Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers - <AUTHOR> http://www.eatthismuch.com <comment><USER3> I am surprised and delighted by this site!

I cannot stress enough how well this nailed the contingencies that may come up when I was just using this. My first thought, I actually don't know how many calories I should eat--BAM there is a button that helps me generate it. What if I want to lose weight? BAM! Button for that option.

Then I see the meals generated and I think, well, I'm a vegetarian so this chicken won't work, but then BAM I see the vegetarian button.

You've got a real knack for thinking like your users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha awesome, thanks! I spent a lot of time trying to pander to different eating styles, and some definitely work better with my algorithm than others. Low carb is especially rocky since I have relatively few foods/recipes with absolutely no carbs.

<comment><USER4> Low carb doesn't mean no carb. If you limit meals to 5-10 grams of carbs or less, most low carbers would be happy. [1]

One of the more extreme low carb diets, the Atkins Induction Phase, allowed up to 20 grams per day. Other diets such as keto or The Zone allow 50-100 grams.

[1] [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many- carbohyd...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many- carbohydrates-do-you-need.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but it still limits the food variety a lot. Since my recipe database isn't huge to begin with, the meals start looking stale much sooner. I'm working on expanding the recipe database a lot, so hopefully it won't be a big problem for too much longer.

<comment><USER5> I can't speak for others, but try to keep my net carbs around 100g/day ... Would maybe want an option to set your daily limits (probably 100/day as a default)

<comment><USER6> That already seems to be there. I see a "target micronutrients" setting, which lets me set the min / max of carbs / fats / proteins for each day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh wow. Simply wow. I've wanted this without knowing I've wanted it.

This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above.

This is a great idea.

Edit: Mobile website please!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the same way with the food picking anxiety, except I'm also really stingy at the same time so I'll often be too lazy to eat anything at all. That was the main inspiration for starting on a diet generator - to make it easier for me to gain weight.

Definitely going to work on a mobile version of the site soon!

<comment><USER8> The site doesn't seem to include drinks. Do you plan on adding them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had it suggesting whole milk for a while, but a lot of people complained that it was giving them too much whole milk so I just removed it entirely. My algorithm doesn't give any special treatment to drinks, but maybe it should to output something more realistic looking.

I use the site myself, and the way I handle drinks is with the "locking" feature (via the lock icon next to a food or meal). If I know I'm going to be drinking a lot one night, I'll lock in a few beers from the "Add a dish" menu and regenerate the plan - the algorithm will fill in the rest of the plan to match the nutrition constraints, making it kindof like an autocomplete for your diet.

<comment><USER9> Ohh, thanks for the tip, I hadn't noticed the 'Add dish' button. From there, you can search for milk in the 'Basic foods' section. Makes sense that I should manually add it, instead of having my drinks planned out.

But what happens if I end up drinking or eating more than was planned? Can I go back and edit the menu the day after? Also, does the site track calorie intake and progress over time?

I've used Livestrong's MyPlate calorie tracker for quite some time, in which I would record my caloric intake every day. Of course, that's after the fact, so it's a different approach to minding calories than what your site does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The servers are getting hammered right now! If you sign up, the automatic weekly planner starts running right away to make a week of meal plans for you, but it's running very slowly at the moment - sorry about that, and if you give it a couple minutes, it should send you an email when it's done. You can use the in-browser planner to make plans more quickly, but they won't have the leftovers planned out from day to day.

<comment><USER10> Don't be embarrassed; HN has taken down far simpler, yet more famous sites than yours. I am very impressed it is still standing at all.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. I just bookmarked it for later, because this has me really excited! Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The idea didn't really seem that exciting to me, but the execution of this is very impressive indeed. I'm going to be using this to demonstrate what I mean by an effective user interface.

The abstraction of complexity until the very moment its needed is masterful here. Its simple right up until you need it to be complicated. Hat is off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, thanks! I'm flattered. You're right that the idea isn't for everyone - <USER2> takes a special level of laziness to want to be told what to make for every meal.

<comment><USER13> replying here since I can't figure out how to PM.. On the food scale under How-To Guide you spelled 'suspicion' incorrectly. BTW, love the idea! Plan on digging into it when I get home this evening! Just wanted to give you a heads up on that spelling :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty marvelous. I have always wanted to create something like this, but the details have always seemed daunting to me. I couldn't think of a way of merging recipes I liked with nutritional facts and then assembling building blocks for meal plans automatically without a ton of manual labor in data entry. Are these recipes crowdsourced? Have you just been taking copious nutritional notes for a while? If you figured out a way to integrate something like Epicurious or AllRecipes complete with pictures and reviews, it would make using this site so much more fun. Right now it feels mechanical which is great for people who see food as just fuel intake. But for me food is more than just fuel, its an experience meant to be enjoyed and savored.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that there's a lot of work before having even something basically functional - the first version of the site only had about 50 foods to pick from that I entered by hand, all very basic (e.g. ground beef, avocado), and it would throw them at you in a random combination. Then I found the USDA food database, but their formatting is a mess and I spent a couple weeks cleaning it up by hand. The recipes are almost all crowdsourced, and it's probably one of the site's weakest points right now since there aren't a ton of them.

I'd definitely like to integrate with a larger recipe site, but the biggest issue is matching their ingredients to the USDA foods to accurately guess the nutrition - tying it to individual foods rather than just importing the recipe's nutrition makes it easy for users to modify the recipes if they want. I'm working on some stuff to make it happen though, so hopefully soon!

<comment><USER15> As a fitness nut and a bit of a foodie, I love this site, but I'm glad you recognize that the recipe database leaves much to be desired.

With almost every nutrition app or website I've seen, there's such a ridiculous emphasis on prepackaged foods or sources like restaurants. I'd be super pleased if you could pull of nutrition calculations based off of individual foods within a recipe.

All in all, though, this is fantastic. I'm going to definitely give a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've tried to make a meal planner that used linear programming to ensure that I got all of the needed nutrients and minimized calories, but it didn't work out. It really liked to suggest moose meat and some insanely healthful fruit from Argentina. It also suggested I drink 642 cups of coffee a day, I guess because coffee has some trace amount of whatever nutrient everything else lacked.

It was also difficult to figure out exactly how much of each nutrient I needed. There is no one list that has all of the nutrients, and different lists that cover different nutrients suggest different amounts of the nutrients that intersect the lists.

<comment><USER17> How did you solve your LP? I think the issue might be due to an extreme point solution from simplex-type methods. Interior point methods might give you something different. Have you tried that?

<comment><USER16> To be honest, I don't remember... I think I was using a Linux command-line LP solver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing that would be really useful would be a "family mode". My wife and I are currently working out together. I want to gain weight, she wants to lose or maintain weight while losing fat and gaining muscle. We always eat together and it's unrealistic for us to cook two different meals every time. Ideally it could propose a meal for two at least for the main 3 meals and tell us the proportion of the meal that she should be eating (since the composition will probably be similar, just the quantity will differ).

<comment><AUTHOR> I added the family meal planning feature a few days ago, but it's more simple than what you're asking - it basically just scales up that meal X times in your grocery list, so the rest of your family is forced to eat whatever random meals my site spits out :-)

Something like an account link would be awesome, but would some serious complexity to my algorithm. Definitely something to shoot for though.

<comment><USER19> That 'family mode' is a good start, but to be really useful it would be awesome to be able to specify different constraints/preferences/etc per family member, and yet have the resulting recipes work (or be modifiable) for the entire family. For example, the recipe book The Adaptable Feast is great for families that have a mix of vegetarians/vegans/omnivores. It would be great if your site could handle this type of situation too. Overall, awesome job! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really cool! Needs a Rob Rhinehart mode though...

Breakfast: Soylent, 20 oz.

Lunch: Soylent, 20 oz.

Dinner: Soylent, 20 oz.

<comment><USER21> you totally stole my joke :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I eat low carb, so I tried customizing for such a diet. Here are my thoughts:

First, huge kudos for allowing me to customize macronutrients that way.

Second, it would be nice to have a "How do you eat?" as the first step. You could have options like "Low calorie", "Low carb", "Paleo", etc. That could pre-set macro-nutrients and food-type checkboxes. The next step could be customization of important features (calories for low-cal, carbs for low-carb, ?? for paleo).

Finally, for my low carb diet, I unchecked the expected: grains, beans, some fruit, some dairy. Then hit generate. I kept getting bacon and pecans. A lot.

Anyway, this is awesome, and I look forward to seeing what it evolves into.

