?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| A cool read, and doubly-ironic that it is presented on such a
| bloated site as medium.com that takes multiple seconds to load on
| a 1Gbps link
| mikehall314 wrote:
| Author here. The irony wasn't lost on me haha.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| As a huge (and documented) fan of doing things in a memory-
| constrained spaces, i say well done :D
| beej71 wrote:
| I'm not proud of the fact that I used to code web ads in both
| Java and JavaScript.
|
| But, damn, that was some fun stuff. Really challenging to get the
| graphical results we wanted and keep it under budget (15 KB in
| the early days).
|
| It's really satisfying.
| exiguus wrote:
| I really enjoyed the article. I have to say, though: sorry, not
| sorry, but application size is a poor measure of performance. A
| 128KB size limit doesn't account for pictures, videos, tracking,
| ads, fonts, and interactivity. Just avoid them, is not a real
| world strategy.
|
| Suggesting that an application should stay within a 128KB limit
| is akin to saying I enjoy playing games in polygon mode.
| Battlezone was impressive in the 90s, but today, it wouldn't meet
| user expectations.
|
| In my opinion, initial load time is a better measure of
| performance. It combines both the initial application size and
| the time to interactivity.
|
| Achieving this is much more complex. There are many strategies to
| reduce initial load size and improve time to interactivity, such
| as lazy loading, using a second browser process to run code, or
| minimizing requests altogether. However, due to this complexity,
| it's also much easier to make mistakes.
|
| Another reason this is often not done well is that it requires
| cross-team collaboration and cross-domain knowledge. It
| necessitates both frontend and backend adjustments, as well as
| optimisation at the request and response levels. And it is often
| a non-functional requirement like accessibility that is hard to
| track for a lot of teams.
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(page generated 2025-07-11 23:00 UTC)