Comments on: Amazon Random Shopper

By: Jonathan Barronville

Jonathan Barronville — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:26:53 +0000

Do you want to learn Computer Science or just programming?

By: Victor

Victor — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:46:25 +0000

Love the idea and excited to see what the bot gets you next!

By: kai

kai — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 22:46:47 +0000

thanks for that project. Thanks to you I discovered Akos Rozmann and bought his album “12 stationer VI”…!

I am endlessly fascinated by Don Buchla’s “Source of Uncertainty” (a module for a synthesizer). You might enjoy that too. (buchla.com)

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:35:52 +0000

That would in fact be interesting!

I do plan to blog about not just the shipments, but also the evolution of the kind of consumer Amazon thinks Random Shopper is.

By: Marcos Marado

Marcos Marado — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:15:54 +0000

Well, an interesting fork of this project of yours (and yes, I understand it would be fit for a different purpose) would be something that would do exactly the same for the first interaction, but then explore amazon generated recomendations. Meaning: after you get the first package, you rate each item, and see how amazon responds to your ratings in suggesting something else. I guess that in a few interactions Amazon would be pretty good at recommending you “random stuff” that you still like :-)

Anyway, please keep us updated with the results of each interaction: I am curious on what will shipment #2 bring! :-)

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:35:14 +0000

I’m unable to work on stuff like this (full time job, no time anyway), but I encourage you to build this! I think it’s a cool idea.

By: Rasto

Rasto — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:57:59 +0000

I had a similar business idea, see http://www.iamfeelinglucky.co.uk
But I haven’t had enough time to set this service up. If you were interested, we could talk about that.

By: Tu Hoang

Tu Hoang — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:31:34 +0000

Okay, confirmed. It’s platform-specific error. I am able to run my code and your code just fine on Windows 8 x64. Interestingly enough, on Windows, using page.render(‘target.png’), I don’t see any rendered snapshot on the filesystem. I need to file a bug then. Very odd …

By: Tu Hoang

Tu Hoang — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:20:24 +0000

Hmm. I am not sure. I will dig into that a bit more tonight if I have time. I am unable to load a different url into page using page.open(). That behavior persists with both pre-compiled binary as well as binary compiled from source. What distro are you using? I am using Archlinux.

Regarding the useragent, I believe it’s implicitly set. However, even when useragent being explicitly defined, it still doesn’t work.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 21:13:37 +0000

I too would be interested in this code if you can provide it privately.

This is just the type of project that looks like it would be fun to modify and play with. :)