Comment by dtgriscom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtgriscom | Hacker News Reader

I have an Instant Pot, and love it a lot. But, here is some perhaps relevant anecdata:

1. The original stainless steel removable liner is embossed with nice, legible capacity levels. Unfortunately, they're way off: the "9 cup" line is actually about 12 cups. (Not a big deal; we just don't use the markings.)

2. I bought the Instant Pot Air Fryer Lid lid add-on, which was supposed to support temperatures of up to 400°F. But, after a lot of testing, I found that it was seriously limited as to the heat it would supply. Basically, the internal temperature never got over 360°F, and in fact after eight minutes of running the heater would turn off and the unit would cool down to 270°F and then maintain that temperature. All the while, the external temperature would happily show 400°F.

My guess: they discovered late in the development cycle that the air fryer lid would overheat and kill older Instant Pots. They couldn't fix this after the fact, so they modified the lid firmware to limit the actual temperatures, but keep displaying the desired temperature, hoping users wouldn't notice. (I complained, and they promptly send me a new lid. But, it had the same flaw.)

My Amazon review with the details: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2D14J5XXHC2GA . (Yes: I may have too much time on my hands...)

IMHO, a company which ships clearly flawed products and hopes their customers don't notice is just burning their reputation.

IIRC "cup" refers to the plastic cup (160ml) that comes with the instant pot.

EDIT: 1 rice cup is 180ml- meaning it will produce 1 cup of rice when done.

https://toirokitchen.com/products/rice-measuring-cup

I'm not even American (i.e. I don't ordinarily use anything else called a 'cup' (unless playing cricket)) but that seems unreasonably dumb. Of course that will cause confusion? That's surely fraudulent in it's deception or reckless unawareness of its deception?

'Cup' is a crazy unit for a number of reasons, one of them is that there's an Imperial cup, a US cup (customary), and a US cup (legal), and a metric cup, and that they're all different. But an entirely new one on me is that there's an 'Instant Pot cup' that's only roughly ⅔ the size of any of them! By comparison the other difffernces are intellectually annoying but completely inconsequential!

It's a "standard" amount for rice cookers- https://www.thespruceeats.com/measuring-rice-for-rice-cooker...

1 rice cup produces 1 cup of rice when cooked

That says 180ml, so similar but different again? Still dumb either way. Don't call it 'cup', if you must use cups just use ⅔cup?

It's like if I invent an 'air fryer' as though that's something new, and then talk about an '18" oven tray' which is actually 6" wide, but in my air fryer line that's the measurement of what we call '18" oven tray'. Who's winning what? How is this good for anyone?

It’s fairly standard for cooking appliances. What your coffee maker refers to as a “cup” is also not a cup.

What's a 'coffee maker'? My espresso machine's portafilter basket takes as much coffee as I put in it. So does a cafetière. A Nespresso/other pod based machine is a fixed amount which as far as I'm aware is always specified in ml if at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeemaker

Ok, the first picture there is of a Turkish stove-top style device which (and the vague description of any coffee-making device too) as I said takes as much as you put in, where do cups come in to it?

If you use cups to measure coffee, fine (I don't measure, but I think grams would be more normal) - or if your specific 'coffee maker' came with a cup, fine, but don't over-generalise?

I mean not even over-generalise - GP told me my 'coffee maker' came with a non-standard cup; I promise you it came with no cups whatsoever. (It's a Rancilio Silvia, the stock basket has a max capacity of probably 18? 21? grams - definitely less than any 'cup', about a tablespoon. But that's a physical maximum and nobody called it a cup or suggested it was for measurement.)

Maybe it's different on mobile but I see a moka pot as the first image. I have a 6-cup model, which has a 12 oz. capacity.

The point is that no one really uses those as measurements, they're not useful. But almost every coffee maker comes labeled with cups anyway for some reason, probably marketing for comparison shoppers. Obviously you're right that espresso machines don't have cup markings (however that would even work), but I have to say this is the first time I've seen someone call an espresso machine a coffee maker (hence my uh... curt previous response, sorry about that).

I see the same, I just forgot the word and also confused it with the Turkish cevze. As in, had always confused them, I didn't realise moka pots were Italian. Anyway - I'm pretty confident you won't find Italians in Italy talking about the cup size of their moka pot or using cups to measure coffee grounds/water into it.

I've never heard an espresso machine called a coffee maker either, but I've never heard the latter term at all, hence this whole thread. Sounds like a refusal to call someone (i.e. a person, not machine) a 'barista' to me.

https://www.target.com/p/mr-coffee-5-cup-switch-coffee-maker...

Mr Coffee carafe markings is 5oz per cup. This is not an espresso machine that makes "small" cups. This is a good old fashioned American pot of coffee and I can tell you what they call a FIVE cup coffee maker makes an actual 2 cups of coffee.

> That says 180ml, so similar but different again?

Please note the adjectives:

> While a standard U.S. cup measure is 240 milliliters, a rice cup according to rice industry standards is much smaller at 180 milliliters.

It's called a "Go" (合) in Japanese, and is equivalent to 3/4 cup (180mL).

Interesting. In Chinese 合 (hé) can mean whole, but also pronounced gê (I don't have e with 3rd tone character) it can mean a measure of grain or 100ml.

公合(gōnggê) can be used to be specific here.

> ”1 rice cup produces 1 cup of rice when cooked”

Will vary depending on the type of rice, but in general, rice expands much more than that when cooked. Somewhere around 2-3X the uncooked volume.

Maybe standard in Japan. Rice cookers in India come with 160ml cups.

The standard Indian measurement of rice is done by the mutthi (handful) and nazar (eyeballed). That's what I've seen moms and aunts and even career cooks do. This is also the crowd that rarely agrees with cooking their rice in a rice cooker. Not surprising, since they rarely agree with each other on how best to cook which rice.

I still enjoy the reactions (of surprise, disappointment, and sometimes mild derision) when I tell people I prefer to cook my rice in a microwave.

Nevertheless, the idea of a standard fixed-volume measure of rice, by the volume it occupies after cooking, seems a poor concept to me, because the factor by which rice grows when cooked varies by breed/variety, level of processing, even soak time. That's why, I was told, the mutthi and nazar system is better.

Cups make sense with historical context. It didn't matter what size your cup was, because they were just a way to express ratios.

Sure, and that's true of feet and others too (all sorts of different regional feet) - but we standardised and that changed long ago, and nobody uses them like that any more (you'll get some non-cup measurement alongside them that breaks the ratio usage).

Cups persist, but without much standardisation - you generally have to measure if you care to know which 'cup' size you bought. It won't often matter that much, but as I said it's intellectually annoying isn't it?

Being British I don't encounter them much, just American recipes, but I generally just mentally convert as ¼l (i.e. as though a metric cup, if anyone used that) if I'm following one.

> Cups persist, but without much standardisation

This is not true. There is the US cup, which is 1/16th of a gallon, and then there's the general notion of a "cup" which is the crap that comes with a rice cooker or whatever.

1/16th of what gallon? There's more than one.

e.g. US gallon != Imperial gallon.

The problem with stuff like cups, gallons, feet, etc. is that they don't travel.

They might kind of work in the US (and long as you're not using an appliance) but they don't work consistently anywhere else.

> they don't work consistently anywhere else

Which is why they're not used anywhere else. Problem solved.

You are dead wrong. The problem most definitely isn't solved.

We live in the age of the World Wide Web and information in ambiguous units is shared everywhere simultaneously all the time.

For example gallon are still used informally in other countries than the US.

People, particularly older people, still talk about "miles per gallon" in the UK. That's Imperial gallons not US gallons. They base their feel for that volume on that.

Same with US vs Imperial pints.

