Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by rabino | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

rabino

Do you homeschool your kids? Grow your own produce? Kill your own cows?

I mean, why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?

Unless you do servers. In that case, sure. Whatever.

View on HN

Your attitude includes an implicit "trust the smart people."

But the smart people are proving again and again that they are not worthy of our trust. They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us so they can influence and move against us in the future. Why should we trust anyone who sees us as a product?

You lost me on how you went from "They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us" (which I agree with) to "move against us in the future". Care to elaborate?

Or to put it a bit more shortly, extreme data collection is a trojan horse, for a brave new world where individual taste, free will, and unpredictability are nearly completely quantified.

Lots of people home school their kids, grow their own produce, and kill their own cows. One doesn't need to do everything themselves to want to do some things themselves. And if your premise is that one needs to be an expert, before doing anything on their own, then how would people learn? How do people become experts?

I never said that. If you want to learn to manage servers, by all means. The industry needs more good people!

But to suggest that everyone should do (or will do it, as some people are commenting here) it is bananas.

  I never said that.

The implication in your original comment is quite clear, "why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?". So, you actually did say that...

  But to suggest that everyone should do (or will do it, as some people are commenting here) it is bananas.

The comment you replied to didn't suggest that everyone should self host, it simply stated a preference. Your comment, however, was the exact opposite, and suggested people shouldn't self host "unless they do servers"

Sometimes, yes. And in each of those cases, the right and motivated person can produce a better product that institutions.

Personally, I self host services on IaaS (Vultr). At least then I have full ownership of my data, and it guarantees I'm running on open source software that can be modified for data extraction at any time.

I do the same. And some times it goes down and I'm busy so it stays down for a day. And I never find time to keep everything updated to the latest security patches, etc. Fun hobby, but I wouldn't trust that as my only repository of data.

You do own your own phone right? Owning a server on the cloud is no different. There will be a future shortly where everyone keeps their data on their own servers instead of handing out to all these corporations.

I own my phone, but the data is still in the cloud.

I'm not sure I agree with your version of the future. People don't know enough ( and don't want to) about security, scalability, availability, etc.

OK, since you own your phone. Do you have any clue about security and availability of your phone? Why do you think millions can own and "run" their own phone but not own and run their server?

You should read the terms of service with your Cloud provider again. When you go out and buy a phone with cash, nobody can take that from you. When you go out and spend money on Cloud servers you will not walk away with that data should you stop paying your bill, or the company is hacked, or there is a scandal and they go out of business, or they decide you're breaking their rules and they delete it. When you setup an externally available NAS from home the only thing stopping you from accessing it is your ISP and your electric company, and those are already common denominators of accessing any Cloud storage medium. And lets not forget Uncle Sam and random Google execs picking up the hood every so often to see what's under there. It's a lot of work, and it isn't for everyone, but the benefits outweigh the risks for me.

"...why don't you let experts do what they do and you spend your time doing what you do?"

I think, mainly, because life is more interesting when you do things you are not an expert of.

Sure. And that's called a hobby. You can do whatever you want, but the point here is this is not what the masses are going to do. Or should do, for that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com