
Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes - keithasaurus
https://www.cinc.kitchen
======
bruce_one
I'm a huge fan of the fact this does weight conversions (cooking by weight is
now my favourite, and I've been looking for a site that is just weights, so
this looks like a win to me :-) ).

One note I'd make, though, is that US, UK and Australian cups are all
different sizes. (and possibly others?)

And from the one recipe I saw it looks like you're using UK cups? But,
possibly not as well... Either way, it might be worth calling that out, or
allowing for cup-type specification similar to how you do for weights?

Somewhat related, some sites call out egg weights too, and that might be
something to try and do here too? (Because, if nothing else, egg weights are
often written on the carton which acts as a guide; even if people don't
actually weigh them.)

Another thought, again... Some kind of showcasing? A la Github's explore, or
even "awesome" pages? I might be off, but to me discovery is really important
for recipes and I love browsing "cookies" or "desserts in a hurry" or similar;
and pages akin to that with community curation could be nice?

Hmm, another random idea... Some kind of more granular forking to facilitate
things like "do you have a stand mixer?" and that kind of distinction?
(Coupled with "equipment switches" maybe?) In the past I've done recipes that
required something I didn't have, and I've had to tweak fairly aggressively to
make it work, but when/if it did work, maybe adding that feedback into the
recipe would be valuable? e.g. user ticks "don't have a dehydrator", and
recipe tweaks to "use your oven and set it low", etc.

Anyway... It looks awesome! Keep doing what you're doing, and I'll use it :-)
Just some random thoughts that came to mind :-)

~~~
askvictor
> Somewhat related, some sites call out egg weights too, and that might be
> something to try and do here too?

Some technical recipe books I've used just specify the weight of total egg.
Not that useful for a home cook though.

For that matter, I'm curious what egg size descriptions is like in other
countries; in Australian shops they're like condom sizes - I haven't seen
'small' or 'medium' eggs for over a decade.

~~~
egeozcan
In Germany, they are "S", "M", "L", "XL"; although I've seen "S" only once,
ever.

~~~
germanier
Size S is usually sold to be processed and not to end-consumers. If you really
want to buy them you probably have most luck in organic food supermarkets
(unless you need a few europallets of them).

------
NickBusey
This looks promising and fairly well done, but it's lacking a few critical
features IMO. The first obvious one is a way to Diff a recipe and it's Forks
(unless I missed that).

The harder and maybe more important one, is an issue that GitHub itself still
hasn't figured out how to solve either. There should be a process for a fork
of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have
the fork be able to be voted on so that the 'best' fork as voted by the most
users becomes the canonical 'Chicken Noodle Soup' recipe, or at least display
the forks on main recipe ranked by popularity.

~~~
keithasaurus
Yeah, it's on the list of things to do. Once there are enough recipes/users it
will also be useful to see the history/ancestry of recipe. There are already a
few that are forks of forks. All the recipe data is immutable and versioned,
so that will happen at some point.

~~~
jitl
A++ would love to see the diff feature :)

------
Jaepa
The idea for this has been around for a for a while.
[http://forkthecookbook.com/](http://forkthecookbook.com/) goes back to 2012.

And its an interesting idea. Recipes can't be copyrighted and and recipes are
generally derivative. The data is generally well structured, and fairly
standardized (ingredients, equipment, instructions, photo, with optional
fields for prep & cook time, servings, notes, difficulty, etc). But there are
two primary issues:

1\. Recipes don't really have a single inheritance. For example, I cook a lot
& really enjoying cooking, but when I'm trying to make something new, I won't
follow a recipe. I will read a bunch recipes, and try to understand the
underlying ideas & steal the ones I think are interesting, then implement my
own. So say I look up Tufo Matar find 3 recipes the make my own, if I want to
contribute which recipe do I fork?

2\. This may have been dealt with by the use of stars. when I was using
forkthecookbook, there was no way of "bookmarking" recipes and the so users
forked them, which lead to the results having huge number of identical forks.
That being said it seems like the star system may resolve that. But currently
it looks as though unmodified copies of the recipes still appear in the Forks
list, which makes it harder to find benifical changes. Also it would be nice
to have a history section with a message summarizing what changed.

All that said this does look nice.

Additionally, a nice feature to have would be to "import" a recipe, though
since phrasing of a recipe is protected this gets a little bit legally
complicated.

