[HN Gopher] This website has 81% battery power remaining
___________________________________________________________________
This website has 81% battery power remaining
Author : behnamoh
Score : 1173 points
Date : 2021-12-12 16:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
| joking wrote:
| I Don't know if it uses the forecast for much other than printing
| on the page, but it has until the end of 2022 to change the api
| it uses, dark sky is shutting down after being bought by apple.
| illegally wrote:
| That's dumb
| moneywoes wrote:
| As someone located in the PNW, I imagine Barcelona must have
| perfect weather for this sort of thing? Great concept
| sondar wrote:
| We've had a few cloudy days these weeks but today I've been
| playing volleyball on the beach and almost got sunburnt :)
| johnmato wrote:
| It would be interesting if other websites were catered to in each
| different country. Thus we can say that there's an interesting
| comparison between countries.
| ozzmith wrote:
| This is a template. Use it for your useless vanity project and
| feel empowered.
| dvt wrote:
| Small technical nit: I love the dithered images and the retro
| feel, but their CSS should specify `image-rendering: pixelated`
| to make sure browsers don't interpolate the pixels.
| elbasti wrote:
| Wouldn't the correct css for the dithered image be `crisp-
| edges`? From the specification:
|
| > The image must be scaled with an algorithm that preserves
| contrast and edges in the image, and which does not smooth
| colors or introduce blur to the image in the process. [...]
| This value is intended for pixel-art images, such as in browser
| games.
| dvt wrote:
| No, `crisp-edges` allows for algorithms[1] like HQ2X and
| 2xSaI, which would not work with the dithered images, whereas
| `pixelated` enforces nearest-neighbor scaling.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel-
| art_scaling_algorithms
| stjo wrote:
| Whoa, TIL. It actually makes quite a big difference.
| Nevertheless I don't actually think being pixelated is much of
| a stylistic choice.
|
| Here [1] they explain how they use dithering to minimise their
| bandwidth and computational costs.
|
| [1] - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-
| low...
| arc-in-space wrote:
| Except dithering is not great for modern compression
| algorithms, making the endeavour mostly performative.
| VyperCard wrote:
| Yeah, I reduced their file sizes in their examples by just
| setting jpeg compression levels to 7% and had actual
| grayscale
| mlok wrote:
| AVIF and WEBP formats give pretty good compression :
| https://squoosh.app/editor
|
| * original colourful image :
| https://homebrewserver.club/images/lime2.png
|
| * dithering/PNG on this site : 34 kB
|
| * AVIF (quality 16 for similar "readability") : 21 kB
|
| * WEBP (quality 16 for similar "readability") : 24 kB
|
| But the "nice dithering style" is lost in the process,
| obviously.
| mlok wrote:
| Lossless compression of their 4 colours dithering PNG (34
| kB) :
|
| * AVIF : 69 kB (+100%)
|
| * WEBP : 27 kB (-22%)
| TobTobXX wrote:
| > Uptime: 2 weeks, 2 days, 11 hours, 25 minutes
|
| This is the most impressive stat of the website!
| 1cvmask wrote:
| It's at 76% now. In 53 minutes since the post it has gone down
| 4%. So say roughly 5% per hour as a back of the envelop
| calculation. That's roughly 20 hours on a full charged cycle.
|
| It would be good to know if there is a fast charge capability of
| the battery and how long would that be. An hour of full sun a
| day? Or two hours of partial sun?
| tgtweak wrote:
| A 30W panel would need about 6 full hours of sun to fully
| charge that battery from 0-100. Lead acid can charge fairly
| quickly and can suck up that 30W input pretty easily.
| agilob wrote:
| Avg. CPU load is 99.5%
| invalidator wrote:
| They are using a 168Wh battery and a 30W panel, so a naive
| first approximation would be 168Wh / 30W = 5.6h to go from 0%
| to 100% capacity. In reality:
|
| * The panel won't be pointed squarely at the sun most of the
| day
|
| * The sun won't be high-noon-bright most of the day
|
| * Lead-acid is about 80% efficient (perhaps 90% at low state-
| of-charge, dropping to 60% at high SOC)
|
| * Lead-acid chemistry is sluggish. It can charge pretty quickly
| to 80% (a 168Wh battery will easily accept the full 30W up to
| that point), but the acceptance rate decays asymptotically
| toward zero as the battery approaches 100% capacity. No matter
| how powerful the charger, going from 80% to ~98% takes about
| 6-8 hours.
|
| * 0% state of charge is about 10.5V, but lead-acid cycle life
| falls dramatically with deeper discharges. To reduce wear on
| the battery, they designate 12V as 0% charge and shut down at
| that point. This means they're only using 50% of the 168Wh
| capacity, but it also means they hit the sluggish part of the
| charge cycle sooner.
|
| Summing up the above, with perfect-noon-sun conditions
| generating the full 30W, the charge curve will be roughly: 3h
| from 50% to 80% SOC (0%-60% indicated); 6h from 80% to 98% SOC
| (60%-100% indicated); a few more hours for the last 2%.
|
| Realistically it will get the majority of the charge by early
| afternoon, and the slow trip from 80%-98% will complete
| sometime in the early evening. At that point the panel will
| only be producing a few watts, but it's still enough to finish
| trickle charging to 100%.
| ronsor wrote:
| One can only blame HN traffic for its sudden decrease.
| superjan wrote:
| I clicked the link, curious what the what the power reading
| would be now. Now I feel guilty.
| vstm wrote:
| Well the sun has probably set in Barcelona too, this won't
| help either.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Indeed, there is a row in the "Power demand" table saying
| "Solar panel active: no".
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| It's on the HN front page, I don't think I'd extrapolate
| anything from its current power usage.
| dsizzle wrote:
| Ha. We better read it while we can!
| mcv wrote:
| Maybe this should have been posted on a sunny summer's day.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Quick, everyone in!
| r-w wrote:
| Or, in keeping with the spirit of the post: think long-term
| and give the battery a chance to rest, then read it later
| :)
| [deleted]
| rodmena wrote:
| Looking into the response headers, I couldn't find any cache
| related header. I hope the site is using cache to prevent extra
| unnecessary load. Brilliant idea by the way.
| okareaman wrote:
| How would I even host a website at home? 20 years ago I knew how
| to get a fixed IP from my local ISP but I don't know how to do
| that anymore.
| a9h74j wrote:
| A recent post on HN mentioned use of a Cloudfare tunnel.
| Apparently that allows for self-hosting behind a router with no
| incoming ports needing to be opened.
|
| https://eevans.co/blog/garage/
| lucb1e wrote:
| Give them a call? Or switch ISP if yours doesn't allow it.
| Otherwise you need a relay service, at which point you might as
| well host with them directly.
| okareaman wrote:
| I'm in a weird situation, hence my confusion. I live next
| door to an Xfinity hotspot. I signed up with Xfinity so they
| sent me a modem. I couldn't get it to work, but I found I
| could just use the hotspot. It works great but it serves
| potentially thousands of users so it's not personal to me.
| pletsch wrote:
| Reverse proxy with a dynamic DNS server (DuckDNS for example)
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| You can use dynamic DNS if the IP address you're getting is a
| public one.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There are also services which you can get a reserved IP with
| all ports open, and then you wire guard tunnel it to your
| server.
| MayeulC wrote:
| As another commenter pointed out, Lead-Acid batteries are
| terrible for this. They are fine for backup power supplies that
| you don't expect to actually use more than a couple of times a
| year, but discharging them too much will completely kill them,
| and even if you keep a margin and discharge them to only 30%, the
| number of cycles is quite limited (1500 to 3000 cycles quoted in
| [1] seems a bit optimistic, probably depends on the specific
| battery).
|
| Lithium-based batteries such as LFP are becoming very affordable
| [2] and can handle much more cycles. They can also handle more
| current variation and are more efficient.
|
| [1] https://offgridtech.org/tech-updates-online/2021/lithium-
| iro...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943741
| makomk wrote:
| The problem with LFP batteries is that they really need to be
| kept resonably close to room temperature in order to be
| efficient and safe to charge. This is fine if you're using them
| for some kind of off-grid home that needs to be heated anyway
| or for intermittent high-power applications like cars that can
| cope with the energy required for heating and cooling them, but
| it won't really work in this setup.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't have it in mind.
|
| You probably need some insulation, and some sort of heating,
| although the computing device could probably provide the
| heat. Handling summer/winter cycles without human
| intervention might be a bit complex, but intervening twice a
| year doesn't seem too much hassle.
|
| > it won't really work in this setup.
|
| I don't recall reading that it was placed outdoors.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| Technology Connections[0] did an episode where he talked
| through some of the science behind why lead acid batteries work
| poorly for the task. He used a marine deep cycle battery as a
| compromise solution.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4dUt1yK0g
| vondur wrote:
| Thanks to everyone here, it's now down to 66%!
| JetAlone wrote:
| 52% when I looked at it. It's like we're all dragging the
| battery down as we're hugging it.
| mizzao wrote:
| A lead-acid battery doesn't seem like a good choice for this
| application. Prolonged discharge states cause the lead sulfate to
| crystallize which is irreversible, making it impossible to
| recharge the battery.
|
| A lithium chemistry might be better, since that prefers partially
| discharged states to being fully charged.
| tgtweak wrote:
| If it's a deep discharge lead acid and it is maintained it can
| last 5-6 years.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| ICANN should make a .solar extension with the caveat that you
| have to provide evidence yearly that all IPs mapped by the domain
| were running on solar power
| therein wrote:
| Can't force me to disclose my subdomains. Maybe for the @ A
| record.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| ICANN can do whatever they want, so they could do things
| differently for this extension. Wouldn't have to publicly
| disclose either -- just to the auditors at ICANN who would
| check yearly that all the IPs that have been mapped have a
| paper trail showing only solar or renewable energy sources,
| something of that nature. It's not as impossible as it
| sounds, especially considering the small number of entities
| that would do it. Analogous to filing your taxes every year,
| and we do that just fine.
| Beefin wrote:
| super cool idea, anybody have connects at ICANN?
| ip26 wrote:
| Nah, it would be .sol
| messo wrote:
| That ... is actually an awesome idea! The condition for getting
| a domain name should be to have a public consumption and
| battery status page.
| justsaying9 wrote:
| Yes, and it should cost $999/year for the registration fee,
| funneled into the pocket of some giant virtue signalling
| multinational corporation, who uses the proceeds to buy media
| time calling for the excommunication of anyone who refuses to
| bend a knee and pledge obeisance to Al Gore and the high
| priests of the Carbon Cult. I approve.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Which anybody could fake - literally pointless tld. What
| business could benefit from this?
| Beefin wrote:
| encouraging innovation, dont be so negative
| sam0x17 wrote:
| It would be quite entertaining for one to watch the large
| solar manufacturers have to put their money where their
| mouth is for their entire public facing websites if they
| want a .solar domain
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Why the distinction between solar vs other renewable energy
| sources?
