"With the 730,000-square-foot lease, Facebook has acquired more than 2.2 million square feet of office space in the city for thousands of employees in less than a year, all of it on Manhattan’s West Side between Pennsylvania Station and the Hudson River."
"The timing of the deal’s announcement was somewhat of a surprise because Facebook, which had expressed interest in the Farley Building for months, has given most of its employees the option of working from home during the pandemic. Even after the pandemic subsides, Facebook has said that within the next 10 years up to half of its roughly 52,200 employees across the country would work from home."
I think that sentence is good, it's just a matter of changing the 'to' to 'and'.
"Y Combinator represents the union of two ideas that had not previously been combined: the application of mass production techniques [and] startup funding."
The "click bait headlines" are part of their substance. And, in many instances, it is the substance -- as it's the only part of the article people do read.
Maybe something that could easily be interpreted as social mockery and making fun of people = crossing the line.
It's not a fair treatment for someone who has made an enormous contribution for startups and is already paying a big price for past mistakes. It can also harm/dilute the cause women are rightfully fighting for.
> Maybe something that could easily be interpreted as social mockery and making fun of people
A victim of sexual harassment points out the irony of Twitter recommending someone who sexually assaulted a woman?
That isn't mockery or making fun of people. It's just pointing out the irony that sometimes happens when an algorithm recommends social connections.
Besides, I think Dave will survive.
> It's not a fair treatment
Sure it is. She didn't even accuse him of anything.
> who has made an enormous contribution for startups
Who cares? He did it to become rich and, perhaps, famous. He's not an altruist or a saint. You don't get a pass for attacking people just because you are successful at your job and your job affects a lot of people.
I'd actually argue Susan Fowler has done more for the startup community (and more to make people's lives better) than Dave has.
> It can also harm/dilute the cause women are rightfully fighting for.
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author.
The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
In all honesty, my impression is that some admirers of the Brazilian Portuguese language frequently believe there are words and concepts that are exclusive to that language while in reality there's, more often than not, a very good translation in English or other languages.
English hack is very much the same. Only in the computer / hobby usage sense does hack mean skilful or clever. The opposite being the engineered solution, opposite in the computer / hobby sense in that engineered often means over engineered and not fun.
1. to cut, notch, slice, chop, or sever (something) with or as with heavy, irregular blows (often followed by up or down): to hack meat; to hack down trees.
2. to break up the surface of (the ground).
3. to clear (a road, path, etc.) by cutting away vines, trees, brush, or the like: They hacked a trail through the jungle.
4. to damage or injure by crude, harsh, or insensitive treatment; mutilate; mangle: The editor hacked the story to bits.
5. to reduce or cut ruthlessly; trim: The Senate hacked the budget severely before returning it to the House.
6. Slang. to deal or cope with; handle: He can't hack all this commuting.
7. Computers:
a. to modify (a computer program or electronic device) or write (a program) in a skillful or clever way: Developers have hacked the app. I hacked my tablet to do some very cool things.
b. to circumvent security and break into (a network, computer, file, etc.), usually with malicious intent: Criminals hacked the bank's servers yesterday.
I'd tend to agree, sort of sidewise, with the article author that "hack", like "make" in the "maker culture" sense, is freighted with all kinds of connotations that I think somewhat blur its applicability here.
Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions.
To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste.
On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.
Many years ago, in my first programming job, I had to do an ugly hack to fix an issue in production that was preventing other people from doing their jobs. In the minutes before I made that decision, while I was contemplating the problem, my colleague (a senior) asked me with a very serious face: have you ever heard of the POG methodology?
"POG"? No... should I have?
He smiled and explained it to me - Programação Orientada a Gambiarra, or "Gambiarra Oriented Programming".
Soylent’s product itself has zero novelty in it. Meal Replacement Powders (MRPs) have been around for decades and are popular among the bodybuilding crowd. The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. Personally, I've never tried their product because the ingredients they use seemed average/fudged at best (and I tend to avoid brands that pop out of nowhere with a lot of hype). Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself.
> The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it.
That's not true though. Look at the nutritional information for MRPs compared to soylent. 3 meals on an MRP will give you 21% of your daily value of potassium; Soylent will give you 100%. 3 meals will give you 12% of your dietary fiber from MRPs, 96% from MRPs.
