Sexism In Tech: We're Not Making It Up - <AUTHOR> http://overit.com/blog/sexism-in-tech <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed that this post focuses on an incident of groping. Not because the incident is "not a big deal" or that it's isolated, but because it's the type of incident that nearly everyone can agree is beyond the pale and should never be tolerated by society.

Even sexists.

I think the more prevalent problem is the underlying sexism, the institutional bias, the reluctance to speak up, the fear of being judged "the token" -- the fact that a man can think it's appropriate to put his hand on a woman's knee unsolicited is just a blatant, ugly manifestation of the underlying sexism.

I know this post had a little more nuance, but it's hard to come away from it without the impression of: "Women aren't on speaker panels because they're afraid of getting molested". Maybe that's the case (and if so, we as a society have _serious_ issues)...but there's at least an equal problem of women just not being considered or being searched for. And as that problem persists, then women continue to become such a minority at these conferences that the aforementioned creep feels perfectly comfortable with invading a woman's personal space.

<comment><USER3> I think it's all connected.

There are many reasons you don't see women speaking at tech conferences. Some is because they're passed over as non-members of the boys club. Some is because they don't want to attend and be part of the environment. I've had far worse things happen to be at tech shows - there's one I avoid altogether after being sexually assaulted in a hotel room - but like you said, there's a reason women don't feel comfortable talking about. i don't want to be the "token" harassment case. I don't want to become known for that above anything else I may do. So do I speak up or do I shut up.

That's just as large of an issue as how do I get that creep from putting his hand on knee. Arguably, it's bigger.

<comment><USER2> Undoubtedly it's all connected in a feedback loop. I guess what I'm simply saying is that the problem of unwanted touching "can be solved" (or at least, ostracized into obscurity), and yet the underlying sexism can persist -- and, in one sense, be affirmed ("Hey I'm can't be a sexist, I _never_ would just touch a random woman) -- and cause the same negative impact: the lack of women participation in conferences and in the tech field (or rather, society in general)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is nothing in the article (IMO) that is unique to the tech sector. These complaints could be made of men in general anywhere in any industry or context. Some guy can put a hand on your knee at the home show too, but not a lot of men go to those events (I assume, I wouldn't know since I don't go to them either).

However, there will always be a set of socially retarded people, there will always be horny people, and there will always be people who posses both attributes at the same time. There are a lot of socially awkward people in tech, I don't know what you can do about this problem.

If you have an attractive physique as a woman, and you wear clothes that don't hide or minimize this fact, then men _will_ notice, and some will _comment_ on it, and some will even be _inappropriate_ about it. As a remedy the women should get mad, she should tell them off. However you could even make inappropriate comments punishable by DEATH. I guarantee that not even the death penalty will stop inappropriate comments, or some guy putting a hand on your knee type of stuff. Even if the women wore a burqua, that wouldn't stop it, some guy would find that hot, "hey baby, what's under the burqua?". I don't have the answer, I don't think there is an answer. Possibly when these issues occur the women are reacting politely when they should react angrily so the offender gets the correct feedback often enough to realize that _he_ is the problem.

<comment><USER5> "they should react angrily" That might be part of the solution, but isn't it important for us to make a proactive effort to do whatever we can to encourage a professional, non-sexist environment?

You say there will always be horny people, but isn't it our place to make this a taboo?

None of this may be unique to the tech sector, but aren't we a forward-looking industry that isn't afraid of changing the world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In any industry dominated by a given gender, there is prejudice against the opposite gender. People fear what they do not know.

[http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/rss/1056170/New-calls- end...](http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/rss/1056170/New-calls-end- discrimination-against-male-childcarers/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have had the misfortune of seeing how very deep this sexism goes- it's not just sexual harassment that's an issue (though I will say, it's the most pressing), but also the prejudices women meet in the tech world. It's as if there are two major discussions about women's roles in tech: women are either assumed to be underqualified or over glamorized.

Get more women into tech, and then get over having them there.

<comment><USER8> > _it's not just sexual harassment that's an issue_

How does discern sexual harassment (between adults with no business ties between them) from flirting?

I ask because I've also seen flirting remakers being conceived as "harassement".

That "the place was not appropriate" or "it was uncalled for" is not a proper answer I think. There would be VERY FEW relationships and/or marriages if people never approached other people out of the blue and in non-appropriate places (in a conference for example).

<comment><USER9> It's pretty simple: if you're not sure, don't do it.

<comment><USER8> Really? That's quite a naive view.

Are people (men/women/gay) ever SURE about when to flirt with another person?

By this logic, half of the population would have never been born (which might have been a good thing, with respect to overpopulation and all, but that's a different argument).

<comment><USER9> What you're saying is, "I am willing to possibly sexually assault someone in order to get a date."

You're a bad person.

<comment><USER8> > _What you're saying is, "I am willing to possibly sexually assault someone > in order to get a date."_

No. That's the strawman you made out of what I'm saying. Can you please respond to what I actually said and not put words in my mouth as you please?

What I'm saying is: some people can also consider completely casual flirting to be a "sexual assault". As in, when you're flirting you're never sure beforehand if the other part wants your flirt. And in many cases, it takes a little time to win them over (or fail). It's not like there's a standard protocol: "OK, you can flirt me now".

And yes, people DO fall in love in tech conferences, or meet possible partners, as they do in ANY other place, including offices and funerals. So they _do_ have the right to approach someone else they like there.

> _You're a bad person_

And who are you to tell me that?

Apparently in your mind verbally assaulting someone you disagree with and telling them they are a "bad person" is perfectly OK?

That's your idea of making the world better by stoping sexism? Introducing hatr-ism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lechers exist in all fields, even in fields where it is agreed upon by everyone that sexism does not exist, or is at least at some level lower than general sexism in society as a whole.

Feel free to call them out, but don't impugn the insanely broad field of "tech" because of some creeps.

</comment><comment><USER11> The number of comments on this thread stating sexism exists in all areas and seemly dismiss this as an issue that needs to be addressed in our industry is very surprising to me.

Just because the problem is not specific to the tech industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve it. If women feel uncomfortable working or contributing to the industry because of their gender then we are missing out on possible contributions from a massive section of the population.

Will cases of sexism always exist? Probably, their will always be a bad apple or two. But we need to work to make these these cases the exception to how the industry works. We need people to feel safe contributing regardless of who they are. If you have something to contribute you should be able to, that is one of the things I personally love about this industry. Just because we can never fully solve a problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize it.

<comment><USER12> It's not that it shouldn't be addressed in our industry, but it shouldn't be addressed as "sexism in tech", because that is an entirely separate issue.

The kind of sexism that is described here occurs just as much in industries that are 50% women. It's not the cause of the under-representation of women in tech, and addressing it is unlikely to solve that issue.

On the one hand, the industry should make an additional effort to address the general social sexism on order to not further alienate women, but the suggestion that tech is more sexist than other areas is blatantly false, and leads to a automatic defensive response because it suggests a certain causality.

It is simply not very constructive to conflate the two issues, no matter how closely related they are. Sexism in general is too sensitive an issue for that, and not just for women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The characterization of this as an industry issue is a red herring. This is a societal issue; the fact we're in the tech industry is simply a commonality.

<comment><USER14> It's considerably worse - both more prevalent and less acknowledged - in the tech industry than elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> I would expect you have some data that substantiates that assertion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a hypothesis: When women are represented close to 50% in the military, there will be none of this so-called sexism in other, unrelated sectors

</comment><comment><USER15> This post again?

<comment><USER16> When it stops being a problem, it will stop being topical.

<comment><USER10> Can you name an industry(at least as broad as "tech" field) which has no sexual harassment lawsuits, or exceptionally few?

You can tell stories like the one in the blog about _any_ field. Tech is not special. If there is going to be change, it will have to come from society at large, and not by fiddling with the dials of a specific field.

<comment><USER16> You are absolutely correct. It's everywhere, in every industry. Tech is not special. But it is our field, our community, and it is incumbent upon us to change our own community. So you propose sitting on our hands and waiting for some magical shift in society at large? No thanks. And that's not how change happens. We _can_ effect change in our own communities - and if enough communities make change you'll see ripples through society and eventually society at large may change. You have to start somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do think sexism exist, but I think the MAJOR problem is as...ole men. I am not a full gentleman but let's think: 1) I think some woman attractive. I will not touch her as first move or even approach or stand too near.

