6 ms·

> "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that

> "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, filled up at the time of purchase! That means there is a huge opportunity to further optimize for many things in the system: - The car no longer needs to have a hole on the side for filling up. A lot of pipes can be removed. Gas tank can be moved to a safer/closer location where it is used. - The dashboard doesn't need a dedicated slot for showing the fuel gauge, more wirings and mechanical parts removed. - No needs for huge exhaust and cooling systems, since the wasted energy is significantly reduce. No more pump, less vehicle weights... Of course, that 0.005L car won't come earlier than a good electric car. However, if it's there, I'd totally prioritize it higher than other things you listed. I think people tend to underestimate how small efficiency improvements add up and enable exponential values to the system as a whole.

saberience 7y ago
The big problem is this, if we related this back to software it would mean the software being delivered in 10-15 years, rather than in 6 months. Kind of a big downside...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Not necessarily. For one, relating this doesn't remove the ability for incremental development. Another thing, there's very little actual innovation in software being done. Almost anything we use existed in some version in the past two or three decades, and it was much more faster, even if rougher at the corners. Just think how many of the startups and SaaS projects we see featured on HN week after week are just reimplementing a feature or a small piece of workflow from Excel or Photoshop as a standalone web app?
- ratww 7y ago
  That's the old Ruby on Rails argument. In that specific case it only made sense when there were no similar frameworks for faster languages, but that's hardly the case today.
  - ryanbrunner 7y ago
    Ironically though, I'd be willing to bet that end-user performance on most traditional server-side-rendered apps using the "heavyweight" RoR framework is far better than the latest and greatest SPA approach.
    - tjpnz 7y ago
      In a previous life I did back office development for ecommerce. We had two applications, one RoR monolith and a "modern" JavaScript Meteor SPA. The SPA was actually developed to replace the equivalent functionality in the RoR application but we ended up killing it and sticking with what we had. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish server side rendering is just as good, if not better than the latest and greatest in client side rendering.
    - ratww 7y ago
      It really depends. I've worked with a Preact SPA where the time to initial render was faster than the HAML templates it replaced. But then, again, that was an outlier. If your target is speed, traditional SSR or static pages are the best bet, anyway.
rogerdb 7y ago
This is definitely an interesting take on the car analogy so thanks for posting it! I don't know that I agree 100% (I think I could 'settle' for a car that needed be be fueled once or twice a year if it came with some other noticeable benefits), but it is definitely worth remembering that sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements. Miniaturization of electronics (including batteries and storage media) and continuing improvements to wireless broadband come to mind as the most obvious of these in the past decades. I'm struggling to think of recent (or not-so-recent) software improvements that have had a similar impact though. It seems like many of the "big" algorithms and optimization techniques that underpin modern applications have been around for a long time, and there aren't a lot of solutions that are "just about" ready to make the jump from supercomputers to servers, servers to desktops, or desktops to mobile. I guess machine learning is a probably contender in this space, but I imagine that's still an active area of optimization and probably not what the author of the article had in mind. I'd love if someone could provide an example of recent consumer software that is only possible due to careful software optimization.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  V8 would be one example. Some time ago, JavaScript crossed a performance threshold, which enabled people to start reimplementing a lot of desktop software as web applications. In the following years, algorithms for collaborative work were developed[0], which shifted the way we work with some of those applications, now always on-line. That would be the meaningful software improvements I can think of. Curiously, the key enabler here seems to be performance - we had the capability to write web apps for a while, but JS was too slow to be useful. -- [0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.
- AgentOrange1234 7y ago
  > sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements In this thought experiment we are talking about a 2 orders magnitude improvement - hardly a small nudge!
clouddrover 7y ago
> I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, filled up at the time of purchase! It's a nice idea but it wouldn't work. The gasoline would go bad before you could use it all. Plug-in hybrids already have this problem. Their fuel management systems try to keep the average age of the fuel in the tank under 1 year. The Chevy Volt has a fuel maintenance mode that runs every 6 weeks: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/automobiles/owners-who-are-happy-when-the-engine-doesnt-start.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/automobiles/owners-who-ar... https://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/18/chevy-volts-sealed-gas-tank-brought-automakers-carb-together/ https://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/18/chevy-volts-sealed-gas-t... Instead of having a "lifetime tank", a car that uses 0.005L per 100km would be better off with a tiny tank. And then instead of buying fuel at a fuel station you'd buy it in a bottle at the supermarket along with your orange juice.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  There is [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alkylate+petrol https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alkylate+petrol which is said to last anything between two years and up to ten years, depending on the mixture while burning rather clean.
vsl 7y ago
Nitpicking: gas goes bad eventually and needs to be burned before that, the usually given timeframe is after ~6 months.
- vetinari 7y ago
  That's the ethanol-component of the gas (i.e. the E part of E5, E10), as it degrades. If you had pure gasoline, you could store it for years (and in past, countries and armies did exactly that for their reserves).
username90 7y ago
You are thinking too small, with a car generating power that cheaply you could use it to power a turbine and provide cheap electricity to the entire world. It would fix our energy needs for a very long time and it would usher a new age!
- adrianN 7y ago
  Or the car could just be very efficient. Gasoline has a lot of energy. Transporting a person 100km on 34MJ/l * 0.05l =1.71MJ doesn't sound as impossible as you make it seem.
  - username90 7y ago
    Trains transports at 0.41 MJ/t·km. If the person weights 0.1t it would take a train packed full of people 41MJ per person to transport them 100km, or a bit more than one litre of gasoline. I don't think it is possible to go significantly below that without transporting them on mag rails or vacuum pipes. Secondly we talked about 0.005l cars, not 0.05l, so it would be a few hundreds times more efficient than train transportation.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Bicycles are probably a bit more efficient than trains.
      - username90 7y ago
        Its about the same, you burn several thousand calories or a few tens of mega-joules biking 100 km.
        stefs 7y ago
        my strava says 100km cycling is ~3370kcal

saberience 7y ago

The big problem is this, if we related this back to software it would mean the software being delivered in 10-15 years, rather than in 6 months. Kind of a big downside...