| jackvalentine wrote:
| .waterwheel
|
| .volcanopower
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I'd buy a .volcanopower
|
| .turbine would also be fun.
| elwell wrote:
| Maybe leverage "specialization + trade" and have some 'SCDN'
| (Solar Content Delivery Network).
| rd07 wrote:
| I really like the concept of this website, a clutter free website
| that running on a solar-powered server. The UI also makes me
| enjoy browsing and reading page after page on this website. I
| don't even need Firefox's reader view, something I almost
| certainly use whenever I read a blog/news site. Granted, that
| something must be sacrificed by selecting a solar-powered server,
| like uptime and they seem to be deliberately not using a full
| colored images, maybe to save the processing power of their
| server. But, IMO, it doesn't diminish the enjoyment of reading
| the website. Good job !!
| ryeguy_24 wrote:
| Reminds me of that Netflix show Clickbait. The more views the
| more it kills the site.
| java-man wrote:
| > This connection is a 100mbit consumer fiber connection with a
| static IP-adress.
|
| Yikes! And me here in Palo Alto, in the middle of the silicon
| Valley, cannot get any fiber because of AT&T.
| driverdan wrote:
| It's not because of AT&T, it's because of government
| regulation.
| java-man wrote:
| AT&T offers fiber on the other side of the road. How is this
| government regulation?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Just as a thought, that might be pretty cheap to have
| extended to your house.
|
| In Germany, Telekom (the formerly-government-owned provider
| and largest player afaik) offers to dig fiber for you for a
| "nice" price. But if it's literally about 5 meters it might
| actually be worth it.
| driverdan wrote:
| If CA laws weren't so restrictive there would be
| competition. Without competition there is nothing
| compelling AT&T to offer better service. The barrier to
| entry for ISPs is so high that it's essentially impossible
| in many areas.
| cure wrote:
| Riiiiight.
|
| I'm sure it has nothing to do with a complete lack of
| competition (cf. how in communities where Google Fiber showed
| up, the incumbents were suddenly quite capable of getting
| gigabit fiber to households, and for a price that was
| competitive with Google Fiber, and a fraction of the price
| they were charging for inferior service before Google Fiber's
| arrival).
|
| I'm sure it also has nothing to do with the billions upon
| billions of subsidies AT&T and Verizon have received to build
| out broadband and make it available everywhere, which they
| pocketed and then didn't deliver on. Cf.
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-
| promis_b_5...
|
| If you really want to blame it on government, do it the right
| way: the government has not been keeping AT&T and the other
| giant telcos accountable for effectively stealing all those
| subsidies, and it has not enforced competition at the local
| level. Regulatory capture, and all that.
| christophilus wrote:
| Lack of competition is due to regulatory capture. Local
| governments often disallow competition in the ISP space.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| And the regulations are captured by the companies who
| much prefer no competition. So we're screwed by BOTH the
| corporations and the government.
|
| We need new laws, and smaller companies.
| driverdan wrote:
| > We need new laws
|
| We need _fewer_ laws.
| petters wrote:
| It's hard to get even 100Mbit in Paulo Alto? Must be hard for
| everyone working remotely these days....
| java-man wrote:
| My AT&T DSL is blasting at 3 MBit/s down and 0.5 MBit/s up!
| fer wrote:
| And I was complaining about 15/1 from my DSL. Ironically I
| work for the company that won't lay fiber fast enough, yet
| asks me to work remotely.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| F
| FerretFred wrote:
| *located in Barcelona*
|
| I hugely admire this website and the tech/philosophy behind it.
| So much so that I decided to build one myself. But here's the
| problem: I live in Yorkshire (UK) where good weather usually
| means a thinner layer of cloud cover. I tried, I really did, but
| I'm not about to move to Spain :) Long may this project continue
| (while I dream of more sun).
| funshed wrote:
| It is very gray today, maybe we should do wind power up ere'
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Right?
|
| > This is a forecast for the coming days, updated daily: >
| TODAY > Clear throughout the day. > TOMORROW > Clear throughout
| the day. > DAY AFTER TOMORROW > Clear throughout the day.
|
| I get 62 hours of sunshine average in the entire month of
| December, looks like you're a couple degrees north of me and
| get slightly fewer (assuming our weather departments do their
| math similarly). This server is probably going to see more sun
| in the next three days than we'll see until the New Year.
|
| I'm not about to move to Spain, but definitely thinking about
| it (or Cali, or Arizona, or the south of France, or...anywhere
| sunny, really) in a few years when my kids move out of the
| house.
| conschy wrote:
| Marginally related*
|
| If anybody is interested about their energy consumption while
| browsing they can use this Chrome Extension that I've created:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/globemallow/jibhio...
| corban1 wrote:
| I wonder the carbon footprint difference for connecting this
| server to the power grid vs using battery and solar.
| louwrentius wrote:
| My own battery + solar powered blog [0] is 100% inspired by
| lowtechmagazine. I am based in The Netherlands and due to my sub
| optimal location, I have to cheat in the winter by recharging
| from mains about weekly. I still do get some sun, but nowhere
| nearly enough to get through the day, let alone the night.
|
| [0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-
| po...
|
| And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because no
| matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar could
| recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents it from
| doing so.
|
| Lifepo or similar Chemistry is probably the better choice for a
| project like this.
| pengaru wrote:
| > And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because
| no matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar
| could recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents
| it from doing so.
|
| This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a
| sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel?
| You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like
| being discharged below 50% of their actual capacity. So you end
| up building in a shitload of excess capacity in parallel, in
| the process attaining high aggregate discharge/charge rates.
|
| It's just annoying because you waste a lot of physical space on
| underutilized batteries. But for a stationary system, it's not
| such a big deal, assuming you're not trying to fit it into a
| studio apartment. You end up with a dedicated battery shed or
| cellar, at least they're cheap.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You want to top off lead acid with constant voltage to
| prevent gucking. It is time bound not power bound.
|
| https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-403-charging-
| lead-a...
| louwrentius wrote:
| This is exactly the problem.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I actually run quite a few of them in parallel, but that
| doesn't solve the problem:
|
| As the other person stated: charging lead acid is time
| constrained. And that means that you can't fully charge the
| battery within the time period when you have sun.
|
| Lead acid deteriorates quickly if left (partially)
| discharged. This is why lead acid works so well with cars
| (almost always fully charged at all times).
|
| Depleted lead acid (50% charge) needs to be recharged within
| 24 or serious damage will occur, accumulating over time. A
| week of bad weather may thus be hard on battery longevity.
|
| Some more info:
|
| [x]: https://louwrentius.com/a-practical-understanding-of-
| lead-ac...
| pengaru wrote:
| Can't you just alternate between sets of cells with
| sufficient excess capacity then? They don't all need to be
| in lockstep at the same phase of their charge:discharge
| cycles if it takes so long.
|
| Perhaps that becomes cost prohibitive even with the low
| cost of lead-acid, I've never attempted this. It just
| appears obvious from a high level that excess capacity can
| overcome all these limitations.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Lead acid have the advantage of being easy to buy and needing
| no balancer. Also they don't get damaged by overcharging. They
| handle full deplation way better too. Also lower initial cost.
| driverdan wrote:
| Lithium batteries don't need a balancer either. I've been
| running a 3.6kWh pack of 12 cells for almost 5 years with no
| BMS or balancer.
|
| I bottom balanced all the cells before building the pack and
| setup my chargers to only go to about 98%. This leaves more
| than enough leeway to avoid problems if one or more cells
| drift.
|
| I've rebalanced a couple of cells once because they were off
| by a few hundreds of a volt. They're probably about due for
| another minor rebalance.
|
| That said, this is in controlled conditions with regular use
| and monitoring. The cells are LiFePO4. I wouldn't run other
| chemistries without a BMS. Next pack I build will be much
| larger and have BMSes for safety and so I don't have to think
| about it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Hmm ok. My experience with Lithium batteries is with EVs.
| Do you have a low discharge rate on your pack? Because the
| EV battery pack needed balancing like every charge.
| Otherwise it has to be a quality difference.
| driverdan wrote:
| Most EVs don't use LiFePO4 although some are moving to
| it. There are also hundreds or thousands of small cells
| in most EV packs. With that volume you'll get more
| variation between the best and worst cells. You also need
| it to be foolproof and require no maintenance.
|
| My average discharge rate is much lower than 1C which
| does help. The max is around 0.9C but that is pretty
| uncommon.
| bnastic wrote:
| It's a like a deja vu, this website. It's been linked repeatedly,
| for years, having the same kind of discussion on HN over and over
| busymom0 wrote:
| I had a similar deja vu because just few days ago I posted a
| comment asking similar tech:
|
| > Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower
| powered board which can run a very simply web server (only
| needs to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun
| hobby project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio)
| to the board which charges it everyday and returns an html with
| how much I charged it and daily cardio stats. Basically, if I
| don't do cardio, then the board won't be charged enough to keep
| the site up, so that gives me incentive to do it regularly.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409339
| lstodd wrote:
| I ran a webserver of sorts on an STM32F767, a python one of
| all things.
|
| 200mA looks like about par for the course, ethernet and all.
| foxfluff wrote:
| What's the supply voltage? Do you have a breakdown of which
| parts of the board consume how much? I feel like one should
| be able to use way less than that, but there are plenty of
| ways to waste power on a board that isn't designed to be
| battery powered.
|
| One project I've been thinking about recently (if I only I
| could find the time..) is to build a tiny server around a
| microcontroller coupled to a small NiMH pack (just standard
| AA/AAA rechargeable cells) and a small solar panel, running
| by the (not particularly well lit) window of my home
| office.
| lstodd wrote:
| 3.3V, that's pretty standard nowadays.
|
| I don't have a breakdown, it was cobbled together from
| whatever was around, an STM32 devboard, some regulators,
| some half-dead li-fe-pos, almost useless BMS from ali,
| this sort of stuff. Obviously that ate significantly less
| than an RPi, but I can't say how much, don't actually
| remember since that wasn't the problem.
|
| Another take was a weather station, basically an ESP on a
| ~2500mAh 18650 li-ion.
|
| That lived for like a week on a charge, stuff being
| fetched from it every minute over wifi.
|
| I would recommend against using NiMH for that, just get
| some 18650s and work them between 80-40% charge, they'll
| last forever.
| [deleted]
| jcun4128 wrote:
| These are neat, reminds me of those live robots you can control
| by stream chat
| tzury wrote:
| When the server is down you can get the offline version of it.
| AKA the Printed Website.
|
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/12/printed-website-thir...
| rvense wrote:
| I bought both volumes last year and made a point of only
| reading them outside by sunlight.
|
| It's great stuff, very thought provoking. One of the many
| points that has really stuck with me is how the invention of
| the typewriter allowed us to write five times faster... and as
| a result we now spend most of our time typing, somehow.
| sriacha wrote:
| Sounds similar to Jevon's Paradox [1], where consumption
| rises with increasing energy efficiency.
|
| Also, as transportation gets faster, commutes don't get
| shorter, people just move farther and farther from their
| workplace.
