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

YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

ycgiftideas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 229 posts

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#131

Post by callmeed »

nostromo wrote: post #37
xiaoma wrote: post #30

The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…

To your point, Airbnb bucks the trend you identified by making travel more affordable and accessible. It's also far and away the most successful company listed.

More accessible, maybe (unless you're black [0])

More affordable, no. In my recent travels to NYC and SF, I was always able to get a hotel room via HotelTonight or Hotwire cheaper than an AirBnB unit. I know its not always an apples-to-apples comparison but even for just a private room (not an entire home), an AirBnB in SF is $100+/night.[1]

All that to say, I think you're wrong.

[0] https://medium.com/stay-woke/i-read-about-this-phenomenon-of...

[1] I randomly checked Dec 18-20 in SF. Hotwire has a 4-star room for $91/night. Most AirBnB private rooms are the same or higher.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#132

Post by teej »

koolba wrote: post #2

Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The one exception would be giving a preloaded credit card to someone who otherwise doesn't have access to one (ex: a niece/nephew that's far away) and only if there are no f…

I own a pair of the Solemn Derbies (https://themarkhor.com/products/solemn-derbies) and I love them. I was in the market for a pair of made-in-the-usa Allen Edmonds but I bought them instead. They're high quality, great construction, responsibly sourced, and the look great. I get compliments when I wear them out.

Apologies for the terrible collage: http://imgur.com/UoFEy80

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#133

Post by idlewords »

tristor wrote: post #59
xiaoma wrote: post #30

The thing that really strikes me about this list is how nearly everything on it is offered at a premium price. One thing I loved about the tech world while I was growing up was that it was consistently doing more with less. Wikipedia displaced Encyclopaedia Brittanica by being both better and free. Hotmail was a clear win over AOL and Yahoo's offerings and then Gmail was faster and handled spam better while giving mo…

This is true in one way of looking at it, but the other way of looking at it is that these are companies offering products that were always out of the price range of the average person, but they've managed to drive the price down. For instance, handmade leather shoes are between $300-$500 for the entry level, but Markhor is selling them for $120. Yeah, maybe your average person can't spend $120 on a pair of shoes, bu…

That is trickle-down consumerism.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#134

Post by aaachilless »

CPLX wrote: post #116
aaachilless wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regard to the comments after the aside: The former model has become a “fad” because of technological progress in e.g. logistics and predictive analytics. The wording “send some stuff to you every month you don’t get to pick the stuff but trust us” belies the fact that this is actually a very difficult problem with a very interesting solution. If some instance of this model succeeds it will be because it managed…

> More generally, building a profitable, sustainable organization of human beings is intrinsically useful and interesting. This last part is less a reply to your post and more a response to a cynical (in my opinion) tone throughout this discussion. I do understand this view, and I share it to some extent. It's easy to be cynical and it's hard to try to make things work. I understand that far more now in my old age th…

I agree with most of this and probably shouldn't have included that last bit because I see that it might indicate otherwise and shift focus from what I think is a more important point.

I guess our disagreement is that I'm not ready to label the wine delivery company as frivolous. It provides, of course, a purely luxury product, but I'm not sure that providing (or investing in) a purely luxury product is ethically or morally deficient or frivolous. If you add in that YC funds many extremely risky companies with highly humanitarian, philanthropic, etc goals, I think it becomes even more difficult to look at specific investments and say "what a shame."

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#135

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #2

Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The one exception would be giving a preloaded credit card to someone who otherwise doesn't have access to one (ex: a niece/nephew that's far away) and only if there are no f…

[deleted]

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#136

Post by xemdetia »

VLM wrote: post #77
Jun8 wrote: post #51

What, no STEM toys!? Have you visited the toy gadget section of your typical store, e.g. Target, BestBuy lately? It's full of crappy stuff marketed under the buzzword "STEM" for unknowing parents. Examples: Construction kits from Vex Robotics, WowWee's CHIP Robotic Dog, etc. etc. Problem with these "STEM revolutionary" toys is that they are not open ended, even with the so-called programmable ones kids get tired afte…

Erector / Meccano is a nice open ended STEM toy that could use some disruption and metrication and modernization and no themed disney licenses please. Unfortunately there is this strange attractor that sucks everyone who trys it into "I wanna make kids version of 80/20 because 80/20 is both cool and insanely expensive" leading to "heres my custom aluminum extrusion of immense expense that works with nothing out there…

