The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap - <AUTHOR> https://tedium.co/2019/06/04/used-workstation-computer-buying-strategy/ <comment><USER6> The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene. There's probably some optimal intersection between cost of the computer and the cost of power consumption.

an older macbook pro (2012ish) gives 12,000 on the MT benchmark and only draws what, 85w?

the author briefly touches on this, but unless you get free electricity, this is a bigger issue than presented.

<comment><USER7> Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines, but they can easily pull $50 a month in power, assuming 25 cents per kwh.

Not only is that a waste of money for power, it is horrible for the environment. These machines are obscenely inefficient power wise. It's likte folks who buy a r720 for $150 that comes with 32GB ECC ram and dual cpu's, but it pulls $75 per month in power. Even if you don't pay for electricity directly (you do in rent then), it's still terrible for the environment.

<comment><USER8> How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!

<comment> frosted-flakes Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your power bill.

<comment><USER9> But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas, etc is the cheapest time for electricity.

<comment> frosted-flakes Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that doesn't affect the total charge very much.

<comment><USER9> Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that "lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want a loud computer that consumes ten times as much electricity as it should, then an old Xean Workstation might be for you. Personally I prefer buying old Thinkpads. They're cheap, fast enough, and their electricity consumption is decent.

<comment><USER11> Coincidentally I'm considering buying a used Thinkpad X220 for fun projects for me/kids because of the reliability, build quality and the awesome keyboard. The best quote I have received so far is about $145 for i5/8gb ram/no-drive (I already have a spare ssd). Hoping the machine is in a good condition :)

<comment><USER12> Go for it. You will not regret it... I still have mine powered on and sits on my desk with an external plugged in. I suggest doing the FullHD mode if you're decent with a soldering iron. Here is a great resource for x220s. Enjoy!

[http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/](http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/)

<comment><USER11> I have never touched a soldering iron and quite wary of h/w tinkering - <USER2> for the link though. Even if I don't know how to work with h/w, I like to read about other people doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been doing this for years, "upgrading" every 6 months when I find a new machine being thrown away. In the past year I did this with a 2006 Mac Pro and a 2013 System76 desktop. Both of these machines were a delight to work on - <USER3> was able to get 16gb of DDR2 ECC RAM and 2 quad-core Xeons for the Mac Pro for around $28 total on ebay. The Mac Pro could be flashed up to a 2007 model and ran El Capitan perfectly with a cheap no-name SSD off Amazon. It took a GTX 760 with some odd power adapters and it was a fantastic machine to do audio editing and playing with tensorflow-gpu on.

The System76 machine was a little more modern, with a Haswell i7, and after a new aftermarket cooler, fresh thermal paste, and another no-name SSD it ran Manjaro silently, even with Bazel putting it under some serious load.

I'm moving soon, so I sold both machines for around $350 each. It's a fun challenge, since usually these computers don't see modifications or have as good documentation as enthusiast PC parts, so you'll find a tiny community in some obscure forum sharing supported CPU upgrades, how to change out the cooler, stuff like that. Highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Meh, these old systems can be fun to tinker with but are _slow_.

E5-2667v2 vs i9-9900k the i9 is 60% faster single core, 44% faster multi-core (both are 8c16t). At lot of use cases, including the majority of development work for most people, is still dominated by single core performance so you're giving up a lot performance to save a couple bucks. The power draw on these server/workstation systems will likely also suck which will offset some of the $ savings.

<comment><USER15> It makes sense if you need much Ram. DDR3 RDIMMs used from ebay are really Cheap.

And the price difference for the whole system is huge if you buy used. I payed for my System with a Xeon 2680 V2 (10C20T) 128GB Ram just a little bit more then the asking price for the 9900k alone. But I bought it almost 2 years ago so the comparable Mainstream CPU at that time was the 4C8T 7700k.

As a student with a limited budget performance per € matters more then performance per watt.

<comment><USER16> This.

I picked up a Dell T710 with 32 cores and 32GB of DDR3 ECC RAM for $400. I can throw more RAM in it for practically zero cost. It's amazing for batch workloads.

For interactive workloads, there's no need to get anything newer than a 4-series Core iX. The single-threaded performance has not improved much over the last five years. My daily driver is an i5-6500; motherboard and CPU, used, were $120.

<comment><USER17> I just got a used Thinkpad with an i7. I was eyeballing cheaper stuff with i5. The reason I upgraded is the security problems in CPU's require mitigations that will probably keep slowing them down. I bought a faster core to mitigate those slowdowns a bit. Plus, get security updates for a while longer.

<comment><USER18> so you gave more money to company with the broken product? why not buy amd?

<comment><USER17> I recommend people buying AMD where they can. Vermaden on Lobsters is a BSD expert. I asked them what hardware runs pretty much all BSD's. Vermaden narrowed it down to a few Thinkpads. All of them on eBay from recyclers had Intels. So, Intel just came with the box.

If building from parts or doing non-BSD, I'd go with an AMD, POWER, or ARM system.

<comment><USER19> > I asked them what hardware runs pretty much all BSD's. Vermaden narrowed it > down to a few Thinkpads.

What were the recommended models?

<comment><USER17> Vermaden's comments on that were here:

[https://lobste.rs/s/szzgjl/cheap_bsd_friendly_notebook](https://lobste.rs/s/szzgjl/cheap_bsd_friendly_notebook)

All the ones I saw in good condition on eBay were Intel's. I got a T420 with Core i7 to mitigate potential slowdowns from future CPU vulnerabilities. I've occasionally had to restart it from suspend/resume issues. Otherwise, it's been great.

One more thing: the function key and control key are swapped compared to most laptops. I didn't like that because I'm used to control being far left. duclare told me about a BIOS setting that swaps them back. Everything's fine now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You're giving away my secrets! I've bought 3 of these types of HP workstations over the years, starting with a Z210 with a Xeon E3-1240. I added a graphics card to make it a super budget gaming PC.

My most recent one is an HP Z420 workstation with 128GB of ECC memory, an 8-core Xeon, and Win10 Pro installed for $620 delivered. Benchmarks of the CPU show its comparable to a Ryzen 1700X in single and multi core, but I really bought it for the RAM. It's a great machine for homelab-type virtualization.

<comment><USER21> Do these older CPUs have hardware level decoding for modern video formats such as AV1?

<comment><USER22> Does any modern chip have that yet then?

<comment><USER21> Perhaps not. I might be thinking of VP9 if that is what YouTube has been using.

<comment><USER22> Ah yes that's VP9, though you can also use an extension (or just a config tweak in Firefox), or Edge to view h264, which is minimum Sandy Bridge.

Intel Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Amber Lake, Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake CPU families, AMD Raven Ridge APU family, and Nvidia Maxwell GM206, Pascal, Volta & Turing GPU families have full fixed function VP9 hardware decoding for highest decoding performance and power efficiency. (Wiki)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This will work if you are located in big western city. He bought his Z420 for 50$, and when I check ebay right now they are going for 150-300$ + 100-200$ shipping. And that with E5-1603 CPU, not the E5-2667 or similar. Lets say I have 5 year old AMD FX-8350 due to upgrade this year. That Xeon is actually slower, looking at some basic benchmarks (of course it may be faster in some, but I don't have time for detailed investigation). So ~300$ total for a sidegrade? And that not including hassle with shipping, maybe dealing with scammer seller from ebay, then import tax 30% (and who knows how base price will be calculated at customs). Etc. etc. Not worth it.

I'm not saying that upgrading for cheap is bad of course, but getting stuff like described in the article is borderline lottery win in most of the countries. You can't depend on it or plan in advance.

<comment><USER24> That Xeon is faster, not slower than your Bulldozer chip.

Passmark for the E5-2667: Multithreaded: 10372 Single threaded 1609

Passmark for the FX-8350: Multithreaded 8951 Single threaded: 1510

<comment><USER23> I was comparing E5-1603 vs FX-8350. That was for ~300$ (of course including case, psu, gpu and memory).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would add another negative to the list from personal experience. About a year ago I built a used server dual Xeon home server with e5-2680v2s. Now the pass mark scores per chip are about 15,000 but the power draw overall can get quite high. If you're in an area with more expensive kwh I would recommend looking into something like a threadripper or a more efficient and newer cpu.

<comment><USER26> If it's a home server doing not much most of the time, an intel skull/hade canyon can be a good choice. It can be really powerful when it needs to be, is effectively a laptop cpu the rest of the time, so not drawing much power. The only inconvenience is that it has no ipmi and it becomes really loud under heavy load.

Also you can sort of get 10gbe through a thunderbolt adapter but I ran into some compatibility issues with hyper-v.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Every comment here so far is about power consumption, which is mentioned in the article:

> And there are also considerations here from the perspective of power > consumption. A big box that's always plugged in will inevitably use more > power than a tiny laptop, even if the big box can do a lot more.

[...]

> But if you can make the case for it, it might be worth your time. In my > case, I was looking to have more of a desktop experience for times when I > wanted slightly more horsepower than a laptop, and I also wanted a machine > that could do virtualization when needed or desired.

<comment><USER28> Why do the machines use so much power?

<comment><USER29> Back in those days, Intel simply did not care one iota about power consumption. The P4 processors were absolute power hogs, and all Intel did was brag about how great their memory bandwidth to the RAMBUS memory was.

<comment><USER30> The last Pentium 4 was released in 2008; the Xeon E5-2667 v2 parts discussed in the article were released in 2013, years after Intel abandoned their Netburst approach.

<comment><USER31> Xeons are usually a generation behind on process and sometimes other technology as well.

<comment><USER32> Be that as it may, that Xeon is post Nehalem, it's not at all related to Netburst. Netburst was an evolutionary dead end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> On a vastly more practical note, check out JDM_WAAAT's site [https://www.serverbuilds.net/](https://www.serverbuilds.net/) . They're more piecemeal parts list, but he has a very reasoned approach to select parts that deliver value/performance at their price point, and are available at the selected price in sufficient quantities.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've looked into this kind of thing in the past, but there was always something that made me shy away, despite the prices being relatively favorable.

Most of the time, I think it was a worry of "if the power supply dies" \- because usually, these workstations have a very proprietary PSU, which can sometimes be difficult to source, and when you find one, the price can be nothing short of insane.

Then there was RAM - most of the time, you needed ECC RAM, and that stuff could be expensive if you wanted to push the system to its maximum config. Of course, this was years ago, maybe things have changed in the market?

Last was the potential noise and heat factors. I once had a Core2Duo that I dropped in a 8800 GTX (or something like that) - and while the noise wasn't bothersome, the heat output was something else. But I do know what a server fan system sounds like, and I'd worry about a workstation having that same kind of jet-engine experience.

So I never pulled the trigger, so to speak.

Today, I've been almost going the direct opposite direction.

I've got on my "list of things to repair/build" a TRS-80 Model 100 (portable), an old Toughbook C29 to refresh, and I'm contemplating building a custom "cyberdeck", using a variety of different parts and components (probably an ESP-32 coupled to an Arduino Nano, with the Nano acting as a keyboard interface, because the keyboard isn't off-the-shelf, it's from a toy computer, the ESP will probably drive some kind of GLCD, then custom firmware, etc for everything else - not really a practical system, but probably more fun).

<comment><USER35> +1 on the PSU.

Having attempted to replace power supplies on both Dell and HP workstations, that's just not possible. It doesn't boot without a one from the manufacturer.

Surprised that none of the comments mention it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I bought once Supermicro workstation (dual Xeon 2680), and it was LOUD. Even when shut down, the fans were still making noise, so I've had a habit of turning it off from power to make it silent.

While the idea looked appealing at the beginning (dual CPU, 64GB RAM, great cable management), at the end I've decided that it doesn't justify the cost and hassle. Plus sometimes there were very funny issues - for example to run Rocksmith you needed to manually set affinity on windows to run it on only one CPU. After upgrading to last gen Thinkpad extreme it feels that Thinkpad even does 4k rendering faster.

</comment><comment><USER37> Old xeons are hot, and power hungry.

My monthly electric bill decreased by nearly $10 after replacing my 2010 MacPro with a 2018 MacMini.

<comment><USER30> > _Old xeons are hot, and power hungry._

The other thing I'd worry about on a old, heavily used workstation is wear on the fan bearings. I've seen ones that got pretty loud after 5-6 years and replacement parts generally aren't available at that point.

<comment><USER38> Aren't most fans available as standard replacement parts? Or at least, something close enough? I once zip-tied (well, tied in with wire) a replacement CPU fan when the one I thought would fit didn't quite line up.

<comment><USER30> Dell and HP are the two major workstation brands I'm familiar with and both of them use custom fan assemblies. Search for "Dell Precision workstation fans" on eBay if you'd like to see examples.

<comment><USER39> On the other hand, ripping out the old case fan and replacing it with one held in place by sheet metal screws or glue is an option. When you are buying old hardware like this it's ok to bodge the repairs if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Great article. It expresses ideas similar to Game & Watch and GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.[0]

> Yokoi said, "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the > state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced > cheaply."

> "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is > cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new > ways of using such technology.

When designing the GameBoy, Yokoi realised that the older, simpler Z80 processor would just as well serve the purpose of making fun handheld games as the more contemporary options would (and one might argue that the limitations of the machine forced game developers to be more creative than they might have otherwise). Likewise with the monochromatic display.

The GameBoy was cheaper to manufacture and buy, more well-understood by developers, and crucially, much more power efficient than its several competitors. And it killed them.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology)

</comment><comment><USER41> Yeah, that's a no from me. Who would want another massive heat-generative, power-hungry desktop/server humming along in their home office as their main workstation?

Now if I were to build a home lab, heck yeah I would jump on board. A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud.

<comment><USER42> > A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud.

+1. I host an R710, R410 and 2 R610s in my basement and its a lovely cluster. I would never have them on any other floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Used to run an older Xeon system I picked for free as home server/workstation. Now you can pick up 8c16t Ryzens pretty cheap and they even support ECC on cheap consumer motherboards, so unless you get used Xeon for literally next to nothing, you may want to consider other alternatives. There's also the fact that recently more and more vulnerabilities have been discovered in Intel products, which makes Xeon much less attractive platform.

</comment><comment><USER44> It may feel a bit anachronistic at times, but learning terminal based apps is a good way to beat the cycle of upgrades. Many tasks are not all that complex, and they don't need recent hardware to perform well.

</comment><comment><USER38> I used to love upgrading my home desktop, I'd research specs, figure out the best price/performance and upgrade components regularly (motherboard, CPU, hard drive, etc).

But now that most of my computer time is spent in a web browser (most of my coding is done at work so I rarely even run an IDE at home), I'm happy with my 5 year old laptop.

I built a nice 8 core Xeon desktop about 4 years ago, but haven't powered it on at all in at least the past 2 years, I moved a year ago and haven't even taken it out of the box, it's still sitting beside the computer desk.

</comment><comment><USER45> I like to do this with laptops -- you can get a few years old maxed out Dell Latitudes, Thinkpads etc on ebay for 80% off. These outperform a standard new $800 laptop easily, though obviously you pay in sleekness/weight (mine is 90% stationary so I don't much care).

</comment><comment><USER46> Funny story. Back in when my Bride and I lived in a single bedroom compartment, she looked at my small stack of computers and said "why don't you get one big one"?

Later that month, I was shopping at the Lockheed Martin outlet/surplus store, and spied a lovely Sun 3/280 in a 8', 19" rackmount for $25. I could not resist, much to her dismay as the refrigerator sized chassis got home. The original hardware hosting a threadripper in the case of theseus.

</comment><comment><USER47> The arguments about power consumption only apply to a specific set of old workstation CPUs. You can buy old hardware that isn't super inefficient. I bought an HP EliteDesk tower on the cheap ($150) last year that had a i7-4790 (an all-around great CPU) and is super quiet. With a lower-power GPU in it (nvidia 1030) it's even decent for light games or video decoding. I've not directly measured the power consumption, but it's not nearly the monster these old Xeons can be.

The main point, from what I gather, is that you can buy older hardware that's just as powerful as something you'd buy today, but you get the benefit of better repairability, cheap replacement parts, and saving a bunch of plastic from the trash. I don't see the need for buying brand-new hardware when the old stuff works just fine. (My main machine is a 6-year-old Thinkpad)

</comment><comment><USER48> I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a hardware refresh. It has 32 GB of RAM and an (edit) 4-core 8-thread i7-4770, plus an OS SSD with several data HDDs (integrated graphics, but meh).

CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade. Even on my home PC (purchased around the same time) the only thing I've changed is the graphics card - and that was to sell it for a less-powerful one, then buy back the original card years later for cheap! Maybe if you want to play games on the cutting edge of VR then constant upgrades are necessary, but five-year-old desktop hardware should be fine for nearly anyone.

<comment><USER49> >CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade

what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads.

[https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel- Core-i7-8700-vs-...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel- Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978)

<comment><USER50> The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2 Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before _that_. An E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780. An i7-8700 has a score of 15155.

And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does.

We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Perhaps someone here can give me a bit of advice. I've been undecided on whether to buy a refurbished workstation for a while now. I do a lot of aosp builds for some of my clients and on my current setup it can take 3 or 4 hours for a clean build. I've been looking at various builds on [https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/](https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/) For about £1500 to £2000. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER52> My favourite setup is an HPz620 v2 with e5-xxxxv2 CPUs, and >= 64 gigs of ram.

Basically any workstation with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2, or the L variant (lower power) will do.

for example:

1 x HP Z620 Grade A - 800W - <USER4>

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 95W)

1 x HP Z420, Z620 - <USER5>

1 x HP Z620 2nd CPU Riser Board, Fan & Heatsink

8 x 8GB - DDR3L 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R, 2RX4, ECC REG)

1 x 2TB - SATA (7.2K, 3G) HDD - Major Brand

You'll need a new graphics card and an SSD, but that is £750 inc vat. this means you can spend £500 on an nvidia RTX, and get a 6k monitor.

<comment><USER51> Thanks I've found it difficult to find any info on what I can expect for certain hardware. It seems most people are either hobbyists who are on similar hardware to me or people working for big companies who can afford massive build servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> For one I would love to have an SGI workstation, I still have CG magazines from this era and its plastered everywhere in the ads, and I'm still amazed at the graphic output (so smooth) and what we had in the 90s.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc)

I'd imagine something like this would've been used to make Crash Bandicoot and likes. It'd be really interesting to play games built on this thing.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card.

Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc.

Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads).

They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts.

The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around...

As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...

<comment><USER55> >pallet of 24 for $80 each

at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption

<comment><USER54> I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 _including shipping_ (which has to be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid for them..

Vendor said they had more than 100 still available, and both of the units I've gotten so far are the original config as shipped from Dell according to a service tag lookup.

<comment><USER35> They probably don't pay for it. The hardware is decommissioned after a few years of usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In late 2017 I built myself a threadripper based workstation for ~5000$ with a 1950x, 64gb ECC (can fit up to 128), a single 1080 ti, single NVMe drive and two 8tb HDDs. The system was designed to allow for more HDDs (case space and thermal capacity, 8 should fit easily), 4 GPUs and durable enough so that I can wrap it up and ship it around the world if needed (The whole thing weighs ~18kg with a single GPU. Whether shipping a PC is a good idea or not I have yet to find out)

Threadripper was still 1000$ + motherboard for 300$. And RAM was at all time high with 750$ for 64gb ECC.

Because of this price tag I considered getting a used xeon, but looking at the total I probably would have only saved less than 1000$, or 20%, perhaps 100-200$ more due to used RAM for a total of 24%. That percentage saving is much lower than expected.

Other factors:

The cpu mentioned in the article has 40 PCIe lanes vs. 60 in threadripper and I figured more lanes is better should I ever put in all 4 GPUs. This seems to more or less not matter though. Something learned since then.

Better energy efficiency (newer processor and better PSU), more control over heat and noise (assumption, I have 6 quiet fans in there), more lanes (although near useless for GPUs apparently), more room for storage (8-12 drives possible), GPUs (4 possible) and simply all parts new with warranty for 20-24% more

This is very use case specific of course and there might be better used systems available as well but I would probably do it again. The savings were less than I initially thought and that was at an all time high for RAM prices and the first generation of threadrippers, should be even less now. What I should have done differently is use it more often, but that's a different story.

-> The expensive parts are storage, GPU and high quality case/PSU/fans. If you want to build your first workstation, storage and GPUs should be bought separately anyways. But if you don't need them or already have those from a different system, a used xeon sounds interesting. You still probably save less than expected though, over the years with less warranty, more power draw and more work necessary (which can be fun! not denying that)

(Yes the linked article is about home computer, not workstation. This is a different scenario. I figured it's nonetheless relevant for some)

</comment><comment><USER57> If a lot of HN users were interested it would be cool if someone could organize group-buys of these types of hardware. Usually buying old hardware (for super cheap) is limited by volume and most sellers aren't willing to ship something. If someone removed those pains and hand-picked "worth it" (for the home/small business server lab) items it would be something a few people might be interested in.

</comment><comment><USER58> This stuff is fun to do but it's not s magic bullet. The title would be better named "why your next home computer _could_ be an old Xeon workstation"

These older machines use way more power. Modern stuff is far more quiet and can do a lot more with less heat and sound.

I have a dual Xeon 2U here at home w/ 48Gb Of Ram, redundant power supplies etc... it's awesome. But it's not even remotely close to being as performant as my new MacBook Pro.

</comment><comment><USER59> My gaming desktop right now is actually an old Dell Precision tower with a third gen i7 that I got for $140 off eBay. I swapped out the PSU, upped the ram to 16gb, added an SSD I had laying around, and replaced the Quadro GPU with a 1060. In all it cost me about $350 and comfortably runs every game I own. Power draw isn't too much of a concern since it isn't used too often.

</comment><comment><USER60> For what it's worth: I keep my computers / servers off all the time. When I need them I use Wake-On-Lan to remotely turn them on when needed.

Even my power hungry 71TB NAS is off 99% of the time and only turned on when needed. Saving me 150-200 Watt idle power usage.

If you don't need your stuff to be on 24/7 you can buy older more power-hungry stuff as long as you turn it off when done.

</comment><comment><USER61> Takes me back. I bought a used Dell workstation for a few hundred bucks. Was pretty bare, basically case, power supply and motherboard. At the time, it was the only motherboard I was aware of that supported dual socket CPUs and AGP graphics. Even though I bought it used, Dell support was willing to help me out debugging why it wouldn't boot (something to due with a mismatch between the CPU power control units - I think that's what they were called- with a dual P4 Xeon setup). For the workstation, it was pretty damned affordable for what I got. The kick in the jaw was that it took RDRAM. To put in 1.5 GB of RAM doubled the cost of the build, easily. Few years later when I was an FTE, and no longer in school, dropped a couple of grand USD to upgrade the RAM to 3 GB. That was circa 2005. Great workstation, but boy was that RDRAM expensive...

</comment><comment><USER62> Oh hey, I have an old z420 that I picked up off of ebay that I use as a hypervisor. It had running for a few years and worked great for what I was using it for. I replaced it earlier this year with a mini-itx ryzen based system, because I didn't want the tower in my office anymore.

<comment><USER63> How is the heat management in your Mini-ITX Ryzen system?

I've read that Ryzen can generate a good amount of heat. I'd worry that Mini- ITX due to the formfactor may struggle more.

<comment><USER64> Works fine with the stock heatsink ootb, even with a mild overclock.

They even have smaller than ITX systems now, though not quite as small as a NUC: [https://www.asrock.com/nettop/](https://www.asrock.com/nettop/)

I have one of these and it runs great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you leagues ahead.

I find the really old workstations to be way more interesting. You rarely see a MIPS, Sparc, PA-RISC anymore. Once the CPU wars were over (Intel won, btw) you could get old SGI supercomputers, DEC Alphas, Sun Sparcstations, and NeXT Turbo Cubes for almost nothing. My very first website was run from an Alpha workstation on NetBSD under my dorm room bed.

They were power hungry, not state of the art, and sometimes quirky to use (Irix Motif comes to mind) but they were a blast.

</comment><comment><USER66> The family machine is a 2009 Mac Pro with dual hex core processors, 48 gigs of RAM and 2 low watt video cards running Ubuntu. It does multiseat like a champ: one side was playing Hitman (2016) while the other was doing Tomb Raider (2013). I had been wanting to do multiseat for about a decade. In addition to using it remotely with ssh, I have guacamole on it, connecting to GDM so I can if I need to get to my desktop through a web browser. Total cost was about $600. I'm very much enjoying it.

