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Comment by IamCarbonMan | Hacker News Reader

You don't know what my site requires, so you're assuming that whatever hosting you just randomly want to assume is sufficient is enough and so you can discredit my legitimate idea for a possible way to get the required cost to run my site, and possibly also make a little profit. Would you rather have me borrow user's time and attention with ads, or bottom a few of their precious millions of CPU cycles per second? And in case you didn't read what I wrote, I'm not "stealing" anything. The site will be hosted either way, if I have to pay for it out of pocket at a loss then fine. But if people would like to donate CPU time to support the project, there is an off-by-default option to do so, just like there's an off-by-default option to donate money. I fail to see how this is evil.

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Ads obviously, as long as you're not using them to spread different kind of malware. It doesn't matter that much to me personally, I'll be blocking whatever garbage you put out anyway, but ads are objectively the better choice as they dont needlessly wreck the environment any further, nor cause unnecessary wear and tear on the hardware of your users.

Anyway, I'd be very interested in hearing how a card game simulator requires more than 8gb of memory and a decent cpu.

God, would you shut up? Jesus, sorry to burst your bubble but people are running their damn CPUs no matter what I do. I heard that some people would prefer client-side mining to ads and I thought I might give that option for those that want it. But I guess that'll cause the Apocalypse next Friday so I'll just go host my application at online.com™ for the low low price of $9 a month, since it's just a card game and can't possibly require anything more than that! Any idiot could see that I don't need to pollute the air and melt the ice caps by trying to give my users options and help support the development of fun internet sites! Could you be any more condescending?

Nope. If you post your idea on a public forum I will be responding with my opinion. Feel free to stop posting if you don't want my replies.

I'm also genuinely curious what kind of card game has such intensive server requirements because I just don't see it. Maybe you have a legitimate need to contribute to global warming, it just seems unlikely to me.

I'm sure it's entirely possible that I can run my application within the arbitrary limitations that you have set for me. I have a MongoDB and Express stack primarily. Sorry that I didn't know that online.com™ can host my application with 8 gigs of RAM for just $9 a month. I came into this damn thread wondering if maybe someone thought this was a good idea from the point of view of user experience. I don't care whatsoever about the planet. Not a bit. If my computer brings about the next Ice Age, fine. I'm a webdev, I saw an idea I liked, you ruthlessly shot me down because apparently it's going to harm you in some way. Honestly, I'd like to make a little money to pay my student loans off with, but that's not about to happen. So maybe, just maybe, I don't care how wonderfully cheap and capable the server you just randomly decided I should use is. I saw a cool idea, I wanted to implement it in an open and honest way for those users that wanted it. Sorry for destroying the planet with curiosity.

Sounds like olyou should take a refresher ethics course. And if not that, a business course because you're just going to drive your idea into the ground the way you're going. There's your feedback.

By the way, users will instantly close your game if you cause their cpu fans to spin up to 100%

Good luck with your doomed project :)

You do know what throttling and debouncing are right? Or do you need to take an actual computer science class?

Of course. I also know you're not going to earn any remotely significant amount of money from crypto currency mining if you do that.

> Ads obviously

You'd have a better argument if the TechCrunch homepage didn't use 50% of my CPU just to render all the ads.

I mean isn't 50% better than the 100% that these crypto miners do? And those miners keep going for as long as you have the page open, not just while scrolling.

Of course inefficient ads are also horrible.

What if you could choose a "support level" or unlock features by donating more resources? I'm thinking out loud here, but I've never heard of customer-donated CPU as a business model and there might be something here. For an author trying to monetize content online all of the "normal" options are pretty bad right now. I think most digital entertainment just isn't very valuable these days, but I'll bet the mining thing has some characteristics that compare favorably to both ads and (micro)payments.

Of course, if it was a viable strategy, wouldn't some malware authors write the malware to do this instead of ransoming files? Has that been tried? Is it a thing?

The main problem for legitimate operations is that the user will spend far more on electricity than what the site operator will earn, especially with implementations running in the browser which still aren't yet able to be as performant as you would like. With that in mind a direct exchange of currency for features/access makes a lot more sense unless you want to trick your users. Most won't realize why their power bill is so high.

There are malwares that mine crypto currencies, usually while the machine is idle as to not alert the user that something is up with their machine. However these profits are also quite low since you're using mostly low end machines.

Crypto lockers are of course way more evil, but they function just as well on low quality hardware so I can understand why malware authors do it.

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