Rent until you know what you want to buy. Done
Buy second-hand and worst case resell. Best of both worlds.
The Ski Rental Problem
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#32Oh man, I had no idea that the decision of whether to rent or buy skis required calculus to solve. I just figured that if you ski more than say, 3 times a season, it's probably better to own your own gear for reasons unrelated to the entry cost, but more to do with comfort, tuning, quality, and so on. Anyone who has rented skis knows that the rental fleets are trashed.
Yeah it's a fun problem but not really related to reality. Some important factors like: proximity to different ski resorts, travel plans, whether to rent demo skis or not, quality of rental skis, skiing proficiency and desire to grow, and many more all factor into the decision. Suffice to say, it's not much of an optimization problem if you're set on skiing every year.
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#33Here's a different version of the problem. It takes 10 minutes to walk home from the bus central. The bus is late but should be here any minute now. The bus takes one minute. Do you wait or walk?
10 minutes? Always walk. Walking then becomes a known quantity, unlike your bus, and your health will benefit. And, yeesh, it’s only a ten minute walk.
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#34Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#35Here's a different version of the problem. It takes 10 minutes to walk home from the bus central. The bus is late but should be here any minute now. The bus takes one minute. Do you wait or walk?
10 minutes? Always walk. Walking then becomes a known quantity, unlike your bus, and your health will benefit. And, yeesh, it’s only a ten minute walk.
It's a problem from computer science, not Dr Oz.
You want to optimize for when you get home, not for your health or environment.
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#36Here's a different version of the problem. It takes 10 minutes to walk home from the bus central. The bus is late but should be here any minute now. The bus takes one minute. Do you wait or walk?
Always decide to walk, especially for just 10 minutes. Good for health, mental wellbeing and it's just easy. If the question was 1h+ then maybe the answer would be different.
It's a computational problem, I thought (mistakenly) that the HN crowd would understand.
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#37What happens if you have a prior knowledge for $k$ as a probability distribution?
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Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#38Every time my wife brings up the skis collecting dust in our garage, I’m reminded of the S.K.I. model — Storage Kills Investment.
> the S.K.I. model — Storage Kills Investment
What is this? Google doesn't return anything for me...
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#39Oh man, I had no idea that the decision of whether to rent or buy skis required calculus to solve. I just figured that if you ski more than say, 3 times a season, it's probably better to own your own gear for reasons unrelated to the entry cost, but more to do with comfort, tuning, quality, and so on. Anyone who has rented skis knows that the rental fleets are trashed.
Yeah it's a fun problem but not really related to reality. Some important factors like: proximity to different ski resorts, travel plans, whether to rent demo skis or not, quality of rental skis, skiing proficiency and desire to grow, and many more all factor into the decision. Suffice to say, it's not much of an optimization problem if you're set on skiing every year.
also ski prices probably vary throughout the season
Re: The Ski Rental Problem
#40What happens if you have a prior knowledge for $k$ as a probability distribution?
[deleted]