octernion

it’s “Instacart,” not “InstaCart” and [citation needed]

(disclaimer: engineer @ Instacart)

I’m the engineer that wrote all the initial replacement algorithms and I currently work on the Instacart fulfillment system. We never have designed or even considered a system that would attempt to profit off not found items, that’s insanely anti-customer and unethical. We do suggest items on the storefront, pre-purchase, but our substitution recommendation system is entirely driven based on any specific requests from you (that order or previously) and a collaborative model driven by prior replacements.

We are also working on better ways to collect preferences from folks; I’m not sure when any of that would be going live.

  Their largely manual, layered-over-retail fulfillment model has inefficiencies that cause higher costs and stocking issues vs. the high-efficiency warehouse approach that Amazon has perfected.

[citation needed] you mean the "perfected" approach they are shutting down in 9 states? (https://www.recode.net/2017/11/3/16601488/amazon-fresh-cance...)

noting this as an engineer on the team that does order fulfillment @ instacart and who actually knows our model...

  Every Instacart shopper currently working for Instacart hates Instacart. 

citation needed

As the engineering manager actually looking at our NPS scores from our shoppers it's disheartening to see this kind of blatantly wrong trolling on HN... if you actually have any insight (other than outdated and wrong news articles from last year), I'd love to see it.

I'm personally excited for the opportunity this affords us -- completely validating this space and market.

what's the story for change data capture with CockroachDB? Postgres 9.4 added logical replication, which is incredibly useful for this use case.

Also, we use JSONB fairly extensively -- I see the tracking issue here https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/2969 but no movement.

See the Arxiv paper[0] on it.

Found this from the Redis code[1] (I was curious, too).

[0]:https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02284

[1]:https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/87538cb7fe19b567118944...

Days when multiple outages happen always remind me of this wonderful article: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Gotcha - thanks so much for writing this up. I'll see about actually implementing this :)

Thanks for doing this, Evan! Much appreciated - I've already implemented it to compare with our traditional confidence score based A/B metrics.

I'm not sure what you mean by Monte Carlo for confidence bounds - is there some reading I can do to brush up on that?

edit: here is your solution implemented in Ruby as I implemented it https://gist.github.com/nickelser/6dfa0f2737c502dae267

I suspect they wrote a new init function specifically for Swift (as an extension), but I could be wrong.

  myobj.addNumber(42, withString:"Hello World")

edit: I see you removed your equals - your guess is now correct :)

for more details, see this link on apple's docs (may change)

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Absolutely true! The geek in me sees a sort of halo effect of having those king of features, though, in how much I appreciate a project; I'm sure that's not as easily quantifiable.

Pretty cool project! I remember the pleasure I got out of (partially) re-implementing the Pusher API.

I wonder why real-time features aren't more popular? Real-time order status, live-updating maps, the list goes on!

Just out of curiousity, what are you looking for in a delivery service that Google Shopping Express/Instacart does not offer?

Differences with https://github.com/plataformatec/has_scope?

Just tried it out - works as advertised!

Doesn't work if you have it in screensaver mode and locked - you need to have the login screen up. Still very neat.

I really enjoyed reading this - thanks for posting!

I had totally forgotten about Prolog, and I love how it essentially forces you to approach problems in an absolutely new manner (conceptually) than more traditional imperative programming.

I'm the complete opposite - I find the mustache extremely gaudy and is the main reason why I prefer Sidecar/UberX (I find the drivers with Sidecar similarly friendly and interesting, and UberX more professional).

I guess that seems somewhat trite in retrospect, but for some reason I feel like I'm getting in a clown car when I use Lyft.

Where is the vitriol from this coming from? This isn't some massive new UI paradigm, it's effectively a theme!

And a handsome one, at that.

Love the idea. Only suggestion: on the How it works page (https://www.uncover.com/how-it-works), the tooltips for the details cover up the other buttons - maybe have the tooltips for the icons on the top row show above, while the tooltips for the lower icons show below?

Holy cow, what a loss. One of the few film critics whose reviews I always enjoyed (even if I didn't always agree with him).

And he just wrote about having a leave of presence! I will miss him immensely.

Instacart Express was a free trial until very recently - no one was charged for the service. When Instacart starting charging the $99 fee, they also sent out the email (which apparently didn't reach anyone?) and changed the policy such that it made sense for the company while also providing that people could opt-out on the new conditions. I agree 100% they shouldn't be changing the policy if people had paid for it (e.g., breaking the contract), but in this case everyone was getting a free service.

Really fun to watch the carts change in real-time across multiple computers - how did you guys achieve this? Very cool.

Ah, I see what you mean. I've never really thought about how one approaches methods from a structural perspective (especially controller methods).

I suppose for something like the respond_to block, which is shared to pretty much every controller method (and unique to that method, most likely), my thought was that its absence makes the method slightly more confusing for the experienced Rails developer.

So, would you extend this reasoning to every controller method? ('perform_index_response', 'perform_edit_response', etc.)

I really enjoyed reading this!

When Discourse was originally announced, I read this file (quite randomly), and was distressed at the complexity and length (even though I totally understand time constraints and the need to 'get it to work').

I had never heard of the Law of Demeter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter), nor had I heard of Sandi Metz's rules for Rails development (http://gist.io/4567190), both of which put in concrete terms some of the lessons I've learned when maintaining Rails applications.

I'd love to see more of these!

Edit: After reading over the pull request, I admit I'm a little confused why the response code was refactored into 'perform_show_response' - this seems like the direct responsibility of this controller method (and isn't common or otherwise misplaced). Is there a reason why you moved it out?

I love this response. It captures exactly why I select text on a page.

In my mind it's much like when reading a book and idly toying with the corner, or shifting position in your hand.

I do see why it's annoying for someone trying to read the same text over my shoulder, though.

I love this. Sadly, forking (without logging in) seems to throw up a rails error screen instead of prompting me to log in. Great work, though.

I went through the exact same experience. In retrospect, it's awful that I came to expect to be treated so horribly about a utility. Comcast isn't perfect, but compared to TWC it's all unicorns and sunshine.

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