Ask HN: Where are you getting your money's worth? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where are you getting your money's worth?

91 pointsFergusonb201 comments

There are very few services / products where I feel my money is being well spent; like ultra-cheap VPS' for personal projects.

What do you enjoy paying for?

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An obvious one, but Spotify. They've solved so many problems in the music-listening experience, it's amazing.

I remember having to manage so many folders of mp3s, manually syncing them to devices. And paying $.99 a song meant a very limited selection. I often relied on free iTunes playlists to find new music, because I couldn't afford to buy new music at the time.

They've eliminated all of these problems. Pay $10-15 a month, and you can listen to whatever you want, wherever and whenever.

I say this purely from the consumer's perspective, though - I'm not super familiar with what artists' experience is like. On one hand I'm sure Spotify broadens your audience quite a bit, but I wouldn't be surprised if artists run into issues similar to creators on other platforms (e.g. YouTube).

My only frustration with Spotify is songs that I like disappearing from my library because a contract didn’t get renewed. Not Spotify’s fault, but still irritating. For that reason I still have a “offline” iTunes library.

(Well, that and that Spotify funds -and will not stop recommending to me- some podcasts that I find grating. I wish I wasn’t constantly reminded that I’m indirectly funding anti-science nonsense. Were it not that I’m paying for several other people’s Spotify accounts via family sharing I would have switched to Apple Music by now.)

The only issue with Spotify is that they are missing quite a few major artists. e.g. Garth Brooks isn’t available on Spotify. One of the best sellers of all time - not on there. Kinda annoying.

Regarding Garth Brooks specifically, the lack of availability of his music on streaming services is entirely his own decision. He owns a streaming service called Ghosttunes that exist /solely/ for hosting and streaming his own music and refuses to make his catalog available on anything else.

Edit: actually looks like he sold it to Amazon a few years ago and it was absorbed into Amazon Music where his catalog is now available. Regardless, Garth owns the rights to all of his music except for his 2014 album "Man Against Machine", so the lack of availability is again entirely his own decision.

I'm just arguing against the "and you can listen to whatever you want, wherever and whenever." statement. It's just literally not true. Tool wasn't available until a couple years ago either. Sometimes I stumble upon major artists and am like, "Oh, wow. Why haven't I heard them in so long?" And then I see that they just signed a contract to stream.

It's annoying. I can't keep track of all the artists I like and listen to. There's hundreds/thousands.

Music not being available due to licensing stuff isn't really a Spotify issue, sometimes (like the Garth example above) rightsholders won't play ball no matter what. And the original comment was clearly generalizing, no one is expecting literally every piece of music ever to be available on Spotify.

So if we're going to be pedantic, you can add local files to Spotify on the desktop app and they will sync to your phone, so technically you still can listen whatever you want on Spotify.

I came here to say this. Spotify is incredible. My only real beef with it is the interface, especially with classical music. I look at my phone to see a list of movement titles, all exactly the same. And with both classical and jazz it’s impossible to see a list of the personnel within the program—if I want to know who’s on drums I need to paste the name of the album into Google or something.

But Spotify changed everything. I recently saw a series on Netflix and liked some of the music used in it, but had no idea what it was. I just entered the name of the show and “soundtrack” into Spotify, and there it was.

From the rumor mill, Apple is building a dedicated service just for classical music.

The biggest problem I have with Spotify is everything is just a playlist. I would like curated random songs. But that seems impossible.

There's curators you can follow, sort of like "Spotify DJs"

> They've solved so many problems in the music-listening experience, it's amazing

And yet each of your comment’s 4 current replies describes a different “only” problem with Spotify that’s solved with folders of mp3s ;)

(Disclaimer: I listen to very little music, so I have no horse in this race except for loathing DRM, and I’m only guessing that the “missing quite a few major artists” problem is solvable by torrenting)

The key here is, how many mp3s are we talking about?

Even though I like music quite a bit, do I want to dedicate multiple terabytes and hours of my time building out and managing a personal catalogue of music I like? Because this is exactly what Spotify gives me for the majority of artists, with 0 effort.

Enterprise-grade home wifi and networking paired with a generous (1gig) ISP connection we don't really need but is never slow.

High-end espresso machine that makes coffee in one button but with all the settings configurable (grind, volume, temperature, etc)

Canon M50 SLR camera permanently mounted for Zoom calls - got the Mk1 open box, looks amazing on calls, wasn't insanely expensive (~$500).

Tesla Model 3P. We just got a flat at home, they came out and swapped the tire for a temp one within 2hrs and then came to the home the next day to repair/replace the flat. Sadly needed replacing but all we paid for the whole experience in the end was the cost of the tire and that was cheaper than local SF places (which are $$). There's so many other great things about Tesla: it's practically maintenance free, the P edition is faster than a Lambo off the line, it's super safe in a crash, carbon neutral when paired with renewable power source, etc. Might be out of scope for this Ask HN but I just feel it's worth every $ I paid for it, and it's apparently only lost about 5% of it's value in 2.5 years which is unheard of in the car industry.

I just got 1gig fiber installed yesterday and it's worth every penny to me.

What do you recommend for enterprise grade wifi? My current setup isn't great.

Ubiquiti Unifi setup is the sweet spot, good hardware and software at a decent price.

