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On HN the passion for tech tends to obscure the harsh realities of the "everyday person". The overwhelming majority of people don't know, need, care, or want to

On HN the passion for tech tends to obscure the harsh realities of the "everyday person". The overwhelming majority of people don't know, need, care, or want to pay for a lot of tech that we take for granted, or as a "bare minimum" to go about our daily routine. Many others would love to have it but for whatever reasons, usually money or lack of skill, won't anytime soon. Though I do have to admire the conviction with which some of my co-techies believe what they are describing is a generally applicable situation anywhere beyond the limits of places like HN. And I am saying this as someone who has over 1000 CPU cores and over 2TB of RAM in my home lab for some years now. I'm realistic enough to accept that this isn't a reasonable expectation even from other techies, let alone for a regular consumer.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 7y ago
Just for curiosity, what kind of processors and servers do you have?
- buran77 7y ago
  About a third are functioning (albeit not very productive) "collector's items". Anything from Intel and AMD, to PowerPC and SPARC. The productive ones are mostly Intel because I acquired them before AMD's resurgence. Also plenty of AMD, and even ARM. They run Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, ESX, or dedicated appliance OSes. All on 1, 10, or 40G network, plus WiFi. I usually buy everything second hand, the most expensive stuff usually from companies that upgraded. To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing". But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    > But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :) Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :) Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

DeathArrow 7y ago

Just for curiosity, what kind of processors and servers do you have?

buran77 7y ago
About a third are functioning (albeit not very productive) "collector's items". Anything from Intel and AMD, to PowerPC and SPARC. The productive ones are mostly Intel because I acquired them before AMD's resurgence. Also plenty of AMD, and even ARM. They run Linux, Windows, MacOS, BSD, ESX, or dedicated appliance OSes. All on 1, 10, or 40G network, plus WiFi. I usually buy everything second hand, the most expensive stuff usually from companies that upgraded. To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing". But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)
- snuxoll 7y ago
  > But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :) Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :) Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.