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Ask HN: How software developers can help fighting climate change?

4 points by khoobid_shoma ↗ HN
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?

10 comments

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wmf
Vote for a carbon tax.
version_five
So that, as a presumably well paid professional, he won't really have to do anything, but other, worse paid people will have to cut back?
wmf
OK, carbon tax with dividend.
version_five
Accept that software development is not the coalface of countering climate change, and use your high earning power to make money and invest / donate to carbon capture or renewable technology.
rytcio
Stop making inefficient electron and web apps that use up insane amounts of processing power for no reason. Get back to writing software like it was done in the 90s, where there wasn't a hundred layers of abstraction wasting computer resources.
Etheryte
This is a common trope, and I dislike memory hogs as much as the next person, but it isn't useful to pretend there's no reason Electron is popular. Building a single codebase and releasing to three platforms with reasonable feature parity while also being easy to develop for is not something most alternatives can bring to the table. Using a lot of resources as a tradeoff is not something that bothers the average user.
rytcio
> easy to develop for

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.

KronisLV
> 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.

HenryKissinger
Serious answer: influence your representatives with political donations. This assumes you can afford to donate a five figure sum to a PAC and get invited to exclusive donor events. But if you make big bucks at a FAANG and deeply care about climate change, become a donor. Tell your representatives that you are willing to contribute to their campaigns but only if they promise to support climate bills.

Play the game. Just don't break the law. But play dirty if you have to.