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Comment by player_piano | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)

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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.

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.

That may be true in general but I’ve found through years of bargain hunting various items that there are always options that aren’t bad. It takes more work to find them, and you might have to wait a while until the right one comes. It’s worth pursuing.

If you look in rural areas they're not too bad in terms of neighbors.

But they'll absolutely have to be gutted and remodeled.

Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.

Thank you. I think the highlight so far has been one of my friends buying an industrial lathe that he found on the site!

That is quite the highlight, now you have access to a lathe :) I also bought a large lathe from a government surplus site, it's by far my favorite tool.

Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?

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.

> I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.

I hope you're adding some fictitious entries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) to track where those scrapes might be going.

This sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"

Oh that would be fantastic.

Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.

To be honest, I don't think I've seen anyone mention Vercel here or on Reddit in any way that could be construed as positive in quite awhile.

Most of that is tends to be over pricing or Next.js, when there's probably loads of quietly happy people using it, but... Those people are quiet, so it is hard to tell.

Where did you hosted those scrapers? where do you store scraped tenders?

A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.

Thanks for flagging. The source's free-text city field gets used directly when I should be deriving from the zip. Adding a zip-to-city normalization step. Will fix.

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