One of the things I have found frustrating trying to get Erector/Meccano for a new generation is that I can't seem to find anything that's just a big bucket of parts. The generally available things seem to only be kits, and those which are a bucket of parts are woefully lacking in fun bits.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#137

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dang wrote: post #5
mark242 wrote: post #4

on edit: There are so many of these companies that are basically stylized versions of Alibaba listing pages or are basically re-skinning of some business process that, turns out, doesn't actually need to be disrupted. Transporting gasoline to fuel up someone's car? Really? We're going to be energy wasteful just to shave 10 minutes off someone's week? The other disturbing thing is how many of these gadgets are IP enab…

Snarky dismissals of other people's work are not welcome on HN, so please don't post like this. I tend not to post as many moderation scoldings in YC-related threads, but that was such a bad HN comment that I'll break the pattern for it. Edit: you rewrote your comment to make it (somewhat) more substantive and less snarky. In principle that's fine, but it would have been more respectful to preserve the original conte…

>it would have been more respectful to preserve the original context for the reader. //

Sounds like a fault of the forum [as well] ...

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#138

Post by aaachilless »

Tossrock wrote: post #129
aaachilless wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regard to the comments after the aside: The former model has become a “fad” because of technological progress in e.g. logistics and predictive analytics. The wording “send some stuff to you every month you don’t get to pick the stuff but trust us” belies the fact that this is actually a very difficult problem with a very interesting solution. If some instance of this model succeeds it will be because it managed…

I think automatic rice cooking is a solved problem. There's a device called a "rice cooker", where you pour in the rice and water, press a button, and then later you get cooked rice. No wifi necessary!

Idk, I think there's room for improvement [1].

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/xiaomi-ih-pressure-rice-...

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#139

Post by Nadya »

[deleted] wrote: post #135
koolba wrote: post #2

Unless there's a significant financial incentive to do so (ex: 2-to-1 match), don't give people gift cards. Gift cards are the biggest scam ever pulled by the retail industry, or more specifically, perpetuating the idea that giving cash is taboo. The one exception would be giving a preloaded credit card to someone who otherwise doesn't have access to one (ex: a niece/nephew that's far away) and only if there are no f…

[deleted]

My family cheats at this. We keep wishlists of "items we know we need but can't justify purchasing yet". Then we exchange lists and pick things/a thing to gift. The trick here is you're no longer trying to "justify" the purchase to yourself and you get something you actually need/want instead of something they thought you needed/wanted. It also means you don't need to think hard about what to get.

We've found we appreciate the gifts more because they are something we know with certainty that we'll use. There is still room to "surprise" with what is picked from the list. And in addition, you can pick similar items to items on the list to still throw that bit of "I thought you'd appreciate this too" in there.

Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

#140

Post by vimalbhalodia »

VLM wrote: post #77
Jun8 wrote: post #51

What, no STEM toys!? Have you visited the toy gadget section of your typical store, e.g. Target, BestBuy lately? It's full of crappy stuff marketed under the buzzword "STEM" for unknowing parents. Examples: Construction kits from Vex Robotics, WowWee's CHIP Robotic Dog, etc. etc. Problem with these "STEM revolutionary" toys is that they are not open ended, even with the so-called programmable ones kids get tired afte…

Erector / Meccano is a nice open ended STEM toy that could use some disruption and metrication and modernization and no themed disney licenses please. Unfortunately there is this strange attractor that sucks everyone who trys it into "I wanna make kids version of 80/20 because 80/20 is both cool and insanely expensive" leading to "heres my custom aluminum extrusion of immense expense that works with nothing out there…

I personally think MakeBlock (http://www.makeblock.com/) does a great job of being a modernized metricized replacement for Erector sets.

It's not particularly cheap - probably costs ~$300 to get a decent sized kit or a smaller kit with enough spare parts to experiment.

All of the mechanical parts are machined reasonably well and fit together in a large number of useful configurations - I really like them for rapid mechanical prototyping.

The electronics are basically arduinos with beginner-friendly connectors - haven't used them myself but have generally heard good things about them.

Post reply on HN