Ask HN: Any good black Friday deals? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good black Friday deals?

122 pointsnagyf194 comments

Do you know any good black Friday deals for tech stuff?

Generally I find Black Friday a bit overhyped, the "bargains" are best checked against price history with (say) CamelCamelCamel before you buy.

Not Black Friday, but in the UK and maybe other countries, Amazon Warehouse is currently doing a 20% off sale, so 20% off the price when you get to checkout.

I've had a few good "As New" things off there in the past, worth having a look.

There's also a 50% off books sale on the UK Warehouse, loads of tech books, though I don't know how many decent ones are left.

Specific Black Friday deals though: Quest Apps on sale:

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/15301901340...

Definitely, it doesn't feel right anymore.

I like what Tutanota does instead: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/black-friday-hype

I really like their service and their attitude towards Black Friday makes me like them even more.

> Amazon Warehouse is currently doing a 20% off sale,

Also...that goes till end Dec.

So might make sense to wait for people returning all their BF crap

Is it possible to do an API request to find greatest price differential compared to historical price of items with > 1000 reviews?

You would think so, I've often wondered similar myself, there's obviously opportunity to increase the chance of finding genuinely good deals but I don't know to what extent Amazon's API and historical data is available generally, these docs look like the relavent ones (eg the pricing section):

https://developer-docs.amazon.com/sp-api/?ld=ASXXSPAPIDirect...

Some apps I really like are on sale. Here are some suggestions:

Web Development:

- ProxyMan - https://proxyman.io/ — web debugging proxy (30% off the first year)

- Tower - https://www.git-tower.com/ — powerful Git Client (50% off the first year)

- DevUtils - https://devutils.com/ — set of small developer tools (50% off)

For overall productivity:

- BetterTouchTool - https://folivora.ai/ — customize input devices (50% off)

- Trickster - https://www.apparentsoft.com/trickster — handy to access recent files (50% off)

For images/screen capturing:

- Affinity Suite - https://affinity.serif.com/ — (40% off for the Universal License)

A great alternative to Adobe's suite. Version 2 is fresh from the oven. Affinity Photo = Photoshop, Affinity Designer = Illustrator, Affinity Publisher = InDesign. The Universal License includes Mac, Windows, and iPadOS apps.

- Xnapper - https://xnapper.com — Screenshot tool (50% off)

- ScreenFlow - https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm — Screencast tool (20% off)

Trickster is something I use every day, many times a day. ScreenFlow is great for screencasts.

Would like to add a few other Mac apps that I like:

DEVONthink — https://devontechnologies.com — is a fantastic Mac app for organizing documents. It's a desktop Evernote replacement for me. (25% off)

Cashculator - https://cashculator.app - Personal finance with a focus on planning and "what-if" scenarios. Like a spreadsheet. (50%, no subscription).

Love BetterTouchTool. It's a must-have to customize your Mac, keyboard shortcuts, automate things you do regularly, etc.

BTT works better than Logitech G-Hub for customizing Logitech mice

Do you have some examples? I see the appeal but aren’t really inspired by the description, could you share how you use it?

I use heavily for keyboard customization. I have all sorts of macros, like moving windows to different parts of the monitor (e.g. left, right, center, top center for video calls), making keyboard navigation more similar across Linux and Mac, launching and positioning apps with a single keystroke, auto-entering common data on a website, and so on.

And there's tons of other use cases (which I don't use), including gestures, controlling gestures, trackpads, MIDI settings, Elgato StreamDeck, and more.

My number one use is a three finger swipe up/down to change tabs in the browser, terminal, IDE, etc. BTT also includes a window manager that lets you drag apps to an edge to half-screen them or snap them to other window edges. It also allows you to create a custom notch bar or custom touch bar, along with many other little tools. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.

No idea why custom gesture isn't baked in macOS itself yet.

There is some list of the Mac Apps

https://github.com/mRs-/Black-Friday-Deals

My apps are 50% off on App Store as well, the most notable for developers:

- ShellHistory (SQLite backend for local shell history, full text search, notebooks and sync via iCloud) 50% off - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shellhistory/id1564015476

- OpenIn (File, Link handler for macOS), V4 (Ventura only) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/openin-4-advanced-link-handler..., V3 (Big Sur+) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/openin/id1547147101 - 50% off as well

AI GENERATION TOOLS

· Thundercontent AI Writer (140+ languages, 20+ tools, based on GPT-3) : $7/ month (usually $49/month)-- https://thundercontent.com

· Article.Audio (Convert articles to audio with AI): $39 Lifetime deal (usually $19/month) -- https://article.audio

I don’t see Thundercontent on discount, shows $24 to me

Worth noting Affinity is a strictly one-time purchase valid forever (or while their licensing servers are up) while offering functionality on par with Adobe. I got their v2 suite at discount.

