For real. The bullet-point summary at the beginning with a "Why this matters for..." immediately followed by, "This isn't just a theoretical exercise—it's a real example of..." Dead giveaways.
Wild to ask, "Is it legal, ethical, responsible or even harmful to build in this way and publish it?" AFTER building and publishing it. Author made up his mind already, or doesn't actually care. Ethics and responsibility should guide one's actions, not just be engagement fodder after the fact.
If I thought this was clear-cut 100% unethical and irresponsible I wouldn't have done it. I think there's ample room for conversation about this. I'd like to help instigate that conversation.
I'm ready to take a risk to my own reputation in order to demonstrate that this kind of thing is possible. I think it's useful to help people understand that this kind of thing isn't just feasible now, it's somewhat terrifyingly easy.
I love Go! Been streaming it on Twitch for the last five years or so (https://twitch.tv/mirthturtle), lately as a "Go airline" (MS Flight Simulator & Go simultaneously). There is an engaged community in the Twitch category, if you are looking for Go friends, but still, nowhere near as large as Chess.
Their "People love our replies" section shows a bunch of RandomWord-1234 accounts giving positive feedback. I wonder if those are included with the service.
Found one on iMessage! Wished former coworker a happy birthday, and it said, "Siri found a birthday: March 1". Though when I pressed update, it correctly marked it as the 29th.
I do all my <3 mile trips on a ebike these days unless it's raining/snowing or I need to carry something large. It's great. The lifetime cost of ownership is a little more than my annual running costs for my car.
To add, you can convert acoustic bikes to e-bikes with torque sensing using the tsdz2 which is pretty decent once flashed with the open source firmware by casainho.
Sorry, but many localities make it illegal for bicycle on the sidewalk (where they should be doing it). That's why many folks do it.
Laws making that illegal are extra stupid since it's relatively hard to kill a pedestrian with a bicycle but downright easy to kill a cyclist with a car.
> Sorry, but many localities make it illegal for bicycle on the sidewalk (where they should be doing it).
No, they shouldn't. The sidewalk is for pedestrian traffic; that's what the "walk" in the name signifies.
> Laws making that illegal are extra stupid since it's relatively hard to kill a pedestrian with a bicycle
Sidewalks can't handle much bike traffic, are suboptimal for it (which is why purpose-built separated bicycle trails are built like roads, not sidewalks), and are in many places less safe for bicyclists, crossing driveways with less visibility for drivers and bicyclists than is the case with the road proper.
I love Mod Archive! Managed to find 99% of my favourites from the 90's on there... though they don't provide a way to play a list in sequence, so I made one for myself: https://www.mirthturtle.com/crunchy-reliable-beats
Ironically it's been unreliable since HN traffic started crushing Mod Archive.
I don't think the math works. $5k + $500/m, for 6 months: that tops out at $160,000 yearly revenue for the 20 projects. Even if it's the same 4 employees spread across all projects, that's $40k yearly salary each as a base. Sounds bad!
It'd take years for any winning bets to pay off and I don't know how you'd pay your employees.
I have a feeling they have some VC backing and they're just farming the work out to cheap overseas companies and freelancers. Sounds like it's some quasi-incubator banking on finding a billion dollar unicorn.
The one way it makes sense is as a mechanism to buy cheap equity stakes. The person running the scheme adds more money to pay market rates for sufficient staff, which effectively buys them a 5% stake in each company.
If it is the same four people across all companies, and their fully loaded cost is 200k (not a lot in the valley, but plenty in many other places), then that works out as 32k for a 5% stake. Compare that to Y Combinator's 125k for 7%.
If you accept that you can't run 20 startups with four people, no matter how much Club-Mate you feed them, then you could try staffing each position at 25%, and be paying 200k for that 5%. Not so hot, but maybe still good enough?
Wouldn't be too bad for me (as a dev) if it's with the understanding that I'd be working part-time. Even 20 hours a week would net a pretty decent junior-level pay (and 10 would be even better).
They'd have to be really simple projects, though, if I'm expected to bang out 20 of 'em a year.
But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries, now just in electronic form.
I think that may be taking it too far, particularly since Google effectively created this entire syndrome.
I’ve got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me. That’s the truth. I don’t know why the WaPo wants those us who are like me to pretend otherwise.
It's weird how you go from "to me" to "wants us." Surely you can imagine that people might be interested in history and stories around food.
I personally don't give a shit about mathematicians and scientists personal lives, but I don't have a problem imagining those who do. I think the numbers say it all. Others think that the examination of every detail of the person who wrote the numbers first might give them some insight into how to create more numbers.
In my experience, traditional English usage there would use context to replace "us" with "those of us like me". But since clearly that is not the case, I have replaced it so it is no longer 'weird' to you.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you polled recipe searchers, the vast majority (>66%) would say that they don't want the story. In fact, I'll back that. If you're in San Francisco, I will bet $1000 against your $1000 that this will be the case and we can equally bear the price of running this. An associate will contact you if you're up for it.
Bloggers who are putting care into their work typically write more for the people who follow them than for the randos who drop in from a Google search. What do people who subscribe to foodie Patreons care about? The people who have a list of bookmarked recipe blogs? What about people coming from Instagram posts who are drawn in by a beautiful photo, what are they hoping to see? Why are we establishing a framing that the people who should be most catered to are the people who care the least about the cook and their work?
I don't think we are establishing a framing where the randos (folks like me) are of prime importance - merely establishing a framework where they exist. The WaPo piece speaks against recipe aggregators who simply strip the recipe down to ingredients and algorithm. i.e. I am fairly comfortable with recipe websites writing long-winded stories for their audience while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients and algorithm. It appears that the WaPo writer opposes the existence of the latter.
The story writers don't have to write for randos, but I (a rando) rather enjoy the stripping tool. So I think I'm going to install OnlyRecipe.app and if OR's author is pressured by WaPo-like folks to shut down, I'll probably write my own since parsing that schema is trivial.
And I have a day job in HFT so I can't be shut down. After all, no one can boycott me or my products.
> while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients and algorithm.
So what you want is for recipe developers to have their work scraped, stripped, and presented outside of its intended creative context and revenue generation mechanism, and while other people may think this is unethical, they can't stop you so that makes it fine.
If Google changed their algorithm to rank recipe sites by efficiency (ie less narrative is rewarded), I bet the recipe developers would change their sites overnight. I suspect the main audience for the stories is the GoogleBot.
No. What makes it fine is that the user agent is my tool to read content that servers send me so it is free to display or not display sections of the content using whatever formatting I desire.
I agree with this. These app don't take anything from the experience of people who want to read these asinine stories -- it just helps the folks that are there for the ingredients.
If this gets shut down I would love if a general, open-source solution could be developed to spread the capability. A generic Python recipe parser that anyone could hook up to a front-end. If the apps proliferate at a high enough rate they can't all be shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_algorithm#Newton%E2%8... is interesting but I wouldn’t want Google Sheets to display it in a modal every time I hit the “/” key. A recipe needs a very high signal:noise ratio when it’s going to be followed in real time while food is cooking.
That's why it's all in one place on the screen at the bottom of the post, so that when you have decided you should cook it, you can just leave it there to look at.
Same. Usual routine is, "Hmm I think I'll make some buttermilk biscuits". I google it because I want to make them. I zero in on how basic the ingredients are (simpler the better for some things), maybe how many "stars" it has, or if the site is reputable.
But rarely do I go on a narrative stroll where I happened to stumble on a recipe that I decide I might make some day.
I don't think it is taking it too far honestly. Even if it can be a bit jarring to see it written out like that. Part of trying food from other cultures/countries/families is getting to see how their history is reflected in the food they prepare. I read cookbooks to get a feel for a place, even if I don't plan to cook everything in the book. Or more correctly couldn't.
The complexity is imagined. It's not complex at all. People using Google for a free recipe are looking for...the recipe. If they were looking for stories from immigrants, they would have googled that.
I mean, this is true. But it’s weird being in the center of that raging fire. We were worried about getting sued personally (there were lots of threats) and or having our family or work brought it into it. Lots of people tried to get me fired. In the moment, it just wasn’t a fight we wanted to fight.
Maybe keep ads so that the bloggers can keep their current revenue stream. As someone who loves this idea, all I care about is easy access to the recipe. Its ok with me to have not too intrusive ads.
The site is back up, although it now seems to contain exclusively "free" recipes (i.e. coming from CC sites and old books).
IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to copyright claims.
1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes content private, hence uninfringing.
2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).
Private as in a single user getting stuff and saving it in their own account, not resharing anything. That's not infringement, or rss feed aggregators would be infringing too.
