Implementing the auto-buying bot from xkcd #576

http://bieh.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/

by bensummers • 16 years ago

333 82 16 years ago

bieh.net

niyazpk• 16 years ago

I am tempted to write a bot to submit $1 items that his bot is likely to buy.

JonnieCache• 16 years ago

Let's start a new monetarist paradigm: low frequency trading.

eru• 16 years ago

Mr Buffett may have prior art on that.

nayanshah2• 16 years ago

Good luck for that. Time for battle of the bots ...

qjz• 16 years ago

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).

DEinspanjer• 16 years ago

You just gave me an idea, but I don't have time to implement it so I'll give it away. Maybe if someone makes money with it, they could sell me my bill.

$1 bills priced at $2 w/free shipping.. the hook, the bills are listed by birthdates contained in the serial number. heh

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

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

yoak3• 16 years ago

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 game." </wargames>

spectre2• 16 years ago

selling $1 bills would likely be difficult using the bot in the article because the site (trademe.co.nz) is only in New Zealand where the smallest bill is the $5 one. Although there are probably other equally effective sales you could run using $1 and $2 coins.

xenophanes2• 16 years ago

This will be tricky. Soon people will copy your bot. Then neither of you will make sales because he searches for rare items.

Maybe then you start putting bizarre titles and explain what you're selling in a field his bot doesn't worry about.

And don't forget you can calculate how much money the bot has available from its Twitter feed, so you can price accordingly!

mike-cardwell• 16 years ago

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.

stygianguest• 16 years ago

A classic case of arbitrage. But it seems to me that it would be quite hard to achieve on ebay. You need to have very little overhead, mailing stuff isn't usually that cheap. Drop shipping --send things directly from seller to buyer-- is allowed on ebay but has many restrictions.

It would be very interesting to see if you could get some heuristics that choose products that are at least moderately useful instead of screen protectors and (exploding) batteries for various mobile phones.

chime• 16 years ago

The mailing/shipping could be handled by Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/fba/fulfillment-by-amazon.ht...

Robin_Message2• 16 years ago

Especially if you delay sending the seller a postal address long enough to find a buyer.

nayanshah2• 16 years ago

That is a neat trick but highly unlikely. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4918184.stm is impossible.

templaedhel2• 16 years ago

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.

rmc• 16 years ago

I'm sure all the fancy wall street trading companies have or are doing exactly that

JabavuAdams3• 16 years ago

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.

albertsun2• 16 years ago

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.

amackera• 16 years ago

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!

cosmicray• 16 years ago

Why bother. Just front-run Amazon with your own affiliate code. Then you could collect the spiff on everything that goes thru your portal.

and, oh BTW, people are already doing this ;_;

user242• 16 years ago

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

amarcus• 16 years ago

Or just follow his twitter account ;)

user242• 16 years ago

blog > twitter

mchouza• 16 years ago

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

nikster• 16 years ago

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

bieh7• 16 years ago

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 :)

bieh7• 16 years ago

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

bieh7• 16 years ago

Should it go down again - there's a mirror at http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/

xenophanes2• 16 years ago

Scan the item description field and buy items with lots of long words!

dkokelley• 16 years ago

How do you make sure you order tangible items? Lots of intangible items sell on eBay, like ebooks and other digital goods. Wouldn't this undermine the goal of receiving packages?

tcdent• 16 years ago

Instead of running it once per day, you could run it hourly. Rank the items with the same algorithm, but take into account time left on the auction. An item expiring soon that scores really high could be purchased early so it doesn't get away. Items expiring later could be watched and dumped if the price goes too high, or determined to be worth the extra expense, if the amount is available in savings, so the more expensive good items don't get away either.

danio• 16 years ago

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.

bieh7• 16 years ago

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.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

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

bergie• 16 years ago

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

vog• 16 years ago

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.

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

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...

bieh7• 16 years ago

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

bieh7• 16 years ago

It's working again now. Although I had to lower the number of maxworkers to get it stable, so it may be slow.

And yeah, I'll be investigating why it's so slow tomorrow after the heat dies down. I think this is the first time that wordpress instance has served more than a few hits per day, so I'm kinda not surprised it's gone horribly wrong.

Mirror at http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/

drusenko• 16 years ago

The Wordpress default install is horribly slow out of the box. The sad reality is that most blog software is not tuned to serve any reasonable number of pageviews by default.

It's one reason why letting someone manage all that for you makes sense. (Shameless plug) At Weebly we spent a lot of time making sure that our blogging engine is very optimized. We have free users -- they don't pay us any money, we don't place any ads on their site, and they even use their own domain -- hit the front page of Digg/Reddit/HN all the time, and we can easily handle it in stride.

patrickk• 16 years ago

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.)

gokhan• 16 years ago

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

Seth_Kriticos• 16 years ago

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.

known• 16 years ago

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

jimfl• 16 years ago

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

ryanjmo• 16 years ago

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?

qq66• 16 years ago

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

cahit• 16 years ago

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.

heyrhett• 16 years ago

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.

spectre2• 16 years ago

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).

trotsky• 16 years ago

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.

Robin_Message2• 16 years ago

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...

happybuy• 16 years ago

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.

hallmark• 16 years ago

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."

Implementing the auto-buying bot from xkcd #576

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