Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

In some alternate reality, reasonable resource usage is considered a feature.

Meanwhile, in our universe, it's somehow considered reasonable to expend nearly six gigawatts (= 51 TWh per year) on a number-guessing game that will totally revolutionize global finance some day.




Resource usage in this reality will only become reasonable when there will be a noticeable penalty involved in unreasonable usage, but I guess it boils down to what you define as reasonable: If a noticeable penalty is measured by the end user then - sorry, enough users just don't care, which enables this technology to continue to gain popularity. If there was a law that companies need to pay a percentage of the energy their applications use then you'd quickly see everybody moving not only to native apps, but to the most efficient native apps.

In the meantime, the invisible hand is doing it's thing. Time will tell what it's thing will look like.


I think a brief look at the wiki page for 'Anthropocene' tells us exactly what the invisible hand is up to.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: