Is it possible to get a view that shows average price AND the number of samples (maybe if you mouse over a column) at the same time? Or maybe some info about stuff like variance, stdev, median, etc?
Trying to figure out why green cars are cheaper:
It looks like green cars are mostly from 97 to 2003 in a roughly normal curve, while most other colors are exponential (so mostly from the last couple years instead, and dropping off dramatically once you reach 2005 and older). Not counting purple, which has 8 samples and is therefore mostly useless, hah.
Ya, I'll add that to our list of feature requests. Would definitely like to put some more features in, to help people with blog posts or other research in the car space.
Ah yes, I would seem that green cars are going out of fashion, dunno who would want a purple car =P
But what about the time investment needed in finding an acceptable car on Craigslist compared to finding one from a dealer?
If you're spending something like 100 bucks and 20 extra hours over three weeks checking out N more cars that don't pan out because {the guy lied about the condition of the car, the guy selling it is really sketchy, other random reasons}, then is it still worth it to save an extra 1-2k?
What I'm trying to ask basically is "but what kind of opportunity costs are involved in these hacks, and when does it stop being viable"?
A great car search engine definitely helps but it's a very tiny part (may be 10%) of buying a used car (speaking as someone who bought a used car 8 months back).
The most time consuming part of buying a used car is to check the car in person (and it's difficult to schedule appointment with an individual person), getting it inspected by a mechanic (If you don't get it inspected by your own mechanic, you are an idiot. I know I was an idiot once.), negotiating the price, paying the agreed price (it's a BIG pain if the car's loan hasn't been paid off).
I recommend CarMax (http://www.carmax.com) (no affiliation what so ever) for used cars because they actually take away all the pain points which I described above.
[And if you are looking to buy a new car, I would definitely recommend carwoo.com. I helped my friend buy a new Infiniti EX at an unbelievable price.]
I had the same exact reaction. I like cars. I like to a variety of drive cars, but I'm not wealthy enough to afford a car collection. Thus, I tend to change cars more than is "fiscally optimal" (every three years). I actually like leasing cars, because I get to negotiation the terms of the buy-back up front. This gives me A) peace of mind knowing exactly what I'll pay in depreciation, B) the opportunity to negotiate that amount up front and in clear terms (I understand the math involved in leasing), and C) a much, much shorter time investment in said negotiation.
Consider the rest of this post to be an anecdotal piece titled, "Hacking the car buying process means getting your hands dirty."
When I picked up a 2006 VW GTI, the dealer was offering 0% financing. I couldn't bring myself to pass up free money, so I bought the car with the intention of turning it around in three years, just like I normally would with a lease. My reasoning was that I'd be giving up the opportunity to negotiate the residual value up front in exchange for the free use of a few thousand dollars over three years. No brainer, right?
Yeah, not exactly. I ran in to a couple of issues.
Lease residuals are actually on the generous side
Leasing residuals are normally pretty generous on the types of cars I like. My GTI was 57%. I negotiated a 63% residual on my current car. Looking at the math from my GTI, with an MSRP of $24,750, the lease residual would have been ~$14,100. When I sold the car at the 3-year mark, it took me three months, and I only got $12,000 for it. So, in exchange for the zero percent financing over three years, I gave up $2,000 on the residual, plus the time and effort involved in selling. I took many phone calls, and drove out to meet about 5 people before executing a sale. Had I leased the car and negotiated decent terms, I would have paid the same, maybe less.
Selling a car over $10,000 is a pain in the ass
Words you really don't want to hear when selling a car: "I've got $3,000 saved up. Can you take payments on the rest."
Times I heard them during the sales process: 9 out of 10.
Selling private means dealing with all kinds of people who really can't afford the car you're selling, but are bold enough to offer you anything. I have no envy for car salesmen. Their job is tough. You're constantly assaulted by people who really don't care if the deal is any good for you. I wouldn't say I was offended, but I did begrudge the time I wasted.
