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https://bytebucket.co https://bytebucket.co I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years o

by mNovak 5y ago

https://bytebucket.co https://bytebucket.co I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks. True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.

cobertos 5y ago
Very similar, but for servers, https://labgopher.com/ https://labgopher.com/. It originated from the Reddit r/homelab sub
- hedoluna 5y ago
  great! unfortunately the pound/TB sorting doesn't work.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Sadly the Australia section redirects to ebay.co.au as opposed to .com.au, welp. Noticed this about a year or so ago, maybe more. Set and forget APIs that just work are kind of cool... maybe that's the moral of the story there lol
- Bilal_io 5y ago
  Thank you! I've used this website before, but I had trouble remembering its name last week, I was searching "lab gator" "gator lab"...
peterfield 5y ago
THX a lot great idea. Table alignment is a miss on firefox :) https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png
- mNovak 5y ago
  Ah, yes looks like my hacky double sliders don't look great either. css was probably my least favorite part of this project
grp000 5y ago
That is a seriously good concept. Your metric works too good though, compared to the refresh rate of the listings so all the good stuff is sold out. If you had a mailing list I would definitely subscribe.
- mNovak 5y ago
  Thanks. Yeah I thought about a mailing list, but couldn't think of a way to make it not spam you every single day for the 1 or 2 best listings. But obviously can't aggregate them unless it's a digest of "here's what you missed," which would be slightly amusing.
breckenedge 5y ago
Scraping projects looking for relative deals is fun. Did that way back in the day with Craigslist motorcycles.
jdmichal 5y ago
I have a small maybe-bug report for you. I thought, hey I don't want anything with a HDD, only SSD. So I set HDD to 0-0, and it just filters out everything. Even systems with no HDD disappear.
BoppreH 5y ago
Another bug report: https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5338661733&toolid=10001&mkevt=1 https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5320... 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, and an i5-1035G is misparsed as 64GB RAM and 1035 GB SSD.
exikyut 5y ago
This is great, except it's showing me listings for laptops with 8GB of SSD storage and 935GB of RAM. A flag button may be the most useful practical reaction to this problem. That way you can outsource the problem of faulty reports - and best case scenario even build up a following of trigger-happy users who are helpfully inclined to click the flag button in the future when the occasional glitch sneaks through. Publishing the parser may also honestly be a good idea as well. Not the whole site, just the parser specifically - maybe with instructions on how feed in the results of small-scale scrapes (~100 pages) - so people can understand exactly what it's doing and provide feedback. This is a very community-oriented sort of project IMHO, so by definition you'll wind up with a small following of stragglers if you hang in there; by the same token, it's possible (gain, best case scenario) that leveraging the spare cycles the community might be able to bring to the table may make it viable to maintain a level of quality that would otherwise be very hard to sustain long term.

by mNovak 5y ago

cobertos 5y ago

Very similar, but for servers, https://labgopher.com/ https://labgopher.com/. It originated from the Reddit r/homelab sub

hedoluna 5y ago
great! unfortunately the pound/TB sorting doesn't work.
exikyut 5y ago
Sadly the Australia section redirects to ebay.co.au as opposed to .com.au, welp. Noticed this about a year or so ago, maybe more. Set and forget APIs that just work are kind of cool... maybe that's the moral of the story there lol
Bilal_io 5y ago
Thank you! I've used this website before, but I had trouble remembering its name last week, I was searching "lab gator" "gator lab"...

peterfield 5y ago

THX a lot great idea. Table alignment is a miss on firefox :) https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png

mNovak 5y ago
Ah, yes looks like my hacky double sliders don't look great either. css was probably my least favorite part of this project

grp000 5y ago

That is a seriously good concept. Your metric works too good though, compared to the refresh rate of the listings so all the good stuff is sold out. If you had a mailing list I would definitely subscribe.

mNovak 5y ago
Thanks. Yeah I thought about a mailing list, but couldn't think of a way to make it not spam you every single day for the 1 or 2 best listings. But obviously can't aggregate them unless it's a digest of "here's what you missed," which would be slightly amusing.

breckenedge 5y ago

Scraping projects looking for relative deals is fun. Did that way back in the day with Craigslist motorcycles.

jdmichal 5y ago

I have a small maybe-bug report for you. I thought, hey I don't want anything with a HDD, only SSD. So I set HDD to 0-0, and it just filters out everything. Even systems with no HDD disappear.

BoppreH 5y ago

Another bug report: https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5338661733&toolid=10001&mkevt=1 https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5320... 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, and an i5-1035G is misparsed as 64GB RAM and 1035 GB SSD.

exikyut 5y ago

This is great, except it's showing me listings for laptops with 8GB of SSD storage and 935GB of RAM. A flag button may be the most useful practical reaction to this problem. That way you can outsource the problem of faulty reports - and best case scenario even build up a following of trigger-happy users who are helpfully inclined to click the flag button in the future when the occasional glitch sneaks through. Publishing the parser may also honestly be a good idea as well. Not the whole site, just the parser specifically - maybe with instructions on how feed in the results of small-scale scrapes (~100 pages) - so people can understand exactly what it's doing and provide feedback. This is a very community-oriented sort of project IMHO, so by definition you'll wind up with a small following of stragglers if you hang in there; by the same token, it's possible (gain, best case scenario) that leveraging the spare cycles the community might be able to bring to the table may make it viable to maintain a level of quality that would otherwise be very hard to sustain long term.