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Ask HN: What do you self-host?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't overload the CPU and my storage requirements are low. 95% of my used storage is stuff I wouldn't care if it got lost, but just nice to have around. I only have around 2GB of data I don't want to lose. I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to…

>I do leave the batteries in. Is it dangerous? I read some time ago that it is not dangerous, but the capacity of the battery drops significantly, I don't care about capacity, and safe shutdowns are important to me. It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard. I'm not an expert, maybe someone else can expand on thi…

> It's not necessarily dangerous but lithium batteries have a chance to fail and in very rare cases even explode, making them a potential fire hazard.

Well, I'm removing the battery and the pseudo-UPS logic right now. The battery looks fine, but I'm not taking any risks, since it's on top of the DL380 but under a wooden TV stand.

Thanks for the heads up! You might have prevented a fire.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#302
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is necessary to construct and reinforce so arbitrary an apparatus as copyright to substantially stymie the tremendous potential information exchange of computer networks. It makes sense when you consider that information is generated in the first place for an incentive, and that incentive is only possible when copyright guards it. People are more than free to create public information if they choose to do so (and…

This is a chicken and egg fallacy. You can't tell what would or would not be made in the absence of an incentive that has never not been provided. > Would you rather they didn't have the option which would result in the effort not being expended to generate such information? Yes, I would argue absolutely that valuable information would still be made because those that would benefit just from the information existing…

>You can't tell what would or would not be made in the absence of an incentive that has never not been provided.

You can though. Precisely because there are countries (past and present) that have / had no legal framework for such incentives, and there are others where the framework was there but the law is not enforced. And we can observe how it is working for them, compare and contrast. I live in one of them (lived here all my life) but work for countries that provide such a protection (precisely because my intellectual property would not be respected here, so my own country my homeland does not get to benefit from my work) so it is easy for me to look at both sides of the coin - though it is not strictly necessary. It doesn't take hands on experience to observe that the most productive and innovative countries occupying planet earth are those that have strong intellectual property rights.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit where I live that would double the GDP of the country in a few years but no one is doing it, because they are either capital intensive, or time intensive (or both) but without any protections there to make it worth your while it doesn't make sense to attempt those - for anyone. It makes more sense to pitch any innovative ideas to countries that will protect you so that you get a return proportional to the value you generate for the rest of the society. If I have an idea that has the potential to shave 1 hour off of millions of people's work everyday, that is enormous value generated for everyone and I should be rewarded proportionally. Not to mention the risk I'd have to take to attempt that, by attempting that I'm doing this instead of doing something else with my only life so of course the incentive HAS TO be there.

>The think tank researching a cure for cancer will still have ample funding sources from those who think not having cancer would be beneficial regardless of those sponsors ability to profit off said cure.

I think this is far too naive way of looking at it. You are taking risk entirely out of the equation. If I'm attempting to do something that is of value to other people, merely by attempting it, I am taking a RISK. My time is my most valuable asset, I only live once, and I'm willing to invest my time and capital into this endeavor instead of doing something else with them. The resources of human beings are not unlimited, so they need to have a heuristic / algorithm to ration their resources. Their survival / wellbeing is dependent on this. So something becomes a viable risk only if there is a possible return that makes sense. Like you wouldn't play coin flip for 1.1x or nothing right? It must at the very least be 2x or nothing to break even.

So we think we'd like to do good for no possibility of personal return, but behavioral economics show that humans do not operate that way (even though they'd like to think that they would) because each and every human being have their own lives, responsibilities, families, wants, wishes and only limited resources. To make ANYTHING the returns must be congruent with your heuristic about how you'd like to divide your limited resources.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#303
Fastmail handles my mail, Newsblur for RSS, iCloud for calendar. My blog is hosted on Netlify.

The only things I host are either just hobbies or non-essentials:

At home: - Node-red for home automation - PiHole for ad filtering on the local network - Plex on my NAS for videos - A Raspi for reading my Ruuvitags and pushing the info to MQTT On Upcloud and DigitalOcean and a third place: - Unifi NVR (remote storage for security cameras) - Flexget + Deluge for torrents - InfluxDB + Grafana for visualizing all kinds of stuff I measure - Mosquitto for MQTT

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is necessary to construct and reinforce so arbitrary an apparatus as copyright to substantially stymie the tremendous potential information exchange of computer networks. It makes sense when you consider that information is generated in the first place for an incentive, and that incentive is only possible when copyright guards it. People are more than free to create public information if they choose to do so (and…

Alot of us think 75 years + life of the creator is a bit excessive.

As long as the intellectual property framework is ther, recognised and enforced, I'm more than open to discuss the specifics of how it should be done. The argument above is about abolishing the idea of intellectual property as a shackle around humanity's creative output - something which I disagree with. They are saying that since making a copy of something is essentially free in the digital era, there should be no protections for copying and distribution of the data - and that people would generate data of similar quality regardless of the incentive of profit proportional with the value of data. I think that is an absurd claim. And we can easily see that it is not the case because there are countries with lax or non-existent legal intellectual property frameworks and they lack productivity growth and they don't innovate.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#305
post #234
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I get other people to build my car, grow my food, generate my electricity, extract and refine my petrol, clean my water, I've rented cars, I get others to fly planes for me that I don't own, I use trains others drive and own. I do everything for little to nothing in my life, and there's no reasonable default as to where the line is other than a cost/benefit comparison. For my for many years owning a car was far…

> So why self host? Sometimes it'll make sense, but the idea it should be the default to me doesn't hold. You can’t outsource your privacy. Once you’ve given your information to a third party, that third party can and will probably use it as much as they can get away with. And legal protection from unreasonable search and seizure is also much weaker once you’ve already given out your information to a third party. To…

This is of course part of the cost/benefit thing you need to look at - but again it doesn't mean it is obviously the default. People can do things with my image if I leave the house, but going out in CCTV dazzling outfits with a fully covered face is not "the default".