I'm back to leasing now, and very happy with it. If you want a new car every few years, and are ok with the associated financial impact, it's worth your time to sit down and understand the math involved in leasing. You can probably do better (fiscally) than you think.
I've bought 'a' car from Craigslist. Took us about eight hours, from 'first car' to 'I'll take it'. Looked at ten cars in person. In one day.
Granted, we were motivated, needed a car that day (long story) but it doesn't have to take weeks, if you just need a car and your value of 'acceptable' is flexible.
There is also the advantage that trading in a car to the same dealership you buy from will deduct this from the sale price of the to-be-purchased car so sales tax can be reduced to zero depending on the trade-in.
I sold a car on Craiglist once, and I will never do it again. You open yourself up to some potentially dangerous (life threatening) situations.
To me a "potential" loss of 2 grand that I would incur by trading my car in at a dealer is worth the time saved, and safety saved. Also all the paper work is done correctly. To me that is another potential "come back to bite you in the you know what" problem averted.
I also live in the East Bay CA, and there have been a huge increase in violence and theft associated with selling cars on Craigslist. It is also not just cars, I have had a few bad experiences on both Craigslist and Ebay in the last 12 months and as a result I have not used either in months.
To me, I am willing to pay a perceived premium from a retailer (like Amazon with free shipping and no hassle return policy) than deal with the BS I have had to deal with on Craiglsit and Ebay.
If not, maybe it's time for a web-based BitTorrent of some kind. The important thing is that file sharing would go back to being a download-only operation which would (ideally) free fans from the threat of disconnects and lawsuits. This is all well beyond anything I could ever do, which is why I ask about it here. To me, this is the inevitable future of the web.
Don't take this the wrong way but, are you trolling?
EDIT: Also, Mad Men's on Netflix streaming, off the top of my head.
No I'm definitely not trolling, but I get that a lot :-)
I've seen several papers and presentations about web-based hashing schemes, where the idea is that you only have to download data once to a city and then people could download using a hash from a local cache server and avoid trips over the backbone:
For example, if they did this with netflix, you'd be downloading from your neighbors instead of a server somewhere, and the load on your service provider would drop by orders of magnitude.
Also, since so little traffic would have to go over the whole web, they could focus more on last mile speed increases and we could all have 100 megabit lines and cheaper plans, getting charged mostly for our backbone traffic, the way long distance used to be charged.
But no, seriously, you should be using a library or something that sanitizes your SQL queries for you. If you aren't constructing the query string yourself, you should be okay.
I personally feel that women get turned off to CS and in general tech courses because they're male-dominated and usually somewhat misogynistic, which makes being in CS classes and interacting with CS majors sometimes unpleasant and encourages them to do something else.
In general, women are perfectly intelligent and capable of studying (see: women in premed, women in law, etc, etc).
CS isn't some mystical major that's harder than every other major ever (me, I'm scared of business majors; those guys are cutthroat), and I don't think "women can't commit themselves and women can't study the same way and women don't do research" is really a good explanation for why there are fewer women in CS than there are in premed.
Also, the sample size is crap and the deviation is crap relative to the sample size, so you can't make very many truly meaningful observations from it.
diolpah, my grandparent here is why you were downvoted. Nowadays, the atmosphere around anything related to gender is super-charged, and people are hyper-super-extra-sensitive to anything that could even slightly be construed as debasing towards women, so even something as simple as observing measured data sounds to them like overt sexism.
It's actually not that hard to get the basics if you're used to ASCII graphics or using a tileset. I was able to figure out how to play it (with the help of the wiki for laptop-friendly controsl) in only half an hour of poking around, mostly.
Trying to figure out why green cars are cheaper:
It looks like green cars are mostly from 97 to 2003 in a roughly normal curve, while most other colors are exponential (so mostly from the last couple years instead, and dropping off dramatically once you reach 2005 and older). Not counting purple, which has 8 samples and is therefore mostly useless, hah.