<comment><USER23> Uh, it has that already. Go back in and fill out the nutrition profile thing, and it'll let you pick 'Paleo' or 'Low Carb/Keto', etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does, but he's right about the abundance of pecans and bacon. Adding more low carb options is one of my top priorities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's probably a culture clash here but... is this considered a balanced nutritious meal in the US?

<http://i.imgur.com/cVpnXJB.png>

I'm French, a country that has a certain reputation for eating healthy, and where a meal is typically:

\- an "appetizer" (small salad or crudités)

\- a main course (typically meat/fish + vegetable/starch)

\- cheese & bread

\- dessert (often fruit, or rarely something sweet like a slice of cake)

(breakfast is typically cereal with coffee/tea, maybe some fruit)

I'm not a nutritionist, but the recommended meals strike me as very unbalanced.

<comment><USER25> Yes, it looks like it's picking 3 random "parts of meal" but not necessarily in 3 different categories...

But maybe it's also linked to the fact that you're asking for 3400 calories? 2500 seems more reasonable for an adult male.

<comment><USER24> I don't know how much calories I need, I gave it my stats (23 yo male, moderately active, 85 kg, 1m 86) and it auto-populated the field for me.

<comment><USER9> 'Moderately active' may not mean what you think it does. Farmers and professional athletes are 'moderately active'. People who work at home all day using a computer are 'sedentary'.

(Given your gender, age, height and weight:) Unless you work out for >4 hours every day, 3500 kcalories is way more than your body uses, so you're sure to gain weight if you were to ingest that many calories every day. If you have a desk job or if you're a student, choose 'sedentary' in the app. The result will be 2300 kcalories, which is most likely enough for you. On days in which you workout a lot, you can ingest a few hundred kcalories more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This site could make a whole bunch of money if it just put together a shopping cart on Amazon for me and took the referral money.

<comment><USER27> Good tip.

Australia: Woolworths.com.au Mainland Europe/Asia: Carrefour group. UK/Asia: Tesco group.

One potentially interesting Asian market to consider is Singapore (almost certain supermarket delivery services must exist there due to regionally high income levels and tiny geography, plus it's full of office-dwelling cosmetic- concern types).

<comment><USER28> I don't see woolworths.com.au having the wherewithall to embrace something like this. Might be worth chatting with someone more "hungry" (sorry, couldn't resist) - e.g. <http://www.hellofresh.com.au/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The transition from just entering info in to get a meal plan and an idea of how it works to a paid subscription was a little rough. It didn't carry over any info I already entered, and didn't make it clear I would have to enter a CC for the trial until after I had re-entered everything.

(Nothing wrong with making me enter a CC for the trial, but make it clearer upfront.)

Looks great, and seems to have improved a lot since the last time I saw it here. This has the potential to be a hugely helpful tool and is in a market that's really lacking.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the only suggestion I can think of is that the suggested meals should be as simple as possible. Part of the reason why I don't cook as often as I could is that I don't have the time (ok, I don't make it a high priority) to cook every meal. If I could simply slap together a sandwich in the morning for lunch and that would fill me up, then we'd be good, but a lot of these meals take more prep time than I'm willing to put forth.

Otherwise, it's pretty rad. I like it a lot!

<comment><USER31> If you go into the meal options, click Meal Options in the header, and click "Can't Cook" then it gives meals that are (IMO) really low on prep time.

<comment><USER30> Ah, cool! Didn't even see that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I want to pay you $10 a month to be able to use this. Please include a recipe/ingredients list for me to be able to go grocery shopping. Plus give me a weekly list of my meals so I dont have to think about what to cook or eat.

<comment><USER33> That's exactly what it does, except for $9/mo :-D

<comment><USER32> Increase the price.

<comment><USER34> _increase the price_

The creator is drastically underestimating how much removing this pain point is worth to people.

<comment><USER33> How much do you think he should charge? In a world of $8/mo Netflix, people make some pretty harsh value comparisons on services.

<comment><USER32> I already said 10 for the MVP. But I will pay more for a more robust product. I know a thousand people would. That's a hundred grand without any VC drama. Under the radar.

<comment><USER33> I know, I was asking the person I replied to, if he thinks ETM is dramatically undercharging. 9->10 is a pretty small difference with a potentially outsized effect on conversion.

<comment><USER34> Always have a version that has what seems like just plain stupidly high pricing. Many people wind up getting the majority of their revenue from such an option.

<comment><USER33> Ah yeah, I remember that from Patio11's Business of Software talk. I was under the impression that that was mostly for B2B SAAS startups, though, largely due to corporate politics and things like SLA requirements, and just generally not caring a whole lot about money. B2C is a whole different ballgame. If I'm wrong, though, I'd really like to know.

There's also the potential to make this B2B with nutritionists/personal trainers/etc, so your point isn't lost in any case.

<comment><USER35> Never underestimate someone's behavior of wanting the "best".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Now the next step is to offer prep & delivery for these meal plans in large busy worker markets, like SF, Chicago, Boston, Palo Alto, NYC, etc. Obvious way to monetize. I'd pay $800/month for this.

<comment><USER37> In Australia there's already a service doing premade meal plans with delivery to a common dropoff point: <http://musclemealsdirect.com.au/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is pretty neat and well executed.

But does the algorithm work on meal combinations that make sense? Two of my generated meals, one was chocolate mousse with a side of bacon & tomatoes, and the next meal was beef stew with a side of fruit salad. Those things may make sense to eat together by raw data, but in all practical sense they sound like pretty terrible meals...

<comment><USER15> I noticed that as well. You can refresh the meal until it makes some sense, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Phenomenal execution! At first, I was thinking "oh not another of these sites", but then I found the various options and features and was floored. I wasn't even in the market for a meal planner, but this may have convinced me otherwise.

My only criticisms are that the hover-overs (such as for the thumbs-up and the lock) take too long and aren't descriptive enough. I think the timer is set to 2s or so? I had already given up on them originally, and then went back to try it again and barely noticed as I moved off it that it had one. Also, there's nothing in the walkthrough that mentions the "like" button....is it supposed to show up on my FB? or it'll just be weighted heavier in the future?

A possible feature (I don't think it has this) would be able to export in calendar(s) format, i.e. I could generate a week's menu and then import it into a calendar app. Just an idea.

Again, well done on the site, and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER40> Good call. Definitely a 'thing i need', and (having just shelled out my ccard) clearly something willing to pay for. Not sure where to put this feedback so I'll put it here.

Both very minor issues but for what its worth...

\- When I switched to metric and put my height in meters/cm the calorie calc went nuts and estimated 7300 kcals. Very confusing to me. Ah I've figured out the cause. I had put 1 meter and 828 cm (shouldve been 82cm). Perhaps cap cm at 100 or put a boundary condition on overall height?

\- In New Zealand the 'days' thing doesn't work right (ie its end of the day Thursday here, but its giving me meal plans as if Thursday were tomorrow). Some timezone adjustments/detection would make it all that much more easier to understand.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well done. Maybe the first Show HN app I've ever sent to family and friends.

</comment><comment><USER42> It would really help if anybody can link a good guide on basics of nutrition, calories, metabolism and their effects on body, weight. I never cared about these things and I never understood all the calorie calculations on the diet plans or why they should be the way they are. I searched on internet, but these topics are so full of litter. I would appreciate if anyone can link a to genuine nutrition basics.

Edit: It's better if the guide is more general, than american-centric.

<comment><USER43> Oh yes, this please. Something straightforward, simple and scientific. Possibly exhaustive. I would pay for a quality book like that.

There is so much noise on this topic. Oh and not too American biased would be great as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So I started developing something remarkably similar about 4 years ago (in Django, too!). Wrote up a business plan with monetization, p&l, etc. I brought the plan and prototype to a few seed folks for early funding before I admittedly lost interest and moved onto something else.

The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had to do an automated intake of recipes from many places. But ingredient normalization got in the way, even with really good regex/etl practices. For instance, a recipe says, "boneless skinless chicken breast".. another says, "skinless boneless chicken breast". Some list the # of breasts. Some list pounds. Some mean the breast is split, some don't. But in order for the nutrition info to be accurate, the normalization process had to be near perfect.

I ended up "buying" the source code to "recipefox" a recipe parsing plugin for firefox (for $100 or something like that) which helped tremendously, but still wasn't good enough for my tastes. I felt like to make it all work, i needed to essentially build a recipe ETL.

The monetization was kind of cool, I felt. Free for users. I felt that companies (food companies, supermarkets, etc) would put coupons for specific brands or specific stores on printed-out shopping lists based on the weekly recipes. i actually got alot of interest from that one from actual supermarkets. Thought that was cool.

