My initial attempt at trying to order pizza from within Vim | Hacker News Reader

My initial attempt at trying to order pizza from within Vim

github.com

67 pointsphilonoist21 comments

Fun story for ordering food: https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marthag/postscript/bur...

A couple years before you could order burritos with Adobe's Fax enabled PostScript printers, I made PizzaTool use Sun's NeWS based "NeWSPrint" PostScript=>FAX gateway to order pizza from Tony and Alba's, and Sun Microsystems shipped PizzaTool with Solaris Unix SVR4. PizzaTool would actually fax a picture of the pizza with all its toppings, and let you preview it in color on the screen! As long as you're FAXing PostScript, why just use text, why not draw it on the screen in an interactive round spinning window too? (Try doing that in Display PostScript or Vim!)

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool

How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

FAXed order with PostScript pizza visualization:

https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.png

NeWS PostScript Source Code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

Manual Entry:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt

  % Fork a process to sprinkle a topping on the pizza in the background.
  %
  /StartSprinkle { % topping => -
    { % fork:
      gsave
       /PaintSetup self send
       /ClipCrust self send
       { % send to topping:
         clear /paint self send
       } exch send
       Sprinklers currentprocess undef
      grestore
    } fork
    Sprinklers exch dup put pop
  } def

  % Kill all the processes sprinkling toppings.
  %
  /StopSprinklers { % - => -
    [Sprinklers {pop} forall] {killprocess} forall
    Sprinklers cleanoutdict
  } def

  % Start spinning the pizza, to cook it.
  %
  /StartSpin { % - => -
    /StopSpin self send
    /SpinProcess { % fork:
      clear
      /PaintSetup self send
      /ClipCrust self send
      initmatrix
      { % loop:
        SpinPause { pause } repeat
        /Spin self send
      } loop
      SpinProcess currentprocess eq { % if:
        /SpinProcess unpromote
      } if
    } fork promote
  } def

  % Stop spinning the pizza, before eating it.
  %
  /StopSpin { % - => -
    SpinProcess null ne { % if:
      SpinProcess killprocess
      /SpinProcess unpromote
    } if
  } def

  % Spin the pizza around a bit.
  %
  /Spin { % - => -
    gsave
      /size self send         % w h
      2 div exch 2 div exch   % w/2 h/2
      2 copy translate
      SpinAngle random add rotate
      neg exch neg exch translate  %
      self imagecanvas
     grestore
  } def

> Solaris Unix SVR4

IIRC, PizzaTool was also available for OpenWindows on SunOS 4.1.1 or so, on `sun4c`.

PizzaTool was probably what inspired me to make the (much lesser) LunchTool, which was an XView UI to a database of lunch places near my employer. It printed snazzy formal invitation signs (using PostScript), for wherever the amorphous lunch group would be going that day.

(Learning PS by displaying on OpenWindows was much easier than huffing from a laser printer, and the Adobe blue and red PS books that Sun bundled were great.)

Speaking of La Costeña's enormous burritos:

http://costena.com/famous.html

>On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

Also set that day was the world record for largest number of porta-potties filled. ;)

http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/200604112036...

>World's Largest Burrito at Rengstorff Park

>Despite the hearty appetites of everyone involved, a substantial amount of food was left over. Soon people were filling enormous paper boxes with foot-long lengths destined for the freezer. A couple groups carried six-foot lengths like fire hoses to waiting pickup trucks.

Previous HN discussion about "Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992) (mit.edu)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25897535

Is the "Barfing Boy" sculpture that was in front of Adobe headquarters on Shoreline Amphitheatre Parkway still there in front of what's now Google?

https://www.ilovemv.org/new-blog-1/category/public-art-tour3

I heard that the artist who they commissioned to create that sculpture assumed by the name of the road that it would be overlooking the shoreline, and meant it to represent a person leaning out of a window to enjoy the view, and they were dismayed that it was actually overlooking a garbage dump landfill, thus the "Barfing Boy" nickname.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56a9576aa976af...

The rotting garbage underneath the lawn of Shoreline Amphitheatre generated methane that you could light for amusement during concerts.

One of Apple’s early LaserWriters had an Easter egg in ROM that faxed in an order for a burrito at a restaurant in (or near) Cupertino.

Details aren’t on the web, AFAIK. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440422 mentions it was to print, but I think https://en.everybodywiki.com/Stump_the_Experts#Sample_Questi... is right that it faxed an order (that’s why the question included “fully equipped”; the fax part was optional)

Nothing against the work, but I thought this was actually ordering pizza from vim not opening up a URL in a browser.

That's a job for emacs. Open a pull request to use https://github.com/segv/sudo-make-me-a-pizza instead.

Not only will Emacs help you order pizzas, but it will also help you do bong hits to stimulate your appetite. Try doing that in vim!

Original UniPress Emacs MockLisp:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/bh.ml

Ported to Gnu Emacs Lisp:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/bh.el

Arbitrarily shaped user defined bong and big stash of hash:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/bh.txt

Modern QR codes aren’t that magical anymore when you realize they’re just of bits encoding a boring string, namely a URL.

Dominoes has an API if you actually want to order a pizza through vim and not just open a browser.

Is there a reason why it’s public?

Because they likely use the same API for their website/app/Alexa/etc. platforms, since so long as the same calls need to be made, it makes sense to reuse the work you've already done.

So long as they have reasonable rate limits & security in place, it makes sense to allow anyone to use it to order pizzas from whatever platform they want, because it's still money in their pockets -- not to mention free press from articles like "how to order pizza from vim"

Is there a good reason not to make it public?

Security reasons. Maybe it’s easier to secure an API than I think.

This looks super cool, and I appreciate you sharing -- I'm a big fan of vi(m), mostly because it's installed on lots of systems and doesn't require pulling down a config file from the 'net when you're on a new box or whatever.

(No offense to "emacs people" but some of us like to keep it offline.)

However, I hope you told the shop you're going to be doing this OP.

I got pretty depressed due to COVID, so I ordered a lot more take out that I used to.

One of my... contacts... informed me many of what I'll call "meal aggregators" take up to 25% of the cost of an order. They also implied these services allow folks to put in so many orders, in parallel, that they overwhelm a place. Apparently once you are signed up for some of them, it's next to impossible to opt out.

So while I'll definitely bookmark this, I hope folks also consider using a telephone to order food -- it can be interesting seeing who can fall back to 90s era social norms and who goes completely insane if you try to talk to them like they're not a computer.

That doesn't apply to Dominos etc. I think but more to Delivery Hero, Uber Eats, Doordash etc.

The place you mentioned isn't an aggregator, but I'd be curious if they have less per transaction costs if you just call the store, ask for a pizza, and give them cash. I've seen places that seem to value it, and a couple that seemed weirdly hostile to the entire idea someone might not want to be a literal slave to the Saudis or whoever keeps propping up services like Uber that are unprofitable and often flout local regulations. (I think)

There's also an Oblivion mod that lets you order pizza in game:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/this-mod-allows-you-to-orde...

I think it'd be cool to order pizza from the commandline, but this makes my workflow a lot more efficient! Well done!

This is a job for woob (https://woob.tech). Make a capability to "order something", and schedule a cron job to deliver pizza every Friday.

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