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Also known as the "cooking recipe on the internet effect", where all you really care about is the ingredients and assembly instructions, but you first have to go throught pages and pages of text on how the author feels in the autumn when the sun hits the colorful leaves through the morning fog, creating this light and mysterious glitter that inspired her to create this recipe which, if we're honest, really is just the n-th variation of some well established dish that people have been making more or less like that for generations but which now has received so much more value by a proper classification into the author's internal system of emotions and motivations.

Don't forget the obligatory google spam;

Did you ever feel the urge to bake cookies but didn't know what ingredients you need to bake cookies? Even Aristoteles knew of some ingredients for baking cookies. Yes that is right baking cookies, or baking biscuits like the British would say has a long history. No need to go to the shop when you have the recipe for baking cookies.... etc. etc.

On the one hand, I love my "New Best Recipe" cookbook, that has several paragraphs on the particular variety, whether it should be crunchy or soft, regional variations, common errors and the types of flaws they cause, and the science/chemistry involved. I would much rather read a cookbook/recipe website with that information than without it.

On the other hand, Google apparently can't distinguish between quality content and auto-generated SEO filler drivel. It has to be auto-generated, right? No one could write that stuff by hand...

This is done for copyright reasons.

You can't copyright the raw list of ingredients, as it is a factual statement with too little creative input (in the list, not the recipe itself!) to get copyright protection.

To stop the recipe blog just being scraped by some recipe site and get zero visitors/impressions for themselves, they have these (at least) "minimally creative" intros that qualify for copyright.

...then the recipe sites just changed to extract the factual non-protected recipe from that, and the arms race escalates. "Whisk the eggs in with a feeling of freedom, and duty to the ancestors" - COPYRIGHT, BABY!

I doubt the connection between copyright and number of visitors/impressions. But of course it's clear that the intention is to provide some kind of "added value" by encapsulating the pure recipe in some narrative. It's just not what most people actually want.

IANAL, but aren't recipes copyrightable in general? Let's say I use the exact recipe for Coca Cola, isn't that punishable as well, if I didn't change it at least slightly?

> Let's say I use the exact recipe for Coca Cola

Coca Cola recipe isn’t copyrighted or trademarked. They went the third route “trade secret” and interestingly enough, the exact recipe they use is still secret, despite all the years it’s existed.

(Yes, some have approximated it though if memory serves)

I'm guessing that several have recreated the exact taste of Coke, but due to brand conditioning, the image of the can prevents your brain from experiencing it the same way. At this point, Coke probably doesn't care if someone recreates their taste or exact recipe. Their unique branding, and common belief that the recipe is a mystery, makes people experience the drinking of a Coke as unique.

Funny enough, it's just like tickling. You have to know that it's Coke to taste Coke. Drinking another brand that tastes identical to Coke in blind tests is like tickling yourself.

> Drinking another brand that tastes identical to Coke in blind tests is like tickling yourself.

What other brand tastes like Coke? I guarantee I can blind taste identify most (all?) the common US brands of cola.

I dunno, whichever ones do, or none of them even. I would be surprised if no one's been able to nail it even once. I just think that if you found one that tasted identical to Coke, it wouldn't matter.

No, recipes aren't copyrightable. Otherwise you could prevent someone from disseminating information about how to make a glass of icewater.

No, as a rule, recipes aren't copyrightable.

The specific wording and 'flourish' of recipes is copyrightable, but the actual factual, meaningful content - the one which impacts the 'success' of the recipe - fundamentally can't be restricted by copyright, you can't get an exclusive monopoly to make a particular concoction through copyright law (you can with patent law, but it has other restrictions).

It's similar to copyright on design for e.g. clothing - the arbitrary artistic parts can be protected with copyright, but the functional parts can not be restricted that way.

So if you know how to make Coca Cola and want to do that, copyright law won't protect that. Perhaps patent law might (I'm not certain) but there is no patent on the Coca Cola recipe - and if there was, the recipe would have to be published in the patent application, and it would expire in 20 years, unlike copyright. However, you could not freely say that it's exactly like Coca Cola (trademark laws would restrict that), and it does matter how you got that recipe - trade secrets are protected, and if you got the recipe through illegal means (e.g. breaking&entering, or bribing an employee) then you could have repercussions for that.

I just read an article about AI and ethics in a national newspaper. 90% was about the researcher and not about the research. I really dislike human interest stories when expecting some more depth.

The same thing for me with YouTube videos. I don’t want to sit through 10 endless minutes of bullshit, self-promotion, and approximately 5931 cuts for that single answer to my question. Drives me insane that more and more content is provided as videos only, and all the inefficiency that must bring.

Check the Sponsorblock extension for Firefox. It not only blocks sponsor segments but also has a „jump to highlight“ function which jumps directly to the answer of the (clickbait) video title.

That, or simply avoid Youtube search results - like you surely already avoid Pinterest results.

Youtube results sometimes make sense. I use them when looking at some electronics setups because it is easier to understand the visual part (locating the connector etc.) than to guess though a written description (the connector is the black square that is next to the ventilator).

