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Comment by podiki | Hacker News Reader

That's huge and a big reason why my next GPU will be from AMD. If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers, ...it is terrible out there. You can be on a stock watcher Discord and click instantly to still see that it is sold out (and at a huge markup too).

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> If I can ever get one that is, between scarcity, demand, bots, scalpers

My advice, assuming you're on HN with a technical background, is to create your own bot for monitoring product availability on your store of choice. It's a pretty small investment of time, and it frees you up from the time spent watching a Discord or refreshing store pages manually. Set it up to poll at a reasonable frequency, set up some form of push notification, and find that it's not that hard to get ahead of the horde who are all relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them.

Signed,

Someone who got a launch day 3090 from the Nvidia store

I'm not dismissing your idea, but the fact you managed to purchase a 3090 on launch day seems more like survivorship bias than anything else.

You have a good point, because I did fail to get a 3080, but I didn't start automating until after the initial 3080 launch.

On the other hand, I did get a 1080ti several months after launch during the crypto-boom of 2017 using the same approach. I have also stumbled upon lots of "we added more tickets to X event" type situations before they are announced on social media and disappear in an instant (think sold out music festivals and concerts).

What would you consider a reasonable frequency?

Once per minute when you're close to an expected release of product, once per 3-5 minutes when you don't have a great reason to believe that inventory will be added.

My goal is just to mimic me sitting at my laptop refreshing a page trying to buy something as soon as it becomes available, so that I can use my time for something better.

Don't you also need to evade IP blocking for pinging their page every minute (or whatever interval)? And either way, right now no sanely priced 6800 series cards are being stocked anyway, from what I've seen. I'm not paying $1,000+ for a card where the AMD stock version is $650.

When I was hunting the 3090, in general I polled every 5 minutes (with some variability to look more natural). When the "official" release time came closer, I brought it down to something like 1-3 minutes. I never ran into problems with IP blocking.

Trust me, there are people sitting there refreshing the page more often than 1x per minute, and as far as I know they didn't run into any blocks either.

Hmm, good to know, thanks. I enjoy setting up little services and playing around, so maybe I'll give it a go. Still, for the 6800xt at least, stock is barely existent and is at huge markups (or tends to be the more expensive versions in 3rd parties' lineups). Gonna be a while...

Something I don't get, both in case of Nvidia and PS5 products, is why they don't open the sales with higher prices. They are basically leaving at least 2x the money on the table to scalpers.

Interesting question.

I believe nVidia once had a policy of deliberately crippling the double-precision performance of their regular consumer graphics cards, in an effort to push their high-end computation-friendly 'workstation' cards, but that's not quite the same thing.

Not a rock-solid source, but: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/why-include-fp64....

Right, why not just conduct auctions?

Personally I've always wished they'd just do backordering, especially with the PS5. Pre-orders sold out? That's fine just let me get in a queue instead of having to check back constantly and try to race for one. I think that alone would kill the scalper market.

I don't think it would, people would still be willing to pay more to cut the line.

Probably some, but I'm not sure it'd be enough to maintain a market. All my friends I game with seem to think they'd prefer just being able to back-order to the current system, and clearly basing market predictions based on myself and my friend group couldn't be wrong :-).

Hey, I would prefer back ordering too. Looks like your model is confirmed 100% accurate.

For what it's worth, Lisa Su said that although AMD had underestimated demand, the tightness should ease up by the second half of this year.

I'm sure it'll eventually ease up (there's always a crunch with new GPUs and consoles, plus all the factors of 2020/21), but I don't take AMD's word for much as their early PR on launch availability was hardly good. This was after what we saw happen for Nvidia's launch too.

Anyway, there's blame to go around, and these days I'm more inclined to look at how poorly retailers handle it. There are few (or none) backorders or queuing, and sometimes easily gamed systems. Either way they get their money, but it's not a good look. (It is not the end of the world, but annoying and doubly so when so many of us are stuck inside. Certainly much worse problems to have, I know.)

A fairly significant amount of the "easily gamed systems" are actually taking reasonable precautions. Several of the people doing the gaming are escalating it to very stupid heights: dozens of LLCs registered, applied for ASNs, used to hijack large amounts of IP space and hijack Comcast/Verizon/etc IP space to place fraudulent orders.

There is a huge amount of CFAA or worse stuff that needs prosecuting - it isn't just bots placing orders, it's mass amounts of hacked machines and hacked phones being used as proxies and cookies stolen for a valid fingerprint/less CAPTCHAs, wire fraud and forgery of documentation being accepted (instead of RPKI/proper filtering)

Anyone that has a slightly popular (at all, really) will get shady requests asking to "install a SDK" or "buy your extension" which installs malware on your end-users devices. This is the slightly legal/grey area part. The other part is where AFRINIC recently revoked a /14 for fraud that was nearly entirely used for proxies and abuse by a 1 person US company, based on WHOIS remarks, obtained fraudulently.

Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)

The people that do this are using queues - by registering hundreds of thousands of accounts from compromised proxies and signing up for the Newegg raffle on all of them, and queuing up for every possible product on all of them. Some sell sets of cookies that you load into your browser after carting, or they check out for you.

Second half of 2021 is rather unsatisfying, although I understand why. Ultimately if this generation isn't going to be available in quantity until nearly 7 months post-release, I don't see much reason why I shouldn't just skip this generation entirely.

This may be a good idea. Wouldn't this delayed release of the current generation give the engineers additional time to improve and iterate on the following generation before release?

I personally see no reason to believe the next generation isn’t going to suffer from similar supply issues. As I understand it there just isn’t extra bandwidth at the manufacturers, it’s less that AMD and Nvidia underestimated demand and more that they couldn’t have gotten more throughout at a reasonable price point. Presumably at some point more factories will start up to close the gap, but (again as I understand it) between COVID slowdown and how difficult modern computer manufacturing is extra throughput could be a few years off.

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