Can you elaborate on the benefits you see from this setup? I ran a Unifi setup for about a year before tearing it out and replacing it with an older Linksys 1900ACS. The Unifi took an enormous amount of trouble to setup to provide worse coverage than the Linksys for 3x the price. Not only that but it was a huge eyesore, with 3 different units with 3 wall warts all intertangled with cat6 cable. All of that on top of the recent scandals and I couldn't be happier throwing it into storage.

I've found Unifi to be a pain to set up just right. But once you've got things just right, it's generally pretty fast and reliable.

I heard that Ubiquiti went through an outsourcing / cost cutting phase recently and a lot of complaints about their software.

So I spent a little more and went with Aruba Instant On and it seems good so far. I really just wanted the ability to make however many VLANs I wanted.

Used ruckus wireless AP on ebay. I have a R720, works great.

It's very easy for a 1gig connection to saturate residential hardware, especially if you have a symmetrical connection which I assume you do if it's fiber. Definitely look into Ubiquti, I posted above a bit more on my setup. I hear the concerns, there are other options but IMHO they have downsides. Going used is an option if you can locate working true enterprise equipment from an office but make sure there isn't a recurring software license on the equipment which many of the vendors implement. I've actually known of offices ripping out their perfectly fine, working equipment because it was cheaper to switch to a different vendor than continue to pay the license fees.

I bought an ASUS mesh system, I think it’s like the rx-92?, based on suggestions here previously. I love it, the ui is incredible and you can tweak lots of settings. For 2 units I get pretty good coverage in my home with masonry blocks all over the dang place and thick wood everywhere (it’s a 50’s home). I can even use ddns and an OpenVPN connection on it with very little work, and it supports a lot of other things like printer sharing and file serving from a usb drive. It’s about 400 bucks. It’s not “enterprise” but it’s just as good and has none of the cloud bullshit.

which espresso machine do you have?

Phillips Xelsis https://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-ho/coffee/saeco-automatic-es...

This is probably my fourth full automatic espresso machine, definitely the best I've owned. Amortize the price based on how much coffee you drink (I drink 4 a day) and cost of coffee shop vs machine + beans. Factor in well used machines probably last 3-5 years and then they do need replacing.

I make a personal rule that I only buy $$ coffee from coffee shops if I'm wanting to sit and work/meet (less likely these days) or if I'm really on the go and need a pick-me-up. Otherwise I make a latte on the machine and bring it with me in a vacuum container when I am out and about.

People will think this is expensive and it probably is but not super expensive when talking about espresso machines.

What is the benefit of enterprise grade Wi-Fi at home? Is it for have better coverage for a larger space or general performance?

> carbon neutral when paired with renewable power source

That's if you don't count manufacturing and repairs of course.

Well, the battery is actually the most problematic part of the environmental footprint. Repairs/maintenance are very minor on a Tesla.

The way we look at it is a family of 3 with a young baby needs a car, we only have one car, and it's the most environmentally friendly one we could get as all cars have some manufacturing overhead. It was also manufactured 60 miles away so the delivery footprint was small too. We're trying our best!

Seeing as a few people are asking for more info on the enterprise home wifi.

Main objective is flawless heavy-usage (Zoom, streaming media) from multiple clients within the home, plus support of lots of clients (we have over 150 assigned IP addresses in the house).

My setup is a server cabinet consisting of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to handle >1Gbps connection, ISP's preferred modem (so they can't shirk out of full support for the connection which they do if you provide your own equipment), Ubiquiti 24 port POE switch, Ubiquiti Cloud Key Gen2+, Synology NAS, Multicore server running docker containers.

I then have 4 Ubiquiti AP AC PRO wireless access points dotted throughout the home (3 level home) all on wired backhaul to the 24 port switch powered by POE and 2 Ubiquiti 8 port switches at different locations for media center, office etc.

I would imagine the total setup is about $1500 which for a large home we both use to work out of too is very reasonable. It was legitimately tax deductible as well.

My satisfaction with Ubiquiti is declining, in part because of the security issue last year. However there isn't really anything I would replace it with because the main draw of Ubiquiti at this class is that it doesn't have recurring licensing fees like Cisco Meraki does (which are $$$$). I could try to roll my own on some of this but I'm too old/busy to run pfSense and a *-WRT flavor etc. If I was buying a new Ubiquiti setup, which if you rely on home internet I would still advocate for, I would buy a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro which negates the router, switch and cloud key as separate purchases. It wasn't available when I purchased this setup a few years ago.

ADDED: Some people below said their Ubiquiti equipment was hard to set up, I actually found it super easy and there is a GUI to help you. I'm am/was happy sysop'ing servers over SSH so YMMV. One strong suggestion is to use their dedicated administration device the Cloud Key rather than roll your own on a docker container. The most problems I have in my entire setup are things running in docker so I try to not have them as dependencies but I am running PiHole for DNS which causes problems if it goes down.

Dream Machine running NextDNS and Tailscale on the device itself feels a little bit like living in the future. It finally feels like a culmination of promises and desire, simplified into something that is just non-discrete enough to disappear. There is an ebb and flow to wanting all your components interchangeable, and then longing for an all-in-one. Having your router itself be a Tailscale exit node is slick. When something goes wrong, there are three panes of glass, but only one hardware device to investigate.

https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki/UnifiOS

https://github.com/SierraSoftworks/tailscale-udm

https://tailscale.com/kb/1103/exit-nodes/

The other home networking things I would throw in that people may find useful are: using MoCA to put access points in places that have an existing coax drop but running an ethernet line is impractical, you can have y and forked shaped networks without switches (although not the cheapest solution); and http://getchannels.com + an hdhomerun (tuner -> ethernet) plus a media server, nas, or nvidia shield.

It's interesting how "feeling futuristic" is a single network device that does everything and an over the air tv antenna, but the shit actually "just works" finally.

What kind of wifi do you have? We got a Netgear Orbi system for our 5400 ft^2 house and it's never worked properly.

Games. Minecraft: 1 cent per hour, 10+ years of free content updates. Satisfactory: 1.4 cents per hour. Factorio: 1.8 cents per hour. Elder Scrolls Online: 10 cents per hour. Bannerlord: 8 cents per hour. Shenzhen IO: 15 cents per hour.

All of the major streaming services. I rotate amongst them depending on what I want to watch. Unbelievably cheap relative to the amount I binge.

Cheap newspaper subscriptions. WSJ, Washington Post both had very low cost introductory subscription plans for 6 or 12 months, and I have a couple of local papers too. Sure, there's workarounds via archive or incognito, but at these prices (WP is currently running a $10 / year deal), might as well just pay the small amount.

I’d gladly subscribe but I’ve heard that these are a nightmare to cancel (unless you live in California)

I use privacy.com for those kinds of services. Always works like a charm. The WSJ ends up chasing you when the card declines (gets turned off), often with continued low monthly plans.

I used to work as an editor for my city's metro newspaper.

As someone who wants to see local journalism succeed, I would be willing to subscribe at a reasonable rate.

But the only subscription plan they offer is {ridiculously low rate for first 6 months} then {ridiculously high rate after that).

And I know what a hassle it is to cancel. No online option. You have to phone in, endure 20-30 minutes on hold, then resist a retention specialist's multiple efforts to get you to reconsider.

No thanks. I want to support local journalism, but this is not the way.

The FTC recently announced that it's ramping up enforcement of subscription services cancellation rules:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-r...

"Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place."

I hope that these efforts do make a difference with news subscriptions.

Definitely a concern unless you're in CA. I do wonder if the newspaper industry as a whole would not be better served by allowing CA-style easy cancellation nationwide. Sure, you get more cancels, but you also get more people signing up initially, and a bunch of those probably don't bother cancelling.

Absolutely true, and this is where i found subscribing to those through Apple’s App Store helps. This way, i am subbed to a bunch of newspapers, and i can always easily cancel them with a single click from a single UI in the “My Subscriptions” section of the app store.

I did that experiment with NYT (note: not a California resident), where i signed up regularly through their website first and tried canceling, and then did the same through App Store.

With the first one (website), i had to call or email them to cancel, no way to do it through a UI. Took me a few days to get it done. With the second one (App Store), all it took was one click from “My Subscriptions” page that has all my subscriptions from App Store.

I would subscribe to the New York Times but do not for that reason.

WSJ's cheapest subscription appears to go up to nearly $500/yr after the intro offer.

Digital services/products:

- Last.fm

- Spotify

- Cloud storage

- Figma for teams

- Managed hosting

- Fiber-optic broadband

Physical things:

- Audio gear

- A good bike

- Food and drink

- Anything for my dog

- Computer + phone

- Home gym, paid for itself after two years

- Experiences

- BIFL quality items, like clothing from brands that will happily repair stuff if it breaks or send you replacement items if you can fix it yourself.

- Skilled laborers/consultants of any kind. Plumbers, electricians, financial advisors, lawyers or specialized health personnel like manual therapists.

I will happily spend hours just to do that initial research, to find a brand that is less likely to disappoint or fall short of my expectations.

If I can maintain and service it myself I will gladly pay a premium price. Examples could be a leather belt or shoes, hardwood flooring or anything that can be repaired and serviced like tools and knives.

What are some of your BIFL items? I've mostly loved darn tough socks.

> - BIFL quality items, like clothing from brands that will happily repair stuff if it breaks or send you replacement items if you can fix it yourself.

Can you list some items?

> - Skilled laborers/consultants of any kind. Plumbers, electricians, financial advisors, lawyers or specialized health personnel like manual therapists.

What's the best way to separate the reasonably priced experts from the overpriced crooks?

There are some things that has tremendous value to me but are offered for free.

A few months ago, I found out about https://endmyopia.org/ and have been following their principles to improve my eyes. I've since learned about how my eyes works and went from -2.75 to -2.25.

If I could have paid a service to heal my eyes naturally without lasik, I would have done it, but the site offered everything for free.

That site just rubs me the wrong way.

“Nearsightedness Is Not An Illness” - of course it’s an illness, an illness is anything that impairs the normal function of your body. A heart stent is just a little tube, and I don’t see anybody arguing that’s not real medicine.

“…classify bits of clear curved plastic as 'prescriptions'” - just about anything can be prescribed. I’m not sure why lenses aren’t eligible.

“An unorthodox approach” - not really, most optometrists will happily talk to you about vision therapy if they think you’re overminused. The only thing unorthodox here is how large his claims are. Vision therapists would love to make claims this huge - but they don’t, because almost nobody will see deltas as big as what he’s describing.

He’s also being pretty misleading about how he’s citing those studies on the main page - while the quotes are there, the studies in general don’t support this idea that myopia is entirely lens induced and/or mental in origin.

Actually, the more I read the more crank-like this gets. Myopia being primarily down to the eyeball growing too long is extremely, extremely well supported by research. This guy rejects that on the basis of anecdote.

