In fairness, the hard part is scaling redundant HA phone operators. I'm sure between twilio, deep learning, and GPT3 they have the problem almost solved.
Riiing. Hi, I'd like to order tamale maker TK156.
No problem! Where in Tokelau would you like us to send 156 tamales?
I mean yeah, plain html/css scales well for any site that just exists to serve a couple lines of text and images. I can't think of a single site (outside of maybe craigslist) that can get by with that functionality today.
Newspaper sites are the obvious example you'd think of... but they need comments, advertising (or login functionality), moderation tools, etc.
All of the features you mention can be done without JS using server side rendering.
It would of course be more convenient to use JS for advertisements, but logins and comments used to be implemented without using JS for many pages, even if JS was available.
HN is an example of such a site. This site does not have scaling issues due to login not using JS.
What is amazing is the story behind the product, http://www.tamaleking.com/page5.html, and how it really is a case of someone spotting a problem, learning multiple new specialized skills to create a solution, patenting that solution, and then making a living off of the invention.
People criticize the patent system in regards to software, but it has been reliably driving progress in meat space for a long time!
> When he reached our table I ordered a dozen for me and a dozen for each of my two friends. "That will be eighteen dollars" he said. As I was paying I told him that it was a lot of money for three dozen tamales
I mean, 50c/tamal isn't bad. Growing up in SoCal, homemade tamales bought on the street were 30c-$1/ea (sometimes less, in bulk). And that was without a tamale extruder. Honestly, I don't even see the point of this machine. People that could afford this won't enjoy the profit margins of making tamales and people who make tamales can already do it plenty fast for much cheaper:
The sellers referenced in my story (and the quoted one) were street vendors, not stores.
Places like El Pollo Loco, Del Taco, The Tamale Factory, etc already have their own (superior, based on images of the final product) specialized machinery.
1) No optimization, no problem. Plain static HTML needs nothing more than maybe some basic caching. Apache hardly even knows it's there.
2) Why is this such a lost art? Why do we tell people to go learn full stack development when HTML can do the job quite well? Are we trying to compensate poor marketing skills by adding whiz bang buzzword bingo technologies?
3) If you are now hungry for Tamales, and I know you are, Costco (in the US) has great tamales in the refrigerated section near the pastas and sausages. They are muy bueno :)
More like...corn dumplings or Mexican(/Latin American) ZongZi. They can be sweet (sugar added to masa, then filled with raisins or other fruits) or savory (more common, salty masa filled with spicy or flavored meats).
Its not sweet (usually)... It is steamed though, and generally filled with some kind of yummy meat. For some reason, I grew up eating them with scrambled eggs so that's how I like em.
It maybe used to be a Windows executable (or any other platform using the .exe extension), but it probably isn't these days - but of course they cannot simply move the script to a different place because it would break all existing counters.
You can still occasionally see this on some websites with old infrastructure or infrastructure that has grown over the years. For example if you book a train ticket in Germany through Deutsche Bahn, it will go through bin/query.exe!
Your mention of Deutsche Bahn reminds me of how their first online timetable was some guy's email address, he extracted data from their CD-ROM, and created a service that periodically fetched his e-mails, parsed them (the timetable query had to have a particular syntax), processed the routes, and sent replies to the e-mails.
It ran on a (IIRC) 486 in his student apartment.
I wish I could link you to this story, sadly Google nowadays can give you train timetables, but it no longer cares what words you enter in a search query, it just thinks I'm looking for the schedule information of train services around me.
Having done this back in the day with Apache on Windows NT 4 Server... 'cgi' is a basic stdin/stdout formatting standard that almost any command line utility can be written to accommodate. In this case, the 'count.exe' would be tracking request counts and returning (via stdout) a dynamically built GIF image of the total number of visitors. Crude, but quite popular during the Web 1.0 days. In fact, the code would have been so simple, that count.exe on Windows and 'count' on Linux would have been the same thing.
I like this one even better and I think many of you will too. I refuse to close the tab just so I can look at it once in a while. It makes me smile. I might buy some tiny trees and a Hornby Peckett 614.
One of the best parts about growing up in So Cal was the fact that every once in a while there would be a few girls at school who would have coolers with dozens and dozens of hot homemade Tamale's for sale.
Similar to my experience growing up in Houston where it seems everyone has a side hustling abuelita tamale connection.
My parents grew up in suburb of Friendswood and this tamale truck [0] is a local legend. I remember early 80s it was the only thing on this FM road for what seemed like miles in either direction. I think it's 2nd generation owner now but I went by last year and it's still very good.
every now and then there'd be people hawking tamale's at a store plaza's parking lot by our house. In our house we still repeat the phrase we heard from one of the sellers standing in the dark shadows under a tree in that parking lot saying "tamale, tamale, tamale".
Our family tradition is tamales after Christmas. Usually the day after while extended family is still around. We also eat out Tex-Mex on Friday night including day after thanksgiving also while everyone is still gathered. I think it’s not uncommon to have some similar tradition for Texans of all backgrounds.
That Facebook page is wild. I could tell last time I went that the hipster foodies had discovered the place. But those lines are wild. It was never like that as a kid in 80s-90s. Any given drive by there was usually max of 2 cars, most commonly 0. There was no parking lot. Things like this are interesting part about getting old, seeing how change occurs over decades.
We used to buy them from a neighbor every week back in Texas. It was traditional for the older Mexican ladies to get together and make them on the weekends. Making tamales is quite a production, so you have to make a ton in one day and sell them over the week.
I take a lot of design inspo from this twitter bot that randomly chooses web archive screengrabs. Indeed, the free video offer seems to be a huge distribution trend circa 1996!
One site I recently stumbled upon from that golden era is the UofM's Geometry Center. Static content still displays. But interactive Java applet support in modern browsers is an issue.
I wonder if the company still exists. I'm seriously considering trying to get one. I'd kill for some tamales, but I never make them because it's an insane amount of work.
I can be, if you don't server everything through databases and app servers. Remember that HTML was really designed to work reasonably well in the age of dial-up modems, so it flat screams if you use it correctly.
(Also note that coming from the age before CSS dramatically helps both speed and code complexity - table-based layouts were certainly abused, but they had their advantages, too - and should still almost always be used for actual tabular data!)
It's sad that 25 years of technology has made for slower websites. I know it's a crude measure but this site scores a perfect 100 for mobile on PageSpeed Insights. Years later people are putting hours into trying to achieve a score in the high 90s, dreaming of hitting 100 so many years later - there are 500+ posts on SO about this.
For reference, CERN released the original Web software to the public in April 1993, HTML tables (which feature prominently on this page) entered the standard toward the end of 1995, and the version of HTML this page uses, 4.0 transitional, was published in December 1997. In short, aside from the embedded YouTube video, this looks more like a late '90s website to me.
I'm Mexican, and I know that there are different kinds of Tamales, that said, that machine does not make sense to me, I have never seen tamales like those.
You haven’t seen tamales like those? The cross section looks like 90% of tamales I’ve seen across Mexico. A quick production machine sounds like what the tamal market needs since it’s relatively labor intensive for such a simple food on the go that ends up getting prices at pennies anyways.
I assume it must be their massively scalable Kubernetes + NoSQL DB + CDN infrastructure.