Spoil your secret sauce | Hacker News Reader

Spoil your secret sauce

taylor.town

100 pointssurprisetalk46 comments

Just want to throw this out there: in a business context, "secret sauce" can also just mean experience, a bunch of incumbent advantages, and successful ways of working. For example, people often talk about Apple's secret sauce, which in my mind is "just" the fact that they control the whole stack from silicon to services, and do a good job making it feel cohesive. It's not really a secret, nor is it a sauce you could use anywhere else.

Dr Pepper tastes like raisin/prunes (caramelized plum if you prefer) + cherry + vanilla + a hint of black pepper way way way off the back end, in that order.

When I was a junior dev I created a looping mechanism in a vendor product that wasn't designed to loop. I let the company know via support ticket and they included it in their documentation of the product because they didn't know it could do that either. I never dove deep enough to find something new. Nor did I combine ingredients from different fields. You could call it lucky, but I think I was persistent and didn't know what my limitations were and that's why it happened.

"Greatness awaits those who find secret sauce and share the recipe."

No. No it doesn't. Although I really like the post and the positivity in it. I'm going to have to disagree with that point. Sharing your greatness more often results in some narcissist or psychopath (clinical, not conversational) taking credit for your work. In an era of social media infested domains, derivative work leeches off your effort and its more likely someone you've never met will become known for whatever you invent.

I would recommend finding your secret sauce, iterating on it several times, then once you're further ahead of everyone else, share the first generation and promote that. Keep everyone else running to catch up to you and when they get close blow them out of the water by sharing the next generation ahead of where they are at.

Your recommendation in the last paragraph of your comment is what the author is already doing here with this article.

> Sharing your greatness more often results in some narcissist or psychopath (clinical, not conversational) taking credit for your work. In an era of social media infested domains, derivative work leeches off your effort and its more likely someone you've never met will become known for whatever you invent.

I cannot upvote this hard enough. I have tried to be the positive force I want to see in the world and it's resulted in me being tarred and feathred as a heretic by people who feel threatened by whatever modernization I've been pushing for. It's sad and disappointing as an engineer working on a platform to have the people (management) in charge just NOT GIVE A SHIT about making things better.

Just get more canaries, who cares if they are dying. Stop asking questions, get back to the mine or we'll replace you with someone who won't complain as much. Come to think of it this might be your third strike...

> Dr Pepper tastes like raisin/prunes (caramelized plum if you prefer) + cherry + vanilla + a hint of black pepper way way way off the back end, in that order.

For the young'uns: Mr Pibb used to be this, with more-forward cherry, no hint of pepper, and maybe a little lower acidity. Smoother, cherry-heavy Dr Pepper. I always preferred Dr Pepper, but sometimes Pibb was what I wanted.

Then they turned it into nasty, thick-feeling sugar-syrup so overwhelmingly sweet you can hardly taste anything else (like... two decades ago. "Pibb Xtra").

So if that's all you've ever known and you're like "OMG how is this gross soda a thing?", know that it used to be a lot better.

i make demonstration and breakout boards and release the designs in the _hopes_ that someone influential will start cloning it

one epaper demo board has led to countless companies emailing me asking how they can take their board clone and make it do the bespoke thing they ultimately wanted to make, since the original seller usually has no clue

so maybe give up 90% of your sauce? the last 10% are circumstantial to the taster anyway...

easter eggs are a great way to prove provenance if it comes down to it

>>To nobody’s surprise, MSG makes food taste better. Although replicable, this is wholly unimpressive. To earn your Michelin star, you’ll need to make your umami masterpiece with mushrooms and elk liver and sardine skins.

I liked the overall article but this section seemed off to me. People at the top of their field know when and how to "cheat" - which is why Rick Barry is in the hall of fame for his "granny" style free throw shooting. It's also why Michelin starred restaurants do use MSG (https://cnaluxury.channelnewsasia.com/people/why-are-these-a...).

this reminds me of one of Bourdain’s stories about being in culinary school… there was some kind of test where they had to make a basic broth, and he kept a tube of lobster paste smuggled in his sleeve

But you need the mushroom and elk to satisfy the fallacious superficial gatekeeping of the reviewers.

