Burger Robot Startup Opens First Restaurant - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/creator-hamburger-robot/ <comment><USER5> Technical feasability aside, I really cringed when the founder started talking about how this gives their employees time to do more meaningful things, like reading books.

Just face it - you're automating a job. If your company succeeds, more people will become unemployed. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but call it what it is and take responsibility.

<comment><USER6> Unemployment is really low right now, and burger flipping is just about the least desirable type of work available. This has been said countless times, but it's worth noting that although there are very few blacksmiths or peat cutters today, somehow we are still pretty close to full employment.

<comment><USER7> Employment stats are very misleading. There are lots of people with full time jobs who can't even afford housing. Sure they have jobs, but they are still in a really bad situation.

<comment><USER6> I am not commenting on the well-being of people working in fast food. Just on the availability of work. Whether such individuals can afford housing is totally beside the point of my comment.

<comment><USER8> Unemployment numbers also aren't low because the economy is producing tons of new jobs; notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets? It's the labor participation rate. People are only counted towards unemployment stats while they are actively seeking employment; after awhile they give up and drop out of the labor force completely.

Of course much of that drop is also demographics; the baby boomers are starting to retire en masse.

Still, the illusion of job abundance does not hold.

<comment><USER9> > Unemployment numbers also aren't low because the economy is producing tons > of new jobs

In fact the unemployment rate is low because the economy has produced an extraordinarily vast number of jobs. In May alone the US economy nearly produced a million new full-time jobs (solidly contracting the part-time count). The full-time job count is at an all-time record high. The US economy has produced 14 million full-time jobs in just the last six years. [1] And the median full-time income in the US is about $50,000, among the highest on earth.

> notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets?

The US homeless rate per capita has plunged dramatically and is at an all-time record low. [2] You're entirely fabricating your claims, both about jobs and homelessness.

The total homeless count has declined by roughly 27% in just 13 years. From ~760,000 in 2005, to less than 550,000 for 2018. The US added about 10% to its population over that time simultaneously.

How is that possible? Everyone knows the US sucks and has no safety net or support systems. Except, that's a lie. The US welfare state is now more generous than either the Canadian or Australian welfare states. [3]

[1] [https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000)

[2] [https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homeless...](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report/)

[3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u- s-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-social- safety-net-has-improved-a-lot)

<comment><USER10> He may live in the bay area, where homeless has definitely increased, and the dynamic of jobs not paying enough to make rent is a real dynamic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I were looking to invest in one of those, the biggest questions I'd have are around reliability, cleaning routines, and maintenance. For example I could pay minimum wage for someone to cut veggies, or pay significantly more for an engineer to repair the unit because it isn't dispensing tomato right.

Their demo unit is very fun, and adds to the gimmick, but like most industrial equipment ease of access is more important than appearances. I'd hate to have to take apart what they demoed for routine cleaning.

And while it is laudable that they're taking the savings and using them on better ingredients, that only lasts until a competitor appears who is going to just lower the price (e.g. "50c burgers here!").

<comment><USER12> If I were looking to invest, I wouldn't give a crap about reliability, cleaning, and maintenance. I'd want to see his business plan, and how he thinks he's going to make money when the highest amount of revenue this thing can produce is $72/hour, when it runs flawlessly.

<comment><USER13> $72/hour * 160hours/month * 12months/year = $138240/year

On top of that it can produce multiple burgers at the same. I assume the revenue per machine is potentially 5x of that (or more) which is $691200 per year.

Making money seems like the lowest priority item on the very long list of potential problems with this machine.

Cleaning and restocking? Those are still unsolved and might even be impossible. Making more money merely requires "revision 2: now 30% more efficient!" or just building more than one machine.

<comment><USER12> If your restaurant grosses $138K/year, you're out of business pretty fast.

<comment><USER14> True, but you don't have the same expenses. Hopefully less direct human labor hours, able to run 24x7 at times when human costs could be higher, way less real estate and more viable locations than a restaurant, as well as just lower utility bills.

Of course there are other expenses such as maintenance, deployment, development and upgrades. But those are the things this company is likely trying to optimize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little disheartened that nearly everyone so far has immediately jumped to finding flaws in this stories and ones like it.

I get it, there is a long history of such robots failing economically.

However, automating food assembly could free a huge number of people from menial restaurant work.

Perhaps we would see an explosion of food culture and personalization that simply doesn't exist when you have several fast food chains operating tens of thousands of stores worldwide and the cost of opening up a unique restaurant is greater than many people's lifetime earnings.

I hope this problem is solved one day in my lifetime, and that we all benefit from lower food assembly costs and increased dietary options.

<comment><USER16> "Free" them? They need that work in order to survive, mostly. They were "free" before having that menial job and that freedom didn't seem to help turn them into software engineers or nurses before...

<comment><USER17> Which is why we should immediately un-mechanize mines and bring back hurriers and trappers!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrying)

[https://thoroglove.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/trappers- hurrier...](https://thoroglove.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/trappers-hurriers-and- hewers-working-in-a-coal-mine/)

Simply put: if a job is so repetitive that it can be automated out of existence, it's in the interest of humanity overall that it should be.

<comment><USER18> Seems like it's in the interests of the owners to automate, not in the interests of those who work jobs that will be automated.

<comment><USER19> No, it seems like it's in _everyone 's_ interest. Or would you really prefer to live in the conditions people lived in 200 years ago?

<comment><USER18> To be honest, _everyone_ would have been better off if coal extraction remained a manual process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I want to see a high-end robot restaurant that's run as a work of art rather than a race-to-the-bottom. Think Benihana, but run by KUKA robots. You'd sit facing a kitchen behind a glass wall and watch the robots fling things around dangerously -- knives, cutting boards, frying pans, etc.

You'd order a complicated dish and watch in amazement as the robots prepare it in front of you.

<comment><USER21> I'm really curious how something like that would be received. Is Benihana entertaining to watch because of the tricks themselves or because it's impressive that a human has learned to perform the tricks consistently?

<comment><USER22> If I ever had the chance to go see a robot doing Benihana tricks it would definitely be worth going at least once. Perhaps I have more appreciation for the degree of engineering that would go into something like that though.

<comment><USER23> Maybe the bot can get the shrimp in my mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think what this company is doing is great. Unlike all the other automated food startups, this one focuses on COST. I would definitely buy a $6 burger with great ingredients.

The founder cares about people's wellbeing, and seems to have a mission. He's been grinding this out for 8 years. It doesn't sound like the other automation food startups out there.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't really understand the appeal of these restaurants. While living in Boston I went to the MIT "automated" wock-esque' restaurants a few times. It wasn't even that, "automated" per-se outside of the wock-cooking. Humans still handled a majority of meal prep, stocking machines, and dealing with payment problems.

IMO I'd rather have spent less money at the neighboring Chipotle for better food.

<comment><USER26> I recently left the Bay Area to live in a major city in another state, and now that it's a little easier to see the tech forest through the trees, I see that for now, very few people want a lot of these types services outside of usual tech centric hubs.

It's like in the Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano: there are certain services where people enjoy the human touch; I think food service is one of those.

<comment><USER27> Machines don't put mustard on when you tell it no mustard. Machines don't give you attitude either. Machines don't spit on your food or do any number of disgusting things that fast food workers have been known to do.

<comment><USER18> Machines will never comply with "Can I please have more than the two ketchup packets that management woefully let's you give me?" or "How are you doing?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everyone is obsessing about the detail when there's already a company that pretty much does this - Subway!

You could pretty much automate the sub construction process since the ingredient prep process is done at an industrial scale and just shipped in bags to each Subway location.

<comment><USER29> Yeah I'm actually really surprised Subway hasn't at least tested an automated restaurant. Seems like they would be perfectly positioned to do it. They even pre-portion many of their meats to make it even easier.

<comment><USER30> A typical Subway has a lower staff count than most fast food joints, I think. At most times, when I worked at one, we needed fewer than three heads on the line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems like it would quickly devolve into health hazard without constant maintenance. Idk, at this point, it seems like it would be a headache just to have this running smoothly. It's cool and all and yeah maybe robots will make our food in the future, but this machine is not something that I'm especially stoked about.

As a person who cooks, 50% of the time is spent cleaning up. I can see gunk, pieces of stuff, residue messing with the machine. A normal person notices and cleans each bit as they go, whereas a machine like this (unless engineered to clean itself) will be cleaned periodically (most likely after business hours). So my point is, I feel like food made by humans is still cleaner and safer.

Also what happens when something needs to be cleaned or replaced mid-lunch? You shut down the machine and open it up... the restaurant loses $. In a normal kitchen, you wipe things up, wash a knife, or grab a new one and keep going.

<comment><USER12> Just imagine how fast this could spread food borne illnesses. Unless the meat grinder is cleaned between each burger, that's a huge potential risk. Just a little e. coli on the outside of the beef, and each blade will be contaminated.