Good luck with this. It was a tremendous idea 4 years ago and I always wondered when someone else was going to do it because it just seemed so damn obvious to me.

"I have a gluten free child and a wife on a diet. What should I buy at the grocery store this week and what the hell should I make?"

<comment><AUTHOR> You're totally right about the pains with ingredients normalization - I've spent at least two months making scripts to scrape recipes, and it will only match the ingredients accurately about 80% of the time, leaving a lot of work in hand curating everything it scrapes. I ended up trying to promote users to enter recipes by offering a month free every time they entered 5 good recipes. I built up a decent recipe database this way, but it does need to be much larger to better target people's tastes.

And I'd love to do the grocery store monetization idea, but trying to form partnerships with the grocery chains always seemed like a daunting time commitment. Maybe I'll send out some feelers this week.

<comment><USER45> Have you considered using Open Recipes? <https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes>

I saw it on HN a couple weeks ago and it's basically one big project to scrape and index food blog recipes. It doesn't include preparation instructions but it uses schema.org's recipe format, which includes ingredients and other useful things: <http://schema.org/Recipe>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think this is the best implementation of this kind of site I've used. I see you already include a paleo option and thats great, but as an ibs sufferer I also adhere to the fodmap diet's guidelines and have had a lot of success with it. This diet excludes foods such as garlic which you cannot currently exclude manually unless you block each individual recipe which I have done. It would be great if you gave a fodmap option or even just the ability to exclude these items. Here's further information on the subject:

<http://blog.katescarlata.com/fodmaps-basics/>

Another interesting take on the paleo side of things is the "perfect health diet" which the creators believe is optimised to help prevent disease, premature aging and the like, but is not strictly paleo. I've found the information covered in their book very interesting and I recommend their site for more information:

<http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/>

Again, great job, best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there a way to choose non-USA type of meals? I mean, in South America, Spain and other parts of the world breakfast means coffee and cereal, or toast with jam, cookies, fruits or croissants. And it's a light meal. Lunch is a strong one course meal, "tea" is a meal (usually with no tea involved), and dinner is the usual.

<comment><USER48> I really wouldn't bother starting down the road of trying to classify meal other than breakfast by name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> K this app is something i've been thinking about making because I really want it. So feel free to charge me money if it means you can spend more time adding cool features.

here's what i'd like:

* You generate about 90% stuff alright, but that extra 10% is hard, I found myself hitting refresh many times. Can you give me a netflix style like it or not which will try to make better guesses?

* Can you hook it in with fit bit? They've already automated a lot of the information you're asking for. It might be nice to receive an email "Hey you didn't meet your daily goal, maybe this would be a better dinner than the one you planned"

* I'm not sure if i saw this or not, can you plan a week ahead so I can shop on weekends.

* I'd like an API, so I can add my own cool things. For instance on days where I have a lot of meetings I'm usually too exhausted to cook. So i'd like to plan easier meals.

<comment><USER50> For me the ability to shop on the weekends would make using this easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the signup process, you can set any day of the week to be your grocery shopping day. It'll send you the email the day before in case you want to make any edits, and then the meal plans start the day after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> All this needs is a button on the generated grocery list to have them delivered to your door. Partner with TaskRabbit, InstaCart, Safeway (I believe they do free deliveries for anything over $40), etc.

This is absolutely amazing (like many others are saying, I've been wanting something like this for years), but if delivery were added, I'd never have to worry about the hassle that is shopping and meal planning again! First world problems I know, but this is actually a pain point for me because of work hours.

Also, I'm SO happy you decided to charge for this from day 1. I'm most definitely subscribing and I now won't worry this amazing service will go away!

<comment><USER52> Charge $10/mo for it and shoo the investors away as your money comes pouring in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is great, and really impressive. There's a couple minor things I'm looking for, in addition to all the things I looked for and found:

\- A 'regenerate all meals' button. Having generated, but then tweaked the meal options for every day, it seems I have to load & regenerate each day in turn?

\- Ability to customize frequency of automatic emails. I see that I can manually email a calendar range's plan, but I do most of my grocery shopping online, which incurs a delivery charge (and needs me to hang around for that delivery). I'd prefer to book up a couple weeks in advance, even if it means figuring out what I'll do about perishables.

<comment><AUTHOR> In your account page there's a "Reset meal plans" button, but it's more like letting you run through the signup process again - it will nuke any edits you've made to your templates to match what you put in the signup form. And I didn't think anyone would want to plan more than a week in advance, but I'll definitely consider it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Hey man, this is amazing! You just gained a subscriber! :)

It would be really good if you had a way to choose certain recipes to available only to certain meals of the day.

This way you could find recipes on the public repository or create one yourself and add to the "list of possible combinations".

I also think that the "like" on each Meal of the day should make the combination of recipes in that meal to be "bundled" and be selectable/randomizable from the ones you already liked , so you can basically open the website everyday and choose the meals you wanna have today.

A "Daily Shopping List" button, or a "Shop for the next X days" would not be bad at all either!

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you for charging for this service. I am tired of sites that turn the user into the product, and will gladly pay $9/month for this if it will make eating easier and simpler (and help me become healthier).

</comment><comment><USER55> Could use a bit more separation of ingredients, cream and sour cream should not share the same selection. Creams would great in many sauces and have a completely different effect than sour creams.

Fish selections might want to expand the number of white fishes listed. Interestingly enough some recipes given have vegetables not listed as selectable, cucumbers and water melon are two I noticed; they were in same recipe! Perhaps an advanced list of ingredients could be offered that allows for more picky eaters.

Still amazing number of recipes.

<comment><USER55> there are some bugs that are annoying, if you let the system choose a customize diet based on your profile it ignores your exclusions. Example, I provided weight, age, height, sex, and desire to lose weight. Now recipes offered have items I have not checked.

Does this hold true if your registered? It becomes quite useless if one segment of the site overrides another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is fantastic. Thank you for explicitly listing keto, and for allowing to customize the exact amount of macronutrients.

That being said: The custom macronutrient range sliders are a bit unintuitive. I think both range sliders and percentages should be displayed at the same time, and both should be kept in sync.

How can I see exactly which ingredients will go into my meals? I've disabled all fruit, but I still got a meal with melons in it.

Also, I'd like to replace non-fat yoghurt with full-fat yoghurt in my meals. How can I do this?

</comment><comment><USER57> Some of the recipes call for 0.13 cups or 0.06 cups, etc. I assume you can convert that to other units like tablespoons / teaspoons for the non-metric inclined?

</comment><comment><USER58> You already received much praise on the service itself, however I wanted to congratulate you having such a clear and short TOS. TOS;DR would be proud of you.

</comment><comment><USER59> When I set my meal options to only show vegan meals, my recommended protein intake went from at least 101 g to at least 61 g. If anything, being vegan requires me to eat slightly more protein (assuming plant proteins are harder to digest than animal proteins). While it's harder to get protein as a vegan, I don't think that means the protein goal should be lowered.

Also, I agree with others that you predict user behavior very well.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're totally right - I do lower the protein target mostly to compensate for the fact that I don't have many high protein vegan recipes. Once the database is bigger I'll try to remember to change it back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is exactly one of the things where the cultural divide is just too far for me to understand. Do people really plan meals like this in america?

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting. I guess the only question that comes to mind is how accurate is the calorie data, which is really what seems to drive this. Accurate calorie data is really hard to come by, unless it's specifically assessed in a lab setting. Ideally you can run a test group that uses the service for a month and weighs in weekly. Would add serious validation.

Still, great idea and effort so far.

</comment><comment><USER62> Really awesome tool.

Couple of suggestions:

Not sure if it is possible in the current form, but it would be nice if I could specify some ingredients to be used in a given plan. The scenario is that I have picked up some cheap carrots for example and I want to use them soon.

Also would be awesome if there was a seasonal preference setting so that it try to select ingredients that are currently in season such as winter veg etc.

</comment><comment><USER63> Awesome! I am from India, so pretty much useless for me. Need food locale's. Like Yesterday!!! Be quick about it. And India first, please.

</comment><comment><USER64> Great idea, fantastically executed. One suggestion or request: I would love to specify from what recipe group or combination of groups each meal should be made up of. For example: Breakfast : Pick something from the cereals group, and a smoothie if it fits Lunch : Sandwich group and salad group Dinner : Mostly meat group, salad group, desert group.

</comment><comment><USER65> Impressed. As others have said, there is a option for everything that came to my mind (vegetarian here). Good work. Will use this.

