Live data from Hacker News

Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

boinc.berkeley.edu

41–50 of 90 posts

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't talk it down just because you don't like it and you are cheap I did Rosetta for years and I was fully aware what and why I was supporting it...

Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and t…

It’s a simple any easy way to donate which you can start and stop and any time without handing over any financial details. You could, for example just decide to crank it up when your solar panels are generating an excess and the export rate is low.

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time What a waste of computing time!

Just wait until you hear about Bitcoin

Just wait until you hear about most ecommerce platforms doing `SELECT * FROM` just to display 2 columns.

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#43
post #33

Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"

??? For the majority of boinc projects its just citizen science, they results are published for free. No money is involved. I donate my computer time (and corresponding electricity costs) to projects I believe in or find interesting.

Dude above said "electric bill", compute on older hardware is expensive. Modern hardware will be considered expensive in a few years too.

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time What a waste of computing time!

SETI wasn't a waste of time don't have any good alternatives to it. Folding@home on the other hand probably could have been a lot more useful if they were training transformers on their results instead of just doing pure protein dynamics simulations.

[deleted]

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#45
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until you hear about Bitcoin

Just wait until you hear about most ecommerce platforms doing `SELECT * FROM` just to display 2 columns.

what if your table just has two columns?

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#47

The SETI@Home screensaver [0] (the predecessor to BOINC) was the peak of nerd-cool when I was 11 or 12 years old. I had no idea what any of the graphs meant, and still don't, but I knew that I could help find _aliens_, and look like a hacker doing it [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home?useskin=vector#/medi...

> Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time What a waste of computing time!

Seti@home started a long long time ago, when computer used the same amount of power, if they worked hard or if the computer was idle. That's why they started as screensaver, it did just not matter.

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and t…

It's research. I benefit from it, you do too. It's the responsibility of the society to do research and just because some capitalism based entities also do this and also benefit from this doesn't matter. Start being less 'sane' if this holds you back formulating your own opinion or actions making society better ...

not all research benefits society and what does usually benefits the wealthy, which boinc users almost certainly aren't. The wealthy expect a return on an investment

Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

#49

Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"

In my province electricity is $0.024 / kWh overnight (that's about $0.17 USD) so almost free and comes from almost entirely renewable sources.

So, I would be happy to run it every night (excepting July & August), but the BOINC Manager just didn't seem to work for me: created an account but then the account was not recognized.

Post reply on HN