I worked in this business for over 15 years on the tech and business sides and I can say that the traditional VC-funded startup regime is fundamentally incompatible with the basic realities of the food industry. What is sort of funny about it is that in many areas there are local companies that have been around for many years doing this fantastically. As other commenters pointed out, this is essentially the milkman model.
There are a number of extremely difficult problems that are definitionally insurmountable on the timescales that VC operates -- paramount among them being the establishment of trust and mutualistic relationships with your vendors/stores, customers, and employees.
You are right that there is such a space, it just won't happen in the context of a startup taking VC cash.
First: my sense is that for most use cases, this will begin to feel gimmicky rather quickly and that you will do better by specializing rather than positioning yourself next to ChatGPT, which answers my questions without too much additional ceremony.
If you have any diehard users, I suspect they will cluster around very particular use cases, say business users trying to create quick internal tools, users who want to generate a quick app on mobile, scientists that want quick apps to validate data. Focusing on those clusters (your actual ones, not these specific examples) and building something optimized for their use cases seems likelier to be a stronger long term play for you
Secondly, I asked it to prove a theorem, and it gave me a link to a proof. This is fine, since LLM generated math proofs are a bit of a mess, but I was surprised that it didn't offer any visualizations or anything further. I then asked it for numerical experiments that support the conjecture, and it just showed me some very generic code and print statements for a completely different problem, unrelated to what I asked about. Not very compelling
Finally, and least important really: please stop submitting my messages when I hit return/enter! Many of us like to send more complex multi-line queries to LLMs
First time I'm seeing valid business advice on HN - unlike the infamous Dropbox comment haha :) But I strongly agree with the above advice on specializing for a vertical and hope the founders take it seriously!
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Getting this error the homepage. In the browser console I am just seeing
Content-Security-Policy: (Report-Only policy) The page’s settings would block a script (script-src-elem) at https://www.phind.com/_next/static/chunks/c857e369-746618a9672c8ed0.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9B from being executed because it violates the following directive: “script-src 'none'”
GET https://www.phind.com/_next/static/chunks/4844-90bb89386b9ed987.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9B [HTTP/1.1 403 403 Forbidden 716ms]
index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers and also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks, so it's a minor inconvenience for some, and straight up unusable for others
> index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers
The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.
> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks
The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.
I am not your target with this question (I don't write Zig) but there is a spectrum of LLM usage for coding. It is possible to use LLMs extensively but almost never ship LLM generated code, except for tiny trivial functions. One can use them for ideation, quick research, or prototypes/starting places, and then build on that. That is how I use them, anyway
Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV
> Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV
Anyone who has spent time working with LLMs knows that the LinkedIn-style vibecoding where someone writes prompts and hits enter until they ship an app doesn't work.
I've had some fun trying to coax different LLMs into writing usable small throwaway apps. It's hilarious in a way to the contrast between what an experienced developer sees coming out of LLMs and what the LinkedIn and Twitter influencers are saying. If you know what you're doing and you have enough patience you really can get an LLM to do a lot of the things you want, but it can require a lot of handholding, rejecting bad ideas, and reviewing.
In my experience, the people pushing "vibecoding" content are influencers trying to ride the trend. They use the trend to gain more followers, sell courses, get the attention of a class of investors desperate to deploy cash, and other groups who want to believe vibecoding is magic.
I also consider them a vocal minority, because I don't think they represent the majority of LLM users.
Working with Agentic LLMs is exactly the same skillset as directing junior programmers or offshore consultants.
You get a feel for how much direction they need after working for a while and tooling and accessible documentation is really important for quality.
Then you give them a task and review the results. In (backend/systems) programming it's pretty binary whether a solution works or not, it's not a matter of taste but something you can just validate with hard data.
I've done so many tiny/small/medium sized utilities for myself in the last year it's crazy[0]. A good bunch of them are 95-100% vibecoded, meaning I was just the "project manager" instructing what features I want and letting the agent(s) make it work.
I think I have a pretty good feel for the main agentic systems and what they can do in the context of what I do so I know what to tell them and how - each has its own distinct way of working and using the wrong one for the wrong job is either stupid, frustrating or just a waste of time.
I'll give you a basic example where it saved me a ton of time to vibe code instead of doing it myself, and I believe it would hold true for anyone.