2) There is better ways to extend the conversation instead of inviting to my 'bedroom'.

3) No or other excuses means no, thanks and farewell.

4) conferences are professional places, no place for flirting (they invented bars for that).

5) Ring on the finger? SHE is NOT interested.

Somehow some men think that if the woman is NOT interested she has be 'wrong' or deserve more 'strong' signals. I support more woman at the conferences and I wish more woman take some stand at this cases and say it loud: 'TAKE OUT YOUR FILTHY HANDS from me' Saying that loud will teach a great lesson and avoid some posts. The main problem is not sexism is lack of politeness and manners.

<comment><USER5> Why is it the responsibility of women to take the stand? Isn't it the responsibility of the people making unprofessional advances to stop and silent bystanders to tell them so? Why is a professional conference ever even thought of as a venue for making advances?

I don't understand why you think this is not sexism.

<comment><USER18> > _Isn't it the responsibility of the people making unprofessional advances to > stop_

Well, yes, but if your plan to stop sexism is something along the lines of "Wait for jerks to suddenly become good people," you're doing a disservice to their victims.

> _and silent bystanders to tell them so_

I don't feel like it is my business to step in and speak for a woman who has not implicitly or explicitly asked me to do so. That seems like a really degrading viewpoint. If she clearly wants the guy to go away and he won't, yes, go up and help her. But the idea that it's my job to run around policing women's sexuality is just antediluvian.

<comment><USER5> I don't see why it's degrading for a victim to have someone else (publicly or privately) tell their agressor to stop.

<comment><USER18> The assumption of woman as victim when there's no indication that she sees it that way is what's degrading. Can you imagine if anytime you were talking to a member of your preferred sex, somebody came running up and yelled to the person you were talking to, "Hey, back off, buddy"?

<comment><USER5> There's a difference between talking and awkward, unwanted, sexist advances. If you can't tell the difference, then you're right, you probably shouldn't tell anyone off. But just because the victim doesn't say something doesn't mean they don't want something to be said.

<comment><USER18> Sure, if a guy walks up to a chick and sticks his hand down her pants, that's one thing, because he's clearly out of control. But the example given in the OP was something like "Would you like to have a drink?" I don't think I would be inclined to come charging to the rescue if I saw that. I don't like that women have to deal with unwelcome advances, but I wouldn't feel right rejecting him for her.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eat This Much – Automatic Meal Planner - <AUTHOR> https://www.eatthismuch.com/ <comment><USER3> I like the idea but it's producing a lot of ... unappealing combos like peanut butter and honey ... sandwich? on ... rye? With a random side of red pepper hummus?

I think what's missing is some graph of compatible ingredients per type of food. Things that generally require some companion (what am I eating that hummus with?) You could generate a pizza via compatibility scores. Same with curries, sandwiches, etc.

And of course hinting at the type of macros one might want. 60% of my diet as fat is probably not a good regular day.

But very compelling. I struggle with meal planning and the state of recipes and meals and the seo gamesmanship makes the whole thing very arduous.

<comment><USER4> Counterpoint: peanut butter and honey sandwich is delicious, and a worthy competitor to the king of childhood sandwiches, the venerable PB&J.

<comment> kube-system Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches are even better

<comment><USER5> Peanut butter, bacon, and molasses is even better.

<comment><USER6> Bacon, bacon, and bacon without bread is my goto.

<comment><USER7> Uh, this doesn't sound very delicious. Have you considered adding bacon?

<comment><USER8> I feel like what it really misses is a slice or two of bacon, to make it nice and rounded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The food choice is US-centric as already pointed out, I want to add that doesn't impact only the macros, but also the prices and availability. For example foods like Buckwheat and Peanut Butter are hard to find in Italy (at least in my region), and when you find them are very expensive (example Buckwheat is around 2£/KG in the UK and around 15€/KG in Italy).

Regarding the macros, the change of proteins, based on the nation is impressive.

Example: Best cottage cheese I can find in Italy: 7% Carbs, 0% Fats, 93% Proteins [https://www.myfitnesspal.com/it/food/calories/naturella- fioc...](https://www.myfitnesspal.com/it/food/calories/naturella-fiocchi-di- latte-light-472127919)

Best cottage cheese I can find in UK: 11% Carbs, 26% Fats, 63% Proteins [https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/light-cottage- che...](https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/light-cottage- cheese-200g-502275010)

Best "cottage cheese" I can find in Lithuania: 11% Carbs, 0% Fatas, 89% Proteins [https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/liesa- varske-0-5-...](https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/liesa- varske-0-5-62189974)

You could add in the receipt the macros of the ingredient we need to use, in this way at the super market I can scan various of them and search the closest one

<comment><USER10> And being US-centric means a lot of the choices a quite gross and really unappealing for people in other countries. Buttered toast? Peanut butter and honey? Yuck, I'd rather not eat at all.

<comment><USER11> I've never heard of peanut butter and honey, must be a regional thing.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure it's a Great Plains thing. I grew up on it, but most everyone I know has never heard of it.

I will say that it's only delicious if you use typical American heavily salted peanut butter. Canadians should not try this with anything but Kraft unless they are feeling dangerously happy and are in need of a quick day-ruiner.

<comment><USER13> It's perfectly fine with natural peanut butter too - you can always add salt onto the peanut butter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a cool idea that I'd personally love to see work in some form or another.

In my experience, though, the tedium of tracking macros and the like has probably been the biggest obstacle for being consistent. When I cut now, just maintaining some very simple principles like "eat less, eat vegetables, it's OK to feel hungry" has been vastly more useful long-term than weighing food on scales and calculating BMI every week... But maybe that's just me.

This solution might make for a nice compromise.

<comment><USER15> >eat less, eat vegetables, it's OK to feel hungry

I think one of the biggest things a person can do is move away from the three daily meal regimen that as I understand is a relatively modern invention. After a few weeks or so you don't miss breakfast anymore, especially if you're the type to drink coffee in the morning.

<comment><USER16> Right but merely skipping breakfast won't ensure you'll consume fewer calories in a day. There are recorded advantages to breakfast consumption with regards to metabolism etc. It's worth experimenting to suit preference. Maybe when trying to run a deficit, skipping is easier, but that doesn't apply to me.

<comment><USER17> part of the problem is that the conventional american breakfast (cereal, fruit, maybe some toast) is almost entirely carbs. unless you go to the trouble of frying some eggs, you're getting off to a bad start that will leave you crashing by the end of the morning and overeating at lunch.

<comment><USER18> I've dealt with insomnia for most of my life (I regularly saw the clock pass midnight when I was 8, just laying in bed) and making sure I ate breakfast _early_ every morning has seemed to be one of the most effective ways to fight it.

After experimenting with various options, breakfast settled on a few handfuls of hazelnuts and coffee with sugar. It turns out to be impossible to overeat hazelnuts because they're chewy and filling^1, it requires literally no preparation, and it keeps me full for a while. I find unsalted nuts go better with coffee; salt clashes somehow.

<comment><USER19> I regularly see people snacking 1 bag of nuts (250g, 1700 kcal) or even 2 bags a day mindlessly in front of their computer at work.

<comment><USER18> I think _snacking_ is the key concept here. I just eat quickly until I'm full and put the bag away. Lots of things are unhealthy when you just eat them out of boredom.

Imagine sitting next to a huge amount of any _other_ kind of food all day!

<comment><USER19> I fully agree.

OTOH These people have had it drilled into them that:

\- Calories are a lie. The model is incorrect (true) and should therefore be completely ignored/rejected (false)

\- Fats are good. Nuts are healthy.

\- 'Grazing' food all day is good.

<comment><USER18> >Nuts are healthy.

There is a great deal of scientific evidence supporting nut consumption. This is not just because they contain fat, but because the fat they contain is monounsaturated, they are slow to digest, and they are good sources of fiber (particularly almond/hazelnut/pecan):

[https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/647S/4690007](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/647S/4690007)

[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article- abstract/415912)

[https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-...](https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-164)

> 'Grazing' food all day is good.

I don't think I've encountered this philosophy much in the wild. I would never endorse it.

I do understand the practical necessity of snacking sometimes when you're trying to get work done on a schedule. In these cases I think it helps to drink plenty of water with any snacks.

