[corvad]

This seems very sketchy. Give us your laptop and we promise we won't keep it...

> © 2024 CoLaptop. All rights reserved.

Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev

> Thank you for your interest. Please submit the form below and we'll get back to you within 2 working days.

> - Team @ CoLaptop.com

Also colaptop.com is not even registered anymore. If I had to guess the pages.dev site stayed up but the domain and email are nowhere.

[kube-system]

> > © 2024 CoLaptop. All rights reserved.

> Website copyright is out of date by two years... And the website has been online since then. https://crt.sh/?q=colaptop.pages.dev

That's exactly what it should be then. A copyright notice lists the year of publication. Not the current year.

> A proper copyright notice consists of three elements: a © symbol, the year of publication, and the copyright owner’s name.

https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-copyright-notice/

[gzread]

Yep. If you write

``` © <?=$currentYear?> Your Name ```

As many sites do, it may actually invalidate your copyright. You have to put all of the years when you made copyrightable edits to the page. A range like 2010-2025 is only allowed if every single year in that range is included.

[StableAlkyne]

This sounds like pseudolegal folklore (in the US at least). Do you have any actual examples where this affected a case?

In the US, you get copyright on your work automatically, with or without a label.

The only thing a label does in the US is defend against "innocent infringement" defenses. But even that defense doesn't absolve the other party from liability; you just can't recover as much.

There is no reason you can't have `(C) 200X-$currentYear Acme Inc` or whatever.

[me-vs-cat]

You're right that the notice is effectively useless for such web pages. And if it doesn't matter, then why bother to put anything?

[StableAlkyne]

Most people do so because everyone else does; it looks off if you don't see a copyright at the bottom of an otherwise professional site.

[me-vs-cat]

That doesn't look off.

What looks off is showing you don't know how copyright works by blindly putting the current year.

[kube-system]

1. Some people aren't up to date on copyright law. Before 1989 you did need to put a copyright notice to get copyright protection in the US

2. Copyright law varies in other countries

3. Many laypeople just cargo-cult legal tropes without understanding them

[0xbadcafebee]

1) You don't have to keep copyrights up to date (and in fact you don't have to put them at all), 2) Every single startup i've seen on HN is sketchy af. Racking laptops in a cage at a Hetzner DC is probably the least sketchy product i've seen here.

And honestly, not a terrible idea, I have old laptops that would work as a VPS. $7/month for somebody to host a public server for me, and not on my crappy residential isp? All I have to lose is an old laptop I haven't touched in 5 years? Sign me up

(they do need a real domain before i'll give them money tho, lol)

[nrdvana]

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

[bigiain]

> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet

That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk.

If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage.

If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month.

If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering.

Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...

[simoncion]

> ...no remote management interface...

I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic.

> ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that laptop.

2) Even if it isn't, computers are way faster than folks give them credit for when you're not weighing them down with Kubernetes and/or running swarms of VMs. [0]

3) <https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...> (2015)

[0] These are useful tools. But if you're going to be tossing a laptop in a colo (or buying a "tiny linode or [DO] droplet"), YAGNI.

[bigiain]

>> ...no remote management interface...

> I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM.

From the https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."

[simoncion]

> From the https://www.colaptop.com landing page:

Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.

[justsomehnguy]

You really don't know how much it costs, do you?

Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.

[simoncion]

MSRP for remote-capable KVMs is irrelevant.

You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.

[jiggunjer]

I think a raspberry pi setup would be the cheapest? Not as professional perhaps.

[literalAardvark]

k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram.

Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.

[simoncion]

> k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s).

Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement.

The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]).

Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk?

[0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/>

[1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...>

[2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3]

[3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't!

[literalAardvark]

Sorry I meant k0s. Off by one error at 3 am.

There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management.

Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system.

k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well.

And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.

[whilenot-dev]

> Website copyright is out of date by two years...

Can you explain how a copyright can be "out of date by two years"?

I always thought the copyright notice should reflect the year of creation, and that it's actually bad (from a legal POV) to always show the current year through scripting.

[ethanc8]

The problem is that the website says they are still working out the logistics details. If the company has been around for 2 years they should have figured that out and updated the page by now.

[timc3]

You are correct. (Had it verified years ago in Europe and the US).

[VTimofeenko]

> Give us your laptop

There's no way to read this without hearing Scottish accent. It's like a sleeper agent activation phrase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKfAjlW6E30

[justsomehnguy]

> Website copyright is out of date by two years

It's fixed now.

And someone bought the .com domain: https://crt.sh/?id=25447880244

[JVIDEL]

The premise was kinda dumb, wouldn't be surprised if its just a scam.

[PaulHoule]

So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1] or if it is a temporary blip)

[1] the motor behind it is cost reduction, once that stops it stops because we can't afford it anymore!

[oceanplexian]

Well, it exists, but it exists if you’re willing to buy server hardware on eBay, hustle to get old parts working together, negotiate a good deal on a cabinet, get space from ARIN and announce it and so on. There are probably 10-50x cost efficiencies vs. renting 5 year old CPU families on AWS at huge markup.

A laptop isn’t the way to do that though. And your typical VC-fueled startup isn’t going to know how to do it either. It takes a very narrow slice of competence to be able to do that correctly.

[jeron]

the one guy I know who has worked with colo at scale (unfortunately in the crypto space) is now an EM at Goog

[tosti]

More likely a prank.

[kube-system]

I think it's most likely testing the waters for a real offering. It's not that weird. Many colo data centers already have policies about hosting laptops because it's already something that happens. It just isn't common and usually isn't for hosting servers.

[dylan604]

If the battery in the laptop is still good, it comes with it's own UPS. My MBPs haven't had an ethernet port in a minute, so do you have to supply your own adapters as well??? You could fit ~15 MBPs on their edge in 9RUs. That'd be an interesting looking rack. Not quite a blade chassis. It'd be rather boring looking as there's no blinky-blinkies

[oceanplexian]

Putting a UPS in a rack is a prosumer/corporate IT thing, it’s not done in real datacenters.

They typically have their own UPS in another room and multiple power lanes. And it’s going to be much more reliable than a laptop battery.

[dylan604]

I didn't really think that any of what I wrote would be taken seriously to the point of needing a retort. I mentioned blade servers and knew rack unit measurements which as context clues would have suggested I was familiar with actual data center equipment.

[gosub100]

A laptop battery would be a huge liability if it caught fire.

[kube-system]

If you got creative with cable management you might be able to double up front and rear. It would probably be a PITA to manage but you could probably get some halfway decent density

Looks like they were proposing supplying usb Ethernet adapters, which doesn’t seem crazy, they’re cheap.

[justsomehnguy]

> You could fit ~15 MBPs

15 MBP x €7 = €105 for 9RU with power and network. Not in a million years.

[wongarsu]

Hetzner rents you 42RU for €199 plus power and network. If we assume they can fill the entire rack, that's 4 9RU units for about €50 plus power and network.

If we assume an average power draw of 20W per laptop, that's 300W for each 15 laptop unit, or about €57/month in Hetzner's Finish DC (including aircon)

Not sure about network. A 1Gbit uplink with 10TB traffic (and €1/TB after that) is provided. Upgrading that to 10Gbit is probably similar to the €51/month cost for the same uplink for dedicated servers, so another €15 for each 15 laptop unit. Plus around €2/month/IP, but you can probably bring your own if you find a cheaper subnet to buy

So yeah, you are right that the math does not work out. But it is pretty close to break even. I think you can break even on this if you find a more space efficient way to cram them into the rack and don't pay yourself any salary

https://www.hetzner.com/colocation/

[type0]

I would like to put my Raspberry Pi Pico in colocation, would it work?

[QuantumNomad_]

There are a number of places that colocate normal Raspberry Pi.

https://lowendbox.com/blog/little-machines-in-big-datacenter...

I am sure that some of them either already colocate Pico ones too, or are willing to do so if asked.

[gzread]

The Pi Pico doesn't have networking capabilities, so that would be silly. You're probably thinking of the Pi Zero.

[kube-system]

There is a Pico W

[kube-system]

The title says PoC, so I presume it's a PoC.

[yonatan8070]

It looks like since you posted your comment, the pages.dev link redirects to colaptop.com, and the copyright notice has been updated to 2026.

[j45]

It could be a pre-sales site to estimate demand.

Colocating itself, though isn't new at all. Lots of different ways to host, including servers, mac minis, laptops are conceivable too because they share the same kinds of parts that mac minis might have.

[InsideOutSanta]

Also, isn't this just a huge fire hazard of they actually do what they claim? Or will they remove the batteries from these old, continually plugged in, poorly cooled laptops?

[SadTrombone]

This is addressed on their site.

> We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery, wireless radios, etc. to ensure it can be used safely in the data center.

[exiguus]

In 2026 it should be: Give us your smartphone and we promise ...

[torginus]

I mean the idea has merit in of itself, but I think this should be more of an on-prem thing, just repurposing old laptops junked by IT as servers.

[Waterluvian]

What if it’s a compute Ponzi scheme?