> Myopia being primarily down to the eyeball growing too long is extremely, extremely well supported by research

Here's a link to a research about the eyeball shortening in adults: http://europepmc.org/article/med/3688185

I think you misread, there is no disputing the fact that eyeball gets longer, I remember him explaining that you have myopia because your eyeball got longer.

I spent 5 minutes on the site and couldn't for the life of me find any free resources to actually change my vision. They have a free 7 day course that tells you about the biology of the eye and how their program works, but nothing actually about anything practical. All I got was funneled into those familiar long-scrolly pushy sales landing pages that somewhere wanted to sell me a paid course.

same, awful design

A good pair of wireless earbuds. I bought a pair of Galaxy Buds+ a few years back on Black Friday sale (think I paid 90 bucks or so), and I've enjoyed them so much, I didn't feel the need to upgrade them for the later models.

I bought my girlfriend a pair of Airpods to upgrade over her cheap Bluetooth earbuds, and it's a massive improvement as well. So I don't recommend any particular brand. Just get a good pair that works well with your phone, has decent battery life (at least eight hours between charges), and provides either ANC or good passive noise cancellation.

It's a real quality of life improvement for me to have these things that can be in my pocket all the time and can pull out any time I need a distraction for whatever I'm doing.

A good microphone on them is also a plus, as it allows people to hear me through my mask.

An "America the Beautiful" annual pass from the parks service. $80 for unlimited day-use to all national land, including National Parks, National Forest, and BLM land.

In what part of the country do you pay to go to parks?

I'm... Honestly not sure if you're kidding, so I'm not sure how to respond. I don't think there's a single National Park in in the US that had free entry.

Well I grew up in NH and went to national parks about once a month without paying.

My guess is you're in the west of the country.

Which parks? There are very few National Parks in the NE—- Maine is the only place that comes to mind.

I was referring to the White Mountain National Forest, though I see now officially it's not a park.

Still, in NH the parks are free, they just are run by the state instead of the federal government.

Which national parks did you go to? You would have had to travel out of state because New Hampshire doesn't have even one.

Most National Parks, definitely Yellowstone/Yosemite. Some of the more rural ones have self registration and the fee is less. And some National Parks don’t have an entrance fee.

YouTube premium, to watch videos without ads. As a bonus you get Google's music streaming (YouTube Music) for free.

Hoppy.network, so I can give the Raspberry Pi running in my closet a real IPv4 address.

Monthly donations to Ardour.org, my favorite DAW.

Check out YouTube Vanced for Android or YouTube++ for iOS.

Been living ad-free for 3 years now

And how do you expect content creators to get paid? I am for adblockers, but I also pay for such subscriptions because I want to support the creators and news industry.

I could care less about giving YouTube a cut of creator revenue.

Contextual/integrated advertising is something many creators already do - in a lot of cases it's because they have no choice (their videos have been demonetized for etc).

Mind you, there are ways to get around that too, but I don't mind. After all, as you say, they need to get paid.

By paying for Premium I am not actively harming content creators like you.

Trying YouTube premium now and I would probably continue to pay after this trial period if it wasn’t for the terrible audio quality.

Some things sound ok, while others are encoded with some painful loss of fidelity. It is like it is 1999 again and you try to encode MP3 at 112 kbit/s to squeeze a full album into your 64 MB player, that bad.

I read somewhere that it uses Youtube as the source material and reencodes that instead of sourcing it properly as in Google Music.

> YouTube premium, to watch videos without ads.

Why? Ad-blockers exist.

Jetbrains IDEs (Rider for me) and the Xbox Game Pass have already been mentioned here, they are totally worth the money.

Hetzner is my favourite VPS provider. Performance and great quality of service for a little price, I've never looked back since I switched from OVH to them a few years ago.

I also use Hetzner for my NextCloud instance[0]. Price for storage is worth it, you own your own data, and it removes the hassle of maintaining your NextCloud yourself.

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Fishing & Hunting licenses and excise taxes. The US has 640 million acres of public land, most of which is available for anybody to enjoy.

Youtube premium. $12 CAD/month. No ads + videos can play in the background.

On the other hand it wasn't worth for us to spend time/money on Netflix/Amazon prime (streaming stuff) so we just killed the subscription and channeled it to Youtube.

The "youtube vanced" app does that for free.

Dont feed the tech giants dark patterns

Dark pattern of paying to have add free content ? If anything I want more of that.

Yeah YouTube premium is where I put my money where my is. Always said I would prefer if I could pay for content outright rather than be advertised to. Well, this is it.

Why do it if its free. Thats posturing

It's not free - if everyone blocked ads and nobody paid they would have no revenue, you are just freeloading by using stuff like vanced.

Youtube had no revenue for years, they dont NEED money magically right now.

If you can freeload something from a big co just do it. Its not a morality debate

but it doesn't do it on all platforms. PC only sure. Red works on smart tvs, phones, tablets, xbox, computer..

and you get the youtube music with it.

it costs me about 20 min worth of work once a month to remove ads from my primary media consumption site.. totally worth it, and don't have to mess with 3rd party BS. Completely changes the youtube experience

Brave browser does it for free by “Enable background audio” in settings. It blocks ads by default too.

Once upon a time (about 10 years ago), I could turn off my iPad’s screen and still hear YouTube playing without paying Google for the privilege. Used to be HN would never accept such a thing, but here it is on a list of things we are happy to pay for. Amazing how times change.

