Honest question: Are you serious? What kind of person thinks to themselves, "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based on a particular financial investor."
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Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
71–80 of 136 posts
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#72Honest question: Are you serious? What kind of person thinks to themselves, "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based on a particular financial investor."
Think of this as like a department store catalogue.
When you get a catalogue, do you comment "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based only on things stocked by a particular store", or just accept that it's marketing/inspiration of a particular category or supplier?
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#73I look at this site and a part of me thinks that there is a segment of the population that is seemingly incapable of doing very basic things like sleeping, cooking or buying clothes without being handheld by the computer in their phone. I'm being a little overboard of course, but I really wonder how dependent we will be on our machines to survive at all in a generation or two.
Compared to your ancestors 100, 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 years ago, you're hopelessly dependent on machines and technology to survive. Fortunately you can harness the surplus energy and attention you aren't dedicating to just getting by in everyday life to do more productive and amazing things.
No, not really.
(I mean, I don't want to come off as a Luddite by any means, but...)
I'm 40, so perhaps things have changed a bit more than those younger than me, but I can still make most food from scratch ingredients, have no issues sleeping outside in the cold, and can iron and mend my own clothes. I don't really see that much of a difference between myself and a person 100 or 1000 years ago, spare electricity, and I certainly don't need that in any real meaningful way.
Perhaps it's a generational gap, perhaps it's my jaded old fart genes kicking in, but I look at this list and I see, for lack of a more fitting phase - a lot of useless shit.
I mean, who the heck justifies a smartphone controlled grill? Who's next purchase priority is a $250 blanket that you program with your smartphone to keep different areas of the bed warm? Is there really a demand for a gadget that helps with your mindfulness and tells you to calm down? Isn't that what a good friend is for? Granted, there are certainly a lot of items that do seem to have useful needs - and I love that many of them seem geared towards sustainability and such, but my god I don't think every single article on the planet needs to be "smart".
Then again, I'm a person that still doesn't see the use case behind the smart watch (that's dependent on the phone in your pocket, at least), so maybe I'm just completely out of touch. At any rate...don't read too much into my comment, I'm not as trite as I probably sound. Just getting a little put off by the trend that seems to be focused on using technology to power hyper-narcissism ("Your own shampoo flavour!") in the name of positive technological advances. :-/
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#74I look at this site and a part of me thinks that there is a segment of the population that is seemingly incapable of doing very basic things like sleeping, cooking or buying clothes without being handheld by the computer in their phone. I'm being a little overboard of course, but I really wonder how dependent we will be on our machines to survive at all in a generation or two.
I agree, and I find myself incapable of doing basic things myself, but not because I only use technology to solve problems. I'm skewing more and more towards old fashioned asking-people-for-help. Where's a good spot for lunch since Chipotle is out of the question? I know, I'll stop in and ask the bank tellers where they recommend! I had a delicious burrito that destroyed Chipotle in taste and quality, and was cheaper…
That's a fun idea for an app:
Post a question and only those geographically within one mile of you can answer. All questions and answers are anon and public.
Tag the questions and answers such that I can see all the questions regarding what to eat were within my vicinity.
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#75It would be fairer to the companies at the bottom of the list if you had the list randomly resort itself with each page load, instead of being rendered in alphabetical order.
yeah but then it would be harder to find things when revisiting the list.
oh wait you cookie everyone and preserve the order on an individual basis. sick.
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#76I look at this site and a part of me thinks that there is a segment of the population that is seemingly incapable of doing very basic things like sleeping, cooking or buying clothes without being handheld by the computer in their phone. I'm being a little overboard of course, but I really wonder how dependent we will be on our machines to survive at all in a generation or two.
How many decades ago could someone write your note but include hunting or making their own clothes?
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#77SkyMall is back!
yeah and its dope now
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#78I don't understand any of the negatively about the items or the site.
I just sent the site to my mom. She could pick anything and it'd be a great gift, it's that good.
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#79I look at this site and a part of me thinks that there is a segment of the population that is seemingly incapable of doing very basic things like sleeping, cooking or buying clothes without being handheld by the computer in their phone. I'm being a little overboard of course, but I really wonder how dependent we will be on our machines to survive at all in a generation or two.
How many decades ago could someone write your note but include hunting or making their own clothes?
I can still do both... so I'm not sure.
Re: Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator
#80Sorry for ranting, but this type of modern webdesign and "user interface" is _horrible_. Who in their right mind thinks that putting a button called "Show me the list" dead center of the page? Hey guys, I have a novel idea: instead of adding a button, just _show_ me that list! And do you know what happens if you press that button? The website scrolls down a ~300 pixels and then you can see the first 1.8 entries of th…
Why is it a bad experience to focus only on 1 thing at a time?
Because it feels cramped. Just imagine your ebook reader would only show you two lines of text at a time. Yes, you could concentrate on each line without being distracted but the overall flow is broken.
Or to use a different terminology: when you read a website or a book you use two modes of "scrolling" at the same time. The rough scrolling is done by hand when you change a page of the book or when you scroll down the website with your mouse wheel. The finer scrolling is done by moving your eyes which scan the available content for interesting stuff.
In my opinion scrolling by eye is much more effortless and faster than scrolling by hand so I'd like to try to reduce scrolling by hand as much as possible.
For example on the yc gift page it takes about 44 mouse scroll actions to see 40 items. In contrast I can see all 30 items on the front page with just 1 or 2 mouse scroll actions.
A practical example is this German news page: http://m.focus.de If you visit it on mobile you will see that they managed to show less than 2 full news items per page (At least on my 720p screen). Half a year I visited that page from time to time but now it is completely unusable because you have to scroll way too often.
Afterwards go to http://www.reddit.com/.compact and see how much more comfortable browsing is when you can see 7-10 items at the same time.