~~~
chewxy
hello, FtC author here... it's mainly a zombie project now (you know, dead,
but still has active users)

~~~
fanpuns
I tried this FtC before this one and really liked the idea. Did you ever do
any write ups about making this project or the launch?

------
zdrummond
Nice!

It is clear you put a lot of care into this, and I am sure there is a bucket
full of features you want to get to, but I have a big request.

What I really want is one step beyond a place to store recipes. I want a meal
planning site! I want to create a pool of recipes that we like, and plug in
how often this week we will eat at home. Then outcomes a grocery list and a
plan for each day. Maybe it even sees what we have liked, and suggested new
recipes to add to the pool.

I am this close to pulling the trigger on PlateJoy, but my biggest hurdle is I
can't add recipes I _know_ we like to their list of experimental (to us)
meals.

Really, I don't mind/enjoy cooking, but never seem to carve the time out to
plan an entire family of four's meals a week in advance.

~~~
rojobuffalo
Hey I'm also working on this (separate from OP). In the meantime you might
check out [https://www.eatthismuch.com/](https://www.eatthismuch.com/).

~~~
papa_bear
Thanks for the mention - I started ETM with a similar goal in mind. We have a
"personalize this recipe" function that's functionally similar to forking, but
we never expanded on it much. We're planning to improve the social and
browsing features eventually, but have some other priorities to get to first.

Also, cinc looks really nice - awesome work OP

~~~
alexkadis
I forgot about ETM! Thanks for creating it. Just logged back in and there was
a friendly note about the new features (really good idea!). FYI there's one
bug on the page:

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

{{ TEAM_NAMES }}

The Eat This Much team

------
xyclos
Should have the fork icon be an actual fork rather than the github icon.

~~~
xyclos
I didn't expect this to get so many points. I'll add a bit more substance:

The ability to base your own work off of others' is one of the most important
features of github. It is probably also a feature that probably wouldn't
necessarily be understood by somebody not in technology or not familiar with
how git works.

If this was my product, I would have named it it "Fork". Putting that feature
front and center and making it really obvious that it is the stand out feature
of the app, IMO, would help people to get right away why what you've built is
so awesome. Even if they don't know what the heck github is.

------
keithasaurus
If anyone wants to know the stack it's Django/Postgres on the backend, and an
Elm SPA frontend. All data goes through an undocumented REST API.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
Nice project!

If you need more data, check out this:

[https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/recipebook](https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/recipebook)

I've also enabled it to talk to this via TOTP, if you ever decide to switch
to/want to enable mongo as your recipe doc store:

[https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/ARMS](https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/ARMS)

Good luck with it, and keep us posted!

~~~
keithasaurus
Thanks, but we have our own importer. BTW, I'd suggest writing a metadata
fallback in your library. You'd be surprised how many sites will work just on
parsing json linked data or schema.org's Recipe format.

Good luck!

------
justboxing
This looks great! Congrats on shipping!!

I like that you have a scaling feature. =>
[https://www.cinc.kitchen/info/features](https://www.cinc.kitchen/info/features)

I know this may be too much to ask, but if you are taking requests, some basic
nutritional info (ex: Protein content, avg. calories) might make it even more
awesome for those of us tracking daily calories, protein (for atheletes etc).
I understand things like sodium, fat might vary depending on how much salt or
oil the person cooking the recipe uses, so maybe this might not be feasible to
implement...

~~~
mch82
Good idea... Formatted to look like a standard nutrition label would be a nice
touch

------
roryisok
I love this, signed up straight away. I've also recently discovered
cookingforengineers.com and I love their card recipe system. it would be so
cool if you could add something similar - I hate the traditional model of
recipes, I always have to read and re-read them several times.

I'm not sure how you would go about adding this though, its quite different
from the structure you have already

~~~
keithasaurus
Yeah, I've seen what they do. I like it in some ways. But with user-submitted
input, their recipe card system at some point will be insanely
wide/large/unwieldy.