Creating ~50 different types of calculators in JavaScript. Gemini can bang out in seconds what would take me far longer (and it's reasonable at basic tailwind style front-end design to boot). A large amount of work smashed down to a couple of days of cumulative instruction + testing in my spare time. It takes far long to think of how I want something to function in this example than it does for Gemini to successfully produce it. This is a use case scenario where something like Gemini 3 is exceptionally capable, and far exceeds the capability requirements needed to produce a decent outcome.
Do I want my next operating system vibe coded by Gemini 3? Of course not. Can it knock out front-end JavaScript tasks trivially? Yes, and far faster than any human could ever do it. Classic situation of using a tool for things it's particularly well suited.
Here's another one. An SM-24 Geophone + Raspberry PI 5 + ADC board. Hey Gemini / GPT, I need to build bin files from the raw voltage figures + timestamps, then using flask I need a web viewer + conversion on the geophone velocity figures for displacement and acceleration. Properly instructed, they'll create a highly functional version of that with some adjustments/iteration in 15-30 minutes. I basically had them recreate REW RTA mode for my geophone velocity data, and there's no way a person could do it nearly as fast. It requires some checking and iteration, and that's assumed in the comparison.
Yeah I had OpenAI crank out 100 different fizzbuzz implementations in a dozen seconds—-and many of them worked! No chance a developer would have done it that fast, and for anyone who needs to crank out fizzbuzz implementations at scale this is the tool to beat. The haters don’t know what they’re talking about.
> Our other tool, HyperTwin, tackles the “tribal knowledge” problem. It learns directly from subject-matter experts, observing workflows, analyzing screen interactions, and conducting AI-driven interviews to capture how they debug and reason about their systems. The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.
How do you consolidate this knowledge across disparate teams and organizational silos?
How will you identify and reconcile subtle differences in terminology used across the organization?
Perhaps I misunderstood, but on your website you primarily identify technical implementors as SMEs. IME modernizing legacy data systems in high-stakes environments, the devil is more on the business side -- e.g. disparate teams using the same term to refer to different concepts (and having that reflected in code), or the exact stakeholders of reports or data systems being unknown and unknowable, and discerning between rules that are critical to a particular team or workflow that are opaque to you because e.g. you don't know who all relies on this data or are missing business context, or because the rule is not actually used anymore, or because the implementation of the rule itself is wrong.
Besides, both technical and non-technical stakeholders and SMEs lean heavily on heuristics to decision with the data they are looking at, but often struggle to explicitly articulate them. They don't think to mention certain conditions or filters because for them those are baked into the terminology, or it doesn't occur to them that the organization deals with broader data than what they interact with in their day-to-day.
And unfortunately in these settings, you don't get many chances to get it wrong -- trust is absolutely critical.
I am skeptical that what you will end up with at the end of the day will be a product, at least if your intent is to provide meaningful value to people who rely on these systems and solve the problems that keep them up at night. My feeling is that you will end up as primarily a consultancy, which makes sense given that the problem you are solving isn't primarily technical in nature, it just has technical components.
The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though.
I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in real time is pretty decisive.
With math classes, YMMV, especially since they are rarely so interactive at the upper division and graduate level, but at the very least seeing an instructor talk about math and work through problems (and if you are lucky to have a particularly disorganized one, get stuck, and get themselves unstuck) can go a long way. But to be fair I regularly skipped math lectures in favor of reading too, heh
I rarely skipped math lectures in university (only when the prof was really bad; but then I watched video lectures taught by a different prof from a previous term).
The lectures in the hardest math classes I took did not feature any “working through problems.” They were 50 minute pedal-to-the-metal proof speedrun sessions that took me 2-3 hours of review and practice work to fully understand. I don’t know how anyone can see a lecture like that and not see it as an inefficient note delivery system.
I did have math classes where profs worked through problems but those were generally the much easier applied math classes. Those were the ones I least needed to attend lectures for because there you’re just following the steps of an algorithm rather than having to think hard about how to synthesize a proof.
For language learning it’s hard to beat full immersion. When we learn our first language (talking to our parents as children) we don’t learn it by theory (memorizing verb conjugations), we learn it by engaging the language centre in our brains. I think language classes are more useful if you want to learn to write and translate in that language, where you need a strong theoretical background. If your main goal for language learning is being able to speak with loved ones or being able to travel and speak fluently with locals, then sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture seems like a very difficult way to do that.
