Ask HN: How do I even use a computer anymore?

#1

Post by re6tor » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

I'm a senior consultant (DevOps, security) with 15+ years of experience. When not doing work for a client, I don't seem to know what to do with my computer anymore... I get put off by all the threats/friction I've been exposed to professionally. Does this happen to any one of you too? I think most of my pain points are related to being perma-connected to the Internet but it might be something different.

Coding isn't fun anymore - Need to set up a devcontainer inside a VM (a Podman machine) so as not to get rekt when using dependencies - Almost no programming language or mainstream project publishes documentation to be consumed offline, let alone manpages - Need to constantly browse the web to look for references or ask my LLM of choice

Self-hosting is its own job - Set up Traefik with a WAF middleware (ModSecurity) when traffic is proxied to stateful applications - Keep up-to-date with my services' changelogs and regularly bump container image tags + digest reference - Integrate services with Authelia for SSO

You can't just download software - Reduce to a minimum the amount of software that I run on my actual laptop - Anything that I don't install from Homebrew needs to get scanned in Virustotal, including every update - If it's a one-off, it'll run in a VM

PS: I decided not to comment on SaaS offerings because that'd keep me going forever...

Re: Ask HN: How do I even use a computer anymore?

#2

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

Being behind a slow ADSL line until 2020 or so meant that I learned how to do everything without containers because the timeouts for the Docker Hub were set so low I couldn't stack up anything.

Building apps on my own account I might set up a database like Postgres and program a web server in Python or Java and use either HTMX or React on the front end. With Tailscale I can access that application with my tablet or phone or VR headset or whatever.

I know the cloud can be frustrating but it can also be liberating. My RSS reader consumes about 110 feeds that are ingested by Superfeedr which then posts to a Webhook which is a 20-line Python script running as an Amazon Lambda function that posts to SQS, then my home computer polls the SQS when it wants to catch up. It's hard to overstate how simple it, how it has been spinning like a top for almost two years without any maintenance.

So I'd argue it is really the best of times.

Re: Ask HN: How do I even use a computer anymore?

#3

Post by cowboylowrez » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Being behind a slow ADSL line until 2020 or so meant that I learned how to do everything without containers because the timeouts for the Docker Hub were set so low I couldn't stack up anything. Building apps on my own account I might set up a database like Postgres and program a web server in Python or Java and use either HTMX or React on the front end. With Tailscale I can access that application with my tablet or p…

lol if docker can't run offline then its dead to me.

Re: Ask HN: How do I even use a computer anymore?

#4

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

cowboylowrez wrote: post #3

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Being behind a slow ADSL line until 2020 or so meant that I learned how to do everything without containers because the timeouts for the Docker Hub were set so low I couldn't stack up anything. Building apps on my own account I might set up a database like Postgres and program a web server in Python or Java and use either HTMX or React on the front end. With Tailscale I can access that application with my tablet or p…

lol if docker can't run offline then its dead to me.

It's not even "offline", it is "online with a slow connection". On some level docker is a machine that turns 50kb of I/O into 3GB of I/O.

Over my slow connection I was completely capable of downloading 20GB games onto the XBOX, Playstation, Steam and such, it just took a while and the downloading software had caches and resumable downloads and all the facilities to deal with that.

It never did, I think because reliability is a "enterprise feature, call to talk to sales" kind of feature.

Re: Ask HN: How do I even use a computer anymore?

#5

Post by JojoFatsani » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

cowboylowrez wrote: post #3

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Being behind a slow ADSL line until 2020 or so meant that I learned how to do everything without containers because the timeouts for the Docker Hub were set so low I couldn't stack up anything. Building apps on my own account I might set up a database like Postgres and program a web server in Python or Java and use either HTMX or React on the front end. With Tailscale I can access that application with my tablet or p…

lol if docker can't run offline then its dead to me.

It works offline, you just need to get the images from somewhere.. it could certainly be a local network repository. You just need to propagate it somehow..