</comment><comment><USER67> We're in a 5-10 year plateau where buying yesterday's machines dorsn't cost much performance, at least for CPUs.

If you bought a 5 year old computer in 2011 you'd be buying last gen stuff. But in 2019 even the sandy bridge (2012) intel processors aren't that bad. Obviously you are paying with _power_ because you'll buy a 2 or 4 way system to compensate, but if you use it just a few hours per day it's a steal.

</comment><comment><USER68> If the noise factor isn't a concern. For me it is, so I'll stick to Intel NUCs (until a good AMD alternative comes along).

<comment><USER69> Join the club - and you can get refurbished NUCs.

Mine is running silently right now and I reckon it is using a quarter of the 65W power available to it.

The HP Z220 has a 400W power supply and I reckon it is probably using 200W right now.

Silence is priceless.

But, what if you can't afford silence?

If the Z220 can be found in a skip then it comes for free. If you keep it for three years then it eats that much electricity (assuming daily usage) that it costs as much as a NUC.

There are a lot of variables here, but I think that the Intel NUC option is just as good value as the Z220 if electricity is factored in and the Z220 is assumed to be free. It all comes down to whether you want to pay up front and save money on the electricity bills or have no up-front costs and pay extra electricity bills over time.

In three years time, what would you prefer?

I think the Z220 would be hard to rehome. The Intel NUC? I think it would make a nice set top box or hand-me-down for many people. If there were no takers and it had to be eBayed then the postage would be affordable to the buyer. I am not so sure the same could be said for the Z220.

There is one final benefit to the NUC - a cleaner conscience when leaving it on. You know that you are not being overly greedy with one's carbon footprint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I dont know what it is but I love looking through junk to see if I can find something valuable.

I rarely find anything useful but I just love going through junk of any sort.

I'm guessing my ancestors were some sort of scavangers or something?? I've never understood why it gives me so much pleasure!

</comment><comment><USER71> Great idea. You can easily buy a Mac Pro quad-core (single or dual cpu) for anywhere between $300 to $900. It's going to work on par with today's expensive machines :-)

</comment><comment><USER72> Currently using a Dell r710 I got from a recycler for $75 as a freenas box

It's not THAT loud and serves my needs pretty well. Came with a single 2.1gHz xenon and has room for a second

</comment><comment><USER73> I always wanted to buy a SGI station, and use the old OS. I hope someday find one example that it's pristine.

</comment><comment><USER74> This article is a bit verbose, not very succinct.

I was trying to find the actual specs on his purchase.

Is it using ECC RAM?

</comment><comment><USER75> Power consumption and fan sounds on those things were insane.

</comment><comment><USER76> The Xeon workstations I have and can easily access, are all 32bit

What good will one let alone several 32bit machines will do for me now a days.

I can use Ubuntu, or chain them, but how would you do anything with virtualization and advanced computing.?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Completely depends on your use-case. Writing/building/running Java, JS, Python, or anything else architecture-independent? Data processing? You're set. Building release binaries for a native-code application? Yeah, no. But it totally depends what you're doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I do this. HP Z620 is a phenomenal workstation.

</comment><comment> dis-sys old Xeon are not all E6-2680v2 kind of junk, you can buy a pair of used Xeon Platinum 8175M + a decent brand new dual socket motherboard for less than $2,500 USD.

</comment><comment><USER78> What a useless article that just talks about intangible social reasons to buy something used.

I would've expected some kind of cost analysis for how much compute power $500 buys you on a few years old workstation versus something new, and that you get more for your money used. Nothing.</comment>


Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/exploring-weight-agnostic-neural.html <comment><USER2> Unpopular quote from my image and video processing professor - "The only problem with machine learning is that the machine does the learning and you don't."

While I understand that is missing a lot of nuance, it has stuck with me over the past few years as I feel like I am missing out on the cool machine learning work going on out there.

There is a ton of learning about calculus, probability, and statistics when doing machine learning, but I can't shake the fact that at the end of the day, the output is basically a black box. As you start toying with AI you realize that the only way to learn from your architecture and results is by tuning parameters and trial and error.

Of course there are many applications that only AI can solve, which is all good and well, but I'm curious to hear from some heavy machine learning practitioners - what is exciting to you about your work?

This is a serious inquiry because I want to know if it's worth exploring again. In the past university AI classes I took, I just got bored writing tiny programs that leveraged AI libraries to classify images, do some simple predictions etc.

<comment><USER3> There has been a lot of research in understanding neural networks and making them less of a black box. If you classify cat from dog videos on YouTube, it doesn't matter if you make a mistake every now and again. But if you want to build a self-driving car or make a medical diagnosis, you better be able to explain which your network made a certain decision.

<comment><USER4> I'm hearing this in the last few years quite often but I'm not sure what kind of explanation you mean.

The x-ray image was incorrectly misdiagnosed, because... What type of thing should come here?

... it didn't look like the other class. ... it didn't have this weird smudge thing on the top left in which case usually there should be a little hazier blob in the middle, except when the pointiness of the thing that is to the right of the brightest blabla...

You get the idea, my description is even exaggerating the nameability and describability of these structures. You'd get a long and complex description at best, because simple models don't work for pattern recognition. But even if you made sure to just use well understood features like edge thickness, angles, sizes of connected components etc, how would a boolean formula of a hundred such terms be helpful in court or wherever you want to use these explanations?

<comment><USER3> For example there is a concept visual attention. You plot which areas of the image the model pays attention to when making it's decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion (about the actual research article at [https://weightagnostic.github.io/](https://weightagnostic.github.io/) rather than the blog post):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693)

</comment><comment><USER6> How is it different than pruning a neural network?

It seems you could train the weights of a state of the art NN, then quantizite it, then prune it. It will remove some weights of the NN, then all the remaining weights are set to the same value. Isn't training then pruning more efficient than using an architecture search algorithm ?

<comment><USER7> At the risk of broad oversimplification, pruning trains and then does an architecture search. This does an architecture search and then trains.

<comment><USER8> No, here the architecture search is the training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a series of Markov chat simulators as a teenager. Often I used a simpler algorithm which ignored the probability weight (all out-links, once learned, given equal probability). These version performed subjectively as well as, if not better, than the versions which tracked the weight of links. I'm not surprised therefore that weight agnostic neural networks can work, too.

<comment><USER10> I think it may not be a great comparison. N-grams (of words) of human speech/writing are way more deterministic than the kinds of things ML usually tries to tackle, I think. If you write the word "because", then "of", "the", or some pronoun are all extremely safe bets for the next word, regardless of their recorded probabilities. I imagine you could also totally randomize the probabilities and not see any issues.

But I'm no expert and hardly even an amateur, so maybe it is a similar kind of thing here with ML. And I know randomized optimization is a big thing in ML, though I'm not sure to what extent that could be analogized with randomizing Markov model probabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The analogy given in the article is interesting. Some organisms perform certain actions even before they start to learn. I myself have seen some animals start running immediately after birth. Less number of parameters (shared parameters) could also be thought of as less complexity and hence less processing power requirements; which implies faster training. Phew! too much similarity.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://github.com/google/brain-tokyo- workshop/tree/master/W...](https://github.com/google/brain-tokyo- workshop/tree/master/WANNRelease/prettyNEAT) to me, this is the really interesting part of the article. NEAT (neuro-evolution of augmenting topologies) is an algorithm for GANN. For those who are looking to implement the algorithm from scratch, see [http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf](http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf) for hours of fun.

</comment><comment><USER13> This seems like it has the potential for massive efficiency gains and maybe could help with better generalization if the much simpler networks could more easily be reused or recursed or something.

</comment><comment><USER14> How is this different from genetic programming?

<comment><USER15> How was early Machine Learning different from statistics?

New names makes things exciting for people to oick up. Who wants to estimate multinomial regression when you can learn a shallow softmax activated neural network!

Its all about creating hype.

<comment><USER16> >> How was early Machine Learning different from statistics?

Some of the very early work in machine learning, in the 1950's and '60s was not statistical. The first "artificial neuron", the Pitts & McCulloch neuron, from 1938 was a propositional logic circuit. Arthur Samuel's 1952 checkers- playing programs used a classical minimax search with alpha-beta pruning.

Machine learning in the '70s and '80s was for the most part not statistical, but logic-based, in keeping with the then-current trend for logic-based AI. Early algorithms did not use gradient descent or other statistical methods and the models they learned were sets of logic rules, and not the parameters of continuous functions.