<comment><USER20> It's the fallacy found first in the list the causes the issue:

>\- Calories are a lie. The model is incorrect (true) and should therefore be completely ignored/rejected (false)

>\- Fats are good. Nuts are healthy.

>\- 'Grazing' food all day is good.

Good fats are good for you and nuts are a source of such fats. For some, eating more frequent, smaller portions makes it easier to hit a reasonable caloric intake for the day. However, add in that calories are a lie and ignore the fact that nuts are calorie dense, and you get people eating 3000 kcal of nuts in a day by grazing on healthy foods.

In another thread, the mention of weighing foods for a while seems to counter this. It's just not that intuitive that a small bag of nuts can have enough calories for a meal (at least is wasn't always to me). As a child of the midwest, it took some time to deprogram my concept of healthy portions, so I can admit to falling into some version of this trap for many year, and still do on occasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Noticed a bit of a load spike, cool to see our site posted on HN :) Let me know if you have any feedback or questions and I'll do my best to respond.

<comment><USER22> I do one-meal-a-day. The website returned 18 servings of egg and 10 slices of bread. Maybe there should be a maximum serving per meal.

<comment><USER21> Oof yeah. It's currently configured to max out at 3 servings unless a meal's target is >1500 calories, and then it uncaps. That's caused a few complaints, so we'll likely revert it.

One workaround in the meantime is to ask for more meals, and then just eat them all at once :) You can also drag items between meals if you want to reorg them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is rad. Some feedback:

1) Don't require me to choose between Male/Female. Let me leave that blank if I'd prefer.

2) If I put 6 in the 'feet' in height, and nothing in the inches, it probably means I'm 6 feet even. Don't make me go back and type in the 0.

3) Alliums (garlic, onion, leeks, etc) are a common intolerance you might want to consider adding to your list. Mushrooms also?

4) The vegetables list is not alphabetized (sprouts appears dead in the middle of the list)

5) Why is Sugar in the 'Grains' category?

<comment><USER21> 1) We've gotten this request a few times before, but we use a standard calorie estimation equation that depends on this. Not quite sure what the alternative should be.

2) Good point, will add it to our to-do list.

3) Also good idea - in the meantime, you can add text filters at the bottom of the suggestions list for anything we missed. If it matches anything in the recipe name or ingredients, it'll exclude the recipe.

4 & 5) Definitely a little weird, and surprised no one has mentioned this before. Maybe recently changed? Added to the to-do list too.

<comment><USER24> Last time I used it I ran into the problem at it sometimes was too specific with the ingredients I already had. For example; I have 5kg of rice, it would recommend me only recipes with that type of rice. While I understand that some recipes are better with long grain or short grain, at the time I was hoping to find an option to have my rice substitute "any" rice. Is there a solution for this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have used this one for a few weeks, several months ago. At the time, there were 2 main issues:

* The food selection was too US-centric - for example, where I live items like sausages tend to have a different nutritional content compared to their US counterparts. I think these types of food should have localised versions.

* Weird portions once you select Metric: for example there were a lot of foods where the default quantity was 28.34 grams - I suspect because that's an ounce in the US.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the feedback!

1) This is true, we are pretty US centric at the moment. Most of our basic- food nutrition data comes from the USDA database, so that biases it a bit. We have some ideas for making it easier to localize the suggested foods, but it might be a little while before we get it in there.

2) We should probably round the numbers there a bit, but you're right, we just convert things like ounces to grams if you select metric units.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looked really exciting at first and I signed-up immediately, hoping to stop thinking about "what I should cook tonight?". However after seeing an Oreo milkshake suggestion for lunch time I'm not sure how healthy the recipes are.

If the diet selection included a low-sugar option, then it may be much more useful for me.

<comment><USER21> One of our philosophies is that we don't enforce our own beliefs about what's healthy or not. What's healthy depends largely on the person (and everyone has different opinions), but we're there to help with portioning to make sure you're not eating too much or too little.

For a lifter trying to gain weight, a milkshake might be perfectly fine. For someone trying to lose, it's probably not the most satiating choice, but as long as it fits your targets, shouldn't throw you off your goals. For those people, you can hit the refresh button in the meal until you see something you're happy with.

Not to say there isn't room for improvement - we should probably remove things like milkshakes if your goal is to lose weight, or maybe limit them to marked cheat-days.

<comment><USER27> >For a lifter trying to gain weight, a milkshake might be perfectly fine.

Y'all should look into insulin resistance. Huge loads of sugar being bad for you is fairly settled science, with foods that have a High Glycemic Index(GI) being linked to the development of Insulin Resistance. This is only the most tested link between high GI foods and higher all cause mortality[1]. The linked study is on a population of high Cardiovascular risk, however considering the website is for dieting that might make it more relevant. There's a good reason the WHO guideline for sugar is a maximum of 10% of your caloric intake and a recommendation if 5%.[2]

I want to eat 1800 kcal in 2 vegetarian meals and a sample suggestion is 3 eggs and veggies(which is great) for the first meal, followed by 2 apples and almond butter and 2 bananas with yogurt for the second(labeled lunch). That's terrible, and going to set my diet up for failure. That's like 18% of your caloric intake as sugar, and in your last meal no less. You are going to burn through all that sugar and then feel hungry/hangry as hell when the insulin load in your body doesn't match your blood sugar.

Seriously, the way your website treats sugar is completely negligent considering it's proposition is that it's an alternative to counting macros. I'd love to be able to suggest your website but my impression today is awful.

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176720/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176720/)

[2][https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar- gui...](https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar- guideline/en/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It would be nice if I could indicate which meals are important to me if I pick fewer than 3 meals a day. Breakfast and lunch is not a winning combination, whereas "that small meal at 10:30 that doesn't really have a name" and "that meal at 5pm that doesn't have a name" would be useful.

<comment><USER21> Hit the 3-dot menu next to a meal's name to edit its settings. You can change the name (among other things), but it might complain if you try to reuse one of the default names.

<comment><USER28> That's not what I care about if I just need a recommendation instead of making this website my religion. I have no desire to become intimate with this website: it seems useful, and so it's reasonable to assume it gives useful information by default, not "after customizing it".

It currently tells people to have "breakfast" and "lunch". That's misleading at best, as those words are tied to ambiguous times, and don't result in a healthy eating schedule.

So even better: don't use meal names, use words like "shortly after waking up", "halfway through your day", etc. and then let people customise _those_ to map to words like "breakfast" or "lunch" if that's what they map to for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is amazing especially with the vegetarian options. I saw some comments about issues within a meal. I find it to be a creative way to get outside my comfort zone. However I do see 2 meals in the same day that are too similar. Some days have 2 meals with sandwiches for each while others don't even have a sandwich. If you can optimize the algorithm to address this variety issue, I am much more likely to follow it more strictly. Thanks for providing this service!

</comment><comment><USER30> For people with a big calorie budget (I put in 3k) the suggestions are pretty hilarious.

EX: This breakfast

        3 ham and cottage cheese sandwich (eww, btw)
        1 Whole wheat toast

The way it starts just adding more servings of things instead of more variety is a bit amusing

<comment><USER21> If you have a big calorie budget, try bumping up the meal's complexity from Simple to Moderate (via the 3-dot menu next to the meal). We should probably do that by default if you enter more than a certain number of calories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> First discussed in 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359542)

A large Show HN in 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640336)

</comment><comment><USER32> I wanted to create something like this ~10 years ago when I got into fitness! In fact, a few years later I decided to get serious about it and found out that this had launched and gave up on the idea.

Obviously, it seems super useful as a starting point. In order to be a real meal planning option however you'd have to optimize for micro-nutrients in the long term, and I'm pretty sure this isn't covered.

</comment><comment><USER33> My only complaint is if I pick "2 meals" it shows breakfast and lunch rather than lunch and dinner and I can't get it to flip.

Anyone know how to fix that?

Edit: even if I pick 3 meals, it comes up with a snack. I just want breakfast and dinner, is that bad?

<comment><USER34> Had the same thought. I find it very easy to skip breakfast and still not feel the need to go overboard at lunch but I have a hard time falling asleep if I didn't eat a filling dinner. Lunch + dinner only lifestyle fits me much better than breakfast + lunch only, I know a lot of people who try to fast from 8 PM to noon who do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Surely this data can't be right, I'm 5 foot 7 and 84kg, this has recommended 3100 calories a day. Won't that just make me gain loads of weight?

<comment><USER36> It depends on how much muscle mass you have, which it should at least approximate properly unless you did not enter the bodyfat percentage correctly. I think this just uses an average base metabolic rate as well, so if you fall significantly outside of that norm (much slower than expected, for example) then that will skew the results towards the wrong end of the scale also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've used both this and Platejoy, and I prefer the latter. It may have changed, but Eat This Much would routinely prescribe strange meals to meet desired macro targets. I remember one being a can of tuna, a raw red pepper, and a slice of cheddar.

</comment><comment><USER38> Do you know how many parts of an insect are in each jar? According to Scientific American, each of us eats about 0.5-1kg of flies, maggots and other bugs a year, hidden in the chocolate we eat, the grains we consume, the peanut butter we spread on toast. According to US regulations (which are easier to access than Australian data), 125g of pasta (a single portion) may contain an average of 125 insect fragments or more, and a cup of raisins can have a maximum of 33 fruit fly eggs. A kilogram of flour probably has 15g of animal product in it, from rodent excreta to weevils to cockroach legs.

</comment><comment><USER39> Where is the pricing page? I do not want to sign up for a service that I cannot afford later on, or that looks like a scam.

</comment><comment><USER40> Heh perfect for about 13ish days from now...

<comment><USER41> Haha. You have control over the menu?

<comment><USER40> You're right, definitely don't :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'd love to be able to skip breakfast! 2 meals selects breakfast and lunch, but i just want lunch and dinner

<comment><USER43> For me, I'd love to weight the meal size. I like a moderate breakfast, small lunch, (relatively) larger dinner.

Its generating larger lunches than dinners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What people need is a plan to buy groceries for n days (likely 7 but may be 3, 4 or 1) and a list of meals for each day. That are good. Make it specific to singles and it'll be really cool.

<comment><USER21> That's pretty close to what we do - we fill in a calendar with suggested meals to hit your nutrition goals and give you a grocery list, which you can change the # of days on.

It works well for singles, though if you're picky, you'll need to configure the options a bit to get meals that you consistently consider "good". Otherwise you'll likely have to regenerate a few of the meals to make sure everything looks good before shopping.

<comment><USER44> Ok I'll look more closely. The first interaction I has suggested a few odd meals and I figured it didn't make sense to shop for them

<comment><USER44> Unfortunately I can't see how this functionality works without entering credit card info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Slightly overkill, but just as a thought experiment, it would be neat to have something where you declare calories / macros / food preferences, how much time you have to cook and how many cheat days you want.

Then the system will figure out all of the ingredients for you, ship them to you through Instacart on a regular basis, put reminders on your calendar for when you should cook what, and optimize both for nutrition, variety, time and food waste.

<comment><USER21> We have some features for most of these things, but you have to dig a bit for it. To edit the macro targets: [https://imgur.com/u08DLNy](https://imgur.com/u08DLNy)

To change cook times, click the 3-dot menu next to the meal, and then when you regenerate, the plans will match whatever your latest settings have been changed to.

You can create a free account and use the single day generator, plus use it as a tracker, but with the subscription, we'll send you a weekly grocery list that you can export to Instacart (or amazon fresh) for delivery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Good idea but poor execution. Asking for 1,500kcal over two meals, I was presented with tomato & onion on toast and an apple for breakfast, and tuna salad & avocado plus a bowl of carrots for lunch. Ideally I would have been able to choose lunch + dinner, and something a bit more exciting - plus, I don't really like tuna!

<comment><USER21> If you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's name you can edit that meal's settings, including changing things from Breakfast to Lunch.

You'll probably also want to bump up the Complexity setting from Simple to Moderate to get some more interesting things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Very interesting to get ideas (as someone already used to counting macros). The default macro ratio seems a bit high in protein, personally I would recommend lowering a bit the carbs and upping the fat.

Also from my experience (lost 25kgs 15 years ago, fit) aiming to lower carbs in western diet usually has the side effect to forcing lower calories, not because you eat less carbs per se, but because a lot of food that can be abused and/or that are junk are carb based. I you aim for low carb and high fat/protein you automatically are looking at the better nutritional option if you eat out. And things like pasta or pizza are way too easy to refill for me, but with a plate of a protein and side vegetables I feel satiated after one serving.

I think keto is too extreme if you are not a nutrition geek, but just aiming at reducing carbs should get you a long way in losing weight and eating more healthy without overthinking it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I love this idea, but I think it needs a little work... maybe something that helps it avoid combining foods that are too similar into the same meal?

For breakfast, it keeps suggesting I eat a "high protein omelet" and 4 hard boiled eggs. That's a lot of egg in one meal. I don't want an omelet AND boiled eggs at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a good idea well implemented. There is much bemoaning the state of web experiences these days. Visiting this site and poking around, trying out their onboarding workflow, and seeing initial results, provides a welcome counterpoint. I'm in for the free plan. Now, to _do_ the thing is another matter, of course.

</comment><comment><USER50> Love the product, and have been following for years, but can you guys fix [http://swole.me](http://swole.me)? I like EatThisMuch but I don't need the meal generation and the fancy features -- I just need a quick and dirty way to create estimated meal plans!

<comment><USER21> Ah, looks like the food search killed itself again. Is that what you're referring to? I gotta add some restart watcher to the search process

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> this is very nice UI, and with some improvements, would be very handy.

Some feedback - 1) It should provide additional filters like 'gluten-free', 'histamine-intolerant' etc. 2) When I suggest 2 meals, it assumes that it is breakfast & lunch - when I might be thinking - lunch and dinner. Allow user to pick the option. 3) When it provides me the choices - lets say breakfast - eggs, onions and tomato omlet, then it should list these 3 ingredients - and i am allergic to 'tomato' \- i can then scratch it off and ask it to 'refine' \-- the next time, it should not return dishes that have tomato in them as a main dish.

<comment><USER21> The food filters are pretty limited until you create a basic account. Then you can do gluten free or any keyword based exclusions, but we don't have any data to factor in histamine intolerance.

You can also edit the meal settings if you click the 3-dot menu next to the meal name, or we have a "Week layout" editor that you can use to mix/match meals.

You can also give a "thumbs down" to specific ingredients like tomatoes and it will exclude recipes that have them on future regenerates.

We've tried to cram a lot of features into the app, but now one of our biggest challenges is managing the complexity and surfacing the most useful things people want. So this is very useful feedback to know what comes to mind first when you use the app :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> You may want to add a similarity checker on the foods. I put in "vegetarian" and got the profoundly stimulating options of "mashed chickpeas" and "carrots with hummus" for lunch.

</comment><comment><USER53> I tried the vegan meal planner but was a bit disappointed. I love the UI, good job. The value of the planner - not so much. It pretty much kept recommending meals like sandwiches and tofu smoothies and tofu stir-fries or stuff like hummus without any bread lol.

Would be awesome if you had a wfpb (whole-food plant-based) options as I feel like that is the healthiest possible diet one can follow (no animal products, no oil, low fat, no highly processed foods). It would probably be a bit harder than the usual american diets, but oh well.

I wish you all the luck with your product!

</comment><comment><USER54> This looks really cool. I'll play around with it a bit next year, but just from the first look, I might want premium :)

One suggestion: When selecting a ketogenic diet, change carb-target to net carbs automatically, or have a note telling one that this is an option.

One question: I found the family/couple planning article [0], is there a plan to expand this in the future so it's easier?

[0]: [https://help.eatthismuch.com/help/how-does-the-family- meal-p...](https://help.eatthismuch.com/help/how-does-the-family-meal- planning-work)

<comment><USER21> That's great to hear, thanks!

Re: your suggestion, I think it's supposed to switch to net carbs automatically - did it not do this for you?

For family meal planning, are you looking to have it meet two people's different targets? The simplest approach might be if we let you add a second person and you can set a % of your intake that they should eat, but then you'll likely have to weigh some fraction of their servings to have any accuracy (or at least some good eye-balling). Is that doable for you? I'm not sure there's an easily workable solution if the other family members need their own custom targets.

<comment><USER54> Auto switching: Nope, I was wondering why the generation was higher than my 20g target, after switching to net carbs it showed 17 for the day.

