
Ask HN: How would you repurpose bulk old computers? - bkcreate
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?
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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?

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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/](https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/) Also,
setting up a spark [https://spark.apache.org/](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?

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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.

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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.

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tiredwired
If they are less powerful & efficient than a Raspberry Pi then probably not
worth trying to use them for anything other than nostalgia.

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kirykl
assuming wholesale cost, start a website that sells old computers one at a
time for cost + $10

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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

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taf2
Recycle the raw materials

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jlgaddis
Return them for a refund.

