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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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).

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...

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.

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