Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 454 posts

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#331

Post by ahartmetz »

reaperducer wrote: post #286
antris wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling fast food workers monkeys won't make you look any smarter.

I'm not. It's a very common business phrase about cheap labor, even here on HN. The fact that you equate the two says more about you than me.

I think it's more acceptable to make fun of people of your level of privilege and up (like the management who underpays) and less of those lower.

If a fast food worker at a better paying, better run chain or restaurant said it, it would be still a little mean (as intended), but not kicking down.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#332

Post by hug »

duxup wrote: post #68
wnissen wrote: post #49

Just a note, the machines are not broken, they have shut themselves down for sanitary reasons. Ice cream, as a food that is very close to neutral in pH and without much in the way of preservatives, is a common source of listeria bacteria. To prevent serious health issues, the machine must be sanitized regularly. As I understand it, the process is involved, and any given McDonalds may not have a person with the time a…

I suppose ice cream isn't high on the list of services they feel they need up and running all the time, but if the machine is determining this I would think there would be some level of predictability that would allow them to schedule sanitizing and etc. It's funny that the machine tells them there's no ice cream. I visited my local library for a tour. They have an automated system that collects returned books, sorts…

It's about ten years since I've worked with an ice-cream machine, but in my experience no matter the model they never forced you to try not to serve ice-cream.

They would enter their self-pasteurisation cycle, and the display at the front would tell you that is what it was doing, but it wouldn't prevent you from pulling the handle, if you so wished.

The problem, though, was that the barrel of the machine where the mixture was normally frozen was now at some 60 degrees C, it would be much much higher pressure than usual, and since the entire staff of a McDonald's tends to consist of teens who don't exactly take pride in the precision in which they carry out their jobs, at least once a night you'd have some poor kid blast a fine mist of hot sugary milk over themselves and the surroundings. Sometimes twice.

Sometimes I miss working at McDonald's.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#333

Post by throwaway373438 »

oh-4-fucks-sake wrote: post #325
joezydeco wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some detail, as someone that has worked with those machines before (internally and externally). In the good old days the soft serve and shake machines were taken apart every night and every piece was washed and bleach-sanitized by hand. Then it was reassembled in the morning. This would leave a lot of room for error and possible contamination in the process. And the sight of a shake machine hitting full pressu…

Said another way: - You have a system whereby every instance has a 75%-79% uptime. - Each instance's 21%-25% daily scheduled maintenance window can (generally) be arbitrarily-scheduled by the ops team. How do you near guarantee that there's always one instance available? If you said: "manage a redundant cluster of at least 2 instances with non-overlapping maintenance windows" Then you were correct! BONUS QUESTIONS: Q…

The answer to #4 is probably that the goal isn't to always have ice cream. The goal is to run a profitable business.

Doubling the cost of the ice cream infrastructure to avoid a 25% downtime may not be a profitable venture -- especially if the downtime is scheduled to occur while the store is closed.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#335

Post by the_only_law »

pkulak wrote: post #152

So I guess this guy doesn't know what "reverse engineer" means? He seems to think it means "use".

Well, I suppose it it's not a public API he may have had to o some work to analyze and piece together conventions, parameters, etc. Personally I just refer to this basic stuff as "analysis".

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#336

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

royaltjames wrote: post #263
thatsnotmepls wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute Do you have to have a cart in order query for broken machines? If not, why was it mentioned in the tweet?

Because it's hilarious to quantify and state. Why ask ridiculous questions?

Because it's a meaningless number. If he is actually placing an order for that amount every minute, it would be a useful number (and he would be an asshole for making so many fake orders and filling their system with garbage metrics). If he placed ice-creams in the cart for 8000 stores, then he should give that number. The dollar value is a completely pointless number in this case, and was done purely for clickbait.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#337

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

whatshisface wrote: post #52
jawns wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably have a different definition of malicious than most of us. What you're thinking is, "Did he do this to break things at McDonald's or actively hurt them in some way?" But if he's hitting an internal API and creating a bunch of fake orders for the purpose of gathering data, that's malicious, whether or not it breaks anything on McDonald's side.

When will this guy realize that the only acceptable pastime for hackers, post-2020, is having long discussions that involve the word "policy" many times?

When it hurts others (in this case McD, by filling their system with garbage orders and metrics), it is not 'just a prank, bro'.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#338

Post by dmix »

throwaway373438 wrote: post #333
oh-4-fucks-sake wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said another way: - You have a system whereby every instance has a 75%-79% uptime. - Each instance's 21%-25% daily scheduled maintenance window can (generally) be arbitrarily-scheduled by the ops team. How do you near guarantee that there's always one instance available? If you said: "manage a redundant cluster of at least 2 instances with non-overlapping maintenance windows" Then you were correct! BONUS QUESTIONS: Q…

The answer to #4 is probably that the goal isn't to always have ice cream. The goal is to run a profitable business. Doubling the cost of the ice cream infrastructure to avoid a 25% downtime may not be a profitable venture -- especially if the downtime is scheduled to occur while the store is closed.

Shelf-space is in high-demand and those machines aren't cheap.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#339

Post by SamBam »

nend wrote: post #185
cdirkx wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machines still get taken apart and washed by hand, along with some maintenance, every 14 days. So every machine will additionally be off for an afternoon every two weeks.

So it's basically a perpetual stew ice cream for 14 days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

I would imagine this is what any industrial ice cream production that's making pints for grocery store freezers would look like.

Re: I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API

#340

Post by dmix »

nend wrote: post #185
cdirkx wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machines still get taken apart and washed by hand, along with some maintenance, every 14 days. So every machine will additionally be off for an afternoon every two weeks.

So it's basically a perpetual stew ice cream for 14 days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

Picture of the mentioned 46yr old (beef) strew mentioned in the article: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

I'm not sure what material it's on to keep it heated. But something like coal I assume.

Post reply on HN