For instance, a lot of work from that time focused on learning decision lists and decision trees, the latter of which are best remembered today. The focus on rules probably followed from the realisation of the problems with knowledge acquisition for expert systems, that were the first big success of AI.

You can find examples of machine learning research from those times in the work of researchers like Ryszard Michalski, Ross Quinlan (know for C4.5 and IDR and the first-order inductive learner FOIL), (the) Stuart Russel, Tom Mitchell, and others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure this was posted a while back (maybe a month or two)?

<comment><USER18> Yes, with some insightful and informative comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discussion from 3 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20160693)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is each architecture given _one_ set of random weights?

Or is the architecture of the net tested against a bunch of random weights so that it performs well independently of the weights?

<comment><USER21> Each architecture is tested multiple times against different samples of the shared weight

From the paper :

(1) An initial population of minimal neural network topologies is created

(2) each network is evaluated over multiple rollouts, with a different shared weight value assigned at each rollout

(3) networks are ranked according to their performance and complexity

(4) a new population is created by varying the highest ranked network topologies, chosen probabilistically through tournament selection

<comment><USER20> What is a "shared weight"?

<comment><USER21> Usually in neural networks, each neuron has their own weights with different values that will be tuned during training.

Shared weight here means that every neuron in the network shares the exact same weight value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> how is this different from boring old evolutionary algorithms?

In my opinion the big breakthrough that enabled optimization and machine learning was the discovery of reverse mode automatic differentiation, since the space or family of all possible decision-functions is high dimensional, while the goal (survival, reproduction) is low dimensional. Unless I see a mathematical proof that evolutionary algorithms are as efficient as RM AD, I see little future in it, and apparently neither did biology since it decided to create brains.

It's not an ideological stance I take here (of nature vs nurture).

For simplicity, lets pretend humans are single-cellular organisms, what does natural selection exert pressure on? our DNA code: both the actual protein codes and the promotor regions. I claim that variation on the proteins are risky (a modification in a proteinn coding region could render a protein useless) while a variation on the promotor regions is much less risky: altering a nucleotide there would slightly affect the affinity modulating transcription, so the cell would behave essentially the same but with different treshold concentrations, think of continuous parameters that describe our body (assuming same nurture, food, etc) some people are a bit taller, some people a bit stronger, etc... so how many of these continuous parameters do we have? On the order of the same number as the total number of promotor regions in DNA in the fertilized egg: both on human DNA and in one mitochondria (assuming there isn't a chemical signals addressing and reading and writing scheme for say 10 mitochondria)...

EDIT: just adding that for a certain fixed environment, there are local (and a global) optimum of affinity values for each protein, so that near a local optimum the fitness is roughly shaped like -s(a-a_opt)^2 where s is spread and a_opt the local optimum affinity value. In other words, it is not so that "better affinity", means fitter, not at all, a collection of genomes from an identical environment will hover around an affinity sweet spot.

According to wikipedia [0] that would result in about

about 2x 20412 "floats" for just protein-coding genes

about 2x 34000 "floats" when also including the pseudo-genes

about 2x 62000 "floats" when also including long ncRNA, small ncRNA, miRNA, rRNA, snRNA, snoRNA

these "floats" are the variables that allow a species to modulate the reaction constants in the gene regulatory network, since natural selection can not directly modulate the laws of physics and chemistry, and modulating the protein directly instead of the promotor region affinities / reaction rates risks disfunctional proteins...

so my estimate of _an_ upper limit of the number of "floats" in the genetic algorithm is ~120000 (and probably much less if not each of the above has a promotor region).

thats not a lot of information, if we think about the number of synaptic weights in the brain, and many of these are shared _in utilization_ by the other cell types besides neurons.

I consider the possibility that: sperm cell, egg cell, or fertilized egg cell performs a kind of POST (power-on-self-test) that checks for some of the genes, although simply reaching the fertilized state may be enough of a selftest so no spontaneous abortion test may be needed (to save time and avoid resources spent on a probably malformed child).

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Molecular_organiz...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Molecular_organization_and_gene_content)

EDIT2: regarding:

>This makes WANNs particularly well positioned to exploit the Baldwin effect, the evolutionary pressure that rewards individuals predisposed to learn useful behaviors, without being trapped in the computationally expensive trap of 'learning to learn'.

The computationally expensive trap of having to 'learn to learn' could end up being as mundane as a low number of hormones to which neurons in the brain globally or collectively respond, which enables learning by reward or punishment, and from then on anticipating reward or punishment, and our individual end goal stems from this anticipation, and anticipating the anticipation etc...

<comment><USER23> Evolutionary algorithms are perhaps easier to approach theoretically. Backprop works amazingly but how does one begin to approach why. There is also an element of backprop in evolution via epigenetics

<comment><USER8> _Evolutionary algorithms are perhaps easier to approach theoretically_

Why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Next thing you know, google will be telling us that the fastest websites are server side rendered from templates with minimal JavaScript.

How could anyone possibly have known?</comment>


Build this 4 bit CPU from TTL ICs - <AUTHOR> http://www.galacticelectronics.com/Simple4BitCPU.HTML <comment><AUTHOR> There's also this z80 machine, which has a nice video of entering a program and data, and running the program: [http://hackaday.com/2014/12/01/a-z80-computer-with- switches-...](http://hackaday.com/2014/12/01/a-z80-computer-with-switches-and- blinkenlights/)</comment>


Sleep is more important than food - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/03/sleep-is-more-important-than-f.html <comment><USER2> Schools such as Caltech and MIT have rigorous curricula that proverbially requires constant study every day of the week just to stay in the middle of the pack. Naturally, most students cut back on sleep. Proponents of this approach are aware of this, even boast about it, saying that this is the best way to learn the material.

On the other hand, numerous studies -- including the link at the top of this page -- conclude that this is the worst way to get anything done.

They can't both be right.

<comment><USER3> Even more disconcerting is the sleeping culture/routine throughout medical residency and fellowship; arguably, the most important stages of medical education, where doctors in training learn the hands-on skills to practice medicine. Despite the importance of learning during this stage, individuals are routinely sleep-deprived:

"20% of all residents reported sleeping an average of 5 hours or less per night, with 66% averaging 6 hours or less per night. Residents averaging 5 or fewer hours of sleep per night were more likely to report serious accidents or injuries, conflict with other professional staff, use of alcohol, use of medications to stay awake, noticeable weight change, working in an "impaired condition," and having made significant medical errors." \- <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15124713>

A Wikipedia article focused on medical resident work hours: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours>

<comment><USER4> I've asked many doctors about this. They insist that they are not effected by sleep deprivation. They claim it is safer to have the same doctor for 24-48 hours rather than hand off a patient to a new, fresh doctor.

<comment><USER5> The problem with sleep deprivation is that unless you have an objective way of measuring your (mental) performance you're usually not able to realize when it declines, because your're self monitoring capabilities decline as well.

A simple test, that worked very well for me, was testing my reading speed (I know it is only a weak indicator for mental acuity, but it is easy and fast to test).

Under perfect conditions (well rested, optimal nutrition, completely silent room, no visual distractions, after mediation and a good cup of green tea) I am able to read about 800 WPM (which is not to bad) of the kind of text I usually need to read with good retention. For me this declines rapidly to less than 200 WPM (which is quite bad for a "knowledge worker") with sleep deprivation and/or a noisy environment, even though I _believe_ I am doing fine.

That being said, even though I would say that doctors are handicapped "mental performance" is handicapped by their working conditions, I fully agree that it is better for patient safety to not hand off a patient to a new doctor say every 8 or 12 hours due to the amount implicit knowledge that a doctor gathers during a >24h time period about his patients that can't be transferred in a handoff.

Software Developers, imagine what a screw up it would be if you'd have to hand off your code every 8h to another developer, who'd have to continue right were you left... add to this not having a version control system, spotty test coverage and highly ambiguous specifications

<comment><USER6> "due to the amount implicit knowledge that a doctor gathers during a >24h time period about his patients that can't be transferred in a handoff."

While this may be true, the process of the handoff could be vastly improved. My wife is a resident, and the quality of info she gets during a patient handoff varies drastically, from detailed notes in a computer, correlated to medical history, to scrawled notes on paper. Sometimes she has to start from square 1.

