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

#841

Post by klipt » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

n72 wrote: post #837

yolesaber wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when he talks about his enlightened post-kitchen lifestyle. "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber." Did this dude just leave the stove on all the time and keep the knives pointed u…

Yeah, so presumptuous of the architect to assume he'd want a kitchen. I'll bet this architect also dared to assume he'd want a toilet.

Now included with Soylent: antimatter suppositories! Never use the toilet again!

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

#842

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #818

dasil003 wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is science-worship attitude that is prevalent among a certain type of personality, usually a person who prizes their own logical thinking and objectivity, and thus more easily misses their own biases. Essentially you're using "natural" as a dog whistle that says my argument is wrong and the Soylent CEO is right. But the only reason you feel that way is because he fits the sort of engineer-type logical thinker wh…

>>I say nutritional science is still in the dark ages and therefore we don't have evidence to conclude a pile of molecules is the same as traditional food What you say is wrong, though. We have a pretty good understanding of how food works and what our bodies need. How do you think hospitals feed comatose patients? They do it either via a feeding tube (liquid food), or through an IV (fluids containing glucose, salts,…

Everything is relative. What you need to survive short-term is much easier to understand then the long-term effects of subtle dietary differences. The core of my point is that treating a pile of molecules as the same as food is not scientifically sound reasoning "from first principles".

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

#843

Post by crpatino » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

api wrote: post #760

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…

"like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations." My wife is into architecture and told me once that "every building code has a tombstone." Every building code is there because someone (or sometimes lots of people) died. Same with vehicle and road regs, etc. I had a lawyer tell me almost the same thing about equity, finance, and contract law: every standar…

Joel Spolsky's essay about never doing a full rewrite seems eerily appropriate. It should be obvious that systems that have been going and going for centuries will have quirks all over the place.

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

#844

Post by Avshalom » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #564

eriknstr wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post. This gave me a positive impression at the start of the blog post and I was agreeing with what he said initially, but then it went downhill. I would not want to get rid of my kitchen and I would absolutely never replace my food with Soylent, especially now that I've heard of all the people getting sick from it. Also,…

That gizmodo article's only "source" of nutritionists is from this article [1] (another article on the same site). That article's only source of nutritionists is someone who just called them up before Soylent was even on the market, and while none of those nutritionists had examined the product. Many cats and dogs will eat the same food source almost exclusively for most of their lives without any ill effect. Obvious…

In addition to what other people said: changing dog food is often accompanied by horrible diarrhea, up through the mid 90s dog shit turned bone and grew hair and canine coprophagia is usually attributed to insufficient nutrition. So you know: dog food, we're still figuring it out.

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

#845

Post by GunlogAlm » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #412

vidarh wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coke Zero exists because they decided to try to make a diet version of Coke that actually tastes closer to regular Coke. Diet Coke does not use the regular Coca Cola recipe with sugar replaced, but a tweaked one, on purpose. Compare to e.g. Diet Pepsi, which is to Pepsi what Coke Zero is to Coke, Coca Cola was for decades worried about making something that was too close to the original (hence Tab being their first d…

Have you ever seen the ads for Diet Coke and Coca Cola Zero?

Coca Cola definitely tried to market Coke Zero to a male audience (it was described as 'Bloke Coke' in UK newspapers [1] around launch), but I think it's popular today not because of the marketing, but because it's a good product. To me, Diet Coke tastes artificial and... bland. Coke Zero tastes similar to regular Coca Cola, but has a distinct enough character to be appealing in its own right. In my experience, this is what most Coke Zero drinkers will say.

[1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/introducing-bloke-co...

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

#846

Post by aalbertson » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

paavokoya wrote: post #805

huac wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like there's asymmetrical information, a great place for a startup to break into. Or create a better marketplace for seeds!

I'd venture to say the reason there is 100% reliability is due to the personal and "non-corporate" aspect to the way he does business. When you stop having face-to-face transactions and stop seeing your customers the interest in maintaining quality plummets. People become numbers. Also, p2p transactions work so well and are cheap because of the lack of middle-men taking unnecessary "fees".

Coming from the Farm culture/environment growing up, I can support this idea that it is in part the "non-corporate" aspect. It's very very much the personal, non-technological, Stay out of my business, get off my lawn, view points and feelings that drive some of this.

In many cases you have a "handshake and your word is your honor" system in place that drives business forward. No one is stressing about much, beyond the weather, and they have a more peaceful perspective on life in general.

That CERTAINLY has room for some technological improvement, but would have to be done in a very careful, well thought out and implemented way. Case in point, if it quits working or requires data fulltime (try getting data/cell/internet on a 10,000 acre farm in the middle of nowhere), then you will fail because even if you CAN convince a large portion of farmers to adopt the tech, once they start having enough problems with it? Out it goes, back to paper, phone calls, and a handshake.

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

#847

Post by eip » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #654

eriknstr wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post. This gave me a positive impression at the start of the blog post and I was agreeing with what he said initially, but then it went downhill. I would not want to get rid of my kitchen and I would absolutely never replace my food with Soylent, especially now that I've heard of all the people getting sick from it. Also,…

> At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post. I'd note that he got anemia early on in his Soylent journey because he forgot iron was a basic nutrient.

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/not-just-bad-for-horm...

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

#848

Post by maverick_iceman » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

kelseydh wrote: post #421

skuhn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos. What Soylent should have built to be worth $100+ million is a way to make a food product tailored to a particular person or group of people that's based on automation and nutritional science. Instead they seem to have a cobbled together amalgam tha…

A cautionary tale that produces a fast-growing company now worth at least $100 million dollars? I'll take it.

Theranos anyone?

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

#849

Post by bbctol » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #821

bbctol wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The dismissal was that the product previously existed. What's emotional about that?

What's not emotional about requiring products you have no hand in to meet your standards of innovation?

What... what is emotional about that? Saying a product is trying to fill a need which has already been filled is the least emotional reason I can think of to not purchase something.

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

#850

Post by nazgulnarsil » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:28 PM 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…

Our experience at MealSquares[1] has been that these external testing services are entirely oriented around the food industries needs for 'check-offs' rather than any concern about whether food is good or even safe for humans. I repeatedly had food science advisors confuesedly tell me 'but it's generally recognized as safe!' when I raised concerns about newly released designer cocktails of preservatives or flavoring agents (MealSquares still has neither). There's also a mini-industry around 'clean labeling' which in practice means food additive companies finding every loophole in the FDA regulations to be able to refer to some crazy concoction as just 'modified starch' and similar on the label. The real rabbit hole is 'processing aids' which don't even need to go on the label but wind up in your food (and our ingredients have to be tested for).

We've found no reasonable way to signal to the market that we are not engaged in these shenanigans partially because 99% of the market isn't even aware of these shenanigans. There's the organic and gmo free sect, but those have often been found to be worse than the alternative in terms of things like carcinogens in the organic pesticides used.

I will say this: several of our friend's kids eat MealSquares. Our advisory panel includes a registered dietician who specialized in meal replacements for many years, an academic nutritionist, and an MD who specializes in obesity research. And we've made changes based on their input. We've also checked in with a pediatrician who does nutrition research for kids. We give a shit.

1. I am one of the founders of http://www.MealSquares.com