It makes way more sense to do value analysis purely on what what you gain vs what it costs rather than trying to factor in the cost of making or implementing said item.

I don't care if the bill of materials is really high, that's no reason for a consumer to be any more sympathetic for a price; similarly, costing almost nothing is no reason to deride a price. That's the company's problem.

It's optimal to just focus on what you get for what you pay.

It also comes with Youtube music, which is a plus. I haven't used spotify due to having Youtube music with my Youtube premium account.

Just saw this on HN yesterday I think it was:

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#youtube

> + videos can play in the background

you can do that by asking youtube to display the desktop version of the webpage or by using the Newpipe application...

I would never pay for Youtube, just for the fact that I am already paying for it by watching all the spam that ask me to pay for it.

It’s $15.99 now in US.

JetBrains IDEs, Hetzner servers, mobifone (3GB LTE for $3 monthly), PCB prototypes, good food :) Samsung SSDs

I've heard good things about Hetzner. How do they compare to Linode?

I agree about hetzner. Specially servers auction. I developed websites that were terrible backend performance wise, just because i knew 20 pounds can get me so much comouting power that i never have to optimise it. i cringe at that now, bht starting your own business without much of a reputation you need to cut corners. When using server auction though make sure you have good backup as its bare metal.

Their "remote hands" service will buy you hardware repairs within the hour. Plus most servers have hardware raid and hotplug HDDs. So I've launched some customers without any backups because they deemed up to 1 hour of occasional downtime fully acceptable.

If you are a US customer you can currently get a beefy server with 256GiB of RAM, a few years old Xeon, and a huge amount of traffic included for €50 a month on Hetzner auction. If you are in EU you need to add local sales tax, still dirt cheap.

Works great for me!

It's not even the same category anymore.

For the price of the smallest dedicated CPU Linode, I get a 64GB AMD Epyc 16 core server from Hetzner.

So Linode is roughly 16x more expensive.

That said, I rent a lot from Hetzner so I get special pricing. But also aside from the price, all of my servers are in their own cage with biometric access check plus I have private dedicated 1GBit LAN between my nodes. And their uptime was better than our Amazon AWS and Heroku instances...

Who do you use for PCBs?

Eurocircuits for NDA stuff. They are slow to work with and expensive, but I trust their integrity and they produce fully inside Europe.

Aisler is super fast and cheap, but I need to solder myself, so I use them for small interface boards

pcbway is in China, but I can send in my own components. I used them for example for an usb3+fpga+RAM base board. They are great for stock modules like USB interfaces, but have no NDA options.

jlcpcb is in China and cheap and fast, but you can only use components in their list. So I use them for larger batches of boards that I prototyped with aisler. Also no NDA option.

This is a very thoughtful response, thank you!

Spotify. The ads haven't gotten jarring enough that it makes sense.

DigitalOcean. While I'm sure it's not the MOST affordable option, I think the value is pretty good. (If anyone has more affordable option please throw it out there!)

Minecraft. Bought the windows 10 version to play with some friends and check out the new world generation. Infinite creativity for ~20 bucks.

> DigitalOcean

Depending on what you need from DigitalOcean, AWS LightSail is cheaper

DO has better uptime lately

I like these.

I use a no-name vps provider that offered a deal for 3core, 2G mem, 40G ssd kvm for 23/year. Could up-in-smoke any time but I've enjoyed it for the last 1.5 years. I usually look for deals on LEB.

Minecraft as well; some of my college buddies and I do a book club and meet up on minecraft since we don't live nearby each-other anymore. 10 years of entertainment for maybe $30.

L.E.B. (Low End Box) https://lowendbox.com/

Vultr has definitely replaced my need for digitalocean

Vultr accepting crypto payments deprecated all other VPS providers for me. Very happy customer here!

Seedbox. $15/mo for 2TB storage + 5TB/mo outgoing bandwidth. Super fast network connection. One click install for Jellyfin so I can share my library via streaming with all my friends. Plus it's a regular Linux box so I can ssh in and keep an IRC session up via tmux.

Which provider if you're willing to share?

Check my profile and DM me or email me.

Really happy with recently moving from DigitalOcean (I had been using DO for eight years or so) to Hetzner's new US datacenter. DigitalOcean's value proposition was already fine by me, and what I'm getting with Hetzner is just that much better (my sense is that I'm getting around 2x the value with Hetzner, give or take). I last used Hetzner roughly a decade ago, and had been waiting for them to open up a location in the US. Their service interface has improved a lot (vs what I had used previously) and is quite smooth and easy to use.

Aldi has come to town. DigitalOcean has a serious challenge on their hands.

Rider IDE for C# development, my god is it a dream compared to using visual studio

I absolutely love Rider.

I was very reticent to spend that amount of money (140$) in an IDE, but when I started daily driving Linux, it was the only viable option for C# development out there. I fell in love with it and I couldn't imagine myself working on .NET projects without it, even on Windows. Worth every single penny, made me a lot more productive.

YouTube Premium was already mentioned. Definitely that. The YouTube Music it comes with isn’t as good app-wise as the alternatives, but the recommendations are aight.

I’ll add: Mint Mobile in the US. $15/mo (paid in larger chunks, I pay annually) for 4GB data, unlimited voice/text. With working from home it’s really quite enough for me.

Factorio. Cost me $30, played around 1500 hours.

