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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Your computer is probably 95% idle. Just saying.

It’s generally true that you have two options—you pay a big capital cost for a chunk of capacity which is available to you whenever you need it, or you pay operational costs for renting as you go. This applies to guest rooms, cars, and computers.

The maxims aren’t very good. “Don’t pay for something you don’t use” is weak advice, because sometimes it’s cheaper long-term to pay for unused capacity than it is to pay for usage when you need it. And this all gets muddled to hell as soon as you factor in the opportunity costs. Each option has a different amount of risk.

“You’re paying for 5% usage, 100% of the time” is just not a solid foundation for making these decisions.

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> Your computer is probably 95% idle. Just saying.

On that point, my next machine will be in the cloud. 32 GB laptops cost around $1,500. For the same cost I can buy 6,250 hours on a VPS ($.24 / hr) which is three years' working-hours use. It's even cheaper if I only need all 32 GB for a fraction of the time.

In return I get zero risk of theft, zero risk of hardware faults, zero capital outlay. The best part is that I can try it for a month for $10[1] and if I don't like it I can revert to the status quo!

[1] I'll probably start with an 8 GB machine

Not that long ago, I provisioned a VM for myself and started doing some development there. I wanted to compile a fairly large project, so I stopped the VM, changed it to a much larger instance (32 CPUs, 128 GB memory) and ran make -j32.

The build finished ten or fifteen minutes later, and I swapped it back out for a smaller instance. It’s nice.

There are situations where it makes sense. If you don't particularly want a pickup truck for other reasons, don't buy one because you might want to pickup a load of mulch or a tree in the spring. Rent a truck at the home improvement store for an hour or pay for delivery.

But the vast bulk of the things I own and don't use on a daily or even weekly basis are things that would either be a hassle to rent or pay for as a service, would end up costing more using them that way, or simply aren't practically available at all as a rental item.

I think convenience is the hidden cost here. No one is going to bother renting a car to move some dirt. They would pay for it to be delivered however because thats even easier than picking it up yourself and the savings from having a smaller car make it cheaper too.

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