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Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon
- drcube 14y agoCool. You could use this to set up a "Random Amazon Purchase of the Month Club" and have a decent side business.
- j2kun 14y agoI'm surprisingly intrigued by this. It sounds really fun!
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoIt is until it buys "Fifty shades of grey" and a XXL baby doll.
- anabis 14y agoI can see this buying spare parts for things you do not have.
- kyllo 14y agoGood for a conversation piece at parties, if nothing else. "Hey, you guys won't even believe what I got from my random shopper bot this week!"
- lutze 14y agoPersonally, I'd rather not risk having to explain why I just got 55 gallons of lube and an anatomically correct blow up donkey through the mail.
- eclipticplane 14y ago... or did the bot give you a reasonable excuse to family and friends as to why you have a 55 gallon drum of lube and an anatomically correct blow up donkey? Hmmmmm. I sense a startup: "we hide your filthy, disgusting pornorgraphy habits from your family by hiding them amongst 'random' automated purchases. Get six days of boring things like glitter and used wing nuts and the seventh day you'll get your favorite, delicious porn. BUY NOW!"
- bambax 14y agoIt's set to buy only paperbacks and CDs...
- jrabone 14y agoThis is a really cool idea - and it shouldn't be too hard to get it to talk to recommendations, personalisation & wishlist if those APIs still accessible as a web service? However, I haven't used the E-commerce service for a long time and I think it might have been turned off or replaced with something more advertising-oriented.
- ErikAugust 14y agoI think that's what it does: http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-consumerism http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/35454415921/randomized-... It also bought him a Chomsky book on Linguistics and a electronic music CD. And if the bot did that on it's own that'd be a little too spooky.
- jrabone 14y agoNo, the article says right there it uses search results (presumably by scraping). ECS used to be WSDL - real easy to drive from eg. PHP back in the day. I wouldn't want to be the poor sod parsing the retail website HTML (although perhaps the last redesign improved it).
- ErikAugust 14y ago"Every time I run it, I give it a set budget, say $50. It grabs a random word from the Wordnik API, then runs an Amazon search based on that word." You're right.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dariusk 14y agoI'm actually not parsing the HTML at all. Not really. I'm using PhantomJS, which is a headless web browser. Each time I load a page, I inject jQuery and just do a simple JS command like $('#whatevertheIDisfortheform').submit(); It's the equivalent of opening up your console on each page and interacting with it via jQuery rather than a mouse and keyboard.
- ErikAugust 14y agoI hope the bot buys an ebook about horses.
- thirdtruck 14y agoIn this (amusing) context, I presume? http://horseecomics.tumblr.com/ http://horseecomics.tumblr.com/
- ErikAugust 14y agoYeah. Wow, these comics are amazing too, thank you.
- salgernon 14y agoOlder, but my favorite set of flow of consciousness comics: http://spamusement.com http://spamusement.com
- qbrass 14y agoReminds me of: http://xkcd.com/576/ http://xkcd.com/576/
- citricsquid 14y agoThis was done a few years back as the result of an XKCD, the original article is gone, but there's a few articles about it: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages-script http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages... http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20022153-1.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20022153-1.html it's a cool idea. Not sure if I'm imagining it, but I think that someone built this into a web service that you could subscribe to and it would buy things for you every day. Does anyone remember this? I can't find anything via HN search, but I'm sure it was a show HN at some point.
- bieh 14y agoI'm the guy who built the original XKCD-inspired bot -- the original blog post is still around at http://bieh.net/wordpress/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ http://bieh.net/wordpress/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/, though the images have since broken. Possibly the web service you mean is http://www.eachdayisagift.com/ http://www.eachdayisagift.com/ ?
- citricsquid 14y agoYes, that's it! Thanks. Here's the related show HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3825524 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3825524 re: blog post, the wired article (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages-script http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/09/xkcd-packages...) links to http://bieh.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ http://bieh.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/ which is broken (missing the wordpress I think)
- viseztrance 14y agoI normally don't like when someone posts an xkcd link, but this was the first thing that came in my mind http://xkcd.com/576/ http://xkcd.com/576/
- Zolomon 14y agoBeing a native Swede very much into electronic music I was very interested in learning about Ákos Rózmann! He was a complete stranger to me until now. Thank you very much.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alpb 14y agoOff topic: I'm wondering when HN users will figure out how to get permalink of a Tumblr post. Everybody is linking to blog home except companies hosting their blogs on Tumblr.
- jaysonelliot 14y agoIf you look at what he's doing from an art perspective, he's engaging in Generative art, art that is created by process outside the control of the artist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art I usually think of John Cage when I think of generative art, and the way he let the environment or random events become part of his music. One of the coolest things I've learned about recently in this realm is Joseph Nechvatal's Viral Symphony, a musical work composed by a C++ program that seems similar to Conway's Game of Life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_symphOny http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_symphOny
- elteto 14y ago"If you look at what he's doing from an art perspective" What exactly is an art perspective? I buy stuff every month from Amazon to serve different purposes, so that they are pseudo-random if looked from outside without context. That doesn't make me an artist, at least not in my book. I don't want to start a modern art flame fest, but where do we draw the line? I mean, it seems like nowadays anything is or can be art. And if I say that I don't get it, well, then it is my problem for not looking at it from the right perspective.
