Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefflinwood | Hacker News Reader

This article is an excerpt from the book, which I thought was a great read - very well paced.

There's more money in corporate relocations and military moves than I would have expected.

My big takeaway from it wasn't anything to do with trucking (the author is a professional house mover) - it was about the accumulation of stuff and how the mover took down all of this heavy furniture for customers from the northern states to Florida, only to find that they didn't really want their old stuff down there anyway.

View on HN

> he mover took down all of this heavy furniture for customers from the northern states to Florida, only to find that they didn't really want their old stuff down there anyway.

When I moved to New York, I - like an idiot - brought a full set of very heavy bedroom furniture with me. It probably cost me more to rent the bigger UHaul than it would have to replace it with IKEA products - and would definitely have been cheaper to just not have a bunch of furniture cluttering the place up.

As I recall, it all ended up on the street - although it was gone within a day, so I hope someone's enjoying my "donation".

When I moved to New York, I - like an idiot - brought a full set of very heavy bedroom furniture with me

There's an interesting startup called Campaign Living: https://www.campaignliving.com that's trying to solve some of this problem by making furniture that looks good and can be disassembled quickly and easily. I wish I'd bought one of their couches instead of the one I got.

There's definitely a market place for that - one of the problems with disassemblable IKEA furniture is that it only survives so many moves. There's a good possibility that our current bed might survive being disassembled, but not being reassembled in our next move.

I did the same thing when I moved to NY in 1999. I don't think I could have afforded to replace a whole living room at the time, even at IKEA rates (my job paid for the UHaul).

That furniture lasted one more move, from Staten Island to Bushwick, Brooklyn, two years later. Probably worth it, but I've moved across the country four more times since then, and I've never moved anything I couldn't fit in a box since that move to Brooklyn.

Companies are paying less and less for big expensive corporate moves. Many household good drivers don't actually make that much money when it's all said and done (and it's very hard work).

I do like his descriptions of the art of packing a trailer. It really is a thing of beauty [0].

[0]https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/moving-cross-country-cost/

Wow, that packed truck section is a thing of beauty. Like real life Tetris.

I used to load trailers for RPS, which became FedEx Ground. Described it to people the same way, too - "like real-life Tetris." Only it was even more like Tetris because of the time pressure and randomness. If you waited too long trying to build the perfect tier your chute might fill up, triggering a sensor that stops the whole line, and earns you derision from the other handlers and a visit from the manager to see what's wrong.

And we didn't have an idea of the complete contents in our heads ahead of time either; we just had to deal with whatever came down the chute one piece at a time. (Though you might be able to store 5-6 pieces off to the side, but that gets clumsy fast.)

One strategy to try to accommodate that randomness would be to have a lower row for one size-range, progressing horizontally, then another row on top of that in the same tier, for some other size-range. Going even further you could even start a second tier in front of that, with two more sizes. But that also could screw you if the one in front (or on top) starts to get too far ahead of the one behind (or on the bottom). Then you're back to setting packages aside and tripping on shit...

That's interesting! How did the items get into the chute? Is there any possibility that someone could have used some software to simulate the packing problem and then organize the sequence of incoming items in order to make them more easily packable?

Oh that would be brilliant - as far as I know it was whatever order they came off of the truck they were unloaded from. Basically up at the top of the building near the roof was a conveyor belt running a rectangular or oval path around the building. It was fed from another wing where incoming stuff was unloaded onto it. All the chutes were connected to it, leading down to the various truck bays where outbound trailers were parked. Barcode readers up top would read each package's destination, and when it got to the right chute, a mechanical arm would push it into the chute. Actually worked surprisingly well, in retrospect (this was the mid-90s).

You'd have to get full dimensional info about each package... probably not that hard. But to change the order, you've now got a storage problem. Where previously your analysis was confined to just one package, now you're dealing with groups of N packages, and depending how far you want to take the optimization, N could be as big as "all packages destined for that truck." So maybe you have some kind of sort area between the inbound & outbound areas. Or maybe you use the conveyor itself as the storage - i.e. if something is out of order, it just makes a circuit around the building until its turn comes. That would probably require a bigger/longer conveyor, and to compensate for lower "density" of chute-appropriate packages, it would have to move faster.

Suddenly this seems akin to the problem of optimizing spinning disc drives, starting from slow ones in the old days and moving forward. What you're essentially calling for is something akin to random access, but instead of bytes we're accessing packages!

Edit: Or the hybrid version: you create multiple, smaller sorting areas somehow, one for each bay, located near the bay.

Sounds like a pretty fun set of problems!

Do any of the Truck Driving Simulator games have Trailer Packing Simulator modules? That would be so much obsessive compulsive fun!

When I moved, circa 16 years ago, the moving crew took the time to describe what they were doing, and why. (It wasn't a large move, it was local, and I was right there with them.)

That proved really useful when, some months later, I received a frantic call in the early morning from a friend who had rented a U-Haul and had some friends from church coming by, but was otherwise completely unprepared.

And a few times, since. The last, this spring, when I was able to advise a friend to e.g. put that many hundred pound commercial air compressor in first, up front, so that it wouldn't crush everything else in the event of a panic stop.

I imagine the description goes far beyond what I know, but there are some basics that you can learn in an hour and that will make such packing and moving go much better and more smoothly.

https://amzn.com/dp/B01M2XRQ50/ $9.32

You can find a local bookstore at which to buy it here: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393608717

Reply on news.ycombinator.com