frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

Website is served from nine Neovim buffers on my old ThinkPad

https://vim.gabornyeki.com/
74•todsacerdoti•3h ago

Comments

yupyupyups•2h ago
Horrific
yupyupyups•2h ago
Jokes aside, it's still cool you managed to do that.
barbazoo•1h ago
I don’t get the joke here
BirAdam•2h ago
It may be horrific, but it's wonderful too.
NoahZuniga•1h ago
I'm no expert, but could it be that one contributing factor to the speed is that neovim stores the files in ram while Nginx has to go to disk for every request?
diffuse_l•1h ago
I'm pretty sure that the website will reside in cache in any case.
cr125rider•2m ago
Yup! The kernel will pull the page from disk and keep it in its disk cache in RAM. Since the kernel is solely in control of what gets written to disk it can be sure it doesn’t become stale, just “dirty” when it gets updated. It will then flush it to disk, but still keep active, hot pages in memory.
jerf•1h ago
Computers are fast. HTTP requests are not that hard. You have to go down to position 480-ish on the latest TechEmpower Fortune benchmark [1] to find a framework that is serving ~10,000 requests per second on this simple benchmark, and as that is running on a higher-spec system and possibly with more threads than "this guy's random laptop he had lying around" (although by the time you get that low in the benchmarks I suspect we're into single-thread-only frameworks) you could probably go to all but the last three to get something comparable in performance. (Yes, this is not a comparable task, because I'm making a point about speed of HTTP in general not static file serving.)

Also as mentioned nginx on a blog site will certainly not be hitting the disk.

Broadly speaking in 2025 if a website is slow it is 100% the fault of the app-specific code being run in the web request. I've been HN'd before on a very small VPS but since my blog is now all static content it doesn't even notice... even when it was making 4 or 5 DB reads per page it didn't notice. This web server is basically fast not because "it's fast" but simply because there's no reason for it to be slow. That's how computers are nowadays; you really have to give them a reason to be slow for a task like this.

You'd think everyone would know this but I fight a surprising amount of rule-of-thumb estimates from coworkers based on 2000 or 2010 performance of systems, even from developers who weren't developing then! It's really easy to not realize how much performance you're throwing away using a scripting language, and using multiple fancy runtime features that have multiplicative costs at runtime, and make bad use of databases with too many queries, that fail to do even basic optimizations on said databases, and come away thinking that 50 queries per second is a lot, when in fact in 2025 you hardly even need to consider the performance of the web requests themselves until you're into the range of interest until you're in the many thousands per core... and that's just when you need to start thinking about it.

Depending on what you are doing, of course, you may need to be considering how your code runs well before that, if your web requests are intrinsically expensive. But you don't need to worry about the web itself until at least that level of performance, and generally it'll be your code struggling to keep up, not the core web server or framework.

[1]: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23

StopDisinfo910•54m ago
> when in fact in 2025 you hardly even need to consider the performance of the web requests themselves until you're into the range of interest until you're in the many thousands per core... and that's just when you need to start thinking about it.

Pretending this is not the case is the bread and butter of so many companies nowadays, saying this is basically like screaming in the void.

You have no idea of the amount of "cloud-native" applications I have seen throwing 10k a month to Databricks for things that could have been done as efficiently by a small server in a cupboard with a proper architecture. The company’s architects did enjoy the conferences through.

At that point, it’s probably better for you to keep pretending and enjoy the graft like everyone else. Unless you are paying of course.

troupo•32m ago
> I've been HN'd before on a very small VPS but since my blog is now all static content it doesn't even notice... even when it was making 4 or 5 DB reads per page it didn't notice.

And even then you can have a default Cloudflare setup that will just cache most of the stuff.

I once had two articles hit the top spot on HN. Meh https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1944765925162471619

:)

giancarlostoro•1h ago
I like that the author put it on a subdomain, probably a smarter move. I have an old laptop I keep installing Linux on and not deciding what I want to do with it. Maybe I should build quirky web servers on it..
miyuru•21m ago
For me it resolves to 198.74.55.216 which is a Linode USA IP. No IPv6.

