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Comment by GuinansEyebrows | Hacker News Reader

townies in university cities have been dumpstering during move-out week since time immemorial. i remember finding an entire complete set of MS Office 9x on floppies in a dumpster when i was in 5th grade :) among many other things over the years. even once found what would have been a treasure trove of 'adult' videos only 5 years prior... 8 hour vhs bootlegs with 3-4 "films" each. but that was 2007ish and VCRs were mostly gone by then.

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My parents did (and still do this) at a little ivy in the northeast. I got some good stuff including an introductory Grateful Dead CD (this was ~35 years ago). My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke). Now we have an entire closet filled to the brim with used water bottles and I have to periodically clean through tons of stuff including very old jars of tomato sauce.

When I later graduated from college I had to dump stuff, mainly because I didn't have a car, and was moving to a small apartment in the city ~70 miles away.

on one hand, i hate how wasteful the culture around move-out day is *. on the other hand, i benefited from that behavior pretty successfully. i guess it's only waste if people don't pick it up and reuse it - and i'm happy to do so.

i wonder if all this is becoming any less common with the rise of fb marketplace/offerup etc. hard to measure such an organic phenomenon, i guess.

* truly not meant as a slight against a population - just speaking anecdotally as someone who spent 13 years of my childhood and my entire adult life dumpster diving for fun and profit.

How much goes on FB Marketplace depends on how economical the student is. Most students will only consider this for their biggest ticket items.

Students are dealing with graduation, job placement, saying goodbye to friends, welcoming family coming in for graduation, etc. Honestly most people have better uses of their time then making a few hundred dollars on the second hand market, especially for the students most well off.

oh, absolutely. but the barrier to advertising resale to a large group is a lot lower than when i was a kid (we had a local free classifieds paper, rip The Echo, but you had to mail in your listings). i'm just curious if there's any meaningful difference in the amount of "direct" secondhand sales of stuff that would have otherwise gone in the trash for dumpster divers to pick through and resell.

> My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke).

I had a friend in college that did literally this. Guy sold weed throughout his time there. While he was a senior, his supplier who had graduated a year earlier hooked him up with an internship at his company's trading desk. Went to work on Wall St after graduation.

I was always amused that the marijuana business was more important to his career after school than his studies (I think he was an environmental systems major). He's a commodities trader now, which is fitting.

Well, a big part of the university value proposition is to start building your network. Sounds like he did that.

Save a VCR. Nobody makes them anymore, and the technology is not easily reproduced.

Those 2000s VCR's made near the end were pretty crappy though. We used VHS well beyond when everyone else threw theirs out - it was a cheap way to record TV. We would find one, it would last 8-10 months, and then break. I must have taken apart dozens of them, it was a fun thing to do as a kid.

Meanwhile, my dad's VHS machine from the 80's works to this day, plus there is a service manual for it.

I have several VCRs I picked up at thrift stores for a few bucks. The interesting thing is the fundamental mechanism in them is all the same. The electronics boards change, the box changes, but the machine is the same. I'd swap parts from one brand to another to keep them working.

Another interesting thing is the size of the circuit board kept shrinking!

The usual failure mode of a VCR is the recording head gets dirty. It takes remarkably little dirt to render it non-functional. A bit of alcohol applied brings it back to working order.

I've noticed that the prices of VCRs in the thrift store hit a low of $5, but have been relentlessly creeping up. They're $25 now, and are rarely in stock. Get 'em while you can. Transfer your old family tapes to mp4 while you can.

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