Shenglong

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).

This is awesome--really excited to see this need being solved.

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.

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.

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.

Remember: people -> product -> profit