Now product information on UK Amazon isn't always rewritten specifically for the UK. Often they just reuse the blurb from US Amazon without correcting the spelling or grammar to save money.

I own an old Jetboil stove I bought well before Brexit. The inside is marked in "cups".

Any guesses if those are Imperial cups, US cups or Metric cups. I mean I bought it in the UK so they should be Metric cups but Jetboil is a US company so...who knows.

This might not be a problem for you personally but it's definitely still a problem.

Read it as 'too much standardisation' of you prefer - see the rest of the sentence after you quoted. Which US cup is 1/16 (a presumably US) gallon anyway, 'customary' or 'legal'?

... And then there's the metric cup, which is 250ml.

This is rarely said, but often the key to undoing many arguments against the (what are now "US") units.

They come from a time where the common measurement tool was a balance scale for weight or two vessels of the same volume and any base unit was seemingly arbitrary. There was no understanding of universal constants yet. They're still useful when you have no reference other than the quantity indicated on the label of a package and the ability to measure equal parts.

The ~180ml rice cups have been around for at least as long as rice cookers have existed.

It makes sense because 1 rice cup is the right amount of uncooked rice to make a decent serving for 1 person. A metric cup is too much!

I don't know how much rice you eat, but my experience has been that 1 rice cup cooks enough rice for a modest serving for 2 adults - in our household at least.

The general idea is that a cup of rice is the main portion of the meal, and the rest of the meal is add ons (mostly veggies with a bit of meat). If the rice is just a side to the entree, then yeah, you're going to be eating less of it.

That's the idea but as someone who have been in Asia all my life rarely do people eat the entire cup per meal. 0.5-0.7 cup per person is more common this days for standard meal.

It causes a TON of confusion!

...which is either a lot of confusion, 1000kg of confusion, 2000lb of confusion, 2240lb of confusion, 2400lb of confusion, 1 giga calorie of confusion, 7 giga calories of confusion, 10 giga calories of confusion, 12,000 btu/h of confusion, or 100, 10000, or 100000 unitless amounts of confusion.

I do get your point, but for the record it should never be 1000kg.

In metric we use the word tonne to disambiguate from the myriad weird, whacky, and deprecated tons used by ~ 5% of the population.

In German, it’s all "Tonne" ;)

In the US we don't really use the word tonne. We might say metric ton though. Use that a bunch in the same context and it just gets shortened to ton.

Admittedly megagram is a better word, as it's not overloaded.

> In the US we don't really use the word tonne.

Yes, that was pretty much the crux of my point. If you did use that spelling, you wouldn't have to disambiguate, and it'd align with popular English-speaking nations that already use metric.

It's a bit like not using the word 'metre' - despite the USA recalcitrantly eschewing the actual measurement - and confusingly re-purposing 'meter' (a device for measuring something).

I mean, sure, they sound the same (refer sibling comment and response) but context can inform in spoken English.

In written English it's dreadfully convenient to have unique strings for unique concepts (or words).

I think you only got down voted here because some fraction of people who identify as US citizens reflexively disagree with anything slightly indicating there are other correct definitions other than their own.

Consider the down votes US Customary Up-Votes.

This is just the -re vs -er difference in English spelling between British English and American English, dating back to Webster's reforms in the late 1700s. https://www.learnenglish.de/spelling/spellingrevser.html

Frankly, the -er is better based on actual English pronunciation rules. The -re ending comes from French and is less compatible with how most of the rest of English is pronounced.

And I can't say I've ever been confused by these two different meanings of the word. Can you even come up with an example sentence illustrating ambiguity here?

Ooh, that first bit suggests you're in danger of suggesting there's a coherent, sensible, set of rules for English ... which I'm sure you don't really subscribe to. Anyone adopting that position as a starting point is going to have a bad day, of course. : )

So, is 'er' better in terms of pronunciation? Perhaps, though I don't think that matters much, as pronunciation varies so wildly based on country, region, education, etc, plus there's so much inconsistency with spelling -> pronunciation within English that I think it's fair to say that ship has long since sailed.