Maybe the reason handoffs are harmful is because they're done poorly. And maybe they're done poorly because the doctor who's handing off is freaking exhausted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised this article is at the top of HN. 1) It is not the announcement of a research study, rather it is just referencing previous hbr blogs and sleepfoundation.org's general guidelines for sleep. 2) It offers no unique advice. 3) The title is basic linkbait (ie, its not really about food vs sleep).

Why the upvotes? is it because everyone is tired?

<comment><USER8> The research is voluminous and has been around for a long time. Articles like this make the results easy for us normals to digest.

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on)

<comment><USER7> I think this is what surprises me - this is hacker news, not normals news. How interesting is a safe interpretation of the research that conforms to what I was taught in 2nd grade? Its like someone posted an article extolling the virtues of the food pyramid or something. Even my doctor has a more liberal interpretation of the research than this particular author (and he is probably more qualified to make this interpretation).

In the past I've experimented with quantities of sleep, polyphasic sleep, measuring sleep quality, light / sound in the room, sleep supplements, etc, etc. Why? because sleep takes up 25-30% of _my life_. Its a no brainer activity for me to try to hack and optimize. Further, given sleep is such a big part of all of our lives, I'm surprised more people on this site do not have a similar mindset about experimenting and tweaking their sleep patterns.

Show me some articles with new research, personal experiments, or useful tips that can allow me to hack my sleep - these kind of interpretations are much more useful to digest.

<comment><USER9> I'm no longer surprised by the number of dumbass articles from HBR, New York Times, and the like. In fact, it's boring me and I think I'll take a nap :-)

<comment><USER10> And the moment you say something like this; they down-rate you. Great going, HN.

<comment><USER11> It did nothing to advance the discussion in any meaningful way. If you don't like this article, don't read it. If you _really_ think it's awful and doesn't belong on HN, then flag it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have mixed feelings about this. I'm someone who sleeps on average 6 hours/night. When I have experiments, then I sometimes drop down to 4 hrs/night. I've found that I can manage with 4 hrs/night for about a week (it has gotten a bit harder with age)--BUT I know that I'm not as effective or creative when dealing with such little amounts of sleep. I also know that I'm more prone to make errors and try to develop habits so that I do the "right thing (TM)" when I'm too tired to think (it's like martial arts where you train reflexes...). I also try to know when to throw in the towel and just go home because if I stay I'm likely enough to make a mistake that will cost me more time in the end, or I need sleep so that I can think about something.

However, in normal running mode, 6 hrs (as long as I'm getting exercise) feels normal to me and it's what I sleep even without an alarm unless I'm recovering from severe sleep deprivation (I don't drink coffee and generally just drink tea when I really need to stay awake...). What are other people's experiences? Somehow the dark room scenario in the article seems unrealistic. I do agree that for creative work that more sleep (in my case 6 hr/night) seems necessary --but if I find myself sleeping longer (like say 9 hrs), then I just end up feeling more tired...

<comment><USER13> I'm with you on this. Like most people, I would like to consistently get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, but I've got two young children, a packed work schedule, and volunteer commitments. These days I'm operating on about 5 hours of sleep per night and I'm functioning fine. If I wasn't up at 5:00 am to get a couple of hours of work in before my kids are up at 7, I'd be falling behind right now.

I'm probably making more errors than I would normally but they're mainly minor. By about 8:00 pm I get pretty fatigued and I may nap for 10 minutes at this time, to recharge for the evening.

The work I am doing is challenging but for the moment doesn't require a lot of creativity, so the tradeoff between the sheer amount of work I can get done versus the decrease in errors is worth it to me at the moment.

I do exercise pretty consistently however (approx. 4 times/week for 30 to 45 minutes) and I find this invaluable in terms of keeping me less stressed and more productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "So how much sleep do you need? When researchers put test subjects in environments without clocks or windows and ask them to sleep any time they feel tired, 95 percent sleep between seven and eight hours out of every 24. Another 2.5 percent sleep more than eight hours."

The broken link there is meant to point to ([http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep- works/how-m...](http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/how-sleep-works/how- much-sleep-do-we-really-need)) and I can't spot where it mentions this study.

In any case, you put me in a room with no clock or windows (and presumably no serious stimuli as it's likely to influence the results) and I can bet you I'll sleep twice as much - out of pure boredom.

<comment><USER15> I think the theory is that once you've fully slept off your sleep debt (which I've heard can be up to 40 hours) you are no longer able to sleep much more than your natural sleep requirement, bored or not.

<comment><USER16> Very interesting, do you have any sources on this? If I forget to set my alarm I can easily sleep for 14-16 hours before I wake, any day of the week. If one possible solution to this is to go on a total sleeping binge for a week or so I'd be thrilled!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Preparing for the California Bar Exam was a fascinating experience for me. Not only was it the most mentally challenging endeavor I had ever undertaken, it proved to be the most psychologically challenging as well.

Fortunately, our two bar prep professors were not only licensed attorneys, but also Ph.D.s in neuropsychology. Part of our rigorous training therefore was not simply learning the law, but actually learning _how_ to learn -- in particular, how to store and recall so much data on demand -- and above all, how to manage our time. (It turns out the human brain is actually quite good at _writing_ and _storing_ data, but really bad at what can be best described as "random access memory" operations: recalling random data at will, instantly.)

A great deal of emphasis was placed on structuring _extremely_ precise "living schedules," for example, what to study when, for how long, when to eat, what meals, and above all, how and when to sleep. And how to force ourselves to sleep when we couldn't.

Long story short, forcing ourselves onto regular sleeping patterns was both immediately necessary and yet proved to be one of the hardest disciplines to learn: to force yourself to stop studying at a given hour (typically 10PM) even in the midst of learning something, and allow time to drive home, have a snack, rest, unwind, and then fall asleep by 11PM, to then awaken at 7 and be back at the library at 8... every single day, for 2 months... that was truly an act of willpower. Especially for me, as I've always been the personality type where, once I start doing or learning something, I can't stop until it's totally finished or mastered. Forcing myself to stop studying without having yet completed the particular matter was excruciatingly difficult.

The same thing proved true for the three-day bar exam itself of course: had to sleep between 9 and 10PM and awaken by 6AM, with virtually no studying at all in between days. At this point, you just had to trust your brain to marinate on all that it had absorbed in the 2 months leading up to those fateful three days.

Looking back on it now, it was due largely to my discipline with sleeping habits that I was able to pass the bar on my first try.

<comment><USER18> You're assigning your success to disciplined sleeping habits which seems very strange.

I would ascribe your success to proper nutrition, proper mnemonics, adequate sleep, and lots of studying.

Getting enough sleep (and not too much) is important but what is the advantage of keeping it within those tight boundaries? The natural human sleep cycle is often running on non-24 hour cycles and the science I've seen indicates that if you CAN work on these cycles it enhances memory, cognition and creativity.

I don't understand why you give so much credit to your rigid sleep schedule, especially because all the science I've seen indicates that what is important is getting adequate sleep and then studying properly, not sleeping at particular times.

<comment><USER17> I am certain that disciplined sleeping habits had a _lot_ to do with it: absent the discipline, I would have often gone to bed around two or three in the morning, gotten less sleep -- or less quality sleep -- and, were I to have maintained this haphazard schedule, would have _never_ been able to have set my biological clock to the necessary 10-6 sleeping schedule required for the three days of the exam itself. Beginning at 8AM, we had to be there by 7-730 or so, and I had to allow time for an adequate (light) breakfast.

Obviously I didn't mean to exclude the value of the actual studying, I'm just saying that studying -- without proper sleep and sleeping schedule -- would have lead to physical and mental and fatigue. And the nature of the bar exam material makes it virtually impossible to adequately perform on a sleep- starved mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sleep rocks! I am in the 2.5% that sleep 8 hours or more. I am much more productive during the day as a result. I am alert, my brain spins faster and I can take on more challenges. My friend is a superstar scientist/M.D. and he sleeps 9 or more hours a day.

The "executives" who sleep < 7 hours need to fine a hour more. If I was a board member, I'd insist my C-level team sleep 8 hours!

</comment><comment><USER20> A tool I've been using for the past days: <http://sleepyti.me/>

I'm currently testing it. The last two days I went to bed at a time which the tool suggested; getting up wasn't much of an issue, and I felt some improvements, but it's definitely too early to say that it works for me.

