Ask HN: How software developers can help fighting climate change?
Ideas in different fields, from GPU programming to Web development...
Is the computing (PCs, Cloud services, video game consoles, ...) contribution to the gobal climate change high?
Is the computing (PCs, Cloud services, video game consoles, ...) contribution to the gobal climate change high?
Right, that's the trade off. If we wrote low level software that can make efficient use of the hardware, I bet these cloud services would need significantly less hardware and thus significantly less power usage than they do today.
But what we have today is companies using inefficient tech to crank out janky products as quickly as possible to hopefully one day make a profit, or to be able to quickly throw out "updates" to give the marketing department something to brag about. This whole web 2.0 start-up culture has turned the software industry into a get-rich-quick scheme, rather than a industry about engineering and craftmanship.
I would gladly pay: a) limited platforms b) slower and slightly more complex development process c) money, to get native software again.
While i agree with this (personally, a world where most applications use the native UI frameworks of each platform and everything seems really consistent and performant is a lovely idea), i don't think that that's the case for the majority of the market.
Most of the people using Facebook apps, or Uber apps, or Google apps, or any other app/program, be it on the desktop or mobile devices, don't really care much about how they look and feel, nor does the native vs cross platform distinction ever come to their minds, because it's not necessarily something that they're aware of.
Thus, it mostly becomes a matter of choosing the right tools for your needs, which in the case of most consumer oriented projects are ease and pace of development, since your competitors are likely to beat you to the market with their otherwise inferior project and get the earnings that you would have otherwise had, making further competition harder because they can iterate on features more quickly than you can.
Using something like Rust or C++ for back end development as opposed to something like Go, .NET, Java, Node, Python, PHP or Ruby would probably lead to much longer development times and possibly more bugs (at least in the case of C++), even if they're more efficient, albeit sometimes it can get pretty close: https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-...
I yearn for the day when these incentives might become irrelevant and we'd actually slow down our pace of development and actually engineer software, though that mostly happens in lower level fields like kernel development, as opposed to business software.
Play the game. Just don't break the law. But play dirty if you have to.