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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

Two thousand dollars for those 3 things? Are you Bill Gates? (See YouTube vid of Bill guessing how much household items cost.)

More like $30 for a coffee machine and $250 for a dishwasher. Then $150+ each for external monitors.

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If you're going to ask people to watch something, it would be nice of you linked to it.

Maybe this is what you wete refering to, but I could only find Bill Gates guessing grocery item prices:

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

If your house doesn't already have a dishwasher you might pay $500+ just for the plumbing and electrical work. Unless you get a "portable dishwasher" that you wheel over to your sink and attach it to the faucet every time you want to do dishes, but if you're going to go through all of that trouble, you may as well just do the dishes yourself.

Depends on the monitors and dishwasher. A $250 dishwasher is a pretty crappy one; the nice ones are $500-1000. $150 will get you a perfectly decent 1080p 23" monitor, however at work I have three 27" monitors that probably cost about $800 each.

It just depends on if you want nice stuff or really basic stuff. The nice stuff costs a lot more than the prices you quoted, just like a nice midrange car like a Camry costs a lot more than a basic, bottom-of-the-line car (Yaris?).

Considering the audience of this site, I would assume most here would buy higher-end stuff, and not the cheapest things available.

Well, if you invest 10-20x that much in your coffee machine, you get something that's much less of a maintenance hassle and makes significantly better coffee. Worth it if you drink coffee every day.

Honestly, it's all about the beans. I've had fantastic coffee from a $20 french press and horrible coffee from a $5k machine. Don't splurge on the machine, splurge on the coffee.

Admittedly, I'm not a coffee drinker, but rather a tea drinker, but I've seen French presses and I thought the idea was that they aren't very expensive, but they're a lot more laborious than a machine, both in preparation and in cleaning.

It's kinda like my fancy tea infuser cup: I have a nice glass mug with a laser-cut stainless-steel infuser for loose tea. It was $30 at a fancy store (could probably get it cheaper on Amazon), but it's a one-time purchase. With high-end loose tea, it makes great tea, but the problem is cleaning: cleaning out the infuser (by hand) is a lot more work than just dumping a tea bag in the trash and putting a regular mug in the dishwasher. But the results certainly are a lot better than a $0.20 tea bag.

They're not that bad. I rinse them out after use and then put them in the dishwasher. Preparation is like making a cup of tea, just pouring some hot water in. I would say prep takes <2min for a pot of coffee (including filling up the kettle), cleaning <1 min.

The problem with the infuser is that there's only one of them, unlike regular mugs where I have a whole bunch of them because they're practically free (they're a common gift item, after all). The infuser set-up is expensive, so I'm not going to buy 5 of them so I make tea frequently with no cleaning, so I need to hand-wash it. Regular mugs aren't like this: I can just use them and toss them in the dishwasher and get another one when I want another hot drink. And you're right, it's not a huge amount of time to hand-wash, maybe about a minute or so, but it's still a lot more than the utterly trivial amount of time it takes to put a mug in a dishwasher.

Stove top espresso and simple milk frother that I own 1) makes better coffee than I've ever had in Starbuck because I buy good beans and 2) costs $30. Admittedly I spent $200 on a grinder so I could fresh grind finely as it makes a significant difference to the coffee IMO however I could just as easily get my beans ground when I buy them for free.

do you have the link?

Let's say you want to have two higher end monitors, those would get you to around $1k each. Coffee machine/dishwasher are cheap. You might also want to invest into some cooking machine or some kitchen equipment that could allow you to prepare healthy meals quickly.

My motorized standing desk, VESA amounting arm, and 27” FreeSync + color-calibrated monitor _combined_ total at around $1000 dollars.

To highlight the absurdity of this estimate: $2000 USD should be enough to pay for an entire work-from-home setup with a high quality office chair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a whiteboard in addition to what I have mentioned above (assuming that work provides your computer).

Imagine you are used to 4k quantum dot HDR10 displays from FAANG. Would you be happy with some gaming monitor instead? A decent 5k2k monitor is $1100, 5k2.8k is $1300. 4k DCI EIZO is 4k+. You might want two of those as well.

Google's standard issue monitors are standard density. FAANG employees aren't used to fancy monitors, and can certainly get by without them.

Edited to remove a claim that I haven't seen 4k monitors, since I just realized the big displays we can get must be 4k. We can only have one of those though and they're not as fancy as you're claiming.

Don't be ridiculous. I work for a FAANG company and we get great but very standard Dell monitors that are all well below $1100.

I don't work at a FAANG company, but we do have some pretty nice hardware. I have 27" Dell monitors that I think cost about $800 each when new. (They're probably less now, they're a few years out-of-date by now.)

The monitor I have is a Samsung C27HG70, which _is_ a quantum for LED monitor.

Although it’s not 4K, given the fact that it ships with a color calibration report I think calling it “some gaming monitor” is a bit silly.

As someone who’s a bit of a picture quality fanatic (I preferred color accurate panel displays “before it was cool”, my television is a 4K HDR10 OLED, etc.) I think it’s quite ridiculous that you’d classify your suggestions as anything other than luxuriously decadent for most programming work.

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