I swear I’ve seen this a dozen times here already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29531145

6 months ago, 1225 points, 357 comments. So a dupe it is.

Either HN re-organizes the whole system so that "nothing can be lost" to the careful user - maybe in an encyclopedic txonomical tree -, or threads will be lost. This Solar powered etc. initiative is new to me, for example.

I don't care how often it's reposted (within limits), this is a really cool site. Stuff like this needs more exposure.

The funny thing is that every time it's reaches the frontpage, the HN rush will probably cause it to burn through the battery quite quickly.

Thankfully it's very sunny right now in Spain.

Still puts a smile on my face every time I see it posted.

xkcd 1053

I'm one of today's lucky 10000, so I really don't understand why people are complaining for something they last saw 7 months ago.

I believe it has also come up a few times in other forms. There was a post about the use of dithering, then another post in response to that, and so on.

The dithered images are fun, but I thought PNG is optimized for large continuous areas of an identical color (or pattern?). Is JPG or WebP not better?

I tried to do a comparison once.

It was approximate, because I didn't have the original images (Or I only had one), but IMO JPEG looks better per pound of bits than dithering. At the same bitrate as their dithered images, it looks a bit crummy, but you can still pick up details that the dithering loses.

They won't admit it's for the aesthetic. If dithering looked as good bit-for-bit as JPEG, independent of aesthetic, nobody would have invented or adopted JPEG.

Am I reading it wrong that they're not doing this for file size but for processing power reasons?

I'd be curious (really, not being snarky) if you tested for that as well.

EDIT: nope, I'm wrong, they say they're doing it for bandwidth.

They would have to admit to transmitting more data (thus using more carbon) for aesthetics. That would undermine their blog and make some of their posts look very hypocritical.

I sent them a email about that (to their comments email) and never got a response.

They're hypersensitive to suggestions that they might be wrong about something.

Do you have context for this?

In previous discussions about the site/posts on the site on HN I remember the site owner getting very butthurt in threads over criticism. I don't have specific links however. Just anecdata.

You surprised? They serve (in the "about" page) one big page for everything, with everything (80% of it user comments, I noted nearby), and their motto is

«radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content»!

Well, when a guy is hypersensitive and defensive about being wrong about things, he tends to remain wrong about them.

Is this a whoosh situation where the low tech comes into play?

I don't know what you mean.

> WebP

No to webp as it's a still vp8 video frame meaning an image codec is burdened with a huge video codec dependency.

Have you not tried?

A 4-cols PNG can be halfish a JPEG.

Of course, a ~10% quality JPEG can be one fifthish of the original, and present more apparent information than the PNG - but it will look dirty.

I love how many times this shows up on HN. Is there a score for that?

For Slack we post whenever it is down and for Low Tech Magazine we post whenever it is up. :upside-down-smiley-emoji:

Why publishing a page on the topic of sustainability, and the page (markup) is 257KB big, when 54KB is the author's HTM and and the rest, _four fifths_, are visitors' comments?!

By contrast this discussion thread is 7 KiB.

Is this one of those stories people repost on purpose to build up HN points?

So close but still using AJAX ...