|
| I'm sure there are lots of other parallels too.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| chj wrote:
| A suggestion: in bad weathers, the server should turn off during
| the time when there is less visitors and less sunshine. That
| probably could help it to serve a few more days (Of course the
| visitors must know when is the best time to visit)
| MayeulC wrote:
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...
|
| > A website that goes off-line in evening could be an interesting
| option for a local online publication with low anticipated
| traffic after midnight. However, since Low-tech Magazine's
| readership is almost equally divided between Europe and the USA
| this is not an attractive option. If the website goes down every
| night, our American readers could only access it during the
| morning.
|
| What about putting a mirror on each continent, and adjusting DNS
| to pick the one that has solar power at the moment? It could even
| work at higher levels of granularity.
| btdmaster wrote:
| They haven't yet responded, but I wonder if it would make any
| difference in power consumption (CPU usage, to be more specific)
| if redbean[1][2] could be used instead of nginx.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117
|
| [2] https://redbean.dev
| ajusa wrote:
| I doubt it for two reasons:
|
| 1. nginx has had many more years of performance tuning (it's 17
| years old) than a project made in the last few years.
|
| 2. redbean is x86 only if I'm not mistaken (it's using x86-64
| from actually pdrtable executable), whereas lowtechmagazine
| runs their server on an ARM CPU. I think switching to a lower
| powered x86 chip might be costly or still draw too much power,
| but I don't have as much experience in that regard.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| The power consumtpion of that server is honestly great already.
| Sustained 2W, _even_ with the HN hug of death?!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I love this experiment. The one comment I have is that when you
| provide "CPU%" but you're using the special "per core" unit that
| can go above 100%, you must list the number of cores. 128% of
| what?
| sz4kerto wrote:
| CPU load is not CPU usage. Load is basically "number of
| processes waiting to be scheduled to run". If load=cpu count
| then you can't schedule more processes, your system runs at
| maximum capacity (although it might mean that the cores wait on
| some IO).
|
| Eg.: https://estl.tech/cpu-usage-vs-load-ecca22287b21
| OOPMan wrote:
| How hard do we have to hit it to drain the battery ;-)
| javajosh wrote:
| Ironic that the content is solely about the server itself. It's a
| bit like a blog about the libraries and tools used to make the
| blog.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I have to disagree. While the common thread is consumption and
| sustainability I found the article about moving away from new
| laptops to be interesting.
| tomcooks wrote:
| ironic? It's the literal raison d'etre of the whole website.
|
| It would be remotely similar to what you implied if the website
| was librariesandtoolstomakeblogs.com
| Shared404 wrote:
| More like a blog post about it, Lowtech mag has an assortment
| of other articles.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| > This was caused by a software upgrade of the Linux kernel,
| which increased the average power use of the server from 1.19 to
| 1.49 watts
|
| I wonder what change in the linux kernel caused the increased
| load. Someone out there is responsible for this crime!
| [deleted]
| ralph84 wrote:
| This is an area where Apple is way ahead of everyone else. A
| code change that increases power usage 25% wouldn't make it
| past CI at Apple.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| How many more hardware configurations is Linux deployed on
| than MacOS? Would it be in the region of 3-4 orders of
| magnitude more hardware configurations?
|
| How long has there been a power consumption focus in the
| linux kernel? The efforts to reduce power usage by the linux
| kernel pre-date PowerTOP's first release and wiki tells me
| that was 2006.
|
| Is Apple way ahead or is it just less popular?
| jolux wrote:
| > Is Apple way ahead or is it just less popular?
|
| They're definitely solving a narrower problem but they do
| appear to have it solved. Is there even a subset of
| hardware configurations for which this is the case with
| Linux? (if there is I would love to know about it)
| r-w wrote:
| > Is there even a subset of hardware configurations for
| which this is the case with Linux?
|
| That's not how cross-platform, cross-application software
| works. Linux is used for everything. Every other change
| for power efficiency will get balanced out by another
| change for raw performance.
| jolux wrote:
| Well sure but there are vendors that advertise Linux
| computers.
| driverdan wrote:
| [citation needed]
| jolux wrote:
| That's incredible. How do they measure that? Does their CI
| somehow measure power impact on a set of real devices?
| ruffrey wrote:
| Apple is designing much of the silicon. Measuring power
| usage is a core competency.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Sorry, what does CI stand for?
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Continuous integration -- Software development practice
| based on frequent submission of granular changes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
|
| ... basically check every small commit, ideally end-to-end.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Thanks!
| goodpoint wrote:
| On the contrary. Linux runs on any Android or FLOSS phone,
| almost every car and plane, TV, router, and plenty of
| industrial devices.
|
| The amount of testing that Linux goes through is staggering.
|
| This has to be a specific bug on that platform in its
| specific configuration.
| jshier wrote:
| I find that hard to believe considering everything else that
| makes it past not only Apple's CI, but their automatic and
| manual QA testing, their beta process, and multiple public
| releases. I know they have to do something in their CI, but
| I'd like to see any evidence of your claim.
| davidcuddeback wrote:
| Perhaps Spectre/Meltdown mitigations?
| nijave wrote:
| Could be a scheduler change. I think the default scheduler
| doesn't try too hard to be power efficient on the assumption
| servers/desktops generally aren't optimizing for a single watt
| or less
|
| On Android, the scheduler can have a decent impact battery life
| widdakay wrote:
| I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting
| is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to
| host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel
| is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also
| shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in
| perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing
| nothing, and many more under load. To handle the top of HN, the
| developer probably would use load balancing and other tech,
| multiplying the power usage accordingly. Edit: fixing typos.
| tyingq wrote:
| I see a fair amount of stories here where the endpoint appears
| to be a VPS, sometimes fronted by a CDN. It's hard to say
| exactly how efficient that is, since configurations vary, but
| it's likely pretty good. Sure, there's hungry servers under
| there, but the multi-tenancy spreads that out.
| gandalfian wrote:
| Though topical thought, the Uk NHS site is text and blue
| hyperlinks. Its still collapsing tonight because the prime
| minister just announced booster jabs available for everyone.
| (Guess what I'm spending my evening doing). So you can't always
| win.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It'd be interesting to know what you actually are doing!
|
| Thoughts and Prayers, etc
| gandalfian wrote:
| Oh, actually, just browsing to kill time while watching the
| open browser window at the side refresh on the NHS booking
| site hoping it will work long enough to give me a booster
| jab appointment. It alternates between "you are in a queue
| ten minutes to go" and "our site is overloaded please try
| later" for about two hours now. Everyone else between the
| ages of 18-50 in the UK is basically doing the same thing,
| hammering the site. Its not quite as life and death
| exciting as I make it sound....
| DanBC wrote:
| https://twitter.com/AmandaPritchard/status/14703629354489
| 856...
|
| > Over 110,000 people booked their COVID-19 booster
| vaccine before 9am this morning.
|
| I don't know if this is a huge amount of traffic, or just
| an unexpectedly large bump.
|
| Good luck getting a booking!
| secondcoming wrote:
| Ah, I thought you were working on the NHS IT systems!
| ascar wrote:
| The key here is that it's just a very simple website with very
| low computational requirements.
| zucker42 wrote:
| And yet it provides the same amount of information as other
| websites 10 or 100 times it's weight.
| denysvitali wrote:
| https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
| rabuse wrote:
| It's a static page... not everything is a static page in the
| web world.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| a lot of the web would probably be better off if it were
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think so, WordPress that isnt cached to a frozen state on
| the backend is kind of silly in my eyes, the only exception
| would be comments, but you could hack around that by using
| Disqus or something, voila.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You don't need disqus, you just invalidate the cache and
| regenerate it for only the next request, serving stale
| copies until the regen is complete. nginx or varnish can
| both do that out of the box.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Forcing people to use disqus is a fantastic way to fuck
| over your userbase
| Cpoll wrote:
| > you could hack around that by using Disqus
|
| But that's not actually solving the problem, it's just
| offloading it. Not to mention that you're selling your
| community to yet another tracking company, and jacking up
| user page load time.
| mro_name wrote:
| >> by Disqus or something
|
| depends on what you want, the low end is incoming
| comments as emails and putting them semi-manually into an
| iframe on the unchanged static article page. Doing it
| myself at https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-
| making-of/ and sacrificed commenter speed.
|
| Others may easily be more sophisticated than above
| brutalist solution. But still: comments in iframes align
| well with static sites IMO.
|
| Edit: even better may be to phase in comments from HN or
| the fediverse or whatever you care about into an iframe.
| Be it copied or inline and re-styled.
| charrondev wrote:
| I'm a technical lead for a SaaS community forum product
| and we handle billions of page views a month. Many of
| them don't put any load on our servers though because
| guest pages are cached with a short duration and the
| cached page gets served up.
|
| Today that's cloudflare but in the past it was varnish.
|
| Otherwise it is very dynamic. Different users have access
| to different content so we generally can't cache full
| pages at the edge for authenticated users.
| mro_name wrote:
| nice. You're working regularly on the website. Not all
| do.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I like this approach, is there something specific you're
| using to automate this at least in part? I feel like it
| could be made into a simple service with very limited JS
| to make it less "slow", unless you decide to manually
| approve of a comment.
| mro_name wrote:
| > automate
|
| not yet, but I think of a delayed shell script (cron
| 15min?). JS (clientside) may be not of much use.
|
| Or use a feedback webform via
| https://github.com/mro/form2xhtml - doesn't have to be
| email then.
|
| Or monitor IMAP folders for accepted comments and cron
| them to the webserver a la
| https://codeberg.org/mro/flohmarkt.monte-
| ts.de/src/branch/ma... and online.sh
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Even comments come quite rarely in most cases, so that
| the complete page with comments can be cached.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I agree, but comments could also be static. Have a
| service handle comment submission, regenerate the page a
| bit later. If displaying to the user is an issue, do it
| client side. Most websites use a moderation queue anyway.
|
| One could even generate a dedicated HTML page for the
| comments, and include it in an iframe, although inlining
| them is probably more performant.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Just POST to a PHP script that regenerates the cached
| HTML including comments.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Comments are far from the only exception to static page
| caches! There are often dynamic changes via plugins or
| functions.php. There are shortcodes and a number of other
| examples too.
| blondin wrote:
| we had semi-static comments you are talking about. they
| were called guestbooks. but we gave up on them.
| DietPi wrote:
| It is not a Raspberry Pi, but an Olimex Olinuxino A20 Lime 2
| and a 30W solar panel:
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware
|
| But yes, web hosting, especially for small/mid traffic websites
| has become very cheap (in power consumption and in money),
| especially for static websites where CDNs can be used to serve
| assets and static content from edge caches. A full x86 server
| or PC is often total overkill and a little SBC sufficient
| instead.
|
| It is a dual core CPU btw, to bring the average CPU load into
| perspective. A very interesting project as a prove of concept,
| also for others to adopt in countries with unstable electricity
| supply and/or in relation high electricity costs :).
