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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I'd definitely like to be able to to tell if I have all the ingredients I need for that cake I'm baking while I'm at the supermarket. I own, literally, four bottles of paprika right now because several times I just couldn't remember so I said "better safe than sorry."

Can we do that yet though? Some sort of smart inventory taking cabinet?

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Sure that wasn't a metaphor? With all the "little things" that we can get individually, we have a bunch of ingredients that aren't really satisfying on their own. But if they could be combined in many ways, they can be useful enough to stock up on. But...

> The problem is it's a thousand little things not just one big thing.

Absolutely right. But we start with things that justify a purchase because they complete a worthwhile task on their own. That reduces the barrier to entry.

Yes and no, you can buy some solutions but the daily extra effort associated with using them doesn't outweigh the occasional effort/annoyance of the mistake at this point.

It's one of those things that would take a large amount of work for a company to get it to the point where the ease of use is the same as the current system, I'm sure we'll eventually see a usable system (as it seems that computer vision and object classification techniques being developed in other areas will be applicable here).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_refrigerator

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