I meant "problems" in a broad sense -- I loved disorganized professors who would pause and stare at their lecture notes in silence for a minute, realize their proof or example contained some flaw, and then have to correct it on the fly.
I found those moments really valuable if course-correcting was non-trivial -- the typical Definition-Theorem-Proof-Example format certainly is essential for organizing one's thinking and communicating new math in a way that's digestible to other mathematicians, but it is not how mathematicians actually think about math or solve novel problems
In the grad analysis sequence this "course correcting" mechanic was built into the course, since we were required to regularly solve a challenging problem and then present its proof to the class and withstand intense questioning from both the professor and peers. If you caught an error in someone's proof and could help the presenter arrive at a correct proof, you'd both earn points.
The thrill of surviving an incredulous "Wait a second..." from that particular professor (who later became my research advisor) was hard to beat
Anyway my intent was to analogize math lectures (whatever they might look like) with language courses or immersion in the sense that they are an opportunity to practice speaking and listening, and to immerse yourself in cultural norms. I think it goes a bit deeper than this, in that language is inextricably connected to most thought and vice versa -- we experience this in a very explicit way whenever we find our thinking clarified in the process of formulating a question, but it's always there
That said, pure immersion for language learning is actually easy to beat -- lots of research shows that immersion together with explicit grammar instruction has far better learning outcomes than immersion alone. Immersion alone misses lots of nuance -- and it relies on the speaker being acutely aware of the difference between their output and target forms.
With your verb conjugation example, lots of time can be saved by knowing that there's a thing called the subjunctive and that it is distinct from tense and it shows up in a myriad of places tending to concern hypotheticals
Similarly, I gain a lot from talking to mathematicians and attending conferences. But I also need to spend time alone consulting relevant theory, reading papers, and playing with examples. Both are important, but in math it seems you one get away with less immersion
I consider the value in math lectures to come from the speaker’s explanation of why to expect certain things. Is this an obvious fact in another context, rewritten for this application? Is this a surprise? What reasons besides the rigorous argument are there for believing the theory?
A lot of the theorems I learned in school weren’t particularly amenable to intuitive explanations like that.
For example, take Galois theory. The fact that a polynomial’s solvability by radicals depends on the solvability of its Galois group is surprising and not intuitive at all. The fundamental theorem of Galois theory is a very technical result utilizing purpose-built mathematical structures that were developed specifically to study the solutions of polynomial equations.
> Every grocery store where I've shopped has yogurt with no added sugar. It's right there on the shelf, just look at the label.
Large parts of the US are designated as food deserts, where one's best option for groceries might be the convenience store attached to a gas station. Good luck finding plain yogurt with no sugar added there. Your specific experience is exactly that.
You made a claim that plain yogurt is generally available in US food markets, attempting to make an inference about grocery store selections drawing from your own experience. I pointed out that it is not actually generally available and noted that your experience does not generalize.
I am not sure why you mention eating habits, since this is not what is being discussed
> I pointed out that it is not actually generally available
Actually, you pointed out that food deserts exist, and asserted that that meant that plain yogurt is not generally available, the thing you pointed out does not support the conclusion drawn from it.
My claim was 100% accurate and my experience does generalize. Plain yogurt with no added sugar is generally available at the vast majority of supermarkets throughout the country. I have actually seen it in both poor and affluent areas all over.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Instead of making things up you can literally just go look.
Wow, 100% accurate? OK, I definitely can't argue with that. Nor I suppose can I argue much with overinterpreted anecdotes and absolutist analysis from a non-expert about a nuanced topic. You should start a Tiktok or a Substack or something, you are leaving money on the table.
Food deserts appear to roughly correlate inversely with population density[0]. I don't interpret the existence of food deserts as evidence that food choice is not 'generally' available. Assuming we are serving people and not geographies.
While I don't live in a food desert where these kind of stores are the only option, I have, in fact, regularly found plain yogurt in gas-station convenience stores, the even smaller refrigerated-food sections in urban drug stores, etc.
Now, fresh produce, except—if you are very lucky—extremely expensive (for the quantity), relatively small packs of cut carrots and other things people might reasonably purchase as snacks, anything usable as a cooking fat excepted salted butter, and lots of other things, sure, you are going to be SOL, but plain yogurt (both the usually watery American kind and strained "Greek” yogurt) seems pretty common.