In terms of writing however there's a huge advantage to having words with different meanings have different spellings. I assume I don't have to pitch that idea terribly hard?

For us non-Americans I suspect the frustration boils down to having a recalcitrant nation stubbornly refusing to join the rest of the metric world while simultaneously poisoning the language well of metric unit names everyone else is already using.

'metre' is homonoymic and homographic even in British English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)

If there's anyone responsible for English words having way too many meanings, it ain't Americans.

I perhaps wasn't 100% clear.

I'm not suggesting English is a perfect representation of thoughts & concepts into strings of letters & punctuation, or that any one variant has tweaked it to be just right.

I'm complaining that the Rest Of The World has to contend with the dilution of metric terminology (by the regrettable rise of f.e. 'metric ton') that's being perpetrated by a nation state that doesn't even use metric.

The US uses a lot of metric, just not exclusively. Which is why we'd say 'metric ton' anyway. Otherwise we'd just say 'ton'.

I feel we are back to where we came in.

And how is tonne pronounced?

Somewhere between 'ton' and 'tone'.

Though I think American English tends to pronounce 'ton' as 'tun', would that be right, or are there significant regional accent variations?

Anyway, refer sibling comments on common usage and cultural defaults - and I'll re-emphasize that it works really well for written communication. Like this.

G'day - just to add for British English, here it's pronounced 'ton' (same as a ton) rhyming with 'stun' or TUN if you will.

It's extremely rare (don't think I've ever heard it) - except maybe in some industries still, I don't know - but there's an interesting history of advocacy/use of saying 'ton-E' or 'tunnie', to disambiguate the same way AmE pronounces it 'metric ton'.

Aha, but are you from the south?

I've never heard it pronounced as a two-syllable word in the UK, but I confess to only very occasionally travelling north of Luton.

SW, couldn't get much nearer the coast, yep.

I don't think it was ever common parlance, just important to disambiguate in some industries. Similarly I think 'thou' (-sandth of an inch) is preferred over 'mil' since that's such a common abbreviation of 'millimetre' (which =39thou, so you want to get that right).

There was an article posted here a few months back on the subject of 'thousands of an inch', the misuse of 'mill', etc - and a slight digression around how our friends on the far side of the pond are fascinated by fractions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34891145

Like taunt, but without the trailing t.

taun

That seems like an UK-specific idea, and only works in writing. I doubt you'd find too many international English speakers make any distinction whatsoever between ton and tonne.

Well, I'm in Australia, and it's common here (too).

I suspect you'd find it's common in most English-speaking non-USA metric-embracing nation states.

It works fine spoken, too, because we could say 'imperial ton' or 'american ton' if we ever needed to refer to a specific, archaic, mostly abandoned unit of weight - which is, rounded down, effectively never.

FWIW we're taught to pronounce the word somewhere between 'ton' and 'tone', but, really, the context here is that all tonnes (or phonetic equivalent) are metric once you're outside the USA.

Re-purposing words - even 'only works in writing' (like we're using to communicate here) words - seems whatever the opposite of 'luxuriating in the massive potential breadth of language' might be called.

Specifically 'metric ton' I expect would be mildly offensive to everyone that uses metric, and doesn't want to disambiguate the pre-existing, and clearly more widely prevailing homophone of 'tonne'.

What Jeff said.

I’m Australian and work in steel fabrication / construction, so constantly dealing with 1000’s of kilograms to mean tonne, and pronounced tun, but also don’t blink if someone wants to pronounce it correctly as per https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... (more like ton).

Canada does this too. I suspect the non-us anglo world does.

Commonwealth wide afaict, and that's essentially the vast majority of English speaking nations...

Having grown up in Canada and now living in the US for several years, I'm just now learning about the "metric cup." I've just been assuming all this time that the cups here are 250 mL!

