Why I Quit Ordering from Uber-For-Food Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/the-food-delivery-start-up-you-havent-heard-of/414540/?single_page=true <comment><USER3> This is nearly incoherent… He doesn't order from Sprig because it's too efficient? I mean you are welcome to value whatever you want, but if you're against efficiency you will probably have a problem with nearly every for- profit business; all his complaints are at least as true of any restaurant that hires full time employees.

> In the hypothetical future we can label Full Josephine, many people don't > cook, but some people cook a lot more, and better, than ever before, and all > of us, cooks and non-cooks, derive pleasure from that."

Minus rhetorical flourishes, this is identical to the Sprig future, with the difference that in the case of Sprig the cooks are compensated with full-time employment rather than the joy of cooking. It sounds like the author doesn't really value that, but I bet a lot of Sprig employees do!

The actual future: Some people cook for Josephine, some work for Sprig, some work for traditional restaurants, some people eat the above food, lots of people still make their own food.

<comment><USER4> I think his "objection" is similar to mine in that technology supposedly promises that everyone can be a producer, but instead we are getting even more centralization. We see the same thing in technology, were instead of open standards we get e.g. Facebook. Or in startups were the prospects of actually competing with one of the larger players is almost theoretical at this point.

A lot of people are fine with living for the moment hoping they can make it rich before opportunities shift. Others think more about what future they want to see.

<comment><USER5> Why does anyone think technology is something other than a force enabling centralization and consolidation? In a free market, more efficient organizations will win out over less efficient ones. Bigger organizations leverage economies of scale and win out over smaller ones. Organizations this keep getting bigger until diseconomies of scale balance economies of scale. Technology reduces diseconomies of scale, enabling organizations to keep getting more efficient at large sizes.

Hence, Amazon versus the mom and pop shop, Uber versus an independent cab company, Sprig versus the local Chinese delivery, etc. The future is megacorps and technology will enable them.

<comment><USER6> _Why does anyone think technology is something other than a force enabling centralization and consolidation?_

Because decentralization and democratization were central to the vision we saw in the 1990s when we discovered the public Internet that universities had been building. The early days _were_ all about independence and progress.

<comment><USER5> I find that ironic because communication technology plainly facilitates centralization. Society was less centralized and grass roots democracy was much more important when people had to ride a horse all day to vote and you didn't have national media markets. The Internet in comparison is going to be what enables World Government.

<comment><USER6> It's definitely ironic. Speaking for my childhood self, I projected my own naive optimism for the future and Star Trek-fueled faith in humanity onto my visions of the Internet's potential.

Needless to say, I overestimated human nature and underestimated the inertia of trillion dollar institutions. I still want that original vision of a decentralized digital utopia, I just don't think much of it is achievable at a population-wide scale.

<comment><USER7> > _Speaking for my childhood self, I projected my own naive optimism for the > future and Star Trek-fueled faith in humanity onto my visions of the > Internet 's potential._

Hey, I did the same thing and that's why I _agree_ with 'rayiner. Star Trek's utopian future is United Federation of Planets, which is a central world(s) government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He paints full Josephine in great color, but that's exactly what Airbnb is - connecting visitors with people want to host people in their homes. Airbnb doesn't dictate the experience beyond some guidelines, they don't hire hosts, etc.

But

We see Airbnb enabling bad actors on its platform, refusing to take action against them, posting ads all over san Francisco to sink prop f - acting like a mega Corp.

Josephine is not mega Corp, yet. But imagine if it became huge. I bet it'd look more like sprig, and all the other mega corps, than the author would like.

Pretty much the only wildly successful company I can think of that has not ended up acting like a mega Corp is craigslist.

<comment><USER6> Craigslist has had some opposition due to its "holding hostage" of people's submissions and shutting down useful third-party apps on a whim.

<comment><USER9> I seem to recall mostly parasites who wanted to bootstrap their businesses off craigslist's audience and data who where shocked, shocked! when craigslist didn't agree to let them do so.

Craigslist is virtually unique in that they don't charge most users anything and don't have any plans to do so, and I'm happy to see them defend their platform despite its warts. They've hooked me up with 5 apartments, a SO, and at least 3 jobs.

<comment><USER10> Padmapper was the main one, right?

What's tricky there is that they provided a wonderful user interface, but used Craigslist data. Since CL refuses to update their UI (and for potentially good reason), I find it hard to justify a monopoly on displaying their data. The links still go back to the CL listings, unless I'm misunderstanding the dispute. I fail to see what is unethical about that.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.padlister.com/](http://www.padlister.com/)

Let's not pretend padmapper was just making a nice interface; the clear goal was to use postings from CL, get people to use padmapper, then migrate them to padlister. Where they charge fees, with more fees on the way the second they get any business leverage, given they are/where a VC funded company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He has no proof what's going on behind the scenes, and jumped into conclusion and project a holier than thou attitude just because.

People that write such articles should realize that they can cause a lot of damage to businesses. If you don't have significant evidence that people working for such companies are not treated well and are unhappy then go do your homework first, otherwise it's just unethical and irresponsible to publish your intuitions and project them as facts.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that reporters should feel that they are responsible for the companies they write about having a good PR day.

<comment><USER13> No, but they should at least gather basic facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see a future where a much smaller percentage of people cook. Roughly equivalent in percentage and frequency as adults that would play a musical instrument or tend to a garden.

Right now a lot of people cook meals not just because they enjoy to do so, but because having someone else cook healthy meals for you all the time is too expensive. A "Full Sprig" society can hopefully leverage specialization and economies of scale the same way that people no longer keep hens for eggs.

Yes, the feel-good-local-farm(kitchen)-to-table aspect is lost, but most people don't care about that.

<comment><USER15> I very much doubt that. Cooking is a part of every culture. It's more than just being about a healthy meal. For many people it defines who you are. The on-demand technophiles are not representative of the majority.

<comment><USER16> Seriously. This is coming from a forum that believes that Soylent is the way of the future.

<comment><USER17> A programmer told me that after 2 months on Soylent, he "Missed the feeling of eating" and returned to eating regularly.

Evolution took a long time to evolve our DNA. It doesn't change easily.

<comment><USER7> I tried Joylent (a version of Soylent made in EU) for few weeks and I too "missed the feeling of eating" a little, but I recognized it as just a habit. The same kind of habit browsing HN is, with similar procrastination values.

<comment><USER17> One of those habits developed over millenia to ensure the survival of the species. Eating is the opposite of procrastination.

<comment><USER7> Tell that to me when I'm eating to reduce stress caused by work I have to do that I can't make myself to.

Like all habits developed over millenia, just because something worked back then, doesn't mean it makes sense now. We had our cost/benefit evaluation slowly tuned to the environment that rapidly (i.e. over last few thousand of years) ceased to exist. A lot of problems we have with each other can be explained in terms of executing adaptations we had from the time where survival involved hunting, and not filling out forms.

Not saying that normal eating is obsolete - just that arguments from nature tend not to be too strong in general case.

<comment><USER17> Good point. I meant eating as in consumption (soylent or not) when comparing to HN but I see what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone who can't be bothered reading the self-indulgent, meandering rubbish before he actually provides the explanation:

"I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because ... they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."

<comment><USER19> I thought it was more about the fact that the sharing economy can either create positive, meaningful interactions that connect neighbors and neighborhoods, or it can turn your neighbors into faceless drones that you only interact with via the touch of an app button.

I admit that the dystopian future the author sets out seems a little drastic, but it does remind me of Jobs' "below the API" argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> FWIW the restaurants behind these actually do a lot better. Imagine you own a restaurant. You serve lunch and dinner. You kitchen is utilized from 11 to 2 for lunch and from 6 to 10 for dinner. With these apps your kitchen now is utilized before 11 prepping food for delivery for lunch and again from 2 to 6, prepping food for dinner. You're now making more on your capital investments and your kitchen staff is getting more hours. The people cooking the food are the same as if you went to a restaurant and the people delivering are the same that would be wait staff. If you didn't feel bad for these people before why would you feel bad for them now because there is an app in front?

<comment><USER21> I'd like to believe that but long-term, I expect the app is just a rent- seeking gatekeeper between the restaurant and their customers. We can expect the gatekeeper to turn the screw and make margins barely survivable eliminating quality leaving only a few low cost supply chain optimisers.

We see the same pattern again and again. Small businesses should fight like hell to keep a direct relationship with their customers.

<comment><USER22> > just a rent-seeking gatekeeper between the restaurant and their customers

Couldn't agree more. I think this central to any discussion about the 'sharing economy'. Uber et al claim to be disrupting established monopolies and their marketing seeks to establish themselves as champions the free market. In reality, they are seeking to build a new monopoly, where they control the information about relationships in a system.

Memory fails me at the moment, but I remember hearing a piece on a podcast recently (it might have been Radiolab) where they discussed how the 'live' view presented by Uber was a prediction coming from their algorithms and that no actual location data was available to the app on your phone until you booked a ride. I thought it was ironic that the new darlings of the free market were operating what was essentially a soviet-style central planning system, albiet with a very modern gloss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let me stand up for Sprig. They have, in my opinion, found the holy grail of McDonalds meets Whole Foods. They are serving organic food from local farms, made by local chefs, with the lowest carbon footprint of anyone -- all in a form factor that people will actually use. That's why I favor their future over that of Pizza Hut, Postmates, Uber Eats, and even Josephine. Instead of looking for faults, I think they deserve a round of applause.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sadly, I'm guessing Josephine is illegal (well, the home cook part) in many cities in the US. It's in the same grouping as paid dinner parties.

<comment><USER25> I'd venture to guess that it's illegal in _most_ cities in the US.

Legal codes requiring certain minimum standards exist for good reasons. Home- scale kitchens are impossible to scale to commercial levels of quality and service without cutting corners that can make food dangerous.

<comment><USER26> > Legal codes requiring certain minimum standards exist for good reasons.

And sometimes for bad reasons. Couple of examples - cooking meat to 160 F / 71 C, Nycity inventing dangers of sous vide. The whole zone thing. Food codes sometimes grossly misinterpret or twist science. Or are made towards large scale operation - you will almost certainly have contamination when cracking 1 000 000 eggs. But with basic chance of even having salmonella in the egg 1/20000 even very sloppily prepared breakfast will be safe.

<comment><USER27> You must have never had salmonella poisoning. It's extremely unpleasant, and I'd certainly take the trivial extra effort to lower the risk to 0.

<comment><USER28> The effects of automobile accidents are also extremely unpleasant; how would you rate your willingness to take the extra effort of not traveling to prevent them?

<comment><USER29> I'm willing to live in a society that mandates annual vehicular safety checks and seatbelts.

<comment><USER24> A lot of states in the US do not mandate annual vehicular safety checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In case anyone associated with Sprig reads this, I had written you guys off a while ago because I can't stand landing pages that do weird/ annoying scrolling. I just checked and it's still like that... please just make it a natural-scrolling page and I promise I'll give you a shot (instead of SpoonRocket which also does healthy).

<comment><USER31> Agreed. Please leave scrolling alone. It's the one constant we have in the world of unpredictable interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tangentially, Mark Bittman's food posts on the New York Times, like 'The Minimalist' \- as well as his books - changed my life. His philosophy is that we do have time in our lives to cook, and that there can be great value in doing so. Personally, I find it to be a nice balance to being so heavily involved with technology all day.

<comment><USER33> I've been looking for something like this in my life, but what's a good place to start learning how to cook?

I'm a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really a huge issue, I just don't know where to start. Any tips?

<comment><USER17> There are 3 kinds of foods I make:

Sautees, Stews, Bakes

* Sautees: *

Oil your pan. Personally I use coconut oil & a cast-iron pan but do your research and find what works for you & your budget.

Start heating your pan (low, 25%)

Chop your toughest vegetables first. For me these are sweet potatoes & carrots & beets. Many recipes online say start with gaplic & onions but I've found that they burn too easily.

I slice the tough veggies into slices so that a lot of surface area covers the pan. Experiment.

Throw the tough veggies into pan, turn heat up between 35-50%.

While they cook, prepare "softer" vegetables - Broccoli, Brussel sprouts, Ginger (great for circulation!). Chop and throw in.

As the tougher vegetables soften (6+ minutes), throw in Kale or Spinach for vitamins & flavor. These will shrink significantly so you may have to load multiple handfuls into the pan in sequence.

As everything cooks down softly (sample it as you feel the veggies getting soft), add in: Eggs and/or Meat.

If you do eggs I recommend pouring into a bowl, mixing yolk & white, adding spices (cumin, paprika, salt, cinnamon) first. Definitely add spice to your meat - and cutting your meat will help you gauge its Done-ness well.

Cook until done, stir throughout every 20-45 seconds or so so nothing burns. Add oil if needed to avoid burning your pan. Be liberal on this to prevent burnt food and hardware.

When it's all ready, turn your fire off and use an oven mitt to grip the skillet. Use a spoon to pour into a bowl. Let cool for 30 seconds and enjoy!

* Stews: *

Same principle as before - prepare heat, start with the tough ones.

Boil your water in a pot. Add in lentils & quinoa - these each take ~20+ minutes. Let boil for a few minutes while you chop tougher vegetables.

Through in the tough veggies, turn your fire down to medium. Add spices.

Add greens - I recommend mustard greens, bok choy for flavor and vitamins.

Drop a stick of butter in to add some much needed fat and improve the consistency. Or, mix tomatoes in after cooking to thicken the consistency.

Make sure you use more water than you need -- better to use too much than burn your food.

20-30 minutes later, you've got yourself a nice meal. I use 1 cup of lentils + 1 cup of quinoa or oats at at ime, with all the veggies & eggs & meat from the sauteeing, you'll have plenty of food for at least a day.

* Granola Bakes: *

Open your oven, clean it. Remove burnt chunks and food. Close the door & preheat your oven to 325. Before this started, you shopped bulk and filled mason jars with nuts of your choosing to avoid wasteful & unhealthy plastic bags. I recommend: Excess Peanuts or Virigina Peanuts. A massive Oat base. Walnuts, Pecans, Almonds. Pour all of these onto a baking sheet inside of a baking pan. Pour several spoons of honey. Add salt. Add cinnamon. Mix around.

Stick in oven, cook for 30 minutes, remove. Enjoy.

I pretty much live off of these meals. Actual ingredients vary with the season and mood but the principles apply. Hopefully you can follow along and try these! Vary spices for more variety. You can freeze food to store for a long time - I recommend freezing half of a huge stew and fridging the rest to save yourself time.

<comment><USER34> No offense, but I would venture your food does not taste so good and a lot of what you are saying sounds like someone who is grossly inexperienced. Burning garlic and onions is the sign you are not a very good cook, for instance. That's cooking 101 and should never happen. That's like burning scrambled eggs - easy, but a sign someone is a very bad cook.

There's a very good reason chefs generally do things in certain orders, and it's not just consistency and cook time. You did not "figure out" what billions of people before you could not. A lot of the reasons why people do not cook things as you describes have to do with basic chemistry. Chemistry is what you are really neglecting given your 3 categories - things like caramelization, absorbing flavors, catalysts, reactions. Not all your choices are bad (cast iron is great), but many have consequences for flavor (coconut oil is tasty, but strong, and has a high smoke point) and others are just head scratching.

I don't even know where to start with your cooking technique, but let's discuss sautés. Firstly, you do not have to cook everything together, at the same time, same temperature, all mixed by the end. I know this sounds counter- intuitive, but some of the reasons around cook time and temperature are there precisely so things blend together well. Other reasons include removing things like water, salts, bitter tastes, etc. from food. For example, you can actually often cook your meat first to some level such as a simple browning. This will season the pan nicely, allow you to do things like sear your meat correctly, and provide some tasty fat to add flavor to your veggies while they cook. Later, you can add back the meat to finish it off and make sure it's safely cooked to the proper temperature. Your way of cooking meat is not always wrong, but for many dishes it will often have consequences - <USER2> meat, veggies overdone, meat not safely cooked, lack of flavor from fat, no sear, textural issues, and so on.

