Hacker News Reader

Comment by octernion | Hacker News Reader

I’m the engineer that wrote all the initial replacement algorithms and I currently work on the Instacart fulfillment system. We never have designed or even considered a system that would attempt to profit off not found items, that’s insanely anti-customer and unethical. We do suggest items on the storefront, pre-purchase, but our substitution recommendation system is entirely driven based on any specific requests from you (that order or previously) and a collaborative model driven by prior replacements.

We are also working on better ways to collect preferences from folks; I’m not sure when any of that would be going live.

View on HN

Maybe you should consider adjusting your recommendation engine to default to keeping the price as close to possible as the original item. The majority of your customers are going to have this as their highest priority. Basing it off prior replacements (which were most likely not optimal the first time), sounds like the engine might be perpetuating mistakes.

We do use (as inputs) problems folks report with replacements (which include “too expensive” as an option), so theoretically this is covered, but I do think that we will be looking at the initial ranking and boosting as it seems this is a consistent problem. As I noted elsewhere, we will be looking at better collecting preferences from customers as “the majority of customers” approaches don’t always work for very personal items like groceries (eg some folks would prefer to have it organic regardless of cost!)

Right but if I’m shopping at Whole Foods, all the red grapes are organic. So are the eggs, whether they’re $4 or $9 a dozen.

Yep, makes sense -- take my comment as "how things stand now" not "everything is hunky-dory" -- we will definitely be looking at this.

Delete this post

Care to explain why? Don't be a corporate cat trying to shut down anything where people from a company are honestly trying to correct a misconception.

This post doesn't delve any more details than what the user is expecting from Instacart.

Nothing like being a corporate cat. More to the point that OP is on record talking about how unethical a certain practice may be, which may be something IC does in the future. It was mostly just to protect OP

I’m not sure what this means. The OP was frustrated with something they thought we were doing, and I (as the engineer who wrote the actual code and knows what we do and do not talk about) wanted to set the record straight.

> We never have designed or even considered a system that would attempt to profit off not found items

But now that you’ve been told, it’s too good of an idea to let it pass innit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com