I haven't posted in years, but felt the need to weigh in on a food topic that's dear to my heart:
With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor:
1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or
2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow.
Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).
Just take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.)
This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."
Or you can bake it. That way you can save the tasty juices. It's especially effective for hamburger patties. When you are done cooking, you can dump the juices on the bread and then put your hamburger patty on it. Absolutely delicious.
After years of overcooked dry meat, setting off the smoke alarm, dealing with splatter all over the stove and a lingering smell in the apartment for the entire day, I discovered the magic of baking meat and will never go back to searing and frying meat.
This works just as well for steak. Instead of buying individual cuts of steak, buy a rib roast. Roast it in the oven and cut it into individual steaks afterwards. Cooked steak keeps amazingly well so you can put it in the fridge or freeze it and eat it later. Pan searing or grilling will never get you the tasty crust that roasting can. Try it and never go back to a smoke filled apartment with a screaming smoke alarm.
Everwise | New York, NY | Onsite | Software Engineer, Architect | Onsite
We're a Sequoia-backed SaaS company, has developed a completely new model for talent development. Our mission is to help the world’s professionals reach their full potential by connecting them to the people and resources they need to thrive at each stage of their career.
About Engineering @ Everwise
We're a small engineering team based in NYC. Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, React, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.
Responsibilities
- Build and enhance the front-end of Everwise's web applications.
- Turn mockups into working products.
- Rapidly prototype new features and quickly iterate on what works and what doesn't.
- Analyze site/page speed and help provide performance solutions.
Your Qualifications
- Experience with client-side JavaScript and MVC frameworks (Backbone/Angular/Ember is a plus).
- Experience with mobile optimization, HTML5 and CSS3.
- Experience with object oriented server-side programming, Ruby on Rails a strong plus.
- Understanding of unit and functional testing best practices (Rspec, Jasmine, Protractor, and Selenium are bonuses).
Benefits
We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.
We would consider relocating the right candidate to NYC. Feel free to apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/careers or shoot me an email (shenglong@).
Everwise | New York, NY | Full Time | ONSITE | Senior Software Engineer, Senior Front-end Engineer, Software Engineer In Test
We're a small engineering team based in NYC, who come from all walks of life. We have successful startup experience and embrace processes and technologies that amplify output.
Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, AngularJs, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.
We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.
As a personal note - I joined about two months ago, and have had an amazing time here. We have a bunch of excitable people, play with an adorable office dog named Cooper, and everyone has a tremendous amount of fun. Our interview process is both fluid and fair.
Find out more/apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/jobs/ Or, feel free to email me a pitch at shenglong@geteverwise.com and I'll pass it along :)
Everwise | New York, NY | Full Time | ONSITE | Senior Software Engineer, Senior Front-end Engineer, Software Engineer In Test
We're a small engineering team based in NYC, who come from all walks of life. We have successful startup experience and embrace processes and technologies that amplify output.
Day-to-day we leverage Agile, Ruby on Rails, AWS, AngularJs, Redis and Postgres. We're very adaptable and looking for someone who welcomes the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.
We offer a very competitive base salary and bonus potential. We also provide a full benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid time off (PTO), employee stock option plan and transit benefits.
As a personal note - I joined about 6 weeks ago, and have had an amazing time here. We have an adorable office dog named Cooper, and everyone has a tremendous amount of fun. Our interview process is also both fluid and fair.
Find out more/apply at https://www.geteverwise.com/jobs/
Or, feel free to email me a pitch at shenglong@geteverwise.com and I'll pass it along :)
Not entirely the same thing, but somewhat related: I used to run the largest Ragnarok Online private server for its time, and this AMA is really nostalgic. Well, except how great their community seems to be.
All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off, shutting the server down.
It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League, so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a solution, and we had just failed in community management.
My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.
I played on Nostalrius for a bit. The sense I got was that the community was mostly populated by older people (by internet gaming community standards, at least) who quit WoW years ago and wanted to relive the experience. So the baseline of maturity was a bit higher than average, and people got along well. On top of that, while there were various 4chan/reddit/insert-notorious-community-here guilds, they mostly kept to themselves outside of world PvP.
I played a tiny bit of RO back in the day, and instead got the impression that the community was mostly populated by teenaged anime fans, so of course the baseline for maturity was lower. And with the way the web was so much more fragmented back then, most of the kinds of people that today would make a thread in a notorious community saying "hey there's a new private server launching, anyone wanna start a guild?" would instead have to be obnoxious in the in-game chat until they found like-minded people.