</comment><comment><USER66> Ive been using this app for almost a year now. I know nothing better for planning your diet, its a great tool for a bodybuilder.

Good Job Papa_bear

</comment><comment><USER67> Awesome- I was considering doing something like this as well. After following the Soylent posts (<http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424>), I'm interested to know if I'm nutrient deficient.

Since EatThisMuch already shows the micronutrients per meal, is there a way you could show daily deficiencies as well?

</comment><comment><USER68> I will give you all of my money if you include support for dietary restrictions. I have food allergies and can't consume milk.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can uncheck milk from the Meal options menu - just click the "Meal options" button on the right side, and a bit down the page there's a big checklist of foods you can filter out of the meal plans.

<comment><USER68> Well I guess I owe you a lot of money.....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Have you considered parsing the Diabetes guidelines so that you could add an entry for people needing to follow that diet.

</comment><comment><USER70> OK, I tried this a bit, and while it looks good, it actually sucks.

For example, a pasta dish is generally supposed to have around 500 kcal, while this site lists less than 200 for "canned" pasta with tomato sauce (protip: no one eats canned pasta, except perhaps in the U.S.), and in general the site has no real clue about pasta.

The first fatal problem is that dishes must be divided both by type of preparation/acquisition (fast food, restaurant meal, basic cooking, microwaved food, no preparation, etc.) and by culture, since there dramatic differences in both.

Then it needs to know about how breakfast works in several cultures (in some you only eat "sweet" food, in others you have stuff like sausage and bacon), the concept of appetizer+pasta+meat/fish with side dish+dessert, how the various broad type of dishes (e.g. pasta, pizzas, steak, cakes,, etc.) work and so on.

Finally, it needs focus more on fundamental recipes, since no one is going to prepare anything complicated at home, and restaurants may not offer them or prepare such foods unpredictably, making the nutrient planning ineffective.

As it is, it's unusable unless you want to completely change your eating habits and eat in a highly weird fashion, or perhaps manually enter reasonable food choices.

</comment><comment><USER71> For the front page demo, I like the method for suggesting the calorie count to input, but I would put a few examples front and centre so it's even easier for people to check it out. e.g., "For Robert who is 205cm and 104kg and reasonably active, try 3,200 calories for a sample menu to see how the process works."

</comment><comment><USER72> This is exactly what I've always wanted. I used to use nutrition data to count meals but that got tiring and wasn't that amazing. I love how you can calculate the daily cost, which is a huge thing for me.

The fact that I can calculate a vegan meal with 3500 calories, and enough protein for under $5 a day is just jaw dropping.

</comment><comment><USER73> It would be nice if there were a few more things I could filter out. Like pork and bacon I feel like should be separate categories, I have no interest in using Whey protein powder, and I hate cilantro, but none of these are options to add or remove. Would it be possible to include these in the list?

<comment><USER73> Sorry I just found the whey powder option, but it just replaced it with a different protein powder. Can I remove protein powder all together?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Looks very comprehensive, with recipes, meal price, and food options. You even thought about vegans. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER45> This is great! I've seen a couple similar sites but not anything nearly as well executed as this. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER75> This is awesome! Two features I would love to see are:

1) A calendar, so you could plan out meals for more than one day 2) A way to enter your own meals, so that the generated meals could be planned around the ones you entered (ie. if I had X for breakfast and lunch, what should I make for dinner?)

</comment><comment><USER76> I'd prefer to see some proven recipes even if they slightly differ in calories and fats from settings. Having salmon, melon and celery in one meal (it generated this recipe) doesn't work, even if it's exactly the requested amount of calories, fats, etc. Otherwise - excellent idea.

</comment><comment><USER77> This is one of the greatest implementations of a good idea I've ever seen, like really, really good.

By the sounds of it you have plenty of traffic as is, but I'd think /r/loseit and likely several other subreddits would be all over this. (I see you've been mentioned in 2 comments on /r/loseit)

</comment><comment><USER78> Seriously awesome. I have to say though, you're not charging enough! Find a reason to add another tier!

</comment><comment><USER55> Impressive, however their recommendations based on age, weight, and such, when your trying to lose weight would do the opposite for me.

I would definitely pay for an mobile version, especially one that could keep recipes locally that I could pop up at a moments notice, as in while in the store.

</comment><comment><USER79> I was just looking for this kind of information the other day. Is there a way to give it a budget?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the very bottom of the meal options page you can set a daily price limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> This is actually really, really useful. Even pulls in the recipes.. Excellent work. _claps_

</comment><comment><USER81> I love the idea!

Most weeks I buy way too much food I can consume and just think that I bought too much vs ate too little.

If I was able to be confident that I need to eat ALL of it, I might not under- eat like I have been (trying to gain muscle).

I'll play with it more and let you know what I think as I use it.

</comment><comment><USER82> I'm going to put a request in because this stuff does my head in slightly, can we have measurements in grams? Not sure how that would work for a 'cup of kale'. I can see myself buying a bunch of American measurements just to use this site. Very very cool.

</comment><comment><USER83> Absolutely brilliant idea. Also want to praise you for adding in the tool for suggesting calorie consumption--like many others here, I had no idea what to put. Even if the calculated number isn't ideal, that's great user-friendly design.

</comment><comment><USER84> I've been mulling over this idea for quite a while after moving into a place on my own and wanting to eat healthier. Really excited to start using it. Impressive execution. Best of luck with this! I'm definitely rooting for its success

</comment><comment><USER85> Nice! I especially like your UI and nutrients display.

I have been working on something (cookingspace.com) that tries to solve a different problem: how to use the ingredients you already have in your kitchen.

My email is in my profile. I would enjoy talking with you.

</comment><comment><USER86> As others have noted the UX is quite intuitive. You should definitely add more low carb options. Perhaps pairing this up with simple workouts (walk 3 miles), to allow more calorie intake but maintain the overall daily goals.

</comment><comment><USER87> Strange feature request: I'd love to be able to specify dietary requirements on a per-meal basic. My partner is vegan, so I'll normally cook vegan dinners, but like to get meat into lunch/the occasional breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER88> Why is it per x meals?

If I still have to think about how much meals I have to make every day, the "auto-pilot" isn't worth THAT much :\

First priority should be on calories a day. After that some fine tuning with the meal count would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER89> Love the idea of having a personal "Chef" who cares about my health!

One feature idea : you could integrate with one these smart wifi scale and use my daily weight as input. This way you'll have a daily feedback loop.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. I use a Withings[1] WiFi scale, which integrates with the Weightbot[2] app. I'd love to see its data integrated with a calorie planner. Currently, I use MyFitnessPal for tracking, but I'd ditch it in a heartbeat if this site were to integrate Withings data.

(Even better would be if I could import Livestrong or MyFitnesspal historic data)

FWIW: Withings has an API[3].

[1] <http://withings.com/en/scales>

[2] <http://tapbots.com/software/weightbot/>

[3] <http://www.withings.com/api>

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I saw this on reddit /r/fitness about a month ago.

Having tried more than a few of these I was prepared for disappointment.

I was delighted. Excellent tool! It really is that rare thing that you can't wait to tell people about.

</comment><comment><USER91> Thanks a lot for including vegan meals! Btw, when I generated a vegan meal it included sausages in one of the recipes. Could be vegan sausages, but that should be more clear.

</comment><comment><USER92> One other thought--you might also want to search a person's geographic area and see if you can find the best deals on the ingredients for recipes :-p But, generally--wow!!!

<comment><USER9> +1, I try to only eat locally grown produce, which of course means that the offerings are dependent on the seasons. I'd love for the app to take into account my country of residence, what season it is there right now, and then use that information to determine what's being grown there now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> This is awesome. It needs a "vegetarian" or "broke" feature.

<comment><USER94> It does actually, click on the meal options and set your eating preferences to Vegetarian and then you can limit your daily meal budget to something like $5/day or $10/day.

I freaking love this thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> +1 for adding custom filtering options (Vegan, Paleo, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER92> This is awesome! You might also add an option to buy some of the ingredients online :-p (for example, services like Peapod if the person is in that region)

</comment><comment><USER96> Very impressed. However, I had to laugh at this meal suggestion:

<http://imgur.com/tVz5WCp>

Not two things that usually go together!

<comment><USER97> Melon and sausage is something I've never heard of, but melon and prosciutto is actually a very common Italian dish (that's also quite tasty!) [1]

I imagine if you got the right type of savory sausage, it'd be delicious.