Sometimes it is useful for coding, where there is some refactoring done that helps you to understand the "why" of some changes.

But it clearly depends on the video. Many have the 20 useful seconds burrien in 4 minutes of BS.

YouTube removing the dislike button counts has made that problem worse for me. Fortunately the chrome extension seems to have brought it back for now.

The rise of YouTube has certainly resulted in some simpler content becoming less usable. While installing a new thermostat, I googled "4 wire thermostat colors" a while back and got an onslaught of videos that were each several minutes in length. It's literally 4 pieces of information, that's it. It's made worse by Google promoting YouTube results, since it probably drives more ad revenue.

On the other end of the spectrum, when I look for information about how to assemble a transmission (or similar) I instead find someone who has cut together some short video that doesn't actually contain good shots of the various assembly steps.

don’t get me started on recipes.

internet recipes are designed to be below 40min, if you look at the instructions. but for certain steps, developing the actual flavor would need to be longer - but „customers“ don’t want recipes that take longer.

so all produce a very limited taste range

Many of them just lie. For example all of the ones that pretend you can carmelize onions in 10 minutes.

This is the best kind of comment.

I’ve always wondered about this! That being said, the answer provided still seems somewhat of a “here’s our best guess”—of course this can be said about most answers, but this just seems particularly far on the “just a good guess” side of the spectrum, rather than a more substantiated theory.

Er... maybe I'm being dense, but doesn't the second paragraph describe exactly the same thing as the first, just in a more complicated way? (1): touching yourself is predictable, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling; (2): when you touch yourself, there is an inhibition mechanism that prevents your own touches from tickling you, so only unpredictable touches cause tickling. Both phrases actually state that your brain, your nervous system, whatever, can differentiate between your own touches and someone else's (or even touching inanimate objects, think spiderwebs) and has a way to ignore your own.

One is stronger than the other. All self-touches are predictable. But not all predictable touches are self-touches. For instance, someone else could “tickle” you in a consistent and repeated pattern and it would be predictable.

Curiously, both of those theories above could be true at the same time: Your brain suffers prediction error or simply unexpected touch error that causes you to go into a little frenzy of laughter and wriggling at the sensation, so in response it developed a body-wide message response that says "self touching coming up, take it in stride", specifically because we all need to touch ourselves all the time and can't afford to suffer the tickling caused by light, sudden touching.

One thing that makes me unsure about this theory is that I have the impression that tickling largely only works when the touch seems to have been volitionally initiated by a being we see as animate. I don't feel like it works the same way with a surprising touch from an inanimate object, or even a plant, even though that wasn't initiated or expected by ourselves.

Do other people not have this difference?

How much of that is due to how complex tickling someone is? Any repetition and you'll get used to it. Theres also that study proving even rats can get tickled. Which gets me wondering if crustaceans can get tickled as well.

> Any repetition and you'll get used to it.

Tickling was a torture method in ancient Rome and people can die from it. So no, suspectable people don't get used to it. Not all people have the same sensitivity however, so I can imagine it was like that for you.

Wikipedia is sceptical about that:

"An article in the British Medical Journal about European tortures describes a method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet because they had been dipped in salt water. Once the goat had licked the salt off, the victim's feet would be dipped in the salt water again and the process would repeat itself.[...] However, it remains unclear if this method was ever used in practice as it is only described in the 1502 Tractatus de indiciis et tortura by the Italian jurist and monk Franciscus Brunus de San Severino – a treatise that actually cautioned against torture in general – and while it seems clear that Franciscus Brunus had not made up this practice, the issue is left open whether the inclusion in the treatise is based on hearsay, (reliable) eye-witness accounts, or personal experience.[...] This uncertainty does not preclude this anecdote from being repeated in popular culture, for instance during a 2013 episode of the British satirical quiz show QI.[...]"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickle_torture#Historical_Anec...

Tickling is restricted to pretty specific areas that you naturally guard because you’re vulnerable. Are you really getting touch there by inanimate objects much?

FWIW, I find various massager devices to be tickle-inducing.

Now imagine if all such fluffy articles posted on HN have such a gist; how much time and sanity it could save. https://hngists.com is my 15-year-old nephew's attempt to do it. It would be great if you could post your comment there.

I'm sure this is useful to some, but I come to HN more for longer-form articles these days.

This change might have originated when I ditched programming as a career, or merely growing older. Dunno.

Language is so disposable these days (much of my received text messages are about 50% emoji now), I really respect someone who takes the time and effort to ply an interesting tome out of English.

There's no reason to use another website. This one works quite nicely.

An advantage of hngists: you can read all the gists of all the 30 articles on the same page without navigating to a separate article page—a few clicks and a few minutes could be saved per visit.

> I'm pretty grumpy about reading long, long, loooong articles

Why, what else you have to do that's so important? I enjoyed reading the history and the current state of this fascinating subject.

true, every one of my activities are just (very modest) contributions to the heat death of the universe, but even so... with such a straight forward title I'd rather have a direct answer

for long-form lovers, why can't we have both? :-/