[bwindsor]

I've been working on a stove safety/smart cooking device which is based on the temperature of your pan [0]. There are a small number of recipes which it currently works with [1]. To do this we defined a JSON format for recipes [2] but if we could use something similar to the text format used by CookLang that would be amazing, as it's much easier to write than JSON and could also be automatically rendered into a web page. Currently we are writing it twice - once in JSON for the cooking app, and once in human readable form.

[0] https://mypippa.me/ [1] https://recipes.mypippa.me/ [2] https://recipes.mypippa.me/schemas/cookMLSchema3.0.json

[smashed]

The newsletter pop-up made your site unusable on mobile. Hard to close, and then it kept coming back. Obnoxious and rage inducing. I hate your product now.

[bwindsor]

I'd be interested if there's research showing whether a one-off popup gives more signups or more annoyance. The marketing people seem to think it's better to have it there.

I agree it's hard to close, I'll see if I can do something about that. It shouldn't keep coming back once closed, which browser are you using? Although it does come back if you refresh the page. I might be able to do something about that as well.

[tomerv]

I just noticed that this kind of pop-up appearing is a trigger for me to close the page. I immediately get the feeling that I got the basic idea of that page.

[culpable_pickle]

Personally, those popups are an immediate close tab for me. If you have no confidence in my wanting to sign up for your news letter after I've seen your content, I don't want to bother with your content at all.

[morberg]

You should ask your marketing people to back up their beliefs with research. While you are waiting think about how you react on other sites that use pop-ups. For me it’s an insta-close. YMMV.

[DavidPeiffer]

I'd be interested in a paired device to interrupt the energy source to the stove. If danger is imminent and the operator hasn't responded in a certain timeframe, a connected valve would turn the gas supply off or a switch would trigger the electricity to turn off.

Growing up we had a sensor in the oven go out, causing the cookies to catch on fire inside the oven. We also had a control board on a Whirlpool dishwasher start smoking ~15 years ago. There was a class action lawsuit against Whirlpool, but we didn't have any documentation that showed the model and serial number of the unit, so we couldn't get the typical "$20 credit for your next appliance purchase" or whatever the compensation was.

In both cases, flipping the electricity off at the breaker prevented further damage.

[bwindsor]

Thanks for the suggestion! We did consider the idea of making it automatically cut the energy source. However at the moment, the install steps are: receive it in the post, pull out the battery tab, and stick it on your stove splashback with a strong sticky pad. Almost anybody can do it themselves. As soon as you need to cut the electricity/gas it requires a qualified engineer to go in and install it, making the install cost an order of magnitude larger. So this wouldn't be a part of the core product.

As an optional paired peripheral, it's a good idea, and perhaps we will look into it further if the main product has some success. If individuals consider it a valuable addition then they could pay to have it installed. A secondary drawback would be reduced battery life on the device, as it would be continuously paired over Bluetooth whenever the stove is in use - usually it is just passively advertising in case you are trying to connect through the phone app.

In terms of saving lives, the automatic cut-off would make a relatively small difference - fire department stats (on smoke alarms) show that having a loud beeping alarm is extremely effective at attracting attention and is enough for the user to go and turn it off manually, or to get out of harm's way if things have turned bad. Where the automatic cut-off would help is in reducing the chance of the house being damaged by smoke or fire when the user is out of range.

[jll29]

Actually, if one defined an XML or SGML DTD, you could inter-weave text and mark up seamlessly without having to create yet another markup language; another reason to standardize is not having to write readers/writers/converters again and again.

Buy @red pepper{2}.

versus

<recipe> Buy <ingredient amount="2">red pepper</ingredient>.</recipe>

For the latter, standard tools like xmlwf or any good Web browsers built-in XML viewer already exist and work right away.

In any case, double maintenance of JSON and human-readable text will eventually lead to inconsistencies.

[groby_b]

I'm curious - have you tested with oils with various smoke points? How does your device know which smoke point to monitor for? That's a 300F range (225 for Sunflower oil - which nobody should cook with, but if you want to prevent fires, look for the people doing things they shouldn't do, but that are convenient. 300F for butter, 520F for avocado oil)

Also, since I have a thing for flambee dishes - how does it deal with pyromanic chefs? ;)

[bwindsor]

It doesn't know which smoke point to monitor for. However, the aim (at least for the MVP) is for it to work the majority of the time for the majority of users - and critically to alert several minutes before there is any flame. So while sunflower oil may start smoking a small amount, it would be several minutes more getting to flame, by which time the alarm should have sounded.

If you put a frying pan on with oil in and leave it, the device will alert you at around 450F. This is a fixed threshold (along with some other checks, e.g. we also consider the rate of change of temperature). This gives reasonable behaviour in most cases, and ensures you don't get nuisance alarms when frying on high heat. In cases where individuals have an unusual cooking pattern which causes unreasonable false alarms we can adjust the model parameters to increase/decrease sensitivity in particular situations. In the future we may be able to adjust these automatically but for now there is not a great deal of automated "learning" involved.

If you're a pyromaniac chef, I think you would get some alarms from that! Again this is a bit of an edge case so we haven't but much effort into that for the first iteration of the product, definitely something for the future though - I can imagine it being a challenge to distinguish flambee and a real fire though, since flambee is real fire!

[CraigJPerry]

Ha! This is one of the best ideas I’ve seen on HN.

Just the safety thing alone has me hooked.