How we built a take-away menu image search engine in just 50 lines of code
In this technical retrospective (2010), @mortenjust shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 13 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 4 comments
I didn't even know Evernote had an API... but now that I do I will check it out.
Not related - but this is one of the sweetest sushi menus I've ever seen: http://findmaden.dk/menu/438b98d9-989e-4ea2-8bc0-46e4b6eca27d
Take OCR from one app, voice recognition from another, and a third super power from a third app, and you have yourself a new service.
Only if all those three external apps are happy with your app. (According to past experience)
What are you using for OCR?
I can imagine the fanciful graphics of such menus often make it harder to convert them to text.