Family: I'd be fine with weighing. I'd love to be able to add a second person and set their calories goal, then have the meal planner spit out meals for the combined target while showing weight/percentage for each person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I love the loading text

Combobulate calories... Chopping onions... Crying because of onions...

</comment><comment><USER56> Why is 4 meals the default option? Do Americans usually eat 4 meals a day?

<comment><USER57> Why'd you jump right to "Americans"? There's plenty of other countries with as many meals as us.

<comment><USER56> Because the site is US-centric. And 4 meals a day is not that common and it's definitely unnecessary for most people.

If that's their goal, I hope people eating 4 meals a day realize they would lose weight by eating only 2 meals a day (without having to change what they eat).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This looks very interesting, but i think something is wrong with it. For 2 meals and 1900 calories, one meal contains 2 avocados, 300g of tuna and a few other stuff. Isn't it a bit excessive ?

</comment><comment><USER59> This website made me realize that I become completely disoriented if I see a meal plan that isn't built around a base of rice+beans. I wonder if other Latin American people here felt the same.

<comment><USER60> Yes, this so much. Here in Brazil a basic meal includes a nice proportion of rice and beans, with some vegetables and for the onivores, a portion of meat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'd like to be able to skip breakfast with the tool. When you select 2 meals, you get breakfast & lunch. With 3, it adds dinner. I want 2 meals, but lunch & dinner.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nice idea, though it did not work for me:

\- there is difference between carbs from glycemic load perspective - e.g. white rice vs oatmeal are totally different carbs for the same carb amount. You may think that you eat right amount of calories but your excess fat will not start to get metabolized if your insulin levels are high because of regular fast carbs intake.

\- same thing for "fat" \- olive oil vs pork - no breakdown of saturated/unsaturated fats - seems important for eating healthy

<comment><USER19> The bigger problem is we know so much less about the human body than we pretend. Everyone in this industry is falsely projecting confidence and giving wildly extrapolated advice on the basis of very fractionary projections of a highly dimensional complex system.

Eat moderate amounts of many different low processed foods' is by far the most rational advice, but sadly at odds with a food and diet industry that wants you to consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> The keto generator needs a bit of work. It was suggesting waaaaay too many carbs. Throwing in things like oranges where bacon would be the better keto option

<comment><USER21> Can I ask how many calories you entered? We've made a lot of improvements to hitting low carb targets recently, but maybe not for certain calorie ranges.

<comment><USER44> Keto is a fixed 25g

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I don't see the technical aspects of this project being discussed as much. Could you the author share some of the technical difficulties with a project like this? For instance, what were the hardest part to make this work? What are some improvements that you are planning on doing? Since it seems that the planner still has room for improvements as can be seen in the discussions here.

</comment><comment><USER65> Any plans on adding family support? It would be cool if you could put in our whole family's needs and it generate a meal plan for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER66> You know, I your heart of hearts, you're not going to generate a plan on this site and stick to it... _but_ , likewise, you'll remember roughly what the plan would have been, giving you a slightly better idea of the boundaries of a "good" diet and when you're in which side of them. And that could add years to your life!

</comment><comment><USER67> I like the idea. It would be great if they could extend it to show macros and let you choose a goal (e.g. build muscle, loose fat). In that regard I really like Scooby's meal planner: [http://www.custommealplanner.com/](http://www.custommealplanner.com/)

<comment><USER68> They do let you choose a goal? Lose weight, maintain, build muscle.

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v I feel like the need to log in and the way the signup is structured obscure what's the actual most potentially valuable part of this service to me, which is the integration with Instacart. It's also not clear how well that integration would actually work in practice, which makes me pretty wary about it.

<comment><USER21> Good point. The instacart integration works alright, but could be better if we had a tighter integration. We basically send them a text version of the grocery list and they just show searched matches for each item that you have in your grocery list.

For some idea, here's a screenshot of the grocery list page, and a link to the Instacart order page where you choose the matches (although Instacart's page is down for me right now):

Grocery list: [https://imgur.com/F6lsdXi](https://imgur.com/F6lsdXi)

Order page: [https://www.instacart.com/store/partner_recipe?guest=true&pa...](https://www.instacart.com/store/partner_recipe?guest=true&partner_name=eatthismuch&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eatthismuch.com%2Fpantry%2Fformatted- groceries%2Fd974d0bc13770%2F%3Ft%3D1576801353%26prefer_organic%3Dfalse&utm_campaign=eatthismuch_grocerylist&utm_medium=recipe_api&utm_source=partner_eatthismuch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Food Allergies. Please support food allergies.

If it is supported, it is difficult to tell, and thusly I can't use the service.

<comment><USER70> The "I don't want to eat" screen under "Food Preferences" allows a pretty wide variety of exclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I saw that there's a warning if someone's weight loss goal is dangerously fast, which I think is great. The creators should also consider limiting the app from recommending dangerously underweight goals (the app will happily recommend that starve yourself to achieve extremely low BMIs)

</comment><comment><USER72> About Food Choice: Can I flip the concept and say "I want my diet to look like {{this}} and want to eat a pizza" and it tells me how much pizza to eat PLUS what from my diet I'm lacking, and make suggestions that could help make up the difference (a protein shake with a,b, and c)?

<comment><USER72> I played with the concept a couple of years ago (mathfood.com as a proof of concept / toy / abandoned side project); and for me it was easier to build a meal I _wanted_ to eat; plug it in; and it would tell me how much to eat PLUS what I was short on macros. Those, I would plug with supplements (protein powder, fish oil pills, fruit). Not fun, but you hit your macros...

<comment><USER21> I think we emailed a bit many years back :) I like the idea behind mathfood, and thought it would make a really cool tool, like a smoothie-builder that figured out the right portions for your macro targets to round out your day's targets. Never got around to adding it as our main focus for a while has been to tone down the app's complexity, but maybe someday.

<comment><USER72> We did. Kudos on your success!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Nice! My girlfriend is on a low fodmap diet (see [https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fodmaps-101](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fodmaps-101) ), it would be awesome if that were a dietary choice...

</comment><comment><USER74> A big fan from way back. I was doing the "six snacks a day each less than or equal to 300 calories" a while back. Yes, they do have some weird combos, but the cream cheese + smoked salmon in a tortilla (300 calories) is still a fave breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER75> It seems at first glance that there is no way to pick that you are both a vegetarian _and_ want to follow a ketogenic diet. They are not mutually exclusive in real life, but in the diet-preference-picker on the website this seems to be the case.

<comment><USER21> Once you create a basic account you can customize the food preferences however you like. The preset diet options simply pre-select some food exclusions for you, but you can select "anything" and create your own set of exclusions from scratch.

As a forewarning, keto + vegetarian or vegan is one of the tougher things for our algorithms to do well. Maybe we're missing some critical recipes that keto vegetarians use, but it eliminates something like 90% of our available recipes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I'd like to use this with my patients but we use kilojoules, not calories.

</comment><comment><USER77> You need to offer more questions up front and offer more choices of meals for this to be a product people will actually use as opposed to a demonstration project. Also be cognizant that not everyone cooks.

<comment><USER78> What would you expect a tool like this to suggest for people who don't cook?

<comment><USER36> I had the opposite problem - with simple meals (the default) it looks like I was barely required to cook at all, just getting recommendations for some carrots and hummus or fruit on bread.

I guess that's something you could expect from a tool that doesn't require cooking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I don't want to be that guy, but looking at the first photo on this site made me think "you can eat whatever you want if your hobby is running in the mud with a sandbag on your shoulders".

</comment><comment><USER80> This is awesome, but doesn't seem to work for people looking to gain healthy weight.

5,000 calories/day is hard enough without needing to eat 3 bowls of corn flakes and 9 cups of greek yogurt for breakfast.

<comment><USER81> As a food addict I don't think this kind of statement will ever make sense to me. I have to work ridiculously hard at not consuming 5k Calories or more a day. When I weighed twice as much as I do now, 5k/meal wasn't unheard of. That anyone can describe eating as _hard_ baffles me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> For lunch I get a chocolate milkshake and avocado. Delicious. Nutritious?

</comment><comment><USER83> Drop the login: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login- walls/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/)

<comment><USER84> Don't they? Or are you saying this site is a good example of doing that?

<comment><USER83> From a UX experience, I think you'd be more successful if you would let the user experience everything your site has to offer and if they decide to continue (or stay with the site, save their prefs and eventually - <USER2> paying customers) - give them an option to create an account, because according to the latest research in UX, any login walls (even the FREE account ones) are detrimental. Check the article I linked above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> The planner suggests some very peculiar meals, like eating a whole avocado as dinner, or pinapple+cottage cheese with a side of pinapple for lunch.

This is essentially the applied version of an xkcd comic titled 'Recipes': [https://xkcd.com/720/](https://xkcd.com/720/)

<comment><USER21> Haha oh man. One time we accidentally added a mostly vodka mixed drink to the public pool of recipes and it started appearing in people's breakfasts... that led to some interesting feedback emails.

Was something like the pinapple+cottage cheese with a side of pinapple the first result it gave you, or was that after a few regenerates? I'll have to do some investigating if it thought that was the #1 best result.

<comment><USER85> Definitely after a few regenerates. I was looking for degenerate cases. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> This was a lot of fun but on my second set of options on mobile I got a sign up wall. I bounced. If I had played around more I almost certainly would have shared it to my girlfriend.

</comment><comment><USER87> I like this idea but it's a bit worrying to me that this company doesn't seem to have a nutritionist on staff. Seems to me that's a key missing element Of an otherwise great idea.

</comment><comment><USER88> This is great! Now if only it could track what food I had in my house by scanning receipts, it could tell me what I could make right now! Looks like great execution.

</comment><comment><USER89> Brilliant, love it. If only there were more vegan recipes

</comment><comment><USER90> I doesn't allow you to select macronutrient breakdown. Selecting calories is all well and good, but I would like to also select the macro ratios

</comment><comment><USER91> I don't really want 2 protein smoothies and a spinach salad for lunch.

Or... 2 servings of banana almond butter with 2 servings of peanut butter and carrots.

Nice idea, needs work.

</comment><comment><USER92> I know It has been made for us... But it's really strange to have a "mediterranean" diet with all breakfast only with eggs

</comment><comment><USER93> Raw carrots and plain greek yogurt.

Does this thing even try?

<comment><USER94> Actually sounds like a pretty cool snack - I'll try that first thing next, thanks!

<comment><USER93> It wasn't even suggested as one meal.

Carrots were lunch and yogurt was part of the breakfast.

So by commenting some random stuff I made better choices than this app, haha

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the feedback! If you want more interesting recipes to choose from, try bumping up the meal complexity. We set most meals to "simple" by default because most people, when they feed themselves, aren't cooking every single meal of the day, and it's easier to stick to a meal plan and not get lazy when things are simpler.

That said, one of the main goals of the tool is to handle figuring out portioning for you. If you find you don't like any of our recipes, you can enter your own recipes and the generator will incorporate it into the plans.

Also, I'll probably bump up the default meal complexity right now since that seems to be a source of a lot of feedback in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> This seems really cool, be nice if there was an option to localise units and currencies. Feels very US-centric.

</comment><comment><USER96> I also recommend you to try the alternative, swole.me. Personally, I like the recommendations better.

</comment><comment><USER97> How on Earth did we survive/evolve to this point without counting our calories/macros?

The stone age man must have been so obese and unhealthy without all this modern counting tools.

Or perhaps we need to count calories and macros because we are eating processed junk. Eating real food and your body responds correctly.

I find it sad that society has come to this level.

<comment><USER98> The stone age man wasn't spending half a day sitting staring at a screen either and was probably more physically active overall...

<comment><USER99> Exactly, Stone Age man had to hunt his food and that meant hiking/hunting all day long until you found some game. And then there were days where you had to go a day or a few without eating anything other than some berries.

<comment><USER100> _A priori_ that story seems right. But surely early man still had to survive Winter, so they actually would have had techniques to store and preserve foods (smoking, drying) and so would likely have picked a pile of berries/nuts and carried them to ration over the time spent hunting, or kept dried meat to hand? For sure you'd also have days where you'd eaten all the food, just as people do now.

<comment><USER101> Early man lived in places without winter

<comment><USER100> Equatorial regions still have seasons, wet-dry : I should perhaps have said non-growing season.

I mean early as in > c.8 kya.

Wikipedia suggests Scandinavia had hunter-fisher-gatherers about 11kya, I'm guessing they did preserving at least!?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> I want to be able to do 1 meal a day, but dinner instead of auto assuming breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER103> Haha it keeps suggesting I eat 4 hard boiled eggs in the morning.... I'll pass

</comment><comment><USER104> Today I'll be eating 6 portions of carrots, radishes for dinner

</comment><comment><USER105> There should be an option to skip egg for vegetarian people...

<comment><USER57> There should be all sorts of options. I don't eat fish so that basically puts me in the vegetarian or vegan categories even though I'm neither.

<comment><USER106> You can exclude just about any common specific ingredient, including eggs, fish and even specific kinds of fish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> I feel like the calculations could use a bit of tweaking.

</comment><comment><USER108> Would be nice to suggest water intake too

</comment><comment><USER109> SOYLENT, SOYLENT, SOYLENT, SOYLENT ...

</comment><comment><USER110> This is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER111> Christmas dinner with low fat

</comment><comment><USER112> I highly recommend keto. If you eat fast carbs when your glycogen reserves are full your body will turn it to fat immediately leaving you feeling hungry again even though you met your caloric needs for the day. The natural response is to eat more leading to obesity. If you nail the keto diet you don't have to plan your meals and go hungry in between to stay in shape. You can eat whenever you feel like it. That does mean your only carbs come from veggies. The calories from fast carbs should be replaced with animal fat, not protein. If you eat too much protein it gets converted directly to sugar anyway and is harder on your kidneys. I lost dozens of pounds without going hungry (except for that initial fast carb addiction breaking) or counting calories.

<comment><USER113> > If you eat too much protein it gets converted directly to sugar anyway and > is harder on your kidneys.

It is true that the process of gluconeogenesis can convert excess protein into glucose; however, I understand that it is very much an open question as to how much of the excess protein will actually be converted in an individual. For instance diabetics apparently experience a higher rate of protein catabolism due to insulin deficiencies than non-diabetics.

<comment><USER112> After rereading what I wrote I realize I made a mistake. It is about spiking your blood sugar which fast carbs do that leads to premature hunger. If you haven't filled your glycogen reserves you avoid the insulin spike, and if they are full the insulin spike is likely causing metabolic damage on top of the future needless hunger. Regarding the protein I swear I've seen low carb studies somewhere that did not improve diabetic conditions but they were all super high in protein. True moderate protein keto seems to be getting rid of at least pre diabetic conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> I use fitchef.nl. Weekly tailored menu with delivery integration of the biggest supermarket

<comment><USER21> Interesting, will check it out. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathanturner.org/2017/10/fun-facts-about-rust-growth.html <comment><USER2> You have to take all this with a mountain of salt. Boosterism is the norm in our space, sadly. If one devotes time to learning a technology it is personally advantageous if that technology takes off. Hence you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into" stuff. And the worse, yet related utter rubbish we see all the time. "C is a virus", "Perl is line noise", "failure to use JVM style garbage collection is idiotic and unsafe". etc etc. You can swap out those languages and swap in any others you like. It's pervasive and that is a shame.

This is the same kind of thing even if less stomach turning than the negative crud. It's pretty crappy and doesn't really belong here any more than Oracle and IBM global services adverts do. It is not anything like objective and in any sensible assessment of Rust should be roundly ignored. Just like big consulting firm whitepaper "Are you enterprise ready!?!?!"

All the very best to Rust hackers, may you achieve your technical goals in both your design and implementations and have loads of fun on the way!

<comment><USER3> It's a list of facts. You don't need a "mountain of salt" to take a list of simple, easy to check facts.

> you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already > wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into"

It doesn't say how wonderful Rust is, it says how many contributions it had, how many users on gitter, etc. You can interpret that like you want, but that's just your interpretation.

<comment><USER4> It's guerilla marketing where one person's fact is another's spin: the Amazon job requiring in-depth domain knowledge and leadership skills mentions rich Java or C++ experience as desirable while also requiring familiarity with Python or Rust.

The resulting fact is then "Amazon is hiring for developers with Rust experience.". If a candidate checks the other boxes they'd probably hire them if they knew VisualBasic... :)

Personally I don't like this forceful advertising stuff unless maaybe it's for a really good social cause which is otherwise ignored. e.g: privacy

<comment><USER5> How is it forceful? It's a link on a link board site. It said it was about Rust in the title. If you don't care about promotion of Rust, you should probably have not read the article.

This attitude pisses me off because advertising is a necessary task in all projects. It doesn't matter if it's commercial or completely free, volunteer- built open source software. You need to advertise the project to ensure enough people know about it to achieve a lasting, critical mass of users and developers. But this attitude establishes a norm of resentment towards project maintainers who are just trying to do well by their projects and their users. I think young people pick up on this and it makes them reluctant to promote their own projects.

I have no use for "know your place"isms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, A totally cs newbee, the Rust team has established a great community. I have learned a lot from the e-mentor(contribute to rust or rust lib directly with the guidelines from rust core developers). Now I'm the founder of Rustacean group in my school.

<comment><USER7> Rustacean, that's the first time of heard of that name. Absolutely fantastic

<comment><USER8> You should enjoy this then: [http://www.rustacean.net/](http://www.rustacean.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, a fun fact: there is nothing funny about that list :). It should have been called "Some facts about Rust's growing popularity".

Now, my predicament: I love Rust's type system and tooling, but it's really hard to justify to myself the pain of writing correct Rust code (borrowing, lifetimes, etc.) when I know I can get almost the same effect by using a GC language + immutable messages.

And I don't need that last drop of performance either.

So if you just want a native language with a good type system and a growing ecosystem, where do you go? Still Rust or something else?

<comment><USER10> You're overlooking that Rusts "solution"(borrowing, livetimes, etc. ) is not only solving the same problem that garbage collection tries to solve. Garbage collection is "only" solving the "memory resource problem". Rusts solution is a more general solution to the "general resource problem" .. like file handles, sockets and of course memory and besides that gives you tools to never get bitten by data races. Nothing (besides memory) garbage collection is helping you with. You have to mitigate those problems still in garbage collected languages like Swift, Go, Java, Python (to name a few) and various other solutions to help with this (try with resource, with statement, immutable message passing etc.) Rust tries to give you one solution "to rule them all". Is this better, worse? Idk – nobody does, the Rust people are trying to figure this out :) Nothing is carved in stone. And if you're more productive in another language you should use it! But you can only know by figuring this out for yourself. Rust works well for me – that's no guarantee that you have the same experience. Rust is still hard to learn and one needs to question himself if the effort in learning pays out at the end – it has for me, i guess/hope ;)

<comment><USER11> >Rusts solution is a more general solution to the "general resource problem"

It's true. Ever since I got familiar with the ownership concept, I've taken to writing C# IDisposables with disposable member variables like this:

       public MyObject(){
          this.myResource = new DisposableResource();
          this.ownsMyResource = true;
       }

       public MyObject(DisposableResource resourceToUseThatIDontOwn){
          this.myResource = resourceToUseThatIDontOwn;
          this.ownsMyResource = false;
       }

       public void Dispose(){
          //not pictured:  .NET's boilerplate dispose code

          if(ownsMyResource) myResource.Dispose();
       }

For the client I'm contracting with right now, mismanagement of disposable resources is the #1 issue in the codebase. 100k lines of code, and it's never clear who should be disposing connections. There are some objects with multiple constructors (like above) that have 'conditional' ownership. In Rust, it's impossible to have this problem, period...although the above C# construct simulates it, lol.

<comment><USER9> I agree and I appreciate what they are trying to do.

But just as a counter-argument, look how a simple lock looks like in Rust [1]:

      fn main() {
          let counter = Arc::new(Mutex::new(0));
          let mut handles = vec![];

          for _ in 0..10 {
              let counter = counter.clone();
              let handle = thread::spawn(move || {
                  let mut num = counter.lock().unwrap();

                  *num += 1;
              });
              handles.push(handle);
          }

          //...
      }

[1] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch16-03-shared...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch16-03-shared-state.html)

\----- edit: Just to clarify my point. The ownership model is a beautiful solution to the resource management problem. And as the parent pointed out, some concepts can be cleanly borrowed/reused in other languages.

But now, in Rust, in practice, you realize that this model requires a lot of boilerplate code just to make the borrow checker happy, even for simple things like using a lock: create Arc(Mutex(data)); clone the arc reference; move the new Arc reference to the new thread.

<comment><USER12> The issue really is lack of scoped threads forcing usage of reference counting to figure out when to drop a value. With crossbeam scoped threads implementation this looks much nicer.

        extern crate crossbeam;

        use std::sync::Mutex;

        fn main() {
            let counter = Mutex::new(0);
            crossbeam::scope(|scope| for _ in 0..10 {
                scope.spawn(|| *counter.lock().unwrap() += 1);
            });
            println!("{:?}", counter);
        }

Four lines to declare a mutex, start 10 threads that all lock that mutex, increase value behind mutex, unlock mutex, and join all spawned threads. There is a lot going on here (unwrap is arguably a noise here however, but the rest is straight to the point).

Also, it's possible to use atomic ints here instead of mutex. Verbosity of mutex actually helps a bit, because locking is fairly expensive and it's better to avoid locking if possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Now over 20% of Rust devs use it at work.

This one jumped out at me. I'd be curious how this compares to other languages. (I know nothing about rust besides that I see it on hn all the time, impressive list though!)

<comment><USER14> I've been thinking about introducing it at work. There was a good talk at RustConf about how to introduce Rust to your company.

<comment><USER15> Do you have a link to it?

<comment><USER14> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCsxYAxw3JQ&t=4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCsxYAxw3JQ&t=4s)

<comment><USER15> Thanks!

<comment><USER16> You may also be interested in:

"Supporting Rust by Using Rust" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-H6Hn_i4PQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-H6Hn_i4PQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Best fact: Rust users are apparently called Rustaceans. I did not know this, and have never seen this wonderful term before.

<comment><USER18> Please please please can we stop with the Rustacean/Gopher/etc crap? You don't need a cutesy label to identify that you use a tool.

I enjoy Doctor Who (though it's been getting worse for the last 5 or so years) but I do NOT want to be called a Whovian.

What's the first image that pops into your head when I say "Trekkie"? It's probably not someone with good health and hygiene, is it?

<comment><USER19> Check your hangups at the door man. I love being a gopher and a rustacean. I like being cute and having a cute name for myself and fellow community members. It's attitudes like this that created the massive gender divide in CS and it needs to end.

<comment><USER18> On the (very cold) ride into work this morning I realized my mistake.

I did not mean to say that being cute needs to go away. If you want to have a teddybear on your desk called Mr. Snuggles, that doesn't bother me in the least.

What bothers me is cutesy labels like what we're talking about here. They're so commonly used in a manipulative manner that I have trouble seeing them as anything other than scary.

I don't like them for when people watch TV or listen to music or use a programming language. And I despise them when companies try to act like there's a strong bond between employees by breaking them out.

Very, very creepy. Please don't contribute to that. That's all I wanted to convey.

<comment><USER20> Can you provide examples of this manipulative manner in which they are used? I'm having a hard time understanding your justification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> lain-dono However, it is still a new programming language. As well as golang. This has its pros and cons.

However, in cases where people say that some language is bad, it means that it simply does not fit their tasks.

(sorry, im using google translate)

<comment><USER21> > However, in cases where people say that some language is bad, it means that > it simply does not fit their tasks.

I disagree. It is possible for a language to simply be a bad language. Intercal is intentionally so. I will refrain from mentioning unintentionally bad languages in order to avoid a flame war.

<comment><USER22> Nobody would have accused Brainfuck of being a good language but it turns out that its radical simplicity works well for integrating with optimization algorithms for creating self-programming AIs. It's all about a niche, except INTERCAL, you're right about INTERCAL.

<comment><USER23> Wait, what? I really want to see some links or papers about that. Care to share?

<comment><USER22> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05703](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05703) is the best one which is explained in these blog posts [http://www.primaryobjects.com/2013/01/27/using-artificial- in...](http://www.primaryobjects.com/2013/01/27/using-artificial-intelligence- to-write-self-modifying-improving-programs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not on Twitter, and so cannot contact Jonathan Turner (whose website this list of facts is on). On this page, some of the links to the Rust Survey results are broken - they have a prefix of jonathanturner.org and have the actual survey results link within parentheses. [1] They should be corrected to link to the Rust Survey Results. [2]

[1]: [http://www.jonathanturner.org/2017/10/(https://blog.rust- lan...](http://www.jonathanturner.org/2017/10/\(https://blog.rust- lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Results.html\))

[2]: [https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey- Resul...](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Results.html)

<comment><USER25> I'll let him know, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Rustaceans? Would recruiting agencies go for that in job ads?

