Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I wish we could have something similar in modern times. Instead, we have a handful of equally-shitty delivery platforms with terrible and bloated UIs and no API.

View on HN

Have you read the documentation for this beast? It is complete but I would not describe it as easy to use. To be fair, we could probably slap an API and a GUI on top of this nonsense:

$ burrito -time +:30 b+g+cc+jf+jf+sf+sc-sc+i"Black Beans"+n:2/Ross \ b+v:cc+g+cm+sc+i"no rice"/Kathie

(sigh no double dash long options and a horrific base food specification thingie - yes it is complete and well formed but it is still bollocks:

FoodSpec::=<type>[options*][/<name>] <type> ::= [b|t|m|q|T] (burrito, taco, mexico city, quesadilla, Taqitaco) )

RLY? Even in 1992 RAM was not too scarce. There was no reason to be so compact in form. If it was then those + symbols can go and better choices of options made to avoid ambiguity.

It is complex, but the advantage is that once I have the command figured out I can save it as an alias and be able to invoke it in seconds.

At least it's something you can work with: write your own interface against, program an UI on top of it, or whatnot.

Now I'm stuck with whatever crappy interface the Grab and Gojek developers give me on my shitty mobile phone (imagine people wanting to use their 1920x1080 screen instead of a phone to order food...)

It’s because the phone serves as another small layer of fraud protection

There was a GUI... named, of course, xburrito: http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81

I was just thinking of this. I have a couple spots near my office (when that is a thing) that have this exact problem. Big lunch rush with long lines.

Everyone has a phone number. It's amazing what a regression the modern web is over 150 year old tech like Fax.

It's a totally federated still widespread platform. All you need is a directory and some idea of an order form. You can probably pick up a form the first time you visit, take a menu too.

The whole thing just sounds so lovely.

how is fax 150 years old?

All the way back to 1843 - fascinating!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax

This is a very cool piece of trivia. I don't think anyone would presume the fax machine predates the telephone.

I find it fascinating as a demonstration of William Gibons "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" how much tech like this turns out to be much older than what people today expect. Another example would be video-telephony (a cctv-like commercial and publicly available video-telephony network operated in Germany 1936 onwards; it was "just" fixed booths at the post-offices of a few cities, but still; and the idea dated back to just a couple of years after the telephone)... Turns out you can write a lot of very prescient-sounding scifi by taking tech that already exist but isn't widely known, and positing a world where it is everywhere... (half of what people sometimes think Jules Verne "predicted" for example where things that existed in his time - including the Pantelegraph "fax" service)

> Turns out you can write a lot of very prescient-sounding scifi by taking tech that already exist but isn't widely known, and positing a world where it is everywhere

I think this is one reason 'Shockwave Rider' [0] from 1975 still holds up quite well today. IIRC the author (John Brunner) had people using their phones to access remote computers and didn't go into tech details of how they actually did this. When I read it more recently, it held up much better than (say) Arthur C. Clarke novels from the same era, because Clarke as a hard-SF technologist tried e.g. to predict what future gadgets might look like and how they might work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

Sorry, 178 year old tech.

I wish we could have something similar in modern times. Instead, we have a handful of equally-shitty delivery platforms with terrible and bloated UIs and no API.

Wasn't Google supposed to solve this for us? Wasn't the news crammed for a week with demos of a disembodied Google-powered ordering Chinese food by telephone?

What ever happened to that?

They signed deals with Postmates and Caviar and now they can't ship features that will render those businesses irrelevant.

Neither of those companies exist anymore so that doesn’t seem like a problem.

Postmates still exists, or at least something does that operates under that name.

Postmates was acquired by Uber last month I believe. Caviar was acquired by Doordash and the brand only sort of still exists.

If you're OK with pizza, I believe the Slice app is this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com