14 ms·

SETI@home is in hiberation

276 points by keepamovin 9mo ago

janandonly 9mo ago
I don’t believe extra terrestrial life will contact us through effort or negligence via radio. To help proof this I’ve run the SETI@HOME screensaver for years.
David_Osipov 9mo ago
Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?
- keepamovin 9mo ago
  It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final analysis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...
  - jve 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - UnlockedSecrets 9mo ago
      Hello chatgpt, what should I make for dinner with bananas and chicken breast as the only ingredients?
    - usefulposter 9mo ago
      As someone who cares about HN remaining a place for humans to engage in curious conversation, please read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503
  - ramses0 9mo ago
    TLDR of jve's AI comment: You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).
gethly 9mo ago
[flagged]
- peesem 9mo ago
  unhelpful and untrue
- junon 9mo ago
  those darn good for nothin' kids amirite
leokennis 9mo ago
I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs. Was it all for nothing?
- Waterluvian 9mo ago
  It’s all mostly all for nothing.
  - keepamovin 9mo ago
    Well, except for Vogon poetry
  - blitzar 9mo ago
    It’s all mostly all for REDACTED
- keepamovin 9mo ago
  No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- p-e-w 9mo ago
  The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit. Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
  - netsharc 9mo ago
reconnecting 9mo ago
I feel sorry for every child who didn't have SETI@home and X-Files at the same time during their childhood. The truth is still out there.
- losthobbies 9mo ago
  When conspiracies were a bit more fun. Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
  - x187463 9mo ago
    Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year. I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
    - lagniappe 9mo ago
      It's not a conspiracy anymore
      - thatguy0900 9mo ago
        I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully convinced
        pixl97 9mo ago
        I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is interesting.
        nephihaha 9mo ago
        I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.
nkrisc 9mo ago
This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way. For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
- entuno 9mo ago
  I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!). If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
  - cucumber3732842 9mo ago
    I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.
- world2vec 9mo ago
  It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.
- rtkwe 9mo ago
  My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
  - catigula 9mo ago
    People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.
compounding_it 9mo ago
The 14 year old me wondering if aliens were being discovered on my pentium 4 feels like the answer maybe out there. BOINC and SETI.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jomohke 9mo ago
It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.
- viraptor 9mo ago
  Are they doing anything not covered by alphafold? I thought that approach basically crushed all previous efforts.
  - cess11 9mo ago
    Here's their take on it: https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opportunities-for-foldinghome/ https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
- firesteelrain 9mo ago
  I forgot all about this project - thanks for the reminder! You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/ https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/
  - philipwhiuk 9mo ago
    Does it? I stopped doing @home projects because I started never finishing a unit for credit under BOINC.
    - firesteelrain 9mo ago
      I have Pi4B 2GB, Pi4B 4GB, and Pi400 folding full time with reasonable success. You need to use the 64-bit OS.
- lloydatkinson 9mo ago
logicallee 9mo ago
Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's good to know!
dnel 9mo ago
I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time, iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.
kyleblarson 9mo ago
My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.
- philipallstar 9mo ago
  That is very fun.
gvurrdon 9mo ago
Years ago I worked for another BOINC project, climateprediction.net and I'm pleased to see that they are still operating (see: https://main.cpdn.org/ https://main.cpdn.org/). IIRC SETI@Home was well-known back then - I'd always mention it if people asked what I did, and they usually recognised it.
markus_zhang 9mo ago
Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.
sgt 9mo ago
Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.
- b3lvedere 9mo ago
  If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.
  - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked so that bitcoin could run?
    - b3lvedere 9mo ago
      I can't really condemn people trying to earn money with their cpu cycles, but good causes sometimes still exist.
  - scottLobster 9mo ago
    Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet. Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.
chrisweekly 9mo ago
mods: typo in title (hiberNation)
- MrGilbert 9mo ago
  It could be [sic] added to it, as the source has the same typo.
- floxy 9mo ago
  I'm beginning to wonder if typos, missing words, and other grammatical error in titles is an accidental thing, or if someone has discovered that it gets more "engagement".
turbocon 9mo ago
Any other worthwhile projects to donate cpu time to? I see Folding@Home is still going. Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr... Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys
jasonhong 9mo ago
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal. The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy.com/intro/intro_feb99.htm#seti https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....
- jjordan 9mo ago
  Sigh. I miss websites like this.
  - duxup 9mo ago
    Small personal web is best web.
- Apocryphon 9mo ago
  Yishan Wong jumpscare
pjmlp 9mo ago
Oh, I used to run it during the early 2000's.
GuB-42 9mo ago
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today. At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made. Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.
- thunderfork 9mo ago
  I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.
- organsnyder 9mo ago
  My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
  - ragebol 9mo ago
    Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
    - speedgoose 9mo ago
      You might prefer a heat pump.
      - ragebol 9mo ago
        I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...
bookofjoe 9mo ago
hiberation
- burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  Tastier rations I guess.
theLegionWithin 9mo ago
wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first crowdsourcing platforms...
KellyCriterion 9mo ago
Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"! :) Wasnt this the original wording?
sizzzzlerz 9mo ago
I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
js-j 9mo ago
they never found any extraterrestials. And they never will...
johnplatte 9mo ago
This happened in March 2020. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
dark-star 9mo ago
What is hiberation? First I thought it was a typo, but it's on the website in the same spelling too. I couldn't find it in my dictionary
ratelimitsteve 9mo ago
https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.
Manuel_TPC 9mo ago
Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now. You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy. Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
f_allwein 9mo ago
on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could contribute there. http://weti-institute.org/ http://weti-institute.org/
CommieBobDole 9mo ago
Apparently they are not completely finished with the project - according to this article from five days ago, there are still some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-observed with the FAST radio telescope. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this-seti-program-is-chasing-down-its-final-100-signals-could-one-of-them-be-from-aliens https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...
skrrtww 9mo ago
Does anyone have a mirror of the old Mac SETI client? setiathome_mac_3_08.hqx? I'd like to see if I can get it running again on my old iMac. Either the OS 9 or the early OS X one would work. I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't seem retrievable.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
Recently: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414
arkj 9mo ago
What we need next is SAGI@home, a distributed computing platform for finding free and open weights that leads to AGI.
msarrel 9mo ago
I used to work in a lab and we set up all 256 machines with the screensaver for when they weren't running tasks. It was fun to walk though there and think we were "helping".
ElijahLynn 9mo ago
RIP SETI@home!!! I remember setting up SETI on my first computer on dial-up when I was 17 years old! It was such an exciting thing to participate in!
unixhero 9mo ago
There was another launched around the same time as Seti@Home and before Folsing@Home. It was called IBM Grid.org [0]. It did the same as Seti@Home, but researched cancer. Here [1] is a list of all active community computation projects and historical ones. [0], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org [1], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
paradox460 9mo ago
I remember running SETI@home for ages, then transitioning to Einstein@home to help LIGO chunk through the ELIGO data. I also remember BOINC was a buggy piece of shit
muragekibicho 9mo ago
There's the YouTube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011. He'll probably (not) kms after seeing SETI went into hibernation.