Pretty much the same applies to stews. For one, many if not most stews taste infinitely better if you caramelize a lot of the veggies directly in your cooking pot, then pour your liquid base on. Never mind you seem to be making stews generally without any concept of stocks and using things like butter as thickening agents (shudder). Too much water is definitely not a good thing for stew and something that is not easy to fix. Thickening stews is somewhat of an art, but there are also many well-known ways that don't involve what you describe.

I've already written a novel, but I highly suggest you buy one of those textbooks from a cooking school (CIA for example). You may look down on professional texts, but cooking is one area where learning the academics are very important. While there's always room for tweaking and personal touches in cooking, completely ignoring cooking techniques will get you no where. I am sure your food makes you happy, but if you want to challenge yourself and grow, you should really do as I have suggested and buy some books. I do not mean to harshly criticize you, but rather you seem someone interested in cooking that could maybe enjoy it more but lacks some basic knowledge to be a better cook.

<comment><USER17> My food actually takes delicious and frequently receives compliments at potlucks. However, I am interested in improving and will research carmelizing & stocks. Thank you for your support.

<comment><USER33> Parent's comment was a little aggressive, but thank you very much for this advice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised HN is so against this article. I'm unhappy with the idea of "full Sprig" or "full Josephine". Furthermore, a "full Sprig" or "full Josephine" society is impossible with their current business models as I highly doubt their contractors have enough money to use their own services, especially if they get sick and have to deal with their uninsured medical costs. The lack of regulations around these services is just a way for the company to transfer more liabilities onto their contractors (cough employees) and reduce costs for themselves and their customers.

I think all of these startups are "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0] and do so by taking advantage (and perpetuating) massive income inequality.

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the- worl...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-world)

<comment><USER36> > "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0]

Yeah, it's not like people with kids ever get take-out or delivery, right?

Maybe this kind of issue is more relevant to affluent young people, but it's hardly irrevelant to others. There's nothing wrong with targeting a luxury market. Even middle class people can afford some luxuries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's something utterly perverse with the logic that "Some people are getting left-behind by the current economy; _definitely definitely don 't find them new, value-creating jobs_ because that will spirit-murder them."

<comment><USER38> There is also something utterly preverse in pretending exploitative "sharing economy" companies create the kind of "value" that should be encouraged, especially as it displaces less exploitative companies.

Which of course is a propagation of the very thing you claim they so nobly rescue these lost souls from!

<comment><USER39> > especially as it displaces less exploitative companies.

You're joking, right? Taxi drivers are practically indentured servants who begin each shift $100+ in the hole to some asshole rent-seeking capitalist who happened to buy the medallion at the right time 40 years ago.

<comment><USER38> There is no doubt taxi cab arrangements are often exploitive, but this article is not about Uber. The "especially as" portion of my statement was in reference to circumstances where this model isn't just pushing out equally exploitative relationships.

But even that being so in Uber's case, why are people championing the replacement of one abusive relationship with another?

<comment><USER39> What's abusive about Uber? You drive whenever you want and their commission structure means their interests are aligned with yours and you can never lose money on a shift (at least not to Uber).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's another option in between Sprig and Josephine that's both a bit slower and far more "human" in the way the author wants.

Doordash brings you food from local restaurants (the same ones you eat at when you go out with your friends). It costs a little more than sprig, and it takes a couple more minutes.

But the food is individualized and made to order. It's familiar, made by the human beings you can go talk to the next time you're in there during a night out.

In short, it's the perfect in-between. And given the tone of the article, not all that surprising the author totally ignored it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like the most hyperbolic article ever.

"Sprig" as I see it isn't likely to replace/centralise all of cooking. It's nothing more than an easier 'takeaway', a 'cometo' if you will.

This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, precursors to Deliveroo, etc. - I was shocked recently in the US when I couldn't find an equivalent (I guess I didn't search long enough to find Sprig, or it's not yet widespread enough).

For me at least, but I'm pretty sure for most people, HH or JE is like the 'one stop' place you can go to choose a takeaway. I don't have to think "I want Chinese food, let me find a Chinese place that delivers", or "I want pizza today, let me find a pizza takeaway site" \- it's all in one place.

But that certainly doesn't mean that all my food comes from a "centralised" place, and I never cook...

<comment><USER42> > This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, > precursors to Deliveroo, etc.

You are correct, and those services just wrap what's been around for even longer - the local curry house that keeps a couple of moped drivers and a telephone operator on staff. It's a fairly old-fashioned business model.

<comment><USER43> Glasgow, 1980s was my first introduction to delivered fast food - people I was staying with phoned (POTS) local pizza/chippy for pizzas salad and chips. Came in 15 mins. Paid (cash) at bottom of the close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can we please stop describing mildly unsettling thoughts about technology as "dystopian?"

You are gaining convenience at the theoretical expense of small businesses at some point in the future. This is hardly the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.

[In fairness, I assume the "dystopian" subheading was chosen by an editor, and not by the writer himself (his own phrase: 'hardly utopian').]

</comment><comment><USER45> I think a lot of these SF-based food startups are filling a need that exists because of SF's fairly bad model of urbanization. Things are kinda dense, but not really, and it's very hard to get around.

If SF was a more spread out city like Sacramento or Houston, driving to a grocery store or a Chipotle or an inexpensive eatery would be trivial to get your food. If it was much more dense (and easy to get around) like Manhattan or Bangkok or Tokyo, it would be trivial to get prepared food at any price since restaurants and street side cooks of all kinds can effectively get to dense districts to sell food.

<comment><USER46> Yeah, that's true. Parking is really a pain for most restaurants. Basically... good luck.

But grocery stores (at least Safeway / Trader Joes / Whole Foods) generally have attached parking and aren't too bad to park at. Though I still try to go during off-peak hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> All this fetishizing of authentic human connections is making my misanthropy flare up.

</comment><comment><USER48> I really like the Josephine concept... mainly because I like "home cooking" I like to cook too.

That said, I think that delivery services for food itself will probably become more common too. If restaurants could just make food, and ping an uber-like service for a driver to do the pickup/delivery it could work out better. Some restaurants aren't busy every day, being able to combine nearby pickups and deliveries for multiple restaurants could be a huge success.

I do think it would take more than the combined infrastructure of grubhub + uber though. Simply because orchestration on grubhub is usually limited/partial menus, and the deliveries themselves can go from simple to complicated... living in a gated apartment (where there's a separate gate to the walk-up entrance, etc) makes deliveries difficult for someone who hasn't been there.

I'd love to see restaurants able to share delivery drivers... and delivery drivers able to stay active, when a single location isn't busy, another may be, and to top that, it would allow more places to offer local delivery.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is ridiculous. In what macroeconomic transformation have we ever landed on just one mechanism of production or distribution? There exists room for both Sprig and Josephine - much like there exists room for both fast casual and fine dining, and for both Uber and taxis, and brick-and-mortar book stores and Amazon (who just opened a brick-and-mortar book store). There is often displacement and pressure to compete, but most of the time we don't collectively make a singular choice, eradicating the other choice totally. There are over 300 million people in this country who all have to eat every day (leaving aside whether they do or don't). What are the chances that all of them are going to land on the same way to buy or prepare food? Zero, just like it is right now.

</comment><comment><USER50> So the author doesn't like Uber-for-food but loves Airbnb-for-food: is that so much different?

Why does he not learn to cook instead, and meet people on the market where he would go buy ingredients?

</comment><comment><USER51> This is fascinating. I am waiting to read with interest what happens when these startups engage with UK catering hygeine laws.

</comment><comment><USER52> This reminds me of a recent interview with Pete Trainor: [https://soundcloud.com/uxpodcast/112-steve-portigal-pete- tra...](https://soundcloud.com/uxpodcast/112-steve-portigal-pete-trainor- anjan-chatterjee#t=19:52)

"...things should be possibly be made more complex or more complicated for people to make them smarter and to make them happier... it's flying in the face of quite a lot of the wisdom that we've been building up for the last 15-20 years in usability."

