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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

I created a program that prints QR codes onto sheets of peel-and-stick labels. When someone scans the code, they are directed to a simple web app that manages food sharing with my four roommates.

We noticed that we buy a lot of the same things (bananas, avocados, eggs, etc), so we implemented a system where anyone can stick a QR code onto something they want to share, and anyone else can scan it to record what they took. For example, this morning I pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge, scanned it, recorded that I took 3, and a Splitwise expense was automatically updated between me and the person who bought the eggs (much easier and less awkward than handing someone 75 cents). Everyone is logged into the application via Splitwise OAuth, and all products/expenses/debts are automatically simplified within Splitwise and updated via the API - so the app is pretty much a wrapper over Splitwise specifically for granular sharing of food.

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It’s like Web 3.0 for your fridge… make a market for anything.

A roommate taking 3 eggs from me doesn’t bother me. Firing off a text, “Hey, I took 3 eggs” is all I need.

We really just don’t like to share these days. That’s the problem we are now solving it appears.

Lol do you really need to criticize someone else's code written by that person to solve their own problem in their own sphere based on your personal (sharing-positive) ideology? This is peak Hackernews.

Live and let live is what I say. Writing code for yourself and your own problems is fun.

Long-term sharing breaks down when one person feels they are contributing more than another. For low-price household items like toilet paper, soap, etc, and common kitchen items like olive oil, flour, etc, we all still pitch in to a fixed "house fund" since it takes more time to split it evenly. But for everyday quantity-based items, it has helped us all stop over-purchasing and throwing out as much fresh produce, and any roommate can opt-in to share as much/as little as they want.

Yea. I might set something like this up if I had awful roommates or some special reason why we couldn’t share. Otherwise, a shared fund for pantry items seems like less hassle for the same outcome.

> We really just don’t like to share these days. That’s the problem we are now solving it appears

Yeah, capitalism took over the sharing economy and turned it into the gig economy.

What label printer do you use and did you end up automating the printing process or just the QR code generation process?

I use a regular desktop printer and feed in sheets of sticky address labels (the 1" x 2.625" and 2" x 2" squares are ideal). I wrote a Java program to output QR codes with random IDs onto a PDF document, and generated one long PDF such that I could pre-print a couple thousand labels.

I chose a different system, you can buy something for yourself or you can buy something for everyone in which case the price is shared between everyone. Is it less fair? Perhaps the unfairness does accumulate (for example, I'm the only vegetarian here, but meat still gets added to the shared budget, but in exchange I eat more non-meat than others), but it would be really inconvenient to have, say, 3 packs of cheese (you can't just take an entire pack of cheese, so it can't be shared with your system). Also I don't need any labels!

You are living the future my friend

Are you maintaining a per item price list? Is is generic or updated after each trip to the market?

0.25 per egg assumed the dozen cost $3 but what happens when I go to a value brand and my cost is $2 or the fancy $5 dozen eggs. Does the roommate have to update the price per item for everything they buy?

How do things like a bag of chips work? Cost per weight probably makes the most sense but the overhead of such a system seems enormous.

Also, what happens when your roommate gets mad at you because they bought those eggs for a specific meal they planned on cooking for dinner and now have to go to the store for more or change their plan? This is the main reason I most had a no sharing rule with my roommates.

I took some screenshots to give better context to my answers below: https://imgur.com/a/5Vx9aOR

To initialize an item, you take a QR code off a sheet of QR stickers (each one has a random v4 UUID as part of the web app URL) and choose a sharing method. In the case of eggs, I would simply enter whatever I paid for the eggs, and it is up to the roommate that scans the code to decide whether to take it or not.

There are four "sharing schemes" supported so far - share by quantity, by rotation (so someone can join the rotation to replenish something like a spice), by percent (so someone can offer/claim 25% of a leftover pizza), or the whole item (probably ideal for the bag of chips example).

The whole system is very hands-free and opt-in, and everything stays synchronized with Splitwise (I wanted to add some screenshots of that bit, but my roommate's names were all over - I might set up an example or GitHub repo for this project some day).

Congrats! You've invented a very bare bones inventory management system :)

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