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xnx
godzillabrennus
People are realizing lots of government data sources are free and building vibe coding apps around them...
millzlane
Yea, this one had wrong and broken info all over it.
player_piano
Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)
craftkiller
Ah thank you for your site! Before your post, I didn't know the government auctioned off homes online and through following the links to the auctions I learned about the FHA $100 down payment program.
edm0nd
yeah but do you really want to live in an area that has HUD housing? Most of the time they aren't in the best areas and/or in high crime areas. also perhaps the house is gunna take 5-6 figures of work to rehab and become livable. far better ways to burn your $ unless you just really need a house ASAP to live in for a year.
83
Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.
player_piano
Thank you. I think the highlight so far has been one of my friends buying an industrial lathe that he found on the site!
rovr138
Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?
player_piano
I am still on Vercel (yes I know, trying to migrate off...) and it gives you automated alerts when there are anomalous traffic spikes. Funnily enough, I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.
gavmor
A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.
JumpCrisscross
Cool, I just bought a school bus.
beepbooptheory
Looks like that one actually works too!
maerF0x0
I'm curious how much of this stuff is actually civil asset forfeiture? (Not to blame the site(s) for such practices, but to think about the whole ecosystem of how a government comes to have a bicycle, switch, truck etc)
https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-for...
graybeardhacker
I have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.
shrubble
From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.
1970-01-01
US Gov auctions are great when you want 400 of something broken or want to travel through 3 states for a $1000 mil-spec kitchen sink.
83
Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
Barbing
One of the top reasons auction hunters hate gun control
The worst ones will try to add a few extra holes the night before the auction
cucumber3732842
Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms. The whole point of Govdeals et al is that the seller is a known-ish quantity. If I wanted to roll the dice on garbage with fresh paint I'd be on Ritchie bros.
Govdeals managed services (or whatever they call it now) is just as questionable as 3rd party sellers on any given big bog store's ecommerce "platform".
triceratops
> Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms
I didn't realize the government could become Amazon.
Twirrim
If you ever want knives, you can get a fascinating set of them by looking out for the TSA/Airport confiscated items auctions.
Hawaii's one is at https://auctions.ehawaii.gov/dot/welcome.html. I had a boss when I lived in Hawaii that would bid on them, occasionally brought boxes of the random "sharps" (as they were called at the time) that had been confiscated from people by TSA. Some of it is somewhat surprising that people still had on them when they got to TSA, like high quality 18" long machetes.
protocolture
My backpack is a bit of a black hole. I used to get pulled up due to carrying my grandfathers pocket knife all the time.
Then as things got worse, these days its screwdrivers, wrenches etc.
Seems like soon even my ethernet cables are going to be taken from me.
SilverElfin
Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?
adrianpike
Depends on the item and if you and the military are optimizing for the same thing It's a lowest bidder situation, so keep that in mind.
Mil-spec transport containers? Excellent.
Mil-spec rucksacks? Not so excellent.
wildzzz
Bid price is kind of irrelevant for milspec. What's actually important is understanding what the spec requires. A crappy rucksack from Amazon doesn't have a milspec, they can say whatever they want as long as it lasts longer than the 30 day warranty and return period. Obviously govsurp rucksacks don't have warranties but there's a legit spec you can look up that says how it was made and tested. Since it wouldn't have been purchased without a certificate of conformity, you can be sure that when the rucksack was new, it should have had a certain level of quality. No milspec manufacturer is designing the product far beyond the milspec because that increases cost and they won't sell. If Ford makes a car that will go for 500k miles without major repairs, it would likely wouldn't sell very well because of how expensive it would be. Meanwhile a car that can go to like 150k miles without major repairs will sell better because it costs less and is still a reasonable lifetime.
The lowest bider thing is such a lame meme. Vendors are going to design a product to cost as little as possible to meet spec. Most consumer products have little to no required specs so they can make it even cheaper. However, since milspec products often just have one spec they are designed to, you have a limited selection of quality. No one is making milspec birkin bags. But in the consumer space, you can buy anything between Temu and high-end designer quality.
tstrimple
I just stumbled across a Reddit post asking military members what military equipment was actually good and not just the cheapest junk the contractor can deliver. One of the most supported answers was actually the sleeping “system” and wet weather gear. I’m mostly familiar with old surplus stuff. Apparently some of the modern gear is really good.
baby_souffle
Slow, but working well.
Really needs a way to refine search results to "within X miles of $someGeoPointOrZipCode". I am seeing a lot of neat stuff in California ... but i'm not going to drive 7 hours to go pick it up :)
markdown
https://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-soni...
This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!
me_online
Agree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.
____tom____
Not by town, please. There are about 100 in the Bay Area. That's just useless.
Lat long of the town center would work. I don't need precise, but not seeing something 100 meters from me because it's in the next municipal unit is aggravating.
yodon
Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
DevX101
You need to cache search queries.
bandrami
I almost bought a lighthouse 25 years ago off of a GSA auction. I'm glad my bid lost because I didn't read the fine print carefully about how much the upkeep would cost.
ocdtrekkie
You just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.
jcoby
That’s exactly what the project lighthouse guys did.
vatsachak
Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.
Great idea though
edm0nd
def some price/updating lags
i saw a listing that ends in 39 minutes and was at $806
i click to be taken to the listing and its $1,270.00
graybeardhacker
Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong
The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "
kraptv
Weird, the first two auction items I checked on for Oregon (sorted by highest) were already bid for and won. Is this not clearing out finished auctions?
samorozco
The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.
Unbeliever69
Vibe coders don't understand concepts such as: indexing, caching, deduping, memoization, profiling, Big O, N+1 queries, lazy loading, connection pooling, pagination, re-render management, layout thrashing, virtualization, debouncing, code splitting, memory leaks, garbage collection, streaming vs. buffering, async parallelism, main thread blocking, race conditions, backpressure, request waterfalls, payload optimization, batching, round-trip costs, cache invalidation, hot path analysis, data structure selection, and countless other concepts related to performance."
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Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945