I have also found plain yogurt in gas station convenience stores
My issue was less with the plain yogurt specifically and more with the logic of the parent, namely that "X product has been available in every grocery store I have shopped in" implies that "X product can be found in every grocery store"
A good example of a food desert would be an inner-city neighborhood, the first time I heard this term, they were talking specifically about places in Oakland, CA. Which ironically is a short train ride away from the Food Mecca of the USA.
> There are no set few factors, but some other influences that affect food deserts may include: mobility, existing health issues, working irregular hours, fast food culture, lacking adequate knowledge about nutrition, and many more.
Seems like the qualifications are whatever they want them to be.
It doesn't, actually. It says most people who are in food deserts are in urban areas. The vast majority of food deserts, however, are absolutely not in urban areas.
Even if it were true, it still only affects 13 million people. There are 330 million in the US, so it's a non-issue with regard to our obesity problem.
OK, point taken re most people vs most food deserts
In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".
I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area
I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.
In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]
I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket
For most US supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid anything in any of the center aisles. While individual floor plans vary, that tends to route you to the fresh produce and meats and dairy and avoid most of the ultraprocessed packaged stuff.
Is there a better source for that data? I appreciate that you're at least bringing data to the discussion, but honestly I kind of don't buy it, having lived all over the US from rural farm communities to Manhattan. I think I can identify where I live right now on that map, by virtue of being right on the border of IL/IN and Lake Michigan, and it has a little indication of "food desert", but it certainly isn't.
This just doesn't align with reality; your chart is practically meaningless.
Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.
The SF Bay Area is hardly an outlier. There may be more specialty grocery stores here, but the large supermarkets where most consumers buy most of their food are the same as anywhere else. If you compare a Safeway in Mountain View, CA to a Publix in Daytona Beach, FL or a Kroger in Toledo, OH there isn't much difference in the products available.
Safeway has an in-house organic brand, "O Organics". I can easily go to Safeway and pick up only organic foods. I don't know if that's true for Publix or Kroger.
UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"
I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.
I lived in rural areas a large portion of my life. What you are describing is limited to areas with extremely small populations. Meaning even my hometown of a few thousand has a Walmart (put up when I was a kid in the 90s) an Aldi, and two local grocery stores with tons of healthy options.
So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.
i lived in one of those small towns through highschool, just a blinking yellow light and a gas station. What we did, and everyone did, was drive the 20miles to the large town with a Walmart and get groceries there. It only takes 20min because there's no lights or traffic in those areas so the time commitment is about the same as living in a city. My mom made meals from her recipes using basic ingredients so it's certainly feasible to eat how you want in these areas. Only in the most rare/extreme cases are people forced to grocery shop at a gas station.
I've got family in the rural Midwest. It would surprise me if their town wasn't a food desert by these definitions. You might go grab a thing of milk or sliced bread in a pinch at the convenience store, but yeah otherwise you just make the short drive into "the city" to get food at a regular grocery store.
Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.
I hope you recognize that your claims are deeply flawed and don't align with the reality that most middle-class grocery shoppers experience. Regardless of what you think makes "sense", major supermarkets throughout the country have rough assortment parity (with minor differences for regional consumer preferences). In some cases the long tail is actually longer in lower median income cities because labor is cheaper and stores are physically larger (cheaper real estate). That Publix where I shopped in Daytona Beach is enormous.
Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.
Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.
In any case, I love most of what you have written here.
Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?
If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?
Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.
Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.
Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.
The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!
I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail
I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.
Me too -- I reacted this way when I read it, and posted it here to see if others would agree or if there was some nuance I was missing. In particular I bristle at this frequent juxtaposition of the US and Japan (or "East" vs "West" more broadly) in terms of individualism and collectivism -- those terms aren't well defined enough to not be misleading, and might convey truth in some cases but better specificity would help us avoid wrongheaded generalizations based on old tropes and stereotypes
It makes sense to me that there would be differences in how people with various cultural backgrounds interpret art, since we largely know that the way people experience and think about color is different, though
It's also funny to see US vs Japan as a stand-in for East vs West, because eg Japan and China have very different cultures; and eg Germany and the US also have their differences. (Or Chile and the US, if you want to stay far in the West.)
There are a number of extremely difficult problems that are definitionally insurmountable on the timescales that VC operates -- paramount among them being the establishment of trust and mutualistic relationships with your vendors/stores, customers, and employees.
You are right that there is such a space, it just won't happen in the context of a startup taking VC cash.
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