Principles of Green Software Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#91

Post by throwaway2016a » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #89

throwaway2016a wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That second part of that comment was very unnecessary. Please don't do that on HN, I even threw you a bone at the end and said: > But maybe my next web app I'll take that into consideration. Your whataboutism comment is also off base since the comment you were replying to was asking about bloated non-browser desktop apps so my comment is very much relevant. And the parent to that comment was about software efficiency…

Where was the ad hominem attack? Unless the other poster somehow happens to know you have a private jet (which no one else would reasonably know unless you just got oddly defensive about it), I can’t see it.

Assuming that is a legitimate question:

Whataboutism is a logical fallacy where a person tries to frame the other as a hypocrite for supporting one view when another view exists.

You probably already knew that but stating it for the sake of anyone who may not.

It is used pretty exclusively by dishonest people and people who have a poor grasp of the topic. Also, to add to it, the car vs plane example is extreme to the point of being condescending. He completely dismissed my point and went straight to assuming I must be either being dishonest or ignorant.

So yes, I took that personal. Especially when my comment was not whataboutism at all, it was actually directly related to the discussion in the parent comment about desktop apps. I apologize for not just letting it go/slide.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#92

Post by axilmar » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

It's too late to replace all of text protocols with binary ones and redo everything in C like languages.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#93

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:56 AM UTC

throwaway2016a wrote: post #91

sokoloff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where was the ad hominem attack? Unless the other poster somehow happens to know you have a private jet (which no one else would reasonably know unless you just got oddly defensive about it), I can’t see it.

Assuming that is a legitimate question: Whataboutism is a logical fallacy where a person tries to frame the other as a hypocrite for supporting one view when another view exists. You probably already knew that but stating it for the sake of anyone who may not. It is used pretty exclusively by dishonest people and people who have a poor grasp of the topic. Also, to add to it, the car vs plane example is extreme to the…

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Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#94

Post by jawache » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #15

BoxOfRain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder how many kW of power things that HN generally disparages as bloated (Electron being the main one people talk about) actually adds up to versus more efficient technologies?

I think you're firmly into the realm of diminishing returns by the time you're trying to optimize code that runs on a laptop that has a total power draw of 60ish watts. Frankly - Using my kettle to make coffee twice a day (~15 minutes of runtime) is the same as running my laptop at full power draw for 5 hours. Just switching a single lightbulb in your house from standard (~100w) to LED (~20w) more than offsets your w…

If your application is used by 1 million people, does your equation become a lot more interesting?

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#95

Post by johnthescott » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #28

OscarCunningham wrote: post #14

If only we had a carbon tax, these could all be replaced with 'save money'.

I often feel that all of these “personal responsibility” initiatives are distractions from passing a carbon tax as well. Polluters have a long history of campaigning for personal responsibility solutions so they can continue polluting (going back to the “Crying Indian” ad in the 70s). Of course I think everyone should lower their carbon footprint, but we’re never going to come close without carbon tax and border adju…

yep. change requires energy. taxation is traditionally how government addresses such social costs.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#96

Post by johnthescott » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

pay the power bill on the dc running your code.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#97

Post by vaughanknight » Fri, Sep 24, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #79

throwaway2016a wrote: post #4

It seems most of these boil down to: build more efficient software. Software that is more efficient with the network and CPU is also cheaper to run. So the incentives are generally aligned. When I deploy a system I want it to run on 5 servers not 50 for cost reasons not because I'm being green. If I'm being green by accident, that's a bonus. I'm glad on the "measure" side it gives examples of how to measure (though I…

You have options as a developer. Instead of python/php/perl/ruby (and hundreds of others most of which I don't know) you can write your server side code in C/C++/rust/ada/ (again hundreds of others). You will spend a lot more energy compiling and debugging your code up front, but in the long run you will use less energy on all the server. But will you - every time you roll out an update there are a lot more compiler…

In addition there is a need to look at the total cost including supporting functions. Dev test servers, build pipelines, redundancy, failover, deployment environments. Sometimes these may be 5% of emissions, but at other times much higher. And some languages will have significantly less emissions when idle.

A good example here may be, a machine learning model may have 90%+ of it's carbon emissions in the training, vs the operation.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#98

Post by fuzzfactor » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #63

I've been having the same so of thoughts for a few years. glad someone is writing this down. so many inefficient systems/languages/algorithms are being used at scale, it is really disheartening. For instance, Python is the Ford F250 double cab dually of the software engineering world.

Not only languages & energy requirements but accelerated hardware obsolescence.

Right now Microsoft has already written Windows 11.

All that's left is for them to decide how much of an anti-reuse & anti-recycling effort they want to mandate this time across the virtually captive worldwide PC hardware resources.

One simple bonehead decision will determine how much perfectly good already-manufactured hardware will or will not be allowed to support Windows 11, or will need to be replaced un-necessarily.

The difference between requiring new hardware versus no new hardware at all is probably a lot greater at this scale than the difference between substituting a Volkswagen for every Ford F-250.

Re: Principles of Green Software Engineering

#99

Post by BoxOfRain » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 8:42 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #90

BoxOfRain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, I've been planning to move onto a sailing yacht for a while and part of the planning process has involved figuring out an energy budget which will inform what batteries and charging equipment (solar panels etc) are required to run a WFH (WFB?) setup. I bought a simple plug-in power meter and I was very surprised by the power usage of some things in my life!

Which power meter did you use?

Sorry, didn't see this. It was just a cheap plug-in one off Amazon, probably cost around £20 or so. It does watts, amps, volts and I think AC frequency too.