| berkes wrote:
| Did the author use a CDN? Because that's kindof cheating: you
| are just having another (free) service burning the
| electricity for you.
|
| I assumed the solar server serves the sites directly, because
| of this. Maybe I was wrong.
| goodpoint wrote:
| There is no CDN, thankfully.
| DietPi wrote:
| True, in this case it is great, somehow mandatory, that it
| is fully self-contained :). However, dynamic content like
| the current power consumption and CPU load would still need
| be served by the origin, or cached at the CDN with short
| timeouts only.
|
| Using CDNs was more an idea/suggestion for others who take
| this project as an inspiration to run their own website
| even with small hardware, unstable electricity supply
| and/or expensive/limited bandwidth, where a CDN can further
| reduce server load and traffic. Also when speaking about
| efficiency of the Internet in general, using small SBCs
| where sufficient, a CDN usually serves assets/content much
| more effective, given a network where a particular edge
| server is usually closer to the visitor than the origin
| server, and hardware that is specifically designed and run
| for that purpose and can be assumed to be highly loaded
| (less wasted power consumption). So as long as one trusts a
| CDN, or the content is not of any security or privacy
| concerns, it is usually a reasonable choice to make use of
| it :).
| foxfluff wrote:
| I recall someone saying that being on HN front page resulted in
| a peak load of a few requests per second. I.e. absolutely
| nothing if you're just serving static content.
| agumonkey wrote:
| i wonder how much information is really needed on wires today
| driverdan wrote:
| > I think this also shows how inefficient modern website
| hosting is.
|
| I suspect it's the opposite. Hosting a static site like this on
| a service designed for it is going to use less power than using
| dedicated hardware. Single server can host hundred to thousands
| of static sites. The power use per site is going to be much
| lower.
| dheera wrote:
| I mean, that's because a lot of websites these days are built
| on bloat on top of bloat. A periodically generated static HTML
| page is pretty easy to take HN load.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| It's mostly static files, if it was a modern SPA with APIs and
| such, it would probably crash having to fetch the same data for
| what is quite literally a static site.
| anchpop wrote:
| I think I've mentioned this before, but nothing about SPAs
| require that level of bloat. My personal site
| (https://chadnauseam.com/) uses React and SPA-type features
| like preloading internal pages so they load instantly when
| you click a link, but almost all of it works fine with js
| disabled. It used to get a perfect score on lighthouse too
| but it doesn't anymore :(
| mro_name wrote:
| embracing outages, though reducing them, is revolutionary, I
| guess.
|
| Just not serving everybody all the time.
| Eikon wrote:
| > a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing
|
| I'm really tired of hearing this. "Serverless because otherwise
| server doing nothing", "very small virtual machine because
| otherwise server doing nothing".
|
| The server is not doing "nothing" it's waiting for incoming
| requests. It's like if you told "this cashier is doing nothing
| because there is no customers in the store".
|
| When a server is loaded at capacity minus some margin,
| latencies are going up, which may not always be acceptable.
| Also, not every web workload scales linearly nor is cacheable
| and traffic patterns may not be that predictable and some
| requests may generate higher loads.
|
| Managing capacity is way more involved that just "this server
| is doing nothing".
|
| Also, many of these technologies supposedly reducing "idle
| time" such as "serverless" are usually incredibly wasteful
| where handling a single request may start a completely new
| environment and may pull resources across the globe.
| IncRnd wrote:
| If there are 100 servers but only one is needed to handle the
| user traffic, then 99% of those servers are considered to be
| "doing nothing" even if they are powered on and running
| software. At the end of the day, running that software is
| meaningless to the business and to customers.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I think the point was that "ready and waiting" is valuable
| to the end customer, even if it only makes a different
| later when they are doing something. It's kind-of like how
| firemen are valuable even when they are not getting calls,
| because they are available for low latency response instead
| of busy doing something else. The idea that this is just
| wasted computation is therefore somewhat disingenuous.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Oh, but it could be improved. Linux can cold boot under
| 300ms (easier if you control the BIOS and can tune it for
| speed, like coreboot can), faster if resuming from RAM.
| That should allow you to perform load-balancing while
| powering off the extra capacity (using wake-on-lan).
|
| If load becomes too important for the SBC or close to
| capacity, wake the server, and perform a handover once
| it's up. You can either hold the packets and use the SBC
| as a proxy, or change your router's config to point to
| the newly awakened server (alternatively, just exchange
| IP or MAC addresses). With a bit of magic to avoid
| closing existing connections (I believe home ISP routers
| should keep NAT connections open if a port forward is
| changed), it would work. Obviously it's even easier with
| a proper load balancer.
|
| edit: actually even a router might be able to handle low
| loads
|
| There seems to be surprisingly little interest in this
| (closest I found was
| https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/89271 ).
|
| So yeah, it's still wasted power and computation in my
| opinion. "Ready and waiting" should not take 100W per
| server, but be closer to 0.1W (WoL), or lower if managing
| state from a central node. I guess it's not worth
| optimizing for most people, and big cloud probably does
| something similar already.
|
| In a way, it's a bit like big.LITTLE with additional
| latency: small, power-efficient vs big, fast, inefficient
| for small loads.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Totally agreed that 100w is a waste at idle, but I don't
| think that's what the parent was talking about. My read
| was that the parent comment was responding to capacity
| planning tending towards reducing the number of servers
| (without building out low latency cold boot infra) in the
| name of cost/energy savings, and that resulting in higher
| latency request latency. Anecdotally this seems
| plausible, but I don't have metrics to back it up.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Modern CPUs go to lower power states super quickly and
| draw almost nothing. The thing is, if the server is
| running many VMs, there's no way it's going to a low
| power state, eveb if some are doing nothing (others will
| be). You also have 10 jet engines blowing air at the
| front, which probably is more than the CPU uses when both
| are idle.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Still, if you switch 100 servers with 100 owners all
| waiting for connections for 1 server hosting 100 sites
| and 99 other in a low power mode waiting for traffic, you
| save a lot of power and doesn't lose much.
|
| Anyway, it would be waste even if you couldn't save it at
| all. "Waste" is simply a name for things we consume but
| don't actually use. All industries use that term.
| hpen wrote:
| Yeah not like the requirements have changed at all........
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| We waste so many resources customizing each response to time
| and observer and it's just nuts. Most people aren't going to
| notice if a calculation is being debounced, amortizing it over
| hundreds of seconds or requests. Instant gratification is the
| most expensive thing by far. And debouncing has such a profound
| effect similar to load shedding for traffic bursts, it really
| should be front and center in the literature.
|
| When I was young I worked on a project that was so inefficient
| that I was professionally embarrassed to have my name
| associated with it. So I moved heaven and earth to fix it. Gave
| myself an RSI before I learned to better automate some
| transformations.
|
| Today I'm also working on another, lesser embarrassment, but
| I'm not working weekends and holidays on it anymore. I'm not a
| hero surrounded by villains, I'm an observant person drowning
| in a sea of apathetic faces.
|
| The amount of hardware we have per user request should have
| gotten someone fired. Most of the people responsible are gone,
| but one is still here complecting anything that isn't nailed
| down, and few others know enough to realize that the reason
| they don't feel confident in the code is because someone
| intentionally made it that way, and you should not be looking
| up to those people. They are literally making you dumber.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Hey @dang, you wouldn't happen to know anything about how
| Hacker News is hosted, would you? Reading this has piqued my
| curiosity. If time / your position permits, of course.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Last I read it was hosted out of M5 Networks in San Diego. I
| used to like fairly close to their data center and had
| considered hosting there at some point, so when I read that
| Hacker News hosted there it stuck with me.
| smoldesu wrote:
| IIRC it's just stored on someone's Dell Inspiron that they've
| got laying around in an office. Might be outdated info, but
| it's really nothing special if memory serves.
| justsaying9 wrote:
| Yeah, and apparently the load is such a problem for them,
| their web server will permanently autoban your IP if you
| load too many articles at once, say 10-15 that you were
| planning to save and read offline.
|
| Then if you email to ask 'Wtf', tiny violins will play as
| they explain they are too broke and impoverished to afford
| bandwidth enough to not do this, while helpfully suggesting
| you go to a different internet connection to fill out a
| form to unblock yourself.
|
| Must be tough times at YCombinator, spending all those
| billions on junk Web Bubble 2.0 companies and none left to
| spare for HN bandwidth, or say a proper index so you can
| look up old articles.
| detaro wrote:
| From what I remember from previous posts by dang: It's living
| on a single dedicated server with some hosting company (I
| think you can look up the IP to figure out which) - at least
| a while ago the code also was single-core, not sure if that
| is still the case. (in the past it used cloudflare for
| caching, but hasn't in a few years)
| saltminer wrote:
| It's M5 Hosting
| [deleted]
| marricks wrote:
| I hate to be that old foggy but, aren't websites just getting
| worse and bloated with JS crap?
|
| I've had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy
| new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the
| interface which used to not exist, previously they just had
| normal page load delays.
|
| For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is
| mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. New UI
| doesn't have as many page loads it seems but wherever you
| navigate to takes far longer to load because of api calls or
| just baaad JS.
|
| Slow for the user, slow for the server. It's almost like the
| people who push website technology are the same one selling you
| servers. Hate it and want to go back.
| onion2k wrote:
| _aren't websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap_
|
| Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that
| are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned.
| They should have no practical impact on the battery life of
| the server.
|
| There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but
| that's not the bloat you mean.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| And, heck, there's a solid argument that server-side
| rendering is more environmentally efficient, since the work
| is done in a data-center, which can (1) utilize caching to
| avoid re-doing work and (2) be built in an optimal location
| for electricity generation.
| nathanfig wrote:
| Conversely, you are losing the distributed computing
| gained by rendering on the client, and therefore need a
| bigger server to scale when needed. And HTTP caching can
| and should be used for API responses as well.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If we're measuring by total resource consumption
| regardless of location, is distributed computing
| beneficial? Your server can be less powerful, but the
| client needs to be more powerful. I'd think the primary
| difference is who's paying for it.
|
| Sure, most clients may already be adequately provisioned,
| but only because so many websites with bloated Javascript
| have forced their hand...
| chakkepolja wrote:
| I think he is talking about badly written JS code serving
| the APIs and the overhead of it.
|
| Of course it's hard to debate whether JS, Java or PHP is
| most inefficient in that regard.
| onion2k wrote:
| I strongly believe that the efficiency of an API is 1%
| down to the language it's coded in, and 99% down to who
| coded it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yes and no; while it's still true that you can write
| FORTRAN in any language, there are network effects that
| mean the effort required to write efficient code is
| different per language/community/framework.
| labster wrote:
| Corollary: The average API is far less efficient than the
| languages you like to complain about their efficiency.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I think that's true if you take a no dependencies
| approach but as soon as you tap into the ecosystem the
| argument is lost.
| onion2k wrote:
| Not really. It still depends on who coded it. It's just
| that there's more people involved now.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files
| that are sent to the user as far as the web server is
| concerned. They should have no practical impact on the
| battery life of the server. "_
|
| ...and if those static files make 100 API calls as soon as
| they land?
