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Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

Should companies eat their own dogfood? Uh, yeah.

I used to work on sports gambling apps and yet I never once gambled using the real production app. Because I saw the data. And behind those data points are real people having their lives ruined by some growth hackers and psychologist PMs trying to increase session length. I know how the sausage is made. I practically have the gambling addiction hotline number memorized because it was required to be on every screen.

Maybe businesses like that have no business existing, then.

Pretty much everyone I know gambles on sports and for most of these guys its like a $50 bet, not a lot of money. No more than a few beers these days at a bar. People get addicted to anything, lets work on having people receive treatment if things become a problem rather than ban everything that most users are using responsibly. Might as well ban video games of you really want to get some people out of some deep holes.

Surely you do not work at Purina.

> Surely you do not work at Purina

I happen to know a handful of people who started pet food companies, albeit boutique ones. (California.) They all taste their pet foods. I've tried some of the treat biscuits, and they aren't half bad, though I wouldn't necessarily reach for them.

I'm not an expert on cat or dog digestion. But I think anything they can eat, humans can, too. (Just not the other way.)

Growing up in California, one thing we were taught as kids is that pet food is safe for human consumption, and can be used for food after an earthquake as emergency rations.

It won't taste good, but it will prevent starvation!

> pet food is safe for human consumption

This is false in general, and dangerously misleading at best. In particular, some dog foods contain ingredients (bone meal IIRC, but don't rely on that) that can pretty much destroy a human's intestines (which are much less hardy than most animals's because coevolution with cooked food allowed cost-cutting). Pet food sold in California might (might) be required to be safe, but that's dangerously unreliable at best.

Well, when I search human consumption of bone meal I get results saying it might be good or might be bad. There's a risk of intestinal blockage but that takes a whole lot and would happen in dogs too.

Searching is not suggesting any other particularly dangerous ingredients, other than to say it's not great long term. But on a level like "be careful not to get scurvy", not "will destroy your intestines". And that you should watch out for bad storage and still probably avoid raw meat.

Not sure why you say that. The FDA regulates pet food the same way as human food: https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-food-feeds/pet-...

I heard it the other way around. Dogs in particular can eat things that might kill a human.

Chocolate is poisonous for dogs and cats, and an amount that would be harmless to you will kill a dog if not promptly treated.

If I work for purina then my _dog's_ gonna eat that dog food, by golly. And maybe I'll at least give it a sniff.

Speaking of the devil, I had to carry somebody's stray dog home (again) when I was on my jog this morning, and man that was a fat dog! Dunno what he eats, felt like krispy kreme and quarter pounders. Maybe I oughta start me a dog food company. Too many fat dogs in this danged town.

you're reiterating GP without addressing exactly the counter examples that i allude to.

Do alcohol makers try their own products to ensure consistency day-to-day? I would hope so. I would certainly hope candymakers do too. Those are particularly bad examples.

ask yourself if you're willfully misconstruing what i'm saying in order to low brow dismiss my point.

jedberg claims he consumed ads every day in order to empathize with this customers. the obvious implication is that everyone at such a company has the obligation to "try their own products".

Your analogy is weak, so I pointed it out. Reddit created their experience a certain way; why would you go out of your way to avoid seeing your product the way your users do?

You haven't presented a single argument as to WHY an employee of a software company shouldn't experience their product as their users do.

Talking about product testing is a deliberate red herring, though. Nobody was talking about some web designer using adblock during the process of implementing ads on a site. That would be a very difficult hurdle to put in front of yourself.

Jedberg, who I know for a fact ran Reddit's infra singlehandedly for a while, claimed he consumed ads as a matter of understanding the user while holding the job. Apparently he grew a brain and decided to block ads after that job, as smart and well informed users tend to do.

I suggest turning off JavaScript for most sites, which keeps the ad blocking tasks to a minimum. Blocking trolling users is another matter entirely.

Master distillers definitely do. Not necessarily every single day, but for every single run of the stills, yes.

Distillery staff will also occasionally test that the caskets being matured are doing okay.

Source: visited 5 out of 7 distilleries on Islay.

> visited 5 out of 7 distilleries on Islay.

Oh that would be _wonderful_. Some day!

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