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Implementing the auto-buying bot from xkcd #576
- niyazpk 16y agoI am tempted to write a bot to submit $1 items that his bot is likely to buy.
- JonnieCache 16y agoLet's start a new monetarist paradigm: low frequency trading.
- eru 16y agoMr Buffett may have prior art on that.
- nayanshah 16y agoGood luck for that. Time for battle of the bots ...
- qjz 16y agoHow about a $1 bill priced at $2 w/free shipping? From every angle, it would be an interesting experiment. From the consumer's standpoint, it challenges the notion of free shipping. From a seller's standpoint, it challenges the notion of easy money (would you really want to stuff a thousand envelopes if the item sold well?). From the middleman's standpoint, it might help to identify bots (or possibly even money laundering).
- DEinspanjer 16y agoYou just gave me an idea, but I don't have time to implement it so I'll give it away. Maybe if someone makes money with it, they could sell me my bill. $1 bills priced at $2 w/free shipping.. the hook, the bills are listed by birthdates contained in the serial number. heh
- GavinB 16y agoGo with $2 bills at $3 w/ free shipping. Some people would order it just to have $2 bill.
- baddox 16y agoYou can probably just ask for $2 bills at a bank. Last I checked, they still mint brand new ones to replace damaged ones removed from circulation.
- yoak 16y agoA bunch of engineers at idealab did this back during the bubble. The idea was the saturate Pasadena, CA with $2 bills, particularly as retailers, lacking anywhere to put $2 bills in registers, tended to quickly re-release them. We tried buying them a thousand at a time from banks. One time a manager came out to talk to us about it and asked what we wanted them for. We explained and his response was, "So we're going to get them all back."
- thorax 16y agoYou'd be undercutting these guys: http://coins.shop.ebay.com/Federal-Reserve-Notes-/40029/i.html?rt=nc&LH_FS=1&_nkw=birthday&_fln=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m283 http://coins.shop.ebay.com/Federal-Reserve-Notes-/40029/i.ht...
- GFischer 16y agoMany people might buy them just to get airmiles (remember the hack about buying coins from airmile-generating credit cards some time ago?): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126014168569179245.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126014168569179245.html
- nodata 16y agoLink to buying dollar coins with free shipping to generate airmiles/cashback: http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/?action=directShip http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/?action=directShi...
- patrickgzill 16y agoUnfortunately you are not supposed to send money via the USPS.
- Bostwick 16y agoYou could send a check instead, payable to CASH. Although, your bank might get suspicious if hundreds of people start cashing small checks against your account.
- mentat 16y agoThat would be a pretty bad idea since checks include all the information someone needs to make hard to reverse withdrawals from your account. Knuth used to send checks but no longer does. See http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html.
- jcl 16y agoFWIW, it sounds like the OP is in New Zealand.
- lancewiggs 16y agoYes - It's for Trade Me, which is the dominant auction site in NZ - and has better trading stats per person than pretty much any national eBay site.
- alextgordon 16y agoSnopes says that's not true: http://www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp http://www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp
- yoak 16y agoTo do this right, you have to be able to change the terms of the auction. Allow bidding for the $1 to start at a penny so it seems like a good deal. Then allow that the highest bidder gets the dollar, but doesn't have to pay... and the second-highest bidder must pay his bid amount, but receives nothing. You should see dollar bills purchased for hundreds of dollars at least. "The only way to win is not to play the game." </wargames>
- tomjen3 16y agoAh the dollar action. The evil part of me wants to launch an online auktion house that runs all its actions that way. The lazy part of me figure it is too much work.
- yoak 16y agoYeah, the busy part of me has too many other things to do as well, but if you need someone to feed you dozens of other ways to use game theory to abuse people, it'd be worth it just for all the headdesk in seeing them implemented.
- BoppreH 16y agoThere's a very strange Brazilian auction site called "Pior Lance" ("worst bid", found at http://www.piorlance.com.br/ http://www.piorlance.com.br/ ). The name is misleading, it actually works this way: 1) You buy "bids", the right to do a single bid 2) Every auction has a timer that ends the auction when reaches zero 3) Every bid placed on an item increases it's price by 1 cent and resets the timer Products get auctioned for values below 20 bucks, which may seem like a great deal, but every cent costed one buck from the bidder. Pure genius.