------
mch82
Maybe a button to order the ingredients from Amazon or similar?

Edit: And maybe a shopping basket in case someone wants to order ingredients
from a few recipes.

Edit (again): And don't forget about letting people order the equipment too.

------
acalderaro
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but should the "What's the name mean" in the
about section be "What does the name mean?" or "Whats the name mean?"

The first is "proper" the second is colloquial. At least that's what I
thought.

~~~
keithasaurus
It's not proper grammar :) Proper grammar would be "What does the name mean?"

It's written this way simply because it's a question I've heard a lot, and
when people say it, they usually combine "what" and "does" and say "What's the
name mean?"

------
AAAton
neat idea!

A weird piece of feedback: Something about the UI gives me a substantial
feeling of loneliness.

~~~
jasonjayr
I don't think it's loneliness -- I think it's a stark contrast to most of the
other major recipe collection sites out there that are visually cluttered.

I think that's a refreshing change for this type of site; You may want to
consider a means of allowing users to curate and discuss recipes on sub-
domains, some kind of API or some other means of splitting it up? A kind of
crisp, clean social platform for food prep ....

~~~
AAAton
I don't seek more flashiness or colors. I actually appreciate the simplicity.

Thoughts on what the feeling could be rooted in:

I Think it would help with more than 3 recipes on the front page. That gives a
feeling of emptiness that can be confused with loneliness.

I also think there could be a better choice of image cropping. One that does
the trick of making them all one size, but that also lets me see the food and
thus inspires me.

------
jordanwallwork
I went for a pretty ambitious test recipe (Heston Blumenthal's Egg in Verjus,
Verjus in Egg), unfortunately I'm not able to save it - it's complaining that
one of my ingredients is an invalid weight - 3.3 grams Gellan F. If I remove
it then it complains about the ingredient before it, so I'm wondering if
there's an ingredient limit? It's at about the 40th listed ingredient. It took
me ages to input everything so I do hope I'm able to save it!

The recipe entry experience was great though, some small details that I think
would improve things even further:

\- Esc should clear the 'text entry' modal, I kept clicking this by accident
when wanting to add a new section heading and it was a nuisance having to
click the 'close' link

\- '\+ Ingredient section' should replace last ingredient row if blank

\- Would be nice to have section headings (similar to 'ingredient sections'
for recipe methods) to break up recipes with multiple discrete sections \-
Hard to find errors in long recipe. Could be more prominant, or add a 'jump to
next error' button?

~~~
keithasaurus
Thanks for the detailed issue. Sorry for the trouble! Could you send me the
recipe link? I'm unsure know why you'd be hitting the issues you mentioned.

I'll try to respond to the issues you raised one-at-a-time:

1\. 3.3 grams should be valid. Unsure why that would be a problem unless some
weird unicode stuff???

2\. There's no ingredient limit.

3\. Esc clearing: I agree :) Clicking on the black transparency layer should
also clear it. I just need to build it in. Maybe tomorrow :)

4\. Plus -- you're right. Hadn't thought of that

5\. Headings: I've left that for users to choose to do on their own. Hard to
get too strict about that stuff. (Same reason steps aren't numbered.) I'd
suggest doing all caps and a line break at each section.

6\. Errors: I agree. There are a number of things ahead of that on the list of
priorities, but it's a good idea.

Thanks for the descriptive feedback! Heston Blumenthal's recipes are always
welcome on the site! Let me know if you run into any other trouble.

------
gyrocode
Interesting idea... Phrase "fork a recipe" just got a new meaning.

~~~
mch82
Might be worth user testing some different ways of saying "fork" in case the
people who cook aren't the same as people who code.

One to try might be "Remix" and "Remixes"?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
"Adapt", "modify", "tweak", "personalise", ...?

Is forking really good for recipes, do you want to automate inclusion of
upstream changes, surely not?

------
DerfNet
this is a great idea. How many times have you looked at reviews on recipes.com
or whatever and the first 10 include a half dozen substitutions, basically
making a different end product entirely? each of those reviews could instead
be a fork. awesome!

~~~
keithasaurus
That's the idea. Still needs some work :)

------
LostCharacter
Nice site! I look forward to using it in the future. One thing - when using
lastpass to generate a password, it fails to fill the first password and only
fills the "repeat" portion. Likewise, it fails to fill the username field for
login.

~~~
keithasaurus
Yeah, I have this problem with Mac's keychain on Safari as well. I haven't had
the time to fix yet, but it's helpful to hear the same from someone else.
Thanks.

------
omnimus
Is it open-source project? Are you looking for contributions? I am passionate
cook - designer - frontenddev. I struggle with recipe sites and where to save
mines. If this was somehow libre and had future i might want to contribute.

------
yellowapple
So I'm trying to submit my cheesy toast recipe as a test. Unfortunately, I
can't:

\- "1 slice" (of bread) is not a valid quantity

\- "to taste" (of black pepper) is not a valid quantity

Oh well. I guess I won't be using this then, at least not yet.

~~~
keithasaurus
those can be handled:

1 | slice bread

(blank) | black pepper, to taste

Some aspects of the UI/UX still need work.

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
yellowapple
I tried both of those; still complained about an invalid quantity.

------
overcast
Looks like a more complex version of what I had created with imadefood over a
year ago. Similar features, with the branching, etc. I've been working on an
iteration into a slightly different direction. As it didn't pick up any steam.
Good luck :)

As others have stated below, forkthecookbook, forkingrecipes, and also
recipelabs. All do basically the same thing. I just don't think there is
enough market for it. Certainly was a fun little project though!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10853665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10853665)

~~~
keithasaurus
Looks like a 502 error on the site. Is it still up? I'd be interested to see
your approach if possible.

~~~
overcast
Took it down to concentrate on other work, though I'd be open to discussion.
hello@imadefood.com

------
trwhite
Nice idea. You should get Schema Json
([http://schema.org/](http://schema.org/)) on this so the recipes can be
crawled properly.

------
fanpuns
Nice project, I like the format of entering new recipes. I think you will get
good uptake even from users who don't know what GH is :)

Is this project open source or does it plan to be at some point? I've looked
at some of the other projects out there that are similar, but many seem to die
based on the founder running out of steam or getting busy with other stuff. I
would really be interested in contributing to this or a a similar project if
anyone has a suggestion for one that is open.

------
whatnotests
AMAZING idea.

Please allow me to G+ connect or facebook connect, b/c I don't want to have
yet another password to remember, and I'd like to (maybe?) share some activity
on Cinc with my FB peeps.

Just a thought.

~~~
keithasaurus
At some point ... :)

------
jstoja
I really like it. I often look for a receipe with many likes online and have
to read dozens of comments to adjust it...

For example the receipe of some cake where nearly all commenters advise to put
1/4 of the sugar advised. If you don't read the comment, chances are that even
with a recipe approved by many people it tastes like shit.

I really hope this will grow and success!

------
joepour
This is really cool, congratulations on shipping!

Have you thought about simplifying the UI by changing "Forks" to something
like "Twists" or Takes (as in 'my twist on' or 'my take on').

We all understand what I fork is but the average user will likely get
confused, and not just because a fork is a kitchen utensil!

------
azeirah
Please pay someone to add a few thousand recipes, and please keep working on
this for a few years. This can be huge.

------
bruth
Wow! My friend and I had this idea years ago.. possibly pre-GitHub. I am glad
someone finally made it! Well done. My particular interest was seeing how a
recipe deviates from the original.. a recipe graph of sorts. That would a fun
way to visually explore and find related recipes that are similar in
ingredients.

~~~
overcast
It's been done to death already. No one really seems to want this, even though
it's awesome branching recipes.

------
taherchhabra
Is there a way to compare how it actually tastes? , These days I am baking
cakes by watching recipes on youtube, the texture always comes correct and I
use exact weights as described but the taste is somewhat lacking. It would be
good if we can give reference to a local cakeshop for its similarity to the
recipie

~~~
keithasaurus
Do you mean can you do that in comments? Or are you asking if we can automate
a sense of taste? The latter would be extremely difficult. Not sure I
understand :)

------
markdown
Viewing source made me sad. One would think that recipes of all things would
survive the appification of the web.

------
tylerdurrett
Next step: npm cook spaghetti-and-meatballs

In all seriousness though, definitely looking forward to a public API. Great
work!

------
x0
Is there a way to do pull requests? I'd like to go through and convert a few
people's °F to °C.

~~~
keithasaurus
No, but you can fork it for yourself if you want. I think most people that are
writing fahrenheit want fahrenheit. However, at some point there will likely
be a conversion ability for that.

~~~
F_r_k
It's a shame that units are not understood by the system. Once imputed they
should be stored as K or °C and then displayed as the user wants

------
melicerte
Nice idea. Just that code is a universal language, english is not. Is there
any way to handle multiple languages for a same recipe outside of forking?
forking is one way to adresse this issue but there would not be any other
value to the fork than translating a recipe.

Just asking

------
joshumax
I started a teensy bit of work on something sorta like this a while ago:
[https://github.com/joshumax/git-cooking](https://github.com/joshumax/git-
cooking)

Glad to see somebody actually brought a similar idea to fruition :)

------
jerrysievert
might I ask that recipes be presented in h-recipe format?
([http://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe](http://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe))
it's simple to do, and works really well.

~~~
keithasaurus
What's the case for h-recipe over schema.org's recipe format?

------
qrv3w
This is cool!

A couple weeks ago I was looking for a way to find similar recipes (forked
recipes, in a way) and I ended up making my homebaked solution. [1]

[1] [https://timetomakefood.com/find](https://timetomakefood.com/find)

------
midgetjones
I think this is a brilliant idea, but I wonder if the terminology should be
changed? I think the concept of saving a copy of a recipe, then editing it
would come much more naturally to the 99% of people who have never heard of
github.

------
enobrev
I've been wanting to try this for a while. This looks great! Nice to see some
excellent suggestions in this thread as well, that I definitely never thought
of. I hope this is successful, as I'm a huge fan of the idea.

------
INTPenis
But it's not really like github for recipes until you solve the url interface.

I should be able to go to a user and their recipes with the same ease as on
github. Having unique IDs for recipes exposed in the URL isn't really
necessary.

------
amadeusw
Looks great! I'm inclined to host my recipes there.

But before I do that, what is the future for this site?

* Do you monetize by getting a cut from the shopping cart? * Will I be able to easily download my data in the future, like I do with git repositories?

~~~
keithasaurus
I built it primarily for myself. It's able to run on cheap hardware and is
very lightweight, so I plan to keep it up indefinitely at minimal cost. I
haven't begun looking into funding/monetization, but that may happen soon. All
data is already available via the API, so at some point, there will be a
"Download my data" feature.

~~~
amadeusw
Awesome, I'm in.

------
52-6F-62
This is a great idea!

My one criticism right off the bat is the name -- the pronunciation isn't
immediately obvious. ("Sink?", "Kink?", "Kins?", "Since?")

Then again, I don't know if that's just me...

~~~
keithasaurus
It's meant to be a pun for "kitchen sink," and also to work with the notion of
"sync"-ing. It's pronounced like "sink." Cinc is the number 5 in Catalan and
refers to the amount of senses we use when cooking.

~~~
52-6F-62
I retract my criticism then! Also, it seems I should have read the About page.
Might I suggest adding it to the top navigation? I think some further
explanation/self promotion (especially as you've written it) is warranted.

edit: Also should have known. "Cinq" is five in French as well.

------
julee04
this is a crazy fast site! can you share what you are using to host and serve
it?

~~~
keithasaurus
AWS/nginx on a fairly minimal instance. speed probably comes from:

\- it's an SPA, so it's mostly just doing API calls.

\- the database is designed to be fast at a few orders of magnitude of size
beyond its current state

\- everything is gzipped

~~~
sandinmyjoints
And no ads, unlike pretty much every other free site with recipes!