The goal of Soylent is to provide you with all the nutrients you need if you eat it 3 times a day. You can argue whether or not it achieves this goal, but it's not even the aim of the MRPs. You can find some examples of people who tried an MRP only diet online; they're pretty good examples of why MRPs are not the same as Soylent at all.
If someone marketed this type of product as a reasonably nutritious meal on the go as an alternative to grabbing a Big Mac or a soggy slice of pizza, it would be utterly unobjectionable--and no one would pay it the slightest mind. So instead we get this narrative around meal replacement for Silicon Valley types who are too busy advancing Western civilization with a Facebook for Farmers to have time to eat.
What's wrong with skipping a meal? (While we're on the subject, what's right about it?) Folks have been sold a solution to a problem that does not exist. Marketing and its various permutations wins again.
The use case of this aptly-named "Soylent" product is a load of hooey. When the military starts using meal replacement powders instead of MREs, then I will reconsider my position on this issue.
> When the military starts using meal replacement powders instead of MREs, then I will reconsider my position on this issue.
The primary challenge with feeding soldiers in the field is not efficiently delivering nutritionally complete food to them, it is getting them to eat it day after day after day. Soldiers get bored eating the same things over and over again and eventually this drives them to stop eating, which negatively affects their performance.
It was technically feasible to replace rations with meal replacement powders decades ago, but the reason that MREs continue to be a variety of real food items is because they are more likely to be eaten that way. Even with all the variety, most US and Canadian rations include hot sauce to add optional variety to the same set of packaged meals for those who happen to eat a lot of them. This is also why MREs include heater bags - because hot food is more likely to be consumed than cold. Incidentally, this is also why personnel tend to love other nations' ration packs and disparage their own - not because they're better, but because they're not sick of them.
Food Officers take this stuff pretty seriously, and put a lot of effort into delivering nutritionally complete food to soldiers that they will actually enjoy eating. Meal replacement powders don't cut it in this environment.
As for Soylent, the primary use case I have seen is convenience. In this role, it's better than many other convenience foods, so I can see why some people go for it.
You really can't think of a situation in which skipping a meal (or maybe several) is the best choice to optimize someone's happiness or productivity?
Example: In my case, I don't particularly feel like cooking breakfast if I get up early to play golf or hike, and doing either while hungry is unpleasant. Soylent solves that problem, and I prefer it to Clif bars, which is what I would have used before Soylent.
Absolutely nothing. But it's not uncommon, if you skip a meal, to feel a bit low energy and/or to snack instead. When I'm out doing things, I'll often skip lunch but I may have a granola bar, fruit, some nuts, or something along those lines.
In the USA, we love to aspire to be other, "better" people. It's why some poor people vote against their own interests to cut taxes on the rich (thinking that one day they'll be wealthy enough to benefit from it), it's why Uber is a "revolutionary" and not a regulation-dodging jitney cab service, it's definitely what's powering much of tech bubble at this point, and Soylent is but another example of all this in action.
I know this comment got downvotes for being kind of snarky/evoking political debate, but I just thought I'd throw my support out for the main sentiment. It seems like a lot of startups are more marketing rather than technological successes. And I'm not sure I really like that.
You are spot on. Almost 30 years ago the tiger bar meal replacement bar was introduced and 1000s have followed. I'm trying to understand how the tech community doesn't get this? The big natural foods trade show happens a few times a year. It is referred to as NatutalExpo East / West. I've been attending (as a food scientist and entrepreneur) for more than a decade. Food bars are perhaps have the lowest barrier to entry. If you have the 10K, I can find you a a dozen copackers who will produce 3-5 thousand bars for you.
As another FS person, I was looking around for bay-area jobs and saw an ad for Soylent. This was probably in 2013. They were looking for someone w/ a FS background to bag product and other general work like this and I was shocked that they weren't using a co-packer.
> Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself.
That defeats my primary use case for MRP: not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.
> not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.
As I've come around to thinking of the human body as more of a system than a binary switch (sick/not sick), I've come to appreciate that natural food sources have a lot of nutrients in them that are hard to get with manufactured foods.