- jerf 16y agoThere are a ton of these. Here is one of several times HN has talked about them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700143 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700143 Actually, "site:news.ycombinator.com swoopo" goes on for a while on Google, and that's just one such site... Edit: Ah, and from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978097 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978097 we get http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/ http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/ . Yow.
- spectre 16y agoselling $1 bills would likely be difficult using the bot in the article because the site (trademe.co.nz) is only in New Zealand where the smallest bill is the $5 one. Although there are probably other equally effective sales you could run using $1 and $2 coins.
- xenophanes 16y agoThis will be tricky. Soon people will copy your bot. Then neither of you will make sales because he searches for rare items. Maybe then you start putting bizarre titles and explain what you're selling in a field his bot doesn't worry about. And don't forget you can calculate how much money the bot has available from its Twitter feed, so you can price accordingly!
- mike-cardwell 16y agoA neat bot would be one which automatically buys and then resells things with a markup. It would figure out the usual price an item goes for on a website like Ebay, and purchase it if the price is set far enough below.
- stygianguest 16y agoA classic case of arbitrage. But it seems to me that it would be quite hard to achieve on ebay. You need to have very little overhead, mailing stuff isn't usually that cheap. Drop shipping --send things directly from seller to buyer-- is allowed on ebay but has many restrictions. It would be very interesting to see if you could get some heuristics that choose products that are at least moderately useful instead of screen protectors and (exploding) batteries for various mobile phones.
- chime 16y agoThe mailing/shipping could be handled by Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/fba/fulfillment-by-amazon.html http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/fba/fulfillment-by-amazon.ht...
- Robin_Message 16y agoEspecially if you delay sending the seller a postal address long enough to find a buyer.
- nayanshah 16y agoThat is a neat trick but highly unlikely. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4918184.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4918184.stm is impossible.
- templaedhel 16y agoI have always wanted to try something like this with stocks or commodities. Make a bot watch the market, and buy and sell. I even got far enough to imagine some sort of genetic filtering, aka give the master bot 10k, then it distributes it to 10 bots, all which are slightly different, they spend it, the master takes any profit above 1k and invests it in another bot that is a combination of the best 2. Etc. That way your max loss would be 10k, and you might make some money.
- user24 16y agoAmazed it took so long for someone to do this! Start a blog with a post for each item that it buys!
- bieh 16y agoHeh, cool - I was going to submit this myself after it bought a few more items, but I guess I was beaten to it. Any questions, or suggestions for smarter ways to select items to buy, feel free :)
- bieh 16y agoOf course the server would choose to die /right now/. I've fixed it, the link should work again now :)
- bieh 16y agoShould it go down again - there's a mirror at http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/
- xenophanes 16y agoScan the item description field and buy items with lots of long words!
- dkokelley 16y agoHow do you make sure you order tangible items? Lots of intangible items sell on eBay, like ebooks and other digital goods. Wouldn't this undermine the goal of receiving packages?
- tcdent 16y agoInstead of running it once per day, you could run it hourly. Rank the items with the same algorithm, but take into account time left on the auction. An item expiring soon that scores really high could be purchased early so it doesn't get away. Items expiring later could be watched and dumped if the price goes too high, or determined to be worth the extra expense, if the amount is available in savings, so the more expensive good items don't get away either.
- danio 16y agoWhy just restrict the search to buy-now items? In my experience more of the esoteric stuff seems to go on straight auctions and buy-now is used mainly by commerical retailers.
- bieh 16y agoYes, I plan to support things other than buy-now. This was just the simplest way to get something running. My plan is to have it wake up every hour, check if it's won something in the last 24h, and if not then do a search for items to bid on that are closing in the next hour.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoI'd be (much) more impressed if he implemented this one: http://xkcd.com/816/ http://xkcd.com/816/
- bergie 16y agoAt least http://xkcd.com/426/ http://xkcd.com/426/ has plenty of implementations, including http://cannonerd.wordpress.com/the-tablet-of-adventure/ http://cannonerd.wordpress.com/the-tablet-of-adventure/
- vog 16y agoJust a small announce on HN, and the site is down. Why does most blog software fail at simple tasks like delivering static content? Apart from comments and quick corrections, blog articles _are_ nothing more than static content. And I'd be happy to not see any comments due to high server load, as long as I can read the article.