No mention of why it needs to go through a Linode server.

messe•15m ago
They might not have a static public IP, perhaps they're even behind CGNAT.

Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

https://scrollguard.app/
85•adrianhacar•2d ago•26 comments

FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons

https://github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lessons
16•flykespice•49m ago•1 comments

Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file

https://hyperclay.com/
407•pil0u•7h ago•135 comments

MCP doesn't need tools, it needs code

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/8/18/code-mcps/
104•the_mitsuhiko•4h ago•65 comments

Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-alternative-lasik-lasers.html
103•Gaishan•4h ago•43 comments

MCP tools with dependent types

https://vlaaad.github.io/mcp-tools-with-dependent-types
45•vlaaad•4h ago•10 comments

Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator

http://www.technoblogy.com/show?2AON
59•chrisjj•2d ago•25 comments

A gigantic jet caught on camera: A spritacular moment for NASA astronaut

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/a-gigantic-jet-caught-on-camera-a-spritacular-moment-for-nasa-astronaut-nicole-ayers/
290•acossta•3d ago•61 comments

Vibe coding tips and tricks

https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/blob/main/VIBE_CODING_TIPS_TRICKS.md
41•mooreds•1h ago•21 comments

Sky Calendar

https://abramsplanetarium.org/SkyCalendar/index.html
23•NaOH•3d ago•1 comments

Class-action suit claims Otter AI records private work conversations

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/g-s1-83087/otter-ai-transcription-class-action-lawsuit
17•nsedlet•41m ago•0 comments

8x19 Text Mode Font Origins

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/8x19-text-mode-font-origins/
39•userbinator•2d ago•11 comments

When you're asking AI chatbots for answers, they're data-mining you

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/opinion_column_ai_surveillance/
65•rntn•2h ago•29 comments

SystemD Service Hardening

https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/systemd-hardening
136•todsacerdoti•9h ago•51 comments

AI accounts impersonating doctors on social media [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNNA-66vKPE
14•mgh2•1h ago•1 comments

Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code

https://claudiacode.com/
460•zerealshadowban•21h ago•212 comments

The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/18/baldwin-a-love-story-nicholas-boggs-book-review
47•Caiero•15h ago•8 comments

LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-coding-agents-security-nightmare
91•flail•3h ago•43 comments

The Enterprise Experience

https://churchofturing.github.io/the-enterprise-experience.html
444•Improvement•21h ago•128 comments

Scientists discover surprising language 'shortcuts' in birdsong – like humans

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/scientists-discover-surprising-language-shortcuts-in-birdsong--just-like-humans/
28•gnufx•4d ago•15 comments

Unification (2018)

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/unification/
56•asplake•7h ago•9 comments

Weather Radar APIs in 2025: A Founder's Complete Market Overview

https://www.rainviewer.com/blog/weather-radar-apis-2025-overview.html
7•sea-gold•1d ago•11 comments

Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

https://github.com/ngafar/llama-scan
189•nawazgafar•16h ago•76 comments

Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-law-gives-grid-operator-power-to-disconnect-data-centers-during-crisi/751587/
15•walterbell•54m ago•2 comments

Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile

https://gmays.com/the-biggest-bet-in-tech/
53•gmays•1h ago•71 comments

Website is served from nine Neovim buffers on my old ThinkPad

https://vim.gabornyeki.com/
74•todsacerdoti•3h ago•13 comments

Clojure Async Flow Guide

https://clojure.github.io/core.async/flow-guide.html
190•simonpure•13h ago•74 comments

Nvidia Tilus: A Tile-Level GPU Kernel Programming Language

https://github.com/NVIDIA/tilus
55•ashvardanian•3d ago•30 comments

Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/google-admits-anti-competitive-conduct-involving-google-search-in-australia
268•Improvement•11h ago•165 comments

Show HN: OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea

406•panphora•22h ago•92 comments