I wouldn't beat yourself up too much wondering about how you could have done things differently, because at the end of the day the intrinsic appeal of certain games to certain demographics has by far the greatest effect on what kind of community will develop around it, and if you're making a direct clone of an existing game, your hands are obviously tied. In all likelihood, it was out of your control from the moment you turned the server on.
I ran a Private Server for another game, community is definitely key. If your community has respect for your team they will overlook issues that arise so long as they are handled properly, and of course even better than that, they will invite their friends.
This is a pretty crass statement to make. If the focus is full-on navigability, I agree that contrast in the navigation bar is paramount. Yet, for many sites with simplified features, the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself.
This is especially true for sites like Airbnb (as in the example) where in addition to emotional response, there is an immediate focus on activating users. The focus shifts from full navigability (logging in, become a host, etc) to searching for a listing.
"...the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself"
The above statement is everything that is wrong with modern visual styling of software. After everything is said and done, software is a tool which people use to accomplish a goal. I would argue that anything that causes friction with that is Bad Design.
As much as some visual/interaction designers may think that "experience is everything", they ignore that they are insisting on manufacturing and enforcing their opinion of what the users experience should be and forget that the user accomplishing their goal is the only experience that matters.
There was a great talk at SXSW last year entitled "The Myth of Reducing Friction in your Product."
Basically, within a given flow (say onboarding or signup), you want to consider having some points of friction interspersed with low friction points. Adding friction in the right places helps to create users who will a)come back and b)will be more active users. The speaker presented some data to back up her assertions.
Getting back to OP's point, the emotional experience is a point of friction that may be worthwhile. Though it may slow down the conversion process or whatever flow the user is supposed to go through, it may result in users who become more attached to the product and ultimately spend more.
The thing is, if the site doesn't make it easy for me to accomplish what I want, then my emotional response is frustration. It doesn't matter how nice or pretty your site is if I get frustrated before I have the chance to appreciate the design.
I think trying to evoke a certain emotional response can really only be effective if it's not getting in the way.
You're right, but there is one key insight you need for your view to be complete: most websites are created to sell you shit - often services, which exist only to be bought. Their actual usefulness is pretty much irrelevant beyond the point people start paying for them. Your ability to use a website / webapp to create value is not something they care about.
As an industry we're hurting ourselves by being in this state of cognitive dissonance. The result is that designers try to apply patterns for selling people shit when they're working on tools, even if given tool is the "real deal" and not meant to drive sales by appearance.
When did sites become "emotional experiences"? I'm sorry I want to say something more constructive but I'm giggling too much at the absurdity of this statement.
Websites are art, the same way that any other creations are. You wouldn't giggle at the idea of a song, a magazine, or a photograph being "emotional experiences", so what makes websites any different?
The emotional experience I have when I go to a site and see a huge image of some stock photo is anger: "Jesus, what fucking moron put this totally useless picture here, and how do I get to the useful portion of this site and do what I need to do?"
I'd like to call out the google analytics splash page as an example that makes me feel this way. Why is it there at all? Why is there a giant image of some irrelevant face on it?
> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself
Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.
The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases completion rates -- if you look at your homepage as another page that needs completions then this makes perfect sense.
> if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out
And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.
Well, if the entire point of your site is to let people get started, ok, remove all navigation.
But if it's useful for something else, like if there's an actual product in it somewhere, with actual features, or if there's actual content somewhere you'd want your visitors to read, it's good to give them the option of doing anything besides "getting started".
> The usability of what?
> why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar?
Typically people are looking for information when the visit a brand new site. If the user can't figure out how to get that information, chances are they're going to be frustrated, and have no interest in clicking the button.
Can anyone related to this explain to me why Yahoo Weather is listed under their "success stories"? As the PM on the project, I can say without a doubt this was not done externally. It was built through the sweat and tears of the wonderful engineers and designers on the team.
One of the main developers of the Yahoo weather app is a gigster (developer on the platform). The statement is that it was built by "one of our gigsters" and is intended to showcase the quality of work developers on Gigster have done. Had that developer been on Odesk or TapFame they would have listed Yahoo Weather as part of their portfolio. In this case they actually do list it as part of their portfolio. Definitely do not intend to take away from your hard work and appreciate you for it. Happy to do better in making this clearer but it's a bit unfair to imply that we cant showcase the work of developers on our platform as an indicator of developer quality.
Sorry, I agree with the OP. I interpreted the "Success Stories" page, especially when it is sub-titled "Our prior work speaks for itself" as referring to the work performed through Gigstar. There is a difference between allowing somebody to claim work they performed versus assigning that claim to the body that employs them after the fact. This example, just because of the lack of clarity, presents itself as the latter which is a little unfair in itself.
