
Implementing the auto-buying bot from xkcd #576 - bensummers
http://bieh.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/
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niyazpk
I am tempted to write a bot to submit $1 items that his bot is likely to buy.

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qjz
How 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).

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patrickgzill
Unfortunately you are not supposed to send money via the USPS.

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Bostwick
You 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.

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mentat
That 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>.

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mike-cardwell
A 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.

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templaedhel
I 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.

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JabavuAdams
Yeah, this is interesting, but there are some annoying realities:

1) If you make something like 3 intra-day trades (buy and sell on the same
day) in some defined period (a week?) the SEC will classify you as a "pattern
day trader". To be allowed to do that, you need an account with something like
$25k USD min.

2) There are a few items that people often forget in simplified models that
will completely eat any theoretical profits: brokerage fees, taxes, and
currency-exchange effects (e.g. if you're a Canadian trading US stocks).

3) After all that, you're competing with the big guys who have a deep
knowledge of how trading works, and fast access to more information than you
do. It's an insider's game.

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templaedhel
I have no experience, and little intrest in stock trading. I was however
interested in the AI and automation aspects of this challenge, with the stock
market being a good source of data with a definite but "unknown" solution.
However due to the obstructions you brought to my attention, it seems although
the stock market would not be an ideal application for this.

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JabavuAdams
Now I feel like a jerk for discouraging you. Motivation is fragile. :\

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bieh
Heh, 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 :)

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bieh
Of course the server would choose to die /right now/. I've fixed it, the link
should work again now :)

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jimfl
XKCD has likely inspired more code than any other comic strip.

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Robin_Message
This 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> and more about the artwork at
[http://caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-
slaugh...](http://caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaughter/)

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heyrhett
There 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.

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spectre
trademe 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).

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vog
Just 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.

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steveklabnik
Given the popularity of Wordpress on LAMP, it could be something like
KeepAlive: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-
memo...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memory-
constrained-vps/)

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bieh
I tried this, the site seems much more responsive now. Thanks!

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boyter
I did the same thing when searchforphp hit the front page. Before I disabled
it the server died under the strain. Following it everything was smooth
sailing again.

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happybuy
Very 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/>

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.

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danio
Why 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.

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bieh
Yes, 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.

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patrickk
In 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>

(Not affiliated in any way.)

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ryanjmo
I 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?

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qq66
The more people who sign up, the less interesting the results will be...

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hallmark
If 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."

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Seth_Kriticos
Silent 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.

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trotsky
Considering 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.

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known
Imports goods from China. Refurbish those goods and export them back to China.

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gokhan
The script has 341 followers on Twitter. I love technology :)

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cahit
This 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.

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user24
Amazed it took so long for someone to do this! Start a blog with a post for
each item that it buys!

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mchouza
The bot has a Twitter account: <http://twitter.com/trademe_xkcd576>

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nikster
Wow!! Live already. That didn't take very long ;)

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michael_dorfman
I'd be (much) more impressed if he implemented this one:
<http://xkcd.com/816/>

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bergie
At least <http://xkcd.com/426/> has plenty of implementations, including
<http://cannonerd.wordpress.com/the-tablet-of-adventure/>

