Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

Great article and congrats on making this! It would be great to have a chat if you like, because I’ve built Zuper, also for Greek supermarkets, which has similar goals (and problems!)

> I’m curious to know why you thought it “sounded like this was a protest project ‘for the people’”?

See the sibling reply by another user, which I think explains it perfectly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179628

> It just seems a little strange when you then go on to say “strive to address… what was said, not what you imagine the other person said”.

It’s not strange at all if you pay attention to the words. I did not mischaracterise the author or their goals, I explained what I expected and what I felt regarding what I experienced reading the post and then the website.

In other words, I’m not attacking or criticising the author. I’m offering one data point, one description of an outside view which they’re free to ignore or think about. That’s it.

Don’t take every reply as an explicit agreement or disagreement. Points can be nuanced, you just have to make a genuine effort to understand. Default to not assuming the other person is a complete dolt. Or don’t. It’s also anyone’s prerogative to be immediately reactive. That’s becoming ever more prevalent (online and offline), and in my view it’s a negative way to live.

> I went from 4vCPUs and 16GB of RAM to 8vCPUs and 16GB of RAM, which reduced the duration by about ~20%, making it comparable to the performance I get on my MBP. Also, because I'm only using the scraping server for ~2h the difference in price is negligible.

Good lesson on cloud economics. Below certain threshold we get linear performance gain with more expensive instance type. It is essentially the same amount of spending but you would save time running the same workload with more expensive machine but for shorter period of time.

> My CI of choice is [Concourse](https://concourse-ci.org/) which describes itself as "a continuous thing-doer". While it has a bit of a learning curve, I appreciate its declarative model for the pipelines and how it versions every single input to ensure reproducible builds as much as it can.

What's the thought process behind using a CI server - which I thought is mainly for builds - for what essentially is a data pipeline?

A good few people cant imagine doing anything for any other reason. The fascinating aspect is that (combined with endless rent seeking) everything gets more expensive and eventually people wont have time to do anything for free. What is also fascinating is that by [excessively] not accounting for things done for free people shall take them for granted. We are surrounded by useful things done for us by generations long gone.

I started thinking about this when looking at startup micro nations. Having to build everything from scratch turns out to be very expensive and a whole lot of work.

Meanwhile we are looking to find ways to sell the price label separately. haha

When I worked at a supermarket I often proposed to rearrange the shelves into a maze. One can replace the parking lot with a hedge maze with many entrances an exits from the building. Special doorways on timers and remote control so that you need only one checkout. Add some extra floors, mirrors and glass walls.

There are countless possibilities, you could also have different entrances and different exits with different fees, doorways that only open if you have all varieties of a product in your basket, crawling tunnels, cage fights for discounts, double or nothing buttons, slot machines to win coupons.

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