Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick • Hacker News Board

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#531

Post by gerbilly » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:47 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #209

ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction. The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work a…

>You've got to [...] take your mind off of whatever you are doing

Exactly the reason we should enjoy actual regular meals, preferably with other people.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#532

Post by LouisSayers » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:47 AM UTC

n72 wrote: post #477

slg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it works despite something like Uber's or Airbnb's total ignorance of the law. Sometimes it fails like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations. Seems like Soylent i…

The founder of Soylent clearly believes he's an expert in many, many fields: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

Seems to work for Donald Trump

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#533

Post by DanBC » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:49 AM UTC

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #524

TeMPOraL wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on keto. It worked. No rectal bleeding. I also didn't die of various stuff I was supposed to. I'm close to getting jailed though, because I fear that at some point I'll break and punch the next person who tells me that artificial sweeteners cause cancer.

They can cause neuronal damage through excitotoxicity [0][1]. I've never heard of keto before, but I would be wary of aspartame and MSG. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7854587 [1] http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/review-ex...

The American Nutrition Association is not a credible source. And they're using a discredited source - he's promoted several outright conspiracy theories. (I mean, fucking chemtrails even).

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#534

Post by arethuza » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #383

hvidgaard wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the probl…

A thousand times this. I remember staying up late to finish programming problems when I was young (and stupid). Now I find the most effective way of solving hard programming problems is to spend an afternoon attacking it and then go to sleep at a normal hour . Magically, an elegant solution - usually quite different from work in progress - appears in my brain while I'm showering. I do my best work while sleeping, I j…

Agreed - for really hard problems I've never found that pounding away directly is effective. I load up on the required information and then intentionally go and do something else (ironically cooking seem to does it for me but overnight and in shower also works) and out of nowhere a solution will appear.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#535

Post by _pmf_ » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:55 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #196

Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are pro…

> and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute

They made more money with that two transactions than some other high rollers.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#536

Post by wallace_f » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:56 AM UTC

arvinjoar wrote: post #499

n72 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of Soylent clearly believes he's an expert in many, many fields: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

It's not a bad attitude though. Experts with authority granted to them in the form of titles have failed us, and keep failing us in so many areas. Ranging from nutrition to psychology, we really shouldn't put their work on a pedestal. Techies are a smart bunch on average and can stomach a lot more complexity than the average joe. It makes sense for them to try to pick up stuff outside of their line of work. Take Elon…

Thank you for that.

To add to that, this reminds me of the kind of Epaulettes Feynman talked about in SYJMF -- creating titles, awards and distinctions to create an aura around experts. This kind of "aura" of trust and distinction is something that I think in 100 years we will look back on the same way we look at experts of our past: imagine how you view religious leaders who held the keys to understanding life and the universe, or doctors who did more harm than good.

Here's an anecdote. Post WWII the Nobel Prize was awarded for the lobotomy procedure... Experts with authority and all the fanciest Feynman-epaulettes that the world has dreamt up have failed us, that's a certain fact.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#537

Post by Nursie » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 11:59 AM UTC

rosstex wrote: post #345

Itsdijital wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/seans-lean-mass-gainer I use a different protein (NOW dutch choc isolate) and a different oil (smart balance). I also dropped the choline because it has a bad interaction with nicotine and I use an e-cig. When I went full soylent though I used it because I stopped using my e-cig during that time. I also added in 5g creatine. I should note that this is a mass building recipe and meant f…

>I use an e-cig Why bother getting healthy in one aspect of your life if you're going to trash it in another?

How is using an e-cig trashing your health?

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#538

Post by arvinjoar » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

tpeo wrote: post #525

arvinjoar wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a bad attitude though. Experts with authority granted to them in the form of titles have failed us, and keep failing us in so many areas. Ranging from nutrition to psychology, we really shouldn't put their work on a pedestal. Techies are a smart bunch on average and can stomach a lot more complexity than the average joe. It makes sense for them to try to pick up stuff outside of their line of work. Take Elon…

There's a difference between "thinking for yourself" and "uncritically discouting past work". And that's the difference between asking yourself whether power poses really work and and coming in kicking doors, yelling that psychology is bullshit. First one is engaging in very much reasonable level of critical thought, whereas the second is just thinking "Dunning-Kruger is okay, when I do it". On a side note, I don't q…

I'm not saying Psychology is bullshit, why would you frame what I said as such? I think it's in general super interesting. I'm just saying that you can gain a lot more from it by evaluating things critically than you can from swallowing anything and everything that's in vogue uncritically because some authority figure tells you it's the Truth.

Also, to nitpick, Dunning-Kruger is certainly ok when the top performers do it, if you care to look at the actual graph[1].

Elon Musk is very much involved in the engineering of his projects, he's not a Steve Jobs-style CEO. As tomp pointed out[2], Elon was willing to look at things outside of his area of expertise, and guess what, he actually managed to learn quite a lot about those things.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/bJXQWRY.jpg

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814851

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#539

Post by nkrisc » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #209

ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction. The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work a…

> Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work and sleep.

I know this is HN, but that sounds awful.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#540

Post by gerbilly » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 12:02 PM UTC

Fun fact: Do you know how vitamins got their name?

When the first scientists to study food tried reducing it to its basic components, they concluded that it contained: carbohydrates, fats, protein and minerals.

Then, based on this knowledge, they started to feed animals a mixture of these four macronutrients, but they wasted away.

Afterwards they began to discover the 'vitamins', so named because they were vital for life.

Today we know even more, and have discovered that we don't just eat to feed ourselves, but to feed our microbiome.

I can't imagine though that we've discovered everything that is necessary in food for humans to thrive, and we may never do so.