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Ask HN: How would you repurpose bulk old computers?

3 points by bkcreate ↗ HN
Say you had access to a bunch of old xboxes, bought a bunch of computers at auction or otherwise had access to a bunch of old computers. Would mining cryptocurrencies be a good use of these resources? If not, how else could you get value out of them?

18 comments

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stephenr
Even on brand new high efficiency setups I'm doubtful crypto mining is cost effective unless you're doing it somewhere you don't pay for the electricity bill.

Depending how old they are, you may find charities that will accept them.

Or use them to learn about clustered systems?

bkcreate
Is there any benefit to having your own clustered system vs just using AWS or other cloud services?
jlgaddis
For learning, perhaps. The power costs would likely exceed your AWS bill very quickly, though.
stephenr
For learning? Absolutely, particularly compared with something like aws.
malux85
short answer: not really. longer answer: depending on how old the systems are, they're likely not useful for learning modern distributed computing.

For example, a friend of mine had four 4 core, 8GB machines and tried to configure a hortonworks cluster, but the system spent so much time just running the cluster state, that you could only do trivial computing on top of the cluster before the nodes started timing out.

He then spent ages disabling unnecessary services, re configuring components to be more memory efficient - and spent so long doing all of this maintenance he never actually learnt how to compute on top of the cluster, which was his original goal.

So it's best just to pay a few hundred a month to amazon and run your own small cluster that you can spin up and down as you need

stephenr
FYI Hadoop is not a synonym for “cluster”.

A clustered system could be a load balancer and a few servers running percona cluster, or a couple of ldap masters with read-only relicas and proxy-writes.

Doing it on bare metal also gives exposure to the parts amazon specifically don’t

malux85
Yes I didn't mean to imply that, only that it can be challenging dealing with a resource constrained environment.

For example our deep learning clusters do not use hadoop, but use multi-process python daemons (written by me) and communicate with protocol buffers. Writing these high performance daemons myself has taught me a lot about cluster computing and some of the tradeoffs that have to be made in order to keep the GPU pipelines full.

For anyone else reading: Pyro is quite fun if you're in a limited environment and want to learn https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/ Also, setting up a spark https://spark.apache.org/ environment can be done on smaller machines too

stephenr
Right, but I think you still missed my point.

The vast majority of software developers will interact with, if it’s running clustered it’s because the project needs higher availability for that service (typically the database) and potentially higher performance in production.

malux85
Yeah, I was commenting on learning distributed programming, rather than configuring distributed service (regardless if goal is performance or redundancy). Configuring distributed services is boring
stephenr
Oh right well I guess all the ops in the world should just pack up and go home, it’s “boring” so no one ever need learn about it?
tiredwired
If they are less powerful & efficient than a Raspberry Pi then probably not worth trying to use them for anything other than nostalgia.
mark-r
I've heard that old PCs can be turned into the equivalent of a Chromebook without too much trouble. Haven't had the opportunity to try it myself.
taf2
Recycle the raw materials
kirykl
assuming wholesale cost, start a website that sells old computers one at a time for cost + $10
temp-dude-87844
You sound new to this, so I recommend you make it someone else's problem. As in, sell, trade, or give them to someone who specializes in acquiring outdated hardware, whether it's a repurposing shop, a recycler, a charity, etc.
leon_sbt
Similar to what kirkyl said, but with a twist.

Your end user is the 6th grade version of myself. (Curious and interested in computers but no mentors/guidance to get started/lay breadcrumbs). My family/friends came from blue collar background, so their programming skills are effectively zero. Asking for help doesn't really exist since I didn't know anyone to talk to or know where to go on the internet.

When I was much younger (10 years old), a big part that delayed me from getting involved in programming, was not understanding "the point" of programming and figuring what to search for when trying to learn.

I (10 year old version) seriously thought that all programming was: cout << "What is your name?"; cin >> name; cout << "Hi << name; return 0;

Based on the C++ book I had access to, I didn't understand what I could tangibly build from knowing the idea of int,strings,arrays etc. I also thought that when people made games, they hardcoded the raw pixel values for every possible state/character/action. (Dumb, I know.)

I also thought you programmed "cool" games, by throwing a stupid amount of time in hardcoding each pixel value.

So I paused on programming for 10 years and picked up paintball/cars/Mechanical Engineering instead.

Make and install custom Ubuntu image with all of the needed packages/software to do introductory tangible dev work on. Make it work for 3 large dev camps(Python, Web Dev(Basic HTML,CSS,Javascript),Embedded electronics (Arduino). Sure the 10 year old kid can install everything via command line scripts themselves.

But knowing that you need a './" in front of 'script.sh' isn't entirely obvious at that age. It is also incredibly demotivating when your getting your feet wet, and can't figure the './' out.

Have links on the Desktop to the Mozilla Developer Network, Python Docs/ Game Tutorials, the github explore tab, Intro to Python/Web Dev online courses and StackOverflow. As well as a challenge for the 10 year old: Like make a pong-like video game.

The mission statement for this entire idea, "We gave you all the tools and they work well. Now the only thing stopping you from being a hacker/programmer is yourself."

Distributing it via old hardware would be nice, because most kids/parents are worried about "ruining" their existing computer by migrating to Linux and losing Windows.(At least I was)

Having a separate dedicated physical box, will give the kids a good environment to try things and fail in. Without worry about accidentally deleting everything on the file system. Like family vacation photos.

Do FB marketing and target parents that have kids in middle school and want them to go college and be doctor/lawyer/engineer types.

Sell it at (cost + $20 +shipping). Plug and play.

bkcreate
I like this idea a lot. Thanks for sharing