| Beached wrote:
| it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than
| when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.
| mro_name wrote:
| Website Obesity crisis going on and on:
| https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
|
| Was here on HN several times, sadly still the case.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I
| care about it because it makes the web inaccessible.
|
| Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome. "
| jmondi wrote:
| What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of
| the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.
| _jal wrote:
| When you replace one with the other and notice a
| substantial change in time-required-for-task, I think you
| can make comparisons.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic
| though.
| RussianCow wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| Websites have become significantly more complex in the
| last two decades.
| unionpivo wrote:
| Really ?
|
| Take for instance news sites or blogs: When I read news
| article, what I want is mostly (there are some great
| interactive infographics, but those are tiny minority)
| text and few images, that are static.
|
| And it's not like that as a consumer I get anything
| extra. The text and images are still static, for the most
| part. Except that now its makes 20 separate requests to
| load it all up. Hell, pages are usually even less
| dynamic, after comments fell out of favor.
|
| What increased is number of extra stuff, that is mostly
| focused on selling me stuff, tracking every metrics
| possible, and trying to figure out somne clickbait I
| would click next for extra engagement.
|
| But that's not content, content has largely stayed the
| same.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't believe the bloat of modern websites is because
| of ad-tech of dark patterns - all of these can still be
| done with an otherwise lightweight website. If anything,
| ads (excluding intentional resource usage such as crypto-
| miners) would be much lighter than what a typical SPA
| website like Reddit or Twitter is.
|
| I believe what's happening is a broader trend in the
| industry of building engineering playgrounds and doing
| engineering purely for engineering's sake to benefit
| one's career - a positive feedback loop where not
| participating puts developers at a disadvantage as they
| won't gain over-engineering skills that companies now
| require (they require them because _their_ developers or
| managers want them for the same reason).
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Text-only NPR: https://text.npr.org/
| dylan604 wrote:
| For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Or the advertises/whatever assholes profit of
| "engagement"?
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| I don't want my browser to be loading entire JS
| frameworks and trackers and whatever other crap just to
| read a bunch of text. That's absolutely nonsensical
| damir wrote:
| I'm using two browsers, one with disabled JS (primary)
| and vanilla one. When and only WHEN page doesn't load on
| non-js browser (and if I really, really, reaaaally want
| that piece of content) then maybe I will use vanilla
| browser...
|
| Browsing with js disabled is fast, pages load quickly,
| almost no trackers and there are "old" or "text" versions
| of sites still available... old.reddit, old.twitter or
| nitter instances...
|
| Heck, even google has one...
|
| To be honest, I just use dillo browser most of the time.
| Small, speedy and safer then most...
|
| Edit: typo.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Let's look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core
| concept of it hasn't changed, it still just has to
| display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back
| in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML
| and a simple form POST. I don't have the numbers for the
| page back then but I'd estimate it at 100KB - nowadays
| it's a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails
| at its primary purpose of displaying a block of text with
| a stupid "something went wrong" message or endless
| spinner.
|
| The "new" Reddit is also a good example. Even ignoring
| all the user-hostile functionality changes, the actual
| experience is still slower and less reliable.
| can16358p wrote:
| Reddit web is incredibly sluggish. I open the app to
| browse which is a smooth experience (putng aside dark
| patterns).
|
| Same for Twitter. Maybe it's intentional to move users
| into the app, where ads are more likely to be actually
| seen (e.g. Many web users have ad blockers) and in app
| purchases are frictionless.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just FYI, for Reddit there's an amazing third-party
| client called Apollo on iOS, and I'm sure there are
| others too, same on Android.
| can16358p wrote:
| Yeah I have it. I actually made the in app purchase to
| support the developer.
|
| I ended up going back to the official app which I think
| is nice, but also feel nice about financially supporting
| an indie developer who does a nice third party client for
| a (generally) awesome community.
| roywiggins wrote:
| And for proof that you can do better, Nitter is a better
| Twitter interface than Twitter is, and it's much lighter.
| kgeist wrote:
| I don't know, we're currently rewriting our UI from the
| classic "PHP renders everything with almost zero JS" to the
| more modern "single page application with a crap ton of JS"
| and the new UI feels much faster to me. The old way was to
| resend and rerender everything on each click, which is
| problematic for complex UIs with a lot of data.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| On a modest 3 year old phone running Firefox, such
| websites are excruciating.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| I agree. There needs to be a substantial effort in web
| development to shed the bloat. Clean and small reduces issues
| with resources, security, and maintainability. The status quo
| is gross.
| hattmall wrote:
| I agree with this so so much.
|
| The problem is too much reliances on frameworks and add on
| libraries.
|
| Developers will import an entire framework that for the
| benefit of a single feature. It's mind blowing to look at the
| amount of js includes for seemingly simple sites.
|
| Stackoverflow answers that direct you to import a library or
| framework should be banned in most cases.
|
| I will often have to scroll past several answers that say to
| import a library before finding a simple and functional
| answer that uses only a few lines of code down near the
| bottom. Which in my eyes is the real answer. I often wonder
| if there's a behind the scenes effort on SO to promote
| certain includes.
|
| The entire ecosystem of some languages / implementations
| relies on this far too heavily.
|
| We are seeing some of the consequences other than just
| bloated systems from this style of coding with malicious node
| packages.
| throwaway11602 wrote:
| I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a
| front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for
| various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to
| use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a
| ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many
| divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices
| pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full
| blown framework like Vuetify. So far, I haven't found
| anything in between. I would love to find a CSS library
| that I can just import and be able to create simple, nicely
| styled pages, e.g. that look Material-esque, without
| jQuery, node, npm, gulp, grunt, sass, and all that jazz.
| mro_name wrote:
| do you know the matrix movie quote "but there is no
| spoon" - maybe the framework you look for is vanilla CSS.
| Write sensible markup to hold your content (almost no
| divs), CSS it and be good. Sounds that feasible?
| throwaway11602 wrote:
| > ... vanilla CSS... Sounds that feasible?
|
| Vanilla CSS is the other end of the spectrum, but the
| problem is there is apparently nothing between hand-
| crafted CSS and a full front-end framework. People, like
| me, who are not good at design will choose the
| convenience of the latter over going through the tedium
| of the former, even if we don't really want to.
| mro_name wrote:
| You won't be a sculptor if you avoid the chisel. If in
| rome, do as the romans do. If you want to swim, you'll
| get wet.
|
| There is no design in/for the web without html+css, is
| there?
|
| Edit: by removing 3rd parties from your project you
| remove a lot of overhead and current and future risk. But
| be warned: Maybe your company sells exactly that for a
| good margin and you ruin the business model.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| We don't want to sculptors. We have other projects that
| just happen to require a sculpture as part of finishing
| them.
|
| > There is no design in/for the web without html+css, is
| there?
|
| Only as much as there's no programming without assembly
| language.
| mro_name wrote:
| > We don't want to sculptors.
|
| It is really sad that you are forced to do things that
| you believe you are not capable of doing and refuse to
| do.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get
| it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?
| throwaway11602 wrote:
| It's been a long time since I looked at Bootstrap. I
| don't remember it being anywhere near as easy to create a
| nice-looking page with it as it is with Vuetify.
| avrgamp wrote:
| How about Tailwind?
| mattl wrote:
| Bootstrap is unfashionable?
| toastal wrote:
| Bootstrap v2 had a LOT of unnecessary features while
| simultaneously lacking features because of Less
| limitations. By v5 it was significantly slimmed down if
| not for removing IE support and jQuery, but also a lot of
| rarely-used components.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| In the same way that Corollas, Applebee's, and Walmart
| brand jeans are unfashionable, yes.
| calebwinston wrote:
| Genuine question from a not-a-web-developer: Is this not
| mitigated by minimization tools like webpack?
| toastal wrote:
| Webpack is a front-end build toolchain, not a minifier.
| Usually Terser is used inside of Webpage to minify.
| simion314 wrote:
| >and bloated with JS crap?
|
| CSS animations too , especially the ones that use infinite.
| marricks wrote:
| I like a good clean CSS animation! They can be very short
| and meaningful. Maybe not for daily driver UI but
| somethings I like them.
|
| Infinite scrolling could be annoying with animations
| though, I grant you that.
| simion314 wrote:
| My issue is with infinite animations, constantly
| moving/blinking stuff. They also do not have same effect
| on different system configurations so you might not
| notice any effect on your dev machine and on users it
| makes the page unusable, and some are super distracting).
| scrollaway wrote:
| Nothing to do with site hosting. css animations don't eat
| the server's CPU; nor does JS bloat (other than bandwidth).
| Retric wrote:
| JS bloat can have significant server overhead when data
| is loaded dynamically. It's generally more efficient to
| have one GET request that can be heavily optimized than a
| lot of tiny XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed
| separately. That may flip around when someone spends a
| long time interacting with a SPA, but there is plenty of
| truly terrible code in the wild.
| RussianCow wrote:
| > It's generally more efficient to have one GET request
| that can be heavily optimized than a lot of tiny
| XMLHttpRequest that need to be parsed separately.
|
| Without context, this statement is misleading at best and
| downright false at worst. You're right that splitting up
| a single request into multiple would incur a small
| performance penalty, but you also generally gain other
| advantages like more localized caching and the ability to
| conditionally skip requests. In the long run, those
| advantages may actually make your app significantly more
| efficient. But without discussing details like this, it's
| pointless to make wild assumptions about performance.
| Retric wrote:
| The context was JS bloat, so we are specifically talking
| about the subset of poorly written sites. When it's
| possible to shoot yourself in the foot many people will
| do so.
|
| That said, if you ever actually profile things you will
| find the overhead per request is actually quite high.
| There is a clear tendency to request far to little data
| at a time.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I've built embedded web interfaces serving up static
| pages that were precompressed with gzip and then used XHR
| to fill in dynamic content. I kept it under 100K for the
| uncached download (zero third party scripts). Everything
| worked well and was reasonably lightweight as long as you
| avoided framework bloat. Not having to compress anything
| on device helps a bit on energy usage although that
| wasn't a concern.
| simion314 wrote:
| yes, I wanted to add that css (especially
| infinite)animation also eats the client energy and CPU.
| culi wrote:
| You're not alone in feeling this way
|
| https://handmade.network/manifesto
| BostonEnginerd wrote:
| We've recently transitioned to Salesforce for a project. It's
| remarkable how laggy the interface is. Removing a line from a
| quote takes three clicks and four seconds. The UI also
| doesn't always refresh the items in a reasonable period of
| time, requiring a page reload.
|
| Reloading the page is like 20MB as well. Great when you're
| tethered to your phone.
| flatiron wrote:
| The new lightning makes it such a pain to do my time cards.
| Try to open my sub projects to see how many hours are left
| and have a tab open with my time card and constantly errors
| out. I can't be the only person who checks hours left on sub
| projects when entering my time.