I just tried three times to buy Trickster on their website and failed each time. The checkout UX is horrendous not letting you go back or telling you why it failed.

ProxyMan looks nice, is it better than Charles?

It's really nice. I bought it last year, but don't use it frequently enough and didn't renew it this year. If you're in the same boat https://mitmproxy.org is really helpful and with `mitmweb` offering a web alternative to their TUI it's really convenient.

If you have ProxyMan you can renew with the discount, too.

+1 for DevUtils

$40/year on regular pricing sounds quite expensive for stuff you have other means of accomplishing.

It's not per year, it's a one time purchase with lifetime (well, "lifetime") updates.

From their website:

  The license is a perpetual license. One license key allows you to use the app indefinitely. You are also eligible for one year of free updates.

  If you don't want to renew your license after one year, you can continue to use the last version of DevUtils that you have for as long as you want.

  You can renew your license here with a 40% discount for another year of updates. That means the renew price is 60% of your purchase price (before discount) and won't be affected if the app price increases in the future. (e.g., $24 for the Basic License)

I have become the thing I hoped to destroy. Sorry!

I've gotten two great "deals" this week.

The first: I bought "unlimited" worldwide maps from Osmand, which I use a TON for offline maps when I bike. It's $9.99 for unlimited worldwide offline map downloads right now. Great deal if you'd like to move away from Google Maps for navigation (not so great for business search, but it's slowly getting there!)

The second: not actually a Black Friday deal, but I recently switched to https://purelymail.com/ for email. It's a one-man show, significantly cheaper than the competition because... it's not bootstrapping some massive startup or running off VC capital. If you just want IMAP for desktop/mobile for cheap, but can't self-host because Google will throw all of your emails into spam, this is a great option. $10/year or less estimated cost. And it's fully encrypted on their servers, not used for advertising, pretty much exactly what you want if you JUST want mail.

Oh, and the Gigabyte M28U 144hz 4k 28" monitor that I use is now down to an all-time-low cost of $450. If you're looking for a beautiful monitor for your home office, this is it.

> And it's fully encrypted on their servers.

I wish we had better words to describe encryption and the specific tradeoffs of each approach. I did not know purelymail, but knowing IMAP I had a gut feeling that things were a bit more complicated than a blanket "fully encrypted on their servers".

Sure enough, reading between the lines of their documentation they can pretty much decrypt any email on an account by just using the password given by the client when connecting to their IMAP server. Since most clients either connect regularly to fetch emails or maintain a long-lived connection to the server, they can pretty much decrypt anything, any time. So it's back to trusting them just like it emails were stored in plain text.

I don't want to pick on this small player, I applaud their effort in pushing email forward, but I have enough with companies using encryption to handwave security concerns. A big example of that is Apple iCloud.

Well said. In their docs they actually call out this exact issue, and mention that they'd like to improve it in the future, but it would require significant work and that's not necessarily worth it for them.

It would be nice to see a lot of competing small-fry players innovating in the email space. In an ideal world, I could just shop around between mail providers with my domain and pick whichever option provides the best price:features ratio for my needs. I was pretty keen on Proton for a while but they're diving deep in the VPN space, and their approach to encryption makes it nearly impossible to use them with simple mail apps like K9 and Apple Mail.

Much like the browser space, it's not healthy for Google to run a near-monopoly of email. We need a healthy number of alternatives out there so they can't push consumer unfriendly standards and creep more and more advertising into their email product.

There are a couple of players in town, namely MXRoute and Migadu (that I know of). The only thing that keeps me off switching to them is, well, bus factor and support. I was on Proton too, and the encryption finagling is what made me switch to Fastmail. Unfortunately for most people, Google IS the internet.

Hi,

> the Gigabyte M28U 144hz 4k 28" monitor that I use

How is the brightness when set to minimum? I have an LG that with brightness set to 0 is too bright to use in the evening (compared to my laptop screen, for example, where brightness 0 is very dim, hardly visible, as it should be)

Thanks

Thanks for the tip on the M28U, just bought one here in Europe for a similar price. The KVM feature is a huge bonus.

I'm pretty impressed by the KVM feature -- it's a little weird that you need to use USB A for the second computer's USB hub connection, but I'm pretty happy with it in general.

FYI: even now, monitors aren't necessarily shipping with the latest firmware. They've improved response times significantly since the early firmware, so it's likely worth your while to update the firmware when you get the monitor. Sadly you need a Windows computer to update the firmware -- if you manage to run the updater via Wine, let me know!

