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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

This fails with cash payments, e.g., at farmers' markets. If I were in the market, I'd prefer an app that analyzed pictures of my actual meals instead. Less work for me, and it represents my actual intake. Such an app may already exist.

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It just can't be done for meal photos -- there's no way of knowing if the mashed potatoes have just a little milk, or two sticks of butter. Or if the tomato sauce is pumped full of sugar or not. Items that are visually identically can have vastly different nutritional profiles.

Not to mention trying to guess what's inside of those dumplings or ravioli...

Start with the picture and maybe a verbal description, presenting an estimate of the ingredients and allowing corrections.

I should stop talking because this is too much work for me either way. Cooking is enough work without all this!!

So if I go grocery shopping, I may purchase a few prepped meals which I eat in one sitting. Then I have a couple sticks of butter. I use one over the next six months, and the next one is stored for after that runs out. I've got some shelf-stable snacks that I use intermittently over the next 2 years. Stuff in my freezer for a couple of weeks.

Overall, my groceries are never consumed at the same rate, so how can this possibly track daily nutrition?

That's a fair point! I can add a feature to remove items from the receipt. The option to manually add items bought earlier already exists. It's not about daily nutrition, but to understand the overall nutrition over let's say a week.

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