<comment><USER21> sleep_times = [wake_time - 1.5 * x for x in range(3, 7)][::-1]

Is that really all that's happening here?

<comment><USER22> Yep. Basically one sleep cycle is 90mins. So it just gives you 3-4 times based on minimum 2 cycles. Nothing fancy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Sleep is important" has been a recurring theme for the last couple of years but I am one of the few that don't buy into it at all. Maybe I fall into the 2.5% but if I sleep 8+ hours I feel overslept and groggy. I function moderately to exceptionally well on 6 hours of sleep and often times end up getting more like 3-5 hours of sleep.

I've read articles about high functioning executives that barely sleep at all and seen studies about less sleep improving lifespan along with all the standard sleep is so important articles. I think its safe to say the jury is still out on this subject and keep hoping it doesn't continue to over saturate the news/science pipeline for much longer. Until there is a definitive answer you'll continue hearing me say "sleep is overrated".

<comment><USER14> I agree for the most part. However, try going for a regular run (say 5km) once per week, same day, and track your times. Let's say you hit about 30 minutes first time, and get it down to around 20 mins over a couple of weeks. Now try greater sleep deprivation than normal one week and watch your time plummet.

<comment><USER24> I find the same sort of result with coding on little sleep. While it _feels_ like I'm "high functioning" while coding at 4:00AM, a code review in the light of day after a good night's sleep often reveals that I wasn't.

<comment><USER25> I've begun to suspect this is because we don't notice all the little issues we'd notice if we were more awake - at 4AM, the code is Flying, because I'm not stopping to realize how crappy the code is.

<comment><USER26> I've had similar experiences. If I am very tired I don't get "coder's block", but the code is often rubbish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I totally agreed with the headline, but the evidence in the article doesn't really support it. You might as well say that water is more important than sleep, because you _die_ if you go more than about 3 days without water. The length of time your body can go without something has little relation to how your body acts when deprived of small amounts of that thing, or how it acts when faced with short-term, quickly corrected deficiencies.

Heck, _breathing_ is more important than all those things. Go without it for 4 minutes and you're dead. However, many people recommend controlling and slowing your breathing as a way to relax. Is that breathing deprivation?

<comment><USER28> Agreed. The OP conflates _significance_ and _urgency_. There a many things that are extremely important, yet there is no need to attend to them at a given moment.

The OP defeats a straw man. He argues against complete deprivation of sleep, yet his conclusion is based on sleep that isn't _limited_ at all. Proving that something can't be done without entirely is far removed from proving that we can't cut back a bit.

He might be right, but for an article intended to be persuasive, he does a bad job of supporting his thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was hoping to see some sleep hacks in the comments here. The author cites a few in the article:

1) Naps 2) Go to bed earlier 3) Start winding down at least 45 minutes before 4) Write down what's on your mind

Does anyone here have any other sleep hacks to share?

<comment><USER30> 4) Stop using an alarm. Wake up when your body tells you to.

<comment><USER16> If I do that I wake up at 4 p.m. What is my body trying to tell me?

<comment><USER31> You need exercise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sleep may be more important than food but, interestingly, there seems to be a relationship between sleep and food. When fasting, less sleep is required. However, when sleep is curtailed, there is a greater desire for food.

<comment><USER33> I always figured if you're awake instead of asleep, you're actually consuming more calories and thus need more food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Has anyone ever successfully sued a company for sleep deprivation? I know investment banks are notorious for requiring junior staff to work without sleep, lest they lose their bonus (or worse).

</comment><comment><USER35> I used to sleep 8 to 9 hours a night, and often could have slept more, until I learned how to relax and recharge my energy. Now I need around 4 to 6 hours (absolute max) and I never feel tired, even if I work late, 7 days a week etc etc.

Over the last 12 years, when I have worked with many people with a wide range of sleep problems, I have discovered that the problem is not in fact that we do not get enough sleep. I think that with the expectations we put on ourselves these days it is almost impossible to get enough sleep. I found that sleep (and food and the other methods we use) is simply not powerful enough to recharge our batteries properly.

Probably 50 years ago it was enough to eat 3 meals a day, sleep 8 hours a night, have weekends and a few weeks holidays every year and so on. My grandfather used to work in the City of London (financial district) and they went to the office in the morning, had a long, sociable lunch and didn't do much else for the rest of the day. Look at bankers and other financial people today and there is simply no comparison. So I believe it will become more and more essential for people to find ways of recharging their energy that are much more powerful than sleep, holidays etc. That's why we are seeing an increase in the number of people meditating, doing yoga and lots of other practices that build energy levels as well as rest.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you're interested in a more anthropological perspective on sleep and its importance, check out "Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival" ([http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Sleep-Sugar- Survival/dp/067...](http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Sleep-Sugar- Survival/dp/0671038680))

</comment><comment><USER37> I am guessing that the 2.5% that needs under 8 hours of sleep is composed mainly of people in the tech industry. If I sleep under 5 hours I feel a bit groggy all morning, but if I sleep more than 6 ~ 6 1/2 hours, I feel like utter shit all day long. Incredibly, I was speaking about this same topic with some fellow coworkers and 5 (counting myself) out of 7 felt the same. It might be that they're bullshitting me or maybe the statistics are wrong, but the lack of sleep (as in the people that actually need less daily sleep, not the one's that do so because of lack of 'time') seems to have a correlation with professions that require staring at a screen all daylong. Anyways, in my experience, the number of people that need less than 8 hours of sleep is hugely over 2.5% of the population.

</comment><comment><USER38> Something I observed from reading the comments here:

A lot of us can function on much fewer hours of sleep regularly and don't believe it adversely affects our performance (It does affect mine though). Does anyone think there may be some selection going on here?

What I mean is, perhaps it's true that HN's distribution is more skewed toward the side of people who need less sleep (and hence has more productive hours in the day) and are willing to sleep less in order to get things done. Maybe we don't really represent the general population.

Just a warning in case anyone takes our testimonials too seriously.

<comment><USER39> Everybody thinks they are above average. "I can exceed the speed limits, because I am an excellent driver." "I need less sleep than the average person."

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "If you leave items in your working memory, they'll make it harder to fall asleep, and you'll end up ruminating about them if you should wake up during the night."

Avoiding thinking about things when you go to bed is something I am struggling quite a bit with. I will sure try out to write down my thoughts.

Any other advice to avoid your mind thinking too much when it should be winding down?

<comment><USER41> I find that listening to interesting music helps. This stimulates my brain just enough to prevent my mind from wandering. Otherwise, yeah, I end up thinking about my unfinished business, or think of "one more thing to try real quick" and then lose hours.

Contrary to some advice, I fall asleep pretty well with the TV on or something. If there is nothing stimulating at all, I just toss and turn and think about what else I'd rather be doing. I need a "light distraction" to put myself on idle, or I will start to actively invent my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Sleep is very important but you cannot discuss proper sleep or proper nutrition without the other.

There have been numerous studies showing a correlation between a healthy diet and sleep requirements. People who eat healthy have more energy and feel less tired throughout the day. In the same regard people with an unhealthy diet tend to feel more tired and nap more often and for longer periods of time.

Eating foods with a low glycemic index throughout the day will keep you grounded, preventing sugar highs and lows, and overall make you feel less tired.

My personal opinion based on my lifestyle is that my nutrition decisions directly affect my sleep requirements. I think it is most important to begin the day with a healthy breakfast upon waking up. This meal should include plenty of fiber, protein, and omega-3 fats.

</comment><comment><USER43> Hey! Put me in a locked room with no windows and no clocks, and I'll sleep 7 hours too - out of boredom.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just take some melatonin and force yourself to sleep in 30 minutes. (Plus it makes 7 hours feel like 8 hours.)

If you're still unconvinced: <http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin.html>

<comment><USER26> Experiment with doses, however. I found that I could be groggy on rising if I took the standard 3mg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Apparently not for everyone:

Ngoc Thai: The Man Who Doesn't Sleep <http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/2855/>

</comment><comment><USER46> I wish there was a way for me to sleep less than 9 hours. At least now i have a great excuse for people calling me lazy. I am special!

<comment><USER47> Try with daily jogging (30-40 minutes/day). I bet you'll feel better and will have enough sleeping 7.5-8h.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I recommend the book "Power Sleep" by Cornell professor James Maas.