[1]:[http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/melon- wrapped-...](http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/melon-wrapped-in- prosciutto-recipe/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> This a total 1st world problem, but I stress over what to make for dinner way too much. This seems like it would help a lot. At least I cook.

</comment><comment><USER99> Very, very cool. Amazingly polished, and takes a lot of different dietary needs into account. Thanks for making and sharing!

</comment><comment><USER100> As a suggestion for a next step or advanced functionality, if there was a way to put in my own recipes or ingredients?

<comment><USER9> OP answered this elsewhere in the thread: if you sign up, you can add ingredients and recipes.

You don't even have to be a paying member; if you skip the payment step, you can still log in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Assuming it does work, this is really cool, but... $9 per month?

Not sure people are going to pay for this, it's possible though.

</comment><comment><USER101> Connect it to Fresh Direct (and understand the quantities things are actually sold in?) and I'd be in love...

</comment><comment><USER102> Way cool. Only time I've said that on HN.

I'm a picky eater, and have been told dozens of times to make a grocery list. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER103> if it's any help, would love to host the site on hpcloud.com (hp's public cloud). drop me a line if you're interested pratik.jhaveri(at)hp.com. Not saying this is an issue with your hosting provider - but perhaps it could help.

* I work in the hpcloud team. this post does not reflect HP's needs/opinions.

<comment><USER33> I think part of the problem is getting many times normal traffic and not being provisioned for that :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Well done, but my initial trials kept suggesting a diet that was too high in carbs and too low in protein.

</comment><comment><USER105> this would be awesome if it had an integration with instacart, ie. you send me the groceries every week

</comment><comment><USER106> Really impressive. Hope to get the Mobile app soon. Any plans for other recipe sites integration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully soon! I've talked to a few recipe sites and none have been interested in collaborating directly. I might try to add an option to let users scrape a recipe directly via a url, but I'm not 100% sure about the legality of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> Brilliant! Add a couples option for registration! Like, a small discount over $9/person x 2 ppl.

</comment><comment><USER108> This is very very cool. You've made a really well thought out service with this. Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER109> I am really impressed with the meal suggestions it is giving me, using the keto option.

</comment><comment><USER110> Great site! I can see it being super useful.

edit: Can you integrate into Google calendar at all?

</comment><comment><USER111> Been using this site since it was Swole.me - brilliant, thanks so much :)

</comment><comment><USER112> iPad app please. I want to embed an iPad in kitchen somewhere that will just tell me what to eat every day.

Edit: Even better if you can told me when I have the opportunity to do mass prep on appropriate things.

</comment><comment><USER113> Great work! I can't imagine the hours you spent building it ! :)

</comment><comment><USER114> I thought about this a while ago, some sort of smart pantry! :D

</comment><comment><USER115> This is awesome i am really impressed. Signed up right now

</comment><comment><USER116> How is this made? A binary integer programming model?

</comment><comment><USER117> The reddit link to fitness/faq seems to be broken.

</comment><comment><USER118> What's your stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of js/jquery in the front, django in the back.

<comment><USER118> Nice that it's holding up so well!

<comment><AUTHOR> It hasn't fallen yet, but I had no idea hackernews would hit my servers this hard. Fingers crossed.

<comment><USER118> What DB servers(s) are you using? Any caching? What kind of server is it running on?

I'm impressed that (from a user's perspective) is barely flinching, although it's clear that it's under load right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> Awesome tool, could turn out very successful.

</comment><comment><USER120> Are you looking for any more developers?

</comment><comment><USER121> "Make what people want" at its best.

</comment><comment><USER122> Looks promising, but the recommended lunch was chicken salad, 2 cups of yogurt, and celery. No carbs...plus that is a lot of yogurt.

<comment><USER123> Perfectly reasonable depending what your goals are... A typical lunch for me is 600g of chicken drumsticks, 400g of lean chicken breast in sweet chili sauce - alternatively some prawn, a sausage and egg sandwich, and a bottle of yoghurt drink, and a small flapjack...

I'm sick of chicken, but I'm doing leangains style intermittent fasting and getting a large proportion of my protein (220g+/day) in during my first meal of the day makes it a _lot_ easier to meet the goals for the rest of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Great job. Really simple to use.

</comment><comment><USER125> There is no mince on the menu :(

</comment><comment><USER126> You have a user, I love this.

</comment><comment><USER127> really good stuff! gonna give it a shot next week for my meal planning

</comment><comment> saiko-chriskun man I was about to start building this exact thing hahah. nice work!

</comment><comment><USER128> this is a cool improvement from swole. great work

</comment><comment><USER129> This is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER130> This is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER131> spartansupper.com runs a twitter feed that generates nutritionally (20+ nutrients) complete diets with calorie/carb/protein constraints

</comment><comment><USER132> Genius.

</comment><comment><USER133> this. is. amazing.

</comment><comment><USER134> If you don't love automagic, you should check out <http://plantoeat.com>. Its bookmarklet imports from all the major recipe sites and most food blogs, and you can then create your plan, your shopping list, etc., with ease. Just schedule a meal on the planner and it gets added to your shopping list. There are some issues with duplicate formatting but otherwise it's great.

To Eat This Much:

Cream cheese pickles? A mixture of cream cheese, pickles, and cured beef??? Fabulous fried cabbage? I… uh… grosssss. I would never eat either of those.

</comment><comment><USER135> Please turn this into a company or start charging ASAP. Do not give this awesome tool away for free. Do not sell yourself short. You have created something truly excellent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You can make a single day's meal plan for free to get a taste of the generator, but I actually do charge if you want it to send you a plan every week automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> asdf

</comment><comment><USER137> zyzz brah

</comment><comment><USER138> LOL LOL LOL!!!! The list it gave me consisted of everything I'm alergic to AND my 2 least favorite foods on the planet: pickles and celery!!

However, this is pretty awesome, my first try was super funny, but I'll definitely check it out more.

I would think that it should also have some checkboxes for common allergies, a la nuts, and maybe even foods I really don't like to exclude... I'd love to see what it shows then.

EDIT: I did see the food options section, but it seems to go from SUPER EASY all the way to ridiculously complicated with the click of that 1 button. There's some fine tuning to be done on this site, but my guess is that he'll kick some ass with this system - especially once it's an APP.

<comment><USER139> It does. Click on the "Meal Options" button to the right, scroll down to "Food and Recipe filters", deselect anything you don't want/like.</comment></comment>


Pharocloud – Hosting for Smalltalk web-applications - <AUTHOR> http://pharocloud.com/ <comment><USER2> This is great. Can't wait to finally push my smalltalk stuff into production -- does anyone have a good example code for interacting with Postgres from Pharo?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/seaside/tutorial](http://www.swa.hpi.uni- potsdam.de/seaside/tutorial) \- go to the "Persistence" page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love smalltalk, seaside, and the website is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER5> More about Pharo at [http://pharo.org](http://pharo.org)

I gave an overview/intro talk recently about Pharo, it's online here: [http://www.slideshare.net/MarcusDenker/pharo-objects-at- your...](http://www.slideshare.net/MarcusDenker/pharo-objects-at-your- fingertips)</comment>


Startups 'are staying private way too long' says Marc Benioff - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/startups-are-staying-private-way-too-long-says-salesforce-founder-marc-benioff/ <comment><USER2> I remember the YC startup school at De Anza many years ago, when Andrew Mason, of Groupon, was one of the guest speakers and he basically said that the worst mistake he made was going public.[0]

And basically what had happened was that post IPO Groupon's accounting irregularities, which were earlier hidden, became public and the company fell from grace.

Same thing happened recently with WeWork and there have been numerous other companies.

Basically, while private, startups are able to engage in practices that don't survive under public scrutiny. No wonder startups, especially ones on shaky foundation, are remaining private longer.

[0] [https://genius.com/Andrew-mason-andrew-mason-at-startup- scho...](https://genius.com/Andrew-mason-andrew-mason-at-startup-school- sv-2014-annotated)

<comment><USER3> So Groupon's CEO mistake was that other people DISCOVERED his fraudulent activities? That's a great learning LMAO. It sounds very much he hasn't learned a thing.

<comment><USER4> He also railed against companies with unsustainable business models. And someone asked him why he went public, if going public was the worst thing he ever did. His reply was that because of how Groupon was financed, it was basically forced to go public.

It was very odd. I got the sense that he got frustrated with all his business ideas failing, ran with the one business idea that actually could succeed (which was basically a pyramid scheme dressed up as marketing), but never really got comfortable in his own head with running a pyramid scheme, so all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms come out when he talks about it. His other actions (like introducing Progressive Equity [1], and his subsequent startups Detour and Descript having legit if less successful business models) also suggest this.