And as anyone who's worked fast food knows, the higher tech the food prep device, the more delicate it is. Cooking beef results in grease, which gets everywhere. You can put gaskets, physical barriers etc etc, and grease particles will coat everything. Then things will break down.

Add in robotic mandolines for the tomatos/onions, the necessary refrigeration of all the components and you've got something that won't be robust, reliable, or efficient.

Then there's tamper resistance. This thing will need to be hermetically sealed to keep people from doing the usual fsckery that happens in kiosks etc.

And the economics looks "challenging." From the article, it looks like it stocks 30 buns. 30 burgers at $6 is $180 in revenue before someone needs to restock it. And restock the beef. And make sure the artisanal beef deliveries are handled properly. Sounds like a prep cook... Then you'll need cashiers, and people to clean tables, and restrooms, and all the other accoutrements of restaurants.

Yeah, it looks cool, and people do like to see their food cooked. The novelty will attract people at first. Then the lines will deter them. Restaurants are all about volume. And at $6 a burger, you'll need to crank them out fast.

<comment><USER32> Do you not think they may have addressed the obvious issues a layman thinks up.

<comment><USER12> Worked in food service for 16 years, started my own restaurant. So not a layman... (yes I know this is a logical fallacy; appeal to authority. So what)

But to answer your question, no. I don't think they've addressed these obvious issues.

<comment><USER27> Why the hell wouldn't they have addressed those issues? It's so fundamental that they'd be stupid to not have thought of what you've described. These people probably know a thing or two about what they are doing — this isn't some kid's science project. Other people have worked in restaurants too — I am pretty sure your concerns aren't novel.

<comment><USER12> I knew a lot of people whose parents worked in the industry. Their kids would "help" out a bit (the parents hoped to pass on the restaurant) by working the front of the house, or doing some bookkeeping etc. This gave them a sense of the business without learning the hard side of it. The really long hours, the fear of going broke, the hassles of employing people. The endless cleaning, stocking, menu planning, working with vendors. The million details that all have to be done for the business to run smoothly.

Then the parents decide to step away from the business. Their children take over the business, and want to put their stamp on it. Modernize it. They update the menu; redo the decor. Aim for a better clientele. Try to remove the difficult parts of the business with technology. And the business fails. Because they didn't understand the myriad small decisions that lead to its initial success.

Restaurants are incredibly hard to start and run successfully. That's why franchises are so popular, they take some of the guesswork out, at the expense of giving up control and individuality.

At the end of the day, people want tasty food, at a reasonable price, served quickly, and in a decent atmosphere. If this robot can provide that, it'll succeed. I don't see that it can satisfy the second and third criteria. If they get that down, and the cost of the robot isn't higher than a staffed and equipped kitchen they'll succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _It might not be the best burger I've had in my life, but it's certainly the > best at that price. A lot of that comes from the savings on labor and > kitchen space afforded by a robot cook. "We spend more on our ingredients > than any other burger restaurant."_

That's a great elevator pitch. Fluff-free and obvious _ex post facto_.

<comment><USER12> Lots of fluff in that. A well run small kitchen can run rings around something this size. It'll still need walk-ins to store the produce and beef, plus room for buns (which take up a crap ton of space).

Other than the beef, all the other components are standard for a decent restaurant. Fresh baked buns aren't anything special, nor is custom grind meat. And bragging about spending more on your food cost is dumb. It shows that he has no real idea about the day to day of keeping a restaurant financially afloat. He'll find out when the VC money runs out.

<comment><USER22> Your comment shows that you've never worked in fast food.

<comment><USER12> Almost two decades in the business.

<comment><USER22> Well then. Good to see you're doing the work you're qualified for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well this was done in the 60s allready.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE&t=545s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE&t=545s)

It was most likely cracy expensive just as these news machines are compared to a ordinary restaurant grade kitchen and you still need people going around unstucking things that get stuck.

Bringing industrial processes into street food seems ... unpractical.

<comment><USER35> Interestingly, to me at least, that machine from the 1960s seems better constructed than the machine in this article.

<comment><USER36> ...and likely easier to maintain/modify/extend too, since everything will be electromechanical and not controlled by a black-box computer.

<comment><USER37> Actually, exactly the opposite is more likely. All else being equal, the electromechanical assemblies are more likely to fail and are harder to change than the computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think what's kind of interesting is if this actually makes it easier to start a restaurant. Assuming at some point, some food robot maker steps up and starts selling the robot itself to independent restauranteurs, instead of selling hamburgers to end consumers, do these robots put the power back into the hands of the small business/restaurant owner?

I have to imagine a big complication in starting an independent restaurant is the overhead of hiring/managing/supporting employees (i.e. wait staff, cooks, dishwashers, etc.). A large employee base probably requires a large franchise with economies of scale to distribute the cost of centralized HR over many restaurants.

Without that overhead, entrepreneurial restauranteurs can focus on differentiating the food, the location(s) of the restaurant and the ambiance.

<comment><USER39> I think getting the location right has always been the biggest obstacle to being a successful restaurant. And there's only so much you can change the menu and "ambience" when you're supplying self-service burgers.

Plus the article does hint the robo-restaurant still has employees to manage customers, clean, load the machine and presumably sort out issues with it on a not-infrequent basis...

<comment><USER12> Restaurants fail because of 1) poor location, 2) undercapitalization 3) poor QSC (quality/service/cleanliness).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm not very impressed with this. It automates some steps, but they need to take this to the next level, where everything is prepared in a compact, self- cleaning machine. I know people love the art of cooking and there's the question of jobs, but honestly, I hate that my food is created in these chaotic, dirty kitchens. People get tired, apathetic, etc, and the consistency really suffers. How many times have you had an amazing meal only to be completely disappointed the next time.

</comment><comment><USER41> Food, laundry and house cleaning: Things that have not kept pace with technological advancements.

I really hope they are successful. The second order effects of this automation, especially for a busy family like ours are hours of saved time, that can be spent with the children.

<comment><USER42> Cleaning the laundry is essentially solved. Folding what's been cleaned is where the gap remains.

<comment><USER43> Or wrinkle free clothes

<comment><USER44> This is solved by folding. Or hanging up your clothes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Robotic fast food is basically inevitable. It's the same exact process, rarely do menus really change. Burger actually looks pretty dang good, and for $6? Heck yes.

<comment><USER46> $6 is a lot for a fast food burger. I can get a really good burger at dozens of places for less and isn't made by a machine.

<comment><USER47> > I can get a really good burger at dozens of places for less

This place is in San Francisco. Where are these "dozens of places" for a really good burger <$6?

<comment><USER48> Super duper has a 4 oz burger that's 5.75, and is widely acclaimed.

<comment><USER47> I really like Super Duper.

But where are the "dozens" of places?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think it would make a lot of sense to do this for food that wouldn't be cost effective today due to preparation costs. Open a restaurant that serves food no one else does because it would be too labor intensive.

</comment><comment><USER50> From a tech perspective, I think it's a good thing to step towards automation for low-quality burgers, especially in chain restaurants where a recipe has been modified to ensure that the flavour is consistent across the country/world.

What I'd like to see more from this kind of startup is a desire to ensure that anyone that loses a job due to their product has the opportunity for retraining. Sure, it won't be great for profits, but if we're heading towards a time where low-paying jobs are to be automated then I'd love to see a trend start where people who will lose their jobs to automation can opt to move into management or train towards an entry-level job in the engineering required to run these tools.

What I really don't want is some smug SV type spouting a load of bullshit about how automation makes peoples jobs easier. It only makes them easier by relieving them of their duties.

<comment><USER51> I agree with your point that it would be great if proverbial disruption would come with more ideas of how the people in jobs potentially eliminated could get jobs elsewhere. Moving into management or engineering though may be out of the question for many of the current employees in those jobs, as they (by and large) may not have chosen/ended up in those jobs if they were qualified and suitable for management/engineering. The maintenance and potentially manufacturing may be more likely transitioning paths, what do you think?

<comment><USER50> Definitely, as long as they have the first opportunity to move into these jobs. I suppose the benefit of management is that it can apply outside of their line of work, but general manufacturing can too.

The key would be to ensure that anyone that is to lose their job in the future through it being automated by innovative tech be given the opportunity to retrain for a better job. This kind of enforcement means that the job market isn't swamped by mass redundancy, and a consistent time period of retraining for people to re-enter that job market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Speaking from the point of view of a professional brewer, cleaning and sanitizing that mechanized butcher/line cook would be a _nightmare_.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think these kinds of machines could potentially be mainstream someday, at least in fast food, and I see a lot of potential in both cost-savings and food safety improvements.

One thing that struck me as humorous though is the founder's comparison to self-driving cars (from Bloomberg's article): "What you're watching is a technological feat. Self-driving cars need a lot of mileage before they become reliable. You're seeing something similar here"

Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there's basically no unknowns!