| brightball wrote:
| Fwiw, the top of HN isn't all that stress. It mostly comes down
| to disk I/O and efficiency of the language.
|
| I've been at the top of HN for extended hours a couple of times
| on just a Heroku hobby dyno with no caching at all, but I had
| Cloudflare out front absorbing all the traffic that would have
| come from serving static assets.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Not to be contrary, but if your site is largely static _and_
| you 're fronting it with Cloudfare, then you're essentially
| saying Cloudfare can handle load.
|
| Not much revelation there, right?
| brightball wrote:
| Mine isn't static fwiw. Just running Elixir w/ Postgres.
| Elixir usually performs well enough uncached that you need
| to justify any caching needs.
| divbzero wrote:
| That's a fair point for GP's Heroku + Cloudflare
| deployment. The OP solar site is a better example of
| efficient static hosting as it is run on a lightweight
| server [1] and not fronted with Cloudflare. The reading at
| the bottom of the website indicates 2.70 W power usage at
| the moment and over two weeks uptime.
|
| [1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware
| tazjin wrote:
| Cloudflare really doesn't make much of a difference for HN.
| The last front page traffic I saw (~a week ago?) was still
| at most a handful of QPS. Any nginx instance with default
| configuration serving static files from any modern computer
| should be able to handle that (given that your link is big
| enough).
|
| Now if you reach the top of a large subreddit, or have a
| viral tweet with a link to you, that's a different order of
| magnitude. HN is just not that large.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Then why do people talk about the "HN hug of death"?
| brightball wrote:
| If you've got a bunch of images and your site is running
| uncached with a clunky CMS behind it, it will probably
| strain you.
|
| The traffic is usually about 40k uniques over 24 hours.
| For reference, my uncached site is running on Elixir
| which is often better without caching.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It's usually not images but rather the CMS making 100
| read queries and 20 write queries per page load without
| any object caching that brings sites down. Even a slow
| uplink serving big image won't bring an nginx server
| down, it's all async.
| brightball wrote:
| Serving a lot of images at the same time will work the
| disk I/O up in many cases. Probably gotten a lot better
| with NVMe though.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It's typically one page that hits Reddit/HN/whatever with
| its fixed set of static images. It's pretty much the
| ideal scenario for the kernel's in-memory cache.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I know people who host a static website on a home dsl
| connection with 5Mbps upload, using Cloudflare. The CDN
| literally does all the work.
| DarylZero wrote:
| 5Mbps when 56k would be more than enough.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It's not all so simple. For one, this A20 is connected to a
| router which is connected to the grid. The connection used is a
| 100 Mb fiber which - thanks to small average page size and very
| little JS - is more than enough. The whole thing is in the
| owner's home. I have a similar setup, and I wouldn't say "This
| is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes
| offline" but "This website is served from someone's home, which
| means it sometimes goes offline."
| goodpoint wrote:
| > this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is
|
| And this is in a world without distributed, locality-aware
| caching.
| amelius wrote:
| Wouldn't it be way more efficient to run it on some
| (virtualized) node in a datacenter that is optimized for it?
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Yes but it only matters if you ignore all the constant
| factors and sunk costs that exist. For example, I already
| _have_ an rpi _and_ a solar panel. My crappy google home mini
| wastes more power than this doing absolutely nothing. It 's
| kind of pointless to hyper-optimize efficiency of a little
| server like this given all the waste around it.
| isthis129283 wrote:
| Nothing new here.
|
| AWS US-EAST-1 has been doing this for years.
| rackjack wrote:
| Relevant, and from the same website:
|
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Interesting and non-obvious fact about solar panels...
|
| The optimal angle for generating as much power as possible from
| the panels is very different to the optimal angle for powering
| something year round.
|
| If you want to power something year round, it's the power in
| winter you need to maximize - so you angle the panel very steep
| to collect winter sun. In the summer, this angle is far from
| optimal, but due to more hours of sunlight there will still be
| plenty to power whatever device it is you want to be always
| powered.
| beckman466 wrote:
| we need this but for storage space usage. i can't even imagine
| the insane amounts of storage used to host useless livestreams of
| gamers gaming.
|
| today's profit oriented economic system causes alienation and
| loneliness for many people, which leads to various coping
| mechanisms (such as watching other people playing games).
|
| the streams are only valuable as content because the working
| class is heavily alienated and therefore our attention can be
| bought by capitalists as 'audience commodity':
| https://youtu.be/CK319sIWwbA?t=519
| obblekk wrote:
| *Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an
| elegant work of art.
|
| *Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on
| the about page):
|
| >> "The entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity
| production with traffic doubling roughly every 2 years"
|
| I think the implication is electricity consumption will also
| double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates
| on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at
| this rate without an increase in energy consumption. *This is why
| technology is brilliant.* It allows us to do much much more with
| the same resources. We should want more technological innovation.
|
| >> " These black-and-white images are then coloured according to
| the pertaining content category via the browser's native image
| manipulation capacities"
|
| This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation from
| the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering
| interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase
| energy as most personal computer processors are much less
| efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy
| savings from caching. I'm not sure where it nets out, but just
| solely focusing on reducing server compute time isn't necessarily
| a path toward sustainability if it shifts more computation to the
| client.
|
| Very happy to hear if I've misinterpreted the thesis. Again, I
| commend the technical work itself.
| y4mi wrote:
| Check out the upcoming ATX power consumption and compare it to
| what we're using currently...
|
| What you said was true for a very long time, but Moore's law
| has slowed down a lot over the last 5yrs and power consumption
| has increased significantly, and is about to become
| unreasonable in my opinion.
|
| Maximum power draw of 2.4 kw for about to 10% of the uptime is
| ... sadly going to be reality soon.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > power consumption has increased significantly, and is about
| to become unreasonable in my opinion
|
| It is not the first time it has happened, and then went down
| again. It's just one of the usual "cycles".
| y4mi wrote:
| I don't think we've went through a circle of more then
| doubling the power consumption before, but I've only been
| paying attention to it since shortly before 2010, as I was
| using prebuilt systems before that.
|
| Maybe you're right and more then doubling the power
| consumption is a normal thing that just occasionally
| happens.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Precisely it was with Core that I think the previous
| "nuclear power CPUs" cycle ended.
| Thorrez wrote:
| While I agree with most of your points, I think that these
| dithering images use less client-side power than a regular
| image compression (e.g. JPEG or PNG). The dithered images are
| smaller (according to them), and I don't see why they would use
| more CPU per byte to decode than JPEG.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > The dithered images are smaller (according to them), and I
| don't see why they would use more CPU per byte to decode than
| JPEG.
|
| Just try substituting something else in that statement and
| see if it makes sense. "The lzma-compressed files are smaller
| than the raw test files, so opening them in an editor
| shouldn't use more cpu" or "HEVC-compressed videos are
| smaller than DivX videos, so shouldn't they be more efficient
| to decode and play (sans hardware acceleration)?"
| Thorrez wrote:
| The examples you give compare new/good compression (lzma,
| HVEC) with old/bad compression (uncompressed, DivX). Yes
| the new/good compression uses more CPU per byte.
|
| I see no reason to believe their website uses a compression
| scheme that uses more CPU per byte than PNG or JPEG. I
| don't think they're using anything advanced. Actually I
| just checked, and their website is using PNG.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I feel like it's a very useful metaphor for the work ahead in
| dealing with energy production, consumption, storage,
| efficiency, etc.
|
| Layer 1: We must think of clever solutions to reduce our energy
| footprint where possible and shifting typical energy uses
| around is one way to do so
|
| Layer 2: But we must also be conscious and aware of economies
| of scale, and shifting the burden of energy usage from one
| central server to N clients is ultimately not a good answer for
| NET energy consumption.
|
| Layer 3: But for some constrained resources, that might be
| worthwhile, depending on the magnitude: The incremental cost of
| extra rendering on the client is a rounding error. But on a
| solar-powered low-energy server, it MIGHT be meaningful, and be
| the difference between something working and not.
|
| This is a lens we must apply to everything:
|
| * Logging * Battery technology * Buying locally vs economies of
| scale * International shipping * Container ships * etc.
| fastball wrote:
| I'd rather avoid all these layers and just build so much
| nuclear we get to a future where electricity is too cheap to
| meter.
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| But isn't one of the problems of global warming (ie where
| humans have a "future") the amount of waste heat we are
| producing?
|
| https://environmentalsystemsresearch.springeropen.com/artic
| l...
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Current world power consumption is about 15 terawatts.
| That's 15,000 gigawatts. [0] One gigawatt takes about 1
| nuke. So, 15,000 nukes. Round that down to 10,000 nukes;
| ignore demand from new electric cars and cooling, and
| required downtime.
|
| On a very good day, a new nuke rounds down to $10 billion.
| 10^4 x 10^10 = $ 100 trillion. Not to mention mining,
| operating, disposal, and environmental costs. Or tsunamis,
| or profits, or interest.
|
| In other units (Q = 10^18 joules) Total world energy
| consumption per year: 400 Q. Total solar power striking the
| Earth each year: more than 4 x 10^6 Q.[1] Catch 1/10,000 of
| that.
|
| [0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-
| scienc...
|
| [1] http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~hetheriw/energy/t
| opics...
| wnkrshm wrote:
| That is entirely forgetting that you throw away and replace
| hardware in that timeline - what happens to the old hardware?
| crazypython wrote:
| Don't forget the reduced bandwidth usage- the energy used to
| transport the data across the entire internet.
| lapinot wrote:
| > This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation
| from the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering
| interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase
| energy as most personal computer processors are much less
| efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy
| savings from caching.
|
| I believe doing image color setting is already eaten up inside
| the cost of doing png decompression: the client is already
| doing image manipulation, this is just doing an additional
| multiplication, so i believe it is minimal additional cost on
| the client (i may be wrong tho, never wrote a png decoder).
|
| > I think the implication is electricity consumption will also
| double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates
| on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at
| this rate without an increase in energy consumption.
|
| We're not doing more with the same amount of energy, we're
| doing _much more_ with more energy. This is always the same
| energy efficiency fallacy: being more efficient (in percent
| "out/in") usually requires having bigger "in" (bigger scale).
| And you know, the thing that capitalistic companies always seek
| to get bigger no matter what. There's no incentive to maintain
| you current consumption. See
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energ...
| for more details by same source.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline,
| so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an
| increase in energy consumption
|
| Except that data bloat grows at a steady rate, and you only
| take advantage of Moore once you discard your old equipment and
| replace it with newer silicon. That generates ewaste, which is
| counterproductive to ecologically aware projects.
| dahart wrote:
| It seems like we have tons of room to make the internet more
| efficient even without Moore's law - how many backends and
| clients are written in scripting languages (PhP, Node, Python,
| Ruby...) without a whole lot of thought put into energy use
| (even if they are carefully designed to be fast or "efficient"
| by some metrics)?
