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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

16GB minimum is still a little silly. My desktop has 16GB, kind of on accident, and my machine literally has no idea what to do with so much RAM. Most of the time it spends 8-10GB on disk cache.

There are absolutely use cases for more. I would love to have my home machine at my desk at work, for example, for EDA tools. But that's why you make 16GB (or even 32GB) an option.

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No way. Everything with a keyboard should probably ship with 16GB. My dev server has 128GB, my laptop has 16, 4GB is a toy and 8GB is the minimum for useful work. This laptop looks pretty good, but compared to a W540 which can have dual sata and 32GB I would have to pass.

My next desktop will have 64GB which is not extreme in the least. The worst trend that I don't see being fixed is the lack of ECC memory. ALL MEMORY SHOULD BE ECC!!!1! Lack of ECC is like running an open loop feedback mechanism. no good can come of it. No ECC and terabyte filesystems, recipe for horrible unrecoverable disaster.

> 8GB is the minimum for useful work

I can do a hell of a lot of useful work with far less than that

Every once in a while, I have a wistful desire to take a notebook with a modern high-capacity battery, pull out everything except those batteries, and slap in an e-ink display, a single flash card for storage, and something less powerful than a Raspberry Pi for processing. And then write just enough operating system for it to boot to Emacs.

That, in my mind, would be a programmer's computer. (Or a writer's computer.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

I actually had one of these, http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=alpha... but the first edition that ran off of AA which looks a little rare (good thing because the keyboard started to stick, oh and dump the contents as everything is stored in RAM).

> My dev server has 128GB

...when you say 'dev server', is that a computer in your home/office, or something hosted somewhere? And, if it's hosted--who are you using for hosting that makes 128GB-memory machines available cheaply enough that it's at-all-sensible to use one for a dev server?

It is a used machine hosted at a friends colo.

For something similar http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sun-SunFire-X4600-M2-8x-AMD-Opteron-...

The only reason to use hosting providers is to provide instant provisioning/scaling. Otherwise, money burned. Colo space is fairly cheap, so are old but still totally serviceable bad-ass machines.

Is that ad for real? Seems to good to be true? What is the catch?

Sounds like a jet? Hardly any ram? Crappy drives? You can't just put any old hardware in these things.

> Colo space is fairly cheap

I'm not sure you have the same definition of "cheap" as I do. $5/mo for a 1GB DigitalOcean droplet is cheap.

Buying old-but-badass hardware seems to be similarly cost-effective for that purpose (if that link is to be believed), but where (other than "a friend in ops") can you get 1U/2U of colo hosting for anywhere near that price?

I guess, if you're talking about the marginal price of an extra 1U/2U on top of your existing production rack, it can be negligible. For non-business-affiliated goofing-around, though?

I mean actual colo space, like you just pay for 4u, 8u, bandwidth and power. No machines, just space.

Both are "cheap" just along different axis.

Right, that's the same thing I was talking about. But again, how is paying for 4u/8u of space at all "cheap", when all you want to stick in it is your own 1u junk server?

But I don't want to stick my own 1u junk server (although I do have those, 4 cores, 8gb). The low end SSD back VPS are phenomenal for what you get.

"8GB is the minimum for useful work..."

What are...just...what are you doing for work?

You don't need it, until you do. Several developer tools I use regularly eat up that memory like nothing when you run in certain modes.

Development shouldn't feel like working on an airplane tray table.

Eh, I never do "real work" directly on a laptop anyway. For me, "real work" happens on a compute farm by necessity.

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