<comment><USER54> >> _Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there 's basically no unknowns!_

I always assume things are more complicated than they appear on the surface, so this is a surprise. You sound like you've explored this topic thoroughly. What is involved in having a robot produce a hamburger (not just the patty, of course)?

<comment><USER37> Process automation (a field I've been involved in for around 20 years) is vastly easier because the environment doesn't change by much. You can pretty much say "move this thing over here, verify that you moved it over there, add this chemical, and mix, verify that the chemical was added and then mixed" and be pretty confident that it will work in all likely scenarios.

Self-driving cars, OTOH, have to work with nice smooth roads, or potholed monstrosities, or ice & snow, deer jumping out right in front of the car, or idiots tailgating you at 70 mph while you're trying to maintain distance from the car in front of you. Their environment is always changing, and not generally in a predictable fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I had the idea for the Sub sandwich version of this on my way home from Iraq in 2010. I wanted a sub sandwich, and was still on middle east time, however Baltimore airport didn't have anything open at 2AM when I landed. So the thinking was, why not have a completely automated sandwich shop, that cut everything fresh as it was ordered? The thinking goes, that if you automate the ends of the farm to table process, cooking/service and Growing/picking, then automating the logistics (transport) will make more sense.

After about a year or two of engineering sketches and business planning I gave up on it because it would take a few years for the technology to be capable and people to be ready for a wholly automated restaurant - with one person there for QC/fixes. Plus it would probably be 1-2M just for a prototype. Sure enough in 2011 Momentum machines came out with their prototype, and now 7 years later they have a new brand and a working shop.

Kudos to them. If they do it right, these guys could automate field to table and drive food costs to zero with minimal waste.

</comment><comment><USER56> > When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 > billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas looks me dead > in the eye and says, "the market is much bigger than that."

A $10B valuation company better understand the profit between $1 sale of SaaS and $1 sale of food ...

<comment><USER57> I mean, McDonalds seems to be doing just fine.

<comment><USER12> McDonalds is a real estate company that sells hamburgers...

<comment><USER57> Sure, and why can't this company do that eventually? Maybe expand into other foods, rent out machines, do maintenance, etc.

(I don't necessarily think they'll ever be worth $10Bn, but... eventually, some company doing something similar will be)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> > The idea is that when you bite into the burger, your teeth align with the > vertical strands so instead of requiring harsh chewing it almost melts in > your mouth.

Is this for real? I don't think I've ever had a burger that required "harsh chewing".

<comment><USER22> If you've never experienced the difference between a burger that melts in your mouth vs a burger that uses tough, grade C or D frozen patties... you've never experienced a burger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The bowling equipment manufacturer AMF was here in 1964 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE)

</comment><comment><USER60> It looks hard to clean and does not look like it uses a lot of common off-the- shelf industrial parts. I'd want a very impressive service contract to go along with it.

</comment><comment><USER61> [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm) pops to mind. again.

<comment><USER62> This seems more like the exact opposite scenario.

<comment><USER61> Both stories literally feature mechanically automated fast-food outlets.

care to elaborate your pov please ?

<comment><USER62> Manna is a robot deciding how the human workers should behave.

This is a bunch of human workers deciding how the mechanical work should be done (i.e. with a robot).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I would be curious to see what the actual economic case is for burger automation like this. What's the labour cost savings here, all in?

Restaurants aren't food factories, not even mcdonaldses. We food factories too, but this doesn't appear to be for them. This was to be more about whether or not people would like to have their burger made by a robot. Price-wise, I'd wager its much of a muchness.

<comment><USER27> Labor costs are by far the most expensive costs for a restaurant. Employee turnover is also a significant problem. You typically aren't able to hire A players to make burgers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Reminds me of a video from Sexycyborg i ran into a a while back where she visited what may well be described as a walk in vending machine.

She could pick out what she wanted to buy on a touch screen in the wall, it would come out pre-heated in a slot nearby, and there was a "bar" of sorts were one could sit and eat, that would basically dump anything left on it into the trash upon leaving.

<comment><USER65> Sounds like [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/f5-future- store](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/f5-future-store) ... there's a human behind the wall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> So they finally came out with the rumored restaurant, with 8 years + USD$25M down. Spyce[0] (slammed by HN[1]) beat them to it, on a smaller budget, with the same 'restaurant with partial automation' model. By all accounts (including the friendly founder of Bistrobot, who was unfairly slammed in the article), US regulations are not friendly toward innovation in this space making a restaurant-based launch an effective requirement.

Previous statements from the company included _Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better_ and that US restaurants can save USD$150,000/year on staff salaries. Current reality: many staff, USD$16/hr each, manual finishing, manual preparation of sides and drinks, manual cleaning.

In 2016 I founded Infinite Food here in China. We're developing a fully automated model more akin to a wholly owned and operated network of futuristic vending machines and logistics fleet than a restaurant. Consumers order and pay through an app. Starting from fresh ingredients stored in a fridge within each unit, we cook noodle, pasta and soup dishes to taste, with an average 3 minute hot meal preparation, packaging and retail time and mere seconds for cold dishes. Think ramen/soba/udon/nyangmyeon/pho/pad thai/laksa/various pasta/various Chinese noodles with total customization. In addition, we provide real time nutritional feedback on personalization, allow for ordering in any human language and 24x7x365 availability. Our core idea is to get physically closer to the high density Asian urban consumer than any other food retail option, and offer a broader choice of fresher food.

Early on we looked at the whole problem took the strategy of simultaneous innovation at the appropriate layer: central facility, logistics network or service location based upon available technology and allowable tradeoffs. There's no public evidence any of the US players have much investment in this area, whereas we have a provisional business method patent filed for our solution with more on the way. Currently we are relocating across the Pearl River Delta from Shenzhen to launch operations in Zhuhai and take advantage of the new HK-Macau bridge while hedging regulatory risk across three launch markets (HK/Macau/Guangdong - China's most populous province) and are raising Series A to deploy 300 locations next year.

Total relative spend vs. MM/Creator: ~5% + 1/3 time. Some of the things we've achieved they haven't: full personalization, zero in-field maintenance, true self-cleaning, automated packaging and cutlery provisioning, logistics innovations. Estimate net profit/sale in initial markets: ~USD$2+. Max hot sales/hr: 80. Max cold sales/hr:200+. Meals/restock: 200+. Parallel meal prep.: Up to 4x. Footprint: 2x1 square meters. Prospective investors are welcome to check us out at [http://infinite-food.com/](http://infinite- food.com/) or email in profile.

[0] [https://www.spyce.com/](https://www.spyce.com/)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792371)

</comment><comment><USER66> Founder says he was inspired by flipping burgers, when in all reality he got the idea while watching jimmy neutron[1] as a kid...

[1][http://jimmyneutron.wikia.com/wiki/Men_at_Work](http://jimmyneutron.wikia.com/wiki/Men_at_Work)

</comment><comment><USER67> I always thought robot-made burgers would be depressing, but this actually looks...not depressing.

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't trust anyone to make my burger when they talk about french fries like that.

</comment><comment><USER69> He's automating the wrong part. Making the burger is cheaper made by humans. He needs to read this: [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

<comment><USER70> > Making the burger is cheaper made by humans.

Non-fiction citation needed. One of the points in the article is that those humans take up _space_ that you need to rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Now all they need is a robot waiter!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg)

</comment><comment><USER72> That's a pretty sweet machine. Can't wait to see it first hand.

</comment><comment><USER73> Get ready for the legislation that attempts to enforce taxing this

[https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes- your-j...](https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-job- should-pay-taxes/)

</comment><comment><USER74> Sounds delicious. (Maybe I shouldn't read when I'm hungry.)

</comment><comment><USER75> This company would be cool if it were helping existing burger employees to have ownership in the coming wave of automation. Let me know when you find that company and I will invest the little that I have!

</comment><comment><USER76> Why is it so expensive?

<comment><USER77> Because they don't have burger king scale and need profits to expand quickly before their idea is copied.

<comment><USER12> They won't be making any profits at $72/hour in revenue.

<comment><USER78> How do you get that number?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I design restaurants. I'm well versed on all the latest trends in food technology. I helped a few companies grow including some that have hit national news. I work with some international chains spanning 200+ restaurants and have worked with a couple fortunre 500 companies. I've met some famous chefs as well. Visited a few factories that span 2 square miles that produce only equipment.

I can tell you people want to buy the cheapest stuff possible to get stuff done. Unless they've tried the cheapest stuff possible, and realize that paying more for extra features might be worth it(but not always sometimes the cheaper things are better). The only end users that would use this are high- end establishments willing to invest in both footprint space, maintenance, and high upfront cost. The 2nd market would be for the marketing appeal in an open kitchen and the cool robotics. The 3rd market would be for someone who wants to cook patties but need a self contained hood system, and those run for about $10k, so adding an initial investment might be worth it.

Some of the problems that this robot solves are solved by independent machinery already.

