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Comment by reagan83 | Hacker News Reader

Paulg taking a victory lap in really odd fashion: telling a couple of kids what he wanted them to build, saying he predicted ordering fast food on your cellphones was a bad idea and still can’t be done today (DoorDash?). This whole write-up seems off.

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Agreed. It feels forced. "Hey Paul, we're doing an IPO soon, can you write something about how cool we are?"

My thoughts exactly. PG just writing a fluff piece to try to get them a lil IPO pop.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I admire pg. But I kind of doubt anything he writes will make any difference for the Reddit IPO.

ITT: pg invented reddit, gives himself a pat on the back, has not used reddit in the last decade to see how much it has degraded

My thought exactly, this had to be written by someone who hasn't used reddit recently.

Also this:

> Steve is not out of ideas yet.

Could this refer to the hugely innovative Reddit live chat (/s), or the idea to alienate many of it's most dedicated users by killing their favorite clients?

The only good idea he had was to fellate pg’s ego and write Reddit in lisp, which is all of talked about in those days. Seems to have a need to be proven that he was a right clever boy.

Yeah, I don't understand what he even means.

>a way to order fast food on your cellphone.

>[...]So it was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.

How does this not exist?? If there was a further problem with their idea why did he describe it in the way of something that not only exists but is super popular? Has he grown completely out of touch or what's going on?

I'm pretty sure he knows what Doordash is. I assume the thing that doesn't exist is ordering via a phone line, not an internet-based interface.

i.e. texting or calling a number in a specific way based on some standard tons of fast food places provide to make fast food orders without human interaction.

I've seen text to order food where you pay at pickup. There seem to be some systems out there.

https://www.usfoods.com/our-services/business-trends/text-to...

It still seems pretty disingenuous to say it doesn't exist even today just because we do the same thing with better tech today - very likely what their hypothetical company would've ended up doing, same as Netflix or Twitter embracing the technology for their use cases and moving away from DVDs and SMS.

I really think he's trying to pussyfoot around his poorly-aged claim by changing the goalpost. Even in 2005, with Domino's order tracker, it was still a purposely-contrarian stance on what technology would allow us to do with food ordering in the near future. If this is considered a hill to die on, that's embarrassing.

I took it to mean "an app like this created by Steve and Alexis still doesn't exist."

It gave me pause though, as it's a weird way to phrase it.

What they were probably pitching 19 years ago would have been ordering via SMS on basic phones, most likely via USSD codes. That’s why he mentioned contracts with cell networks, as they’d need to secure numbers and codes.

That model absolutely has taken off, just not in places where everyone has smartphones. USSD services - driven by basic text menus - powers everything from microtransactions to ordering food to accessing government services in many parts of Africa to this day:

https://africastalking.com/ussd

PG essays from the 2000s felt insightful and honest. The latter-day stuff is veering dangerously close to A16z.com fluff.

Yeah, it's definitely marketing.

Re: ordering food by cellphone: paulg probably means doordash but via texts or calls navigating a tree of choices, as opposed to in an app/browser. Hence his vocabulary choice of "cellphone" not "smartphone".

You could even charge customers food orders indirectly via premium SMS texts. Without having to sign up for an account.

Isn't ordering food on your phone huge everywhere?

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