- steveklabnik 16y agoGiven the popularity of Wordpress on LAMP, it could be something like KeepAlive: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memory-constrained-vps/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memo...
- bieh 16y agoIt's working again now. Although I had to lower the number of maxworkers to get it stable, so it may be slow. And yeah, I'll be investigating why it's so slow tomorrow after the heat dies down. I think this is the first time that wordpress instance has served more than a few hits per day, so I'm kinda not surprised it's gone horribly wrong. Mirror at http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/
- drusenko 16y agoThe Wordpress default install is horribly slow out of the box. The sad reality is that most blog software is not tuned to serve any reasonable number of pageviews by default. It's one reason why letting someone manage all that for you makes sense. (Shameless plug) At Weebly we spent a lot of time making sure that our blogging engine is very optimized. We have free users -- they don't pay us any money, we don't place any ads on their site, and they even use their own domain -- hit the front page of Digg/Reddit/HN all the time, and we can easily handle it in stride.
- patrickk 16y agoIn the book "Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers" by Michael Schrenk, there's a topic that deals with automatic procurement and 'sniping' for those who are interested in reading further. See #19 on the section list for a description: http://www.schrenk.com/nostarch/webbots/DSP_inside.php http://www.schrenk.com/nostarch/webbots/DSP_inside.php (Not affiliated in any way.)
- gokhan 16y agoThe script has 341 followers on Twitter. I love technology :)
- Seth_Kriticos 16y agoSilent prayer for your soul, only $1, no shipping cost! No, seriously, I like his crazy optimistic attitude. Probably get some fun stuff out of it. Non the less, there are really people selling this kind of enlightened service on eBay, not for $1 though.
- known 16y agoImports goods from China. Refurbish those goods and export them back to China.
- jimfl 16y agoXKCD has likely inspired more code than any other comic strip.
- ryanjmo 16y agoI would pay $20 to have this set up for two weeks for me. That would give you $6 you could keep for yourself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Business here possibly?
- qq66 16y agoThe more people who sign up, the less interesting the results will be...
- cahit 16y agoThis would be much more interesting if he spent the money on auction items, instead of "Buy Now" stuff where the value is not much more than the price.
- heyrhett 16y agoThere is clearly some confusion in this thread. He didn't actually make the $1-buying ebay bot from xkcd. He made a completely different buying bot for some new zealand auction site: trademe.
- spectre 16y agotrademe is pretty much just the New Zealand version of ebay (albeit with a better reputation and more engaged community). They are also impressive because they cloned ebays business model early enough to prevent ebay from dominating the New Zealand online auction sector (as ebay did in Australia with ebay.com.au) and sold in 2006 for $700 million (NZD) ($550m in USD).
- trotsky 16y agoConsidering the environmental impact of door to door shipping and the low chance the items will get any significant use, it's almost like the program is optimized to promote global warming over any other goals.
- Robin_Message 16y agoThis reminds me of the artwork by Caleb Larsen, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. It's a box that sells itself on eBay for a higher price. As a condition of buying it, you accept it can sell itself again, and so on. Recursion, profit, AI - what's not to like? You can see its latest auction at http://atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com http://atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com and more about the artwork at http://caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaughter/ http://caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaugh...
- happybuy 16y agoVery similar to some of the automated logic I needed to create for price tracking & prediction for my new startup www.happybuy.com. What I found was that the biggest savings list: http://www.happybuy.com/search//by-savings/ http://www.happybuy.com/search//by-savings/ Needs to be quite intelligent to filter out a lot of product noise. A lot of this is due to pricing manipulation whereby a price is low but the shipping is high. Also a lot of the products with the biggest savings aren't that useful :) We've managed to improve the value of the list but are constantly tweaking it to get a good balance of savings and useful products listed. Its especially important as we use a bot to auto-tweet the best saving of the day through twitter & facebook. Trying to get a bot to do this sometimes produces unintended (and often interesting) results.
- hallmark 16y agoIf the Apple App Store had an API, I would be tempted to write a bot to buy me a highly rated app every ~3 days. Didn't try very hard, but I was unable to determine whether the Android Market has an API for purchasing paid apps. In that case, the Android phone could be the bot! "Bzzzzztt. I bought this app for you. Hope you like it."