Static.wiki
Learning and science
offline wikipedia reader
SHOW HN2021
How HN took it
14 positive, 44 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 16 critical, out of 75 comments about the project. Thread score -0.04.
Execution: 2 for, 10 againstIdea: 5 for, 2 againstPerformance: 3 for, 3 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clever use of HTTP range requests on a static host
From 2 comments
Shocked to find out that this is very much a static website, it's "merely" downloading a small portion of the 43GB SQLite file in question with HTTP Range requests, and then it…
arianon on HNThis is fantastic. I knew that we’d see things like this once that hosting sqlite databases project was posted.
nynx on HN
Useful for offline reading and travel
From 2 comments
I've been using static copies of Wikipedia for years; they're great to have when traveling. I mostly use the Kiwix app. Their ZIM format database for all English is 83 GB; 43 GB…
NelsonMinar on HNThere's also https://www.kiwix.org/en/ which is great to take on long offline flights, browsing through wikipedia.
voldemort1968 on HN
Objections
Hosting cost on S3 is risky at this size
From 2 comments
I'm nervous on your behalf for your S3 bill, have you done napkin maths for how much this will cost to host, especially given the relative inefficiency of the autocomplete…
simonw on HNThis is a risk any time you host anything on the internet on any system that charges you for storage, bandwidth or CPU usage. It's fine to take that risk on as long as you're…
simonw on HN
Downloading or holding 43GB is a barrier
From 2 comments
You still have to download it all... Which is a barrier for most...
londons_explore on HNHow does it do for performance if you throw the whole 43GB into RAM? Plenty of very affordable workstation systems out there today gently used with 128GB in them.
walrus01 on HN
Search and autocomplete have bugs and are slow
From 3 comments
The search seems to be broken right now, but it looks like you can access whatever page you want via URL (e.g. http://static.wiki/en/Computer_Science)
max1cc on HNTwo immediate issues: 1. Doesn't work if Privacy Badger is active. 2. Nim (Programming Language) is not indexed.
dleslie on HNThere's a bug when the target article is titled the same as the disambiguation page. Search for "Earthbound", and try clicking on the article for the video game. It'll bring you…
yukinon on HN
Requests
Fix search and clickable links for disambiguation pages
From 2 comments
Really cool! I think I see a bug: searching “Nim” shows “Nim (programming language)” but it’s not clickable.
dom96 on HNThere's a bug when the target article is titled the same as the disambiguation page. Search for "Earthbound", and try clicking on the article for the video game. It'll bring you…
yukinon on HN
Compress article text and enlarge SQLite page size for latency
From 1 comment
You should compress the individual article texts with zlib. Right now, looking up an article text for a decent size article ("Virus") takes 10 round-trips-- 5 appear to be btree…
Scaevolus on HN
Offer IPFS or torrent mirrors
From 2 comments
Since it doesn't require any backend, a IPFS mirror would be great.
hutrdvnj on HNCould article pages be stored as a torrent?
xchip on HN
Questions
How are the XML dumps generated
From 1 comment
how are the xml dumps generated?
neocodesoftware on HN
How does it compare to Kiwix
From 1 comment
How does this compare to https://www.kiwix.org/en/
andrepd on HN
Alternatives named
Kiwix
From 3 comments
I've been using static copies of Wikipedia for years; they're great to have when traveling. I mostly use the Kiwix app. Their ZIM format database for all English is 83 GB; 43 GB…
NelsonMinar on HNThere's also https://www.kiwix.org/en/ which is great to take on long offline flights, browsing through wikipedia.
voldemort1968 on HNHow does this compare to https://www.kiwix.org/en/
andrepd on HN
Full-text search with tantivy
From 1 comment
Author of the referenced blog (and library) here. This is great! The full text search engine in SQLite is sadly not really good for this - one reason is that it uses standard…
phiresky on HN
sqlite_zstd_vfs
From 1 comment
I plowed the 40 GiB database file into sqlite_zstd_vfs [1] which reduced it 75% to 10 GiB. This plug-in also supports HTTP access [2] in the spirit of phiresky's, however, I…
dnamlin on HN