71–80 of 84 posts
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...
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Many people do this in the World of Warcraft auction house using a tool called Auctioneer. Was one of my favorite parts of the game back when I played.
It's a little remarkable that a virtually-real auction house (WoW AH) has better auxiliary tools than a real(ish) auction house (eBay). If only I could hover my mouse over items around my house to discover what they are worth on eBay!
1. The WoW auctionhouse has a finite set of goods that can be sold and the titles and identification of the goods are unambiguous.
2. The cost of failure is much much lower if something goes wrong with the tool.
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Many people might buy them just to get airmiles (remember the hack about buying coins from airmile-generating credit cards some time ago?): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126014168569179245.html
Link to buying dollar coins with free shipping to generate airmiles/cashback: http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/?action=directShi...
"The immediate bank deposit of $1 coins ordered through this Program does not result in their introduction into circulation and, therefore, does not comply with the intended purpose of the program."
and
"There is a 4-box $1 coin limit for every 10-day period on any and all $1 coin orders. Beyond that your credit card will not be authorized. If you need quantities greater than this, please send an e-mail before placing your order to directship@usmint.treas.gov explaining why your order should be exempted from the limit."
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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...
I tried this, the site seems much more responsive now. Thanks!
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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 y…
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 theoreti…
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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 laun…
To do this right, you have to be able to change the terms of the auction. Allow bidding for the $1 to start at a penny so it seems like a good deal. Then allow that the highest bidder gets the dollar, but doesn't have to pay... and the second-highest bidder must pay his bid amount, but receives nothing. You should see dollar bills purchased for hundreds of dollars at least. "The only way to win is not to play the gam…
The name is misleading, it actually works this way:
1) You buy "bids", the right to do a single bid 2) Every auction has a timer that ends the auction when reaches zero 3) Every bid placed on an item increases it's price by 1 cent and resets the timer
Products get auctioned for values below 20 bucks, which may seem like a great deal, but every cent costed one buck from the bidder.
Pure genius.
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Many people do this in the World of Warcraft auction house using a tool called Auctioneer. Was one of my favorite parts of the game back when I played.
It's a little remarkable that a virtually-real auction house (WoW AH) has better auxiliary tools than a real(ish) auction house (eBay). If only I could hover my mouse over items around my house to discover what they are worth on eBay!
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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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 theoreti…
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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To do this right, you have to be able to change the terms of the auction. Allow bidding for the $1 to start at a penny so it seems like a good deal. Then allow that the highest bidder gets the dollar, but doesn't have to pay... and the second-highest bidder must pay his bid amount, but receives nothing. You should see dollar bills purchased for hundreds of dollars at least. "The only way to win is not to play the gam…
There's a very strange Brazilian auction site called "Pior Lance" ("worst bid", found at http://www.piorlance.com.br/ ). The name is misleading, it actually works this way: 1) You buy "bids", the right to do a single bid 2) Every auction has a timer that ends the auction when reaches zero 3) Every bid placed on an item increases it's price by 1 cent and resets the timer Products get auctioned for values below 20 buck…
Actually, "site:news.ycombinator.com swoopo" goes on for a while on Google, and that's just one such site...
Edit: Ah, and from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978097 we get http://www.pennyauctiontraffic.com/ . Yow.