This is simply not true. Numerous Michelin-starred restaurants offer relatively simple food. The most famous example is perhaps Liao Fan Hawker Chan, who serves mostly chicken and rice with soy sauce.

They lost their Michelin star actually. They were pretty decent when I went but nothing exceptional compared to other stalls.

I'm not really sure what gate is being kept here.

The reviewers know what they like. If you like that thing too, you go get that. If you don't like that thing, you don't have to purchase it. Their tastes are just as superficial as fans of a sports team or movie franchise.

I absolve you of the need to like the things that rich people like, if that helps. There's nothing there to be kept out of. There are plenty of foods to like in the world, and if the sneering of fancy restaurant critics bothers you, you have my permission to flip them the bird. Preferably a free-range heritage breed bird.

this seems more like what people think about "fancy cooking" than the reality. if a chef has used mushrooms in a dish it's not because they want to get the glutamates the hard way, it's because the mushrooms have other flavours and textures that they wanted to incorporate into the overall dish. if all they wanted from the mushroom was the msg they would have used msg.

> In many cases, the story is the sauce. The Mona Lisa isn’t exceptionally good art – it’s the world’s most well-known painting because it was stolen and recovered during the birth of global media coverage. Likewise, Banksy’s works are more valuable when theatrically shredded.

Actually, it is stunningly good, innovative and unique art and was renowned and exceptionally valued long before it was stolen. When DaVinci moved/retired to France, it was one of only a handful of paintings he took with him. Napoleon hung it in his bedroom.

A great documentary on it by Great Art Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElWG0_kjy_Y

It is also small: among many equally important masterpieces at the Louvre, it is one of the most portable, making it a good option if you are deciding what to steal.

I am really into and also confused by the writing style. This is great.

I had a teacher that once said "don't get lost" which I see as the same advice.

The style is very compelling. The author's style fits their "collection of random and loosely related insights" content.

This article feels incomplete and fragmented. So it fails to make and substantiate a real point, though a lot of the sentences/paragraphs would make great T-shirts!

The bit about MSG being cheating was funny. I’ve given out 1lb bags of Aji-No-Moto as gifts for years. Most people I know use it at least a little bit. It’s not a secret or banned or even discouraged much outside of weird blogs.

You must ignore others to notice invisible insights. But to avoid Cassandra’s curse, you must learn to understand the people you ignore... Greatness awaits those who find secret sauce and share the recipe.

I don't understand the pre-amble always thought Dr. Pepper tasted like cherry cola?

Maybe it's Vanilla Cola.

Mastery is made of intuition and practice, but secret sauce is inherently unintuitive.

I think it's unintuitive to the outside world and very intuitive to the creator.

Isn't Dr. Pepper simply off-brand cola with almond syrup?

Dr Pepper was introduced before Coca Cola.

One more reason why it couldn't be on-brand.

That I think is the point being the first recognized commercial soda defines the category. I didn't get it from the preamble because I wasn't aware of Dr. Pepper's iconic status.

I usually drink water flavored seltzer but I'm going to have a Dr. Pepper today.

Huh, only by five months. Dr Pepper was officially sold starting on Dec 1, 1885, Coke on May 8th, 1886.

IMHO as a soda drinker with discerning taste, Dr. Pepper is kind of its own category, but more root beer adjacent than cola adjacent.

Good point.

Root beer isn't a thing here, so I don't had a reference.

Anybody willing to make that claim has my attention.

Do you think it is different than Mr. Pibb? Do you think it is like cherry Coke?

Having developed some in Pennsylvania Dutch country I have to ask what about Birch Beer?

Mr Pibb/Pibb Xtra is in the same category as Dr Pepper, IMHO and Coke had originally named it Peppo to target the Dr Pepper market; incidentally Pepsi doesn't have anything in the "pepper-drink" category). I don't have a lot lot of familiarity with Pibb, because this category isn't something I desire very often, and Pibb availability is generally low; but next time I see it, if it's not one of the hideous Coke Freestyle machines where the flavors come out of inkjet cartridges, I'll give it a try and update my references. There's some similarity in initial flavor to cherry Coke, but you know, there's cherry Dr Pepper out there too, and that's distinguishable from regular Dr Pepper.

