Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know why everyone is being so negative in the comments so far. It's really discouraging to other people who want to share something they made. It makes me sad.

OP: This is cool. It's not meant to replace Netlify or GH Pages or a million other things, and I understand that. Some people just want to make something and you made something. You've done more than so many people here by just releasing something and that's something to take great pride in. I don't have a use for it personally, but I think it's really cool and I took a look at the code to see what was going on. I found it neat.

Ignore and excuse everyone that's expecting a multi-million dollar product from you.

Everyone else: If you're genuinely asking "what's the point of this?" or "why's it free? who are you? why should I trust you?" or "what does this do that Netlify or GH Pages doesn't" — let's get real for a minute: Not everything is meant to compete with these services, or any service. There are a hundred-thousand products that exist on the internet with very happy users that you and I have never heard of. This bias that everything needs to be "the one" that we all use is discouraging, isn't the goal of this community, and isn't in the hacker spirit. It's fine to be skeptical and curious, but don't be a downer or shame.

This is show and tell: Timmy brought a rock he thinks is cool, Cassie brought her mom's diamonds, and Shaun brought a 2Pac album. Don't yuck other people's yums.

I hear ya. The tone / atmosphere on HN can be underwhelming at times.

One of the main reasons I show up here is to see what others are charing. That said, those doing Show HN should probably scan some other Show HN's to get a sense of what people are looking for.

- What is it? High level. - Why should I care? That is, what's in it for me. - Along the same lines, benefits (not features) - What is it? Deeper, the technology behind it. - What makes it different (and perhaps better)? - If it free, assure me (or not) I'm not the product. - Along the same lines, be upfront about what you might do - or not - with any data using the product might provide. - Why? Why did you do this? There's a difference between launching some cookie cutter product and a side project for learning / exploring.

When I get around to it, I'm going to do a proper blog post on this list.

Nice summary. Bookmarked.

I wouldn't mind if you pasted this at the top of every Show HN. On the other hand, sometimes it's useful to point out similar things that exist. Maybe the author actually didn't know about those things and would like to! Criticism always requires walking a fine line being constructive or being discouraging. It's even harder with strangers whose intentions and motivations you don't know!

I don’t mind when people bring up these arguments I’m here for a healthy discussion and to let everybody know that 1MB will help you get your site online fast.

Hear, hear!

"The bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

- Anton Ego (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ratatouille)

I use physical world analogies:

The existence of another sandwich shop, even a successful and tasty one, doesn't mean I can't open up one of my own - or that my sandwiches need be exposed to constant criticism for lacking some arbitrary ingredient such as, say, tarragon or sage. Not all websites need to offer the digital equivalent of say beansprouts with hollandaise spread even if you really like that (it sounds magnificent tbh).

Nor do they need a new spin on sandwiches or a new innovation in sandwichcraft. All they need is to execute well: offer fair prices, quality service, and use decent ingredients. That's quite enough. It's not the French Laundry, ok fine, who cares?

We are at a point of tech where people are opening up internet sandwich shops. That's fine. A well executed me-too nothing-new thing is totally absolutely fine. The internet is big enough for all of us. Have a good time and enjoy building stuff.

At this point I'm wary of hauling the old Dropbox example, having learned that the author has acknowledged his mistake in being prematurely dismissive. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988051)

Regarding 1MB: looks like a good idea for teaching people how to get a simple website on the web. Like many here, I grew up in the age of Geocities and similar services.

I'm happy to have high quality services like Netlify available for me, but we need more indie services to serve as entry points for newcomers. Netlify and co. may change; we're already centralizing development workflows too much (e.g. GitHub).

More power to small creators using their resources to open up spaces for other creators.

That’s a good point - the attitude of “how is this any better than X, just use X” is one of the reasons why the web is so centralized.

But the attitude of "can you compare it with X?" is fine, and is what most of those comments are actually doing.

The reason why the web is centralized is that people use other people's computers to host instead of their own. Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.

If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.

> Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now.

Uh... Down maybe. Up... We're not quite there yet. Rural America (sometimes just a few miles outside a major city) can have <5meg down and under 0.5meg up. During non-peak hours that is.

Also, sadly, many ISPs dislike you serving stuff from your own home.

> Everyone has a multi-megabit home connection now. Hosting a simple static site is easy and works well.

Hardly. 2 megabytes/s download, around 120 kilobytes/s upload - my upload speed barely even reaches one megabit.

And it's from a dynamic IP, and connectivity drops off randomly once a month.

Could I host a static site on my own computer, with a little fiddling? Sure. Even a dynamic one. And it would be slow as molasses, and it would probably get denial'o'service-d if getting ten visitors at the same time.

I did it on dynamic IP connections with far less upstream for more than a decade. Luckily I've had 5-10 megabit up for another decade on top of that and it's even easier now. But it's certainly possible and even easy on limited connections. We're not talking 56k here. Also, limiting bandwidth to some appropriate value is also not hard.

And so what if your websites goes offline for a few hours a handful of times a year? Or even a week. It doesn't matter. This isn't some profit driven job.

If this 1MB free hosting ever became popular enough it'd be just as bad as all the other centralized sites.

This reads as condemning someone because of the actions of others. Like if I said to you: If I hire you, you'll just steal my source code like Levandowski did when he was at Google.

I don't think anyone would appreciate the second statement.. but you seem eager to condemn the motivations of this project without learning a single thing about the founder and his ethics or motivations.

I don't need to know anything about the founder or his ethics. Once popularity brings in money only having one set of rules will always create a highly censored environment. Self-hosting bypasses this by allowing many sets of rules.

Everyone saying that 100KB/s upload isn't enough to host a static site that is under <1MB in size is either ignorant or intentionally disingenuous. I was hosting my static site from home on far less than that for a decade.

> how is this any better than X

This is called switching cost and it's a challenge for any new business in an established market.

Consumers ask themselves this question constantly and it's something you need to be prepared to answer if you want people to use your service instead of X.

I'm currently using Netlify for free static hosting. How is 1MB any better than Netlify?

I talked about this a little here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772530

Thank you for your kind words! :)

You're welcome.

While I have you: What itch lead you to build this? What did you draw inspiration from?

I feel like there’s a lot of tools out there to simplify web development but none that do it how I wanted them to. I don’t want a drag-and-drop builder and I don’t want a command line only interface (although we offer one - the key is choices). I want to be able to easily code right inside my browser.

> I feel like there’s a lot of tools out there to [...] but none that do it how I wanted them to.

That’s as good a reason as any. Similar reasons to that are why there have been some large changes in the way people use computers at all.

Nice work and good luck

Thank you! :)

I agree with your points, but can you link to the specific comments on this HN post that you think were made as disingenuous criticisms? I read through all the comments just now, and none of them seem to have any degree of antagonism or unfairness at all, not even the ones that (quite respectfully & dispassionately) ask to know how it is different than possible alternatives (and the 1mb creator does a nice job replying to them too).

The comments here all look quite reasonable & polite. Maybe I am missing something? I can’t see any comment that warrants you to have posted this here (though, again, I agree with all your points).

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