There's a good amount of criticism as well as praise for her, and I'm not entirely sure your question is entirely fair.
The reality of it all is that transformations take time, especially when things at Yahoo had been so Scott Thompson'd. Marissa has been rebuilding a sinking ship from the inside out - where most people would've just tried to patch it up as it slowly sank, or sold it off for parts; I think that's what's admirable. I think that's why people defend her. She dared to defy the status quo. She dared to employ the same dedication as founders do day in and day out, and she demonstrated over and over again, the audacity to take risks.
I find it stranger that more people don't defend her. All of us should know that technology companies thrive or die from the inside; it's why startup founders spend such a disproportionate amount of time hiring great people. To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity; the transformation is apparent - and even if not yet absolute, it is still miraculous.
>That’s why she has spent $2 billion on acquisitions, most notably the $1.1 billion for Tumblr, which instantly gave Yahoo a credible entry into social networking and user-generated content. (It was, in fact, a Tumblr post that was Patient Zero in “The Dress” contagion that ate the Internet last week.)
I think the above excerpt, is a good reflection of what I believe the OP means by defending MM.
It may be unfair to try to sum up MM's time as CEO in terms of acquisitions, but its simply what the media has highlighted and I am sure Yahoo wants the media banging that drum for all its worth. Therefore, if the biggest argument for the $1.1B Tumblr acquisition is pointing to the latest viral post, I consider that running to her defense. From the tone of this article, the stockholders are demanding cost savings (sounds like less employees), new revenue streams and a general direction for the company. For better or worse the CEO is responsible for making the stockholders happy, I personally think Yahoo's niche could be in privacy - give users alternatives to Google, Facebook, Gmail, cloud storage with a focus on what people want...privacy. IMHO Yahoo has always had a respectable focus on the cross section of technology, privacy and human rights (maybe one of the first in tech to create a human rights program).
privacy typically does not drive revenue up, unless you are violating it. this might be something your social circle claims to want, but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.
New startup idea: convert existing privacy-apathetic customers of big companies like Google/Yahoo into privacy-aware customers who fear their data or identity being stolen, then sell conversions to a Google/Yahoo competitor who values privacy more highly.
If fear mongering works for wars, it should work for tech company privacy concerns meets mass consumerism!
>this might be something your social circle claims to want,
Professionally I practice law so yes, myself and my colleagues are concerned about government entities violating not just privacy but the attorney client-privilege...though I digress and this is not what I am talking about, but it does happen.
>but if you look at the "average" person, they have next to zero concern for their privacy.
The "average" person isn't using Yahoo, that's why it would be a niche. I'll leave you with a interesting quote: "A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine."[1]
It's an interesting thought for sure, I just don't see how you sell it to shareholders. If I had to make a baseless assumption, I'd say the bulk of yahoos users are seniors who moved on from AOL, and don't know any difference.
I would be really interesting to see yahoos audience demographics to confirm or deny that though.. Perhaps they have a larger international audience I'm not aware of.
To anyone who actually bothered to pause and compare Yahoo's culture today to yesterday's, it would be obvious that Marissa's conviction and aptitude is heralding a new era of prosperity;
That is the complete opposite of what I've heard from those still at Yahoo.
Yes her mandated Quarterly Performance Review system in which managers were forced to put a % of employees in under performing buckets single handedly damaged the moral more than anything in the companies history.
> in which managers were forced to put a % of employees in under performing buckets
... except other managers, of course! ;-)
I'm an ex-Yahoo, and I feel that Yahoo has too many layers of management. Marissa would be well served by reducing the ratio of managers to engineers to something like 1:10 (currently I've heard it's close to 1:3, but that's just rumor and speculation).
I've been backpacking around SE Asia for a few months now, and this sort of system has been active on an ad hoc basis for years in Chiang Mai, Thailand. There, it's expected that "red cars" (seemingly the only active taxis), will pick up other passengers.
They'll stop for passengers flagging them down, and check location before issuing a quote, if in fact they're on the way. While this made traveling really cheap, there were times where a 10-minute trip stretched into over half an hour. I'm interested to see whether these services will customize allowable wait times to the individual, or whether all ride-sharers have roughly the same tolerance for delays.
But, to say that any one company copied another in this case is a pretty stupid argument to make. I asked myself this question the first time I rode with Uber, and I'm sure many of you have as well. I would imagine that any good PM would've thoroughly investigated it; it's pretty obvious.
With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor: 1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or 2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow.
Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).