276 points by keepamovin 9mo ago

I don’t believe extra terrestrial life will contact us through effort or negligence via radio. To help proof this I’ve run the SETI@HOME screensaver for years.

David_Osipov 9mo ago

Wait, they have been in hibernation for almost several years, why to publish it now?

keepamovin 9mo ago
It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final analysis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...
- jve 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - UnlockedSecrets 9mo ago
    Hello chatgpt, what should I make for dinner with bananas and chicken breast as the only ingredients?
  - usefulposter 9mo ago
    As someone who cares about HN remaining a place for humans to engage in curious conversation, please read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503
- ramses0 9mo ago
  TLDR of jve's AI comment: You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).

gethly 9mo ago

[flagged]

peesem 9mo ago
unhelpful and untrue
junon 9mo ago
those darn good for nothin' kids amirite

leokennis 9mo ago

I remember feeling like a right scientific benefactor running the SETI@Home screensaver on my Pentium II, looking at the fancy graphs. Was it all for nothing?

Waterluvian 9mo ago
It’s all mostly all for nothing.
- keepamovin 9mo ago
  Well, except for Vogon poetry
- blitzar 9mo ago
  It’s all mostly all for REDACTED
keepamovin 9mo ago
No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
p-e-w 9mo ago
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit. Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
- netsharc 9mo ago

reconnecting 9mo ago

I feel sorry for every child who didn't have SETI@home and X-Files at the same time during their childhood. The truth is still out there.

losthobbies 9mo ago
When conspiracies were a bit more fun. Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.
- x187463 9mo ago
  Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year. I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.
  - lagniappe 9mo ago
    It's not a conspiracy anymore
    - thatguy0900 9mo ago
      I'd really like to see it disclosed by a government that isn't panicking about epstein files/being impeached and trying to cover up other stories before I'm fully convinced
      - pixl97 9mo ago
        I mean this is a meta-conspiracy in itself. I don't think you're incorrect/wrong, but using one conspiracy theory to hide a conspiracy with lots of evidence is interesting.
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        I would be more interested in the former USSR or China, maybe Iran and Latin America. The Eastern Bloc must have covered up a lot of stuff but would have wild stories.

nkrisc 9mo ago

This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way. For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)

entuno 9mo ago
I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!). If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
- cucumber3732842 9mo ago
  I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.
world2vec 9mo ago
It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.
rtkwe 9mo ago
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
- catigula 9mo ago
  People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.

compounding_it 9mo ago

The 14 year old me wondering if aliens were being discovered on my pentium 4 feels like the answer maybe out there. BOINC and SETI.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jomohke 9mo ago

It looks like folding@home is still going https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ I'm quite surprised these are still around as I hadn't seen them mentioned in so long. I always assumed the phase out of screensavers (and introduction of CPU low power modes) were terminal for them.

viraptor 9mo ago
Are they doing anything not covered by alphafold? I thought that approach basically crushed all previous efforts.
- cess11 9mo ago
  Here's their take on it: https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opportunities-for-foldinghome/ https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...
firesteelrain 9mo ago
I forgot all about this project - thanks for the reminder! You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/ https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/
- philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  Does it? I stopped doing @home projects because I started never finishing a unit for credit under BOINC.
  - firesteelrain 9mo ago
    I have Pi4B 2GB, Pi4B 4GB, and Pi400 folding full time with reasonable success. You need to use the 64-bit OS.
lloydatkinson 9mo ago

logicallee 9mo ago

Contributing resources to a scientific experiment aligns contributions with outcomes, since getting a hit is knowledge that everyone benefits from: the result (including a negative result) is in the public domain and benefits everyone to know. In this case, the result is that after 20 years of distributed search, no plausible ET signal was found and verified. That's good to know!

dnel 9mo ago

I rebuilt my PII system last year and really wanted to run SAH on it for old time's sake but sadly that hasn't been possible for a long time. I miss watching that old screensaver and optimising the system performance so I could get through a WU in less time, iirc at the time it took about 18 hours each.

kyleblarson 9mo ago

My first internship was at DEC / Compaq in 2000. I was on their C compiler team and my project was to build seti tools with their updated Alpha Linux C compiler and compare perf against the tools built with the GNU C compiler. It was a fun project.

philipallstar 9mo ago
That is very fun.

gvurrdon 9mo ago

Years ago I worked for another BOINC project, climateprediction.net and I'm pleased to see that they are still operating (see: https://main.cpdn.org/ https://main.cpdn.org/). IIRC SETI@Home was well-known back then - I'd always mention it if people asked what I did, and they usually recognised it.

markus_zhang 9mo ago

Is there any other alien searching distribution screensaver? It was really interesting watching it do FFT back in the day.

sgt 9mo ago

Used to have this running on all of our computers in the office back in 1999, or 2000. Such a satisfying screensaver! Then I went even further and put it on the servers too.

b3lvedere 9mo ago
If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked so that bitcoin could run?
  - b3lvedere 9mo ago
    I can't really condemn people trying to earn money with their cpu cycles, but good causes sometimes still exist.
- scottLobster 9mo ago
  Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet. Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.