For PC Parts there's usually good links on reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/

There's a few regional equivalents as well. I know of

r/bapcsalescanada

r/bapcsalesuk

r/BaPCSalesEurope

r/bapcsalesaustralia

r/bapcsalesgermany

I'm doing a 50% off sale for my app Recut, https://getrecut.com

It's a simplified video editor that removes pauses and dead air, and creates a cut list you can then import into a "real" editor.

Saves a bunch of time if you're doing talking-head videos, vlogging, podcasts, screencasts... the sorts of content where the first step of editing is to chop out the long pauses and mistakes. I originally built it because I was doing screencasts and wanted the process to go faster :D

Ooh, that's a great app idea! I hate having to do this in my own videos - it takes so long.

Looks nice I probably will pick it up - any thought about adding a "filler" word detection/removal such as "umms" and "ahhs"?

One of these days, probably! It's on my list of things to look into.

Do you find that people use the “remind me on my computer” feature? I like it

It brings in a handful of signups, not as many as I thought it would. Plus the occasional comment about how people like it :)

Makes sense! And by the way thanks for teaching me React two years back, your course was the only thing that made sense to me.

Hey you're welcome! Great to hear it was helpful :)

Hope you don’t mind the Q: does Camtasia support the export format for cuts..? Thanks.

Not right now, no. As far as I know Camtasia can't import XML, so I need to export something in their own format. It's on my list of export formats to add.

Little Snitch is 50% off right now. It's an application firewall for MacOS. - https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

An Anker Power Bank (24,000mAh) has a £40 discount right now on Amazon UK.

This is a really nice piece of tech that has helped me to work outside the house with peace of mind. Can keep my phone charged (which I use for tethering) for over a week, no problem. Drains way quicker when charging my M1, but that one has far less battery issues when compared to my phone.

The discount is real, as well. I know because I bought it recently, but you can also check it against camelcamelcamel or keepa.

Anyone else bothered that they do not specify the energy in watt-hour? Back when USB was 5V it was pretty easy to do the conversion from Ah, how does it work now that USB can negotiate voltage dynamically?

You should be able to calculate the watt hours based on the voltage of the internal batteries. Its likely a 3.7v lithium, so this anker bank would be 3.7v x 24,000mAh = 88.8Wh

The issue is comparable to mileage numbers... I dont trust that at all.

Usually they just multiply the number of cells with their "rated" mAh-value, but who knows what their cutoff voltage is. Also you need to integrate over the voltage (which keeps falling during discharge) and the discharge graph also depends on how much power you draw. Then the 4.2V=>5V (or 9..19V for USB PD) conversion losses are also not counted.

Anker does specify the Wh ratings. Just on the battery itself, not the website. In flyspeck 2.8pt size font (I just checked with my Peak 10x inspection loupe with reticule, the characters are exactly 1mm x-height), dark gray on black for maximum unreadability, that needs a microscope to read. On my 737, it says 86.4 Wh.

The official Anker response on Amazon UK Q&A is "86.4Wh" But yes, it is annoying.

If anyone is thinking of buying a power bank, I strongly recommend those ones that can also start a car. Way less hassle than jumper cables

I've jump started lots of cars over the past 30 years and was super skeptical of these at first. They are pretty incredible. 3-4 starts off of one charge easily and make for a hell of a battery pack.

Just mind the size because they are quite a bit chunkier than average power packs.

edit: I’ve bought a few of these as gifts. I *strongly* prefer the ones with a molded softshell case to manage the jumpers. I haven’t found any from a well-known brand that weren’t just re-badged noname products with a big mark up. Project Farm on YouTube has some of the best product reviews out there, it looks like he’s done a bit of a bake off, might be worth your while watching if you’re looking at these.

I bought one off of Amazon that stopped working after three months, extraordinarily frustrating. Hard to find a decent brand since they all seem to be cheap junk.

This thread reminded me that I was thinking about picking one up, I just looked again and it’s almost impossible to pick from the offerings that are out there.

Can you give an example of one? It blows my mind that this is possible - I mean not the technology exactly, that makes sense, but just that something reasonably portable that I would carry around in case my phone dies can also have the level of utility of jumping my vehicle in a pinch.

The future is pretty cool.

I’ve used some of the NoCo ones for years and happy with them. The Drive has conveniently listed the Black Friday deals!

https://www.thedrive.com/news/black-friday-amazon-noco-jumps...

The battery packs for jumping cars (at least the ones I've seen) are generally more of a size appropriate for putting in a trunk than a backpack or pocket.

I had one a while ago when road tripping in the US, served me a few times, it won't fit in your average jeans pocket but it easily fits in a jacket, you could fit 20+ in your glovebox

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/rP7cR7ffBYrpfZ2Yz7FHdE.jpg

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0096/6764/1402/products/AC...