- mseebach 14y ago> but where do we draw the line? Somewhere around "If you have to explain to people that it's art, it's not."
- jlgreco 14y agoSeems like a fuzzy line still. What if the artist doesn't really "explain" that it is art so much as he tells someone it is art? If, as a classic example, you submit a urinal on it's side to an exhibit, I don't think the act of submission would necessarily be an act of explanation. Of course you can go the other direction, and wonder who this explanation has to be directed to in order to disqualify something as art. If I am a particularly dense person and ask what the point of the Sistine Chapel is, that certainly does not disqualify the chapel's ceiling from being art. Is there perhaps a threshold percentage of the population that has to understand something as art for it to be art?
- stevewillows 14y agoThe two purchases are fascinating. I am curious as to what other purchases of his suggested the CD.
- filipeximenes 14y agodxRoulette uses an non automated, but similar approach. Although you have to manually buy, it still very fun to sort the item wait for it to arrive in a random date since the product comes from china. http://www.dxroulette.com/ http://www.dxroulette.com/
- JaggedJax 14y agoHmm, no mater how many times I try, I always get a V for Vendetta mask as the result.
- adv0r 14y agoyou have no respect for the value of money, time and our planet. You better use your spare time write a bot to feed 80 human beings in poor country. :\ disappointed how this can get so high on HN. Srsly, you guys are loosing it.
- johngalt 14y agoAnd you spend your time commenting on work you don't respect. Why weren't you out farming?
- adv0r 14y agowhat is the purpose of your comment?
- devb 14y agoI thought the insinuation was fairly clear.
- illuminate 14y agoTo point out that there are more things you can be doing for others than getting outraged at a person's lost productivity, if that is your prime concern.
- tossacct 14y agoI'm not sure that the OP was "outraged at a person's lost productivity". It seems like badv0r may have thought that the project could have potential merit if it focused on something like "feeding 80 human beings in poor country" instead of "Buying random things from amazon each month". To be more general, the bot currently buys: <unneeded thing> for <person who can afford it> while it could buy <needed thing> for <needy person, who can not afford it>
- illuminate 14y agoThen they should offer suggestions instead of chastising. Most persons buy unneeded things whether they can afford them or not. The OP ought to take the time and energy they squander on judging others and devote it to helping the needy. Less anger, more good.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- zdgman 14y agoHow is he actually completing the amazon purchase solely via a bot? I know there is no API to automagically buy an item from Amazon. Would love to see a write up of how this is accomplished. EDIT: Noticed he is using PhantomJS and running the process through a browser. Very interesting.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tubelite 14y agoYou know what would be really cool? Write a mini-me program, with enough money that hosting can be funded on interest, with a little left over for gifts. Then, you die (painlessly, after a long and happy life, etc. etc.) The program keeps running, tracking your descendants over time and gives them little random, appropriate gifts from the ghost of great^n grandpa or grandma. I wrote about this in 2007 (https://tubelite.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/autonomous-software-agents-as-trustees/ https://tubelite.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/autonomous-softwar...). Perhaps Facebook is in the best position to do this, help people plan and create their ghosts.
- rijoja 14y agoLet's say that you save 10'000 $ in an account with 5% interest, then you'll have 500 $ a year to spend on presents. If every child has two children the amount children in a generation is 2^n. When they grow up we stop giving them presents for mathematical simplicity. Then it's possible to give every child in the 9th generation a $1 gift a year. Which is quite neat. If we have a generation length of between 25 and 30 years this will be between 225 and 270 years in the future.
- tubelite 14y agoIn the long run, it is highly likely that you will either be an ancestor of every single human, or none of them. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19331938 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19331938) You don't need to give every single one of your descendants a gift. Give 2-5 gifts a year, randomized after filtering out undesirables using a naughty/nice algorithm. Assuming total population remains roughly the same, if enough people did this, it would actually work. Most kids would get gifts from grand^n Santa.
- rijoja 14y agoNice idea and an interesting article. If the goal is to be remembered for as long as possible giving more presents is obviously better. After 9 generations only a small part But some might feel that a enormous list of children with ratings of their behavior would be questionable.
- jastr 14y agoReally funny idea. Are you using http://zinc.io http://zinc.io to ship the stuff from Amazon?
- dariusk 14y agoNope, I'm using PhantomJS, a headless web browser that's mostly used for test automation. I programmed it to log in to the Amazon account, fill out the various forms, and buy/ship the stuff.
- sounds231 14y agoI will be writing a bot to buy me random things from musiciansfriend.