HACKER Q&A
📣 samsquire

What do you use excess computer and storage for?


Hi

I am always on the look out for new hobbyist or power usages of computers. I know some people are interested in financial models and run their own smart trading algorithms.

I am interested in database design and internals so I write reference implementations of data structures and I have a toy SQL and Cypher database which I plan to change to be multi model.

I find the idea of processing trillions of records efficiently interesting.

I want to see how fast multiplying a trillion numbers by another trillion numbers is and maybe use the GPU to do so.

At one point I used OpenGrok to store sourcecode of large projects to try understand how they worked but I didn't do enough studying.

Storing sourcecode is one use of storage capacity for building in parallel with distcc.

I don't store music I use Spotify and I don't store video since I use Amazon Video.

The question becomes, what's a power usage of computers when you have all the processing power and storage space you need but nothing to process or store.

I tried to understand Gentoo but I didn't enjoy any of the instructions.

I can only read so much code a day.

I've looked at Kaggle and I didn't find any interesting data sets.

I am designing a Postgres synchronization solution for sharded postgres which I find interesting.

The truly interesting data is kept secret. This means I cannot store it or process it for insights. So what do I do instead?


  👤 32gbsd Accepted Answer ✓
At some point you realise that its niether storage or processing. Making things faster or having more stuff doesnt solve the core problem of physics. Alot of modern solutions are just old stuff with new names. We really need new stuff and not remixed reimplementations.