They put mini jumper cable connectors on the pocket-sized ones now.

This type of thing: https://www.amazon.com/NOCO-GB40-UltraSafe-Lithium-Starter/d...

I've had one for each car since ~2017. I have a portable air compressor that goes with us on camping trips, too. Highly recommended.

That does look like a good discount, but in the US it's still pretty pricey ($100). For my needs, the 535 looks like a better deal — it's $50 and has 30W max. Fine for my M2 MBA and certainly my iPhone and other peripherals. It's 20k instead of 24k, but it's half the price and still has USB-C. Not a bad deal!

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Portable-Charger-Micr...

is this the 140w one that you have?

Yep, the one with the handy digital display.

That's a feature I wish all batteries had. The 737 is twice the weight of my Nitecore NB20000 for not much extra capacity, and I don't have a laptop that draws more then 45W anyway, but I got it for that one feature alone.

How Black Friday works:

Companies release products 6-12 months in advance. On the day of their release they are at their most valuable. Every day that goes by they slowly lose a little bit of desirability. For practicality, and human marketing reasons, companies do not adjust their prices every day to reflect the reduction in demand. Instead they gather all the erosion into one big clump and release it in a frenzy on Black Friday.

So are there "deals" on Black Friday? Not really, in the sense that you are buying a product that is of truly lower value. At the same time, many people don't care about the newness of various products, so are happy to trade that time for money in their pocket. In short, Black Friday is about segmentation than it is "deals". It's a way to charge the most eager top dollar at the beginning of the curve, while also cashing in later with the rest at the end of the product lifecycle.

Thank you.

Certainly true for larger retailers, but there's plenty of small and independent businesses that offer true discounts today. For example, many artists that sell enamel pins keep them at the same price forever. So a discount today is a true discount.

Beyond that, you can also look for any retailer selling gift cards at a discount. Given that gift cards spend at their face value, you know for certain the discount is a real discount.

Gift card is one of most profitable category of items. Every year so many go unused, lost, thrown away. So it is pure profit for retailers.

Thanks.

So do you know any great deals for today?

:D That question is not really answerable, it only depends on what mid-cycle products you're interested in and how much oldness you are willing to tolerate.

:-)

Not only that, but at least some companies just increase the prices slowly before Black Friday, such that what is shown as a discount on Black Friday is not really one. You might end up paying less 3 months after.

Not always. In order to attract business amid all of the other sales, plenty of companies do offer genuine black friday discounts. Particularly when you’re not selling a physical product (think gym memberships or spa days, for example) these sorts of things don’t decline in value each day.

Agree, op is the fundamental impetus, but various supporting mechanisms are also at play.

Create a list of the products you need and try to find deals for this list.

Otherwise, there is a huge chance to buy something you don't actually need, just because it's a good deal. Then it will be a good deal for the seller :)

This. I have a "want list" in my notes and have a weekly check on a few retail sites (if it is a retail item) to see if it isn't suddenly in sale. By now I know the prices by heart so if it's a real deal, I'll notice. This also ensures that I don't get impulse charmed on a day like Black Friday, unless it is really significantly cheaper than what it was in the past 6 months.

Someone compiled a big list of deals on apps, SaaS software, utilities, books, courses, etc and seems to be taking PRs: https://github.com/trungdq88/Awesome-Black-Friday-Cyber-Mond...

$80 software 50% off to take screenshots and that's a deal? Mac app economy is truly crazy.

Just mind blowing to me when we have FOSS software like ShareX which pretty much does the same and more https://getsharex.com/

If you think that’s wild, wait until you hear about Dropbox and rsync.

I always thought that, with Dropbox, you weren't paying so much for the tech as for the storage space. I'm on a free Dropbox plan, which is presumably using essentially the same tech as a paid plan, just with less storage.

Honestly I understand Dropbox more than a $80 screenshot app

But it takes not just screenshots. But "beautiful screeshots"

Whatever that means

It means it doesn’t work when your screen looks like crap. ;)

Retina(tm) screenshots

I'm more of a Greenshot fan, it's small and gets out of the way. Unfortunately only available for Windows.

Greenshot is available on the mac app store now (for $2).

TBF that is 3 licenses – for one license it is $35. Also quite a lot IMO: it's really just a screenshot cropping and editing tool, since macOS has a screenshot tool already.

Cmd-shift-5 brings up a cropping screenshot tool in MacOS. There is a button in the tool to capture to preview which has some editing tools.

I mean, it's worth it because it's been so helpful, but I bought Recut (which takes the silences out of video editing and is on that list) a couple of weeks ago, and now it's 50% off.