> If you do, you turn yourself into a serf;

I'm really not sure I follow. This is about self hosting services, I can't really link (e.g.) hosting my data on github.com and turning myself "into a serf".

> someone with no recourse when those whom you place your trust in ultimately betray you.

There's obviously recourse - as an EU citizen (at least currently) it's possible that companies can lose 4% of their global turnover for misusing data.

> (Also, just like “owning” a timeshare is not like owning your house, having a VPS is not self-hosting.)

You can see from my post that I also put up the price of running a rpi if you didn't count a VPS as self hosting, which I absolutely would because to me it's about what services I run vs what services I pay others to run.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#306
A household wiki. Contains all kinds of information about our house and lives. We used to track stuff like this in a google doc but it was getting unwieldy.

I wasn't happy with any of the free wiki hosting solutions available so I ended up self-hosting a mediawiki site. It's been...challenging...to convince my wife and family to adapt and use wiki markup.

I've been considering switching to something that uses standard markdown instead since it's easier to write with.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#307

A household wiki. Contains all kinds of information about our house and lives. We used to track stuff like this in a google doc but it was getting unwieldy. I wasn't happy with any of the free wiki hosting solutions available so I ended up self-hosting a mediawiki site. It's been...challenging...to convince my wife and family to adapt and use wiki markup. I've been considering switching to something that uses standar…

+1 for even having a conversation with family about wiki markup. You are a baller.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#308
post #36

I host a bunch of docker containers plus Traefik to route everything. It runs on a cheap GCP instance (more on this here: https://sdan.xyz/sd2 ) Overleaf: https://sdan.xyz/latex A URL Shortener: https://sdan.xyz All my websites ( https://sdan.xyz/drf , https://sdan.xyz/surya , etc.) My blog(s) ( https://sdan.xyz/blog , https://sdan.xyz/essays ) Commento commenting server (I don't like disqus) Monitoring ( https://sda…

You may want to consider adding netdata user to docker group. It will allow checking Docker names of containers instead of numeric id.

Of course, it would simplify privilege escalation if someone successfully attack netdata service. If you want public dashboard, streaming is supposed to be quite safe (no way to send instruction to streaming instance of netdata).

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#309
post #297
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. They have direct access to your vitals and can push certain buttons to figure out how your system is running to brute-force that attack, ultimately ruining whatever they intended to do. I'm probably going to change how publicly accessible my monitoring view is soon, but for now, it seems pretty cool for everyone to see.

Indeed it was cool. Would love to get a link to a screenshot of your system's resource monitoring. The description of each panel & eache metric was quite useful!

It's still public as of now.

Re: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

#310
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a chicken and egg fallacy. You can't tell what would or would not be made in the absence of an incentive that has never not been provided. > Would you rather they didn't have the option which would result in the effort not being expended to generate such information? Yes, I would argue absolutely that valuable information would still be made because those that would benefit just from the information existing…

>You can't tell what would or would not be made in the absence of an incentive that has never not been provided. You can though. Precisely because there are countries (past and present) that have / had no legal framework for such incentives, and there are others where the framework was there but the law is not enforced. And we can observe how it is working for them, compare and contrast. I live in one of them (lived…

> without any protections there to make it worth your while

You are still approaching it from the "make it for free, charge for the result" model incompatible with reality. If there is something worth doing that will radically improve society you should be soliciting the funding first before undertaking the labor.

Yes, risk is involved. You take risks when you pay someone to build a house for you. You take risks when you buy Sushi at the store that may or not still be good. We have, as a society, very effectively structured and produced buyer protections for services rendered ranging from guarantees to total free for all. You would, like with every other transaction, budget and account for risks and pay to mitigate them if warranted.

> It makes more sense to pitch any innovative ideas to countries that will protect you

Its more like foreign nations with IP laws are offering you a magic money machine that nations without don't, and the pile of gold is a tempting proposition over attempting alternative funding models.

> So something becomes a viable risk only if there is a possible return that makes sense

I don't think we are in any disagreement here. I'm never arguing that you abolish IP and expect all further scientific advancement, art, programming, etc to be done by people who cannot seek compensation for making it. I'm arguing that the US IP regime smothers any potential alternative with how exploitative having the government constrain information by law is.

Your story runs a similar thread seen in tax evasion and money laundering - the rich will gravitate their wealth towards wherever they can keep the most of it. That is where Swiss Bank Accounts and Latin American cartels get their power. Likewise businesses want lower taxes and thus gravitate towards the countries that offer the lowest tax rates - even if those lower tax rates have abject demonstrable harm to the citizenry through reduced social programs, etc. The result is that there is a global race to the bottom economically - to appeal maximally to wealth to attract it, or see your nation rot as it constantly flees your borders for greener pastures. IP is a massive pile of money to be had, hence nations without it see creators flee to nations with it, but might does not make right - just because the existence of IP represents untenable profit by any other means does not justify its existence, especially when it is so contrarian to baseline reality. Its a perversion of normality meant to attract investment the same way having low or no wealth and income taxes or no corporate tax attracts the wealthy and businesses.

> So we think we'd like to do good for no possibility of personal return

The personal return on funding the cure for cancer is having the cure for cancer exist.

> To make ANYTHING the returns must be congruent with your heuristic about how you'd like to divide your limited resources.

And macroeconomically we are all constituted of limited resources - limiting information compels most to partition their scarce resources towards affording the IP regime, not for any physical necessity, and this reduces the buying power of everyone involved. IP falls under the same purview of economic cancers as advertising, health insurance, and the military - bureaucracy and a race to the bottom that has no abject benefit but siphons productivity away to rent seekers and middle men.

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