It's inherited from Japan, where 180ml is one gō, the standard measure for a portion of rice.

Even more confusingly, this originates from a Chinese unit which was standardized differently in modern China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_(unit)

Interesting. I wish they had just labelled it as a "gō" then, alongside the mL equivalent, and told us about why/the history in a blurb on the box/manual and then it'd have own neat little cultural thing going on.

Rice cookers are all the same, they come with plastic measuring cups that are that size. I just call them rice cups.

I think cup is a translation of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_(unit)

Which like cup has different definitions depending on where you are.

No, that's backwards. It takes about 12 cups of water to fill the inner pot to the "9 cup" line. In other words, 1 cup as measured by the lines is actually 1 1/3 cups (or about 315ml). So, measuring with the lines gives you more than you want, not less (as you would with a rice measuring "cup").

And, the manual doesn't mention anything about the scale (although it does mention the "MAX" line at the top of the pot).

Here's another guess - my rice cooker has line for cups that are for filling with water after you add rice. So, in your case, you put in 9 cups of rice, then add water until it is at the 9 cup line, then that's the right amount of water. The water fills the space between the rice and then fills up to the line.

It is the same company that sold cheaper soda-lime glass under the name "Pyrex". Pyrex as a brand used to mean "borosilicate glass", a type of glass known for its superior resistance to thermal shock.

Corning started doing that in the 1980s. Then Pyrex was spun off to Correlle in 1998. Then Correlle merged with InstantPot in 2019.

It’s strange instant pot would burn their brand by being associated with pyrex. Just last week, I was talking to an older person, who commented that she kept somehow shattering her pyrex. I guess an older piece finally broke a few years ago, and she hadn’t heard about it.

Anyway, it continues to be a safety hazard. Shame on corning for making the change (without just killing the brand name).

My instant pot’s fine though. I dropped the lid from 10 feet on to concrete, and the heat sheild cracked, but it didn’t affect the seal or safety.

Not familiar with the Instant Pot personally (I have a Sage/Breville Fast Slow Pro pressure cooker, which is pretty great!), but I believe it has a rice cooker function?

The “cup” markings are presumably the fill lines for making rice (ie: for 6 rice-cups of rice, add water to the 6 cup mark)?

At least, that’s how it works with a regular rice cooker.

While I don't disagree, I think the main reason they failed had to do with spreading themselves too thin. Competing where they had no business competing.

When they launched, they made an Instant Pots, and it was a fairly good product, with good marketing. There were other pressure cookers before, but this was beyond easy to use -- and super Instagram and Facebook friendly to share cooking videos.

But then they expanded out to... Air Fryers, Coffee Makers, even Air Purifiers... and it's just too much. They weren't going up against old pressure cookers that hadn't really been updated in 40 years, they were going up against established modern brands like Nestle and Keurig, and whoever else.

And they never really established a reason for all the different devices to live under that brand... and probably lost quality control (as you said). And yeah, I mean... I got an Instant Pots as a housewarming gift in 2010, and I loved it. So I gave Instant Pots to a bunch of friends as housewarming gifts... and it never seemed like a hit with the people who received it. At one point someone told me, "Thanks, but I already have one..." So I figured I'd replace my old one, and holy hell the quality in like 2017 or so was not good.

Like you pointed out the measurements on the sides were not accurate. And every dish I had made in the old Instant Pot didn't cook right in the new one. (Probably because the temps were off.) I was an idiot and tossed the old Instant Pot I had before really trying the new one out... then when the new one sucked I stopped using it all together and never bought another one.

Edit... here's a pressure cooker from like 2004. It was such a pain to clean and no matter what I did it splattered steam and liquid all over when it was turned on. Instant Pot was so much easier to use than this thing was.

https://www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Wolfgang-Puck-7.5-qt.-...