[http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sleep-Revolutionary-Prepares- Per...](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sleep-Revolutionary-Prepares- Performance/dp/0060977604/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286296474&sr=1-1)

Exceptional book that really transformed my college experience.

</comment><comment><USER49> Can't think straight because you're too tired? !Try a power nap! A 15 minutes nap in the afternoon (use the timer on your iphone to not oversleep) and you'll be good as new.

</comment><comment><USER50> > _I still take the overnight "redeye" from California to New York, but I'm > asleep by takeoff --even if takes an Ambien._

Seriously? I bought the guy's argument up until that point.

</comment><comment><USER51> I was suffering from insomnia for almost 6 days last December, it was an experience, but not one I would ever like to happen again.

</comment><comment><USER52> yes sounds true. Sleep relax whole your body and thats better to feel.

i guess atleast 8 hours sleep is needed as my doctor said me.

you can also watch this video to help you more [http://www.warezvilla.net/tutorials/23345-deep-mind-brain- ev...](http://www.warezvilla.net/tutorials/23345-deep-mind-brain- evolution.html)

</comment><comment><USER53> This guy obviously doesn't have any young children at home. I've forgotten what a good night's sleep is ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is obvious to notice that, this is yet another useless research stat.

Everything is equally important for life to survive, breathing, drinking water, food, sleep, exercise. How does it matter if breathing is more important that exercise? It is common sense; you obviously breath more than you do exercise.

</comment><comment><USER54> Subtext: we're torturing Bradley Manning.

</comment><comment><USER55> Isn't Red Bull the same thing as sleep?

</comment><comment><USER56> People say that you'll die... faster than without water but we know it's just a lie Scare your son, scare your daughter

</comment><comment><USER57> For more information about how to adjust your schedule so that you can fit in the essential 7-8 hours of sleep, why powering down before sleep is so critical and how to do it, and the secret to falling back sleep when you wake up and begin ruminating, register for Tony Schwartz' webinar, Sleep or Die, on March 22 at 1pm EST. Sign up at [https://theenergyproject.webex.com/theenergyproject/onstage/...](https://theenergyproject.webex.com/theenergyproject/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=660947476)</comment>


Time to take the Bitcoin bubble seriously - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4ad1bba0-61fa-11e3-aa02-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#axzz2n5jNJOeW

<comment><USER2> Full text - I generally don't condone pulling stuff through paywalls, but the FT's policy is particularly daft and suppresses just the discussion their "readable when reached from a search engine" policy is supposed to promote.

      Time to take the Bitcoin bubble seriously

      By John Authers

The moment has come to take Bitcoin seriously. This month has seen notes on the online currency from mainstream foreign exchange analysts at Wall Street banks Citi and BofA Merrill Lynch. When Wall Street has to take Bitcoin seriously, the online currency has arrived.

However, governments and central banks are also now taking Bitcoin seriously. This week has also brought news that Baidu, the Chinese search engine, would no longer accept Bitcoins as payment, after the People's Bank of China ruled that Chinese banks should not process or insure Bitcoin transactions.

So should investors also be taking Bitcoins seriously? There are two levels to this question, as Bitcoin aims to take at least two of the roles played by a currency; first as a store of value, and second as a means of exchange.

Its role as a store of value is encouraged by its founding computer algorithms, which guarantee continued scarcity. This gives it an appeal compared with "fiat" money, created for governments by central banks, where there is no limit on supply.

But, unlike fiat money, nobody is legally required to accept it. As Brown Brothers Harriman's forex analyst Marc Chandler points out, creating such money remains a monopoly of governments. They are not likely to give it up.

        Cryptographic defences

Therefore its value rests on perception – what people think it is worth. The same is true of gold. But millennia of history demonstrate that humans perceive some intrinsic value in a shiny metal. Bitcoins have only been around since 2009.

BofA Merrill Lynch's heroic assumptions suggest that at very best Bitcoins might one day gain a reputation to equal that of silver, which is perceived as worth only a 60th of gold. That implies a total value of about $5bn – far below its recent implicit valuation of $13bn.

However, as a means of exchange, Bitcoin's layers of cryptographic defences, the ability to pay instantly, and the security that comes with the ability to trace each transaction made with each coin, all offer intriguing advantages.

So far, it is not widely accepted. But this year's hubbub of excitement over the currency suggests that it could be.

Increased trading in the decentralised virtual currency has begun to attract the attention of regulators

Merrill's grand back-of-an-envelope estimate is that it might account for as much as 10 per cent of global online transactions, and of international worker remittances (which would again be a remarkable success). On that basis, Bitcoins could fund annual transactions worth $9.5bn in today's money.

It is easy to poke fun at such huge extrapolations, but hard to come up with anything better. In any case, the point of Merrill's guesswork is that even if Bitcoin is as successful as it is possible now to imagine, it looks overvalued at recent prices. It is in a bubble.

But this does not prove that the concept has no future. Shares in Amazon.com were also in a bubble in the late 1990s, and yet proved a great long-term investment after the bubble burst. Wild swings in value are typical when new technologies arrive.

        Built-in scarcity

There is a further problem. Bitcoin, as Citi's Stephen Englander points out, is replicable. The genius of the new currency is that it has built-in scarcity. But if the concept catches on as a means of payment, then demand will increase, and that scarcity will get in the way of its ability to function as a means of payment.

It is not possible to conjure up a new precious metal to deal with this problem. But it is possible to conjure up new online currencies and that is already happening.

This could be an investment opportunity. Rather than an alternative to fiat currencies, Bitcoin has a role in a critical trend; the disintermediation of banks. African tribesmen can now pay each other using their mobile phones, without involving a bank. Crowdsourcing systems raise loans over the internet without involving a bank. Internet currencies are part of the same trend.

Does Bitcoin have first-mover advantage? Will other currencies be able to compete? Again, compare with Amazon. It used its first-mover advantage to become the dominant online retailer, as did eBay in online auctions. Yet both contended with plenty of me-too rivals who were briefly valued very richly by the stock market.

In internet search, first-mover advantage was no use to AltaVista, for a year or two as dominant as Google was to become. The same proved true for MySpace among social networks, or AOL among internet service providers.

It is too soon to bet that Bitcoin will be the hegemonic online currency, but there is plenty of time to bet on its competitors.

Where does this leave us? Foreign exchange analysts agree, mostly off the record, that Bitcoin is not worthy of being treated as a real currency.

Buying Bitcoins while their price is so bubbly is nothing more than a gamble. Investing in other online currencies, or in companies that can help the Bitcoin economy develop, looks like a sensible use of a venture capitalist's money.

<comment><USER3> I like this idea of first-mover to market not being a real force nowadays, fluidity let the structural value of a system emerge by ~itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Money quote:

 _Buying Bitcoins while their price is so bubbly is nothing more than a gamble. Investing in other online currencies, or in companies that can help the Bitcoin economy develop, looks like a sensible use of a venture capitalist's money._

Also from the comments section this one is particularly insightful:

 _If you want to value Bitcoin 's potential properly you have to understand it's at minimum a decentralized payment network which will provide most of the service of retail banking offers for free or minimal fees to all the unbanked of the world. Actually considering how antiquated the banking system is, it will also offer serious competition for the already banked.

Can you imagine a world where anyone can set up a shop on the internet and instantly accept payments from all over the world to sell its product or service without any intermediary ? Well that's only one face of what Bitcoin enables. And It enables a world of possibility after that. If for people who understand Bitcoin, we can't even grasp what's going to be done with this technology. It's like trying to grasp what's going to be done with the Internet in 1990.

So you want to value Bitcoin's potential, you have to compare it to Gold as a store of value and to m1 of major currencies. Anybody that builds a model for Bitcoin's POTENTIAL without landing AT LEAST in the hundreds of billions of $ at minimum is doing something wrong.

Not everything with an exponential curve is a bubble. Technology adoption follows a S curve. And Bitcoin could be the most important technology invented since the Internet._

</comment><comment><USER5> You have to pay to access the article. Why even bother posting it?

<comment><USER6> You don't have to pay, but you do have to register. The conclusion is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the full text, but I will flag this paywalled link anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> use this to go in without registering or paying [http://bit.ly/IPaspb](http://bit.ly/IPaspb) (via google)</comment>