Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Ok, reading the responses to my comment, it seems I should have been more explicit.

1. I do understand that cost of living varies. Still, I will insist that $500/month is too low. Even a single $2000 computer amortized over 24 months is going to eat nearly 1/5 of your revenue. Remember, your housing probably isn't free, you do have to plan for retirement, you do have to go to the dentist from time to time. Many people make unrealistic assumptions here.

2. If you start with $500 as your goal, you will end up reaching $500. You will have something that you have to support and maintain. If you designed it as a $500 dollar business, there is no good way forward, and you are stuck.

View on HN

Getting a 2000 computer every 2 years is vast overkill. A 1000$ computer every 4+ years is fine for the vast majority of users and under that if you don’t need a laptop.

As to 500$ a month, many people live fairly comfortably on that in very low cost of living areas. Also, setting that money aside can add up quickly.

Can confirm, my $1,200 i7, 16 GB Ram, SSD is four years old now. I can easily get through the year with it as well.

Saving like that on computers is a difference of about $60/month. I think most developers reading Hacker News can add more value than that with the faster hardware.

Not if your only income is a ~500$ a month side business.

The effort of upgrading hardware take quite a bit of development time. Even if hardware was free I don’t think a 2 year upgrade cycle is worth it based on how slowly hardware is improving.

As to buying 1k vs 2k computers without a gaming graphics card or the need for massive storage you hit real diminishing returns at around 1k. 500gb SSD (90$) case (30$) PSU (40$) CPU (200$) MB (100$) RAM (200$) -= 660 for the guts, buy two 22 inch 1080P monitors for 100$ and you got 140$ for an OS keyboard and mouse. Sure you could spend 4x that but it’s not going to make that much difference.

I was assuming laptop for some reason. For desktops this makes sense.

My previous phone lasted me almost six years. It was still going strong, I only replaced it because I needed a bigger screen. My current laptop is 8 years old, it is still going strong even after very heavy use and abuse.

So no, we don't need to replace electronics every two years, we just want to :P

If you designed it as a $500 dollar business, there is no good way forward, and you are stuck.

Disagree. If my living expenses are taken care of (500$ post tax is enough for me), then I can always look at improving this, or making bigger products

Everyone else seems to disagree, but I will raise my hand and say I agree with you. It's good to keep ambition in check and expectations realistic, so you can get something off the ground, but part of your mind should always be thinking about how you might scale it up when the opportunity presents. That isn't something you want to try and retrofit.

There is a serious lack of theory of mind going on here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com