There's a lot of debate about studies proving this one way or another, but for me looking at it intuitively from a co-evolution standpoint (foods we eat evolved in conjunction with humans) is proof enough to pay attention to the quality of my food. The intuition is basically: food we've been cultivating and bringing around with us for millions of years is going to be more beneficial to our internal chemistry than a substitute we recently made up to save money on production costs.
I also view eating as a chore (except when it's not), so I often end up eating this: black beans, chicken, guac, milk
PS: for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost? Optimization targets make a difference.
Evolution is not an optimizer for health. It is an optimizer for breeding and nothing more. The only optimizer for health that I know of is medical science.
EDIT: Also I think the term we should actually be using is "Natural Selection" rather than "Evolution" in this case.
> Also I think the term we should actually be using is "Natural Selection" rather than "Evolution" in this case.
Nope, I'm using it in the "evolutionary algorithm", "evolution as mathematical optimization" sense.
> It is an optimizer for breeding and nothing more.
I really disagree there. Humans did not evolve in a vacuum; their are a ton of systems and subsystems that evolved across different species leading up to humans. I don't have time to write an essay, but I think you're vastly oversimplifying evolution in pursuit of a binary function. It's just not that simple, and neither is how food interacts with our body.
Ok, I now see how you were using the word "evolution". For some reason the fact that you were addressing the "natural fallacy camp" made me think you were talking about human evolution and its role in our eating habits, my mistake.
As far as your disagreement goes... Perhaps "breeding" wasn't the 100% accurate thing to say, but natural selection is the process that decides what genes to pass to the next generation causing evolution... if you really disagree with that you are not disagreeing with me personally, you are disagreeing with over 200 yrs of science spanning many fields.
> you are disagreeing with over 200 yrs of science spanning many fields.
Oh, is that what I'm doing? And here I thought I was suggesting that evolution (in practice and in theory) is a more nuanced process than you're letting on.
Yes, actually that is what you are doing. Natural selection is that simple. I think you are confused by the fact that sometimes the goals of "health" and "passing on genes" overlap. However "passing on genes" (or what ever the analogous "building block" is if you are using a genetic algo for something) is the only underlying "purpose" of evolution. There really isn't any more nuance required.. but go ahead, Im all ears..er eyes. If you don't want to write an essay just post up a link. Im curious if there is actually something out there leading you this way or if you are just "saying stuff".
> for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost?
Human evolution has optimized us for having children early and often and living to 40-50 so they've enough time to grow up and become the next generation of subsistence farmers/breeders.
In my opinion, no. We can't even completely understand all of the chemical reactions (the Maillard reaction) involved in making toast at this point.
Sure, we do have a fair bit of nutrition knowledge right now, of course, and not everything natural is good for you, of course. However, current popular "natural food" at this point has been vetted through centuries of sampling and cross breeding. At this point I would consider it "more reliable" than processed MRPs (soylent powder is made of natural ingredients too but has been very heavily processed to get where it is) for that reason alone.
MRPs are okay every now and then, sure. Personally I would bet against using them all the time. Even in the bodybuilding community where whey protein supplements are popular, the consensus seems to be its much better to get your protein from a chicken breast if possible.
Not really. We still really don't know as much about nutrition than we think we do. That is why eating a varied diet is promoted; because we just don't understand what we need as well as we think we do.
2 years of gym and I never needed these powders to fill up my macros.
>sunday
>market, buy groceries, pasta and meat for whole week
>cook everything at once
>put everything on freezer
>clean up everything only once
Of course, I need to wash my dishes during week, but it takes literally 1 minute and half. And you can argue that there are powder to purposes other than macros, and I agree with you that you must take it if you think you need to. I, personally, don't.
I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?
That's why I started the sentence with "if you care about maximizing the quality of your product" -- it's a trade off. If you are ok with getting the average stuff, it's absolutely not necessary to customize your own MRP. The problem is, in the supplement industry, "average" often times means bad, so at least do a little research on any off-the-shelf supplement you're about to buy.
In the past when I was using legal prohormones and needed to feed in a lot of protein and nutrients, a 1 gallon milk jug filled with mix and stored in the fridge was ridiculously efficient. There's no way it was more unpleasant than Soylent; I distinctly remember kind of enjoying the chocolate flavor.
