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by littlestymaar 27 days ago
> Even you use HN.

A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time.

> My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house

> (where I pay $0.35/kWh).

Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.
1 comments
rahimnathwani 27 days ago
Does dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API?

"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."

The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?

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littlestymaar 26 days ago
> Does dang run HN on a single server?

I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.

HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.

> Why does HN use Algolia for search

Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.

> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?

You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.

Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.

Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.

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