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Comment by mizzao | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the perspective, it's a common objection. Similar arguments I've heard are that in order to learn to cook, you need to do one of:

- read a lot of cookbooks and understand them

- go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it

- go get a job in a kitchen (essentially, apprentice)

I learn the way you do and I totally get where you're coming from. But this only works for serious autodidacts. For everyone else, doing any of the above is a pain in the butt. So that's the problem we're trying to solve.

The magic of the tech tree is that it addresses the issue of "you can't type what you don't know into Google."

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Are you sure that is a pain for 'everyone else'. Who are these people? If they aren't self-learners for all the other free resources available to them, why would they be self-learners (autodidacts) for your app?

I really don't believe that these are all your options for learning to cook. You can be taught by a friend or a parent. You can just read a recipe online and try to follow along. You can take classes - you don't have to apprentice in a professional kitchen.

Beyond that everyone has to eat. So they know what they like to eat. So for me, the argument that 'you can't type what you don't know' doesn't really hold for me. You're googling for something you do know and then from there if you don't know one of the steps (dicing an onion) you can pretty trivially look that up.

> go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it

I don't understand this, you can watch one video of someone just cooking a thing you think sounds tasty.

No? I'm clearly the prime demographic for this app because your comment makes no sense to me. Most recipe videos skip the tedious (but important) bits, and many ALSO don't give notes about needed techniques. I often find that 1 recipe video results in me watching at least 5 other videos to clarify things that were left out, usually in pairs so I can compare/contrast the info provided. Because, again, I'm new to this whole thing and I can't tell which advice is good/relevant/etc

Just to clarify, I'm not defending their app, I'm defending the problem statement.

Is this just about finding good sources? People like Adam Ragusea seem to me like they cover pretty much everything, and he just shows a sped up video for all the chopping/etc as he explains it.

Something like this https://youtu.be/p53xab3c3tg

That's certainly important, but again, there's just so many pieces to cooking that experienced cooks don't even think about anymore, but are still uncertain & awkward to noobs.

Btw, your response implies that you deny this point, but I don't understand why that would be. Most activities are this way. People aren't born knowing how to play sports or use computers or make art, whatever. Cooking is no exception.

Anyway, thanks for the rec, I'll definitely check out Adam's recipe vids (I'm more familiar with his non-recipe vids)

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