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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Customers ultimately pay for engineering time, too.

it is an interesting point though. Like I've tried to think of elegant solutions where we can get the customer's browser to preprocess work for us so we can reduce our total lambda/ec2 time. for example one could have their browser generate the thumbnails for an uploaded photo instead of just uploading the single image upload. After all, 1000s to millions of browsers can make short work of something that might be heavy on AWS.

Sadly I've yet to find many FE engineers that are all that experienced with WebWorkers

Someday this could be a good use of all those free CPUs

Reminds me how in one online multiplayer game developers decided to offload the decision of "who's the winner of the match" to client machines. Because there were some problems on server side and they couldn't do it reliably there.

Developers said this voting system worked surprisingly well. Theoretically if there were >50 percent of malicious game clients they could all vote for a wrong player but this was hard to accomplish, it would require a coordination of randomly-matched players.

(eventually developers did fix server-side code and removed this system)

You don't have to hunt for rare examples like this, most multiplayer FPS games use client-side hit detection nowadays.

Well that's mainly for latency I think, not just a complicated computing problem.

this sounds... unexpected. I thought client-side detection is only to make blood splashes more instantaneous

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