Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradk | Hacker News Reader

Well, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)

View on HN

Labs can be places for getting serious, routine work done, as any working pharmacologist or chemist would tell you. The term doesn't imply experimentation outside of vernacular usage.

I want to say thanks for the post. I hadn't considered this before, but now it makes me really wish we had a different term in common use.

I definitely tend to think of networking labs, of things meant for short term use & experimentation, but many of us really enjoy & rely on these systems serving our homes, our lives, reliably, consistently. I've heard some defenses of labs, but rarely is a lab doing the same reliable work again and again and again at a lab; labs feel like forerunners, not established bedrock.

Some day I really hope home servers cross the chasm, become more and more accepted & common. I know there's so many countervailing reasons, conveniences that keep this unlikely, but still I hope some folks find reason & find it not hard to back off from big cloud, to find advantage in running things ourselves.

There's the well known home-ops repo & folks. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops among techies I've seen some lightbulbs go off by calling the system a home-cloud. I'm curious what other nomenclature people have seen used, and how they feel it's been received?

I self-host a few things that are important to me but likely unimportant to anyone other than me. I use the term 'homelab' because that's the use that seems to be the norm in describing various computers in a network running shit at home that, if it were in production, would be on more modern, serious and redundant hardware.

I don't experiment much these days, so 'lab' isn't quite right. But if I were to experiment then it would be using the same hardware as all the other stuff. So it's both accurate and inaccurate.

In this instance: who cares, it gets the message across to the necessary demographic - and isn't that what communication is about?

...and I'm someone who could care less about words and grammar (notice the correct use of the term, so as not to say the literal opposite of what I'm trying to say (notice the correct use of the word literal, rather than it's not-oft-used-but-oft-correctly-applicable figurative)).

I don't know the (in)correctness of the use of brackets within brackets.

Indeed we do. I call it the same but in a local network I bought domain. Lake backups.mylocaldomain or webs.mylocaldomain or storage.mylovaldomain or kavita.mylocaldomain

I've had people get visibly upset when either questioning the intent of a word they've used or when attempting to use a more specific descriptor for something they've asked me about, specifically when it's failed to accurately capture a given concept or could otherwise be ambiguous. Seems to me that it's at the heart of language and communication to think about these things, and while some may be more trite than others, I say go ahead, split those hairs and write about it. I also don't have a home lab, I have computers at home, and some random bits of gear. I don't know at what point I'd consider it a lab, maybe if it was more of a collection that was deliberately experimental, but it's not, it's just computers that have general purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com