I wonder if marketers ever think about how black friday sales annoy customers.

Hey, Recut creator here :) Glad to hear it's helpful! I also hate this feeling of missing a sale by mere days, so I've been offering partial refunds to folks that bought very recently. Feel free to shoot me an email! (in my profile)

Bought myself a Razer Core X (Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosure) for CAD$109.99 a few days ago. Was a discount of 71% off from an original price of CAD$389.99. Not sure if the US site reflects the same kinds of savings.

https://www.razer.com/ca-en/gaming-egpus/Razer-Core-X/RC21-0...

What's the use case for a device like this?

E: Thanks for all the replies. I have a XPS 15 that was, maybe 5 years ago occasionally reliable for playing Doom 2014 at 1080p for half an hour before the gpu would shut itself down, maybe I could have benefited from one of these + a desktop GPU...

If you want to do GPU-intensive work on a laptop that can’t fit a high powered GPU (some of the desktop ones are quite large), then you can put it in an enclosure like this and plug it in to your laptop.

The GPU equivalent of an external hard drive.

Right now (for my use case) it's primarily for GPU pass through into a Windows VM via Qemu/KVM.

If that doesn't work, and since it's just PCIe, I wanna try experimenting with setting up 10 Gigabit fiber to a home server.

I'm considering moving from a desktop with powerful GPU to a laptop + external GPU using a device like this. Would be nice working from a single machine both at home and away.

You can get a lightweight laptop with great battery life, then when you're home, connect it to a desktop GPU for gaming.

Anything that might benefit from using a desktop GPU, but doesn't justify buying a desktop machine.

With the caveat that desktop GPUs are most of the times connected via 16 PCIe lanes. Depending on the workload, reducing it to 4 lanes may seriously bottleneck the GPU.

Adding a GPU to a Mac, or anything with TB3 really.

Keep in mind it won't work on Apple Silicon Macs though, and I think Intel Macs have limited support for nvidia cards in macOS

Hardwarewise or just macos? What if you want to add the GPU to a windows/linux VM?

To my understanding, it's just a lack of support from both macOS and third-party vendors. There are numerous other reports of successful usage in Bootcamp albeit with some caveats.

Regarding VMs, and this is hardware dependent due to IOMMU groups (and is based on a Linux host), but I also recall cases where this is possible on reddit.com/r/VFIO

$199 in US

https://www.razer.com/gaming-egpus/Razer-Core-X/RC21-0131010...

MBP 14" are $500 off sticker again like they were recently. It's still expensive, but the M1 Pro based laptops really are that good and I'm happy as a pig in poop.

M1 Airs are 800 and great for your lower tech relatives.

> MBP 14" are $500 off sticker again like they were recently. It's still expensive, but the M1 Pro based laptops really are that good and I'm happy as a pig in poop.

Where are you finding them? Apple themselves do not seem to have any such discount.

Amazon, this morning at least. edit: checked just now and they're still 20% off.

The VPS provider that I use, Time4VPS has some pretty nice discounts until the 28th of November: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link)

Another already affordable VPS provider, Contabo, also seems to have nice deals: https://contabo.com/en/ (they expire in an hour at the time of writing)

The Namecheap domain registrar that also offers e-mail and other stuff has some ongoing deals: https://www.namecheap.com/domain-web-hosting-ssl-deals/black...

Ambient Weather's weather stations are on sale (20% off some components, and some base stations). That never happens.

Sincerely curious question: Why would one want a home weather station?

Like, are you growing crops at home? Or just curious about hyper-local weather over time?

If you garden then you may want to know your actual amount of rainfall to gauge how much watering you need to do. You'd be surprised how much rainfall can actually vary over a small area compared to a regional average.

And for people in rural areas that are not near other weather sensors, or areas that may not have regular internet connectivity or frequent outages (and coastal areas subject to storms and high winds). And of course weather nerds and sensor nerds, because those MQTT databases won't fill themselves.

Also if you get a good enough weather station you can feed the data to NOAA and improve the accuracy of your local forecasts.

Yes, growing crops. The hyper local weather has been drastically different the last few years (dry; redwoods are stressed, etc).

Also, there is no vaguely-accurate local weather station for our place (internet services report wind speeds and temps that are routinely off by 20% / 10 degrees F, and rainfall that is off by 5x)

They're good, too. Accurate and good battery life.

I have mine feeding to Ambient Weather, but also a custom API endpoint that feeds the data into a local database, so I can use my own software/scripts to do as I please without having to make external API calls.

How do they compare to the Ecowitt stations?

I've been looking for a station to integrate into my home automation system.

