361–370 of 608 posts
I really enjoy this campaign because it gave me an excuse to compare it with snake oil labels. ( https://www.google.com/search?q=snake+oil+label&tbm=isch... ) The characteristic of this kind of marketing that I enjoy the most is the presence of what I call 'linguistic asymptotes.' These are words that imply a product has unparalleled or infinite properties. On the soylent page we have "ubiquitous", "perfectly", "opti…
It's interesting to see everything went from supportive on soylent to very negative after they published this campaign. I wonder what has changed?
There's a pretty big difference between "I'm trying this new nutritional approach out for myself" and "without any serious testing, I am trying to get investors to sell this nutritional approach to the public".
I suspect the difference you observe in responses is tied to the that difference.
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Are you hearing what you are saying? One person with a vested interest said it works...therefore it must be good? Do you buy stuff from infomercials?
There's no reason why it wouldn't work. If a multivitamin works then this works too.
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I'm more interested in seeing Soylent succeed as a benefit to people around the globe who literally cannot afford (or don't have access to) a proper healthy diet.
Then let the population double again. Make larger Soylent factories. Repeat until all joy in life is gone.
Pretty disappointing.
"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition." Bull-fucking-shit. This is a product made by four twenty-somethings, none of whom appears to have a background in nutrition or any kind of health studies. To trust your health to these people would be fucking stupid. Jesus. Also:…
Wow, it's like the "Hacker News Is Depressing" Article didn't happen. I trust the Soylent folks more than I trust myself purchasing frozen meals in a grocery store. It's hard to be worse than that benchmark.
If you look at something and find yourself salivating / very hungry, it's probably your bodies way of telling you it has some nutrient you're missing.
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I read his blog posts leading up to this and liked the idea. So, I decided to try it myself. After many revisions, I finally figured out a good way of doing it and it ended up being more expensive than just eating regular grilled chicken, sweet potatoes, etc. He is using Maltodextrin for carbs. It likely contains Glutamic Acid and has a horrible glycemic index. You might as well eat sugar. I don't know what he is usi…
Believe it or not, consuming the toxins contained in whole foods makes us more robust. This is similar to the phenomenon where children who grow up desperately poor and literally living in dirt have a markedly lower rate of autoimmune diseases than first world kids.
I hope they eventually state all of the potential allergens that are in this. As I've gotten older I've become very sensitive to various foods (especially anything with lactose in it) and this sort of thing appeals to me, but if it had lactose in it, say, it could be.. interesting ;-) Ditto for people with peanut allergies and the like.
I think HN's hatred of Soylent has been increasing exponentially as we get closer to a mass-market release. What's with all the negativity? If you don't like it, don't buy it -- easy as that. It may not be the perfect product, but at least it's pushing some boundaries. I, for one, am excited to get my hands on a batch and let the results speak for themselves.
Liquid feed is not new.
A lot of the arguments here seem to boil down to "Much smarter people are working on this and they haven't solved it, who the hell does this KID think he is?!?"
That's pretty depressing for a website that, at least originally, was to help startups talk to one another. Shame on you, hacker news. You're smarter than this. By this logic, never ever trust your data to anybody other than IBM because those dumb hacker kids don't know what they're doing!
Second: "He's violating ALL KINDS of FDA regulations! [none of which I can name]"
Oh is he? Because if you actually look at what he's doing, it appears that he is taking things are already approved from human consumption, and mixing them together. This would be akin to a baker taking eggs and flour and mixing them.
What he's selling (although selling is a bit of an incorrect word here) is effectively a big power bar, except his comes in powerdered form. There are some hippies that sell power bars at my local coffee shop. They are terrible. What sort of advanced degrees do you suppose the hippies have? None? Possibly some experience in "baking"?
Finally: this is being presented within the context of "an experiment". If you start eating soylent, and you get sick, STOP EATING IT!
I'd imagine that I might have similar results if I ate nothing but the hippie vegan power bars at the coffee shop.
Personally, I'll be in for whatever the $65 level is.
1) Because I think this is neat
2) I want to encourage people to experiment with the world around them.
3) I'm not an idiot, and if I start feeling sick as a result of not eating any "real" food, I'll stop eating soylent.
Geesh.
STILL sticking with that absolutely horrific name, I see? You should seriously give out DVDs of the film as rewards. How about a sleeping pill named Quietus[1]? [1] Children of Men reference, film version