The deal is that people have to know what their body needs first and foremost. Gain? Lose? Maintain? All are different goals and methods. Solyent advertising as an off-the-shelf works-for-all-people might be fundamentally true, but I don't think it can be argued that it's the ideal for each and every person.
but cooking good meals is so damn easy, there are even companies which will deliver the ingredients to very nice meals if you want to cook them.
anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many in a single pan and all were healthy.
I subscribe to Blue Apron, one of those companies you describe that deliver ingredients. I'm thinking about canceling because it takes so damn much effort to cook their meals. I have to chop my own garlic, where I would just use garlic powder or minced garlic before. I have to prepare my own kale, which I would just get kale with the stems removed before. I have to fry my own sage, which... well I would never use a garnish before. It's a meal I'm eating, not a meal I'm selling.
Saying "it's so easy, they deliver the ingredients" is a non-sequitur. Sure you don't have to buy groceries, but cooking still takes a lot of time and effort. Sometimes it's a solid hour that I spend cooking, then a half hour eating, and a half hour cleaning up.
I get four hours I spend at home between work and sleep, and two of those are spent preparing to eat, eating, and cleaning after eating. It's much quicker and easier to pick up KFC on the way home instead. That's the problem Soylent solves.
I tried Blue Apron. It was OK but their meals were definitely reasonably involved to prepare. For example, one of their meals was some sort of gourmet hamburger that took way more work than I would normally put into making a hamburger and I wasn't even all that impressed by the final result.
On the one hand, it can be kinda nice getting everything you need for a new recipe delivered to you. But I have a pretty well-stocked larder and a binder of recipes I make semi-regularly so it didn't really solve a problem I have. (And it's not inexpensive either.)
I strongly recommend getting a good electric pressure cooker. Getting one has been a huge time saving for me because of how automated it is. Just put the food in the inner pot, put the lid on, and press a single button. It senses temperature and pressure to control the heating element so the food is cooked perfectly every time with no burning/scorching and minimal steam escaping. You can put frozen food in and it will still cook perfectly. If you don't overfill it the only thing that touches the lid is steam so all you have to clean is the stainless steel inner pot. You still have to wait about 60 minutes but most of that is leaving it unattended. The food usually has a better texture than with conventional cooking too.
I'm sitting here eating my scrambled-eggs breakfast taco. Fry eggs, fry taco (for decadence), add veggie condiments that are already prepared, eat. I even use a cast-iron skillet so I don't have to wash it, just rinse & leave on the burner a minute. 10 min.
Cookbook author Melissa Joulwan has an algorithmic approach to weekly meal prep that results in delicious and easy weekday meals, if you're willing to make the "cook 2 hrs on weekend + cook no more during the week" trade-off. It's not the mere minutes that Soylent promises, but for some folks reading this it might be useful. It's paleo so easy to adapt to high protein/low carb/high veggie/whatever floats your boat here.
This is underrated advice that applies to any household chore. I like cooking for the sake of cooking but the time spent on it feels wasteful. If I put on an educational podcast I suddenly don't mind the time I spend cooking/washing dishes/whatever.
man, I'm glad I'm not the only one. One compromise I found that works is go to the deli at your grocery store. Get a half pound of some salad (doesnt have to be greens, they have potato salad, noodle salad, etc ), then get either "tuna salad" or "chicken salad", and buy a loaf of bread or crackers. Then just scoop the meat-salad onto your crackers/bread slice right before you eat it. It's like JIT cooking. Cleanup consists of throwing away the salad containers.
You do not spend 30 minutes, let alone 60, chopping, mixing, turning, cleaning. No way. You can do other things like browsing HN (or nothing if you wish) while the meal(s) cook. A fair part of the 'cooking' is just about waiting, not acting.
And as far as the active part is concerned, I like to listen the radio and if I can get organised so that I can prepare the food while one my favourite broadcasts is on the air, I don't even notice I "have to work".
Find me a MRP that has: A balanced amount of nutrients, and not just 600% protein and 10% of everything else. Isn't loaded with sugar so it tastes like a dessert. Isn't filled with artificial sweeteners so it tastes like a fake dessert. And isn't nutritionally designed for body-builders / children / elderly.
I wouldn't mind switching away from Soylent. With articles like this, and their spammy marketing for their new products (no, I don't want a coffee flavored drink, no I don't want a candy bar). But I don't know any other products like it aside from the Soylent clones.