Proton Unlimited (ProtonMail, Drive, VPN, Calendar) is 40% off the two year plan (172.56 €) or 35% off the 1 year plan (93.48 €). Good for those who like the service.

I'm developing microtonal algorithmic music, leaning towards chiptune sound, and for sounds/timbres/instruments I found the Plogue synthesisers to be the best - https://www.plogue.com/index.html - they have 3 great FM-synthesizers/emulators of Yamaha chips: OPL2, OPN from megadrive, and DX7. Bought 2 of them on this black friday.

I put off buying a new gaming laptop for my daughter until I could find one with decent specs for under US$1000. I'd check every week or so. Finally, thanks to Black Friday, I found two yesterday that had just crept under.

Asus TUF F15 at B&H: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1702433-REG/asus_fx50...

Acer Predator Helios at Best Buy: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/acer-predator-helios-300-15-6-f...

They're really almost identical; I ended up buying the TUF (which has since gone up but only by $20) because it had a larger SSD. I'm sure somebody else can do better - please comment here if you do! - but this seems to set a pretty good benchmark.

I owned the previous generation of the Asus TUF, the A15, along with my wife, and can recommend it.

My experience with these low-end gaming laptops is that the screens are low quality. You might buy her an external monitor and a wireless keyboard + mouse so she can use it in clamshell mode.

But those are fantastic deals -- kind of jealous actually. Last year I paid ~$1,400 on Black Friday for an MSI GE76 Raider 11UE that has these specs:

  > 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, 17.3" FHD 144 Hz, i7-11800H (11th Gen), RTX 3060

Computing advances at insane paces.

I picked up some discounts on recurring software/app subscriptions I use:

Fitbod Elite - Workout tracking/planning - 40% off - 47.99 annually - I was paying 12.99$ a month!!!

Plex Pass Lifetime - 25% off - 90$ once - Regular $120

I have used YNAB for budgeting for years. I wish I could find a discount on that. Still keeping an eye out for any other similarly useful deals on stuff I already pay for.

- Copylime - https://copylime.com is an amazing AI writing tool that I personally had the chance to use.

It can help you write anything: from a cold email to a Facebook Ad to a blog post...

It has super affordable and generous Black Friday deals:

-> One-time $6.99 for 200 credits

-> One-time $11.99 for 300 credits + 25 FREE

-> One time $16.99 450 credits + 50 FREE

'Black Friday' - Another consumer's day in the year when everything gets marked up so you can have your discount.

Maybe for you. Myself and my colleagues have found good deals where things aren't marked up - your experience is hardly the standard, and it's quite rude to imply that it is.

Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless headphones for $228 (normally $350) at pretty much every store (Sony, Amazon, Best Buy, etc). Just got them and they are great but I never had wireless headphones. They do take 10-20 seconds to connect to my iPad, but that might be because they are also set up with my phone.

I considered the newer version but the reviews made it seem like it wasn't a huge upgrade and in some ways a downgrade, like the newer version doesn't fold to a smaller size.

I have the newer XM5s. The main reason for me to go with them instead of the cheaper XM4s was the call quality.

I use my headphones very often in conference calls and the XM5s have excellent microphones compared to their predecessors. Side note: before, I have tested the Bose QC45 but those microphones are absolutely garbage. Sad, because the QC35 microphones were good.

I don’t mind that the XM5s don’t fold anymore. In a way I like the new design better compared to my wife’s XM3s.

"Used - Good" Sony WH-1000XM4 on Amazon seems to have an additional discount when get to checkout. I just picked up a pair for $148.26

Careful buying used stuff off Amazon. I've received duds more often than not. It's patently obvious that Amazon doesn't actually do any QA/checking of stuff they sell as "used" - I bought a pair of headphones once where one of the ears was simply not working, something that any tester would catch immediately. The lower price is not worth the hassle of having to return if it doesn't work.

- Easy-Peasy.AI - https://easy-peasy.ai - AI content assistant, 40% off

- Laracasts - https://laracasts.com - Screencasts for modern developer, 45% off

- DevUtils - https://devutils.com/ — set of small developer tools, 50% off

Not sure if it's available in other countries, but in France you have Dealabs which allows you to vote on deal and offers a bit like on reddit, allowing the community to highlight the best bargains.

It's also used as a commercial device by companies directly nowadays but the good deals there are usually worth checking out.

https://www.dealabs.com/

Slickdeals is the (American?) equivalent https://slickdeals.net/ .

If you scroll down to the very bottom, it tells you it's part of the Pepper platform and you can select the local version from the dropdown menu. I check it out every now and then and have a few alerts set for things.

https://ozbargain.com.au/ for Australia

https://hukd.com for the UK equivalent.

