

How I hacked my room hunt in SF - dpolaske
http://polaske.tumblr.com/post/65469856095/how-i-hacked-my-room-hunt-in-sf

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rcatsr
Great, now craigslist is going to be filled with a couple real rooms for rent,
the usual spam, and a bunch of "hacker" spam.

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banachtarski
Agreed this is horrible.

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birken
Unfortunately this fails the categorical imperative test. If everybody did
this, the system you are using would be much worse off. You are benefitting at
the cost of other people's wasted time and effort.

So I wouldn't brag about it too much.

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__--__
It's the methodology that's interesting, not the specific context or results.

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bensw
Was considering of doing a similar thing for accepting candidates for my
house. My plan was to take all the responses, strip all references to
locations, and then randomly send them to every listing in every other major
metropolitan area. The one that got the most callbacks I would then callback.
In the end, my roommates read through all the responses and I didn't have to
do any work.

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ocfx
This means you trust the average populations opinion.

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bensw
That was another problem

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jashmenn
I can imagine an unethical candidate reposting a duplicate job (or several
copies) and then replying "sorry, no thanks" to the competition.

This introduces an interesting dynamic: how can you verify that a post you're
replying to is genuine?

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jqueryin
Very interesting... having never had to apartment hunt before in an area I was
unfamiliar with, I find it fascinating that I would've overlooked sounding
interesting in my emails and kept things pretty stock.

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mikesilvis
You mean... If you make yourself sound like a somewhat normal and interesting
person people will want to live with you? I don't understand how this was a
breakthrough for you.

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uxuf
Well that ended abruptly.

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paulorlando
Cool. Easy hack I'll try next time I look for a place.

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nemrow
Thats a pretty sweet way to utilize startup strategies you have learned on the
job to benefit you personally.

