Priceonomics Blog

You might be interested in learning more about Priceonomics (http://priceonomics.com/), a company does price comparisons for a bunch of stuff. I don't know what their engine is written on but it's certainly something custom, and that's most likely the way you want to go. They also have an amazing blog (http://blog.priceonomics.com/) where they showcase products and nifty stuff they do with them. They use Tumblr for this part of the site but you might as well go for Wordpress or whatever you prefer. No matter what you choose, you want to separate both parts of your site, and the comparison engine will most likely be a custom solution (Ruby, Python, PHP, doesn't matter).

And diamonds are nothing like true love. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit

I'm not sure I agree with that point of view. Phones currently can be located, and yet there are no repossession services around already. And police is already unresponsive when it comes to this* (I don't know if they uncover theft rings, though). I think phones fall under the same category as bikes - good resale price, low risk[1]. A kill switch doesn't have to be perfect, I think. It only needs to be hard enough to circumvent to make the effort worthless, the same way that the woman in the article found her phone despite it being relatively easy to circumvent the "find my phone" feature. * Results may vary according to your city and country. [1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b…

I would love the priceonomics guys to do the same survey on RVs. My experience shopping for RVs is that RVs have a price co-efficient that is strongly correlated with "mileage" and poorly correlated with "condition." This was exactly their point on cars when a 79,900 mile car was $210 more expensive than a 80,100 mile car. I read the article to say that people use mileage rather than condition to price cars. So far the closest I've seen on that topic is this entry http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/32944888191/living-in-a-van which talked about the Westfalia RVs.

I contributed. It's obviously a worthwhile cause, and their overall strategy seems sound. I also appreciate their efforts to bake the open source mentality into the project. I hope they reach the goal and this gets big, because that's how it will be effective. edit: following them on twitter turned up a couple of worthwhile articles: one on the economics of bike theft [1] and another review of locks performed by interviewing bike thieves [2] [1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b… [2] http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-bike-lock/

Taxi medallions are a byproduct of a past age. They should not exist as they do today. Great article, with research, here - http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-…

Some examples: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-f… I'll agree, "most" is probably way off. It is greater than 0, but it could well be a negligible amount.

> Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets. To those surprised by this sentence, jarjoura might be influenced by this recent Priceonomics blog post: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-f… "Most street kids we spoke to came from one of two backgrounds: either they had job prospects (whether good or dead-end) but preferred the freedom of homelessness, or were transient homeless who fell in love with the street kid community...Street kids defied our expectations of living on the street as a last resort; instead they seem to be drawn to the Haight."

Priceonomics blog: http://blog.priceonomics.com/

Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/) to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered) ; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title. A few feeds I follow: News * Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page]) * Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php) * ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed) * TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb) * Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index) * iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml) * TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak) * r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss) Blogs * Securelist -…

Could it be this one from 2013? http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit

There's a nice article by Priceonomics on Diamonds. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit

The economics of bike theft are interesting. See this article: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b… Here is the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4444708

Good Priceonomics article on the economics of bike theft. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b… TLDR; with bikes theives can hit a sweet spot in the trade-off between risk and reward.

Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b…

The hack is completely fair, because the existing medallion system is a hack itself, which the cab industry lobbies for in order to ensure regulatory capture. That position is quite easy to defend if you understand the industry. The reason that you don't know any cab drivers living the high life is in fact because of medallions. Medallion owners don't need to drive taxis. If you control the medallion, you're made. No pun intended. As recently as July 2014, medallions in NYC were being sold privately for over a million dollars (http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/july_2014_medallion_transfer… Some interesting economics on the industry and how we got where we are: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-…

Mandatory article (that was commented on HN a while ago): http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit

Reference: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit

Diamonds. > Americans exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process, because in 1938 De Beers decided that they would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign 1938, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but wasn’t a pervasive occurrence. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit I think it's naive to think that marketing doesn't in some way shape and reinforce what one thinks is "normal".

Their very first blog post [0] said "We’re building the price guide for everything, from bicycles to boats, Aeron chairs to iPads. We hope as you look to buy or sell things you can use our data to get a good deal (or at least prevent yourself from getting ripped off). For example Priceonomics can show you how much a used iPad 2 3G should cost, as well as a whole range of prices" [0] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/14567999429/how-to-use-priceonomics

I don't think it's fair to lump all taxi regulations together and then say Uber is decrying regulation. I doubt Uber cares about transparent pricing regulation. They've always shown the fare breakdown on the website and in the app. You can also estimate the fare for locations in the app and website: https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco There was some initial complaining about using a phone with GPS to meter the ride, but I think that was just chaff from entrenched interests. If the initial cost to start a taxi was low enough (i.e. medallions were used to vet the driver and not to protect existing taxi companies [0]), competition might arrive at transparent pricing anyway. Especially with e-hailing where you can be more selective about the cab you choose. [0] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-…

>This suggests that 78% of bitcoins are being hoarded, waiting for prices to rise. Even when controlling extremely cautiously for the possibility of users who “lost” their bitcoins and other contingencies, they find that at least 51% of bitcoins have never been spent. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future Reminds me of comic books and baseball cards in the 90s.

More proof of the irrationality of the art market and how artwork is priced. Reminds me of [1]. [1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/53857118493/is-wine-bullshit

I don't think many people buying bikes on craigslist want to get a stolen bike. Bikes are stolen because they're easy to sell - check out the link someone posted here earlier: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to-stolen-b… Rather than try to make bike theft profitable - you'd prefer to just say it won't work and give up?

This is a relevant read: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-…

consider using a rice cooker to cook all the cheap stuff that you buy - http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/38399141597/using-a-rice-cooker-to-r…

The article stated that taxi activists would be protesting today. I wonder if the protesters are the people that own the medallions? I doubt the drivers making $8 an hour have time to protest. The medallion scheme needs reform or replacement. Further reading: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-…

In SF this is definitely not an assumption you should make. Talk to some people around Haight St. http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-f…

The kids on Haight street just want to bum around – there was that article* that found they could make almost as much money begging as they could at a minimum wage job. Other parts of the city I think have more people that really are drug-addicted or borderline insane * http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-f…

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kids-of-san-f… Which is about the community aspects of current day youth homeless in Haight-Ashbury district of SF. This sort of homelessness is different than the Tenderloin [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco