I think I've heard of past attempts, but they didn't seem to catch on? This Soylent stuff seems to be "proving" itself; or at least not debunked enough to drop it just yet. If it truly does work, I think a lot of 3rd world countries would benefit from it. So at least for me, I'm interested in the developments of Soylent. In general, I'm interested in any tech that TRULY is world-changing even if it's not in the form of a computer. Now do I think it belongs on HN? That's a bit debatable, but if people are upvoting it(and not gaming the system) then it has the right to be here just like anything else. Maybe HN is slowy changing to be more than strictly 0s & 1s news?
But this is what I don't get. We literally already have this. Some cancer patients live on a liquid diet for YEARS already. We have complete liquid nutrition. It's a solved problem.
Now, the application can be debated, but soylent doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.
It feels like this is just old solution with new marketing.
I'm curious -- are these formulae available for purchase by anyone? I do think that Soylent's research is somewhat redundant (although more research is never a bad thing especially with tricky business like nutrition), but is there another product that's come out of this cancer patient diet that I could buy?
Well, I dunno. I cannot say you're wrong. I'm just interested in stuff like this as long as their are large groups of starving people in the world. Maybe my interests are misdirected and I should be wondering why current solutions aren't being applied.
On a global scale, Soylent is very very expensive. Their current pricing is $65/week. Many nonprofits feed someone for $50-100/year in the third world. The price would have to come down to 2% of the current value to be considered. That's unlikely with such a heavily industrialized product.
Maybe we'll decide to mass-produce and/or subsidize? I don't know, I just think it's cool thing he's doing and want to see the conclusion of it. Maybe it's all a big waste of time, who knows. I just want to be kept informed of the progress.