\- There's already machines that cut, slice, and toast buns on a timed conveyor belt. Examples: [http://www.bellecocooking.com/services.html](http://www.bellecocooking.com/services.html) . These are used in panera bread

\- Someone dedicated to burger flipping is generally cooking multiple patties all in one go. There are also few pieces of machinery that broil on both sides at specific cooking curve temperatures, so you cook a patty like you would a panini. This eliminates the need for "flipping burgers" producing a more consistent dining experience, with an operator needing to attend to the beeping noise when the burger is finished. [http://www.taylor- company.com/en/products/commercial-grills/...](http://www.taylor- company.com/en/products/commercial-grills/commercial-grills)

\- Cutting onions, tomatoes, and lettuce is a completely unnecessary step. Most places would buy from sysco or another food distributor that precuts it at a factory.

When we look at labor intensity of making a burger, tasks are generally divided into the following approach

\- 1. One person flips burgers and handles raw meat only (Cross contamination)

\- 2. Another person assembles the burger + the precut veggies + adds sauce + assembles + wrapping it.

\- 3. Another person handles the register (Cross contamination)

\- 4. Same person usually calls number and delivers person the order

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

While one person can fulfill multiple roles, you have to swap out gloves constantly (cost of swapping tasks), so its more feasible to have a dedicated person to each task. The most important step in making a burger is the patty itself, its the MVP and the longest step in the process. Assemblying the burger is already fairly precise as well, there are specialized squeeze bottles for dispensing specific amount of sauce, everything is precut, etc.

The actual burger bot production line style is not new. There are a few pieces of specific foodtypes that capitalize on assembly line production inside of a restaurant, these are the following:

\- Donut production (Krispy Kreme). Step 1 would be dipping the donut in a fryer, step 2 is coating it with sugar and frosting, etc. When you think of assembly line production inside a physical kitchen, this is the first thing that comes to mind. They machinery operates automates step 1 in the process. Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l013vVp3OU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l013vVp3OU)

\- Japanese restaurants in Japan. Or go to a fancy McDonalds, Wawa, airport restaurants, etc in the states. Many times you'll see step 3 automated, because let's face it I'd rather deal with a kiosk that never makes an ordering mistake over some fresh hire from some high school. Step 4 is sometimes automated in Japan as well with conveyor belts, especially in sushi restaurants. You'll see steps 1 and 2 automated with specialized sushi packing rice machines and rollers. Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R47tfK1dna8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R47tfK1dna8)

\- Sandwich prepackagers for grocery stores. Tesco is a good example. This is a good example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS_hnmHWEcg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS_hnmHWEcg). But the thing with this though, when you scale to an industrial level - <USER2> demands for production are consistent and predictable. This is not true for restaurants. Some hours are incredibly crazy while some are incredible dead (3pm to 5pm). Certain reasons might be booming others might be slow, depending on a number of factors. Not all restaurants cater to the same crowd - <USER3> cater to locals, others tourists and convention goers, etc.

\- In addition, Step 4 is currently being automated by many companies. Servers and hostsess are generally not the MVP in a fast casual dining restaurant, people come for food not service. Think of delivery based robots, there's a couple of them I can't remember their names offhand.

\- Burgerfi merges step 3 and 4 so the service staff knows where you are sitting for that order.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

This machine is looking to do both assembly and cooking. Unless this robot provides more value than its costs (upfront cost, maintenance, footprint oppurtunity cost) vs 2 waged employees, most business owners won't go for it. There are machines such as the misorobot that capitalizes only on the raw meat step, [https://misorobotics.com/](https://misorobotics.com/).

You can't really compare this same process to something like subway. Everything at subway is already either precooked so cross contamination with raw meat is not an issue.

Next, lots of moving parts or generally relying on one "assembly line" production has a few fatal flaws. Namely, these are the following:

\- 1. Lots of moving parts means potential for many things to break.

\- 2. If your entire burger making process relies solely on the machine, you are screwed if it breaks on rush hour. Anyone who throws their eggs in one basket doesn't know risk management.

\- 3. The veggies are not refrigerated. This is a health hazard if you aren't moving enough burgers at a time. Looking at the prototype this could be implemented though, since veggies are all roughly next to each other. This unit comes to mind when I saw the burger bot [https://www.silverking.com/project/lettuce-crisper- dispenser...](https://www.silverking.com/project/lettuce-crisper-dispenser/)

\- 4. You might be limited in variations of what burgers you can make. Manual labor cooking allows for infinite customization, machines do not. Many burger chains are going for "green" based low-fat burgers as well, where you use lettuce leafs over burger buns. In addition, a few burger chains also stamp their logo on the bunn by burning part of the top. Some customers might request things like no pickles, double onions, etc. Machines wouldn't account for it probably.

<comment><USER79> Because of #2, you will still need a backup method of cooking your burgers manually. This might be done on the machine or a standalone grill. You will still need a commercial griddle more than likely (usually a 24" or 36") as a backup. Whereas something like misorobotics only performs the flipping, so this is unnecessary.

Onto the actual comments of the video itself. The author mentions 5 minute breaks to read books, etc. Those sound really great but in reality people come to their job to pay the bills. Employees already abuse smoke breaks so its going to be abused as well. This wouldn't fly for part time employees especially too. If you've run a restaurant you would know this to be true.

Another issue with this machine is how big of a footprint it is, and that it needs to be displayed somewhere openly. If you intend to go with a machine like this, you have to 100% know it will be in place before the store even opens. Because of this only a franchise would invest in this machine. Restaurants generally have a few different patterns for kitchen design layouts, and they vary based on the actual building size. For instance, some restaurants might have a square-ish foot print space, some would have a rectangular-ish layout spacing. Some might have prebuilt interior walls, others might not, so these are contributing factors.

Basically, if you buy this machine, you better bet everything you have on it and make your whole concept revolve around it as well. This means training staff, having trained technicians on hand, parts for JIT supply through nearby vendors or in house stock, etc.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Also, there is still lots of innovation going on in the restaurant industry still. You don't hear about it on the news, but one item that is really penetrating the market right now is dropin induction based cookers here [http://vollrath.com/Vollrath](http://vollrath.com/Vollrath), drastically reducing maintenance costs and improving safety. Its currently being discussed with Chipotle as a replacement for their warmer line (e.g. the place where you order all your food and look through the sneezeguard, etc). Most newer concepts revolve around the Chipotle-style serving process, so it has large market implications.

One item that is actually "high tech" that actually works (for 5+ years) in the market is smart combi convention ovens. Its been around for some time, here's a youtube demo of it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5I3JcA5bA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5I3JcA5bA). The reason why it works is because it simplifies many operators task and produces a variety of menu items that pass for a 5 star gourmet restaurant. It also has a small footprint so the cost is usually justifiable (Usually 20k to 30k range), and many times its used in banquet, senior homes, and a la carte style cooking. The reason it works is because it enables the chef to also perform ANY type of cooking method (parbroil, partial frying, steaming, baking, roasting, saute, etc).

Other things that are currently being adopted by the market because they are solving issues related to cooking itself(not assembly line processes) - <USER4> vide based cooking, vacuum based smoke injection, air frying, etc

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

TLDR

I think AI based commercial food equipment is interesting. I can 100% tell you experienced restaurant owners prefer stupid-simple equipment that handles one task extremely well. I don't believe this type of assembly robot will hit it as big as kiosks designed for hostess / cashier replacements, delivery food robots / servers, or dedicated robots like misorobotics for handling singular tasks. Many of these items I have just listed don't have a huge investment cost in terms of footprint, or maintenance, and have a lower risk portfolio. Many of these are already being tested in california and parts of Japan (or have for some time).

You need to understand what the problems restaurants actually face. While every restaurant faces issues of food consistency, these can be solved with many types of equipment in the market already. The other issue that many restaurants face is customer-service quality - e.g. staff are trained poorly, staff don't add the order to the system, servers in rush hour are doing too many things at a given time, etc. It actually makes a lot more sense to automate this as much as possible, with services like opentable, smartRobots, etc. Lastly, restaurants always have to deal with potential health code violations, infestations, and poor reviews on yelp / google.

Building a burger is not a problem almost any restaurant faces IMO. Assembling a proper burger requires little to no skill at all, can be fucked up and still works fine (e.g. look at McDonalds). However cooking a burger patty does require some skill but again there is equipment that handles that. Misorobotics does solve this issue because the operator does have to be present to physically flip the burger, else it burns over. I really wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to cook a burger like you would on a pizza conveyor toaster, but I have not seen it yet. Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgNEbQDX3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgNEbQDX3k).

Those are the reasons why I don't believe assembly-line based burger production is going to be a big thing. Not only that, if you dig back a little into another prominent industry, most car companies aren't even using pure assembly-line production either (e.g. The Toyota Way).

Or if you want a programming based example, assembly line production is like a sequential based process. Its can be slow because you have to wait for one step to finish before doing another. However, concurrency based approaches (Async JS / NodeJS, GO-lang concurrency, hyperthreading) lets you process tasks much faster. That's how restaurants operate and the ones who do it best are the ones you actually know about today.

</comment><comment><USER80> This sounds like quite the Rube Goldberg machine; if it becomes a reality and is economical, that's great news.

I have to think there is lower hanging fruit in the fast food industry, though. I just really want McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts to turn their POS machine around so I can key in my own order, or maybe they could cut a deal with Amazon or Apple to start using Siri or Alexa. The failure rate on the biological natural language processors currently in use are shockingly high.

<comment><USER81> McDonald's already has ordering kiosks in some of its restaurants. They also have a mobile app that allows you to order and pay before you walk in the door, just show up and walk out with your food.

<comment><USER82> This handles the transactions really well, but now you get 40 people standing around the cash registers waiting for their order grumbling about how this process sucks. It feels like a bread line.

<comment><USER83> The UI is also awful. You have to touch in opposite corners for each successive selection or choice. It takes sooo much longer than saying a "#5 medium to go" > insert card > they finish > remove card. It is a reasonable choice if there is already a line of 4 people in front of you and you are waiting anyway.

The thing I'd really like is a combination of voice (the above is trivial to parse) and a history of my last 6 orders to one touch order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> People still eat meat?

</comment><comment><USER85> I can't wait.

One reason I don't like eating out much is who is touching my food?

That burger looks pretty good and $6 sounds pretty good.

<comment><USER31> Lol someone is always touching your food. It's not going to kill you.

<comment><USER85> There are other things that can happen besides death though. And you know all those things you do with your hands? Well, those people do that also.

Seriously, removing the dirty hairless ape element as much as possible from food prep is great all around!

I'm really really surprised everyone doesn't feel this way but apparently not. I do though. Can't wait for these machines to get rolled out.

<comment><USER22> Machines if not properly cleaned have the potential to become way more septic than a healthy animal. Shows how much you know.

<comment><USER85> That's ridiculous.

Plus it's easier to keep a machine clean (which they no doubt will) than a fleet of fast food workers.

Besides, it's not real potential, it's how I feel about it. Bring the machine on I say!

<comment><USER22> No, it's really not. Fast food workers clean themselves. They tend to notice when they develop gangrene. Machines, not so much. That stray piece of lettuce that got caught in a machine joint for 6 weeks? Hope you enjoy E. Coli.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I'd go for it as long as they use fresh undamaged and proper ingredients completely devoid of preservatives, corn starch etc. The cleaning of the machine has to be top notch too and done several times a day I think.

If done properly it could be great, nothing turns me off food more than seeing a sweaty cook drip sweat onto the food while making it (yes it has happened, the food went into the garbage).</comment>


Wall Streeters in favor of genocide - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/10/15/wall-streeters-in-favor-of-genocide/ <comment><USER2> Good explanation here:

"It's because their products are index funds. They measure their performance by how well the track the relevant indexes, not their absolute return.

If they have to not invest in stocks that make up an index, they're more likely to deviate from their target performance.

If you want to make ethical choices with your investing, invest in a product that specializes in such a thing, or invest in individual stocks.

Vanguard having to change VFINX from "S&P 500" to "S&P 500* (* except companies that our board believes support genocide)" would make their performance much more difficult to measure.

I see how the optics are strange, but it's not Vanguard's business to be making ethical choices with their passive investment products"</comment>


YouTube Considering an Ad-Free, Subscription-Based Version - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/youtube-considering-an-ad-free-subscription-based-version/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> Rumors of these sort of things have been around for a few years. If YouTube had enabled channels to easily take $X/month subscriptions years ago, they'd be making a killing by now, but it still hasn't arrived.

</comment><comment><USER3> why would i pay for an ad free version when i can use adblock?</comment>


Interview with Bill Joy (1984) - <AUTHOR> http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html <comment><USER2> Thank you! I really enjoyed that.

Here is a 1999 interview with Bill Joy on the design of vi:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_g...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/print.html)

<comment><USER3> In that article , George Coulouris cites a description of em linked to at the following page:

<http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/index.html>

Unfortunately, that page is 403 and archive.org never captured a working copy of it [1] -- in case anyone is in a position to address this.

\--

I see one copy from 2010; however, it is simply the 403 message:

[http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/...](http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/index.html)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100818011111/http://www.eecs.qm...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100818011111/http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/index.html)

<comment><USER4> I've got the same material (and more) on my personal website at: <http://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/> There's complete source code for 'em' there too.

George Coulouris

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really insightful read.

> _I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market > share because we gave it away. Everybody has it now. So it actually had a > chance to become part of what is perceived as basic UNIX. EMACS is a nice > editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be > people who won't buy it._

<comment><USER6> Its hard to imagine unix without vi; I didn't realise there was a time when it wasn't there.

<comment><USER7> Also hard to imagine paying $400 (source: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs- timeline.html>) for a text editor. Even if it's Emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It must have been one hell of a time during 60s/70s as a student at UC Berkeley's CS dept. You had opportunity to work with folks like Joy, Thompson etc. (who were also students) who became legends of the field by contributing things like UNIX, BSD, vi etc.</comment>


A practical introduction to functional programming - <AUTHOR> http://maryrosecook.com/blog/post/a-practical-introduction-to-functional-programming <comment><USER2> > Ignore all that. Functional code is characterised by one thing: the absence > of side effects. It doesn't rely on data outside the current function, and > it doesn't change data that exists outside the current function. Every other > "functional" thing can be derived from this property.

This. So much this. I'd go even further and say functional programming is just like imperative programming but without variables (except for those passed in as arguments). This has always struck me as the key difference between the two. The rest (first class / higher order functions, mapping, reducing, pipelining, recursing, currying etc) in my opinion is just making things more convenient in functional languages, dealing with this absence of variables.

The key achievement of functional programming in my opinion is then the provision of special tools (see above) that help programmers solve particular problems in particular efficient ways, that programmers would have solved by using variables in a possibly less efficient way in an imperative language. In short functional programming forces the user to pick the right tool for the task.

<comment><USER3> How many functional programming languages do you cross of the list of functional programming languages if you make that claim? At the very least anything Lisp related, all the ML languages as well. You are pretty much left with Miranda, Haskell, and a few related languages.

<comment><USER4> >You are pretty much left with Miranda, Haskell, and a few related languages.

Agda and Idris as well.

The bar for what constitutes "FP" has been changing since the 50s. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER5> Functional programming used to mean programming with first class functions and closures; they even put it in the name "functional"al programming (just like OOP meant program with objects, whether this involved classes or not).

So that is Lisp, the first FP in the 60s, and then the MLs of the 70s/80s. They knew about purity, and even preferred it (for things like list comprehensions, it is very useful), but were never very dogmatic about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found Higher Order Perl as a good tutor as well: [http://tinyurl.com/orwm2ed](http://tinyurl.com/orwm2ed)

<comment><USER7> [http://amazon.com/dp/1558607013](http://amazon.com/dp/1558607013)

<comment><USER8> [http://www.plover.com/amazon.html](http://www.plover.com/amazon.html)

<comment><USER9> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSo...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSources&isbn=978-1558607019)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's worth noting that things like print and random are just as much side effects as mutability. To eliminate random is easy: realize that random generation is a function from a hidden random generator state to a "random" value and a new random generator state. Now use state-minimization techniques.

To eliminate print is much harder.

<comment><USER11> print is IO so of course it is hard to eliminate side effects.

<comment><USER10> IO monads aren't the only way. If all you want is print it's even quite easy.

<comment><USER12> Please do tell or link to more, if you're willing!

<comment><USER10> Print alone is easy as you can just have functions output both their normal output and a listing of whatever they printed. These listings then get concatenated together (this is technically "the writer monad", but you don't need to know as much).

IO was originally handled in Haskell as `main :: [String] -> [String]`. More generally, we might think `main :: [Input] -> [Command]`. This is obviously a pure function. If the types Input and Command are a bit like

        Input   = SawChar Char   | Tick UTCTime | FileRecv String
        Command = PrintChar Char | RequestTime  | RequestFile FilePath

you can imagine how a more general effects framework could be done purely.

In practice, monads are a lot simpler than this. In particular, it can be easy to get desynchronized from your Commands and Inputs.

Other language have more explicit effect typing as well. Conor McBride's `Frank` comes to mind, but it's fairly complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The lambda syntax seems like a major shortcoming in Python's readability. It uses the comma in its declaration and then the comma is used again a separator for the arguments being passed into the outer function (reduce in this case). I feel their should be better visual indication for when you are out of the lambda part.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the colon an adequate indicator that you have left the anonymous function declaration?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems somewhat perverse to do this in python, and never once mention list/generator comprehensions.

I get that this isn't a guide for using functional programming in python, but rather a guide for using functional programming in non-python languages, shown with examples in python. But practically, who's the audience for that?

<comment><USER16> > But practically, who's the audience for that?

Anybody that would benefit from re-using some of the lessons from functional programming such as side-effect free programming, splitting pure and stateful code and so on (though some of the examples could do this better than they do now it is a step in the right direction).

Python, PHP, Java, Ruby and C programmers could learn quite a bit from this.

<comment><USER15> It's a well-written and nice article, but just kinda weird in spots, saying that the code is more self-evident and readable, whereas I think it's sometimes making a language do something it only does with considerable strain.

Insofar as python is essentially pseudocode, I can get the appeal of writing non-pythonic python, but ... it strains it a bit to do this for such extensive use of lambda, the most awkward bit of syntax in python, one that almost always has more readable alternatives.

<comment><USER17> Any time I see a use for lambda (typically only with the functional builtins), I just write a function instead. Two extra lines are worth it for the readability alone. You can also reuse a function, which makes more sense to me than potentially writing the same lambda multiple times.

I do like that the author used Python, even if it was only for the purpose of pseudocode. Python is, after all, "executable pseudocode". It's also the only language I really know in-depth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the same article was on hacker school website also?

<comment><USER19> Yes, since the author works at Hacker School.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So clearly written. Thank you.</comment>


If You Can't Retain Women, Don't Recruit Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/05/cant-retain-women-dont-recruit/#article-comments <comment><USER2> > A senior manager started a conversation by saying, "You're in this > demographic, let me ask you…" and proceeded to ask a question about > promotion (or not), for women in my stage of life, meaning: a mother of > young children. On its own, the question was likely not enough to make > anyone quit, but certainly enough to give me pause. To put me on alert.

Yikes - a Professional Landmine for anyone concerned about talent retention & engagement. Recalling Marshall Goldsmith's excellent advice - Happiness comes from the inside. What can you do to engage yourself? > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz7zRjKGPyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz7zRjKGPyU)</comment>


Testing Smarter with Mike Bland (formerly of Google) - <AUTHOR> https://hexawise.com/posts/smarter-software-testing-with-mike-bland <comment><USER2> Haven't gotten through much of this yet, but this is really interesting so far. Has anyone watched Bland's Rainbow of Death presentation? I think he gave it at a conference recently.</comment>


The disappearance of salesmen explains America's economic woes - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2268122/ <comment><USER2> Praise be to FSM, think of all the productive workers this has freed up! (I kid... Sorta)</comment>


Stealth Payment Startup Stripe Backed By PayPal Founders - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/stealth-payment-startup-stripe-paypal/

<comment><USER2> We (awe.sm) have been using Stripe for our payments since last November. They are great: a simple, tiny API that abstracts away huge chunks of the complications around taking credit cards -- you don't need a merchant account, they handle 99% of PCI compliance, they handle pro-rating and recurring billing natively. We got our payments system to market way faster than we could have otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Anywhere us HN folks can go to request early access? :)

<comment><USER4> Mention that you're a HN user when you email us :)

<comment><USER5> Any chance you're international or is it just US only for now?

<comment><USER6> It's only US right now.

Moving to other countries will take time as each country has their own banking/financial/etc issues that need to be dealt with.

It took years for PayPal's Web Payments Pro to go from US only to US, UK. And then a few more years to go to US, UK and Canada.

Amazon FPS has been around for ages and is still US only.

So it may be a while.

<comment><USER7> Can I suggest you announce loudly and publicly when you're ready to roll out in non-US countries (in my case, Australia), remembering that many of us will have already written you off as "US only" in our heads and will skip straight past future mentions of you, expecting to be disappointed.

<comment><USER4> 3kMarlin isn't involved with Stripe. collision and I are the founders. (Good point, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lowdown on Stripe:

JSON-based HTTP API

PHP, Ruby, Python and JavaScript Support

Setup in 5 minutes.

No branding requirements or redirects.

5% + $0.30 per transaction.

US Based Sellers Only.

Recurring Billing Support.

Data Portability if you ever want to leave.

You pay all initial fees (5% + $0.30) if you issue a refund.

You will only receive money at the end of the next month.

<comment><USER8> 5% is horrendously expensive. Just the other week I was ragging on Braintree for being very slighty above wholesale merchant rates.

Stripe is quite literally _double_ Braintree's rates, with no value-add.

And on top of that, they hold the float for up to _thirty days_?

Good luck, guys. You're going to need it.

<comment><USER9> Does Braintree eliminate the need for a merchant account, with all the complexity that entails? Do they offer a developer API that's super-friendly to write for, allowing for weird use cases like processing payments from native BlackBerry apps without exposing you to PCI requirements or risks of publicly exposing your API keys by shipping them in apps?[1] And most importantly, is it a piece of cake to communicate directly with Braintree's founders?

'Cause that's what I've seen so far from Stripe. They're incredibly responsive and helpful. They even changed their SSL cert provider for me because older BlackBerries had a rough time with their prior cert provider.

Not to rag on Braintree, they've sounded like a good choice for a long time, but Stripe's changing some of the rules of the game. Killing the need for a merchant account is a really big deal and I'm happy to pay their rate.

[1] This isn't a rhetorical question, actually. I'd be interested in whether you can do this with Braintree.

<comment><USER8> I can't speak to Braintree because we don't use them. I do believe that they will set up a merchant account for you as a proxy or agent, IIRC.

But I can speak to the economics of all this "complexity" of which you speak.

We currently use CyberSource for our gateway and associated banks for our Merchant Accounts, and we maintain several accounts. Each account takes less than a day to set up, with our representatives at each company.

Integrating with the CyberSource API takes roughly 20 developer-hours.

An increase in transaction costs to 5%+0.30, would cost us roughly the salary+benefits+taxes+overhead of two fulltime developers, _per year_. That's a cost that's simply unacceptable.

There is also the issue of "killing the need for a merchant account", being problematic from a number of legal/accounting angles( tracing this transaction from A to M, entity separation and identifcation ), as well as customer service angles( what is this PAYCSTRIPE_TCMERCH charge on my card?? ).

<comment><USER9> You've got what's called a nice problem to have. At that rate you must be charging many millions per year, so sure, it's all about minimizing your fees. But for those of us with much smaller-to-nonexistent revenues, wondering whether our app will even make money at all, Stripe makes all kinds of sense and is a prefect place to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If that logo in the TC article is accurate, you may be getting a call from Deutsche Bank <http://www.db.com/en/img/logo.gif>

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure TC just made up that logo because they couldn't find one on the Stripe website. These guys are too canny to come up with a logo that shitty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We (Simplenote) have been using Stripe since summer also, it's awesome. At least an order of magnitude easier than Paypal api and the merchant account process was completely transparent, we actually have no idea what's involved with getting a merchant account because they just handle it all and payments show up in our bank account.

<comment><USER13> Do you know if you actually have a merchant account somewhere (created by stripe)? Or does everything go through stripe?

<comment><USER6> Everything goes through Stripe.

There is no way that any merchant account provider would allow you to sign up and start charging customers in 5 minutes like Stripe lets you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We've been using Stripe since August and couldn't be happier. They are super- responsive, do things right and make it incredibly easy to get up and running.

</comment><comment><USER15> What did that domain cost?

<comment><USER16> Since they're not answering I'll take a guess: $80k - $140k

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They went through YCombinator for Auctomatic, but not to for this company it appears. I wonder what what led them to that decision.

<comment><USER4> For Stripe, YC was actually the first firm we took investment from. Doing so was a very easy decision.

<comment><USER16> Well there ya go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So i'm assuming this is the YC company in this batch that didn't present in Demo Day?

</comment><comment><USER18> I would be interested to know how the rates look for high dollar transactions.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's not really about 'stealth payment' but rather a startup in a 'stealth' mode (for those confused by the title as myself).</comment>


Forecasting the US Elections - <AUTHOR> https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president <comment><USER2> Surprising they have Florida at 70%-30% odds. Of all the tossup states, I find it to be... most tossup-y, and consequently, hard to give _any_ candidate a probability >50%.</comment>


Show HN: Administrate – Rails framework for creating flexible admin dashboards - <AUTHOR> https://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-administrate <comment><USER2> Thoughtbot really has some smart people who make great things. I've really liked both Hound and Formkeep (not to mention their plethora of open source projects like Suspenders, Liftoff, Paperclip, Factory Girl and more).

I always get the feeling they eat their own dog food and really like their contributions to the ruby community. Great work guys - looking forward to trying this out in a project!

<comment><USER3> Shout out to Thoughtbot, a company who has influenced my Rails development thinking, workflow, and habits.

vim-rspec in conjunction with vim-rails (by Tim Pope, not affiliated with Thoughtbot) has tightened my red-green-refactor loop. It's so nice being able to quickly iterate using this methodology and workflow.

