Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era.
>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998
My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.
But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.
A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.
I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.
All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.
If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.
My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.
1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
>I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available.
That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices.
I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux.
That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.
"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc."
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.
An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.
We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.
>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.
Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years
Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.
This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear.
A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.
Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)
The reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
Most cloud features are open source tools with special sauce sprinkeled in. But at the same time these companies heavily fund said OS project so I suppose it's not just pure community based work.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.
I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.
I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.
I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying).
I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
Uhhh, me? 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit.
The main exception would be Google Photos pictures that have been uploaded from my phone but which I haven't curated and downloaded yet.
I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.
> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.
Hold up, is this OR or XOR? Why is "non-archival" media important?
The virtue is having a copy under my own control which has some protection from bit-rot.
That isn't voided simply because one has an off-site back up against catastrophic loss. That copy being in "the cloud" isn't meaningfully different than when it was going to a singular Linux machine that someone else owned.
Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.
2020s, people are going offline to have fun.
Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.
Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
You never go full cloud.
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era.
I guess I'm just old though.
>I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998
My excuse is that I never had the financial stability that I have now in my middle 30s to get things going, also moving oversea and what not didn't help either.
But I didn't go crazy, I have 3 Proxmox servers running a few services, Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS to avoid DNS poisoning and personal data tracking.
A DIY TrueNAS as the primary system to have a copy of my data.
I have a 4K bluray with physical media, but I do have Jellyfin also because nothing matches 80s, 90s, early 2000s movies and buying DVD in 2026 is pointless. Also, it is not easy or very, very expensive to find a bluray copy of old movies in 2026. Jellyfin solves that.
All my servers are consuming 110W 200VA tops, connected to a second hand APC UPS 1000VA.
If the whole world goes to shit right now, I can still run all my stuff without dependency to the internet.
My last goal is to have a solar/battery system so if WW3 really happens sending us to the cave age, wherever I am will still be 21st century.
1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
>I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available.
That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices.
I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux.
That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.
"Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc."
dude this is way more than "power user" you're being unserious.
If you tell a genuine power user, someone comfortable with Windows registry edits, Office macros, maybe some light PowerShell scripting, that they can "totally do what my brother did," and then the actual task list is Proxmox installation, IOMMU group isolation, VFIO stub drivers, GPU passthrough debugging, RAID configuration, and multi-OS VM management, subnetting, raid and HBA configuration, you're setting them up for a brutal wall of frustration.
I echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.
An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.
We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.
>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300.
Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years
Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything.
This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start.
Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)
As it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/qsdc3
Sometimes you fuck the cloud, sometimes the cloud fucks you
Maybe the old man is on to something.
Nope
or https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.tex...
lol, as a VPN user, I get to read nothing. No offense to archive.org, I get it.
the irony
Flared by the cloud.. sic
The reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
The title is an erroneous translation of the Japanese original; it is actually: テキストファイル好きで奇妙な帽子をかぶった男が、天気とセックスをするという計画を発表する。
Can you more accurately translate this to English for us?
According to Google Translate: “A man who loves text files and wears a peculiar hat announces a plan to have sex with the weather.”
Hope this helps.
Keep hoping!
It took me way too long to get that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539
Thanks, Macroexpanded, and some others too...
Fuck the Cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 - Dec 2015 (219 comments)
Fuck the cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)
Fuck the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885 - Jan 2009 (23 comments)
Resource Limit Is Reached - Hug of death
The irony.
The sequel to Kiss the sky
Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this:
> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
I think very soon we will read “Fuck AI”.
Neither would be fucked if they were open source.
Or if they had a ton of viable competition.
Is not most cloud tech based on open-source? Without Linux I feel like we would have seen cloud take off 20 years later than it did.
Most cloud features are open source tools with special sauce sprinkeled in. But at the same time these companies heavily fund said OS project so I suppose it's not just pure community based work.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.
I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.
Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.
I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.
I still have hour long techno/house mixes that I downloaded from some dude who was trying to get into DJing in 2008/did house shows or something, because we played on the same garry's mod server. They don't exist anywhere else on the internet as far as I could possibly find. Searching his dj name doesn't bring up anything.
I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying).
I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
Uhhh, me? 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit.
The main exception would be Google Photos pictures that have been uploaded from my phone but which I haven't curated and downloaded yet.
I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.
> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.
Hold up, is this OR or XOR? Why is "non-archival" media important?
The virtue is having a copy under my own control which has some protection from bit-rot.
That isn't voided simply because one has an off-site back up against catastrophic loss. That copy being in "the cloud" isn't meaningfully different than when it was going to a singular Linux machine that someone else owned.