Ask HN: Share Your Pain • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Share Your Pain

#21

Post by ebiester » Sun, Jul 15, 2012, 9:56 PM UTC

ljd wrote: post #5

Trivial Pain (if that): I was watching Storage Wars last night and I couldn't help but wonder about bidding patterns. The show has such a rich data set and their bidding strategies are so simple that I would love to see someone break down the metrics on that show. It's rare that someone has chronologically recorded all bets of all competitors and followed up on the asset value after the purchase. Strangely, this real…

The problem is we only see a small subset of the bids. Any bids that the main characters aren't playing on won't be shown, will they? This will lead to selection bias.

Re: Ask HN: Share Your Pain

#22

Post by ebiester » Sun, Jul 15, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

botolo wrote: post #8

My pain is having many ideas for startups and not being able to develop them for lack of coding skills and lack of interest in coding. Give me a drag&drop development system and you will make me happy :)

http://www.wavemaker.com/

Make your MVP in this. You can work out many of the kinks in the idea from this, and get the idea of the flow down. From there,

http://www.balsamiq.com/

and you can start thinking about what your design should really look like. Between the two, you should have a better chance of sharing your vision with someone else.

Re: Ask HN: Share Your Pain

#23

Post by ljd » Tue, Jul 17, 2012, 4:37 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #21

ljd wrote: post #5

Trivial Pain (if that): I was watching Storage Wars last night and I couldn't help but wonder about bidding patterns. The show has such a rich data set and their bidding strategies are so simple that I would love to see someone break down the metrics on that show. It's rare that someone has chronologically recorded all bets of all competitors and followed up on the asset value after the purchase. Strangely, this real…

The problem is we only see a small subset of the bids. Any bids that the main characters aren't playing on won't be shown, will they? This will lead to selection bias.

This is a great point. I imagine whoever wanted to do the analysis would call Storage Wars and try to get them to work with you and give missing information such as that. It would be good PR for them to help out.

I'm mainly interested in how large the leaps are from competing bid to bid relative to the margin actually realized from liquidating the unit. My intuition says that the jumps will be larger on high margin units and they'll be more fine detailed when lower margin is present. Essentially, you're crowd sourcing the value of the unit.

While that may seem obvious, if this was proven to be true the best bets would be very small incremental jumps above the current high bid to signal low margin. If you did that you could convince the other bidder that you have information he doesn't have and since no one wants to be involved in a low margin liquidation the opposing bidder would have an incentive to bow out.

It's creating the allusion of information asymmetry.