5 ms·

Y’know, folks complain (with some justification) that Bitcoin wastes a massive amount of energy globally. But almost noöne uses Bitcoin, or mines it; I wonder

by rauhl 8y ago

Y’know, folks complain (with some justification) that Bitcoin wastes a massive amount of energy globally. But almost noöne uses Bitcoin, or mines it; I wonder how much energy is wasted on transporting & executing useless JavaScript. It’d be interesting to know how it compares.

jeffbarg 8y ago
This definitely interests me as well. Another 'wasteful' mechanism is the nearly-ubiquitous use of JSON over a more optimized format like protocol buffers, etc... It reminds me of another HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9761667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9761667 I understand that economically the savings in development time usually outweighs the bandwidth costs, but I would be interested in any analysis on how wasteful this is overall.
- tatersolid 8y ago
  We tested this at $dayjob and JSON+gzip wins hands down because you already have an optimized native-code parser in the browser. Large-ish arrays of similar JSON objects compress very well with gzip, and ultimately parse more quickly than JS-based protobuf or msgpack, at least in our testing.
andrethegiant 8y ago
I wondered the same thing. I wrote a basic crawler to measure JS footprint on various sites on the web. Most of the JS bloat I found was due to misconfigured webpack configs: leaving development mode on, inline source maps, etc. Tons of whitespace and comments. I tweeted at some of the offenders (https://twitter.com/bundlebloat https://twitter.com/bundlebloat for those interested), but only a few actually fixed the problem.
- azemetre 8y ago
  Are you willing to post your code for your crawler some where? Sounds like a neat project, shame most people aren't fixing the problem.
  - JimDabell 8y ago
    You may not need a crawler for this. The HTTP Archive has already done all the crawling for a million URLs from the most popular websites. If one of their existing reports doesn't cover what you need, you can write custom queries using BigQuery: https://httparchive.org/faq#how-do-i-use-bigquery-to-write-custom-queries-over-the-data https://httparchive.org/faq#how-do-i-use-bigquery-to-write-c...
  - andrethegiant 8y ago
    Maybe one day. Right now it's really messy. It uses crawler[0] and rethinkdb[1] FYI. [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/crawler https://www.npmjs.com/package/crawler [1] https://rethinkdb.com https://rethinkdb.com
daxfohl 8y ago
Bitcoin mining is screenless. Javascript energy is generally outweighed by screen energy anyway, I would imagine. All of which I believe isn't really the lowest hanging fruit.
monadgonad 8y ago
Your spelling of “noöne” is commendable - I love the rare occasions when I see things like coöperation these days - but “no one” is definitely two words.
- ramses0 8y ago
  Is there a term for using an ö like this?
  - impirius 8y ago
    It's a diaeresis, used when a second consecutive vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable. The New Yorker likes to use them.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- nayuki 8y ago
  Moreover, "no one" has two vowels in spelling but not in pronunciation - it's pronounced [noʊ wʌn].
- rauhl 8y ago
  I think that ‘noöne’ is the logical next step from the (widely viewed as permissible) ‘no-one’; OTOH ‘noone’ would just be wrong. Keeping it as two words would be like writing Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften as rechts shutz versicherungs gesellschaften, which would obviously be terrible
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English: > The use of [diaeresis], however, is considered to be largely archaic. My experience has it pretty much only moderately commonly used now in “naïve”, and by people that read and enjoy The New Yorker (though possibly only to be different and not for any good reason).
snaky 8y ago
"Almost One Percent of the World's Energy Consumption" is hardly 'noone', https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/26/162242/bitcoin-mining-now-accounts-for-almost-one-percent-of-the-worlds-energy-consumption https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/26/162242/bitcoin-mini...

by rauhl 8y ago

jeffbarg 8y ago

This definitely interests me as well. Another 'wasteful' mechanism is the nearly-ubiquitous use of JSON over a more optimized format like protocol buffers, etc... It reminds me of another HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9761667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9761667 I understand that economically the savings in development time usually outweighs the bandwidth costs, but I would be interested in any analysis on how wasteful this is overall.

tatersolid 8y ago
We tested this at $dayjob and JSON+gzip wins hands down because you already have an optimized native-code parser in the browser. Large-ish arrays of similar JSON objects compress very well with gzip, and ultimately parse more quickly than JS-based protobuf or msgpack, at least in our testing.

andrethegiant 8y ago

I wondered the same thing. I wrote a basic crawler to measure JS footprint on various sites on the web. Most of the JS bloat I found was due to misconfigured webpack configs: leaving development mode on, inline source maps, etc. Tons of whitespace and comments. I tweeted at some of the offenders (https://twitter.com/bundlebloat https://twitter.com/bundlebloat for those interested), but only a few actually fixed the problem.

azemetre 8y ago
Are you willing to post your code for your crawler some where? Sounds like a neat project, shame most people aren't fixing the problem.
- JimDabell 8y ago
  You may not need a crawler for this. The HTTP Archive has already done all the crawling for a million URLs from the most popular websites. If one of their existing reports doesn't cover what you need, you can write custom queries using BigQuery: https://httparchive.org/faq#how-do-i-use-bigquery-to-write-custom-queries-over-the-data https://httparchive.org/faq#how-do-i-use-bigquery-to-write-c...
- andrethegiant 8y ago
  Maybe one day. Right now it's really messy. It uses crawler[0] and rethinkdb[1] FYI. [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/crawler https://www.npmjs.com/package/crawler [1] https://rethinkdb.com https://rethinkdb.com

daxfohl 8y ago

Bitcoin mining is screenless. Javascript energy is generally outweighed by screen energy anyway, I would imagine. All of which I believe isn't really the lowest hanging fruit.

monadgonad 8y ago

Your spelling of “noöne” is commendable - I love the rare occasions when I see things like coöperation these days - but “no one” is definitely two words.

ramses0 8y ago
Is there a term for using an ö like this?
- impirius 8y ago
  It's a diaeresis, used when a second consecutive vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable. The New Yorker likes to use them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
nayuki 8y ago
Moreover, "no one" has two vowels in spelling but not in pronunciation - it's pronounced [noʊ wʌn].
rauhl 8y ago
I think that ‘noöne’ is the logical next step from the (widely viewed as permissible) ‘no-one’; OTOH ‘noone’ would just be wrong. Keeping it as two words would be like writing Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften as rechts shutz versicherungs gesellschaften, which would obviously be terrible
chrismorgan 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English: > The use of [diaeresis], however, is considered to be largely archaic. My experience has it pretty much only moderately commonly used now in “naïve”, and by people that read and enjoy The New Yorker (though possibly only to be different and not for any good reason).

snaky 8y ago

"Almost One Percent of the World's Energy Consumption" is hardly 'noone', https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/26/162242/bitcoin-mining-now-accounts-for-almost-one-percent-of-the-worlds-energy-consumption https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/08/26/162242/bitcoin-mini...