------
jdjdjdhjehd
Why does your terms of service mention a web development agency?

------
TekMol
Interesting project, well executed!

Are you storing the recipes in Git repos or in the Postgres DB?

If in Postgres, what is the format? Do you put each receipe in a single JSON
field? If not, what does the data structure look like?

------
zitterbewegung
I'm working on a project and having a API for recipes would be great. I see
there is a mention on your ToS but I don't see where you could access it?

~~~
keithasaurus
It's undocumented, but feel free to check out the calls in your browser's
debugger. There's no guarantee of API stability or token permanence at this
point. So integrations are not advised yet.

------
rkuykendall-com
Love it!

Would be most useful to me with calorie support. I see some users are hacking
it by adding it to the title or in the notes. That should be a strong hint.

------
kbanman
Very well done!

I had started on a similar idea a while back, but never got around to it. Even
have a cute domain for it (pifork.com) in case you're interested :)

------
damerms
It's like
[http://www.forkingrecipes.com/landing](http://www.forkingrecipes.com/landing)

~~~
keithasaurus
Cool. Hadn't seen this before. Is it your site?

------
Toast_
Looks good. I think you should also consider adding the "keto" diet on there
as well. Maybe meals < 10 net grams of carbs?

~~~
pyedpiper
yes, then it will be easier to avoid diets that assume our digestive system
hasn't had any evolutionary pressure since the neanderthals...

~~~
Toast_
I'm confused, do you actually think the ketogenic diet is based on a
neanderthal diet?

------
linopolus
Another site totally unusable without JS enabled, where it could be just used
to add dynamics to otherwise nicely generated HTML..

------
thearn4
An analog to Travis CI for this would be interesting and delicious.

An analog to Docker images would be something like Blue Apron or Hellofresh I
guess.

~~~
noway421
>An analog to Travis CI for this would be interesting and delicious.

Surprised it is not a startup yet..

------
rcpt
"guthub"

~~~
aracarie
Open Sauce

------
joombaga
How are you doing volume to weight conversions? Do you have a big table of
weights-by-volume for different ingredients?

~~~
keithasaurus
Yeah, densities and fuzzy matching. It'll get more intelligent eventually, but
does a pretty good job on common ingredients at the moment.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
It'd be good if you could customise what kinds of foods should be displayed in
what measurements.

E.g. I'm seeing 1 cup of steamed rice - being British I have no idea what that
means. I turn metric on and it tells me 237 milliliters of rice, whereas I
would be expecting grams. I'm pretty sure measuring solids by volume is a US-
only thing.

------
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Looks good!

The mix of Sans-Serif and Serif is a little weird.

------
yousifa
Would like to pm you. Can you please put your contact info in your profile or
email me (in my profile)

------
amelius
> Chicken Alfredo Pasta with Sweet Potato Noodles (480 Calories per Serving)

You probably mean 480 _kilo_ calories.

~~~
zimpenfish
It's been commonly accepted that "calories" without qualification means
"kilocalories" in prose / speech for many years.

------
macygray
I have a feature request: add diffs and ability to show who have starred and
who have forked your recipe

------
boromi
Does this not support issues and comments? If not those would be welcome
additions.

~~~
keithasaurus
There are comments (if enabled by the author). Not sure if issues will make
sense? Would you be writing recipes collaboratively?

------
williamle8300
Are sign-ups disabled? Not getting my confirmation email

~~~
keithasaurus
No! We've just had so many that our email server has been backed up! It should
come soon. Apologies for the delay!

------
kwhitefoot
Minus marks for blank window if JS is disabled.

------
m3kw9
I was sold on Forking, I'm sure no pun intended

------
livas
this is a pretty cool thing. just maybe they can change that design. Anyway, i
like that.

------
k__
Seeing metric units written out feels kinda odd.

Otherwise very nice idea :)

