16 comments

  • perdomon 2 minutes ago
    Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.
  • 1970-01-01 1 hour ago
    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 1 hour ago
      Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
      • cucumber3732842 44 minutes ago
        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".

  • xnx 1 hour ago
    Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945
    • player_piano 1 hour ago
      Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)
      • 83 57 minutes ago
        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 54 minutes ago
          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 1 hour ago
        Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?
        • player_piano 56 minutes ago
          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.
          • xnx 53 minutes ago
            > 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.

            • player_piano 46 minutes ago
              This sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"
          • kjs3 15 minutes ago
            Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.
  • yodon 1 hour ago
    Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
  • pwr1 24 minutes ago
    Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?
  • graybeardhacker 41 minutes ago
    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. "

  • kdot 20 minutes ago
    Missed the District of Columbia
  • sjducb 1 hour ago
    Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?
  • DevX101 1 hour ago
    You need to cache search queries.
  • bbstats 1 hour ago
    First thing I searched was Pokemon cards and found items with bids at 50% higher than market value...either shill bidding or folks who are bidding blindly.
    • reactordev 1 hour ago
      Surprised you even got it to load.
  • spate141 46 minutes ago
    Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling
  • mintarex 5 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • Xiaoher-C 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • wotsdat 5 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • zikduruqe 1 hour ago
    Can I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s

    I wish I had jumped on those offers back when they were in the back of Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, and SOF magazines back in the day.

  • scarsam 2 hours ago
    [flagged]