San Francisco Symphony has a 50% off for all seats, which is pretty sweet if you listen to classical music.

Sadly Michael Tilson Thomas has retired in March due to being afflicted by brain cancer (glioblastoma). I lost my aunt to that horrible, atrocious disease, and wish him the best. Apparently there still are some performances of his scheduled in January.

- 50% off https://medium.com yearly subscription

- 20% off https://getimg.ai (text-to-image and AI editor) monthly subscription for 3 months

Picked up an m1 macbook air for $780 from Microcenter

PragProg has 40% off with a potential additional 30% off on a future purchase.

The coupon code is on their blog.

Not The Pragmatic Programmer :(

INR 750/-

Who knows, they might ship to your location?

The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition your journey to mastery (Indian B&W Edition)

https://amzn.eu/d/isce36n

Hot lead! Thanks for sharing

AMD slashed the price of the Ryzen 9 series CPUs this week. A 7950X now goes for $550, down from $700.

That said I'm not sure if this is a Black Friday deal or a permanent reduction to be price-competitive with Intel Raptor Lake.

It's a trap. Notoriously, electronics bought for Black Friday are the worst batch available. You can expect higher error rates and technical issues for CPUs and GPUs bought during BF.

This sounds a bit conspiratorial to me. Do you have a source?

It is a bit conspiratorial. Since everything that’s is being made is shipped immediately and nobody has a warehouse to store bad Black Friday electronics I would take such statements with a grain of salt.

Not so conspiratorial, I don't know about AMD but companies like Samsung do sell modified SKUs (I believe mainly TVs) with generally worse processor power than their not BF counterparts. A quick Google (or HN even) search should bring up a few articles about this behavior.

They also have store-specific models which may be the issue. All subtly different and generally only the base model is reviewed.

Eh? Source?

Then you just RMA them. Problem solved.

They lowered the prices everywhere, not Black Friday specific. PC demand has collapsed due to the coming recession.

SimulaVR (https://simulavr.com) is offering a $100 discount to Hacker News preorderers: use the code "DISCOUNT_HN" at checkout.

I'm an indie author and my "All books bundle" is $10 (normal price $28) - https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/all-books/FestiveOffer (Topics include Linux CLI tools, regular expressions, Vim and Python)

I've also collected deals from other indie creators, publishers, etc on my blog (https://learnbyexample.github.io/programming-deals-2022/). Some highlights:

* Python books by Michael Driscoll - https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2022/11/22/python-black-f...

* Python Morsels - https://www.pythonmorsels.com/pricing/

* Boost Your Django DX - https://adamchainz.gumroad.com/l/byddx and Speed Up Your Django Tests - https://adamchainz.gumroad.com/l/suydt

* Python, Git, and Pandas courses - https://twitter.com/reuvenmlerner/status/1595402066213601280

* Practical Guide to Technical Blogging - https://bhavaniravi.gumroad.com/l/technical-blogging/WRITELI...

* Complete Guide to CSS Flex and Grid - https://shrutibalasa.gumroad.com/l/css-flex-and-grid/BlackFr...

* Explain Ideas Visually - https://twitter.com/OzolinsJanis/status/1595743978531348480

* Leanpub Monthly Sale - https://mailchi.mp/leanpub/monthly-sale-2022-november-black-...

* Infosec - https://github.com/0x90n/InfoSec-Black-Friday

My React codebase generator is 40% off for the next few days: https://divjoy.com

This ASUS Chromebook for $80 on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AK6oDD

You can now buy three new laptops for the price of a Raspberry Pi 4 kit.

Ahh, the Canada tax. $153 + $34 to ship on Amazon.com

$312.07 + $5.54 shipping on Amazon.ca

can Ubuntu be installed on a (former) chromebook?

Check the model on https://mrchromebox.tech/ but I'm not sure if you'll have good luck with an Arm based chromebook.

I've had good luck with Acer Aspire windows laptops. They're basically Intel/AMD Chromebooks, and are in the $100-$500 range.

Keyboards and trackpads are generally tolerable (so, 75th percentile or so).

I wish they'd make windows ARM laptops with less locked down (than Chromebook) BIOSes (that would also run Linux), but windows on arm is perpetually non-viable.

The pine book pro is also a decent choice for a cheap Linux laptop.

I'm offering 25% off all plans for https://www.paced.email and https://www.vend.email with BF2022. Not really had much success with BF/CM in the past, but alas, I'll try again this year now the products are in more solid positions.

TainwindUI all access bundled with Refactoring UI book for free, pretty good value for engineers looking to get better at design.

This is actually pretty good, I've just started learning Tailwind, and was going to buy the book. Thanks!

Free? It's 30% off.

