Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 114 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#91

Post by majewsky »

I have a flatrate pass for most of the German public transit [1]. The sticker price is 4000 € a year, but my employer pays for it (in lieu of a company car), so I only have to pay income taxes on it, which comes out to about 170 € a month for me. For that price, I can get on any train whenever I want any time I want (except for overnight trains where a reservation is required), and I also get free local transit in over 100 cities, including the one where I live.

Now, since my commute is rather short, I would certainly be cheaper off if I just had a subscription pass for my city's local transit and bought train tickets as needed, but it's such a vast quality-of-life improvement to be able to, for instance, decide on Friday to visit my parents for the weekend without any extra hidden costs.

(Caveat: All of this does not apply right now since I'm not entering any vehicles with other people until my vaccination has taken effect. But I'm still renewing my subscription because I already know the date when that happens.)

I know that that's only one thing, but the other similar-sized line items in my ledger are much more mundane (rent, utilities, insurance, and such).

[1] https://www.bahn.com/en/view/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-co...

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#93

Post by yummypaint »

hpb42 wrote: post #85
yummypaint wrote: post #75

Accelerator time - $500-$1k/hour Sis3316 digitizers - $10k each Helium 3 - $2k/liter at ambient pressure

I assume this is for work? What kind of accelerator you use? Could you describe what for?

The $500/hr figure is for a 1965 vintage electrostatic "tandem" accelerator with a 10MV max terminal voltage. We mostly make beams of protons, deuterons, and helium. A common use case is making tightly pulsed deuteron beam, and then hitting a gas target filled with deuterium to make neutrons. The outgoing neutrons will also be pulsed and have a well defined energy spectrum, which makes them great for doing experiments with neutrons. At these energies they are non-relativistic, so you can measure their energy through time-of-flight.

The more expensive facility is for making beams of gamma rays. It uses a free electron laser built into a ~1GeV electron storage ring to make ultraviolet laser light in a building-length laser cavity. The laser light then collides directly with an electron bunch and is scattered up to gamma ray energy. It then passes through the laser cavity mirror and on to the target rooms. This is a unique kind of facility because it produces gamma beams with high resolution. It's complimentary to bremstralung gamma beams (often made by shooting electrons directly into a piece of diamond to make them wiggle).

We typically use the gamma rays to study photonuclear reactions. Having an electromagnetic probe instead of another hadron hitting your target allows for alot of simplifications on the theory end and helps theorists to generate testable predictions with less uncertainties attached. It also probes slightly different physics.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#94

Post by Arrath »

yummypaint wrote: post #93
hpb42 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume this is for work? What kind of accelerator you use? Could you describe what for?

The $500/hr figure is for a 1965 vintage electrostatic "tandem" accelerator with a 10MV max terminal voltage. We mostly make beams of protons, deuterons, and helium. A common use case is making tightly pulsed deuteron beam, and then hitting a gas target filled with deuterium to make neutrons. The outgoing neutrons will also be pulsed and have a well defined energy spectrum, which makes them great for doing experiment…

That is so very cool.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#95

Post by agencies »

LordHeini wrote: post #68
virtualpain wrote: post #37

$8500+ a month for Google Map API, we opted for developing our own local places database now

We have a similar problem. Care to explain how you replaced Google?

Yeah I'd be curious what both your and parent's use cases are that could possibly be covered by other smaller, existing maps services, or if there is some market that remains underserved.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#96

Post by LordHeini »

agencies wrote: post #95
LordHeini wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a similar problem. Care to explain how you replaced Google?

Yeah I'd be curious what both your and parent's use cases are that could possibly be covered by other smaller, existing maps services, or if there is some market that remains underserved.

Basically we want to show a bunch of pois around a real estate (like the nearest super market, airport and so on).

We build a service calculating those but have trouble getting the data.

It is more of a nice gimmick for us. Since the pricing changes using Google maps apis is just prohibitively expensive.

There are other companies providing the data but those too are somewhat costly.

Maybe we should use open street map as a data source.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#97

Post by erikrothoff »

amosson wrote: post #12
erikrothoff wrote: post #7

Servers at DigitalOcean $2500 per month. Paypal: Our last transfer to our bank account cost $1000 because PayPal takes a currency conversion fee of 3% from USD to SEK (that's in addition to the transaction fee) Intercom.io: ~$200 for the support package. Using the messaging automation would be ~$3000 per month...

Have you considered Wise. You get a “US” account that you could route (or wire money) into from PayPal. Wise only charges 40-50bps to convert to SEK.

We have Wise and used this as a workaround like you described. However, Paypal recently ”fixed” this loophole by charging 3% on USD to USD transfers. It’s insane.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#98

Post by erikrothoff »

iyn wrote: post #70
amosson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered Wise. You get a “US” account that you could route (or wire money) into from PayPal. Wise only charges 40-50bps to convert to SEK.

+1, I've saved thousands by using Wise.

Are you still doing this? For us Paypal added a 3% transfer fee on USD to USD transfers. We’d really like to get this fixed, it’s killing us.

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#99

Post by erikrothoff »

noja wrote: post #38
erikrothoff wrote: post #7

Servers at DigitalOcean $2500 per month. Paypal: Our last transfer to our bank account cost $1000 because PayPal takes a currency conversion fee of 3% from USD to SEK (that's in addition to the transaction fee) Intercom.io: ~$200 for the support package. Using the messaging automation would be ~$3000 per month...

Take a look at Wise.com for currency

We have Wise and used this as a workaround like you described. However, Paypal recently ”fixed” this loophole by charging 3% on USD to USD transfers. It’s insane. Have you found a way around this?

Re: Ask HN: What are the three most expensive tools/services that you use?

#100

Post by input_sh »

louisvgchi wrote: post #72
input_sh wrote: post #21

1. Hetzner servers ~€40/month 2. Zapier $30/month 3. Probably Airtable ($24/month), though I'm slowly moving away.

Why moving away from AirTable? Pricing or feature set?

Mostly pricing. I like it as a product, it's just expensive. I've played around with Seatable (self-hosted clone) and it serves my purpose just fine.
Post reply on HN