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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

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Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#81

Post by mizzao »

biophysboy wrote: post #76

An idea for the long-term future: I've often felt like cooking would be a perfect use case for very simple augmented reality. Often times my hands are messy while cooking, making it hard to deal with a book or smartphone. Also, recipes are often very time-sensitive. If I could see the ingredients/steps quickly, that'd be terrific. Better yet, it'd be nice to see a demo of what I am making, for things that are difficu…

That's part of our plan! The idea is to build a data platform that can drive a 10x better AR/VR experience that teaches you interactively.

Doing it from an app like this is just the first step. New products need a wedge.

I've heard from the grapevine that this application is one of the huge efforts in Facebook's metaverse effort. Let's see if we can do it better...

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#82

Post by century19 »

mattknightlewis wrote: post #27

What I really need is a browser extension that recognizes I'm on a recipe website and automatically scrolls past the recipe writer's whole autobiography to the section with the ingredients and instructions.

Isn’t Google responsible for this? They rank results based on how long users stay on the page, plus how much they scroll. Forcing all those “when I was a girl in Sicily…” stories at the top of a recipe that nobody wants.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#83

Post by im3w1l »

Bedon292 wrote: post #54
im3w1l wrote: post #42

I found duolingo extremely frustrating when I tried to practice a language I already had some knowledge in. It forced me to do a bunch of stuff I didn't care about. As most people will have some knowledge of cooking I think applying this concept to cooking is a bad idea.

What did it force you to do that you didn't care about? I don't have any other language skills but it offered me ways to test out to higher levels and such. I figured that would get people with knowledge to a better spot.

It was a few years ago now so I don't can't recall the details. But the way I remember it, the testing out system was better than nothing but not good enough.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#84

Post by danpalmer »

I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific.

Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have met a reasonable quality bar. It's not that the info is globally applicable, it's that it's an awkward combination of wrong and useless depending on where you live. Starting another quiz about kitchen equipment it seems this is a pattern throughout.

Cooking is deeply embedded into culture, tradition, region, climate, regulatory environment, retail infrastructure, and more. I don't think these quizzes will be able to overcome this without being fully localised per country.

The recipes? Maybe they're better. I don't know, I'm still 7 levels away from being able to know how to make scrambled eggs.

Edit: when I opened the app the first time it asked me how experienced I am and I answered the 3rd out of 4 options, I know my way around a kitchen. The app just asked me to match pictures of eggs to how they have been cooked: fried, scrambled, etc. I'm not sure I can survive this level of patronisation, it's honestly a bit insulting.

Edit: "what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#86

Post by fsckboy »

cwkoss wrote: post #78
fein wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the process of writing my own scraper for recipe sites that grabs only the recipes and parses them into a machine readable (searchable) format. Turns out you don't need much for parsing, because an incredibly large percentage of these sites use wordpress, and either the tasty recipes plugin or wprm (wordpress recipe maker) plugin. The only tedious part at this point is writing the different search crawlers fo…

Recipes cant be copyrighted, so bloggers write long-form narratives ahead of the recipe to make the contents of the page intellectual property.

a substantial number of people (not me) do enjoy reading the stories, they get something out of it, damn normies.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#88

Post by atlasunshrugged »

pc86 wrote: post #79
biophysboy wrote: post #76

An idea for the long-term future: I've often felt like cooking would be a perfect use case for very simple augmented reality. Often times my hands are messy while cooking, making it hard to deal with a book or smartphone. Also, recipes are often very time-sensitive. If I could see the ingredients/steps quickly, that'd be terrific. Better yet, it'd be nice to see a demo of what I am making, for things that are difficu…

This might be the one good use case for something like Google Glass. AR to tell you what ingredient to grab (even highlighting/circling/whatever the item if it's already out), timers, notifications ("those egg whites look done!"), etc.

The other good one is identifying people for me at a party who I'm pretty sure I've met before but just can't place!

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#89

Post by danpalmer »

danpalmer wrote: post #84

I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific. Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have…

To perhaps be a bit more constructive, and to suggest a way forward...

I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel".

As a user, being able to select a difficulty level and see the differences not only allows me to learn new techniques at a pace that suits me while experimenting, it also teaches me more about the dishes and how recipes can be changed while keeping the spirit of a dish, or the flavour profile.

The best cooking videos on YouTube, people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John from Food Wishes dot com, tell viewers what's truly necessary, and what's not. What "makes the dish" and what they're replacing in the recipe themselves because they ran out of the proper ingredient. I've learnt so much from this sort of thing, and am far more confident both creating my own recipes and modifying existing ones, having been a to-the-letter recipe follower for many years.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#90

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

century19 wrote: post #82
mattknightlewis wrote: post #27

What I really need is a browser extension that recognizes I'm on a recipe website and automatically scrolls past the recipe writer's whole autobiography to the section with the ingredients and instructions.

Isn’t Google responsible for this? They rank results based on how long users stay on the page, plus how much they scroll. Forcing all those “when I was a girl in Sicily…” stories at the top of a recipe that nobody wants.

Source?

My understanding is Google wants pages to be different and have a lot of keywords.

If you have a generic recipe website with just the simple cooking instructions:

1. it's going to have less key words

2. it's not going to look different from hundreds of other websites like this

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