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Not necessarily. For one, relating this doesn't remove the ability for incremental development. Another thing, there's very little actual innovation in software being done. Almost anything we use existed in some version in the past two or three decades, and it was much more faster, even if rougher at the corners. Just think how many of the startups and SaaS projects we see featured on HN week after week are just reimplementing a feature or a small piece of workflow from Excel or Photoshop as a standalone web app?
ratww 7y ago
That's the old Ruby on Rails argument. In that specific case it only made sense when there were no similar frameworks for faster languages, but that's hardly the case today.
- ryanbrunner 7y ago
  Ironically though, I'd be willing to bet that end-user performance on most traditional server-side-rendered apps using the "heavyweight" RoR framework is far better than the latest and greatest SPA approach.
  - tjpnz 7y ago
    In a previous life I did back office development for ecommerce. We had two applications, one RoR monolith and a "modern" JavaScript Meteor SPA. The SPA was actually developed to replace the equivalent functionality in the RoR application but we ended up killing it and sticking with what we had. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish server side rendering is just as good, if not better than the latest and greatest in client side rendering.
  - ratww 7y ago
    It really depends. I've worked with a Preact SPA where the time to initial render was faster than the HAML templates it replaced. But then, again, that was an outlier. If your target is speed, traditional SSR or static pages are the best bet, anyway.

rogerdb 7y ago

This is definitely an interesting take on the car analogy so thanks for posting it! I don't know that I agree 100% (I think I could 'settle' for a car that needed be be fueled once or twice a year if it came with some other noticeable benefits), but it is definitely worth remembering that sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements. Miniaturization of electronics (including batteries and storage media) and continuing improvements to wireless broadband come to mind as the most obvious of these in the past decades. I'm struggling to think of recent (or not-so-recent) software improvements that have had a similar impact though. It seems like many of the "big" algorithms and optimization techniques that underpin modern applications have been around for a long time, and there aren't a lot of solutions that are "just about" ready to make the jump from supercomputers to servers, servers to desktops, or desktops to mobile. I guess machine learning is a probably contender in this space, but I imagine that's still an active area of optimization and probably not what the author of the article had in mind. I'd love if someone could provide an example of recent consumer software that is only possible due to careful software optimization.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
V8 would be one example. Some time ago, JavaScript crossed a performance threshold, which enabled people to start reimplementing a lot of desktop software as web applications. In the following years, algorithms for collaborative work were developed[0], which shifted the way we work with some of those applications, now always on-line. That would be the meaningful software improvements I can think of. Curiously, the key enabler here seems to be performance - we had the capability to write web apps for a while, but JS was too slow to be useful. -- [0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.
AgentOrange1234 7y ago
> sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements In this thought experiment we are talking about a 2 orders magnitude improvement - hardly a small nudge!

clouddrover 7y ago

> I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, filled up at the time of purchase! It's a nice idea but it wouldn't work. The gasoline would go bad before you could use it all. Plug-in hybrids already have this problem. Their fuel management systems try to keep the average age of the fuel in the tank under 1 year. The Chevy Volt has a fuel maintenance mode that runs every 6 weeks: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/automobiles/owners-who-are-happy-when-the-engine-doesnt-start.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/automobiles/owners-who-ar... https://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/18/chevy-volts-sealed-gas-tank-brought-automakers-carb-together/ https://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/18/chevy-volts-sealed-gas-t... Instead of having a "lifetime tank", a car that uses 0.005L per 100km would be better off with a tiny tank. And then instead of buying fuel at a fuel station you'd buy it in a bottle at the supermarket along with your orange juice.

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
There is [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alkylate+petrol https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alkylate+petrol which is said to last anything between two years and up to ten years, depending on the mixture while burning rather clean.

vsl 7y ago

Nitpicking: gas goes bad eventually and needs to be burned before that, the usually given timeframe is after ~6 months.

vetinari 7y ago
That's the ethanol-component of the gas (i.e. the E part of E5, E10), as it degrades. If you had pure gasoline, you could store it for years (and in past, countries and armies did exactly that for their reserves).

username90 7y ago

You are thinking too small, with a car generating power that cheaply you could use it to power a turbine and provide cheap electricity to the entire world. It would fix our energy needs for a very long time and it would usher a new age!

adrianN 7y ago
Or the car could just be very efficient. Gasoline has a lot of energy. Transporting a person 100km on 34MJ/l * 0.05l =1.71MJ doesn't sound as impossible as you make it seem.
- username90 7y ago
  Trains transports at 0.41 MJ/t·km. If the person weights 0.1t it would take a train packed full of people 41MJ per person to transport them 100km, or a bit more than one litre of gasoline. I don't think it is possible to go significantly below that without transporting them on mag rails or vacuum pipes. Secondly we talked about 0.005l cars, not 0.05l, so it would be a few hundreds times more efficient than train transportation.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Bicycles are probably a bit more efficient than trains.
    - username90 7y ago
      Its about the same, you burn several thousand calories or a few tens of mega-joules biking 100 km.
      - stefs 7y ago
        my strava says 100km cycling is ~3370kcal