I read this as “The book is included”

I think they used to sell the book for 150$, ui for 299$, so yes 30% off the bundle, I looked at it as, free book but with full subscription.

I'm doing a 50% off (first year) for my SaaS KTool, https://ktool.io

It allows you to send multiple types of content to your Kindle: Reddit posts, Hacker News discussions, Twitter threads & newsletters. It supports multiple file types too: PDF, DOCX, markdown etc.

We're running a deal for 38% off ($99 vs $159) for a yearly membership to StackAbuse.com. We have a number of data visualization courses, guided projects, and a pretty extensive course on Deep Learning for Computer Vision.

https://stackabuse.com/

Here's the list of Top Amazon Black Friday deals which are currently active - https://thegadgetlite.com/2022/11/amazon-black-friday-deals-...

FYI, they don't list prices here and have incorrect photos for at least some items (Apple Watch 8 shows an image of an AWU).

Thanks for the information, I saw it too, but what I like about them is that they are constantly refreshing it with new offers.

The best deals are usually in software. For physical goods, find a price tracker.

That being said, I grabbed a lifetime Laracasts subscription for $219 - about 2 years of the ordinary yearly price ($99, on sale at $54). Great resource for new & rusty Laravel developers.

DxO https://www.dxo.com/fr/ 50% off https://www.dxo.com/en/

These Apple deals are good till Monday...

https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/deals/apple-black-friday...

For those of us old enough to remember when holiday sales really did start on the day after Thanksgiving, in my area, most of the shops started their Black Friday sales on Monday. If you waited until today, you missed out on a lot.

Many things only dropped today. At least in Canada

There were a few good ones which started before today but surprising number of good ones only today.

Most of the shops in the UK started their sales last Thursday

We put together a bundle, mostly engineering soft: https://resources.youteam.io/bfcm-bundle-deals-youteam

Every Layout. Not directly for specific solutions and components but more to get inspired from them and from latest CSS capabilities they use (seeing them in action beats reading specs). Updates for life are promised.

rOtring 800 is down to $20. Lost mine a couple weeks ago and was really bummed.

> rOtring 800 is down to $20. Lost mine a couple weeks ago and was really bummed.

Where? I found it listed on the rOtring site (https://www.rotring.com/pens-pencils/pencils/rotring-800/SAP...), but they don't clearly give any option to buy that I can see.

I couldn't find an option to buy directly from them, either. It's $21.29 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AZWNS84/

Yeah, on Amazon. Whoops, forgot to specify.

I am addicted to Rotring pencils. I already have more than I will use in a lifetime (56). I have taken to gifting them to my loved ones. I am not sure all appreciate the quality, and the longevity of these pencils, but for those who do, this is a gift greatly appreciated.

That said, I was unable to resist myself and bought four to gift to my direct reports this holiday season, so, thank you OP!

AI GENERATION TOOLS

Thundercontent AI Writer (140+ languages, 20+ tools, based on GPT-3) : $7/ month (usually $49/month) -- https://thundercontent.com Article.Audio (Convert articles to audio with AI): $39 Lifetime deal (usually $19/month) -- https://article.audio

We're doing 50% off CodeInterview Pro (coding interview tool). So $24.50/m instead of $49/m for new customers. Link: https://codeinterview.io/pricing

Coupon code: BLACKFRIDAY2022

Razer Huntsman Elite is at $120 instead of $200.

Adding to this: ~30% off Keychron keyboards (https://www.keychron.com/pages/bfcm-2022) for those who've been burned by Razer peripheral drivers before. I love my keychron, if you use a Mac I think it's the nicest mech keyboard out there since they offer versions with a proper mac CMD ctrl-opt-cmd layout.

That is a keyboard, for anyone curious.

Dynavap has some pretty killer specials. Buy one get one on their B model!

Any technical courses do you guys recommend?

Disclaimer: i work at corise.com and am one of the engineers building the platform.

If you like:

- learning from real industry experts

- learning in small cohorts

- having live lectures

- working on real-world projects each week on order to finish the course

Check out corise.com [1]

Yearly subscription for unlimited courses is down to $750 from $1000 and you get a single course for free as a gift to someone.

[1] https://corise.com?utm_source=HN

Edit:

We also occasionally run 100% free courses for 1000+ students (also broken down in smaller pods), for those you just need to apply by filling out the form:

https://corise.com/course/python-for-data-science?utm_source...

https://corise.com/course/sql-crash-course?utm_source=HN

I've had good results with ACloudGuru and they have a 50% off sale right now. That is a better deal than they had last year.

https://acloudguru.com/

+1 for ACloudGuru. I've been a happy customer of theirs when studying for AWS certs.

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