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Ask HN: As a developer, do you consider the carbon footprint of your apps?

by lnalx on 6/11/23, 8:56 AM with 50 comments

• by gizmo on 6/11/23, 9:57 AM

  Frankly, I think efforts like these are misguided.

  We are collectively rewriting desktop apps to run in the browser, where not only it runs 50x slower than on the desktop, but all data has to be downloaded time and again from servers. The amount of waste here is staggering. And yet, desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software that just works.

  Web developers can, and should, build light and fast websites. But the average person runs spotify, youtube, netflix and other streaming services pretty much 24/7. A slightly faster personal blog isn’t even a drop in the bucket.

  And waste from computing, bad as it may be, pales into comparison to the waste of a “quick trip to the store” with a 4 ton truck.

  As software engineers the best thing we can do is to write good software that lasts and that solves real problems. Climate guilt really doesn’t come into play here.

• by 000ooo000 on 6/11/23, 11:11 AM

  I can't help but feel that the performance of software with regard to its impact on the climate is a long way down the list behind far more effective but also polarising ideas such as abstaining from the consumption of animal products, limiting the number of children one has, etc.

  I ran the websitecarbon.com calculator against my org's public website. For 10k/y visits, about 42kg of CO2 is emitted. Dubious how that's calculated, but let's say it's off by 10x and the emissions are closer to 420kg. Apparently, the average Australian emits 17t/y of CO2. If I were going to attempt to reduce my carbon footprint, there's probably something far more valuable I could be doing than worrying about 20kb of JS.

• by torginus on 6/11/23, 10:16 AM

  First of all, that 'carbon calculator' website is total bunk. How the hell do you tell how much work needs to be done in the back-end to display your page?

  How does it tell apart if a site lazy-loads, meaning it might do less work on first load, but does way more total traffic to render all the information the user requests?

  I'd wager the majority of energy is spent in the backend, where the majority of the energy will be spent between microservices ping-ponging each other.

• by PaulKeeble on 6/11/23, 9:52 AM

  Certainly for desktop software and user utilities I take consideration of power consumption and idle load especially. There is a strong overlap with performance but also there is being a well behaved application that doesn't consume resources when the user isn't directly doing anything.

  Its a common reason why I get rid of open source self hosted apps. If they hammer the disk all the time or seem to constantly impact the CPU when they shouldn't be then it gets replaced. I want my NAS asleep unless it has to be doing something. Its a consideration I raise bugs around and its something all software I have ever written takes account of.

• by lrpe on 6/11/23, 11:33 AM

  This seems like a good way to shift the blame for climate change to individual people who are powerless to do anything to stop it.

• by phito on 6/11/23, 9:16 AM

  To be really honest, no, not at all.

• by solanpaa on 6/11/23, 9:21 AM

  I’d be happy to include carbon footprint considerations in the projects I work on, but often clients are not willing to pay for it.

• by CommanderData on 6/11/23, 3:37 PM

  I was wondering this wheb I realised Amazon's FireStick does not actually sleep like you would expect an Android device would. My monitor / display stays switched on, the stick is working in the background according to CPU monitor.

  Considering at least 150+ million devices have been sold (not sure if that includes Fire TVs) and most of these devices stay switched on even when the TV is switched off. Just a single watt of saving may equate to a coal power station. The power bricks are rated for 5v x 1a.

  I do wonder if the developers knew how big an impact they have when developing a device used by so many.

• by manuel_w on 6/11/23, 9:29 AM

  Rockstar Games for sure didn't. They were "performing nearly 2 billion (largely pointless) item checks before each game." [0] Patching them out reduced load times by several minutes.

  HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

  [0] https://www.eurogamer.net/rockstar-officially-implementing-f...

• by RedNifre on 6/11/23, 9:31 AM

  Of course not, my software does not put CO2 or CO2 equivalents into the atmosphere.

  What matters is keeping the atmosphere balanced or even remove greenhouse gases from it. The way to do it is to have serious carbon certificates, as in coal power plants need to buy carbon certificates before they emit CO2 and the certificates get destroyed after, Brazil gets certificates for having a rain forest, which they can auction off internationally to motivate them to not destroy the rain forest and also to make planes fly etc. If my software costs too much electricity, it will either mean that people switch to cheaper electricity (renewables, since they don't have to buy the certificates), or they will switch to a different software that consumes less of their expensive coal power.

