Recipe

Consumer and social

recipe site

SHOW HN2011

79points
48comments
#145of 1,097 in 2011
Top 14%of 2011 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

9 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 12 critical, out of 32 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.

Execution: 2 for, 10 againstIdea: 4 for, 2 againstDesign: 3 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Clean, slick design

    From 3 comments
    • I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool. Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the…
      sray on HN
    • Cooking + statistics = ♥ Design is really nice, I'll just make hover menu font little bigger and changed the color of "ask a question" btn.
      Santas on HN
    • Is there any way of changing how the ingredients are measured ie pounds to grams? Also.. perhaps cups is not the best way to measure onions ;) Nice work though, design looks slick
      sycren on HN
  • Useful for adjusting recipes you already know

    From 2 comments
    • A lot of comments here are about what you can't do with this site (with the usual conclusion that therefore the site is useless). Sure, there are some things it doesn't do. It…
      jmilloy on HN
    • With only three clicks, using the suggested ingredients, I removed one ingredient, added two others, and was told the proportions automatically. Notepad neither suggested the…
      jmilloy on HN
  • Interesting statistics-based approach

    From 2 comments
    • Cooking + statistics = ♥ Design is really nice, I'll just make hover menu font little bigger and changed the color of "ask a question" btn.
      Santas on HN
    • Interesting concept. I suppose this is based on statistics/ml, which is nice for finding positive matches. It doesn't work with diets avoiding certain ingredients like…
      konstruktor on HN

Objections

  • Ingredient database is inaccurate (e.g. units, broad matching)

    From 3 comments
    • It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy. But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.…
      tptacek on HN
    • You need units; I typed in lasagna and got suggestions for "200 cheese" and "1 beef". EDIT: just realized that I actually typed in "lasanga", hence the weird ingredients.
      ryanwaggoner on HN
    • Yum, except you might have to tweak whatever function you're using to add or multiply ingredients... I typed in "popcorn" and it suggested using 9 1/2 cups of popcorn =) I think…
      noduerme on HN
  • Quantities don't scale linearly across recipes

    From 2 comments
    • A pretty basic point to make here is that many recipes --- perhaps most --- don't scale linearly with ingredients. There's usually a core ratio you can distill out that can scale…
      tptacek on HN
    • I feel like this is pretty well known; not that recipes can't be scaled, but that you can't reliably do it by multiplying the ingredients. I just flipped through Ferran Adria's…
      tptacek on HN
  • Unclear purpose for users

    From 2 comments
    • I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool. Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the…
      sray on HN
    • It looks nice. I like the simple and functional design. I don't know how I'd use this though. If I want to make pancakes and type that in it gives me six of the seven ingredients…
      thirdstation on HN
  • Recipe scraping raises copyright and ethical concerns

    From 2 comments
    • It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy. But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.…
      tptacek on HN
    • It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy. You probably already know this, but the ingredients…
      nitrogen on HN
  • Fails with dietary restrictions like vegan or gluten-free

    From 1 comment
    • Interesting concept. I suppose this is based on statistics/ml, which is nice for finding positive matches. It doesn't work with diets avoiding certain ingredients like…
      konstruktor on HN

Requests

  • Ingredient substitution support

    From 1 comment
    • One cool feature would be how to handle substitutions. For example, if I am trying to make a pie crust. And I don't have butter, it would be good to be able to cross out butter,…
      aaronjg on HN
  • Ability to input available ingredients and get shopping list

    From 1 comment
    • It looks nice. I like the simple and functional design. I don't know how I'd use this though. If I want to make pancakes and type that in it gives me six of the seven ingredients…
      thirdstation on HN
  • Metric (SI) units and unit conversion

    From 2 comments
    • You should definitely show temperatures and measurements in SI units as well for us Scandinavians (and other non-crazy folks)!
      Zolomon on HN
    • Is there any way of changing how the ingredients are measured ie pounds to grams? Also.. perhaps cups is not the best way to measure onions ;) Nice work though, design looks slick
      sycren on HN
  • Dietary filtering for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free

    From 1 comment
    • Interesting concept. I suppose this is based on statistics/ml, which is nice for finding positive matches. It doesn't work with diets avoiding certain ingredients like…
      konstruktor on HN

Questions

  • What is the purpose of the guided recipe tool?

    From 1 comment
    • I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool. Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the…
      sray on HN
  • Are recipes sourced by scraping other sites?

    From 1 comment
    • It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy. But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.…
      tptacek on HN

Alternatives named

  • The Flavor Bible

    From 2 comments
    • So, what you really want is _The Flavor Bible_ (you can get it on your Kindle), which is an intensely well curated, expert-driven dictionary of flavor pairings. For instance,…
      tptacek on HN
    • It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy. But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.…
      tptacek on HN
  • Foodily

    From 1 comment
    • There's a related but different recipe tool in the UK: http://www.foodily.com/
      mattslight on HN
  • Recipe Puppy

    From 1 comment
    • http://www.recipepuppy.com/ is what I made to search for recipes that use ingredients you already have. It lacks the shopping list functionality though.
      kbrower on HN
  • Ingredient Pairings

    From 1 comment
    • Thanks for your feedback. I realize this won't ever work perfectly for every type of dish. But the dishes I have tried using the given ratios have all come out much better then…
      kbrower on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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