|
| And how much of internet energy use is made of serving ads? It
| seems to be a growing share, and ads increasingly want to
| stream video, which puts things like PNG decoding & dithering
| in the margins of overall energy use.
| cseleborg wrote:
| > _This is why technology is brilliant._ It allows us to do
| much much more with the same resources. We should want more
| technological innovation.
|
| But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox,
| the name of which I forget, which says that the more
| efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute
| terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we
| introduced household appliances or when productivity went up.
| Cars became both more fuel-efficient but also heavier, so we
| burn more fuel. Smartphones have gotten really good at managing
| power, making them a viable choice for plenty of activities
| throughout the day, thus increasing their total energy
| consumption.
|
| Personally, I just don't believe more efficient tech will help
| reduce our power consumption. It will require either a
| completely different tech that doesn't require electricity or
| fuel to run, or a change in societal habits.
| edanm wrote:
| I'm not sure about your general point - people definitely use
| more things as they become cheaper, which is a good thing
| IMO, but you're right that this means power consumption
| doesn't necessarily go down with lowering costs.
|
| But just to add another dimension to the discussion, there's
| an interesting book I've heard about, the thesis of which is
| basically that technology has made a lot of material goods
| much more efficient. E.g. they give the example of aluminum
| soda cans - nowadays, the cans themselves use much less
| material than 50 years ago - using modern production
| technology, using CAD systems to design them better, etc. has
| led to a lot less material wastage (I think it was like 25%
| or something like that, but I'm not sure).
|
| And in general, from the point of view of the companies
| selling material goods, the less material and more
| efficiently produced materials the better, since that's a
| direct cost, meaning they are in general working to make
| everything a lot more efficient.
| fbardamu wrote:
| "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological
| progress or government policy increases the efficiency with
| which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for
| any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource
| rises due to increasing demand."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| sumtechguy wrote:
| It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the
| demand curves show it. As making something more efficient
| moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is).
| Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'.
| I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider
| there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not
| all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some
| sure act like it.
| putnambr wrote:
| In urban planning there's the 'law of induced demand'
| that has parallels to this and shows the paradoxical
| nature. When a road starts to see congestion, the
| reaction in the past has been to add lanes, widen the
| road, and/or increase the speed limit to get more cars
| through faster. This has its intended effect in the short
| term, but makes the road more attractive to drivers. More
| drivers start using the particular road, exceeding the
| planned capacity and in the average case causing worst
| congestion than existed before.
| em500 wrote:
| I guess the "paradox" or counterintuitive part comes in
| situations when the price elasticities are such that a
| 10% efficiency gain (or price cut) would result in >10%
| increase in demand and hence in final spending.
|
| Another part may be that non-economists (and even lots of
| students who succesfully passed econ 101) don't think
| about shifting demand or supply curves. In my experience,
| most people who remember the textbook supply-demand
| curves only think about moving along the curves (which
| makes the classic diagrams pretty crappy pedagogical
| devices IMO).
| sumtechguy wrote:
| agreed. 1 to 1 would be an interesting result and
| probably a linear set of curves. But some curves look
| more like log scales so the effect depending on the slope
| of the curve could be wildly more or less.
|
| I agree the classic diagrams are kind of crappy. As
| usually they are very simple just for demonstration. But
| to make both of those curves is usually more like a N
| dimensional curve. But remembering back on my econ
| classes I took they were excited about point slope
| formulas and maybe a mix of linear algebra in the
| advanced classes. Which was amusing from the CS/Math
| background which was my major.
| Closi wrote:
| Eh, I'm not so convinced that the relationship is direct -
| Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but
| I'm not convinced the two are necessarily linked.
|
| I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I
| did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was
| certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current
| monitor and Mac mini.
| ElKrist wrote:
| "I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox
| works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time
| spent.
|
| 20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or
| downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a
| regular basis now and a bigger share of the population
| worldwide has access to similar services
| Closi wrote:
| No, but I was torrenting those movies to my seedbox which
| was on 24/7.
|
| IMO I don't think usage scales to power consumption -
| this sounds like correlation vs causation to me. It
| sounds like use has also increased while efficiency has
| increased, not one because of the other (ie I would
| personally still be streaming the same number of movies
| if my AppleTV used twice the power, and if they release a
| new version that doubles the energy efficiency that won't
| cause me to watch more)
| roeles wrote:
| With a lot of these arguments (including for example the
| Unabomber manifesto), I wonder if we're not projecting our
| own behavior on technology, because we see the effects so
| easily when looking outward rather than inward.
|
| Technology just is. How it's used makes the difference, and
| that stems from our way of living in the world. Any tool can
| be used for both "good" and "bad", however you define those.
|
| I think we tend to prioritize our own desires above anything
| else, because "someone else" might do that and gain an
| advantage over "us". We're largely stuck in survival mode,
| rather than an abundance mindset where we take a step back
| and reflect on what the goal is, and what is needed to
| achieve that goal.
| bocytron wrote:
| > There is this paradox, the name of which I forget
|
| It's called the Rebound Effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
| carlio wrote:
| Significantly, shifting the image calculations from the server
| to the client means the work is duplicated for every client.
| While it saves energy for the server, it increases the overall
| energy consumption required to deliver the content.
| united893 wrote:
| False. Energetic costs of distributing duplicate information
| is significantly more expensive than local computation. Eg:
| measuring joules spent for decompression vs transmission is
| orders of magnitude over the n duplication.
| markburns wrote:
| But surely the orders of magnitude thing factors in when
| you can have orders of magnitude more clients than servers?
| I think you'd need to run more specific numbers to lean
| either way on this.
| arghwhat wrote:
| You seem to not realize that moving the calculation client-
| side means to send a JavaScript implementation, which for
| all sensible implementations would be significantly larger
| than the pre-computed result.
| kome wrote:
| No useless JavaScript in this case.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| The way the image is colored on the client is just some
| CSS (mix-blend-mode). Check it in the inspector.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Apparently the mix-blend-mode for images on the client is
| noticable performance-wise:
| https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/issues/6
| soheil wrote:
| Can one client do the work and post back the final version to
| the server so the server sends that version to all the other
| clients?
| an_ko wrote:
| Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting
| goatse'd.
| soheil wrote:
| A. Cryptographically verify the final version
|
| B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients
| in case some fail
| randombits0 wrote:
| The state of Missouri pushes SSN sorting to the browser. I'll
| allow it.
| ozzmith wrote:
| This guy fucks.
| jcoder wrote:
| I thought Moore's Law is about the density of components on an
| IC--what about it suggests a constant energy usage of IC as it
| gets denser?
| Smithalicious wrote:
| I believe ICs are limited by how fast you can cool them. All
| that energy goes into heat eventually, so temperature is
| going to depend only on total energy / area
| varenc wrote:
| Digression: Is it true that every single watt my
| CPU/server/electronics consume is ultimately turned into
| heat?
|
| To put it another way, does a server under a constant 500W
| produce the exact same amount of heat as a dumb 500W
| electric space heater? Excluding things like the tiny
| amount of energy that gets sent out on CAT5 cables, which I
| believe still gets turned into heat just elsewhere.
|
| I think this is true, but it's still counterintuitive.
| Makes me think there's something more useful we could make
| electric space heaters do with their energy and still
| produce the same amount of heat.
| [deleted]
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > I think this is true, but it's still counterintuitive.
| Makes me think there's something more useful we could
| make electric space heaters do with their energy and
| still produce the same amount of heat.
|
| Indeed: people have experimented with mining during the
| winter to recoup electric heating costs, which makes
| sense but only if you ignore the (expensive and getting
| more expensive by the day) cost of procuring the original
| mining hardware (aka GPU).
| int0x2e wrote:
| Hardware is a high cost if you're using current gen
| mining hardware to be competitive. If power is
| essentially "free" (since you'd use it anyway for heat),
| then even very old mining hardware would have a net
| positive benefit for you. It might only be worth a cup of
| coffee a week, but it is "free" money you can collect...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It still depends on what your alternative is. Much of the
| world does not use electricity for heat; in the United
| States, electricity is rarely used for heat in in the
| parts of the country that traditionally get brutal
| winters. It's cheaper for me to heat my home via the
| forced-air natural gas furnace (even though it is a less
| efficient fuel-to-heat process as compared to resistance
| heaters) given the disparity in pricing between
| residential electric and natural gas costs. I tried
| mining ethereum for a month last winter and I don't think
| that I broke even (despite using a relatively recent RTX
| 2080).
| wyager wrote:
| The only other places the energy could go are small - LED
| light, radio waves, sound. Almost all of it will go to
| heat.
| tempestn wrote:
| And all of those things will go to heat eventually too,
| as will all other energy!
| BubbleRings wrote:
| > something more useful...
|
| Ha! A space heater with bitcoin mining coils. Call them
| "bitcoils".
| taneq wrote:
| I'm sure you've heard the old joke about gamer college
| students using their fancy graphics cards to heat their
| rooms. :)
| eightails wrote:
| I did this last winter. Mining 24/7 on my personal rig
| noticeably took a bit of load off the heater and made a
| modest amount of ethereum. I stopped once the weather
| warmed as it seemed like a waste of energy.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I did the same, then my graphics card died and it was a
| net loss :-(
| sprkwd wrote:
| How were your electric bills?
| eightails wrote:
| Not appreciably different, that was the whole logic
| behind my thinking. In my case I have electric heaters,
| so doesn't make a difference compared to a gpu -- they're
| both effectively 100% thermally efficient.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| In short, yes. Exactly (well minus a few used to spin
| fans and hard drives). Here's one source from a quick
| search:
|
| https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-
| Spac...
|
| I remember seeing a paper referenced here once explaining
| why that energy loss is actually necessary, but I don't
| seem to have it saved anymore.
| divbzero wrote:
| > _I remember seeing a paper referenced here once
| explaining why that energy loss is actually necessary,
| but I don 't seem to have it saved anymore._
|
| Taking a stab at explaining the energy loss...
|
| When computing you are reducing local entropy ( _e.g._
| achieving a certain pattern of electric charges in chips
| and a certain pattern of pixels on the screen) while
| still increasing global entropy (the second law of
| thermodynamic). Heat dissipation from the local system to
| its surroundings accounts for the difference.
|
| This is analogous to Schrodinger's description of life
| where life forms increase the entropy of their
| surroundings to maintain their own low entropy.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The spinning fans use energy to move air, a (slightly)
| viscous fluid, which eventually encounters turbulence and
| friction and turns its kinetic energy into heat. Similar
| to discs that use energy to overcome friction in bearings
| and generate noise, which is a kinetic energy in the form
| of vibrations that also eventually dissipates into heat.
| manwe150 wrote:
| By a paper, do you mean the laws of thermodynamics?
|
| The fans also eventually also dissipate their energy as
| heat when they push air around.
