Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilsharma | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent, but how does one with SWE/product skills get involved in climate work? There seems to be some research every other day indicating how disastrous global warming is going to be, but a dearth of jobs outside of solar installation or academia.

View on HN

Make the Linux kernel more efficient, save a bazillion CPU cycles in datacenters all over the world.

Which hipsters with Ruby and Node will burn away.

I hope you are being sarcastic.

Not really. Node and Ruby both increase global warming

He's not. Inefficient code multiplied by millions of users = quite a lot of coal being wasted.

For example AirBNB talks about 2000 web servers with Rails. I bet they could be 200 web servers with Java. So because of Ruby, we have 1800 servers burning coal in a datacenter somewhere.

Indeed. And to be clear - I'm not saying everyone needs to do everything bare metal. But more often than not, inefficiency comes out of people's laziness. But that very laziness gets dangerous when multiplied millionfold, which is what happens when a service gets popular. Therefore I think making things efficient deserves at least a passing thought.

Node and Ruby: The beef and pork of technology.

Sorry for killing the vibe of the joke, but what does that expression mean? (Non-native English speaker)

Eating beef and pork is tasty but really bad for the environment.

Oh I see. Thank you!

"really" is sort of relative here

Yeah, of course you don't stop global warming by going vegetarian, but having some more lentils and less meat wouldn't hurt either: http://static.skepticalscience.com/pics/EWGGHGLCA.jpg

Make public transportation more efficient and a better experience: https://angel.co/massachusetts-bay-transportation-authority-...

if you haven't already seen it: Bret Victor offering some thoughts on "How do you think the tech community (startup community, or any community) can contribute to tech and/or policy solutions on a global scale?" - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

We started using this as a recruitment tool at a company I work for

(p.s. we're hiring: http://genability.com)

https://rcmes.jpl.nasa.gov/content/rcmes-and-apache-open-cli...

Find a way to hack Bitcoin and make it worthless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com