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Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by mNovak on Thursday February 10, 2022 @07:54PM (#30295316)
https://bytebucket.co

I'm the kind of person that always buys electronics used on eBay, where you can get really powerful but 2-3 years old devices for a few hundred $. And, I find shopping for used electronics elsewhere is still terrible (how good is a 1yo i5 vs a 3yo i7?). So, I made this site to help me in that -- I started scraping eBay listings for laptops, picked out the specs and cross-referenced them to benchmarks.

True to form, I made this early in the pandemic for the fun of it (I'm not even a software dev), then realized marketing is boring and never shared it with anyone. Real life makes me busy, but there's tons of features I want to add eventually. And now I have a very interesting dataset to play around with.

Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by jdmichal on Thursday February 10, 2022 @11:53PM (#30297148)
I have a small maybe-bug report for you. I thought, hey I don't want anything with a HDD, only SSD. So I set HDD to 0-0, and it just filters out everything. Even systems with no HDD disappear.
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by cobertos on Friday February 11, 2022 @01:33AM (#30297800)
Very similar, but for servers, https://labgopher.com/. It originated from the Reddit r/homelab sub
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by exikyut on Friday February 11, 2022 @09:55AM (#30302150)
Sadly the Australia section redirects to ebay.co.au as opposed to .com.au, welp. Noticed this about a year or so ago, maybe more.

Set and forget APIs that just work are kind of cool... maybe that's the moral of the story there lol

Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by Bilal_io on Friday February 11, 2022 @10:30AM (#30302535)
Thank you! I've used this website before, but I had trouble remembering its name last week, I was searching "lab gator" "gator lab"...
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by hedoluna on Friday February 11, 2022 @04:54AM (#30299420)
great! unfortunately the pound/TB sorting doesn't work.
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by grp000 on Thursday February 10, 2022 @08:16PM (#30295496)
That is a seriously good concept. Your metric works too good though, compared to the refresh rate of the listings so all the good stuff is sold out. If you had a mailing list I would definitely subscribe.
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by mNovak on Friday February 11, 2022 @12:47AM (#30297541)
Thanks. Yeah I thought about a mailing list, but couldn't think of a way to make it not spam you every single day for the 1 or 2 best listings. But obviously can't aggregate them unless it's a digest of "here's what you missed," which would be slightly amusing.
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by BoppreH on Friday February 11, 2022 @03:18AM (#30298602)
Another bug report:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125134793099?mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5320...

4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, and an i5-1035G is misparsed as 64GB RAM and 1035 GB SSD.

Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by exikyut on Friday February 11, 2022 @09:54AM (#30302133)
This is great, except it's showing me listings for laptops with 8GB of SSD storage and 935GB of RAM.

A flag button may be the most useful practical reaction to this problem. That way you can outsource the problem of faulty reports - and best case scenario even build up a following of trigger-happy users who are helpfully inclined to click the flag button in the future when the occasional glitch sneaks through.

Publishing the parser may also honestly be a good idea as well. Not the whole site, just the parser specifically - maybe with instructions on how feed in the results of small-scale scrapes (~100 pages) - so people can understand exactly what it's doing and provide feedback.

This is a very community-oriented sort of project IMHO, so by definition you'll wind up with a small following of stragglers if you hang in there; by the same token, it's possible (gain, best case scenario) that leveraging the spare cycles the community might be able to bring to the table may make it viable to maintain a level of quality that would otherwise be very hard to sustain long term.

Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by breckenedge on Thursday February 10, 2022 @11:11PM (#30296856)
Scraping projects looking for relative deals is fun. Did that way back in the day with Craigslist motorcycles.
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by peterfield on Thursday February 10, 2022 @08:10PM (#30295450)
THX a lot great idea. Table alignment is a miss on firefox :) https://i.imgur.com/6lBuwQ0.png
Re:Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” proj... by mNovak on Friday February 11, 2022 @12:50AM (#30297557)
Ah, yes looks like my hacky double sliders don't look great either. css was probably my least favorite part of this project