AWS EC2 Spot Instances at about 0.004 cents per hour. For personal use, I only need to use them for a day or two at a time. I have some Terraform code that can quickly spin one up and then destroy it when I am finished.

https://github.com/jftuga/terraform_ec2_spot_instance

As far as subscription go - nothing. Although I will say that Steam is my preferable place to shop for games because they spend actual effort fixing other people's shit. From joypads and AMD GPUs to wine/proton updates.

Yes, gog doesn't have DRM but also expect me to use windows.

I wasn't a huge fan of Valve until MS pushed them into this direction about a decade ago

> Yes, gog doesn't have DRM but also expect me to use windows.

Wine exists.

A quality mountain bike and road bike. Quality hiking/backpacking gear. A stand up paddle board and camper van to lug it all in. Solid hiking shoes, a great foot insole and trekking poles.

Outside of that, over the ear wired headphones are used everyday. Mine are 10 years old and work and sound fantastic.

Jura espresso machine. Use it every day, one push button, easy to maintain. In 14 years have had two issues, once they did a complete refurbishment at no cost, the other they gave 30% off a new machine. With great beans, anything at coffee place tastes awful by comparison.

In no particular order. Spotify. Lululemon sportswear. Casual wear from Club Monaco. Uniqlo hoodies. Contact lenses. Good coffee. Netflix. Chocolate. Accountant. Gifts to people I love. Travel to see the people I love. Favourite restaurants and bakeries.

Uniqlo anything

I've found some of their basics to to be cheap but low quality. I'd rather pay more for nicer stuff, good quality clothes can last many many years.

FYI Uniqlo is suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/fashion/xinjiang-forced-l...

Xbox Game pass - Gives bang for the buck

Books - Teaches you variety of stuff that will save you money

Xbox Game pass is fantastic. I bought a Series S alongside a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, one of my best purchases ever. Ultimate gives you access to the console and PC libraries, EA Play and Gold (required to play online on console) for only 15$/mo[0]. I also discovered some incredible games I would have probably never played without the Game Pass, such as The Artful Escape[1].

[0] https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass#join [1] https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/The-Artful-Escape/9NG...

Apart from some of the services already mentioned, I can definitely recommend Stratechery newsletter and Instapaper.

I generally try to live a decluttered life and minimize the number of "things" to deal with as I value my time above anything else.

That said, here are some things I value:

- Spotify. At ~$10/month, a great deal that makes listening and discovering music really easy. Have a shared account with my wife.

- Gaming. While gaming hardware isn't cheap these days (~$2k for a decent build) games have incredible value. Playing competitive online games once a week with friends kept me sane through the pandemic. Incredibly immersive experience.

- Guitar and Rocksmith. At ~$300, let's you hook up an electric guitar to your computer and learn how to play the guitar in a fun way. Really elevating experience.

- Electric Bike. These aren't cheap either ($2k+), but this purchase made commuting by bike exclusively (pre-pandemic) practical (cutting down my commute from ~55min by regular bike to about ~35min).

- Climbing gym membership. About $70/month. Such a fun way to stay in shape and socialize while doing so.

- Wired headphones that work well while biking. Let me keep in touch with aging parents on daily basis. Never need to worry about charging.

- Relatedly, Pixel 4a. Comparatively cheap ($400) phone with a headphone jack. Camera is great. It's very light which makes reading before sleep pleasant.

- Books. Unbelievable value. Authors' life's insights distilled into something you can buy for ~$10. The hard part is finding good ones, but lots of good recommendations on HN.

- Good food.

Other things that I don't have yet, but am considering:

- Mail forwarding service (~$30/month). We've been moving around a bit since the pandemic started. These services let you maintain a permanent address, scan or forward mail if needed. Still deciding which one to get since it's not an easily reversible decision.

- Fiber. Not offered yet where we live, but would get it in a heartbeat.

This may sound cliche, but luckily some of the greatest things in life are free (spending time with family and friends, playing volleyball on the beach, going for hikes in nature and all the great content online such as on HN).

Could you recommend good wired headphones with a good mic usable on a bike ?

I own Philips Pro 6105 headphones.

While they are nothing special and aren't expensive (~$30), their shape keeps noise levels from airflow low while biking. I've owned them for about 3 years now and they are still going strong.

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for

1. pernos.co: Time travel debugging with a beautiful, online interface. Simply record a bug locally, then upload it to this website, and you can travel through the execution forwards and backwards (with source file labeling and other views at each step).

2. Wolfram One: Symbolic computation for everything. A high-level shell which can run almost any basic computation with great visuals and natural language input.

Can you explain more about how you use wolfram one day to day? I’m very curious.

1. I use it to caption images for blog posts (e.g. the images in https://simulavr.com/blog/technical-overview/)

2. I use it for easy image hosting that I can control in the Wolfram command line (vs. imgur, etc).

3. I use it to upload lengthy text files (e.g. error outputs when programming) over things like pastebin.

4. Until very recently, I used it to manage our site's email waitlist (setting up an email submission form was 1 Wolfram function).

5. I use it to visualize personal data (productivity stuff, timelog data, etc).

6. I use it to run mathematical computations when reading technical materials. Wolfram can do things like "show how this integral is derived in a human-readable way", which makes it easier to understand steps glossed over in math proofs.

7. I use it to collage images together when sharing them with other people (https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ImageCollage.html).

