Speaking as someone who cooks a lot for himself and is very interested in nutrition and proper diet, I have no idea why you're even asking this. Nutrition wise, vegans who play it smart are just as if not more healthy than the rest of us. Finance wise it's often cheaper because lets face it, meat is expensive. Time wise it's no different than any other type of meal preparation, which I believe studies have shown is actually faster than waiting for delivery or going out and ordering at a restraunt.
The fact is that it shows a level of dedication above and beyond what normal people exert. I'd say that puts them well in the running for a startup.
My experience is that a terrible vegetarian diet (pasta, white-rice, tomatoes, as the staple) is the cheapest method of eating. A nutritionally adequate vegetarian diet (variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole-grains, etc) costs about the same as a terrible carnivorous diet (i.e., meat + pasta, white-rice, etc), and, at the top of the price-point, is a nutritionally adequate carnivorous diet (which, incidentally, few people can afford in terms of both cost and time to prepare).
I don't know about any studies regarding which is faster, but I do know that in my personal life I've found vegetarian meals to be both easier to prepare and easier to clean (e.g., meat has to be cooked just right or it is either a) dangerous or b) tastes terrible).
> The fact is that it shows a level of dedication above and beyond what normal people exert.
Because he's targeting health, the hardest part he needs to work through is having to wait for his taste-buds (i.e. brain) to adjust to a low-salt/low-fat diet; while not an insignificant feat, his wealth does allow him to skip the practical re-education of both how to shop for food and how to cook meals.
I'm exactly the same way but I've found that sighs j-pop fits in this as well. If I can't understand the words then it doesn't break my flow. German techno also seems to work.
I like music with nonsense lyrics for the same reason, i.e. cocteau twins, sigur ros, dead can dance. Otherwise, ambient stuff like explosions in the sky, god is an astronaut, mono (the japanese mono).
It's sad. After coding in Haskell and Erlang I moved back to Python for a project and my code was just littered with extra variables. I had become so used to the functional way that varying variables just seemed so wrong and foreign.
This isn't an easy problem. One thing you could do is mod the moderators. Have each persons vote count a certain amount. People who report true spam you bump up, and people who are abusive get bumped down, perhaps to the point where their opinion doesn't matter. Then require a minimum threshold before you have to deal with it. Also have this ranked against the up votes and popularity.
On imageboard.net we have it setup so more than one person has to mod something down to hide it. It still doesn't work that great, but it's better than nothing.
I'm pretty sure what you described is what he meant by brevity. It's not about writing less code per say. It's about adding layers of abstraction, which classes are, to shrink the problem space.
Comparing python to assembly, python has basically added in another level of abstraction. It's easier to translate a concept into python because of this. A good hacker can build up these abstractions himself no matter the language, but it's just easier and nicer to use a language that has the type of abstractions you'll be using already built in.
Once you fully trust your classes then they become like DSLs and you build your program out of them rather than the raw bits of whatever language you're using.
I was on a first date the other week and was explaining some of my ideas and the lady I was with nearly wet herself with excitement telling me about a webapp she'd love to have. After thinking about it and asking a few other women I know, I'm going to start working on it and apply to YC with it.
Most every idea I came up with seems like someone else has already done. This one... I spent two days searching and found nothing comparable.
honestly I don't know why you got 5 points since you didn't mention anything about your app besides that your date "almost wet herself"; and I'm willing to bet that there are 5 other teams with the same idea.
I believe the government should provide the following services:
1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."
2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.
The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.
3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.
> Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point.
What's the incentive for them to provide more, particularly since fiber lines usually cut across constituent boundaries, yet don't cut far enough to make a majority in Congress?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'provide more'. The entire idea behind the government owning the infrastructure and not the services that run on them is to stimulate fair competition between private enterprises. I wouldn't really want the government to do more than provide a usable signal to my jack.
Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.
I live in Alberta and up until a few years ago the telecom was owned and operated by the provincial government. It dropped copper to every house. I don't see why fiber would be any different. Some provinces still run their own telecoms.
Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.
One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.
In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.
> I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.
But shouldn't the government only be concerned with providing a usable signal? If you want a fast signal, then leave that to private enterprise. You can pay them for a faster connection, and they can pay the government to upgrade the infrastructure in a particular area.
