YC admins: The "S" in Sixa is linking to Doblet.
thank you kind stranger! updated.
YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
191–200 of 229 posts
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#192Unless 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…
> 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 problem is that cash often feels like not giving a gift at all. If you exchange fifty-dollar bills with a sibling, it feels pointless. Gift cards can alleviate that fe…
This is where the Asian culture 'gets it right'. Instead of putting money in a regular envelope, they color it red. Now it's a fancy hong bao, or red envelope.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#193Man, I was hoping for books. The YC staff book recommendations are usually good. As it is, there is nothing of value on this list. Most of these are absolute rubbish. But most outstandingly rubbish is Vidcode. It claims to teach code to teens/tweens, but speaking as one myself, this looks like the same kind of condescending, manipulative, "we be down with the kids, yo" crap that attracts teens the same way that a man…
I'm not sure why this is so badly downvoted. Maybe the forced "covered in shit" metaphor was over-the-top but otherwise this is spot on. I'm 27 which I guess counts as an adult but I certainly clearly remember that everything explicitly marketed towards kids or other varieties of "dummy" always felt forced and condescending to me when I was younger.
I definitely should have gone for a different metaphor on that. I thought a lot about how to do that, and in retrospect, I didn't pick the right choice. Hindsight truly is 20/20.
But no doubt a big part of why I got downed so much is because dang reprimanded me (and rightfully so!). If the admins have something, anything bad to say about it, most people don't want to say anything good.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
True for web software - but that's never been true for hardware. Hardware always starts expensive for early adopters and gets radically cheaper as adoption scales up. The cheapest Apple 2 was over $5,000 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) at its release, the IBM 5150 debuted four years later at a more competitive $4,000, and the monitor was separate in both releases. Besides hardware, lots of the other current startups…
From at least the late 90s to recently you were consistently getting more for less with hardware. Things were expensive as they came out, but then got cheaper than the previous alternative. The market moved from a school having a couple of slow computers to everyone having multiple supercomputers. Not only did they become faster but you could do more things with them. These days many things seem to be getting slightl…
>The market moved from a school having a couple of slow computers to everyone having multiple supercomputers.
This is exactly what he says here:
>Hardware always starts expensive for early adopters and gets radically cheaper as adoption scales up.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#195The 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…
"Amazon and Netflix broke down even the movie industry and ended the $70 per tape movie sale price." Is that a typo? When were movies ever $70?
Not a typo, but misleading. Very few people bought tapes when they were $70-$100. The only purchasers were video stores. There wasn't a slow glide, it went from very high down to $20 quickly, a few years after VHS killed Beta.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Not having credit cards? It's fairly common. Even Debit cards are not the sort of things you give to kids. Must be a huge pain in the ass. With modern electronic only debit cards it's really easy to give your kids cards and makes managing money within the family so much easier. Kid texts you after school and says they need $5 to go out with friends? Sure, pull up your phone app and instantly put $5 to their card. It…
> Kid texts you after school and says they need $5 to go out with friends? Sure, pull up your phone app and instantly put $5 to their card. It's almost impossible to cleanly replicate this with cash. Certainly this could be helpful in an emergency but what's wrong with encouraging your children to budget and plan ahead, rather than expecting instant gratification whenever they want it?
You might want to have two accounts for your kid, one for the card and one for "savings". Hence them messaging you to get access to those savings.
In any case, I think cards and online banking give you useful tools that can make it much easier for your kid to learn budgeting and to track their spending.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-re…
When you have a large group (like 6+ people) renting a house outright via airbnb is usually better. It also lets you hang out together in a living room. Also you have more location flexibility. Private room airbnb is probably not the best deal.
If you're renting a large place, I would highly suggest shopping on AirBnB then trying to find the contact information of the owner and hitting them up directly. Large places usually have their own websites and you can save a ton of money since the fee AirBnB charges is a percentage of the total cost (although AirBnB reduces risk).
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you just give kids prepaid Visa/MC cards instead? And I'm not from the US, but the idea of school-age kids not having their own cards sounds a little funny to me.
> Couldn't you just give kids prepaid Visa/MC cards instead? Those come with expirations, a variety of fee structures, etc.
Don't all gift cards?
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a sewing machine it takes less than 15 minutes to tailor a shirt down (just put it on inside-out, pin, and sew). Made-to-measure mail-order dress shirts are an idea from the 1990s AFAIK. A while back I collected some promotional offers from in-flight magazines and online and ordered a big stockpile of white made-to-measure dress shirts. With the promotional pricing it came out to less than $20 a shirt. As…
The issue in my case is not the trunk. I'm a 'gentleman of size' (6'3 300 lbs) which means to find something that fits my neck, I have to buy a shirt large enough to accommodate another large person inside of it with me. I also, do not have a sewing machine, nor do I have a good place to work, or time to do it. I've had trouble finding a place locally that will do bespoke clothing. I would rather not dress like a slo…
You can get a demo shirt from ModernTailor for $20 and then as many perfectly tailored shirts for under $100 as you want. As the earlier commenter said, these companies have been around for years.
Re: YC’s 2016 Holiday Gift Guide
#200The 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…
Markhor doesn't appear to be doing anything new or special. You can get similar shoes for less from makers like Meermin. They're not a venture funded startup though.