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0 pointsthanhhaimai6y ago0 comments

> "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.

0 comments

rogerdb6y 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.

TeMPOraL6y 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.

AgentOrange12346y 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!

clouddrover6y 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-ar...

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.

LargoLasskhyfv6y ago

There is [1] 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.

username906y 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!

adrianN6y 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.

username906y 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.

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saberience6y 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...

TeMPOraL6y 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?

ratww6y 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.

ryanbrunner6y 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.

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vsl6y ago

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

vetinari6y 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).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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rogerdb6y ago

TeMPOraL6y ago

[0] - They may or may not have been developed earlier, but I haven't seen them used in practice before the modern web.

AgentOrange12346y 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!

clouddrover6y 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/automobiles/owners-who-ar...

https://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/18/chevy-volts-sealed-gas-t...

LargoLasskhyfv6y ago

There is [1] 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.

username906y ago

adrianN6y 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.

username906y ago

Secondly we talked about 0.005l cars, not 0.05l, so it would be a few hundreds times more efficient than train transportation.

1 more reply

saberience6y 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...

TeMPOraL6y ago

ratww6y 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.

ryanbrunner6y ago

2 more replies

vsl6y ago

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

vetinari6y 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).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse