I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race

I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race(steele.blue)

309 points by nxten 2 years ago | 98 comments

mhb 2 years ago |

Colin will make you a pizza while he's delivering it: https://youtu.be/YjyJRTM0knE?si=fes2lbRntUlciPSH

rafram 2 years ago | |

You laugh, but the concept of this funny YouTube video was the actual business model of a SoftBank-backed startup that raised half a billion dollars [1]. The crucial flaw in their otherwise ironclad plan was that the pizza had a tendency to fly around and lose all its toppings when the truck went over a bump in the road.

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-...

siva7 2 years ago | | |

I'm pretty sure that was a money-laundering scheme disguised as some silicon valley-esque startup to not trigger alarm bells with institutions

arlort 2 years ago | | |

That's fun, this was also the premise of a Donald Duck story in the italian mickey mouse weekly

https://inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+2629-3&search=paperino%...

kbutler 2 years ago | | |

Seems like you could install pretty good motion isolation systems in the trucks with that kind of money...

asimpleusecase 2 years ago | | |

Should have pivoted to calzones.

lostlogin 2 years ago | | |

They need that tech tanks use to keep their gun level, that multi axis gyroscope thing. This is the sort of tech crossover that could make military spending more acceptable.

bipop5000 2 years ago | | |

Seems like it would have been a better option to do the final cooking which is around 7-8 min in the oven at the delivery doorstep.

heavenlyblue 2 years ago | | |

They didn't raise half a billion dollars, they were valued at half a billion.

heavyset_go 2 years ago | | |

Here's the thread that debuted this on HN in 2016 titled "Zume, a new startup trying to make a more profitable pizza through robotics"[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980694

mortureb 2 years ago | | |

Should have had the oven on shock absorbers.

franky47 2 years ago | |

That's what happens when you remove the GIL.

Edit: the video was the best laugh I had on YouTube this year, thanks!

Waterluvian 2 years ago | |

Is Colin’s recklessness a fake act, like Electroboom, or is he really as reckless as it seems? I’m not sure I’ve ever really figured it out, and for some reason it makes it hard for me to watch. I guess obviously they wouldn’t publish a video where something goes horribly wrong, though.

sureglymop 2 years ago | | |

Another one if you want to see some real recklessness is "I did a thing".

sublinear 2 years ago | | |

It's an act, but I wouldn't call it fake. He has more in common with photonicinduction than electroboom.

wayfinder 2 years ago | | |

What’s something that Colin did that was reckless? Everything he does looks pretty run of the mill for a workshop, but cool.

LegitShady 2 years ago | | |

they're just playing characters

hayleox 2 years ago | |

Omg my entire Sunday evening gone. Just watched this man build a tunnel from his house to his shed for 2.5 hours. What a fun channel.

DryLabRebel 2 years ago | | |

Colin's channel is just a treasure trove.

CalChris 2 years ago |

Very nice. A 21st century take on pizzatool.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

FWIW, there's a pizza restaurant, Waypoint Pizza in Tiburon, which if you ask nicely will deliver on the water in the San Francisco Bay. This comes in handy during weird less serious sailing races like Three Bridge Fiasco.

MuffinFlavored 2 years ago | |

> if you ask nicely

how much does that cost if a normal pizza delivery can cost $5-$10 extra?

CalChris 2 years ago | | |

You'd have to call+ask. It was a thing circa 2012. It's been awhile but the woman who ran Waypoint was a racer on the America3 team. It was more of a courtesy to other racers than an Uber Eats thing. Dunno if she's still there or if they still do it.

rcarr 2 years ago |

Dean Karnazes did this in an ultra running race minus the tech. He rolled the pizza up like a burrito and ran with it:

https://gffmag.com/the-raw-endurance-of-ultramarathon-man-de...

nathancahill 2 years ago | |

Endurance running is really just eating.

cjmcqueen 2 years ago | | |

It's literally the second hardest thing to do after the biking/running/swimming/skiing itself. Fueling is the operational excellence challenge of endurance sports.

MuffinFlavored 2 years ago | | |

how does your body not have a hard time processing cheese/sauce/butter/fat/grease while running?

nhance 2 years ago |

If it is a react website that would imply it has an api you could just use directly. Might still need to login to get a token but that's a lot more robust

internetter 2 years ago | |

Agreed! I always am confused when people screen scrape instead of just monitoring and replaying network requests. Much cheaper and much more robust. Is there anything I'm missing?

rendall 2 years ago | | |

I was curious about this myself. Perhaps the pizza request is arcane or buried in lots of other requests?

avg_dev 2 years ago |

i cannot tell you how much i enjoyed this article. it was very funny. it had so many great elements. a fun tech problem, pizza, getting me to look up what “s-tier” meant, a dash of humor (as if the premise wasn’t already hilarious), the mea culpa at the end and the ideas as to what the bug was (his theory sounds plausible to me, but idk).

tesin 2 years ago | |

Hm. I thoroughly disliked it - 100 layers of abstraction, glue and duct tape in the cloud to construct a rube Goldberg machine that doesn't work. It felt like everything wrong with modern tech.

fullspectrumdev 2 years ago |

This is pretty neat not gonna lie. I wonder now if something similar can be done with Deliveroo or similar - on day X if certain conditions are met (eg: working late), have preprogrammed order Y submitted when approximately Z distance from house.

whywhywouldyou 2 years ago | |

Why would you lie about this being pretty neat? Seems like a weird thing to clarify.

tbrownaw 2 years ago | | |

It's usually spelled "ngl" and seems to be a stock phrase that's used more-or-less as an opposite of "/s".

Loocid 2 years ago | | |

Its just an expression, dont overthink it.

willcipriano 2 years ago | |

Wire it up to a fitness tracker and only have enough pizza delivered to keep you at a calorie deficit so that you lose weight.

netrus 2 years ago | | |

Add enough pizza alternatives to make it a somewhat plausible diet and that's an actually great idea - for the crowd that can afford a fully delivery-based diet.

wanderingstan 2 years ago | |

Yes, it’s seems like food ordering services should have good APIs for this—why not make it easy for people to integrate food ordering (and paying!) into IFTTT-style hacks?!

gdprrrr 2 years ago | | |

They might fear abuse or trolls

zschuessler 2 years ago |

I have fond memories of growing up with Casey's pizza. I pick it up any time I am back in the Midwest.

I can't place it, but it has its own distinct charm.

ecommerceguy 2 years ago | |

Extra grease? The breakfast pizza is the best err, usually after a night of drinking busch lights.

weekay 2 years ago | | |

https://investor.caseys.com/press-releases/press-release-det...

This might surprise some people . Pizza for breakfast . Not left over pizza from previous night

loeg 2 years ago |

Oof, and it didn't work. That's pretty rough to find out at mile 200!

throwaway413 2 years ago |

Software, cycling and pizza. Some of my favorite things in life. This project and write-up was thoroughly enjoyed, and has inspired some of my own similar ideas now! Cheers

tomglynch 2 years ago | |

Hi, these are also my favourite things. OP, yourself and myself should start a club.

stevage 2 years ago |

I think I would either:

- just call up using hands free - have a friend do the call, and message them to trigger it

Also he keeps referring to "delivery" but it's actually pickup, no?

fullstackchris 2 years ago |

Great stuff! Thanks for the Playwright link and detailed Lambda blog posts, I had a similar project I was working on trying to convert text into animated (typed) code videos (on visual studio code) - trying to get anything non trivial in lambda to run is indeed an interesting endeavour to say the least!

hardware2win 2 years ago |

>My going theory is that the Lambda had terminated processing as soon as the final form.submit()

Kinda odd behaviour

devit 2 years ago | |

That's because the author apparently neglected to parse the resulting page to ensure that the submission succeeded.

If you terminate the system right after sending a form there is no guarantee that the data even left the local buffers for the network.

frankthedog 2 years ago | | |

This is the right answer. He’s immediately closing the browser after clicking the button. He should wait for a success UI or at least that the resulting network call finishes with success or a failure to retry on. Not lambdas fault, it’s performing as coded.

_joel 2 years ago | |

Isn't that the point of serverless though?

isbvhodnvemrwvn 2 years ago | | |

It wouldn't have worked regardless of what they ran it on, it's the runtime that terminates.

Gelob 2 years ago |

If they take phone orders you could just play a pre recorded messages and call them using twillo. I've done this in the past to call many stores and check inventory of an item

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 2 years ago | |

How does this work with a conversation? Did you ask them to press 1 if the item is in stock, or send you an email to a provided address?

sahkopoyta 2 years ago | | |

You could start the message by explaining your situation. But yeah still lots of edge cases this doesn't catch.

callalex 2 years ago | | |

Twilio has different verbs you can use to quickly and easily throw together a small voice controlled phone tree with basic conversational understanding.

sambalbadjak 2 years ago |

that was a fun read! hope you get your fresh pizza next race

exabrial 2 years ago |

Ok let’s fix one thing: Casey’s pizza is not great, despite the cult following :)

Source: Missouri resident

perebas 2 years ago |

LOL this guy is amazing and does amazing things. I would never think of something like that.

bilekas 2 years ago |

There's a great way to get motivated for the last leg of the race!

weirdkid 2 years ago |

But… Hawaiian pizza?

cultofmetatron 2 years ago | |

makes sense in a weird way. if you're running. pineapple got plenty of sugar in em which is exactly what you need when you're running and eating at the same time.

terminous 2 years ago |

The lengths people these days will go to in order to not make a phone call...

Theodores 2 years ago | |

Exactly. Personally I like making calls whilst riding my bicycle, in part to make motorists go mad because we all know that texts, calls and such phone activity causes accidents. But, on a bike you are not going to kill anyone.

dools 2 years ago |

> In other words, after having wasted an ungodly amount of money trying to make pizza in the most complicated way possible, Zume decided that the best course of action was to just try selling boxes instead

Started off as a Futurama episode, finished off as a Simpsons episode.

thrdbndndn 2 years ago |

Sorry for being kinda off-topic, but what's going on with these small(-ish) businesses configuring their websites to block users randomly through Cloudflare nowadays? I've seen this happened at least 5 times this week clicking random links, they are all local business websites.

I'm talking about https://www.caseys.com in this article, which gives me

    Access denied
    Error code 1020
    You do not have access to www.caseys.com.

    The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site."

Is this a GDPR measure (but My IP is in Japan, not EU), anti-proxy measure (I do use one), or cost-saving measure?

foooobaba 2 years ago | |

Well, Casey’s is not actually smallish, it’s a fortune 500 company publicly traded on NASDAQ (CASY) and has a market cap of over 9 billion.

thrdbndndn 2 years ago | | |

I guess that makes it even worse. Large companies surely want people around the world to visit their websites for brand recognition even if they don't operate in their regions.

weekay 2 years ago | |

This really is a hard stop being applied on Cloudflare WAF rules to stop any traffic from geo locations a sys admin believes would stop threats and also reduce their bandwidth utilisation. If companies don’t have business interest outside or their territory/ country the new trend seems to be just geo block that domain. While https://investor.caseys.com/ is accessible from Europe for eg., the main site isn’t . This isn’t a GDPR thing just a playbook some of the cyber security and ops team seem to be applying across various retail companies now a days .

evrimoztamur 2 years ago | |

This, I believe, is the free DDoS guard that people opt into because it's free.