8. I use it to make timelines when making back-of-the-napkin Gantt charts (e.g. https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/george.w.singer/business/pn...), or histories (e.g. https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/george.w.singer/business/pn...)

Hope this is helpful =)

Was very enlightening, thank you!!

[1] Top quality laptops (high spec XPS13s running Linux) rather than cheap ones. [2] A good (non-electric) bike in my small flat town. [3] SailfishOS rather than a surveillance or walled garden phone. [4] Intel Synology NAS with maxxed out RAM and storage. [5] Brix laptop bag. [6] Standing desk and wobble board.

Fastmail. Excellent features, fast performance, and very reliable

I use gmail, besides privacy what other benefits can I get from FastMail.

You can use your own domain.

Fast, excellent customer support.

Audible helps me go to bed on time and that is worth at least 10x what they charge.

Goodwill Industries - They have liberated me from all the crap I'd acquired.

And, as an added bonus, they offer a ton of different books for a dollar or two.

Goodwill is great.

* Pet insurance. Saved my ass several times. I would've found a way to pay for my cats' emergency treatment regardless, but it was nice not to get stuck with a sudden several-thousand-dollar bill after emergency surgery.

* AWS S3 - nice, cheap hosting for my personal site.

* HBO Max, especially after I took advantage of their new member deal after they phased our HBO Nordic recently.

* Polyver boots. So warm. So comfortable. So ugly, but so worth it.

* Patagonia Insulated Prairie Dawn parka. I've had this thing for years and it's held up really well and gotten me through several Nordic winters.

Last year I invested in upgrading my home office after working from home for several months messing with USB-C dongles without enough ports, don't always work and interfere with the WiFi signal.

I expected to go back to the office after getting vaccinated. But that much took longer than expected, and now again we're stuck in a lockdown waiting for booster vaccines to become available.

Keyboard: Keychron K1 mechanical keyboard. Slim enough so that no additional wrist support is needed but still feels great to type on.

Screen: Dell 27" U2720Q 4K screen. Good quality screen, charges the laptop with one cable and connects keyboard mouse etc. with built in USB hub. But the best feature is the optional soundbar with built in microphones and noise cancelling like a teleconference unit you find in a meeting room. It allows me to talk to people without having to plug things in my ears all the time which was a giant bother before.

Patagonia clothes, they last so long

1. Alfred Powerpack - clipboard manager, snippets, workflows

2. Chase Sapphire Preferred - rental car insurance, free memberships for Doordash (12 months), Instacart (6 months) etc

3. IWI multivitamins

Our nanny. Best money I’ve ever spent besides our EVs.

Our au pairs were some of the best money we've ever spent. The biggest cost is that you need to have the extra room / living space available for them.

App subscriptions to worthwhile products made by individuals and small teams. Podcast Addict, Rain Alarm, Before Launcher, AllTrails.

Gasoline for my motorcycle.

Literally looking for a cafe racer for the summer lol

Educational subscriptions.

I used to be a huge miser and resent the idea of paying for, well, anything digital or knowledge based.

Now I realise that, well, I'd spend £5 on a pint in a pub, what's £10 a month? Even if there's only a 1% chance I actually learn XYZ that's better than nothing.

Tower, Postico, Arq, 1Password, M1 MacBook Air, Hetzner servers, HHKB Hybrid Type-S, eero WiFi Systems

Netflix. When I first got it there wasn’t a lot of content and I’d spend an inordinate amount of time looking for something to watch, but nowadays it’s a lot better. I need to remind myself to not watch too much!

Well worth the $12/month or whatever I’m paying.

Not a service

My Fujifilm x100v (or most of the previous x100 models), it’s been a fantastic family camera. I try to just leave it around the house for moments with the kids.

The coloring is superb and makes it seem like I know what I’m doing when I certainly do not.

Backup using rsync.net special Borg pricing 100GB for <$20/year

https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

https://www.lowendstock.com/ (I pay $10/year for my VPS') ... and I think I have better uptime then Amazon.

Spotify. Steam.

Dev tools:

GitKraken. Linqpad. Sublime Text.

An account at musicbrainz.org for easier tagging and organization for my music library - 4$ p. month.

I also value my Digital Ocean nodes, but they get torn up and down based on what I am doing.

> An account at musicbrainz.org for easier tagging and organization for my music library - 4$ p. month.

Have you tried beets?

I actually think HBO Now is a super great value for the price

Streaming tv.

We pay for a handful of inexpensive channels, get an incredible array of shows for a fraction of the price we used to pay for basic dish. It's awesome.

Good military grade clothing - someone designed them to be robust, well fitting and usable. It's like good software:

* HAIX P3 Shoes - best shoes I ever had.

* UFPro P40 Pants

* Eberlestock F3F FAC

GCP E2-micro compute instance- GCP gives it to you for free and is an excellent place to throw things up for which you don't expect much load.

Gigabit internet

The money I spent to upgrade home WIFI and have Ethernet for my desk

Lexus

The money I pay to book Tennis court every week

Donations

All my ergo equipments (chair, monitors, standing desk, lighting, keyboard, mouse ...)

Patagonia. Money-back guarantee, super high quality. Completely committed to the environment.

Certain publications (Economist) and Substacks.

Flighty - far and away the best app for flights, not even close. The plus subscription is worth every cent.

Bottomless - my internet connected coffee scale, I love this thing.

Stratechery - probably the best tech/software newsletter available.