chrisweekly 9mo ago

mods: typo in title (hiberNation)

MrGilbert 9mo ago
It could be [sic] added to it, as the source has the same typo.
floxy 9mo ago
I'm beginning to wonder if typos, missing words, and other grammatical error in titles is an accidental thing, or if someone has discovered that it gets more "engagement".

turbocon 9mo ago

Any other worthwhile projects to donate cpu time to? I see Folding@Home is still going. Update: looks like there is a Wikipedia list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr... Would still be nice to know for the applicable ones if any success have come out of these or if they're just fun toys

jasonhong 9mo ago

Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal. The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy.com/intro/intro_feb99.htm#seti https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....

jjordan 9mo ago
Sigh. I miss websites like this.
- duxup 9mo ago
  Small personal web is best web.
Apocryphon 9mo ago
Yishan Wong jumpscare

pjmlp 9mo ago

Oh, I used to run it during the early 2000's.

GuB-42 9mo ago

I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today. At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made. Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.

thunderfork 9mo ago
I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.
organsnyder 9mo ago
My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
- ragebol 9mo ago
  Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system? Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course
  - speedgoose 9mo ago
    You might prefer a heat pump.
    - ragebol 9mo ago
      I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...

bookofjoe 9mo ago

hiberation

burnt-resistor 9mo ago
Tastier rations I guess.

theLegionWithin 9mo ago

wow. I didn't expect that to ever happen. one of the first crowdsourcing platforms...

KellyCriterion 9mo ago

Raise your hand if you read the title as "... in hiberNation"! :) Wasnt this the original wording?

sizzzzlerz 9mo ago

I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.

deleted 9mo ago

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js-j 9mo ago

they never found any extraterrestials. And they never will...

johnplatte 9mo ago

This happened in March 2020. https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267

dark-star 9mo ago

What is hiberation? First I thought it was a typo, but it's on the website in the same spelling too. I couldn't find it in my dictionary

ratelimitsteve 9mo ago

https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/ there's always folding@home if you like contributing idle cycles to projects like this. it's not quite alien hunting but it's kinda neat to try to brute force protein structures to beat various diseases.

Manuel_TPC 9mo ago

Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now. You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy. Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.

f_allwein 9mo ago

on the other hand, WETI still seems to be up, so you could contribute there. http://weti-institute.org/ http://weti-institute.org/

CommieBobDole 9mo ago

Apparently they are not completely finished with the project - according to this article from five days ago, there are still some signal candidates currently in the process of being re-observed with the FAST radio telescope. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this-seti-program-is-chasing-down-its-final-100-signals-could-one-of-them-be-from-aliens https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this...

skrrtww 9mo ago

Does anyone have a mirror of the old Mac SETI client? setiathome_mac_3_08.hqx? I'd like to see if I can get it running again on my old iMac. Either the OS 9 or the early OS X one would work. I checked the wayback machine and the download pages are still findable, but the client downloads are all FTP links and don't seem retrievable.

deleted 9mo ago

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ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

Recently: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642414

arkj 9mo ago

What we need next is SAGI@home, a distributed computing platform for finding free and open weights that leads to AGI.

msarrel 9mo ago

I used to work in a lab and we set up all 256 machines with the screensaver for when they weren't running tasks. It was fun to walk though there and think we were "helping".

ElijahLynn 9mo ago

RIP SETI@home!!! I remember setting up SETI on my first computer on dial-up when I was 17 years old! It was such an exciting thing to participate in!

unixhero 9mo ago

There was another launched around the same time as Seti@Home and before Folsing@Home. It was called IBM Grid.org [0]. It did the same as Seti@Home, but researched cancer. Here [1] is a list of all active community computation projects and historical ones. [0], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org [1], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...

paradox460 9mo ago

I remember running SETI@home for ages, then transitioning to Einstein@home to help LIGO chunk through the ELIGO data. I also remember BOINC was a buggy piece of shit

muragekibicho 9mo ago

There's the YouTube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011. He'll probably (not) kms after seeing SETI went into hibernation.