Ask HN: Is there anything worth purchasing on Black Friday/Cyber Monday? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there anything worth purchasing on Black Friday/Cyber Monday?

54 pointscoreyp_159 comments

I just haven't seen anything that catches my eye (and many sites make it surprisingly difficult to browse their Black Friday deals). I refuse to go out and shop (it's too cold, & I don't really want to mess with the crowds), but I would buy something online if it was a good price & I had a use for it.

Any suggestions or discoveries?

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The nature of your question in itself indicates that there is nothing you should buy. Buy things if you need them, otherwise leave your wallet in your pocket.

I took it to mean "I have some extra money, and I want something to fiddle with, is there anything that the hackernews readers know of that might be on sale?"

But maybe that's just my question...

I took that point too, and there's also another point... there's software that's on my list for a while (JetBrains and Hazel come to mind, in particular), but since the exchange rate for me is bad, a sale might tip me over the edge.

JetBrains does nice discounts around conferences. PyCharm was 30% off for PyCon for example. I think anyone can use the code whether you attend or not.

If you are into a software architecture, @simonbrown is offering both of his software architecture books for FREE on Leanpub https://twitter.com/simonbrown/status/800340593507438593 https://leanpub.com/b/software-architecture

Thanks. Having started this game in 1997, in some respects fortunately with punched card FORTRAN and hands on use of an IBM 1130, since that sent me straight to the library because I knew there had to be better ways, and being cash strapped right now I'm not in the market for architecture books. But for free? I'll try them for sure, and who knows, may pay him some real money in the future, nothing ventured, nothing gained. At least for me, one good free book has more than a few time resulted in that.

Udemy has a few interesting courses reduced to $0 courtesy of OzBargain https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/276987

If you're a gamer, there's tons of stuff on sale. On Steam you can get Doom for $20, and it is well worth it. I'm also binging on The Division which is $25 with an optional $20 season pass for some extra stuff. If you want something more low key Stardew Valley might be the ticket.

Yeah it's pretty dangerous to browse Steam now... I already purchased 4 games today (even two AAA titles), and I still have 5-6 untouched games from the last christmas sale.

> I only have 5-6 untouched games

FTFY :)

If you're interested in the actual stats for your Steam library, check out the SteamDB calculator[1].

[1]: https://steamdb.info/calculator/

Interesting! 40 of my 102 games haven't been played yet. Jesus christ, I'm gonna have to call in sick next week to catch up here.

I've put two of my JavaScript courses on sale for 50% off:

ES6 For Everyone

https://ES6.io

React For Beginners

https://ReactForBeginners.com

thanks Wes, purchasing now!

Awesome! Seeing a few sales come through from this.

Enjoy it!

I purchased a 1TB EVO 850 from newegg/amazon (both have the same price). But I had a specific need for large fast storage.

Thanks for the heads up! Been meaning to buy one for gf's 2012 MBP, and now seems like the best time.

Yeah, Newegg has a variety of interesting storage deals, I picked up 1 out of 2 $30 refurbished Dell branded Seagate Cheetah drives they had that are the same model as I used 3 of in a computer I built in 2011, all the original drives are of course beyond Seagate's 5 year enterprise warranty service (which is good in my experience). Might save me time and trouble when one of the original drives gives up the ghost.

Apress [1] are doing ebooks for £9.99 and print books for £12.50.

Picked up a copy of Practical Common Lisp for £12.50. Even second hand these are going on Amazon for £25, and lord knows I've been through that book online enough times to know it's about time I got myself a hard copy!

[1] http://www.apress.com/gp/shop/cybermonday?&token=cyber16&wt_...

Thanks! I've already bought PCL, but noticed a couple of newer RDBMS books by C J Date, and add these observations:

I suppose this changes if you create an account and log into it, but the prices are initially quoted in Euros (close the US$ right now), and shifted to dollars after I entered my address in the registration process.

They say free shipping to individuals world wide, and the physical book I bought is going to be printed on demand by Springer Customer Service Center LLC, with the usual delays. And of course the ebook I bought was immediately available; all very slick so far.

PacktPub[0] and PragProg[1] both have discounts on eBooks (50% and 40%).

[0] https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/thanksgiving-2016

[1] https://pragprog.com/

Humble has a nice UNIX book bundle:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle

Top discounts by product category: http://blackfriday.semantics3.com/dashboards/RJ7EP446XUIOLEU... Might aid the discount hunting process, if not the decision making process.

It's worth noting that there are lots of stores not indexed by Semantics3, and Amazon is one of the big ones they miss out.

Amazon is part of the list of sites being tracked. Any reason you felt otherwise?

The urge to buy is real. Just be frugal and enjoy your day :)

I'll just leave it there. Real discount for domaine names, shared hosting and ssl. https://www.namecheap.com/domain-hosting-ssl-deals/black-fri...

Thanks for the link, but current deals all gone (other than Comodo Instant SSL, lots of those left)

New ones at 6am EST

NP, I waiting for .website domain.

There are other hosting deals out there as well. Check out Cloudways that is offering 25% off for 3 months.

Machine Learning Mastery has a 40% discount on all their products using the code "blackfriday": http://machinelearningmastery.com/

HTC Vive is $100 off this weekend on Amazon.

Does the Vive support Macs or Linux yet?

Valve has indicated that support for it is coming soon. Their recent developer conference they demoed it running on Linux. I'm not sure how well it's going to work on Mac with the lack of decent graphics cards unless maybe using a Hackintosh.

Then I'll consider it "soon".

Eeeexcellent. It'll be a cold day in hell before a Microsoft operating system darkens my network, especially the likes of Windows 10.

It is essentially $200 off through the Microsoft Store.

$100 off and $100 gift card

am waiting for the safari books online subscription deal. Last yr they had a 50% price drop.

On Twitter: "sorry, no big sale this year. Contact us via http://bit.ly/1aK0wMg and we are happy to talk about available discounts."

- https://twitter.com/safari/status/798558536905224192

sadboy :(

nearest I saw: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle

OVH Black Friday deals:

https://www.ovh.com/us/black-friday/

Slickdeals.net is your friend. Some TV deals and SSD deals. Amazon discounted all its hardware stuff around 15% it seems. Picked up the fire 4k box for $65.

https://paw.cloud/ is half price all weekend. http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2016/11/24/Black-Friday-... has deals for game creators.

O'Reilly is running a 50% discount on all ebooks: http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/cyber-monday.do

(full disclosure: I'm writing 'Java 9 Modularity' with them, available in early access)

Is it just me, or are some of their prices double the price at Amazon ?

Put some gas in your tank and head out camping for a weekend.

Or take some unpaid leave and spend the time with you family.

He did say it was too cold outside, so maybe camping wouldn't work. :)

I've done my own personal "cost/benefit" for these things.

We might call it "dollars saved / aggravation induced".

Short answer: Ratio is consistently way too low.

Message to retailers: Make my life easier, if you want my business. (Fair price for a good product and support.)

If your in the UK http://www.hotukdeals.com/black-friday lists all the current deals.

For anyone based in Germany/Europe, mydealz.de lists offers, you can sort by "hot" to see the most popular ones. (not affiliated)

Any good deals for setting up a home GPU cluster? Like GTX 1080s, motherboards with multiple PCI Express slots, etc.

I'd love to see aCloud or identify deals on Amazon Web Services training. lets hope that it happens.

Same here, keeping my eye out for exactly this.

Newton Mail subscription is 50℅ off at the moment, which I find is a great deal for their service.

Not really. It's just a marketing scam.

digitalocean had some good deals for cyber monday last year if I am not mistaken. I haven't checked this year.

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