[1] [https://medium.com/detour-dot-com/introducing-progressive- eq...](https://medium.com/detour-dot-com/introducing-progressive- equity-f424a51ee3a4)

<comment><USER5> My accounting professor used Groupon as an example of a company that was aware it's business model was unsustainable. Basically, their domestic churn is remarkably high because businesses realize after a couple campaigns on Groupon that they're actually losing money. So, Groupon decides to tap international markets. This does nothing to reduce churn, so it's just a matter of how long it takes before they run out of new businesses to bring into the fold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Palantir, 16 years and counting ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies)

What is the life expectancy of a unicorn anyway?

<comment><USER7> Valve (maker of Steam) is another company that has been private since 1996.

<comment><USER8> But Valve never was a startup. It was entierely self-funded by Newell and Harrington who had become rich after working from Microsoft.

Benioff remarks about governance don't really apply to Valve because even if Valve was poorly managed it would pretty much be Newell misusing its own money.

<comment><USER9> > because even if Valve was poorly managed

based on their culture deck it doesn't seem great.

Purely from the standpoint of maximizing value I mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let me rephrase this: private equity is extracting too much value out of early stage companies and left nothing for the public market.

<comment><USER11> Private equity funds do not invest in early stage companies; perhaps you mean venture capital funds?

Otoh, VC's can't really "extract value" ; they can only sell share to the public or to other VC's.

<comment><USER12> Venture capital is a form of private equity.

We are, in fact, conversing on a website owned by a private equity firm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are a lot of disadvantages to going public and very few advantages. Most companies these days don't need the money because private money is willing to pour billions in, and it's pretty cheap to run a company now if you're just software.

That's pretty much the only advantage, other than liquidity for early employees, which most companies don't really seem to care about, since many of the early employees have left by the IPO, and the ones that are sticking around for their payout are probably just coasting anyway.

But the disadvantages are numerous. You have to tell your competitors about your profit and loss. You have to hire a bunch of auditors to make sure you follow all the SEC regulations. You can't do any long term bets because the market will skewer you and make it hard to hire. Your every action is up for public scrutiny. Your valuation is no longer flexible when you want to make acquisitions with stock.

<comment><USER14> > You have to hire a bunch of auditors to make sure you follow all the SEC > regulations

Following the law is just so onerous and painful.

Sunlight is a wonderful antiseptic.

<comment><USER15> It IS painful. Today's laws reflect the misdeeds of the last 100 years. Compliance is incredibly expensive and slows down everything. I don't think its a bad thing at all, but most people don't understand the scope of the legal burden of being a public company. As a private citizen, I have a legal obligation to not murder people. As a public company, analogously, one would have to file a report every few months detailing how many people you didn't murder. Please indulge my terrible analogy.

I'm with Mr. Benioff on the point that private companies can harbor a lot of decay, while over-concentrating wealth. However, data shows that small-firm IPOs are simply not very profitable, and acquisition can be much more attractive: [https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acsec/acsec-090712-ritter-...](https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acsec/acsec-090712-ritter- slides.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I work at a publicly traded company and deal with compliance and audit teams on a regular basis. It's not the end of the world. It's not overly costly. It's a good check and balance to ensure things are on the up and up.

As companies get larger, the risk for fraud and misdeeds increases. Kickbacks, payoffs, etc. Compliance and auditors are a good thing. Trust but verify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Admittedly I don't particularly follow Marc Benioff and / or Salesforce in the news much, but is his advocacy for privacy laws generally considered be an attempt towards regulatory capture?

Relevant quote: "We need a national privacy law," he said. "Otherwise you're going to get a patchwork of privacy laws. We have to get our privacy and data locked down so we know where we're going. [Regulators] need to be stepping in now and they should be working hard to make those changes."

<comment> kube-system If anyone, a large actor like Salesforce would be _more_ equipped to handle a patchwork of laws than smaller competitors. A patchwork of laws is a pain in the ass for large companies, but it's a barrier to entry for small ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "And if your orientation is just about making money, I don't think you're > going to hang out very long as a CEO or a founder of a company."

If you're a competent CEO, don't expect to be a CEO for very long...what a time to be alive.

<comment><USER18> "Competent CEO" and "making money" aren't the same thing. Hewlett Packard has had numerous CEOs that just slashed jobs en masse to make the bottom line look better. Nokia's CEO slashed jobs as well, took up with Microsoft, and now the company exists as a burned out shell of its former self, selling boring telecom and software IP like Blackberry and Ericsson. The then-CEO Stephen Elop is long gone with a nice golden parachute.

CEOs are supposed to be there for the long haul and drive real vision for the product. They're not supposed to be emergency stopgaps parachuted in to calm everyone's tempers because the last guy screwed up one too many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Startups stay private because the regulatory burden of being public is so great. Want to change behavior? Change incentives. It's simple math.

</comment><comment><USER20> Or, rephrased, "They become really expensive for me to acquire and add to my crappy pile of product spaghetti in a monopolistic fashion! It would be much better if they went public when the were still cheap."

<comment><USER21> Huh? It is much cheaper to buy a company before it IPOs. That's why you see things like Cisco acquiring AppDynamics five days before its scheduled IPO.

<comment><USER20> It's much easier to buy a public company than a private one (in a "hostile" or undesired situation), so if a company becomes public at a lower valuation, it's cheaper for Salesforce to acquire them and eliminate the competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It'll be interesting to see how this'll affect startups down the line. If employees aren't cashing out in a reasonable amount of time (or at all), will the majority of startups suffer a brain drain of top talent? Will startups need to come up with a new way of compensation beyond just equity?

<comment><USER23> I think that's already happening to some degree, though it's not a "new way" exactly. Totally anecdotal, of course, but based on watching people move between jobs in my professional circle, it seems like experienced people are no longer willing to take nearly as much of a salary cut for the sake of equity as they used to. A startup that doesn't offer competitive salary _and_ equity will have a pretty tough time hiring the most in-demand employees.

<comment><USER24> On the flip side, it seems there's still an endless pool of less-experienced people who are chomping at the bit to work at startups. There's a reason startups recruit primarily people in their 20s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well when you have

\- Founders getting to take cash out earlier

\- employees with golden handcuffs that could last forever

\- Questionable to outright illegal behavior being completely okay in the private market

\- Insane levels of founder control

\- massive VC firms willing to pump in enough late money to take pressure off earlier VCs

Then why go public? Especially if a lot of companies seemingly can't survive the IPO completely intact. Just look at WeWork

</comment><comment><USER25> Eh. I don't think it's a good idea for a startup still going through rapid change (whether releasing new product lines, entering new markets, testing new pricing) to go public, since as soon as you do it's hard to be "experimental."

There are, however, private companies whose business models have largely stabilized like Airbnb and Stripe that I agree should've gone public already.

<comment><USER26> Curious why you think they should have gone public? What advantages does an IPO offer these stable businesses? Is it a belief that _all_ stable business at a certain scale have a obligation to enter public markets? Genuinely curious

<comment><USER25> You need to provide liquidity to your shareholders at some point, so yes. Investors and employees have been waiting 10 years to cash out. They helped build the business and deserve to be rewarded at a certain point. A decade is stretching it IMO.

<comment><USER26> The old fashioned way shareholders would receive liquidity was through distributed earnings aka profit sharing; this is still a viable option. Employees receive a salary and shoulder little risk relative to shareholders/investors so I'm not sure I agree they "deserve" to be rewarded in the same way.

<comment><USER27> So you've given me compensation (equity stake) that I can't sell, ever, effectively making it worthless. Borderline fraud. If I want cash flow, give me liquidity and I'll go buy a public dividend fund.

My time is worth more risk wise then some investors bottomless pit of fund dollars (cough SoftBank cough).

<comment><USER26> I agree with you, though. I think employees _want_ stock options without understanding their drawbacks and limitations. Receiving stock options sounds sexy and is motivated by social factors that may not be as beneficial now as they were several decades ago. But employees need to take personal responsibility for the offers they accept and if they feel under valued, they can leave at any time. I would personally opt for the cash flow route as well.

<comment><USER27> I think that stock options (and the eventual shares realized through option exercise) are a legitimate method for a cash constrained startup to offer deferred comp to early employees (as well as meaningful ongoing ownership in the business if done properly), but that additional government regulation is required to tip the power balance away from the employer/option grantor. I don't disagree with social factors, but I think even today employees want upside exposure you can only obtain with options (or other equity instruments). Hustle has a cost.