Slimfast and Complan off the top of my head. And those two have been around for decades. MyProtein sell simular stuff that is more balanced than whey protein + whole milk for a meal replacement. Also, whey + whole milk + instant oats lets you control the macros fairly well, assuming your getting all your micro-nutrients from real food elsewhere. And this is without looking on google. Id bet there are many many more. All the own-brand versions of slimfast for example.
I know those, and they don't match any of my criteria. Slimfast has no flavors that aren't dessert drinks.
For a 400 calorie serving of Slimfast original, it's over 36g sugars (vs 9g Soylent). Slimfast Advanced has almost no sugar, but is "sweetened with non-nutritive sweetener" (from their website). I can't find which actual sweetener it is, but most artificial sweeteners upset my stomach and taste more terrible than sweet.
Complan is also loaded with carbs, (33g sugar + 30g else) and has no fiber.
They're marketed as meal replacements, but I don't see how they're anything but vitamin enriched milk shakes.
You've got to be kidding me. There are 100s of products to choose from. And nobody should be living off of a powdered food. But a vitamix blender ($450) and you'll be able to blend about anything. Here's one of my favs, Take some cashews, Coconut oil, avocado, raw Cacoa you'll be below away and healthy.
The only person to respond with a real answer! Thank you! An actual product with an unflavored version that's low in sugar. Sadly I see no option to have it shipped to the US on their website.
It might just be an irrational perception, but when this first came out and got some media attention, I thought it was a great example of the attitude that some engineers/developers have: "too good to do something normal like eat a sandwich, the only thing that matters is more coding."
It struck me as a fundamentally antisocial product developed by someone who might have some kind of an eating disorder. But, like I said, that might only be a perception.
You rally against a false dichotomy and then commit one in almost the same breath. There isn't a choice between a "food prison" of fast food or soylent.
The reality is you should probably choose neither.
Fast food is designed to be addictive (salt/fat/sugar triangle), so the dichotomy is not really false. Its possible to be addicted to fast food. I point to obesity in America and draw some supporting evidence there.
You don't need to point at things there's actually evidence. "Neuroimaging studies in obese subjects provide evidence of altered reward and tolerance." Reward seems to me the most underrated, and extremely powerful form of cognition effecting behavior. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21999689
Agreed. Personally, I take supplements as a way to complement my normal diet -- not to substitute it. Once in a while, when it's not possible to have a real food meal, those MRPs can be also very handy.
Although I'd imagine a liquid diet where you are mainly only consuming smoothie type beverages has to be less hard on your digestive system just because of the simply fact it requires less effort to break down?
I don't think "less hard on your digestive system" is an advantage but rather a disadvantage. Just like "less hard on you bones" is not really an advantage for astronauts that spend a couple of weeks/months in space.
If you want to have a healthy body you have to put it under a stress level for which it was designed by evolution. I.e. exercise once in a while and don't just sit in front of your computer, eat enough fibres and harder to digest food, etc
A lot of our digestive flora actually uses "non-digestible" components for sustenance, we're finding. There can be surprising and unexpected side effects to eliminating food components we thought we just excreted. Fiber, for instance, is technically not all digested -- much just passes through -- but it's really important! Other types of fiber are fermented in the gut depending on what bacteria you've got.
Our bodies having to break down food is not necessarily bad. For example, it allows you to receive a steady stream of nutrients throughout the day, instead of getting it all at once and being deprived later on.
Your dismissal is 100% emotional. Do you have any reasons that I should find it compelling or are you relying entirely on emotional resonance to make your anti-soylent case?
What... what is emotional about that? Saying a product is trying to fill a need which has already been filled is the least emotional reason I can think of to not purchase something.
That wasn't the reason given for the dismissal. I'm not arguing anything in particular about soylent, and in fact I don't care about it at all. I'm just pointing out that personal standards are a boring emotional basis for deciding what is innovative.
"The timing of the deal’s announcement was somewhat of a surprise because Facebook, which had expressed interest in the Farley Building for months, has given most of its employees the option of working from home during the pandemic. Even after the pandemic subsides, Facebook has said that within the next 10 years up to half of its roughly 52,200 employees across the country would work from home."