Distilling, one wants to control extraction yield to isolate the best flavors. Done carefully, one makes armagnac. Maximizing extraction yield makes moonshine.
First off, let's talk about how it completely annihilates the fun of sarcasm. Sarcasm is like a secret handshake; it's supposed to be subtle, a little game of wit between the speaker and the listener. But no, we had to slap a big, fat "/s" at the end, just in case someone's sarcasm radar is as effective as an ashtray on a motorcycle.
And then there's the snobbishness of it all. It's like saying, "Oh dear, I better put this here because you might not grasp the advanced concept of sarcasm." It's patronizing! We're basically assuming that people online have the emotional range of a teaspoon and can't catch a sarcastic comment unless it's gift-wrapped with a "/s".
But wait, it gets better. The safety of "/s" makes a padded playground look like an extreme sports event. It's like we're afraid of a little scrape or bruise from a misunderstood joke. Remember when playgrounds were made of concrete and we survived? Now, it's all about safety first, even in our online conversations. "Watch out, don't hurt yourself on that sharp wit!"
And as we progress down this ridiculous road, let's envision a world where everything is as blatantly obvious as sarcasm with a "/s" tag. Imagine going to a comedy show where the comedian has to pause and explain each joke. "And that, ladies and gentlemen, was a joke about marriage. You can laugh now." Or picture reading a book where every metaphor is followed by an explanation. "The curtains were blue, which symbolizes the character's deep sadness, in case you didn't catch that."
We could even take it further. How about emotional cue cards for everyday conversations? "I'm about to tell a joke – please prepare to laugh" or "Warning: sarcasm in 3, 2, 1..." The possibilities are endless in our brave new world of over-explained humor.
In the spirit of this absurdity, let's just put disclaimers on everything. "Warning: This rant may contain traces of hyperbole and a pinch of irony. Please consume responsibly." And don't forget, if you didn't find this funny, it's probably because I didn't put a "/s" at the end. My bad.
Some people hate emojis too.
The guidelines don't rule out sarcasm. They ask for comments to be civil and substantive. The Venn diagram of those things may not have a lot of common area but there's definitely some. Just don't ask me to specify what it is—that's probably too hard.[1]
Readers here recognize sarcasm, but they also recognize what happens to a web forum where it is allowed to proliferate.
We don't have any problem with satire and sarcasm as such, but on a large public forum like HN, with everything a mile wide and an inch deep, they are nearly always associated with really low-quality discussion.[2]
I've often wondered why jabs, swipes and sarcasm are so corrosive on HN when anyone who knows about the history of discourse knows what a lively role they have played. [The lack of sarcasm] makes the discourse a little more bland, but the alternative is not lively exchanges of high wit, it's YouTube comments.[4]
I think sarcasm is more of a problem on HN than lame humor is. Humor doesn't always succeed, but at least it's intended to make others feel good. (Think "good humor".) Sarcasm is only marginally related to humor. It's really about scorn. Sarcasm is verbal bile. It feels good to let it out, but it acidifies the environment. It feels like you're being smart[5]
Note that Dang seems to personally like to use sarcasm[6].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411394
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18506429
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284457
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378899
/s
Including the “/s” helps to ensure that one is understood. To me, that seems more important than whatever it is you think has been lost.
Coffee beans contain diterpenes, which have been shown to increase cholesterol. Paper filters significantly reduce the quantity of diterpenes in the end product.
Generally increased extraction (i.e. getting more "coffee" into the water) is better.
So there's varied ways to adjust each given aspect of preparing coffee (including times of everything, the process itself, the order of the process and so on). And how you tweak each given aspect will have varying degrees of noticeable effect on the taste of the drink (some have almost none). Beans roasted 3 weeks ago probably won't be discernable from beans roasted 4 weeks ago. Beans roasted today might be discernable from those roasted a week ago, though.
Each of these aspects isn't inherently independent of one another either. Coarseness, brew time, and pressure are often very closely linked and adjusting one or the other often requires adjusting the other for desirable results.
Now while some of these sort of tweaks are tiny, combining all sorts of tiny tweaks can result in noticeable larger differences. It might not be obvious what it is because of all of the small component improvements, but the end result is something that, even slightly, is noticeably improved, which is true for about anything.
Ultimately the question is does all this effort combined yield enough improvement that's noticeable. Maybe one small improvement isn't noticeable like adjusting from 92 to 99 degrees. That combined with a series of other tweaks might yield something worth the effort though.
I know when I first started brewing espresso at home I laughed at a lot of advice thinking certain aspects of the brewing process were silly so I'd skip them or just ignore it all together. Things like weighing my beans, tweaking grind size, and so on. My first few weeks of espresso drinks were... pretty disappointing. Why can Starbucks (which in terms of espresso is often lackluster) make better espresso than me at home? As I went down the rabbit hole and adopted more silly strategies, I tasted notable improvements.
It's not just me either, I've had friends try throughout the process and it went from "thanks, that was drinkable" being nice to my not so great coffee to now people saying "wow that's really great, how do you make that, that's the best coffee I've had."
It sounds stupid until you start tweaking all these little parts. I'm not entirely scientific about it, much of it is a hit of an art and inference with science mixed in. I'm at a point now where I think no matter how many slightly improved tweaks I make, I won't be able to tell the difference and it's not worth the time.
From your example, 92 to 99 C might come down to how much energy the water actually has and how precise you can measure it. When you're approaching boiling, some parts of the water probably is boiling and made a phase transition, you're measuring an average of some other part that may not be a good sample of the whole. Those parts that are boiling may result in damaging organics in what you're brewing leading to bitter flavors you don't want, so backing off gives you some margins of error in your measurement. 7 degrees might not make too much difference if it's say 95 and 88 C (a little more time might make up for similar results) but something approaching a critical point like boiling might actually matter.
(some) Programmers can't do anything without knowing everything about it
edit: auto correct did me dirty
I rarely exactly follow a recipe so it's important to understand what effects the steps have so you can experiment with them. I've been trying to perfect cookies for years.
I wonder if that’s a part our (everyone’s) inevitable future that we didn’t conceptualize yet playing on “default settings”.
But out of curiosity, how much time does the coffee nerd community spend pondering and tweaking environmental variables?
For example, ambient room temperature and relative humidity? Can't do a whole lot about pressure, short of tracking historical trends vs present air pressure and setting expectations, I suppose.
Other factors: tamping down physical, emotional irritants, such as screaming children, freshly burnt toast, headaches, etc.
And something that is adjustable but not quickly so: the (paint) colour(s) of the room. It's been something like 30 years, but ISTR hearing that different colours can affect us in subtle ways. For example, red can help stimulate the appetite. I imagine good lighting (eg, warm lighting, avoid fluorescent) is another variable.
All this to ask: do coffee nerds consider tweaking any of the above, or only those things that are in very close proximity to the grinder and espresso machine?
Nice! I got a bit burnt by a Quick Mill Andreja and have always wondered if it related to the the conversion to 240v that was done on it for New Zealand. The reality never came close to the reviews.
I’m now on a Faema E-61 Legend and an orange Mazzer Robur - it’s like having a particular large traffic cone in the kitchen. Every so often I consider a more tuneable double boiler, but going back to your comment, appearances matter and and my ridiculous setup makes the coffee seem better.
I worked a bar with a 3-group. What a joy to work with.
I don’t think I would be able to tell - I make fussy coffee, but not to this extreme.
You don't see many men doing knitting but it's also a very careful technical thing. And it's full of strong opinions just like coffee or golf or whatever.
It's just saying it out loud isn't very polite unless you're a comedian or jesting, because people will automatically read into it as a moral or intelligence judgement.
But otherwise I think it's pretty obvious men typically go very hard into their new hobbies, almost obsessively. Additionally, they often do it for short periods before finding a new one to jump into next month and then suddenly they forgot about coffee and are learning how speakers work.
Generalizations are Generalizations, that's how they work.
> But otherwise I think it's pretty obvious men typically go very hard into their new hobbies
I'm a man. The other day I wanted to see if there was a way to fix one of my daughter's Barbie dolls and ended up in a huge rabbit hole of Barbie dolls collectors, which you can peruse (at your own risk) in r/Barbie, YouTube and others. These are (mostly) grown women obsessing about their dolls collections, swapping heads and bodies, re-rooting hair, fixing damaged hair, sewing their own custom clothes, asking questions about "color charts" (to match parts from different dolls), re-painting face details from scratch and consulting authoritative databases that list every Barbie head by year and detail which bodies use it. Some tattoo their dolls. One had replicated the main characters from Cyberpunk 2077, meaning she was also a cyberpunk and videogame nerd.
There are some men there too, but I grant you it's mostly women. Their attention to detail and obsession with their hobby rivals model train enthusiasts.
I think in this day and age there's a hobby for anything, and women are not only not excluded from this trend, but tend to be passionate about it.
I've also found women who are nerds about coffee, mind you. Many have YouTube channels about this.
Example book nook: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7900081/scotte
That community is about 95% women. Book nooks are adjacent, hobbywise, to dollhouses, which may explain it.
Women can be that type of person, for sure, but statistically they tend not to be, and on a colloquial forum we write colloquially and interpret intent broadly and generously, the best to facilitate productive dialogue and avoid descending into semantic argumentation.
- Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
We don't need to be so literal and inflexible about everything. Even with modern sensibilities, we're adults here and we're all capable of reading a comment like that and understanding that the author doesn't actually mean that no or even few women can be obsessive about coffee/knives/audio systems, or that no/few men can do yoga.
(FTR I'm sure I'm not alone here in being a male who does yoga and can also be obsessive about things like audio quality.)
I'm a bit of a non-conformist generally, so maybe my view is skewed, but I think a big part of the "X people like Y" pattern you see and refer to is that many people just aren't practiced in trusting their own feelings and senses to develop their own preferences: they see people like themselves, and they align, and conform, often unwittingly. They join the [let's say] goth clique in high school, and then come to like mostly the same things as the rest of their clique, not only by nature or coincidence, but by a mostly subconscious desire to belong. It applies to things like gender and profession, too.
I've taken this simplification bent to its logical conclusion and no longer drink coffee. Best repo is the null repo, simplest cup of coffee is the one you never brew.
https://www.statista.com/chart/27653/yoga-men-and-women-by-c...
Also to the extent that “kindergarten teachers are women”, women do yoga. 3 to 1 participation vs men, and the pop culture face of the hobby.
I agree that it's for a certain personality type (I myself am one of the obsessive espresso people). But it needn't be gendered.
But it is
You're right that it doesn't _have to_ be gendered but it is - observably so - gendered.
You could also well make an argument that the female body structure lends itself better to flexibility than the male body, due to that elastin and hormones and stuff, so it could well be said that there's a gender-bias built in from the ground up.
Off-topic warning: Man here, in "late middle age." For several years I've been accompanying my wife to yoga classes 2-3x/week at our local YMCA.* I'm not especially fond of it, but it seems to have been good for my balance and flexibility; I don't feel the way I'd always imagined my age would feel. (Diet and lifestyle also help, and I've long done and still do plenty of other workouts, incl. a fair amount of running and swimming in the past.) The yoga classes typically are about 1/3 men, mostly in my age bracket.
* For years, my wife tried unsuccessfully to get me to come with her to yoga classes. Then one day I heard a tone in her voice that she really meant it and would be upset if I didn't comply. I've been doing yoga ever since ....
On that topic: Jerry and I and some other Googlers did test one variable, at least.
what does that mean?
It IS hard to organize a tasting, and then what have you proved? But the evidence adds up, eventually.
I don't know if they make sure the person putting the cups down doesn't know which is which.
But you can think of it differently and see it as a way to have a cup that is just as good but using less coffee, because it is better extracted. Less waste is a good thing, for the environment, for the coffee brewing industry, and for you.
I tried the RDT once. I find absolutely nothing practical about it. The mistake is trying to grind straight into the basket. I started grinding into a separate large cylindrical receptacle (a.k.a. a Tall Cup) that I can fit directly under the spout and catch all the grindings with.
Wait 10 seconds for the static to settle.. bang the cup three times on the counter... then pour the grindings into the basket. Manages most of the static, nearly all of the mess, and makes the whole operation so much easier and efficient.
The espresso space is filled with people who are _content_ to spend 95% of the effort chasing the last 5% of quality. I cannot truck with those people.
- Your routine with the cup can count as "high effort", and if spraying a bit of water on the beans lets you avoid that extra step, it may actually be an improvement in terms of effort.
In the end, I think it all comes down to your grinder and tolerance for effort. Some people have espresso as a ritual, and as far as rituals go, that one is harmless and results in a good cup of coffee, so I am all for it. Not my thing either though, and while I like playing a bit from time to time just to see what can be done with some effort, my routine is as simple as it can get. Note that I happen to have a doser grinder, which is usually not ideal in a home setting, but it does a good job with the static, essentially what you are doing but as built-in feature of the grinder.
I actually like to use the bean hopper, and to use the RDT, you have to keep the hopper empty and fill on each use so you can actually spray the beans that are about to be ground.
With the cup, I can load up the hopper for the entire day, then just grind. It's significantly less effort. Particularly when it comes to weighing the shot into the basket, I can just tare out the weight of the cup, and I don't have to mess around trying to balance a basket on a scale.
When I watch most of these "youtube experts" push out a cup of espresso it drives me up the wall how much effort they waste. In particular, because to them, it seems like the more effort wasted the "better" the routine is. It needlessly scares amateurs away from learning how to make their own espresso.