I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race | Hacker News Reader

I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race

steele.blue

309 pointsnxten98 comments

Colin will make you a pizza while he's delivering it: https://youtu.be/YjyJRTM0knE?si=fes2lbRntUlciPSH

That's what happens when you remove the GIL.

Edit: the video was the best laugh I had on YouTube this year, thanks!

You laugh, but the concept of this funny YouTube video was the actual business model of a SoftBank-backed startup that raised half a billion dollars [1]. The crucial flaw in their otherwise ironclad plan was that the pizza had a tendency to fly around and lose all its toppings when the truck went over a bump in the road.

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-...

They didn't raise half a billion dollars, they were valued at half a billion.

From the article:

///

Most notably, the company enjoyed a generous infusion from Japanese investment firm SoftBank, which injected a whopping $375 million into the startup in 2018. By the end of its lifespan, Zume had raised as much as $445 million.

///

They actually nearly raised half a bil.

Yeah, the headline’s wording implies valuation, but that’s actually the amount they raised. Who knows how they managed to spend it. That’s a lot of Bali offsites and kombucha on tap.

My current company was somewhat involved with them as a supplier I think, before my time. They never had robotic pizza trucks, they were just regular pizza trucks with an app. They hired so many engineers they loaned some out to my company because they had no idea what to do with them.

Seems like it would have been a better option to do the final cooking which is around 7-8 min in the oven at the delivery doorstep.

Neapolitan pizza needs to cook for like 3 minutes tops, but getting an oven hot enough for that on the back of a truck would probably be a challenge.

Why would it be a challenge? An Ooni oven can do it in a much smaller space.

I'm pretty sure that was a money-laundering scheme disguised as some silicon valley-esque startup to not trigger alarm bells with institutions

I don't see how one would do that. Mind expanding? You won't turn out dividends and salary sounds highly taxed

> I'm pretty sure that was a money-laundering scheme disguised as some silicon valley-esque startup

considering some of the half baked shenanigans I've seen conducted in SF that actually raised funding back when I was there. this would explain a LOT...

I'm pretty sure it was not: there's much more effective ways to launder money than a high profile startup

That would be a perfect cover up considering it’s not that unheard of with their investor: https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/c4d82a

isn't all of softbank a money-laundering scheme? it's just kingdom of saud buying influence in the west.

Your second sentence contradicts your first.

Im kinda with the other reply, sneak. Isnt softbank a Japan/asian based cartel? From the first articles I can find they just cost saudia some money (not to say it wasnt laundered ... maybe they bought some softpaintings?)

It's really not that deep

Seems like you could install pretty good motion isolation systems in the trucks with that kind of money...

Should have pivoted to calzones.

Should have had the oven on shock absorbers.

That's fun, this was also the premise of a Donald Duck story in the italian mickey mouse weekly

https://inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+2629-3&search=paperino%...

They need that tech tanks use to keep their gun level, that multi axis gyroscope thing. This is the sort of tech crossover that could make military spending more acceptable.

His cellphone uses GPS and connects to other computers over the internet using TCP/IP, but I guess you're waiting on pizza gyroscopes to see any valuable tech crossover relative to this project.

Imagine the things achieved if the money being spent wasn't focused on military applications.

I imagine military applications for "know where something is in world" and "have network of computers communicate in a damage resistant way" are no more costly to develop than non-military applications.

Hard to say. Would the research even have occurred if there weren't military applications? At the end of the day, there are only a few ways to get politicians to fund research:

* War (physics, chemistry, computer science, psychology)

* Fortune-telling (astronomy, economics, political science)

* Immortality (medicine, fine art, humanities)

To illustrate just how capable that tech was even back in 1986, look at 1:45 of this Bundeswehr video demonstrating a Leopard tank carry a keg of beer and not lose a drop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2mcO6l-0cY

It’s actually a stein of beer, carried on the end of the barrel of the tank’s main gun, for others that like me did not understand. It’s cool.

Here's the thread that debuted this on HN in 2016 titled "Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics"[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980694

Is Colin’s recklessness a fake act, like Electroboom, or is he really as reckless as it seems? I’m not sure I’ve ever really figured it out, and for some reason it makes it hard for me to watch. I guess obviously they wouldn’t publish a video where something goes horribly wrong, though.

It's an act, but I wouldn't call it fake. He has more in common with photonicinduction than electroboom.

