Really cool to read about Aaron's start. I've just started smoking meat this year and it's a fun hobby. How many other hobbies do you get to eat when you're done!

I'm still trying to get a consistent cook, but I've already found a couple of variables to control for. And I've had one cookout where a couple of people told me they thought it was restaurant quality.

A friend owns a restaurant and said if the laws here weren't overly strict on buyint outside pre-cooked product he would buy from me to sell in his restaurant.

You should definitely subscribe to /r/charcuterie.

Why not do a partnership with the friend - do it in/for the restaurant and scale it out to a separate business once you have everybody hooked?

I'm subbed to /r/smoking. I'll check out charcuterie

Big Central TX BBQ fan here.

For those in Texas, it's not very well known but the family running Kreuz Market (mentioned in the article) opened a new location recently, in Bryan TX, 90mn North west of Houston.

And for the readers in the Seattle area, I recommend Jack's BBQ on Airport Way S. It's owned and operated by a Texan native (former Microsoft employee* ). Their brisket isn't bad!

* for the overlap between tech and BBQ :)

Hacker News is about whatever the community of Hacker News elects to upvote. My guess is there is a significant overlap between people interested in tech, people interested in BBQ, and people just interested in anyone striving for perfection.

Thanks for pitching in, but it's worth pointing out that this is not the case. HN is not about whatever the community elects to upvote: there are categories of stories (politics, cat pictures, &c) that are off-topic for HN regardless of votes.

But you're right in spirit! Interesting articles about barbecue are absolutely on-topic for HN!

+1 striving for perfection

Barbecue is meat hacking.

Yup. Meat smoking is the perfect tinkerer's hobby. There is so much to control and optimize. Plus, the payoff is delicious meat.

A lot of people think that! I don't know why, maybe it's something the guidelines need to be a bit clearer about.

It's never been about only tech. Here's dang from 2 years ago saying it's not only about tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663631

Here's the guidelines from 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

If you really want to kludge it into "on topic for startups" it talks about building a brand and competing against incumbents.

> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Do you think this post lives up to that? Aren't we setting the bar a bit low here? I don't see anything special about it.

Then flag it and move on; that's better for HN than very generalized complaints such as these, and much better for HN than content guideline rehashings such as thread parent's. Of course if any particular post only inspires threads like this one, that may be a negative indicator...

OTOH, it's not something that people find 'interesting' in order to make a point. "I find this article trashing Ron Paul to be... really interesting and intellectually gratifying!"