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EMERGE
Company blog · emergeinteractive.com/insightsdesignprogramming
EMERGE is the company blog at emergeinteractive.com, writing about design and programming. Since 2020, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite this UX agency's post for its estimate of about 3kg of CO2 per GB of data transferred, based on US power-plant figures. The commenters cite the number and question its source paper, not the post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Emerge is a UX design agency in Portland, OR. We specialize in digital product strategy, UX/UI design, and full-stack development.
Most-linked posts?
- /wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aceee-cached-research.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-21
What Hacker News says?
https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres... In the US as of 2020, it was 3KG CO2 per GB Data.
Comment linking /insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming/
on “A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page”Submitted The Guide to FavIcons for Nearly Everyone and Every Browser as a story · 1 points
HN discussionData taken from : https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres... > And according to the Department of Energy the average US power plant expends 600 grams of carbon dioxide for every kWh generated. That means that transferring 1GB of data produces 3kg of CO2.
Comment linking /insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming
on “ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable”Submitted Demystifying the True Expenses of Building a Digital Product as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFrom skimming the paper[1] they pulled that number from it seems... not the best metric. It looks like they are estimating the power consumption of the internet, then dividing that power usage by the amount of data transferred and claiming that is the cost per gigabyte. But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data et…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aceee-cached-research.pdf
on “The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud”The source for power per GB links to a paper published in 2012 [0] that describes how they arrived at 5.12kWh per GB. Maybe things have gotten more efficient in the last decade? Note that the power figure includes all of the networking equipment between your desktop and the server, and the infrastructure required to run it like cooling equipment. Also note that watching a video at 2x speed may result in the server s…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aceee-cached-research.pdf
on “The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud”> Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet. This appears to be hyperbole - from what I could find, one steak has a carbon footprint of 15.5kg [0] and one Google search has a carbon footprint of 7g [1]. That makes one steak equal to 2214 Google searches. Over a lifetime, 2214 searches seems low. In my browser history, I found evidence of 776 searches in the last 3 months. Moving awa…
Comment linking /insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming/
on “The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud”