I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
So boil your water in a device designed for the purpose: an electric kettle. Takes about a minute.
Electric kettles are certainly fast, but this feels like an exaggeration. Technology Connections[1] made a good video on this recently and even boiling roughly 1 quart of water (which is significantly less than you'd typically use for something like cooking pasta) required almost 5 minutes to come to boil in an electric kettle.
That might be true, but the folks who are actually reading these recipes aren't restaurant cooks working in a professional kitchen.
In any case, I am very disappointed with HN for this thread. While I also think "actual time" would have been a more useful standard, words mean what they mean and the comment quality is ...
- "Hey, surely everyone is lying, instead of me misunderstanding a common convention."
- "That universal convention used since forever is dumb. Me complaining to you surely is going to retroactively change this in every publication ever."
- "How dare you tell me that I misunderstood something. I am sure you are personally responsible for that convention."
- "Of course a butterfly is made out of butter, it is right there in the name you moron!"
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
You might not like this convention, but nobody is lying. It is somewhat surprising that you genuinely thought "writers routinely lie" and never thought to stop and think whether your understanding might be wrong.