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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

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Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#121

Post by mizzao »

blindseer wrote: post #93
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…

I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information a…

As the knowledge graph gets bigger, we're definitely going to have to find better ways to present it. The challenge is that most people don't want to see the whole knowledge graph, they want an extremely simple experience. Do you think your perspective represents something that would appeal to the mass market?

Here's the technical approach we're taking with the goal of taking a very hairy knowledge graph and turning it into a remarkably simple, even magical, user experience: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#122

Post by mizzao »

teacpde wrote: post #101
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…

Pretty much same experience, I also chose the 3rd level in the beginning, and some of the questions I got are just tedious. I did learn something new, but I feel like overall the questions are not tailored to the level.

They're definitely not tailored to the level. We only have beginner and intermediate content on the app right now. I mean, this is supposed to be a Show HN right? Don't shoot! :)

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#123

Post by appletrotter »

pessimizer wrote: post #114
itsoktocry wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way Cooking is different things for different people. I feel like tech people see it as nothing but sustenance (yay Soylent!), so the idea is for it to be quick, cheap and easy. For other people it's a hobby and they actually enjoy the process. Grinding your own grain or peeling grapes can increase the food quality, and it takes nothing but time,…

There are endless resources for the second type of person; it's the person who wants to make nacho cheese sauce that is underserved. Once you've got them to make that, you got somebody who can also make gravies and bechamel, and you can suggest other things they they might want to try to cook after they're pretty good at nachos.

A quick google search for "nacho cheese sauce" gave this as the first result -> https://www.budgetbytes.com/5-minute-nacho-cheese-sauce/

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#125

Post by ac29 »

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…

> 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.

The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#126

Post by FalconSensei »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #96
danpalmer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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". Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of yo…

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying.

I'm not Italian, so I don't care as much...

Also, as the original comment mentioned, this is supposed to have different degrees of how easy/flexible/practical it is

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#127

Post by ajb »

bkandel wrote: post #119
ajb wrote: post #105

Please, please, please, avoid status cuisines . It's going to be hard to do, because they make good PR. But you will be helping your users a lot more of you hold them off with a ten foot pole. What do I mean by a status cuisine ? They are meals that are intended to show that the cook is a worthy person, rather than that the meal is practical, healthy, and good to eat. Here are some examples: The endurance cuisine: de…

> chop your own veg Is there a way to avoid this? I can get some chopped vegetables at the grocery store, but the vast majority of vegetables are only available whole.

Frozen veg is often pre-chopped. However I admit that I put that in to make up the rhetorical triad.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#128

Post by theonething »

Does it help with organizing meal planning and generate shopping lists? Those would be killer features. Bonus is automatic online ordering of ingredients.

Something that generates weekly meal plans taking into consideration food preferences, nutrition, time, availability of ingredients, etc and then tells me what to buy or orders it for me.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#129

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Yeah, it doesn't seem good for that at all. It bogs you down in things that are very easy (or even encourages you by gamifying flawless performances.) Even if you test out of units, the farther you move along, the more you realize that Duolingo sets up a very specialized arbitrary mapping of translations from English to the target language as you learn. If you've skipped ahead, you'll be missing questions because you translated "waste" as "malgastar" instead of "desperdiciar." Couldn't be more frustrating.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#130

Post by mizzao »

ajb wrote: post #105

Please, please, please, avoid status cuisines . It's going to be hard to do, because they make good PR. But you will be helping your users a lot more of you hold them off with a ten foot pole. What do I mean by a status cuisine ? They are meals that are intended to show that the cook is a worthy person, rather than that the meal is practical, healthy, and good to eat. Here are some examples: The endurance cuisine: de…

We agree with you 150%. Because of the algorithms driving social media, so much of food content is meant to be entertainment, not education, and far from accessible. Because of the focus on attention, cooking appears way harder than it has to be. Here are some of the principles driving what we're doing:

Cooking fundamentals rather than recipes

Education rather than entertainment ("food porn")

Don't have the right tool? No problem! Here are 3 ways to improvise

Missing that ingredient? No problem! Here are 3 substitutes

Scaling primarily using software/data/ML instead of hardware (capital-intensive) or physical delivery (operations heavy)

Exponentially less content to create with knowledge blocks ("legos") rather than recipes ("what you build with the legos")

"Learn to make this with Parsnip" rather than "buy these groceries" or "order this food" or "watch this video"

Encouraging you to be the creative process vs. outsourcing work to someone else

I believe we have a few aces up our sleeve for avoiding the status trap. You can get a sense of how we're thinking about it here: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now

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