  If all green house gas emissions have to be set off by certificates first (or by 1.1x the certificates, to lower the green house gas levels), you won't have to worry about where the power for your software comes from, since it's all accounted for already and if your software really costs too much electricity, the market will regulate it.

• by shoo on 6/11/23, 11:42 PM

  If the webapp is attached to an associated business, it'd be a more useful exercise to consider the carbon footprint of the whole business, especially in terms of scope 1,2,3 emissions.

  E.g. suppose you have a business like a large bank that lends a lot of money to finance residential and commercial property development, as well as expansionary fossil fuel projects. This business may have extremely large scope 3 emissions after attributing some of the greenhouse cases generated by these real estate & energy projects back the bank's financing. The carbon footprint of the bank's website / webapps will be completely insignificant compared to the scope 3 emissions associated with the real world impact of how the business actually makes money.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_accounting

• by jalict on 6/11/23, 9:20 AM

  I have been to a few talks and likely about the footprint of making and running modern video games (and companies).

  It is on my mind, and I have become more aware about how game design and implementations can facilitate over consumption. Small example is to have vsync enabled by default for all users, just so you don’t have users GPUs spinning at max speed.

  I am not actively persuading it at the moment. But I have been aware about and been sharing knowledge with people of those ideas.

  One nice side effect of reducing carbon footprint of these things is that it usually becomes cheaper to run as well :) similar to how accessibility seems to benefit a lot more people than what you target.

• by Jemm on 6/11/23, 11:06 AM

  Indirectly, any good coder should be considering the impact of their work on the cost of computing each operation. We do this less so now that compute power is so high but it should still be on our minds.

• by Jumziey on 6/11/23, 9:48 AM

  I think the issue is that any energi i spent on trying to make my apps have a less of a co2 footprint would be better spent engaging in climate questions instead, preferbly using ones profession.

  Ie doing stuff like writing applications that scrapes metrics and show how green the energi grids are realtime, doing real time stuff around planes current climate effect given the amount of planes up in the air etc.

  If thats not an option just vote with climate in mind and engage in public discussion around these issues would probably have a lot more potential

• by erokar on 6/11/23, 9:17 AM

  It doesn't cross my mind.

• by mschild on 6/11/23, 9:20 AM

  Not entirely. Besides the ones I build for work, I have a few systems running in a local server that I wrote, but I already optimized my home electricity network to use as little as possible.

  For work, I don't have all that much choice. Obviously, I try to write as efficient code as reasonable, but I have no input on where it's hosted.

• by monkin on 6/11/23, 9:24 AM

  Looks like a new term for website optimisation? Which, more or less, anyone building anything online should do anyway. But forcing any environmental meaning behind in doesn't feel right.

  It's like sorting waste that will end up in the general landfill.

• by perilunar on 6/13/23, 4:02 AM

  Yes, but only indirectly. I just try to make sites that small and efficient. I just tested them all in websitecarbon.com: one was 98%, one was 100% (rounding up I presume), and the rest were 99%.

• by xupybd on 6/11/23, 10:22 AM

  How does this compare to say switching to n electric car?

  I think it's important people focus their efforts on the low hanging fruit. What's the biggest impact at the lowest cost.

• by is_true on 6/11/23, 12:11 PM

  Nope, I just try to avoid doing the same computations over and over again.

  Cache all the things.

• by peter-m80 on 6/11/23, 9:27 AM

  No.

• by Traubenfuchs on 6/11/23, 10:22 AM

  I call this kind of clownery "climate masochism". If you really want to do something for the environment, don‘t have children and become part of the voluntary human extinction movement.

  Anything else is nothing but lipstick on the pig.

• by activiation on 6/11/23, 3:17 PM

  I try to make them efficient... So indirectly yes.

• by konspence on 6/11/23, 9:24 AM

  No.

• by lemper on 6/11/23, 1:49 PM

  no. and I don't care at all as long as the highest per capita of carbon producing countries keep pushing other parties to lower their carbon footprint while keeping their wasteful lifestyle.

• by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on 6/11/23, 12:09 PM

  No because climate change is a lie and a conspiracy to make you poorer. Maybe you shouldn't be writing horribly inefficient software regardless of your beliefs.

• by theo32 on 6/11/23, 9:10 PM

  Actually I do consider it. I make sure it has the biggest footprint possible. After all, all the top apps and websites do, don’t they