Show HN: Just Get Me Food | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Just Get Me Food

justgetmefood.com

58 pointsloeber49 comments

This is a pretty neat hackathon idea, but as an actual business, I'm afraid it falls into the vanishingly large set of services aimed entirely at well-paid young urbanites who haven't matured into basic life skills yet.

We've probably seen enough startups aimed at people who don't want to cook, do laundry, shop for clothes, manage their budgets, go grocery shopping, or other life skills that everyone has to learn after you leave home.

It's a nice alternative interface to Yelp. As a business, though, I'd look for a bigger problem to solve.

Making clothes by hand and growing or hunting food used to be basic life skills, too.

This seems useful, with a few tweaks, for an office setting, where it takes ten people arguing over slack using three different services about where to go eat.

You talk about those things you listed as an irrevocable part of maturity, but back in the day, wealthy people did not have to do them. They had servants who cooked for them, did their laundry, cleaned their homes, bought their groceries, etc. And that's still true today, and even more so in certain places.

And frankly, if you have a high enough salary to pay someone else to take of the mundane parts of your life, I don't see why you shouldn't.

Specialization and comparative advantage are fundamental to human progress.

Not that long ago, most ppl on Earth grew their own food. Now, only a few percent farm and the rest buy it from them.

Why is it better for 100 people to each do their own laundry, vs paying a shop that does it efficiently, in bulk?

> well-paid young urbanites who haven't matured into basic life skills yet

> life skills that everyone has to learn after you leave home

This is condescending. People make different choices with their time and money and that's fine.

> It's a nice alternative interface to Yelp. As a business, though, I'd look for a bigger problem to solve.

This is the Middlebrow Dismissal, my least favorite pattern on HN.

Local search is a totally reasonable challenge, and Just Get Me Food is a nice prototype. What bigger problem are you solving?

I disagree with your premise that specialization is much more efficient. In many cases, it is, but in the sort of services that have historically been in-sourced to the domestic sphere, it isn't. Once you account for capital investment, labor, overhead, profit margin, taxes paid by the customer, and taxes paid by the business, services such as these are priced high enough to be luxuries. If they were efficient, the price would be so low that they would be considered commodities, and they would be the default choice for most families just from a pragmatic perspective.

Keeping a cow for milk is not usually economical, and that is why most people dont do that. Doing your own laundry, cooking, and cleaning are economical. Some things are more marginal- tasks such as doing your own car maintenance and taxes require enough investment of tools and skills that many people should not do them themselves, but many people should, too.

The special case where it is in your best interest to outsource everything other than your own career best applies to people that have a high income, are very busy, and can easily adjust their working hours per week. These folks are relatively rare.

Cost is king.

Super markets fall into the vanishingly large set of services aimed entirely at well-paid young urbanites who haven't matured into basic life skills (growing food) yet.

:hmmmm:

As someone who has frequently traveled for work I have to disagree. When you're in an unknown area and just worked through lunch to finish something up, anything that will shave time between you and access to food is greatly appreciated. I can't investigate the app as the api limit was hit, but based on the name, I'd be very interested in this.

The trend of "Programming must be for business!" is so tiring. Also the trend of dismissing the next generation's preferences as nothing more than a fad, or somehow detrimental to human civilization. Life goes on.

It's just as easy to call it a preference as a fad.

A writer (I forget who) noted the number of ideas that fall into the category of:

"Things 20 something software engineers wish their mother still did for them."

Brutal, but accurate.

Hi Everyone! Thanks for the overwhelming interest -- I've hit all my daily API limits. I'll try to get those raised, and JustGetMeFood should be up and running for you tomorrow :)

Please follow https://twitter.com/_justgetmefood for updates.

Congratulations! I'm looking forward to trying it out tomorrow

API limits are reset -- up again! :)

While this is a lovely idea, obviously the dataset is limited to not include things near me -- there are four open bars within 20 minutes walking distance.

While the minimalism is lovely, a link which provided a little more information, particularly on where the data is coming from, would be nice.

Thank you! There is a "Read more on Yelp" link under the pictures for any restaurant, over to the right. I can make it more apparent.

There are a few bars within two blocks of me and the site didn't find any of them. I like the minimalistic look but isn't the database the whole point of it?

The name of the app implies a more impulsive decision, which means less friction on the search filtering would be ideal. Removing the distance filter and showing results which include the walking distance would take me directly to results.

There's a cafe about two blocks away that I go to on the weekends and I swear it doesn't feel like a six minute walk, but the fact that I didn't see this location show up on the results for three minutes was disappointing.

Could default to “Hangry” mode and just show you a map of places to get food inside X minutes, including average wait time once there. No buttons.

> Something went wrong!

Stockholm, Sweden. I guess nothing outside SF works? :P

It uses Yelp's API under the hood. Is Yelp active in Stockholm? I'll go through the error messages and see what's up.

Same in Miami, FL

I got the same in SF at first, but it worked after refreshing. Maybe an issue with getting location permissions on the first run?

You got farther than I did - tried it with restaurants in 10 minutes with $$ filter and it just spun on “Finding Restaurants” for 30 seconds before I killed it. This is in a rural area outside Zürich Switzerland.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Next time my girlfriend goes into “I don’t know what I want, no not that, or that, or that”-mode, I can just hand her this app and let her sort it out herself.

I like the idea, except that you can't override the location selection. It determined my location to be 80km away from where I really am, basically geoip. No idea what my browser based that on, but there seems no way to override this in your website (and I always prefer to override it, even if it would have worked, because it probably triggers sending WiFi MAC addresses to google).

This is a little tricky. I don't use GeoIP, but request a location from your browser.

Location selection on mobile is generally pretty good, but it's very spotty from desktops. If the website can't get your location at all (i.e. if your browser refuses to share it), then you get to input it manually. Maybe I'll add a subtle option to always be able to access that dialog, to override the default geolocation.

Oh I didn't think denying would work, since it kept 'loading' (waiting for me) instead of showing an alternative right away. For most sites, that means it won't work. Perhaps show the alternative input at the same time as requesting it from the browser? Something like:

        Requesting location from your browser...
        <hr color=grey margin-top,bottom=50px>
        Or input your location manually:
        [               ] [OK]

If the user hits deny, the form text could change to what it says now.

Anyway, cool site :)

This finds 4 restaurants at $ within 20 miles of Chicago and Austin in Chicago; the circle with that radius covers almost the entire city of Chicago. I'm guessing this is optimized for SFBA; I'd recommend telling people it's not ready in other places yet.

It's a 20 minute walking distance (i.e. about a mile), not a 20 mile distance.

Yikes, I stand corrected. But it's also missing basically every restaurant on North Avenue and most of Oak Park.

I'm using Yelp's data under the hood, so that's surprising. Please confirm that those restaurants are currently open -- it's possible that I need to expand my queries.

I think it's user error. The app's first recommendation for "I don't care, just give me cheap food" was a place I had no idea existed. It happens to be on North Avenue. https://www.yelp.com/biz/forastero-restaurant-chicago?adjust...

This is an awesome app. I suspect there are a lot of happy users, but no one's saying anything because we're too busy visiting all the great places your app helped us discover. :)

I wonder if it's a location API thing; I can't tell where it thinks I am (and it's down now so I can't repeat the experiment.)

USEFUL (!!!). Will definitely use the next time I can't decide on where to eat

Looks like 500 errors on posts to https://justgetmefood.com/api/get-suggestions, may have hit Yelp API limits already?

Should be working now -- there was a hanging database transaction. I've had to do a bit of live debugging.

Also see 9forks - https://9forks.com (Austin, Houston, Portland, Seattle). Just a quick side project, but maybe we'll pick it up again someday.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for my city.

The idea reminds me of "WHERE THE FUCK SHOULD I GO TO EAT?"( https://wtfsigte.com/)

Doesn't work in a Sacramento suburb. Tried cafes and restaurants.

Cool idea. I've seen more than a few things work based on the questions they ask and how well they present the results. Consider using design thinking for this space.

Had no idea San Francisco was in walking distance from my location. Guess I'm the Flash (I'm literally on the opposite side of the country)

This is just a proxy for yelp API, same thing can be accomplished by opening their app and selecting the first thing you see. My friend and I made almost identical app with their api at CalHacks and it had the same options and app flow and returned one restaurant at random. You could also say no and it would give you another random restaurant.

Quite low useability in the long run considering there's no unique dataset here and the app is trivial to build in a day.

This is a pretty low quality comment.

What's wrong with someone experimenting with something? Many projects start small and after some iterations become much more useful.

But instead let's harp on how simple/basic it is and how easy it is to make. \s

Something went wrong?

Works in Sydney. Ty will try it for real soon

How do you plan to compete with my mom?

"Something went wrong!"

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