I think one of the author's points is that he appreciates that Josephine actually satisfies a higher level of Maslow's hierarchy than Sprig not in spite of its lower level of convenience, but because of it.

1) Uber For Food: Immediate satisfaction of fatty, salty food.

2) Sprig: Higher-level satisfaction of food better for long-term health.

3) Josephine: Slower, more conscious choice; face-to-face connection with your neighbors.

</comment><comment><USER53>
        Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of
        the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs
        with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden.
        They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units
        of labor.

Seems like you could make the same criticism of grocery stores.

</comment><comment><USER54> OT I would NOT recommend any investors from investing in the uber-for-food space. Mainly because these businesses will ultimately parallel the competitiveness of the restaurant business. So at the end, you're ultimately investing in a restaurant chain business and not an Uber-like business.

<comment><USER55> Another way to think of it is like a racket, if you don't join you suffer. Once everybody joins the customer base is the same. In this way, it makes for a good although distasteful(maybe) investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I cook all my own food. I think it takes longer to deal with ordering it and having it delivered than it does to prepare--if you just want basic healthy dishes. A lot of the HN crew came from upper-middle class families, so they didn't learn this from their parents.

<comment><USER39> My mom cooked all of our meals growing up -- you could probably count on two hands the number of times I even set foot in a restaurant before leaving for college.

But I could tell even as a child that spending an hour and a half cooking and cleaning every day doesn't make any sense when you're earning $40/h each and takeout for three costs $20 and requires no clean-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is it just me, or was that one difficult article to read? It's almost like he was told by the Atlantic to make this a long-form piece just because it's the Atlantic, so he tried to write an unnecessarily long and patch-worked narrative.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's clear that the author wants me to dislike Sprig and like Josephine, but after reading the entire article I honestly can't articulate a single reason why other than an abstract feeling of wholesomeness. This reads like satire.

</comment><comment><USER59> Personally I can never get behind any of these food startups, just because I find that they offer extremely little value.

Sort of like grocery home-delivery, after awhile you realize the premium you're paying for something you can easily do yourself.

I feel like this class of startups are needlessly attempting to add services on top of existing things that people can do themselves for much cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER60> > A harried courier extracts your meal from a fat insulated bag; you say > "thank you," close the door, and feel bad for a moment about the differences > between your lives.

People have been delivering food since before tech startups <comment>disrupted<comment> delivery, but enjoy that self-congratulatory pity

<comment><USER61> > People have been delivering food since

For the urbanites among the ancient Romans, food vendors (and even things like grab-and-go street vendors and fast food restaurants) were a normal part of life, since their apartments generally didn't have personal kitchens.

I can't find a source for it, but I have to imagine they had at least some personal food delivery services.

<comment><USER62> The wood fired pizza (and oven design) dates to roman times.

<comment><USER63> No, that was just flat bred, aka focaccia.

Pizza only came to be much later, when the tomato got introduced to Europe, from South America. And when people eventually found out that many varieties of tomatoes are not only not poisonous but also well tasting. :)

<comment><USER53> "Pizza" doesn't have to include tomatoes. For example, "pizza bianca".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> > We don't know. We don't get to know. We're just here to press the button.

I mean, I'm sure you could find out.

</comment><comment><USER65> > They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor.

This isn't a new problem... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA)

(Clock scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927))

</comment><comment><USER66> Trying way, way too hard.

On demand food businesses are just catering companies. Catering companies have always existed. Bolt on pizza delivery magic, paired with remote-button access from your little black mirror that constantly tracks your coordinates/altitude and now it's a daily faustian dilemma weighing too heavy?

Do you want another app to help you with that too?

From the article the author's main point is this:

 _Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden. They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor._

He just doesn't like that a store exists to cater to his demand. How gauche to have to interact with a store that's not a store!

He then wax romantically about some weird hippie future where it's much more fun to have your neighbors cooking for each other like one big timeless block party.

That's called a marketplace. An unregulated, cottage protected, open marketplace! That must be better better than a store but as lovely as that sounds to mingle with a range of people to get a bowl of pho or some sandwich one has to face the fact that every marketplace ends up centralized.

Every one.

An open marketplace is a winners take all video game.

Look at eBay and its class of power-sellers that dropship or flip their Alibaba account. Look at Fiverr and its class of power-users that end up dominating the search results.

You just end up dealing with the most polished store for the sake of what being a store brings to the table. The consistency, quality, and ease.

So wait, really what's the point here? What are we really trying to discover and realize about ourselves today? That treating people as interchangeable economic units is bad but this hippie fuzzy feeling way is less bad? As opposed to just cooking yourself or going to a restaurant?

Maybe this is just a promoted native post. Who knows. But it notches up another line about how frustrating annoying Berkeley and its residents are.

For extra credit contrast this piece to another post today by New York Times on the culture of GoFundMe community and a response by nostrademons

Per [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526447)

 _On the whole, I think this is a good trend - it makes the economy more efficient, it encourages people to celebrate diversity instead of shunning it, and it 's how the upper classes have operated for a long time, which is the source of a major power imbalance where corporations & rich people feel entitled to ask for anything and then working-class people feel ashamed to refuse._

I hope you take that, stuff it in your pipe and smoke it, guy.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm thinking maybe the author should get his thoughts in order and try again. That read like a collection of partially conceived ideas - it was a difficult read.

</comment><comment><USER68> I absolutely love this idea! I thought to myself - "cooked by people for people" as a good tag line

</comment><comment><USER69> Funny thing is, I'd rather have an API for cooking me meals than an API for driving me home (Uber/Google car). Because in the latter case, when I come out of the office, I still need to spend X minutes in a car, then spend Y minutes in the kitchen. Whereas in the former case, my dinner is being cooked _while_ I'm driving home, so I'll need to spend only X.

</comment><comment><USER70> Don't you need a license to sell cooked food? How do FDA regulations work on such kind of things?

</comment><comment><USER71> Any experiences with Postmates? I keep ordering with them everyday and things are great so far.

</comment><comment><USER72> Is there a Josephine-equivalent in Melbourne?</comment>


The Least Liked Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-least-liked-programming-languages/ <comment><USER2> Some words around a part of the StackOverflow survey they reference. Three of the mentioned languages Java, Ruby, and R are all side by side on the list. That js is less disliked is a mystery.

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology- mo...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved- dreaded-and-wanted-languages-dreaded)

</comment><comment><USER3> Familiarity breeds contempt

</comment><comment><USER4> Perl? COBOL?</comment>


Design principle: IKEA effect - <AUTHOR> https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-ikea-effect-2d908b2de81 <comment><USER2> > _People had the need to be emotionally invested and get rewards from the > process of making the cake not just the end result._

Yes! Not sure it really works with Ikea, but it works in other contexts. See this (excellent) video from Ooshma Garg of Gobble telling the story of her startup:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A21qyXsAfME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A21qyXsAfME)

Gobble was at first a marketplace where local people could sell their ready- made food to other people who don't have time to cook but don't want to order ordinary take-out.

In order to grow her startup she asked customers what they wanted; they said they wanted instant orders and it failed.

Then she produced excellent food, and all you had to do was heat it up in the microwave. People loved the food but sales were sluggish.

The main insight was gained by watching customers use the product inside their homes; they discovered that although the food was good, people were ashamed to serve microwaved food to their loved ones.

So Gobble offered ready-to-cook elements that you can prepare in a pan, and the startup really took off then.

Maybe she would have saved some time by reading this post! ;-)

<comment><USER3> It's sad that the stigma persists of microwaved food being somehow lesser than "real" cooked food. A microwave is just another tool in the kitchen. People shouldn't be embarrassed to use it.

<comment><USER4> No, what's sad is that so many people can't cook anymore. It's especially bad in the United States.

It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave. And oven-ready food is garbage. You can't even re-heat most of your left overs properly. Ever tried to re-heat a slice of pizza in a microwave? Use a skillet or a grill, and it's as good as new.

Cooking real tasty food requires many many tools (most of which have been used for many centuries), a lot of ingredients and skill. It's an art form, essentially. And a couple decades ago, everybody knew how to do it.

<comment><USER5> > It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave.

That's bullshit. That's so bullshit that France (they might know a thing or two about good food) has discussed passing laws to require restaurants to denote which food on their menu is heated up in a microwave.

eg. [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/business/international/in...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/business/international/in- france-a-battle-to-keep-menus-fresh.html)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/french- restauran...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/french-restaurants- acknowledge-serving-factory-frozen- food/2013/07/09/9857b69a-dda2-11e2-b797-cbd4cb13f9c6_story.html)

It was a huge scandal when it came out, because most people didn't even realize their food was being microwaved!

Yes, the microwave does a terrible job of reheating the slice of pizza that was left out overnight, but using the wrong tool for the job doesn't mean the tool is bad. A really good, properly seasoned cast-iron skillet is _terrible_ for making coffee with, but that's no reason to throw it out.

Don't microwave pizza that's been left out overnight. Instead try food from Picards ( [http://www.picard.fr/](http://www.picard.fr/) ). They don't exist in the US but they sell exclusively microwave food, and it's just not on the same level as the sad microwave TV dinners for one that they sell at Safeway.

The microwave's just another tool in a modern kitchen, next to the sous vide machine, the Thermomix, and the Tnstant Pot. The way the microwave cooks food makes for healthier steamed vegetables, though regardless of how you steamed the veggies, slathering them with butter negates some of their health benefits.

<comment><USER4> > That's so bullshit that France (they might know a thing or two about good > food) has discussed passing laws to require restaurants to denote which food > on their menu is heated up in a microwave.

Doesn't that proof my point? How do you think that food was cooked? With real tools, that's how. Not in a microwave. You can't cook food in a microwave.

But yes, I should clarify that I've meant 'store bought oven-ready food'. It's awful and probably the main cause for the stigma.

And yeah I agree that the microwave is just another tool in the kitchen and awesome for some things, but you can't cook most meals with it, just prepare parts of it quickly.

<comment><USER6> > You can't cook food in a microwave.

If you can heat food with it, you can cook food with it. Obviously, microwave cooking has different behavior than, say, baking in a conventional oven, but so does braising, pan-frying, cooking in a convection oven, or, well, any other cooking method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I vaguely remember reading about this effect before but honestly, I've never met someone who expressed this feeling about Ikea products. Whether it's my own set-ups, friends, or the dozens of people I've bought and sold Ikea furniture from/to. If anything some have expressed frustration at the difficultly they had in putting together some builds.

It's also said to cause sellers to place a higher value on the second-hand sale price due to the bias of assembling something of their own effect, however those I've bought from rather price their items substantially lower as they're looking to see them gone for various reasons. Perhaps this bias holds more true for things like home renovations as described elsewhere in articles on the effect.

The application of this concept in tech for the examples I've read seems to be mostly in allowing customer customization which I do think helps give a feeling of creating something a little unique but personally I'd call it by some other name.

<comment><USER8> I have yet to experience (in person) anybody expressing frustration about putting together IKEA furniture. The closest thing are some friends who have expressed bewilderment at "the internet's" view that IKEA furniture might be difficult to assemble.

<comment><USER9> IKEA furniture is not "hard" to assemble per say. It's annoying and frustrating because the qc on hole alignment and how well they tap the holes is lacking. Coupled with cheap veneered particle board lowering the overall build quality.

I am pretty handy and have a ton of nice tools and have worked with my hands building things for a living for about 6 years or so and a software developer otherwise.

I actually just had to "fix" a crappy ikea chest of drawers because the particle board popped out of the dado in the rear piece so the drawer would rub on the next drawer down. Some cheap brackets were installed as a temp fix but a real fix would be to install a better bottom board that flexes less and to glue it in place rigidly.

<comment><USER7> Agreed about the build quality. Something to consider about assembly is also the circumstances of the installation. Was talking with a person recently who together with an engineer assembled one of the Pax systems with the large sliding rail doors in a space that had literally about a half an inch gap between the top and the ceiling. Because of this it ended up mostly being assembled upright, not to mention the task of affixing the upper clips in the narrow space at the top to hold the slider for the rather hefty dual doors. So at times there can more factors involved with the frustration than something like the instructions themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With IKEA, at least I, don't value my efforts, but the savings compared to having to pay someone for a perceived(!) zero-skill job, while still getting the same product.

For me it's the over-embellishment of the general trend of transitioning things over from the production and retail to the consumer, charging only marginally less to beat the competition, while reaping in the profit, while marketing the whole thing as _empowerment_.

The build and material quality of an IKEA furniture is almost never anywhere near a well made furniture, it's only big plus is in being affordable due to economies of scale and low transport and storage costs.

Recently IKEA seems to get just outright greedy. Their material quality and thickness went from solid to barely tolerable in the last 10 years. For me they are at a borderline point of becoming disposable furniture, where it makes no sense to disassemble to move furniture even in your own house due to the one-time only quality of the connections.

Peddling in an urban or more relevantly marketing myth, doesn't even help either:

«The key marketing innovation that Dichter's analysis spurred was not the fresh-egg cake mix, but rather the repositioning of cakes as merely one element of a larger product, an overall creation that entailed a much greater degree of participation and creativity from homemakers and emphasized appearance[!] over taste»[1]

It's a trick! You get a less tasty product, a mere product transitioned into an outlet of ego. I you're not only into marketing, but also want a good product it's important to be aware of that deceptive effect.

[1] [http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp)

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm a snob but I begrudgingly buy IKEA products, view assembling them as tedium in which I gain 0 improvement in a translatable skill and despise the sight of their borderline cardboard junkiness until the day I can replace them and send them off with some stranger.

edit: On the flip side, IKEA actually sells some really nice pulls and handles for a price far below what I've seen anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER12> that plot of "the sweet spot of getting to the ikea effect" is a mediocre visualazation... it implicitly puts "contribution" and "value" on the same axis with no way to decouple them.

my biggest question that isn't answered is "how do you define contribution?". It's not a lot of work (because that's effort), and it's not how much it's worth in the end (because that's value). So... what quantity are we talking about, exactly.

 _edit: remove extra words_

<comment><USER13> I found the plot a bit odd also. But I don't consult designers for mathematical problems. The text communicated to me that contribution and value are not directly proportional.

The "quantity" of contribution is measured on an emotional scale. It's how the individual feels about the impact of their effort. This is different than the value of their effort. For example, someone telling a joke, the value stays the same, x% laugh at it. But if the joke were to go viral and tens of thousands of people laugh, the contribution is increased (making more people laugh). But the value is the same. The audience had x% chance of laughing.

A different example is the original Star Trek. The value of showing fictional technologies like videoconferencing and cell phones was very low. It was part entertainment value and mostly expedited storytelling. But the contribution to human society is hugely significant, just by prompting people to action, to pursue the development of such tech, and also by helping people visualize how such tech would simplify things and make time spent more productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If this were true, then an unnecessarily difficult user-onboarding-procedure would make them like the product better.

<comment><USER15> Vim or Emacs?

<comment><USER16> and most Linux distros

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This feels dubious. People go to ikea because it is cheap but stylish, and flat back saves shipping costs.

<comment><USER18> The cake mix example was much more compelling to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The solution was to get out the egg of the dry mixture and allow people to > add it themselves.

I'm no foodie, but wouldn't dehyrdated/dried eggs be far less appealing taste and/or texture-wise? If not, why don't we see them around grocery stores? It seems like it'd be great to have non- or even just less perishable eggs.

<comment><USER20> Dried eggs are definitely less desirable, but in cake batter they are there for neither taste nor texture, but rather for their chemical properties as a binding agent. Swapping out traditional egg for dried eggs wouldn't make a difference as long as the chemical effects are the same.

Also, I'm not sure, but I'd guess that the "egg" previously in the cake mix was not actual dried egg, but some alternative binding agent.

<comment><USER21> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdered_eggs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdered_eggs)

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure why you're linking to that. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER21> The history of the powdered egg is based on a cake manufacturer that was sourcing liquid egg from china. By dehydrating the egg, they were able to save weight/space. So, I think it is likely that the powdered egg in cake mix was also the powdered egg variety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "People tend to place high value on products they partially have created. Hence, the name IKEA effect." \- Frankly, I've never met anyone who thought that IKEA products are of particularly high value. They're great because they offer modern-looking furniture that even students can afford, but at least where I live, the middle class stops considering IKEA once they leave student status behind, unless it's for book shelves or stuff like that in the study or the basement, i.e, not for rooms you actually live in.

<comment><USER23> Where do you live? I guess I've only lived in poor and/or stingy countries, where frugality has a high status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The article is inspired by the book "Universal Design principles" by William > Lidwell.

The book doesn't talk about this specific design principle. But the same author has a course at Lynda.com where he explains exactly that, giving the same name and using the cake mix as an example, too.

But Dan Ariely is probably the first guy that came with the idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkaWYKlnli0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkaWYKlnli0) also with the cake example.

</comment><comment> real-hacker That's why there are tens of thousands of toy web frameworks out there. It's quite a simple task (basically assembling routing/template engine/ORM, etc), but programmers just cannot resist the sense of accomplishment from such a project. Because the end product looks so valuable, people just ignore how little value was added in that process.

BTW, I am not talking about full-featured production-level web frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very interesting principle. Now when I think about this games utilize this design heavily. For example in Final Fantasy X you can select which statistics to improve or skills to learn on a Sphere Grid. The Grid is designed so that its effect is mostly predictable and similar to previous games (in terms of skills learned and stats increased) but the player has a feeling like he was in control here.

</comment><comment><USER26> I just recently bought my first piece of nicer furniture, not Ikea, but a bed from Crate and Barrel.

Not only did I love the style of the bed, but they scheduled delivery to my house.

I assumed I still had to put it together, but the delivery guys assembled the bed in my room and put the mattress on top.

IMO This is way better than spending 2 hours driving to Ikea, wandering around, buying, loading, unloading, and assembling the item.

</comment><comment><USER27> For further coverage, this is also discussed in the (kinda disturbing) book Hooked as the Investment part of their cycle.

</comment><comment><USER28> If the effect applies to programming languages, it could explain why some people love lisp so much.

<comment><USER29> It kind of shades into post-purchase rationalization, which is (in my experience), the standard theory of why programmers get attached to all kinds of tools, notably text editors with high learning curves.

Bear in mind that I am a bit of a Rust enthusiast myself, but I wonder if this effect is a contributor to Rust hype.

<comment><USER30> Post purchase rationalization doesn't apply in the rust example because you've received gains that no other language offers.

I learned it knowing well up front that it had a difficult learning curve and that was the price to pay for safe/performant code.

<comment><USER29> Humans being what they are, the _actual_ benefits don't necessarily come into the equation. :) Sure, Rust's manifold qualities contribute to its popularity, but post-purchase rationalization could still be one of the reasons that people get excited about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In my experience, if someone has a vague interest in something, then any new information (in an easy and digestible fashion) goes a long way in making them care a lot more about what you do.

</comment><comment><USER32> Also known as Stockholm syndrome :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Golang for furniture.

</comment><comment><USER34> The only problem is that IKEA furniture smells like formaldehyde (more often than not).

</comment><comment><USER35> Holy shit. This really does describe my relationship with my IKEA furniture. This is amazingly insightful.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is very interesting and new to me. Not mentioned in the article, but it also explains these yogurts you mix a dry side into ( [https://www.google.com/search?q=yogurt+with+separate+topping](https://www.google.com/search?q=yogurt+with+separate+topping) )

However, I am concerned with the description I just read. I see many classes of products where the IKEA effect could be done very easily, yet is not. Does it really apply across the board?

I wonder if anyone has done a very strict AB test against user satisfaction: for example, shipping boxes of hardware product that are fully assembled, or where the user must snap one thing together (that is easy and obvious).

Do they observe a difference in user satisfaction?

I am not certain I believe the effect is as described in this article, or as strong as described in this article, and wonder if anyone has done blinded AB tests.

<comment><USER37> The two part yogurts are just so the granola doesn't get soggy...

Edit: The greatest example of IKEA Effect in food is the story of how all- included cake mix (vs from scratch) didn't sell, until they removed the egg powder and required the addition of your own eggs. Which apparently is an old wives' tale [http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp)

<comment><USER36> Says you. :) I've seen versions that would do just fine with the separated part mixed in. (They're not just with Granola.)

At least we can agree that if there is an Ikea effect, then it is present in mixing your own Yogurt.

However I am not convinced about the presence of the Ikea effect, as there are many classes of product it could apply to but, I don't see such product packaging. don't.

If you go into an electronics store (a demographic that you would think responds stronger than average to the Ikea effect) most items are absolutely fully assembled. There is nothing to snap on, pull off, a sticker to apply, a thumb screw to screw in or unscrew, nothing.

So if the Ikea effect is real (across a variety of product types), I am sure someone has done a test like to see it demonstrated by someone doing a blind AB test using two shipped versions and comparing customer satisfaction.

I'm not going to blindly believe it because someone says it's real. It would be one thing if this explained an aspect of all the products of every category that I see everywhere - but it's just not the case. Companies aren't in the business of turning down free money, so if the Ikea effect were real then you'd see it in products everywhere. More likely, the theory is just false: that an AB test shows no increased customer satisfaction from token user- assembly, or even decreased satisfaction.

This is why I asked if anyone has, in fact, done such a strictly controlled AB test.

<comment><USER38> _> I've seen versions that would do just fine with the separated part mixed in. (They're not just with Granola.)_

My guess is that, if you're going to be offering a version with granola, you're going to be designing/fabricating packaging with a separate mix-in container anyway; and since you have to have that package, it's just easier/cheaper to re-use it for other mix-ins that don't technically need to be separate than it would be to come up with another package just for them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-data-api-for-amazon-aurora-serverless/ <comment><USER2> With this, VPC is no longer needed from lambda call to RDS, and this means that cold start time will be lowered from seconds to milliseconds. I made a ready to use recipe (source code+deployment script+demo included) here [https://coderecipe.ai/architectures/77374273](https://coderecipe.ai/architectures/77374273) hopefully this help others to easily onboard to this new API.

<comment><USER3> This only works for Aurora Serverless, not regular Aurora or any other managed databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I told my AWS account manager today that this is what I wanted to see on Aurora Serverless:

\- mysql 5.7 compatibility

\- acting as replication master or slave

\- faster upscaling, more likes 5s instead of 30s

\- publicly accessible over internet (the rest of RDS has this)

\- aurora parallel query built in

\- aurora multi master built in

Basically, I asked for one product to merge all their interesting features. That sounds nice and like a one-size-fits all database. I would very much like to use it in production. It would require very little maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what effect this may have for AWS Lambdas connecting to a DB for synchronous calls (e.g. through API gateway). The biggest issue with Lambdas IMO is the cold start time. If your Lambda is in a VPC the cold start time is around 8-10 _seconds_ , and if you have decent security practices your database will be in a VPC. I know AWS said they would be working on improving Lambda VPC cold start times, but would like to know if using Aurora Serverless with these kind of "connectionless connections" would also get rid of the need to be in a VPC. I've used Aurora (and really, really liked it) but I haven't used Aurora Serverless.

<comment><USER6> Would it "get rid of the need to be in a VPC"? I think yes.

It looks like by enabling Data API, you expose that endpoint to the entire internet - which is secured like all the other AWS services with HTTPS, IAM, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another cool thing about this is it avoids the connection pool issue with Lambda (where concurrent requests cant reuse connections).

Aurora is already pretty good at handling a lot of connections but this is even better.

<comment><USER8> You can create a connection pool in a static context that lives throughout the lifetime of the JVM.

Although admittedly if Lambda scales to multiple JVMs as request rate increases, you'll have multiple pools. Or if your request rate is low you'll not get much benefit

<comment><USER7> Lambda containers serve 1 request at a time, so the number of JVM's tends to scale out a lot quicker than you would expect. This is more of a broader problem with Java on lambda, as the classic Java way of creating a bunch of singletons on startup and accessing them from multiple threads doesn't work, you just get a really slow cold start time and some near empty connection pools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The beta version seemed like it had pretty poor performance: [https://www.jeremydaly.com/aurora-serverless-data-api-a- firs...](https://www.jeremydaly.com/aurora-serverless-data-api-a-first-look/)

Does anyone have performance feedback now that it is no longer beta?

<comment><USER10> I'm definitely excited about this, especially after paying $36/month for a NAT that I barely used for a long, long time, and spending too many hours configuring it for my Lambdas.

That said, I don't know how Jeremy Daly got away with making that post, per AWS preview terms. They are pretty explicit about not posting benchmarks on their preview products, and that makes sense as the API is not stable at all.

Still, I'm glad to see the data and hope that the performance has improved. I wasn't accepted into the preview, and I've started work now to move most of our infrastructure to GCP. It notably does not require any fancy footwork to have a Cloud Function talk to a Cloud SQL instance [https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/sql#overview](https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/sql#overview)

<comment><USER11> Wait if I read that doc correctly, does it seem to suggest that connections will be closed when the function goes cold. So the locked up connections where lambda dies without disconnecting isn't a problem google functions?

Think of a spike in traffic, 100 functions connect one connection per function. Then a break 80 of them go cold. Your max connections is 100, so if 80 didn't disconnect and are waiting to timeout you are stuck. Any more functions coming online won't have any connections.

The only work around in AWS was to setup an external connection pool, kind of begins to kill the serverless savings and all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ... Don't you have to establish an HTTPS connection to use this API? Is that really easier than using the existing MySQL protocol? Or is it really so horrible that HTTPS is faster?

Things establishing new connections will never be as fast as things reusing existing connections. It seems wasteful to ignore this.

<comment><USER13> This appears to be targeted at Lambda function, which can't reuse existing connections between executions.

Also, establishing an HTTP connection is much faster than establishing a typical database connection, in my experience. I don't know why that is.</comment></comment>


Angry Bots Demo - <AUTHOR> http://webassembly.org/demo/ <comment><USER2> Kill flash, they said..

Flash version, [at least] 5 years ago: [http://tsuyobi.heteml.jp/unity/flash/AngryBots/](http://tsuyobi.heteml.jp/unity/flash/AngryBots/)

It's great to see WASM coming at last, but I must admit I'm a little disappointed (for now, anyway). Huge download, and though it runs smoothly (firefox 50) I'm not really impressed given what was possible with the flash version.

<comment><USER3> Old-timers as myself already saw this coming.

The main idea of killing Flash was because some _websites_ completely ran on it, which is bad. But games never was an issue, and never will be.

Battery life, system resources, downloading assets, ..., it's all the same if you use either Flash or JavaScript.

Newsflash: Apple didn't block Flash because it is "bad", they blocked it because they wanted you to go through their app store

Newsflash: Games written for Flash (in ActionScript3) also run on Android and iOS. It even became "Best Mobile Application Development product" of 2014 and 2015.

They say Flash advertisement banners were annoying, so what do you think about those JavaScript popup banners that pop in the middle of the page you are reading, saying "Please subscribe to our mailing list"?

I you develop a game for Flash, it runs consistently in the Flash plugin. If you develop a game in JavaScript, you need to test it in all browsers you want to support. And yes, they are all different. And still gives troubles so many years later. Surprising? Not for old farts like myself.

But no worries. I looked at my google analytics for the past few years. Most visitors moved to Chrome. Flash plugin installed percentage: remained the same.

<comment><USER4> Flash also has huge security flaws and memory leaks. Pretty much like Java applets.

At least with JS, if it leaks or has security breach, the browser's developer can fix it without waiting for a 3rd party, or I can use a different browser.

<comment><USER3> The more complex software is, the more potential security flaws and memory leaks. All software is subjected to this. Bringing HTML5 to browsers adds to this, and don't assume browsers are immune because they are not developed by Adobe.

Same arguments can be made for Flash: Plugin's developer can fix it without waiting for browser. Disable the plugin and use the same browser.

Conclusion: makes no difference conceptually.

<comment><USER5> The difference is that Flash, being proprietary, Adobe is the only party allowed to fix a memory leak. HTML5, a standard, can have many proposals, discussions and implementations on how to fix issues.

<comment><USER6> Seriously? Have you ever seen something fixed faster by a committee then by a vendor who has a large financial incentive to protect?

I want to live in your world!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It reminds of Alien Swarm[0], a free game by Valve, it is well worth it if you can find 3 friends to play with.

[0] [http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This feels like history repeating itself. The Flash version still runs better for me than the WebAssembly version, and the Flash version worked well on people's systems 5 years ago! It seems like half of the things I see on HackerNews is JavaScript poorly doing that other solutions did better a decade or more ago

<comment><USER9> webassembly is not javascript

<comment><USER8> My point is that all of these things are running slower than flash did on much older hardware. The technical sophistication of what the average user does with computers hasn't changed much in the past 10 years (for the most part), but these bloated web stacks have made real world performance actually go down as raw hardware performance has gone up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems to work nicely in Firefox 50 release (no nightly required) once the config is set.

Really happy about the way this is progressing.

<comment><USER11> For me, the WASM version was noticeably slower, with an especially noticeable JIT warmup. It might have been because the asm.js version was running at a lower resolution, so it's not a very fair comparison.

<comment><USER12> If your browser natively supports WASM, there is no JIT and no warmup time.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I didn't realise there was no JIT. In that case, I'm not sure what caused it, but there was definitely a lower framerate at the start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the total download size? For program? For data? How does this compare to the previous emscripten output?

<comment><USER14> From the network tab of Chrome developer tools:

      AngryBots11.wasm	GET	200	webassembly.org	xhr	UnityLoader.js:187	11.9 MB	54.38 s	GitHub.com
      AngryBots.mem	GET	404	webassembly.org	xhr	UnityLoader.js:72	5.6 KB	172 ms	GitHub.com
      AngryBots.memgz	GET	200	webassembly.org	xhr	UnityLoader.js:47	314 KB	1.30 s	GitHub.com
      AngryBots.wasm.mappedGlobals	GET	200	webassembly.org	xhr	AngryBots.js:279	3.1 KB	250 ms	GitHub.com
      AngryBots.datagz	GET	200	webassembly.org	xhr	UnityLoader.js:47	36.3 MB	2.9 min	GitHub.com
      HWStats.cgi	POST	200	stats.unity3d.com	xhr	AngryBots.js:6595	149 B	3.80 s	Apache/2

Just shy of 50 MB all in all.

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind this is built in Unity. It's difficult to make even trivial native apps in Unity in less than 25 megs.

<comment><USER16> The Unity WebGL engine is about 5MB gzipped. You won't get a web export smaller than that, but you shouldn't need 20MB of assets on top of it for a small game either.

<comment><USER13> For a point of reference, Three.JS's source code hovers around 100KB gzipped, sometimes more, sometimes less. That is a factor of 50x difference.

<comment><USER17> three.js doesn't have 1/50th the features of unity. three.js is great and ive contributed to it but a game engine is a lot more than just a renderer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your stuff is broken

UnityLoader.js:72 GET [http://webassembly.org/demo/AngryBots/Release/AngryBots.mem](http://webassembly.org/demo/AngryBots/Release/AngryBots.mem) 404 (Not Found)

</comment><comment><USER19> Now they need to add on-demand loading for parts of these applications and things could really get nice.

</comment><comment><USER20> What I'd prefer to see in a demo is running compiled code of other languages (e.g. Haskell, C++, Python, Rust, Go) in WASM, and comparing performance.

Also interesting would be to run other virtual machines (JVM) inside WASM, and see what the performance is.

Also interesting: compiling Firefox into WASM, and running it on Chrome (or the other way around) :)

Further, I'd like to see a good test of multithreaded/shared memory performance.

<comment><USER21> You can transpile this demo to C++ with IL2CPP. It's built into Unity for iOS/Android platforms, never tried to do it on desktop, but I think it must be possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Chrome (Version 57.0.2935.3 canary (64-bit)) on Windows 10 crashed the tab when I tried to reload the page to play again.

<comment><USER23> Would appreciate a bug report if you have a repo: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/entry?template=WASM%20...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/v8/issues/entry?template=WASM%20issue)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The Web Assembly version seems to be faster (not just warmup), but it would be nice to get a 1:1 comparison there.

<comment><USER25> The Web Assembly version also looks to be using much lower texture resolutions as well. It's cheating to get better speed it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I tried this with ASM.js - looked impressive to think this was all built with WebAssembly. Haven't seen the flash version, but still this looks awesome for 50mb.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious, why not use JVM bytecodes for web assembly... or actually any of the legitimate, mature, optimized, hardened runtimes out there? I feel like we're reinventing the wheel, again.

<comment><USER28> This has been answered 900 times already. See the design docs on GH.

<comment><USER29> The design docs have a rationale for why not llvm bitcode [1], but I can't find anything comparing wasm to other bytecodes or interpreters. Could you point me to the right place?

[1] [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#why...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#why- not-just-use-llvm-bitcode-as-a-binary-format)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I look forward to the day I'll be allowed to use ttk (tcl/tk) compiled to WASM instead of html/css to build interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why Oh Why Oh Why would you use isometric WASD for this instead of Forward/Backward/Strafing?

<comment><USER31> Because the camera doesn't rotate, so when you are facing south, forward would move you backwards on the screen, and strafe-left would move you right on the screen.</comment></comment>


ThoughtWorks is now a sales-commission free zone worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/blog/challenger-sales-customer-value-and-not-dollar-value

<comment><AUTHOR> though the post refers to ThoughtWorks Studios only (product division) this is true across all of 20+ ThoughtWorks offices worldwide</comment>


Finnish e-commerce marketing SaaS Nosto raises 2.8M Seed round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/16/nosto-seed/

<comment><USER2> It's very interesting that these guys are automating the marketing processes that patio11 talks about: automated lifetime email marketing. Patrick has shared how much value this can add.</comment>


Threads and fork(): think twice before mixing them - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/threads-and-fork-think-twice-before-using-them <comment><USER2> > The only clear case is to call execve(2) in the child process just after > fork(2).

It's crystal clear that you should _not_ call fork() then execve() in any nontrivial process or multithreaded process. Use posix_spawn() or, if you _must_ roll your own, use vfork() or clone(). Even if you can arrange to use fork() correctly like this, it's very slow in a process that uses a lot of MAP_PRIVATE memory.

<comment><USER3> One more reason to use posix_spawn() instead of fork() is that the latter must duplicate parent process memory, so for large processes which work under time constraints this can take nontrivial amount of time. This can bite when calling system() to execute shell command, since under the hood it also calls fork().

<comment><USER4> That is not actually true. Under the hood in the GNU C library system() calls clone().

* [https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/pos...](https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/posix/system.c#l116)

* [https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/uni...](https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/system.c#l35)

Under the hood in the musl C library, system() calls posix_spawn() which in turn calls clone().

* [https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/process/system....](https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/process/system.c#n35)

* [https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/process/posix_s...](https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/process/posix_spawn.c#n173)

<comment><USER5> For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter whether system() uses clone() or fork() - they have the exact same problem that they have to do a non-trivial amount of virtual address space setup, and can trigger OOM if you don't have overcommit enabled. (Indeed Glibc's fork() is just a wrapper around clone() rather than the legacy fork() syscall.)

<comment><USER4> > _For the purposes of this discussion_

On the contrary, the purposes of this discussion were set out by amluto above:

> _you should not call fork() [...] Use posix_spawn() or [...] use vfork() or > clone()._

and by kruzcek:

> _This can bite [...] since [...] it also calls fork()._

The people at the head of this discussion set out the premise that it very much _does_ matter whether fork() or clone() or vfork() is called, by system() or directly, and this is in fact the very thing that they are discussing.

They are wrong about what system() actually does under the covers, they were slipshod about what C library they were talking about, and like you they have not picked up on the CLONE_VM flag being the important thing when it comes to the memory map, but _they are right_ that there is a difference in the address space work that one has to be careful about and it is _not_ "the exact same problem".

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653238)

* [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/0e9b10395018ab78bf6bf...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/0e9b10395018ab78bf6bffcb9561a703c7f82cee/kernel/fork.c#L1322)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could fork a "forker" process, early in the program and use pipes to make it do what you can't later in time. socketpairs if you need to send descriptors as well.

closefrom(2) is nice bsdism, btw. After setting up stdin, out and err, just closefrom(3). For the same money, it could have been designed to close a range instead, odd this was not selected.

</comment><comment><USER4> A less thorough article, which conversely generated more Hacker News discussion (than exists here at the time that I write this), can be found via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449164) .

</comment><comment><USER7> While there are flags for closing file descriptors on exec(), they are not set by default. This means that delvelopers of every application that uses fork() must set these flags otherwise descriptor leak is present.

<comment><USER8> But if your 3rd party library keeps a file handle around internally that does not have the flag set, you're still going to have a bad day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe on OS X you get no guarantees of state post fork(), essentially you _have_ to exec() afterwards because it does a shallow copy.

Presumably for issues similar to those pointed out here.</comment>


To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/drone-warfare-precise-effective-imperfect.html <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


System that limits e-bike speeds will be tested on Dutch roads - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21154094/ebike-dutch-speed-limit-system-test-green-light-schiphol-s-pedelec-isa <comment><AUTHOR> "An ISA like the one being tested on e-bikes at Schiphol could allow s-pedelec riders to rejoin the safety of bike lanes in city centers. They could ride as fast as they like on the outskirts of town before being slowed to rejoin the flow of cycling traffic in congested, multimodal cities like Amsterdam."</comment>


Think Twitter is frivolous? Ask the protesters in Venezuela. - <AUTHOR> http://carlos.bueno.org/2007/06/think-twitter-is-frivolous-ask.html <comment><USER2> They are using Twitter, SMS, camera phones, etc

I don't read Spanish. How crucial was Twitter compared to SMS, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> SMS is generally point-to-point. A Twitter is a subscription can go out to many people at once, as they choose.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you like where you live? - <AUTHOR> Does location matter to you? What are the pros and cons of living in your current city/country? Would you rather move somewhere else, and if so, where? <comment><USER2> Current location: (suburbs of) Salt Lake City, Utah.

Pros:

The surroundings. I've got 6000 vertical feet of mountains visible from at least the southern half of the valley. I've got world-class ski resorts 45 minutes away. That's close enough that I can look at the weather report in the morning and decide to take a day off work. There's a pretty good trout stream 45 minutes away. There's a bunch of red-rock national parks 5 hours away. There's solitude within an hour. There's _real_ solitude (being the only person in the surrounding square mile) within two hours.

It's a fairly safe city. I can walk around downtown at midnight and still be alive the next morning.

It's a fairly clean city.

It's reasonably well laid out, reasonably easy to get around.

There's decent economic opportunity.

Cons:

I'm not Mormon. Salt Lake is less heavily Mormon than it used to be, but those aspects still sometimes drive me crazy.

Air pollution can get somewhat heavy sometimes. (A large city in a valley surrounded by mountains typically has that problem.)

It's too big for my taste (and too small for others). I'd rather live in a city of 100,000 than in a city of 1,000,000.

I'd rather move to Fort Collins, Colorado. That's pretty close to my ideal situation. But my parents are here, and they're pretty old. And my daughter has a full-tuition scholarship at a university here. Under current circumstances, I don't see going anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> _That 's close enough that I can look at the weather report in the morning and decide to take a day off work._

This is an amazing advantage.

How's the tech scene there?

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of web and B2B stuff in Utah County. (Google for "Silicon Slopes" \- yeah, the term is marketing hype, but there really is a fair amount going on.) I'm an embedded systems guy, and that's... not a roaring market, but fairly steady.</comment></comment></comment>