I think I'm slightly more worried that photonicinduction has actually died when he goes silent for a while, though. I know it's mostly down to career/relationship ups-and-downs, but there's always a chance it's "got turned inside out by a flying washing machine drum".

they're just playing characters

Another one if you want to see some real recklessness is "I did a thing".

Seconded! Here's the channel link

https://youtube.com/@Ididathing

What’s something that Colin did that was reckless? Everything he does looks pretty run of the mill for a workshop, but cool.

Maybe:

https://youtu.be/soxxPyaAT1k?si=-LPT22_aPrOx9xyT

https://youtu.be/fzMi6yf1Roc?si=v6s9QcCX5ughgnlk

Omg my entire Sunday evening gone. Just watched this man build a tunnel from his house to his shed for 2.5 hours. What a fun channel.

Colin's channel is just a treasure trove.

Very nice. A 21st century take on pizzatool.

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

FWIW, there's a pizza restaurant, Waypoint Pizza in Tiburon, which if you ask nicely will deliver on the water in the San Francisco Bay. This comes in handy during weird less serious sailing races like Three Bridge Fiasco.

> if you ask nicely

how much does that cost if a normal pizza delivery can cost $5-$10 extra?

You'd have to call+ask. It was a thing circa 2012. It's been awhile but the woman who ran Waypoint was a racer on the America3 team. It was more of a courtesy to other racers than an Uber Eats thing. Dunno if she's still there or if they still do it.

Dean Karnazes did this in an ultra running race minus the tech. He rolled the pizza up like a burrito and ran with it:

https://gffmag.com/the-raw-endurance-of-ultramarathon-man-de...

Endurance running is really just eating.

It's literally the second hardest thing to do after the biking/running/swimming/skiing itself. Fueling is the operational excellence challenge of endurance sports.

how does your body not have a hard time processing cheese/sauce/butter/fat/grease while running?

It does. Getting your stomach good at that (and figuring out what food you can personally tolerate best) is a nontrivial part of training for longer ultramarathons.

Really interesting. I wouldn’t have conceived of this. But it only makes sense.

I was aware of the eating but I still don’t quite understand it. You don’t completely run out of fat do you? Can a person not run on fat stores alone?

Breaking down fat costs a lot of oxygen. The body can run on fat if you have a lot of oxygen to spare. If the effort is causing you to breath heavily, then you are probably mostly burning faster carbohydrates (glycogen, a sort of sugary fuel the body has already stored in the muscles).

Running out of fast carbohydrates is (at least in biking) called "bonking". You'll feel extremely tired, maybe be shaking, and feeling dizzy. It's a blood sugar dip: a very low and long dip. Your brain usually runs on sugar too, so you'll feel stupid and angry. Your body still has fat stores, so your body can keep running - but at a much lower effort intensity.

If it is a react website that would imply it has an api you could just use directly. Might still need to login to get a token but that's a lot more robust

Agreed! I always am confused when people screen scrape instead of just monitoring and replaying network requests. Much cheaper and much more robust. Is there anything I'm missing?

I was curious about this myself. Perhaps the pizza request is arcane or buried in lots of other requests?

i cannot tell you how much i enjoyed this article. it was very funny. it had so many great elements. a fun tech problem, pizza, getting me to look up what “s-tier” meant, a dash of humor (as if the premise wasn’t already hilarious), the mea culpa at the end and the ideas as to what the bug was (his theory sounds plausible to me, but idk).

Hm. I thoroughly disliked it - 100 layers of abstraction, glue and duct tape in the cloud to construct a rube Goldberg machine that doesn't work. It felt like everything wrong with modern tech.

This is pretty neat not gonna lie. I wonder now if something similar can be done with Deliveroo or similar - on day X if certain conditions are met (eg: working late), have preprogrammed order Y submitted when approximately Z distance from house.

Wire it up to a fitness tracker and only have enough pizza delivered to keep you at a calorie deficit so that you lose weight.

Add enough pizza alternatives to make it a somewhat plausible diet and that's an actually great idea - for the crowd that can afford a fully delivery-based diet.

Yes, it’s seems like food ordering services should have good APIs for this—why not make it easy for people to integrate food ordering (and paying!) into IFTTT-style hacks?!

They might fear abuse or trolls

Also not being able to put ads down your throat via API

Why would you lie about this being pretty neat? Seems like a weird thing to clarify.

It's usually spelled "ngl" and seems to be a stock phrase that's used more-or-less as an opposite of "/s".

Its just an expression, dont overthink it.

I have fond memories of growing up with Casey's pizza. I pick it up any time I am back in the Midwest.

I can't place it, but it has its own distinct charm.

Extra grease? The breakfast pizza is the best err, usually after a night of drinking busch lights.

https://investor.caseys.com/press-releases/press-release-det...

This might surprise some people . Pizza for breakfast . Not left over pizza from previous night

Oof, and it didn't work. That's pretty rough to find out at mile 200!

Software, cycling and pizza. Some of my favorite things in life. This project and write-up was thoroughly enjoyed, and has inspired some of my own similar ideas now! Cheers

Hi, these are also my favourite things. OP, yourself and myself should start a club.

I think I would either:

- just call up using hands free - have a friend do the call, and message them to trigger it

Also he keeps referring to "delivery" but it's actually pickup, no?

Great stuff! Thanks for the Playwright link and detailed Lambda blog posts, I had a similar project I was working on trying to convert text into animated (typed) code videos (on visual studio code) - trying to get anything non trivial in lambda to run is indeed an interesting endeavour to say the least!

>My going theory is that the Lambda had terminated processing as soon as the final form.submit()

Kinda odd behaviour

Isn't that the point of serverless though?

It wouldn't have worked regardless of what they ran it on, it's the runtime that terminates.

This wasn't obvious to me just looking at the problem from a distance, but thankfully testing reduces the level of skill required to get something right :)

That's because the author apparently neglected to parse the resulting page to ensure that the submission succeeded.

If you terminate the system right after sending a form there is no guarantee that the data even left the local buffers for the network.

This is the right answer. He’s immediately closing the browser after clicking the button. He should wait for a success UI or at least that the resulting network call finishes with success or a failure to retry on. Not lambdas fault, it’s performing as coded.

If they take phone orders you could just play a pre recorded messages and call them using twillo. I've done this in the past to call many stores and check inventory of an item

How does this work with a conversation? Did you ask them to press 1 if the item is in stock, or send you an email to a provided address?

You could start the message by explaining your situation. But yeah still lots of edge cases this doesn't catch.

Twilio has different verbs you can use to quickly and easily throw together a small voice controlled phone tree with basic conversational understanding.

that was a fun read! hope you get your fresh pizza next race

Ok let’s fix one thing: Casey’s pizza is not great, despite the cult following :)

Source: Missouri resident

LOL this guy is amazing and does amazing things. I would never think of something like that.

There's a great way to get motivated for the last leg of the race!

But… Hawaiian pizza?

makes sense in a weird way. if you're running. pineapple got plenty of sugar in em which is exactly what you need when you're running and eating at the same time.

The lengths people these days will go to in order to not make a phone call...

Exactly. Personally I like making calls whilst riding my bicycle, in part to make motorists go mad because we all know that texts, calls and such phone activity causes accidents. But, on a bike you are not going to kill anyone.

> In other words, after having wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to make pizza in the most complicated way possible, Zume decided that the best course of action was to just try selling boxes instead

Started off as a Futurama episode, finished off as a Simpsons episode.

Sorry for being kinda off-topic, but what's going on with these small(-ish) businesses configuring their websites to block users randomly through Cloudflare nowadays? I've seen this happened at least 5 times this week clicking random links, they are all local business websites.

I'm talking about https://www.caseys.com in this article, which gives me

    Access denied
    Error code 1020
    You do not have access to www.caseys.com.

    The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site."

Is this a GDPR measure (but My IP is in Japan, not EU), anti-proxy measure (I do use one), or cost-saving measure?

This, I believe, is the free DDoS guard that people opt into because it's free.

This really is a hard stop being applied on Cloudflare WAF rules to stop any traffic from geo locations a sys admin believes would stop threats and also reduce their bandwidth utilisation. If companies don’t have business interest outside or their territory/ country the new trend seems to be just geo block that domain. While https://investor.caseys.com/ is accessible from Europe for eg., the main site isn’t . This isn’t a GDPR thing just a playbook some of the cyber security and ops team seem to be applying across various retail companies now a days .

Well, Casey’s is not actually smallish, it’s a fortune 500 company publicly traded on NASDAQ (CASY) and has a market cap of over 9 billion.

I guess that makes it even worse. Large companies surely want people around the world to visit their websites for brand recognition even if they don't operate in their regions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com