I must admit I haven't had birch beer; but I'll try it when I see it too. :)

Funny that PEPsi missed the PEPper drink market.

Yes, I assumed that Pep- was similar to -ito in the salty snack category.

The untrained pallet might compare birch beer to toothpaste.

I thought of cherry Dr. Pepper as just more cherry.

Pibb isn't bad but it certainly isn't in the same category as Dr Pepper. They aren't even remotely the same

Well... I had some with dinner tonight, and I disagree. It's definitely distinguishable, and as a sibling mentioned Pibb is a lot more sugary, but it tastes pretty similar to Dr Pepper to me.

Pibb used to be cherry-forward, smoother-drinking Dr Pepper (nb I preferred Dr Pepper).

Pibb Xtra is mostly just SUGAR punching you in the taste buds.

Dr Pepper was formulated to taste the way Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco TX smelled in the early 1880s. It's not supposed to taste of anything identifiable.

It definitely has notes of horse or barn. I guess the point is the first vanilla, almond, or cherry cola was original.

The preamble makes more sense to me with the olfactory dynamic added.

Where did you get that info from? You made me curious, so I tried to dig in a bit. The entire early history seems a little murky when you push past the 'official' story and try to find evidence. But even so, I couldn't find anything at all referencing what the flavor was intended to be. I was trying to find Morrison's original patent from ~1885 to see what it had in it, but couldn't dig it up.

I also found a the true story they didn't mention it. Most of the "true stories" seems to be the struggle for credit.

The early drug store/soda fountain days seem pretty wild. People were freely mixing up drugs and sugar water.

The early seeds of RiteAid originated in a small central PA. town. Think about all the derivative business spun out of drug store plus soda fountain.

The most questionable part of the "true story" to me was that the soda was named after Dr. Charles T. Pepper because Morrison was in love with his daughter. According to census data, Dr. Pepper's daughter was 5 years old when Morrison was 17 and lived in the same town, and there's no record of Morrison having worked for Dr. Pepper as claimed or having known him at all. But there was another Dr. Pepper who lived a couple houses down from Morrison when he was 17 who had a 16 year old daughter at the time.

In fact, Dr. Pepper tastes like Amarena cherry, which is a taste a bit more common in Italy that I haven't found abroad: it's often found in ice creams and other confectionery as a darker, slightly sour cherry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarena_cherry

I think this is why I find the Cool Continuum (http://continuum.cool/) so satisfying to work on: I get to (briefly) explore artists from various disciplines and discover how they broke through into public consciousness. I'm on number 42 and I've learned a lot already. I have hundreds more to do.

And yes, Vermeer and Bjork are both Level 5 Geniuses according to the Continuum.

>> Greatness awaits those who find secret sauce and share the recipe.

Nope. Not in the copy copy copy cat work of software startups.

The idea behind your startup matters more than anything else.

Not convinced? Go ask the Winklevoss twins.

An amazing idea is a critical ingredient for startup success.

Only if you have a great idea does execution matter.

Success comes from the combination of great idea and great execution. Startup success requires both…. neither are optional.

So sure, share your secret sauce if you want competition from people who have only the execution side of the equation. And having only skill in execution is MOST software entrepreneurs.

Execution is the easy bit, compared to how devilishly hard it is to have a truly great idea.

if someone tells you that ideas don’t matter, that it’s execution that matters, ask them why they don’t create a really well executed startup selling dogshit and apple pies.

The idea is the critical ingredient.

If you aim to “make something people want” then you’d better have a great idea.

> To earn your Michelin star, you’ll need to make your umami masterpiece with mushrooms and elk liver and sardine skins.

To earn your Michelin star, you need to know someone on the committee.

(Or so I'm being told. I'm not in that industry.)

It's obvious - Dr Pepper tastes like marzipan.

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