There's a whole generation of pressure cookers after that thing with electronic controls, presets for different food items, etc, that precede the Instant Pot. I have one that I got for free somewhere that has all of those features. Which was why I wondered what the big deal was when everybody started raving about the Instant Pot.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/OdoAAOSwPFNkUgOY/s-l1600.jpg

imo, it's the standardization that a universal device offers. Perceived or actual. But it's one big variable in preparation removed.

I wish everybody on the planet had the same couple of ovens too. Then your recipe for preparing cookies or whatever will have one big variable removed.

But because we don't have that, we waste time and energy pre-heating the oven, just to be sure that we're all cooking at the same temperature. And even then, ovens will vary in how they control temperature and grrrrr.

Same for soft/hard boiling eggs: the only error-proof way is to boil your water first and stick eggs in there for X minutes and then drench them in cold water. But that's a huge waste of the heat in the heating process. If we all used the same amount of water on top of the same heating source in the same place, we could use that pre-heating process as a part of cooking.

I’m confused reading these posts about recent Instant Pots being considered low quality. I’ve been using mine every other day for over five years with zero issues whatsoever. Maybe it works too well as I haven’t checked up on the company since.

What do you make every day that you can stand to eat for 5 years?! (=

The original was good, but the version I got later has issues. Like sone of the button controls stopped working, and the pressure seal leaked and sputtered even when it was “locked” in the close position.

> What do you make every day that you can stand to eat for 5 years?! (=

They didn’t say they were cooking the same thing every day.

I use the pressure cooker function of mine probably 4-5 times a week. Risotto, stew, chicken stock, tomato sauce for pasta, etc.

me, daily, for about that amount of time: steel-cut oats.

I eat a (large) breakfast of 1/2 cup dry oats, 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 cup water, cooked for 10 minutes at pressure, with a bit of brown sugar and any of dried cherries, raspberries, blueberries.

The massive advantage of an instant pot is if you cook w/ milk on a stove top, it requires constant attention to not burn the milk and have the burnt milk weld itself to the pot. Whereas in my instant pot, I throw the ingredients in with my first cup of coffee and come back in 30-40 minutes for hot breakfast and coffee #2.

Also, it makes a pretty good (not great, but I have a tiny kitchen, so I have to cut somewhere) rice cooker. Recipe: wash rice, drain, add same amount of dry rice and water by volume, pressure cook for 4 minutes. Depending on the type of rice, 3 minutes may be better. After cycle finishes, let depessurize on its own for 10 minutes, then open. Mix with a fork.

Others have answered well enough, but I didn’t say I ate the same thing. Steel-cut oats, curries, chilis, soups, etc. Mine is the Ultra not the original. It may have been manufactured between 2016-2017.

ps -- I had some issues with the pressure seal; pulling the (presumably silicone?) seal out and reseating it in the lid periodically seems to make everything work better. Also, you shouldn't feel any resistance when you rotate the lid into sealed position. If you do, pull the lid back off; juggle the seal a bit; then reseat and twist to seal again.

I don't know much about the business side, but I've been using their Air Fryers for a while and they're excellent.

Yeah the Vortex was quite well rated and I got one recently for half price. I'm not sure if it's enabled anything my oven can't do yet, but it is much quicker and more efficient especially for something like reheating. So I'm using it more than I thought I would.

> I was an idiot and tossed the old Instant Pot I had before really trying the new one out...

You put a working appliance in the trash?

I believe the line markings is for water when you cook rice.

You add 9 cups of rice (perhaps with the plastic cup that comes in the box), then fill it up to the 9 cup line with water. Once cooked, this will produce perfectly cooked rice.

Thank you for your service. As a consumer, you not only have rights, but also have responsibilities - if a product is not as advertised, the market needs to know about it and the producer needs to fix it.

Maybe the temperature is meant to be "oven equivalent"? Our air fryer goes up to 200C, but at that range it's closer to 250C on convection ovens.

Your theory is probably right though, of course.

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