Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | snerbles's commentslogin

I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game.

On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.


Any pointers on how to buy one?

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.

---

So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.

The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.

If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.

Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.

The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.


    >and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks
Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason.

    >If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable
The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS update. Overall, they are the 2nd best affordable Haswell-EP workstations after the HP Z440 in my opinion.

    >E5 v4 revision CPU
They are less efficient than V3 CPUs due to the lockdown of Turbo Boost, but then again on a Precision you'd have to flash the BIOS with an external flasher regardless to get TB back.

Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware.

Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.


It's not an issue with Dell it's an issue with how the chips themselves are designed. There are buggy microcodes in the Haswell-EP series which can be exploited to unlock FULL Turbo Boost on ALL cores of the CPUs. This is NOT possible on Broawdwell-EP.

Man this so much incredible information in one comment

The incentive is less about morals and very much about self-preservation.

With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast. It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for the storm to blow over.


For what it’s worth, I found the original announcement childish and unnecessarily negative towards people working on the product (against their CoC which I found hilarious and hypocritical), and I find it refreshing that they updated the post to phrase their criticism much more professional.

I think that real honesty works well as long as you have the character to stand up for yourself. An unflinchingly honest self-assessment which shows that you understand the error and rectified it is almost always the path to take.

Acknowledgement of mistakes do not invoke much of a mob reaction unless there is wavering, self-pity, or appeals for leniency. Self-preservation should be assumed and not set as a goal -- once you appear to be doing anything that can be thought of as covering up or minimizing or blaming others, the mob will latch on to that and you get no consideration from then on.


It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.

State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.


No, I totally get it. If you're home schooled maybe you get out to see a few kids, go do some lessons in a forest classroom or whatever. All good. But it's still not the dynamic, varied (sometimes uncomfortable) environment of school classrooms, corridors, playtimes, etc.

Again, to re-iterate, I don't want kids to be uncomfortable as a norm, but bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions - finding your friends, finding people you dislike, learning how to work with social cues - all of this is important grounding for later life. What do you spend your life doing? Bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions.

I also can't help but notice that amongst our friends who homeschool there is a very strong correlation between parents who didn't go to school and their kids not going to school. Around us this rarely seems to be about some kind of positive choice, mainly it's parent exudes strong "I didn't like school" vibes and kid picks it up and runs with it.

Creating silos where you closet away and attempt to "protect" people from the outside world has never, ever been good. Social Media (should) have taught us that.


Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].

--

>> You can also learn outside of school, too.

> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.

---

>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.

> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.

> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295


> Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

The guides are written for cryptographic infrastructure nerds and not regular normal users that have a habit of forgetting their own passwords after six months. Not to mention the fact that the Element UI tends to churn a lot.

I didn't even know that they deprecated creating new passphrases, and that's what I was telling my users to do!


Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.


Often projects need a history of stable checkpoints, and source control is one way to provide that.


Yes, but does it need all the ceremony surrounding it? If, every time I saved the file, the changes were analyzed and committed to git, and a useful commit message included, and commits squashed automatically and pushed and tested and tagged (using magic, let's say); if the system existed in the background, seamlessly, how would our interactions with source control and with other developers look?


> if the system existed in the background, seamlessly, how would our interactions with source control and with other developers look?

They would look like noise.

You would be the source of that noise.

One commit per edit? Nonsense.

Me and any other developer would hate to share a repository with you.


ye gods, have you never heard the word squash?


Why should I do your work instead of mine?

Even your comment is also noise =)


Who's asking you to do my work instead of yours in this hypothetical magic future system that I've invented in my head?


automated commit message will tell you the "what" not the "why".

In any circle of "what makes a good commit message and why even do it" discussions, invariably the recommendation is to explain the "why" and leave out the self-evident "what".

If your stance is that commit and commit messages can be automated away then we might as well not even have them.

I don't share this view, but yeah in this world we don't need AI to do things that shouldn't be done in the first place.


> we might as well not even have them.

You can't see any value in being able to see the "what" in a short bit of English at a glance vs having to analyze a 300+ line diff to figure out what it's doing?


increasingly, the automated systems have access to the original ticket or bug report, and maybe even the conversation while implementation is happening. They can record the “why”


Use jujutsu


At a prior job, employees wearing the logo started getting a lot of unexpected targeted attention outside the office. This ranged from lots of questions from randos about future products, to desperate passers-by handing off resumes on the sidewalk and begging for jobs, to even stalking and targeted theft. OPSEC culture wasn't something practiced there, and it was quite the rude awakening for some.

I do sticker the everloving snot out of my (removable) laptop cover with memes vaguely opposing or otherwise orthogonal to the local culture. No references to my job or place of work. Any interactions have generally been amusing to all parties involved.


Also the Yellow Press drumming up support for the Spanish-American War.


NocoDB is also a self-hosted option. I used it to power a family project that required regular API access, but without the rate limits of Google Sheets.


For now.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: