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Comment by papa_bear | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

A lot of the recipe quantities are unreasonable. This is a common outcome of taking base recipes and scaling them without thinking. For steamed potatoes I got:

* 1 5/8 medium potato

* 5/8 tbsp butter

* 5/8 tsp dill

* 3/8 tsp garlic

* 1/16 dash salt

These aren't real measurements, nor do many of them matter. Only the butter and potatoes matter here and since "medium potato" means basically anything the specific amount is largely worthless. Yes, there are gram amounts below but you are better off rounding to something reasonable (just round the butter down and don't even include measurements for things like dill).

More generally, this feels very much like the HN approach to cooking (there have been many similar tools) rather than a general product with a wide audience. What led you to believe that this is a product that serves a serious need? In my experience, people who know how to cook don't need this and people who don't know how to cook are going to see a lot of these recipes and panic. BlueApron seems to have hit a similar problem, where once their customers learned how to cook they just do it themselves.

It's suggesting Avocado Toast for breakfast. I'll never be able to afford a home if I use your app!

Is okay though. Most of the Oz is on fire, so there won't be a lot of homes anyway.

Hey! I really like this concept, and I could imagine myself as a paying user for a service like this.

Some feedback:

1. I can't see any information at all about the different membership plans. It says "Get started with a free account", but there's no information about what a free account includes and what other types there are.

2. You mention Google/Facebook remarketing in your privacy policy, which is a gigantic turn-off for me.

3. Regenerating a meal while hovering over a food item causes this bug to happen: https://send.firefox.com/download/476d36ae77d82097/#0LA0xL7u...

This is really nice. I love the UI, and am probably going use pieces as inspiration for something very unrelated I'm building.

Are you building this as a side gig? How many hours per week is going into it?

Thanks! I started it as a learn-to-program project almost 8 years ago, and it's slowly grown since then with 7 people working full time on it now. It actually got posted on HN in 2013, and the boost helped me enough to hire my cofounder.

Wow. Great job! Will definitely be giving it a go.

A minor critique, I got recommended strawberry oatmeal, with strawberrys, rolled oats, fat reduced milk and brownulated sugar.

I'm aware there are lots of differing opinions on macros, but I would certainly skip the sugar (given there already is 2 cups of strawberries) and go for regular/whole milk, which should even out fairly similar on kcals.

I noticed the paleo and keto options, but seeing as the oats, milk and strawberries already push this outside of those diets, it's still an awkward default recipe.

My very nitpicky 2c.

Great work!

I used to use this, and it doesn't seem to distinguish between perishable and not. It'll make a shopping list for one week and throw away a ton of leftovers. Also, it was pretty tough to get it to meet macro targets.

Food waste is my criticism as well. Two tablespoons of black beans? Two sticks of celery? And then do what with the rest?

Not sure if these two issues are still current but here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841027

Responded, thanks!

really like the ui and experience, you're on to something here

these meals just seem...odd. I have a very basic diet, no avacado toast or carrots with hummus. maybe your initial options could have like, burgers and fries or pizza or something that's more standard? my first impression is that this a great website, but the meals aren't for someone like me

Why, when I chose metric on registration do I get my meals in ounces?

There doesn't appear to be any way to delete my account.

It should auto-convert units like ounces and pounds, but I'm not 100% sure if it does on the apps. As a fallback, we show gram weights on everything, but obviously not the most convenient to bust out a scale all the time.

To delete your account, click your username -> membership status -> delete account.

Had never seen this before

not sure how much I’ll use it with the holidays coming up :)

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