Sam Harris, Persuasion, and Astral Codex Ten - writers and podcasts I like a lot.

YouTube Premium - I’ll pay for a no ads version of any service I use that allows me to.

Gigabit internet, ubiquiti networking hardware, T-Mobile cellular (actually super fast now compared to Verizon with 5Guc - I can get 600mbps and it doesn’t require being a foot from the access point).

> my internet connected coffee scale

Why?

YouTube Premium Google Fi Fairfax Connector bus service ($1 as a senior) WMATA (non-rush-hour service, or )

or as a senior)

Hah, my example is exactly the example you listed. A single cpu, 2gb ram, fixed ip VPS for $30USD per year.

Oracle Cloud (crazy, I know) will give you a 4-core ARM VPS with 24GB memory and 10TB bandwidth per month for free!

Then you're just waiting around for the lawyers to figure out how to screw you - safer to just avoid it all together.

Are Oracle's lawyers really a concern for people? How can Oracle's lawyers screw you if you're simply using one of their VPS's?

Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

That's an insanely generous offer - they seemingly also let you split it up into 4VMs if you want. Any gotchas other than Oracle generally being icky?

I would seriously consider moving a couple small Linodes I use for work over that way. I quite like Linode, but free is compelling.

The block storage devices are HDD, not SSD. You have to pay extra for SSD storage.

That is a downside, though with 24GB of memory, there are certainly use cases where most everything is going to be cached in RAM anyways.

This is great - thanks very much for mentioning it. Creating an account now! ARM might be tricky but for zero dollars might be some fun.

GCP offers a similar machine for free- the E2-micro- 2CPUs but only 1 GB of RAM so if you can live with that you could save the $30 https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#always-free...

unfortunately the 2gb RAM is the one thing I feel constrained by - I mostly use it with code-server and even the default TypeScript language server is a bit too much sometimes.

Hyatt loyalty program and credit card

VPN that lets me torrent anything I want without dealing with a million different platforms.

Anything that isn't a "subscription" for no good reason other than greed.

Software: Directory Opus, Connectify, PTFB Pro, DisplayFusion, ClipboardFusion

> Software: Directory Opus

Did you buy a lifetime license or are you stuck paying for annual updates?

Happy I paid money to: Fastmail Backblaze Synology

Not happy I paid money to: Sonos Samsung tv

Setapp.com is awesome for Mac users Soyoustart for fair priced bare metal

+1 for SetApp! Love it and the iOS complimentary apps are always a bonus

Poweramp Equalizer app (much more bang per buck than any headphones)

SmoothScroll app on mac.

Donations to Signal.

Tinder Platinum.

Cheaper than bars and clubs, way better results.

For what? Bars and clubs are well known, for generations, to be bad places to meet nice people. The best way to make long term relationships is by doing things you enjoy (group events like sports or maybe hobbies) and having friendships grow into more. Not trying to be a dad here, but random fucking eventually gets old.

I do not enjoy group events. I enjoy solitary hobbies in the comfort of my own home. So what is my solution dad

I also do not have time to fake enjoy a group hobby or event for years in hopes that a hot single woman will eventually join and become friends with me and blossom into a relationship.

I get you, I’m the same, I guess my advice sucks, honestly. Of course, just looking for hot singles is part of the problem. As an old man I can tell you looks don’t last but personality tends to.

Personality definitely fades. People change, become less fun, grow into different people.

Everything fades, so just get the best you can now and hope for the best.

Tinder Platinum sounding like a better value proposition now?

Not really, I’m married so I don’t need those, but everyone I know has had poor luck with them and I never had good luck with the previous generation of dating sites. The two rules of dating sites basically preclude my ugly ass from getting decent results anyways. Don’t listen to my bored crappy advice, clearly you know what works for yourself.

I’m curious, if you had to start dating again what would be your strategy?

I probably will soon the way this year is looking. I have no idea honestly, but apps are at the bottom of the it’ list for me, personally. Maybe I would join a volunteer organization or go to a match maker and pay actual money to them. Maybe go to places where I can do hobbies I enjoy and just talk to anyone. Ask other friends I know if they know anyone, things like that.

It's a bit narrow to lump all Tinder meets into the "random fucking" box.

I'm in an exclusive relationship now, but I'd used Tinder for years prior when I wasn't interested in a committed relationship and made many genuine connections as friends with benefits (and I'm still just friends with many of them today).

People seek different things at different times. I agree that hookups can be a bit shallow, but those aren't the only answer for physical connection if you're not in a relationship.

Whatever is on sale this month at Costco.

I moved 10years ago to a small town (Sacramento, CA > Springfield, Missouri) without a Costco, and we finally got one in town. It’s so worth it not to drive 3 hours to nearest one!

Surfboards

AoPS and Beast Academy.

USB flash drives.

iCloud.

Deezer, concerts, Family pack of Office 365. Cheap home gym. Illegal techno parties in the forest. MDMA pills at 10 euros vs overpriced alchool in Paris. Traveling in central / south america for suoer cheap.

There are a lot of smart good plans in life if you care looking for it. Is there a subreddit ?

Feeling those end ones for sure. Alcohol is terrible, esp like 14 bucks for a cocktail.

Travel can be so cheap and so good. The expensive hotels are so overrated. As long as there's a good bed, it's clean, i'm set.

There is a middle ground. You can get a nice hotel (Hyatt) nearly for free, using their credit card program.

What's the best one for that?

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