If you want to issue options, no right of first refusal. You have to allow the transfer of your shares on a secondary market for accredited investors. You have to provide a cap table to all shareholders, as well as dilution and preferred share info. You have to hand over a 409A valuation annually to all shareholders.

You don't have to go to the public markets, but you also don't get to treat common shareholders (usually employees granted ISOs) as second class citizens. If private markets are the new public markets, we still regulate the private markets, just a bit less so.

</soapbox>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >"I really strongly believe that capitalism as we know it is dead… that we're going to see a new kind of capitalism and that new kind of capitalism that's going to emerge is not the Milton Friedman capitalism that's just about making money," said Benioff. "And if your orientation is just about making money, I don't think you're going to hang out very long as a CEO or a founder of a company."

This is like simple minded Darwinism where nature is red in tooth and claw. That perspective was not very good at explaining more complex behavior like altruism. All compatible in a neo Darwinian model. Simple minded capitalism is no different but who really believes in simple minded capitalism? This is a strawman.

</comment><comment><USER28> Overfitting at its finest

</comment><comment><USER29> > I think in a lot of private companies these days, we're seeing governance > issues all over the place,"

But not with public companies?

It's an opinion, I'd ask for some data.

I personally don't think the public market cares much about things like privacy and governance. If it were, Facebook would have neither investors nor users. Same goes for so many others.

He then goes into talking about salesforce going public as if it were an exampl. But definitely privacy and governance are not the same for b2b and b2c.

I have been with two startups that got public way too quick, when half of what you're doing is for PR effects in preparing to bring new investors, you forget about the customer. One of them is dead, the other survived after being bought out by a private equity firm. Going public is such a burden for the representation aspect of it that expecting _this_ to br a regulatory practice is delusional. (imo)

<comment><USER30> > I personally don't think the public market cares much about things like > privacy and governance. If it were, Facebook would have neither investors > nor users. Same goes for so many others.

This is a silly take. Data privacy is a completely separate issue from corporate governance, and by most analysts who cover it Facebook is considered a particularly well-governed company.

<comment><USER11> A company whose founder/CEO is the only person who can remove him(self) is well governed?

<comment><USER31> The way analysts are probably looking at it: Governance in the letter of laws/regulations : We'll give it a B- , invest and make $$

They are probably smart/cynical enough to know that governance in the spirit of laws/regulations is an F</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook and Speech - <AUTHOR> https://continuations.com/post/188425562010/facebook-and-speech-its-all-about-power <comment><USER2> This is the _best case for users_ I can think of if social media were forced to allow APIs:

Different products/companies exist to fulfill each of these roles:

\- host the firehose of tweets/posts/snaps/grams. Likely the husks of Facebook/Twitter/SnapChat/Instagram.

\- filter/sort firehose for user given their preferences time/popularity/relevance etc.

\- GUI to display posts to user by Web/Mobile/VR/SMS/Postcard etc. Aggregate social media readers do (did) this.

\- GUI to (re)post/comment on/react to/edit/delete user content to the firehose. These already exist: HootSuite/Buffer

\- firehose analysis for marketing, etc.

\- firehose-level moderation/flagging/censorship/tagging

The problem is there is far more user value in vertically integrating some or all of these functions than there is in keeping them decentralized. Most users will prefer one product that filter/sorts AND displays posts to two products where one filter/sorts and the other displays.

<comment><USER3> This will balkanize the user-base, as we see with Mastodon.

You're either going to have every node do redundant work with moderation, or they'll adopt a common blacklist, thus re-centralizing.

Operators that fail to self-moderate will be blacklisted by operators that don't, because when 1% of the content broadcast by a node is, say, CP, nobody in their right mind will think twice before blocking it outright.

<comment><USER4> Reading the article and the parent comment I'm pretty sure that's the intent. By 'balkanizing' the users, the power is reduced and the network as a cohesive unit of control is dismantled.

<comment><USER5> the question is why the end-user would want balkanization, other than for the abstract reason to limit power, which almost never works (or everyone would be installing firefox right now).

People seem to be allergic to balkanization. They want the convenience of typing a search result, a movie title, or a name into the platform instead of having to jump over ten. Even Mastodon with its hybrid model is unable to attract a significant amount of users from Facebook or Twitter.

Open APIs probably won't result in significant competition, and even if they do the privacy concerns exist for small companies as much as for larger ones, see Cambridge Analytica which with open APIs would basically roam around freely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He doesn't say why it's a trap to think about facebook in terms of publisher versus carrier.

Someone made an insightful comment here the other day saying that they (the tech companies) chose to play publisher and opened themselves up to whole lot of legal battles and complaints, when they should have stayed with the carrier option.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to know why so many people treat the publisher vs. carrier issue as some natural law of speech, when it's actually a fairly recent concept. To me it seems like a false dichotomy. Arguing from first principles, why should there be a binary choice between those two options?

<comment><USER8> We need carriers, because we need people to be able to dedicate themselves to plumbing without having to worry about the terabytes crossing across them. If they did, the Internet would grind to a halt from all the necessary processing and blocking and examination.

We want publishers to carry some responsibility, for various obvious reasons.

It seems to me that once someone is being held a little bit responsible, they're going to be forced to act as being fully responsible and need the power to block a bit of content, which will then come with the full corresponding responsibility for blocking that piece of content. What do you see as a middle ground? (This is an honest question, not an argument.)

<comment><USER7> The middle ground to me is something like "people should be free to interact, but if they're going to say something I think is racist they need to do it elsewhere." (Substitute "racist" with whatever you wish in this scenario).

At that point, the publisher vs. carrier crowd goes "well, that racist thing wasn't _illegal_ , so now you have to be responsible for _everything_ someone says." But I don't really _care_ about what most of people say; I just don't want them to be racist.

This isn't a standard we apply to most businesses. If I run a bar, I can generally remove a patron for saying something without the conduct I choose to allow coming under scrutiny.

I agree re: carriers, for the reasons you stated. But to me that's a status mostly reserved for plumbing-type infrastructure, not a choice services have to make when they're deciding what type of content to host.

<comment><USER9> > But I don't really care about what most of people say; I just don't want > them to be racist.

I hope you're ready to be accused of being a sexist and anti-Semite by many people's definitions. Not to mention that I hope you know that watermelon, dancing, math, and balloons are racist (according to someone with 1000 Tumblr followers, probably), and so have no place on your platform. The point being that determining what is and isn't racist can be a pretty hard problem.

<comment><USER7> Coming up with an objective and broadly agreeable rubric would indeed be difficult. But this is _my_ hypothetical service, so the only definition of racism that really matters is my own. People are free to disagree and criticize, of course — but ultimately it's my way or the highway, so to speak.

I'll also note that this doesn't really answer my question. What is the reason for the platform vs. publisher dichotomy? If I choose not to host content I don't want to, why does it follow that I should be liable for _any_ content I host?

<comment><USER10> > People are free to disagree and criticize, of course — but ultimately it's > my way or the highway

No, it is not your way or the highway, though. Because you, as the platform, are _also_ subject to the opinions of the public, now.

And if you are subject to the opinions of the public, then you might start to decide to censor more and more things, not because you actually think that they are bad, but instead because some vocal minority is clammering for it to be banned.

I don't want you to be subject to that public opinion. Instead, I want to give platforms an excuse to say "sorry! We can't ban anything at all, because we are required to act neutrally!".

That way nobody can complain and try and pressure the network into expanding their definition of bad things more and more.

<comment><USER7> _Every_ company is subject to the opinions of the public. I avoid Google products because they don't respect my privacy; I know people who don't use Apple products because they're too controlling. That is called "doing business".

And trying to be neutral doesn't even insulate you from those opinions! When I realized my previous webhost's position was to allow e.g. Nazi content as long as it was legal, I switched hosts. What do you think that webhost would do if enough people followed suit?

<comment><USER10> > Every company is subject to the opinions of the public

When was the last time that the phone company was protested because it refused to censor certain people?

The answer is that this basically never happens.

> What do you think that webhost would do if enough people followed suit?

Well, if it was illegal for webhosts to refuse service to groups, then I don't think that these webhosts would be protested, or whatever, for not censoring certain groups.

> trying to be neutral doesn't even insulate you from those opinions

Which is why I want to give networks an excuse, where they can say "Sorry everyone! It is completely out of our hands! We can't censor them even if we wanted to."

> I switched hosts

And if every host is hosting controversial content, then you won't be able to find any that isn't being neutral.

Have you changed your phone provider, because Nazis are using AT&T to make phone calls? I doubt it.