Their weekly iteration videos (at least, the ones that delve into best practices) are great for beginner-intermediate rails developers. Any rails developer just getting started should watch the first 10 or so videos with Joe Ferris and Ben Orenstein - they're fantastic.

Finally, I really like their ruby gems. I'm always a bit weary of pulling in new gems to a project, but Thoughtbot's gems have always made my life simpler. I recently came across their nifty 'Scenic' gem which allows you to add views to your app - you write a view migration and have the view sql statement reflected in your schema. You can then access that view like any other ActiveRecord model.

Anyway, I just had to give props to Thoughtbot somewhere. Figured this HN post would be a good place to do so :).

<comment><USER4> Oh wow, Scenic looks really nice, thank you. I have a unreleased, home-made solution like that, but the gem looks much tidier. And apparently supports `change` migrations, something that has been on my to-do list for the longest time now :)

<comment><USER3> It is. It has made my app easier to work. Adding scopes onto view-backed models has been painless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who's played the "Let's use Rails Admin, it's quick and easy... <time passes> Oh hell, the client wants to see _what_ in there now? <much more time passes, punctuated by intense pain and misery> OK, maybe just building a custom admin interface from scratch would've been easier" game more times than I'd like to admit, I'm very keen to give this a try.

The "No DSLs" principle is particularly appealing to me.

<comment><USER6> I take it you've had a bad experience with ActiveAdmin?

Even with its "DSL" (I wouldn't call it a DSL) it's pretty customisable and can do pretty much anything brought up in the article here [http://activeadmin.info/docs/documentation.html](http://activeadmin.info/docs/documentation.html)

<comment><USER5> RailsAdmin's "automatic" nature is a big win for us, whereas with ActiveAdmin we would have to write some code (even if it is easy code) to get us to the same point. For some of our projects RailsAdmin in its default state does the job excellently, without any fiddling; for other projects it starts out well and then goes downhill from there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have immense respect for the team at thoughtbot for building all of these incredibly useful gems for the ruby community. As an aside, the thoughtbot playbook is a fantastic read for anyone starting out in the development industry - I was very pleased to read through it one day and find that it validated every practice we ended up following. Really keen on checking out this latest project and submitting a few pull requests!

</comment><comment><USER8> The search feature currently only works on Postgres. It builds an SQL sentence with an ILIKE clause, for case-insensitive matching, which I think is valid only in Postgres. It's not a huge problem for me, but I'd like having full SQLite support for when I'm in development mode.

They said they will work on a connector architecture to support other RDBMS, I hope it's not too difficult.

It looks nicer and is more easily configurable than ActiveAdmin. For simple CRUD it's probably the best admin gem I've seen. However I usually build moderately complex dashboards in ActiveAdmin (things like "show me lists with the 10 oldest open tickets and the 10 unassigned tickets with the highest priority"), and I'm not sure how would one replicate this in Administrate.

<comment><USER9> Sorry about that! Working on the ILIKE fix at [https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/166](https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/166)

<comment><USER8> It works in SQLite now. I'll wait for the next release. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome work! very clean and simple UI. I'll have to checkout how it fairs in production, but it sounds leaner than ActiveAdmin and more naturally customizable.

My one complaint about thoughtbot is that they can be slow in responding to PR's and issues; So if you submit to the project, don't be surprised if you wait 9 months to hear back about it. It might just be dependent on who the project lead is, so YMMV.

Also, the demo doesn't render quite right in safari for me, but looks right in firefox. I'd look into fixing it, but, see above.

Still, i'm thankful these folks are still pumping out these projects; i use quite a bit of their toolkit now that I think about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Most of these tools miss 2 things:

\- Automaticly generated API

\- Image upload ( eg. as a property or productImage which is only a 1 - * relationship without meta attributes) -- now an url is used as image

It's also missing here, but other then that. This tool is very nice / easy to use!

</comment><comment><USER12> I like this approach. RailsAdmin/ActiveAdmin never appealed to me as a good solution.

Nitpick: These are admin interfaces. NOT dashboards.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love how people could make things better based on what exists.

</comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to ActiveAdmin?

<comment><USER15> It's actually explained in the post. To sum it up, this seems to be less rigid and doesn't come with a lot of expectations about your project/structure, which is nice.

However, I still think it's better to design a custom solution tailored to your very individual needs.

<comment><USER6> I didn't feel like it brought up any of the changes they wanted that ActiveAdmin couldn't solve apart from the auth-solution.

When it comes to alter anything within the MVC stack, ActiveAdmin does offer a lot. Maybe I am missing something here?

<comment><USER16> I think the issue isn't so much that you can't do this stuff with ActiveAdmin, it's more that if you want to do custom stuff, you now have to go look up how to do it in activeadmin instead of relying on your Rails knowledge.

<comment><USER6> Well explained, now that you mention it it was in their post as well and... it's actually true.

Fair enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice simple CRUD app, good job

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER19> awesome :)</comment>


Facebook – Private Image – No Authentication Required to View - <AUTHOR> What's funny is Facebook -> has a publically faced image server that has NO authentication required to see even private messages. When FB Security was contacted ... they say it was not a "guessable" URL, ergo security through obscurity was their "security method" of choice. This was two days ago. If anyone wants to test this theory - setup 2 FB accounts, message an image one FB account to the other. Click on the image with the second account (to bring up the lightbox custom thingy they have). Drag that image into notepad (to get the URL)... then try and logout of both accounts, clear your cache, and you'll see the image is COMPLETELY public -> meaning no authentication is required.
They refused to acknowledge this as a "security risk". I laughed, then was really pissed that a PRIVATE image shared between two parties can be viewed w/o authentication above it.
WTF? <comment><USER2> So, let's calculate this: I pulled an image from a private facebook group, and the URL is of this form (although this particular URL is bogus, of course):

      https://scontent-abc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p600x600/35938454_4896129300617330_9044691654193995233_n.jpg?oh=cbfe497e1191ff4669103957691ba34b3&oe=92AC4028

We have a section of length 43 that can vary in the range [0-9] (that is, 10 possible values):

      35938454_4896129300617330_9044691654193995233

A section of length 33 that appears to be in the range [0-9a-f] (that is, 16 possible values):

      cbfe497e1191ff4669103957691ba34b3

A section of length 8 in the range [0-9A-F] (that is, 16 possible values):

      92AC4028

So how many different URLs are possible?

      10 ^ 43 * 16 ^ 33 * 16 ^ 8 = ~ 10 ^ 92 ~ 2 ^ 306

This is a HUGE space, just to get a sense of it, adding 100 billion images a day, it would take ~ 10 ^ 80 YEARS for facebook to exhaust it!

By the way, that's also how much it would take you to examine all of it while hunting for user's images (assuming this facebook endpoint does not even have rate limiting on it, which it almost certainly does).

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you call a password "security by obscurity" because it can be guessed?

How long is the identifier in question?

Edit:

It sounds like they're not trying to protect the person sending the image, they're assuming Bob and Alice trust each other not to send the link where it's not intended, but want to enable Bob and Alice to share the image with Joe if he's trusted by the receiver.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the trusted party could always upload the image to imgur instead of copy and pasting the URL to an untrustworthy party. Imagine a URL that contains the entire image data and passing that around, for example.

<comment><USER5> Information security typically models risk assessments with two axes for severity, not one. They are not purely consequential; rather, they are both consequential and probabilistic. If you have a 10% chance of SQL injection being present in your application but a 50% chance of it being devastating, and a 90% chance of CSRF being present with a 50% chance of it being devastating, you want to prioritize the CSRF vulnerabilities first.

Similarly, yes, it would be really crappy to have a private photo published on Imgur, but from an application security perspective the probability (and thus, risk-adjusted severity) of that is absurdly unrealistic. From a risk policy standpoint, the context of Facebook makes sense for implicitly trusting friends with photos. It's not terribly important or strategic data, and since you're starting from "only a subset of people I select can view this", not "only I can view this", it becomes difficult to design a better policy than what already exists.

Even with a much more stringent ACL in place, your friends could just download the file when they view it and distribute it from there, bypassing the link altogether. This is a rabbit hole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Putting aside this being a potential security vulnerability it seems like an easy way to get free image hosting. I wonder if you could use this by changing the file extension of a .zip to.jpg

</comment><comment><USER7> Just to be clear, this is how it's always worked. While I don't think it's ideal either and I'd rather have it more locked down, it's also not something that they've changed. A lot of apps use this pattern of secret vs truly private.

</comment><comment><USER5> To be honest with you, I'm not even sure where to start with your rant. I'm normally pretty open minded on HN but this is just frustrating to read.

They refused to acknowledge this as a security risk because it's not a security risk. In fact, they specifically call this particular topic out on their Whitehat page under the _Ineligible Reports and False Positives_ heading. They have called attention to this topic as ineligible for a bounty for _at least_ the last two years on that page, because 1) it's not indicative of an application security failure and 2) they receive a vast number of invalid reports about it.

Let's talk about "security through obscurity", a term that has become a hand- wavy way of saying, "I don't really agree with how they're doing this because it seems theoretically imperfect, but I can't really explain why." A series of strings in a URL that are securely generated and infeasible to brute-force do not constitute actual security through obscurity. Security through obscurity is setting SSH to a port other than 22 (and let's be clear - security through obscurity is not a bad thing when it's coupled with best practices). A vast foundation of information security as a discipline relies upon the security of things that are infeasible for a computer to brute-force. Cryptography is a science predicated on the idea that making things extremely work-intensive is an acceptable substitute for information-theoretic security, which is generally unreasonable or redundant in practice.

Each portion of a Facebook CDN image URL is designed with an access and authorization policy in mind. The fbid URL parameter _alone_ is a 64-bit number, and that is only _one_ of the parameters you would need to successfully brute-force in order to correctly identify a valid image URL. How long do you suppose it would take your computer (hell, let's give you 100, each with different IP addresses) to process 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 requests for a particular image URL on the Facebook CDN? But wait, let's not forget, this is not offline cracking - you are making requests to Facebook's servers, where they are free to rate-limit you at the slightest sign of suspicious or abusive activity.

Now let's talk about this model of security at a higher level. Facebook uses a very robust ACL to discriminate between users that are and are not authorized to view a specific resource on facebook.com, before the user can be sent the CDN link. This ACL guarantees that parameters such as the fbid need to be correct before the CDN link will be granted, at which point those parameters are "inherited" by the CDN URL. The CDN uses a capability model, not unlike Imgur's "Private" albums or Google's published, non-public Docs links. If someone has a direct link to the resource, the URL parameters inherent to that link almost certainly suggest that the user is authorized to view it, because it acts as a gate before they could have been redirected to the CDN in the first place. The only other options are 1) a user brute-forced an image URL (good luck!) or 2) someone who was authorized passed the link on to someone who was not authorized.

Seeing that case #2 is the only realistic risk for an image URL compromise, let's continue with that. Is case #2 a problem? From an application security perspective, no, because it doesn't constitute a technical software vulnerability. From a risk assessment perspective, maybe? I agree with Facebook in that if you trust someone with a URL, you implicitly trust them to be prudent in passing that along (at least, in the context of Facebook). But this is a good juncture to talk about risk as a dimension of information security's business process. The context of this discussion is not a military staging server, nor is it even a HIPAA compliant database. This is a CDN for people to store photos on that are _inherently designed to be shared with the world._ From a risk assessment standpoint, these photos are only designed to be shared with friends. Could your friends do something vindictive with the links? Sure, but in the context of Facebook it's (reasonably!) assumed that you trust your friends enough to not use that access against you. From that perspective, the security measures are optimized for ensuring that only a subset of people (based on the ACL policy) are authorized to view them, not "no one but me." Let's also not forget that even if Facebook designed a much more stringent ACL, your vindictive friends could simply download the image after they are able to view it, and distribute it that way.

Security vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. They are logical failures between a software's design and implementation, or they are risk failures in a software's design. And even if this presented an issue from a risk assessment perspective, this still does not constitute an application security vulnerability, which means it's not eligible for a bug bounty anyway. In short, you have quite a few bars to pass in order to demonstrate that this is an issue at all.

Finally, I'd like to hear from you what you would do differently. How would you design a CDN for Facebook with a superior security model that matches the same scale and usability requirements?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused as to why _anyone_ would think facebook's security is good? Their entire profit model is based entirely on sharing information that most people would consider private (and have no clue is being sold to third parties).

Furthermore, however, how would _you_ design a Content Delivery system that was performant that also had the level of security/privacy that you'd consider appropriate? keep in mind that cookie/session based security requires extra network traffic and coordination, whereas a simple GET request is pretty simple.

Considering the _massive_ amount of traffic they deal with (nearly 1B people, right?), I think their use of UUID type strings (though I don't think they're specifically UUIDs) is pretty appropriate.

I guess let me ask it this way: what threat do you feel they've left you open to?

</comment><comment><USER9> Post an example link, or it didn't happen.</comment>


Most Popular Highlights from Mark Zuckerberg's Book List - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookhighlighter.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm always looking for a new book to read or listen to. Sites like these help give me a grasp of what's up my street and what's not.

Q1: How do you pull in the highlights? Goodread? Q2: Any plans to expand beyond the Zucks?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is manual curation for now! (non-technical) All pulled from the kindle sites of the books on Amazon. You can see all the user highlights and they give you the most popular ones on the side

Yes I have a huge list of books to go through but as its manual and time- consuming I thought I'd test it out like this.

<comment><USER2> Ah nice, that's pretty cool to be fair. Respect it when people do it manual first and then switch it over to automated later, if manual is quicker then by all means do things that don't scale :)</comment></comment></comment>


Seattle Tech Employees Earn 56% More Than NYC Finance Workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-24/seattle-tech-employees-earn-56-more-than-nyc-finance-workers <comment><USER3> As an SE in King County (they really should include Snohomish County too) I've noticed comps for this line of work really going up over the past 5-6 years. I attribute it to Amazon and Facebook's growth and Microsoft paying people more to stay-put.

What I don't know is when it will end. Smaller established companies that don't have the RSUs to give-out in lieu of cash comp are already feeling the pinch: one small company I worked at recently is certainly circling the drain because they can't afford to attract talent.

However, given Amazon's famously short employee tenures, do people decide to do a 1-3 year stint at a $250k/yr job and then retire or move-back to a slower-paced job, or do they get established locally? I know there's a LOT of new startups in Seattle lately that were founded by former Amazon people - <USER2> we don't see this happen anywhere near to the same extent with Microsoft's people. Perhaps it's self-selection-bias: the people who want/choose to work at Microsoft want a stable career and not deal with the stresses of moving every couple of years?

<comment><USER4> I thought I'd do the "3-5 year stint then move back" thing - bad news is BigCo is even more laid back than anything I can imagine, there's beauty in the invisibility of being one in a crowd

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FTA, "King County, Washington, tech workers average $5,367 per week, or about $279,000 a year."

Sounds about right, when including stock compensation. I wish they'd provide the median and not the average.

<comment><USER6> Seems high for an "average", even in King County, and even with stocks. Or maybe I need to up my billing rate. :-)</comment></comment>


1 year ago: living with no heat, no electricity - in the middle of a crime scene - <AUTHOR> http://tommy.authpad.com/the-one-year-anniversary-of-sleeping-in-the-freezing-cold-without-power-or-heat-in-the-middle-of-a-crime-scene

<comment><USER2> Seeing how this is Ycombinator, I should have expected this to be about a start up; however, I can't help but feel I was slightly mislead by the title.

Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn interesting and I'm willing to wager that's the reason most people clicked on the link.

<comment><USER3> _Why was there no electricity? What about the crimes? Those sound darn interesting_

I, too, would like to hear about this stuff!

<comment><USER4> Umm, did we read the same thing? It said _in the robbery... his roommate was shot_ leading to blood on the walls and his apartment becoming a crime scene.

no electricity or heat was from having no money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you think that ABC boards in other states will come to the same conclusion about the concept behind CitySwig (helping connect bar and store owners with stock to sell at discount with customers)? I commented on what on your previous posts that I think CitySwig a really good idea, and I still think so. I'm curious what direction you are taking now.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. No. There are about 35 states where TCS could work relatively uninhibited. Our flash deals model is something bars want very badly and I believe strongly someone will get it right.

2\. We built too many features. The app was too feature rich and we couldn't iterate fast enough. That said, with a solid seed round we would move into other states and start killing it with the news apps we've finished (but haven't released).

However, investors don't care about that, it's too unknown and our model would take a long time to scale. I fully support and understand their perspective, and I wish we could have done what we needed to do in Virginia to prove them wrong. We couldn't, and now we're going to move on with something else we're really excited about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Came for gory details, stayed for the warm and fuzzies.

For every startup that has a nice clear run at it I imagine there's a dozen swimming in poop. In some cases, like this one, going through the worst possible circumstances that can happen, and you either sink or swim.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I wrote this badly, but you got exactly the point I was going for: for every Airbnb there's someone exactly as resilient that is NOT Airbnb.

However, not dying has its own merits and has huge upside, so I recommend adopting it as a philosophy and constantly doing everything you can to turn "not dying" into "living large".

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. Falling to the deepest depths and surviving has the side effect of making you more fearless, and thus stronger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can you describe exactly what is "Virginia's ABC"? And how were they able to shut you down? That part of the story was completely lost on me - I feel like there is some context that I might have missed.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's harsh. I thought "don't die" was strictly metaphorical. You did it most literally as well. I'd like to hear more about your troubles with ABC.

Stay strong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man, we will!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What did PG mean when he said "go to your users"?

</comment><comment><USER11> There's no lesson here... people already work hard to stay alive, and serious tenacity is a well-known component to getting a business off the ground.</comment>