|
| There is an alternative heater design though for the same
| power, which is a heat pump (the same as an AC, run in
| reverse), which can be much more efficient at heating
| (down to -5F outside, or so, when they may freeze over
| and stop working entirely)
| rrss wrote:
| This property is called Dennard scaling. It mostly does not
| apply to the latest few generations due to increasing static
| power (leakage current).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
| jcoder wrote:
| Fascinating, thank you
| jasonjayr wrote:
| For posterity ---
|
| @ 5:00 CET (Local time zome to the site) it's @ 36%. Sunrise for
| Barcelona is @ 8:08 am
| subroutine wrote:
| @ 08:44 CET it is at 28%. - Seems to have survived the night.
|
| edit
|
| @ 08:50 CET and it's up to 30%. She's in the clear.
| rob_c wrote:
| Very cool :D
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| This site loaded instantly for me.. I also get 210ms RTT to
| Barcelona from Australia. That's a first
| pym4n wrote:
| This is cool! Now I know what to do with some old PIs! :D
| florisuga wrote:
| I hope tons of web developers see this project and take note. How
| much more enjoyable could the web be if it moved in this
| direction, cutting out the bloat in favor of dense, useful
| content.
|
| I also find the whole site a trove of well-researched information
| and well-argued points of view on sustainability. Truly
| refreshing to find something that does the math instead of
| regurgitating the latest hype and buzzwords.
|
| One thing I come away with, and have realized more and more
| lately, is just how much we are getting in our own way and
| preventing ourselves from getting on a sustainable path,
| continuously chasing "innovation" when so much of the technology
| we'd need has been around for a long time. I'm not too optimistic
| we can break our growth addiction before things get (much more)
| ugly.
| [deleted]
| pezzana wrote:
| This is a fascinating site beyond the power indicator. For
| example, a recent article discusses low-tech solar panels:
|
| > ... To start with, ever since the 1950s, solar panels have been
| unfit for recycling, resulting in a waste stream that ends up in
| landfills. This waste stream will grow significantly during the
| coming years. Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25
| to 30 years, and most have been installed only in recent years.
| By 2050, researchers expect that almost 80 million tonnes of
| solar panels will reach the end of their lives. 1 2 3 That is a
| significant waste of resources and a danger to the environment -
| discarded solar PV panels contain toxic elements and present a
| fire hazard.
|
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...
| stephen_g wrote:
| We have some solar panel recycling companies coming online here
| in Australia already ([1] for example, but there are at least
| three or four other companies I've heard of starting up), and
| I'm sure that will be the case elsewhere as well, so I don't
| know how accurate that is.
|
| It's worth putting it in perspective too - huge amounts of
| waste are generated in power generation that solar is
| replacing, like coal power. One source (quoting research from
| IEA but the original document link is dead now) puts the amount
| of coal ash produced each year at 3.7 billion tons [2]. Here in
| Australia, it makes up more than one fifth of all waste
| produced in the country, and most of it is just dumped (in some
| places around the world it's used as an additive in concrete).
| But coal fly ash is full of highly toxic elements, including
| heavy metals.
|
| 1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-first-solar-panel-
| rec... 2. https://www.envirojustice.org.au/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/07/...
| culi wrote:
| To put that in perspective, in 2019 we generated a total of
| 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste.[0] By 2050, we expect to
| be generating 6 million new metric tons of e-waste from solar
| panels alone.[1]
|
| [0] https://ewastemonitor.info/gem-2020/ [1]
| https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-wh...
| kmstout wrote:
| There's another article that discusses a material-efficient way
| of making domes arches and vaulted ceilings:
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/11/tiles-vaults.html
|
| I've been watching videos of the technique. It's almost as
| relaxing as watching a professional butcher dismantle a cow.
| onethought wrote:
| How is PV unfit for recycling?
|
| It's pure silicon, with something like Boron on it. Losslessly
| recycling might be challenge, but you could definitely reuse
| all the Silicon and remake another panel. Which toxic elements
| do you mean? What's the fire hazard?
| justsaying9 wrote:
| It is believed they over time slowly absorb rays of smugness
| from virtue signalling urbanites in the surrounding vicinity,
| gradually rendering the panel material radioactive and unfit
| for future use, even after recycling. Some believe this
| effect can be mitigated by first sprinkling the unit with the
| used oil from a sacrificed Chevy 350 engine, while walking in
| a counterclockwise circle and chanting a priestly
| incantation. More scientific study is needed to confirm or
| deny the efficacy of this approach.
| culi wrote:
| While solar cells might be almost pure silicon, the panels
| themselves use a lot more materials to work. For example, 2%
| of all global copper production was just for panels 2018. The
| frames and the cells both use aluminum (the actual most
| abundant material overall). Silver, the most expensive
| component, has been pushed from about 400mg per panel in 2007
| to about 100mg per panel today.[0]
|
| Each solar panel contains about 14mg of lead which means
| around 4.4k tons were used in the production of solar panels
| in 2018.[1] This is much smaller than, say batteries (which
| solar panels drive a huge demand for), but is still
| significant considering lead has been found to leak into the
| environment from solar panels even from regular rainfall.[2]
|
| In 2017, a study found that as much as 62% of the cadmium
| from cadmium telluride models were leached out at room
| temperature depending mostly on acidity of the solutions.[3]
|
| "Even only one day of leaching of two module pieces in 1 day
| of acid rain and neutral solution is sufficient to exceed the
| World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water limit: for Cd
| the threshold limit is 3 ug=L.33) Even under alkaline
| conditions (pH 11), it takes only three days to exceed this
| limit. After nearly one year, the Cd concentration cCd in
| acidic solutions is almost 20000 ug=L (62%)" [4]
|
| [0] https://www.freeingenergy.com/do-we-have-enough-
| materials-to... [1] https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-
| panels-really-full-o... [2]
| https://www.zmescience.com/science/solar-panels-lead-
| plants-... [3] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.7567/JJA
| P.56.08MD02/me... [4] https://sci-
| hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.756...
| danans wrote:
| > In 2017, a study found that as much as 62% of the cadmium
| from cadmium telluride models were leached out at room
| temperature depending mostly on acidity of the
| solutions.[3]
|
| From the related article:
|
| "The pieces are cut out from modules of the four major
| commercial photovoltaic technologies: crystalline and
| amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride as well as from copper
| indium gallium diselenide."
|
| So they cut pieces from a sealed module? Seems unsurprising
| that leaching would occur when you cut pieces of a PV panel
| and expose it to acidic solution for an extended period.
| Functional installed solar panels are sealed behind a
| protective glass panel.
| onethought wrote:
| The frames of aluminium are obviously directly recyclable.
| The silicon is also completely recyclable, so you are
| talking about fractional materials being "wasted" if you
| apply a zero effort approach of recycling.
|
| Applying a small amount of effort, given you'd need to re-
| smelt the silicon, all of the materials you mentioned have
| different melting points (mostly lower than silicon) so you
| could extract them at the appropriate time as you resmelted
| the entire product.
|
| I don't see how this is at all a waste problem, looks like
| a great recycling opportunity.
| culi wrote:
| Recycling isn't free. Currently it costs 20-30x more to
| recycle a panel than to dump it in a landfill. Maybe the
| aluminum frame, the glass and polymer sheets, and the
| junction box containing the copper wiring are relatively
| straightforward to recycle, but it takes much more
| complicated (see: expensive) machines to get to the
| smaller parts like the intra-cell wiring and the silicon
| itself. And the silicon wafers aren't really recyclable.
| There's some specialized companies that can melt them
| down to reclaim the silicon cells and various metals
| within but this takes a lot of energy (and/or chemicals
| if it's a chemical treatment) and money.
|
| The reason solar panels are hard to recycle isn't really
| because of their materials. The hardest part is
| separating all those materials, which all have their own
| unique recycling needs.
|
| The EU requires solar recycling; Japan, India, and
| Australia have some minimal regulation around it; but in
| the US it's the wild west (except in Washington). Which
| means there's almost no recycling infrastructure in the
| US
|
| All of this is the reason recycling a solar panel is so
| much more expensive than dumping it right now. Regulation
| will definitely help, but getting to the point where it's
| economically feasible to recycle them will require
| technology that hasn't actually been developed (yet,
| hopefully).
|
| Some readings:
|
| [0] https://grist.org/energy/solar-panels-are-starting-
| to-die-wh...
|
| [1] https://news.energysage.com/recycling-solar-panels/
|
| [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342671383_Me
| tal_dis...
| onethought wrote:
| Okay, so we've moved on from: Panels can't be recycled.
| To: Panels in the US aren't recycled enough because the
| economic conditions aren't right.
|
| Thats a much more nuanced point. Government regulation
| can help here for sure.
| culi wrote:
| Umm, it's not just that. The most advanced company in the
| world at recovering precious materials from solar panels
| is a French company that uses a chemical treatment to
| recover the silver intra-cell wiring. Even they are not
| really economically feasible. The reason the EU recycles
| is because they have to. Not because of economics
|
| So no, it's not just solar panels in the US. The
| technology to make recycling solar panels feasible just
| doesn't currently exist
| scrose wrote:
| Semi-related --- does anyone have recommendations for where to
| find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with
| for small devices like a Pi?
|
| Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a
| traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running
| the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even
| point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are
| there any concerns about the sustainability of a setup like this
| if it's adopted on a larger scale?
| noman-land wrote:
| Adafruit has a variety of them.
|
| https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=solar%20panel
| louwhopley wrote:
| Sparkfun is a great goto place for electronic stuff like this.
| However, I'm sure there's more specialized solar panel sources.
|
| Https://sparkfun.com
| folmar wrote:
| For hobby/experiment use decomissioned panels from upgaded
| farms, sometimes you can get two years old panels that were
| swapped for more efficient ones for a fraction of the original
| price.
|
| For setup with batteries there is (depending slightly on local
| electricy cost) no long time break-even - the battery
| deprecation due to discharge cycle costs more than electricity
| from the utility.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I'd look for solar panels intended for camping.
|
| Probably eBay or Amazon is the easiest place to look for cheap
| gear. Hobbyist electronic stores might be a good source too
| depending on the country (here in Australia Jaycar has some
| fairly good value panels and PWM solar charge controllers).
| strickvl wrote:
| If you're in the UK, Pimoroni
| (https://shop.pimoroni.com/?q=solar) has some good options as
| well.
| driverdan wrote:
| Unless you don't have the space there's no reason to go smaller
| than a 100W panel. You can find them used for $50 or less. For
| smaller panels the cost per watt goes up enough that it ends up
| costing the same for less output.
| DavidGetchel wrote:
| For small panels, check sites already suggested by others. If
| you want to experiment with larger panels, craigslist or
| similar have good deals. Used panels or new leftovers from a
| pallet.
|
| I've paid $130ish each for 4 panels 280w-315w. And since it's
| local, you don't get dinged for shipping.
| unbanned wrote:
| I love this. I want to see more things like this hitting HN.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This is such an amazingly simple thing to do that I'm surprised
| it shows up so consistently on HN.
|
| A raspberry pi or similar, a solar panel, a charge controller,
| and a battery.
|
| Running everything off it (router, modem) would be cooler, since
| that's likely powered from the home and connected via WiFi.
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