<comment><USER11> One important difference is that YouTube carries content to be consumed by the public, while phone companies are more like the postal service: they send things from point A to point B, blindly (except for snooping from intelligence agencies), between private parties. These companies have many common carrier aspects, but they also have many aspects of regular private enterprises.

I agree that perhaps some degree of regulation could be warranted to adddess their unique sort-of-carrier status, but saying that they should be forbidden by the state from disallowing anything that's legal is a slippery slope in the same way biased censorship is. For example, they may not want any risk of people seeing extreme gore videos, since that could cause people to use their service less, even though such videos are typically not illegal to distribute or view. But with total free reign over a behemoth communication monopoly, politically biased content curation and removal is also a huge problem. I think there needs to be a middle ground approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In the EU all bank accounts are now required to have an API. This has > massively reduced the power of incumbent banks, allowing for rapid > innovation in the banking and payments sector. The same would and could > happen if platform such as Facebook and Twitter were required to have an > API.

I agree with the author's assertion of a problem, but this is really confusing. Both Facebook and Twitter DO have APIs. Granted the APIs are proprietary and subject to significant restrictions on acceptable use and functionality. However, providing even a full-featured API doesn't change the effect of the platforms owning a person's user account and persona, or their ability to suck people in to waste countless hours watching their ad targeting feed algorithms.

Only true decentralization of social graph hosting will really address the core issue of centralized power.

<comment><USER13> Forcing Facebook and Twitter to have truly open APIs would be amazing. We'd have everything from custom clients, custom News Feed algorithms and much more.. Heck, they can even require ads to be served, the point is we'd be in a far better situation than we are now.

<comment><USER14> Forcing Facebook to have truly open API means forcing them to allow Cambridge Analytica to vacuum up everyone's data.

<comment><USER15> Open API doesn't mean all data available to everyone all the time. You'd still have ACLs and privacy options. It would just mean that the data and interactions you as a user already have in Facebook's proprietary walled garden, would be API callable from 3rd parties.

Today you cannot see my FB page if we're not friends, an open API wouldn't allow you to access my data either. If we were friends, you could use your custom FB client to look at my page though, which would be very user friendly.

<comment><USER16> > It would just mean that the data and interactions you as a user already have > in Facebook's proprietary walled garden, would be API callable from 3rd > parties.

This was precisely the level of access which caused the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

<comment><USER17> False, the level of access which caused that scandal and others was the fact that the early versions of the Facebook API granted access to second degree nodes in the network once you approved an app. Cambridge did not manage to get hundreds of millions of people to take their survey, they got access to the hundreds of millions of friends of those who did.

<comment><USER16> > If we were friends, you could use your custom FB client to look at my page > though, which would be very user friendly.

Yes, this is what used to exist, and this is what Cambridge Analytica exploited. The level of access I'm talking about, and what people in this thread are advocating for, is allowing a third party app to see all info an authenticated user is authorized to see (including their friend's info).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't see what opening Facebook's API would buy us. You'd get different interpretations of the feed, but you'd still be siloed into whatever feed it was you accessed. Cambridge Analytica used FB's data to manipulate the feed and thus the users, but no feed algorithm is going to prevent that. Just the opposite: people would find it even easier to choose a feed algorithm that siloed them further. You _could_ jump to a different one -- but would you?

I don't think it would return nearly as much power to users as he imagines. FB won't make quite the same mistakes as they have in the past, but an enormous amount of information is still public knowledge -- putting your social life in public is the whole point of a social network. People enjoy putting themselves out there and voluntarily, voraciously consume what others put there too. No tech tweak is going to change that, or limit the consequences.

<comment><USER19> Based on the history of facebook and its news feed, I believe that the news feed or activity feed in general, unless it is a dumb pipe, should be considered human psychological experimentation. Under this premise, I would submit that not facebook, but instead its curated feeds, should be made illegal.

But then again, the same logic could be applied to advertising/marketing... well, at least some of it, perhaps most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think we are seeing the divergence of humanity into Morlocks and Eloi.

Most people can't begin to understand the kind of power that FB/Google has accrued due to the enormous and detailed information they are hoovering up. The vast majority of people are digital serfs.

I don't know what, if anything, to do about it. I do not think requiring Skynet to have an API will be very helpful though.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's only going to stop when being on Facebook is seen as shameful.

<comment><USER22> I agree and I think this is going to happen at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I stared in shock as the red mist speckled my glasses. After a few moments I managed to stammer a response.

"My god, that worker just fell in! Why haven't you stopped the machine? Why isn't anyone _doing anything_?"

The foreman who was leading my tour made a plaintive gesture and stared into space for a moment.

"It's complex, you see. The machine is certainly dangerous. That's the third worker this hour."

"The third?!"

"Every 10 minutes, like clockwork. But on the other hand, the machine is quite valuable. You must understand. Our competition all has machines just like it, and if we stopped ours, well, it wouldn't make much of a difference, would it? They're building more every day and we simply must keep up. That's the business."

"But those are people- human lives!"

The foreman looked tired. He'd given this speech many times.

"Our workers sign all the necessary releases. They're fully informed. Our legal team will assure you there's a great deal of paperwork involved, and we cross every T and dot every I. Totally above-board. I didn't build the damn machine, I just keep it running, and this is how it's done in the industry. Now, if you'll all follow me- just step over that mess for now, the cleanup crew are already on their way- I'll show you the way to our recruiting department. Turnover is a bit high here, but we've been working on some great new internship programs with elementary schools..."

<comment><USER2> Did you write that? It's reminiscent of Kafka's In the Penal Colony.

<comment><USER24> If you did write that, it's absolutely brilliant, and I hope to read more from you!

<comment><USER23> Yes, I wrote it. Thank you.

<comment><USER25> Brilliant. Thanks for sharing it with us!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> TBH, as a Chinese expat, all these utilitarian arguments give me Deja Vu of how the Chinese government defended GFW.

<comment><USER27> Can you elaborate on this? I don't know about how they defended the Great Firewall (had to look up that acronym) And I was thinking about the utilitarian argument for the world... that argument sides with China on the surface.

From Webster, "Utiliatarianism" is the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain or the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

China is the largest country by population in the world. A very quick argument would be 'We have the most people, so anything that's good for our people is good for the world." That thinking justifies ghettos - the minority would upset the majority, and the most pleasure for the majority is what utilitarianism is.

That has me worried - it's a simple argument that is wrong on deeper inspection. What do you think as a Chinese expat? What was CCP's argument for the Great Firewall?

Population reference: [https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-by- percentage-...](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-by-percentage- of-world-population.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The second trap is misunderstanding network effects.

Network effects, also known as efficiencies of scale, exist in every industry. This was as true of the railroads and the telephone companies as it is of tech companies. That's the whole reason corporations tend to become monopolies in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER29> The best way to get an open social API may be a "Ship of Theseus" approach, where users run a scraper that copies their FB data to a new service, and keeps their FB data synced with the new service. As more people join the new service, eventually all FB logins will be by the scrapers, and at that point FB can be dropped.

<comment><USER30> Isn't this explicitly against the Facebook terms of service?

<comment><USER29> Probably. But it's still the user's data.

Also compare this to a tool like YouTube-dl which is against YouTube's ToS, but is still used by many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An API in and of itself is not going to prevent censorship if Facebook still controls the backend.</comment>


Guess the Correlation: a game of statistics - <AUTHOR> http://guessthecorrelation.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It will now only be a matter of time until someone trains a deep neural network to beat the game.</comment>


Ask HN: Social decision making tool - what do you think? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, we have made a social decision making tool at http://www.rslvr.com
We have a lot of ideas of where to take it next: * NextGen Question/Polls website * Offering widgets for websites
We can help our users decide anything from "Where to eat?" (in an upcoming mobile version) to things such "Which university should I attend?"
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I think you might want to actually list the benefits of what this tool does, or at the very least will do instead of a 'coming soon' box.

<comment><USER3> Hey, I'm one of the founders of the website. You mean writing down in the main page, right? Good idea - we plan to add an introduction video on that page (similar to what Dropbox did on their main page)

Yaron</comment></comment>


RHEL 7 is out - <AUTHOR> http://rhelblog.redhat.com/2014/06/10/red-hat-unveils-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7/

<comment><USER2> This version of RHEL has all of the base bits for running docker as well. Super exciting times!

Also, the project atomic stuff looks very interesting: [http://www.projectatomic.io/](http://www.projectatomic.io/)

It is a quasi-coreos like version of RHEL that does atomic binary updates via the ostree software.</comment>