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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

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Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#291

Post by mizzao »

munk-a wrote: post #170
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…

Endurance cuisine spreading via social media is quite silly but I did want to provide a brief counter example. My SO and I are lactose intolerant so we make occasional big batches of cheese at home - given that we're doing this if we're making lasagna or calzones we'll often set aside a portion of the cheese to tune it to the right moist/dryness level and that makes a big difference in the final product. Knowing how…

Awesome comparison to learning programming.

Parsnip 5 years from now may have a recipes with a slider you can drag with "completely from scratch" on one end and "as fast as possible" on the other, which helps even beginners manage the trade-off between time and simplicity the same way that a much more experienced cook can do in their head.

This kind of magic is how we think we can help make cooking the easiest way to eat.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#292

Post by georgeoliver »

danpalmer wrote: post #89
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…

This thread went into the weeds, but I think this core idea is great. Usually I skim recipes for three things, the title, picture, and the main ideas, it'd be interesting to have recipes presented at that high level of abstraction.

Jacques Pepin's book La Technique often refers back to earlier basic recipes to construct more complicated recipes, kind of similar to this idea (I guess nearly all cookbooks do this, but it seems like Pepin's does it more than usual).

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#293

Post by mizzao »

arcticbull wrote: post #216
acaloiar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, you're the only one talking about a cooking course in this thread.

I wish more were! That's what I was hoping parsnip.ai was. I was really excited actually.

OP here. a16z has a thesis that education will go from

1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/

That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#294

Post by mizzao »

traceroute66 wrote: post #157
EddySchauHai wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful. I'm not Italian, but I'm willing to give the OP the benefit of the doubt in the following way: Have you ever read a professional cookbook ? I (would like to) think that what the OP was saying is that "hardest" level would equate to professional cookb…

We created Parsnip because we believe that even beginners can cook in this way (i.e. making a plate of scrambled eggs), by first understanding what they have to do and then following high-level instructions using those principles.

Rather than what currently often happens with novice cooks, which is blindly executing an algorithm without knowing what it's doing or why.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#295

Post by mizzao »

blindseer wrote: post #133
mizzao wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the knowledge graph in this case is mostly derived from first principles, e.g. understand roasting, searing, broiling etc and you can apply that to any vegetable or meat. Ideally one would be able to learn language with the same kind of etymological study, however I put it to you that is FAR more complex and boring and doesn't have more fact / science based rules than cooking does. Also, cooking is a very per…

I think you're predicting some interesting future technical problems with Parsnip, which is to build a personalized user-specific knowledge graph that is simultaneously overlaid across generalized common knowledge elements.

One thing at a time, though! This is just an MVP.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#296

Post by mizzao »

ac29 wrote: post #234
mizzao wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 99% percent that washing ground beef is a wrong answer -- what we teach NOT to do is just as important as teaching what to do. Same way how it's more important to know the ways a startup fails than to see what the successful ones did. But if it isn't, mea culpa and I'll get that fixed.

It wasnt a multiple choice question, it was a put the steps in order question. link: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Oh, that was a version of the question we didn't ship where one or more of the choices was actually wrong, so you would have to leave it out of the final ordering. In that interface you didn't have to select all of the choices.

In this case, the point was to teach users about common mistakes and remind them NOT to do that. If they added this to the sequence they'd get it wrong. We haven't shipped this (yet) for simplicity's sake, but may add it later.

To reiterate, one of the goals of Parsnip is to teach people all the things they shouldn't do, rather than just the right answers. Thanks for reading that memo, by the way.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#297

Post by klodolph »

WebbWeaver wrote: post #219
klodolph wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write programs and never know what an algorithm is. That’s roughly the equivalent. Someone with formal training in cooking will know the mother sauces, almost certainly, just like someone with formal training in CS will almost certainly know big-O notation. If you want to learn this stuff, there textbooks on cooking. Not quite the same thing as a cookbook!

Fair. Just follow https://www.reddit.com/r/GifRecipes/ for recipes so you dont have to think.

I find those much more difficult and frustrating than a traditional recipe. I don’t like having to pause or scrub through videos to figure out what the steps are. I like having a list of ingredients, so I can do some basic mise en place and figure out if I need to go to the grocery store or choose a different recipe.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#298

Post by mizzao »

SteveDR wrote: post #289
Mikeb85 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious if you've ever actually taught someone to cook before? Like, I can definitely see a market for something that teaches skills versus recipes. I've thought about doing it myself. But if someone wants to learn to cook an egg, it's because there's an egg in their fridge and they're hungry. So start with actually cooking that thing. Like, getting a suitable frying pan, setting the right temperature, throwing…

> But if someone wants to learn to cook an egg, it's because there's an egg in their fridge and they're hungry. So start with actually cooking that thing. Like, getting a suitable frying pan, setting the right temperature, throwing some butter in and then cracking and flipping the egg, learning to recognise when it's cooked to the desired doneness. No one cares about how to buy eggs... This is exactly it. I desperate…

I think it would be a miracle if any product could teach you how to cook and get you food in 5 minutes. I'm not sure it's possible.

But, I think we can get you there after a few weeks of using Parsnip on a regular basis, with some basic dishes.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#299

Post by mizzao »

butwhywhyoh wrote: post #250
TheDarkestSoul wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to come off rude but your app comes off like it's aimed at people who are almost literally afraid and bewildered by the sight of a pan or stove or avocado like the apes in 2001 coming across the monolith. With people I know who don't cook it's usually due to wanting to avoid the hassle they think exists because of misconceptions about the difficulty or time it takes. I'm not sure there are that many peop…

Exactly. I have never met anyone in my life with the fear they are describing in learning to cook. Is there a person on earth actually afraid of the "literal fire on their stove"? I don't think an app is going to solve that problem.

Here's someone in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270169

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#300

Post by mizzao »

no_circuit wrote: post #249

Sorry, it seems like a whole lessons section is missing from the app. The only way someone can learn currently is by guessing all of the quiz sections. First question received: "The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is: a) smell, b) whether it was frozen, c) the manufacture date, d) color. The answer "a" smell was marked incorrect, "c" manufacture date was the "correct one". Uh... maybe... unless it wasn't…

The wisdom from Duolingo is that 90% of users didn't care about lessons but 10% really wanted them.

So out of the Pareto principle, we skipped the lessons for the MVP. Definitely plan to add them in later.

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