Top all-time · #985
tech-at-instacart
Company blog · tech.instacart.comprogrammingdata
tech-at-instacart is the company blog at tech.instacart.com, writing about programming and data. Since 2015, 69 different Hacker News readers have linked it 108 times, most often “3M Instacart Orders, Open Sourced”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Instacart's engineering blog for posts on deep learning with embeddings, moving search off Elasticsearch, real-time item availability, and zero-downtime Postgres cutovers. Most comments are job ads or citations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- 3M Instacart Orders, Open Sourced8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-05-03
- Deep Learning with Emojis (not Math)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-29
- How to build a deep learning model in 15 minutes5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-02-27
- Instacart Built a Modern Search Infrastructure on Postgres4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-05-29
- Creating a logical replica from a snapshot in RDS PostgreSQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-05
- An Instacart Order, Part 1: Building a Digital Catalog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-09
- Predicting the Real-Time Availability of 200M Grocery Items2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-12-05
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-07-02
- Distributing Data Across Multiple Postgres Databases with Rails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-14
- Using Monte Carlo simulations to balance supply and demand in a marketplace2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-11
What Hacker News says?
Instacart | Sr Full-stack Engineer, Sr Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Sr iOS/Android Engineer | ONSITE in San Francisco/Toronto or REMOTE | https://instacart.com Instacart (YC S12) is building the best way for people everywhere in the world to shop for groceries. Using your phone or the web, you can order groceries and have them delivered to your within an hour. You can choose from a varie…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2018)”Submitted Freezing Python’s Dependency Hell as a story · 200 points
HN discussionInstacart | Sr Full-stack Engineer, Sr Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Sr iOS/Android Engineer | ONSITE in San Francisco/Toronto or REMOTE | https://instacart.com Instacart (YC S12) is building the best way for people everywhere in the world to shop for groceries. Using your phone or the web, you can order groceries and have them delivered to your door in minutes. You can choose from a vari…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2018)”Submitted Why We Moved to React as a story · 158 points
HN discussionYou could encode categorical variables into embeddings, they are more natural to deal that way. https://tech.instacart.com/deep-learning-with-emojis-not-mat...
Comment linking /deep-learning-with-emojis-not-math-660ba1ad6cdc
on “Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on tabular data?”Submitted The Garden: Instacart's Physical Staging Environment as a story · 124 points
HN discussionThere has been a rise in romantic thought pieces lately about how Data Scientists are wizards and can solve any problem with the real superpower of teamwork. (here's an older example from Instacart: https://tech.instacart.com/data-science-at-instacart-dabbd2d... ) In the real world, the state of affairs in Data Science is more practical and pragmatic. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Comment linking /data-science-at-instacart-dabbd2d3f279
on “What Data Scientists Really Do, According to Data Scientists”Submitted Using machine learning to estimate lost demand in a fulfillment chain as a story · 100 points
HN discussionThe value prop for customers vs Elasticsearch are: - ACID w/ JOINs - Real-time indexing under UPDATE-heavy workloads. Instacart wrote about this, they had to move away from Elasticsearch during COVID because of this problem: https://tech.instacart.com/how-instacart-built-a-modern-sear... Beyond these two benefits, then the added benefits are: - Infrastructure simplification (no need for ETL) - Lower costs Speaking t…
Comment linking /how-instacart-built-a-modern-search-infrastructure-on-postgres-c528fa601d54
on “We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication”Submitted Data Science Challenges at Instacart as a story · 93 points
HN discussionLongtime FreshDirect user. Nothing beats having an inventory management system. And the quality of the produce is fantastic. In 10 years of using FD, only during coronavirus have items been missing from my order. And not many. Compare to InstaCart, which has to go the opposite direction: https://tech.instacart.com/predicting-real-time-availability... Sounds like a nightmare to me. And stores may not want to "plugin"…
Comment linking /predicting-real-time-availability-of-200-million-grocery-items-in-us-canada-stores-61f43a16eafe?gi=9ef75bacc52b
on “America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies still struggle to profit”Submitted What the Formula? Managing State on Android as a story · 22 points
HN discussionEarly on they built a Rails app backed by Postgres [0] to store, these days, 500 million items. Then in this post [1] they say they're rearchitecting the database, then mention Snowflake. It sounds to me like they need a document store like Lucene in order to get fast search performance--but they may be optimizing for other use cases like tracking orders which is probably easier in a RDMBS. It also looks like they m…
Comment linking /the-story-behind-an-instacart-order-part-1-building-a-digital-catalog-46df5a8ff705
on “Web Performance Profiling: Google.com”Submitted Instacart Tech Blog – Just Getting Started as a story · 20 points
HN discussionWe have updated article https://tech.instacart.com/zero-downtime-postgresql-cutovers...
Comment linking /zero-downtime-postgresql-cutovers-e6f16090fabf
on “Zero Downtime Postgres Upgrades”Submitted Introducing Coil: a Kotlin-first image loading library on Android as a story · 17 points
HN discussionSubmitted Instacart Does Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Cutovers as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Offline First: Introducing TrueTime for Swift and Android as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Instacart's OhMyCron – Locking, Logging and Environment Setup for Cron as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted Animating programmatically with Redux and React as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing Ahab – Docker Event Handling as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Amountable – a gem to manage your Money fields as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Instacart Order, Part 1: Building a Digital Catalog as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploring Images in Jetpack Compose as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cooking and coding go hand in hand as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Distributing Data Across Multiple Postgres Databases with Rails as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to build a deep learning model in 15 minutes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deep Learning with Emojis (not Math) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Garden: Instacart’s Physical Staging Environment as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Instacart Built a Modern Search Infrastructure on Postgres as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
