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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly what "time" means for recipes and why ingredients list say things like "onions, finely chopped" and not just "onions".

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.

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> Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason

That might be true, but the folks who are actually reading these recipes aren't restaurant cooks working in a professional kitchen.

Sure, but having wildly different conventions would be even more confusing.

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!"

> My water won't even have started boiling by then.

So boil your water in a device designed for the purpose: an electric kettle. Takes about a minute.

> 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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c

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