"Are you a top rustacean and looking for a challenge in AI and Big Data and want to work in an international team with young and dynamic rustaceans? "

<comment><USER27> Good point. The term doesn't sound good. I'd rather call myself a Rubyist or a Pythonista. What we call something matters. Presentation matters. Some geeks think they're hyper-rational, but do you turn up to a job interview in pyjamas? A new programming language should use a positive and cool name.

<comment><USER28> "Rust" is positive and cool. Job ads can just use "Rust programmer" instead of whatever cutesy demonym. I don't look at job ads often, but I don't recall seeing terms like "Rubyist" or "Pythonista" used in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Indeed.co.uk has 2 jobs in the UK for title:Rust and one of them is for a Ruby Developer. When that changes I'll start taking Rust seriously.

</comment><comment><USER30> And yet not a single project written in Rust is out. The only project is Servo and nowhere close to production.

<comment><USER31> There's a good chance Rust code is on your machine. If you have a recent version of Firefox or Dropbox there's Rust inside.</comment></comment>


If it has lots of comments, it's probably buggy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/05/byron-cook-sla/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ezyang+%28Inside+245s%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I'm not a heavy commenter, mostly because I'm yet to work in a team, but there are many reasons to comment a lot. Sometimes the whole readme for something like a javascript library api is the file header. Maybe you want to make clear what you've started/done incase others are allowed to edit it (though if you have to point some things out you shortened too much).

<comment><USER3> Yes, I don't think Byron was knocking API documentation in the form of comments. My interpretation is that when someone edits clever code they don't understand fully, they tend to add lots of comments—and that (not the comments) is absolutely asking for lots of bugs.</comment></comment>


The Paradox of Sharing: should you share a contest if you get extra entries? - <AUTHOR> http://findingscience.com/statistics/2012/06/04/playing-for-3k-share-or-no-share.html

<comment><USER2> The first graph here is wrong. Recall the constraint that only you and people you invite can enter. If you invite _n_ friends, you have _n+1_ votes. Since each of your invites also gets a vote, there are _(n+1) + n_ votes total, or _2n + 1_.

So, for a given n, your chances of winning is _(n+1)/(2n+1)_ . The limit of _(n+1)/(2n+1)_ as n->infinity isn't 1, as the graph implies; it's 1/2. ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit%20%28n%2B1%29%2F%...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit%20%28n%2B1%29%2F%282n%2B1%29%20as%20n%20goes%20to%20infinity)). So the more people you invite, the closer your chances of winning get to 50%.

If none of your friends accepts your invite, you have one vote, and your friends have no votes. 100% chance of winning.

If one of your friends accepts your invite, you have two votes (your original, plus your bonus), and your friend has one vote. 2/3 chance of winning. For two friends, you're at 3/5; for three, 4/7, etc. Note that we're _above_ 50%, so the delta in your chance of winning is actually _negative_ for each friend you invite.

The author is also confused whether you get an initial vote or not, but that's less important. The author didn't seem to count the friends' votes anywhere: "If two friends sign up, then you have a 2/3 chance of winning, then 3/4, then 4/5, and so on." If two friends sign up, there are either four or five votes total, neither of which is divisible by three, as that sentence states.

But the author's final conclusion is correct -- at least, it's close enough; you want to share with your friends such that they have enough time to enter the contest, but not enough time to share withe their friends. The appropriate time, of course, varies per-friend.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't quite understand the conclusion formed in the first half... that your odds increase as more friends join. I would think it would actually decrease for every friend that joined with an asymptote at 50%.

Assuming you are the only one in the competition, you have 100% chance to win. Invite one friend and you now have a 2/3 chance to win (2 entries for you, one for him). Invite another friend and you now have 3/5 chance (3 entries for you, 2 for your friends). Invite another and you have a 4/7 chance to win (4 entries for you, 3 for your friends). The general equation is (n +1)/(2n + 1), which approaches 50%.

Am I wrong with that?

<comment><USER4> Haha, I just posted the very same comment on the blog. The only thing I could think of is that you win _if one of your referrals wins too_ (like AppSumo does with their MacBook Air contests).. but then in the hypothetical "only you + friends" scenario, you'd have a 100% chance of winning(!)

I'm no statistician though so I suspect I'm missing something.

<comment><USER3> I think the author messed up. Logically I was thinking "wait... it should go down", and then when I started to do the math I _started_ doing the same mistake that the author made in the calculations until I realized I wasn't adding 2 entrants to the total pool for every friend invite (the bottom term). Easy mistake to make, but I fear the article's conclusion is wrong. Instead, the answer should be a resounding no (assuming you don't gain some marginal utility for seeing your friend win instead of some random stranger).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The final conclusion is incorrect. I've gone into detail responding to heeton, but I now thought of a simpler way to explain it.

First, the case in which you are the only entrant is irrelevant. Your chances are already 100%... why share?

For all other cases, think about this:

-Getting one extra entry DOUBLES your chances of winning.

-Supposedly, the network effect of inviting friends offsets the above. Think about what that means. The number of people you are able to get to join through invites has to be MORE THAN HALF of the total number of final entrants (if there are 10,000 entrants already, you have to cause at least 10,000 more to join to offset the doubling above).

The author is essentially stating that by the end of the contest _the majority of the entrants_ will have been caused by _you_. There is no universe in which this makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER6> This completely ignores the fact that in a real competition, you are NOT the only person entering.

If you were in a competition with 10k (or any high number) other entrants, inviting a friend will almost double your chance of success.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. The comment at the end "Now imagine there are hundreds of other entrants, even further decreasing your odds" makes no sense. Those hundreds (actually, more like you said: tens of thousands) of other entrants make the negative effect of inviting your own friends negligible.

Example: let's assume there 10,000 entrants including you, maintain the assumption that "a new person will sign up each day based on your initial invitation", and give it 30 days. Therefore, you only get 1 extra entry and 30 of your extended friends have signed up (each getting an extra entry except the last). Your chances have gone from:

1/10,000

to

2/(10,000+30+29)

You've increased your odds by _98.8%_! And you could do _even better_ by waiting until right before the contest deadline and inviting as many people as possible.

The break even point is ridiculously low too: only 60 entrants under these assumptions. So even with just "hundreds of other entrants", you should share.

Keep looking for that science, bro.

<comment><AUTHOR> That ignores the effect of your friends sharing with their friends and so on. I added the final graph to illustrate this point - yes, having 2 entries is better than having 1, but the network effect of your friends pulling in their friends eventually kills your odds.

<comment><USER5> Your "network effect" assumptions are rather silly. After all, by the end of your last graph you've caused a _billion_ extra people to join the contest (2^30). Give me a break.

If I were really to invite 5 of my friends, their most likely response is:

a) not to join at all

b) not to share (that's extra work)

c) or being generous: invite one or two people

But let's roll with the post's bizarro assumptions that each accepted invite results in 2 more and see what happens if there are _just 6_ other entrants initially (this problem favors your argument with less entrants, not the other way around).

Your chances without sharing (remember, those other entrants are going to be able to bring in a billion persons each):

1/(1 + 2 * 6 * 2^30)

Your chances with sharing (you get two extra entries):

(1 + 2)/(2 * 7 * 2^30)

That's right. Every human being alive has joined. Only 6 other people started in the contest and you still improve your chances _157%_ by sharing.

The absolute only case in which it makes sense not to share is when you're the only person in the contest. And I would hope most people know not to try to improve on 100% odds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> zck is right about failing to account for the friends votes - which does mean an asymptotic approach to 0.5 rather than 1. I updated the graph (and the example fractions). That does, however, change the conclusion, that you shouldn't share with friends at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this a "should" as in "is it in my own selfish interests" question, or a "should" as in "is it right to harass my friends in order to marginally promote my own interests as part of yet another goddamn evil viral marketing scheme for yet another goddamn internet startup" question?

<comment><USER8> Read the article and find out?</comment></comment>