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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I ended up not claiming the majority of the things I won because I wasn’t able to use them or attend them.

It sounds like the bot could be made (slightly?) more intelligent, to avoid entering contests that you're certainly not eligible to.

so I had to spend a decent amount of time going though my DMs to find legit winner notifications.

Making the bot read DMs to find them seems an easier task than determining eligibility.

Reading through the winnings list gives an interesting idea of the scale of how many ticketable events happen globally... he only won a tiny fraction of the contests but there's already more tickets than any single person could ever make use of.

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It'd have to be a lot more intelligent, and then some. It's quite a leap to go from matching "RT" and "win" to checking what kind of thing the prize is, whether it needs to be mailed or claimed, and what the location is where that needs to happen.

It would need to be a lot more intelligent to be perfect, but there are probably a few keywords you can use to filter out the bulk of prizes you don't want.

I'm not sure how the filter would work to catch something like:

-tickets to Carrot Top at Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City

So I'm pretty sure there's going to always be a modicum of human involvement in the claiming part. It could auto reply with some PO box address maybe. He did note sometimes he didn't receive the item (ex: 'tupaware').

Judging by the word cloud [1], you could simply ignore all posts with "ticket" in the tweet and that would help for the majority of cases.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003570

I've often found that nation-specific metadata is often difficult to scrape - the entire internet assumes that everybody is American, and then just handles non-Americans with error-messages at the last step.

The author of this blog would find a very different functionality for his bot if he were located in, say, Australia.

As a German, I gave up on online contests and giveaways if they are written in English. Luckily I have the ability to see from the language almost instantly if it is available here, but I’d imagine for an Australian or British person it would end up a lot harder.

Yeah, I'm Canadian and despite the short trip from the border we're usually ineligible for these things. It happens occasionally, but not terribly often. I just mentioned Australians because they'd be the more extreme case.

More frustrating is just google-searching for products and whatnot.

It would ruin the point of the bot a bit if it was only entering local, claimable competitions wouldn't it? Hugely localising the data it's gathering.

It sounds like the bot could be made (slightly?) more intelligent, to avoid entering contests that you're certainly not eligible to.

Why? It's better to win everything possible to prevent other people from winning them.

Preventing other people from winning contests doesn't make the bot "better"

Well I guess we have philosophical differences, but if I could hypothetically prevent every person in the world from winning every contest, it would be very funny and exciting to me.

Trying to prevent other people from winning stuff for no reason?

That's not called a "philosophical difference". That is called "I'm an asshole".

Sounds like your philosophy is being a bit of a dick

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