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Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

No longer will we hear stories like we heard from Airbnb’s founders of surviving off of cereal or “ramen.”

'ramen profitable' and it's derivatives should be taken as a cutesy fluffy marketing term and nothing more (like most startups were never actually started in a garage).

No one should be living literally off Ramen noodles and cereal. It's incredibly bad for your health and a total lack of investment in your body and your brain.

I'm not saying YC's small funding encourages this, but nevertheless we should not be encouraging the promotion of this concept.

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Hey that sort of diet got me through university and freed up funds for that other important calorie source : beer.

You can actually live on that type of diet for a little while when you're young and eager. There are far worse things for you to do.

I ate ramen a lot for one semester for so in undergraduate. My mind and body felt horrible in short order; I never got any sort of nutrition, and I basically haven't had any since. That was like 6 years ago.

If you need to buy cheap food for a while, ramen is not the answer. Finding ingredients at the grocery store and cooking them up yourself is the answer. I suspect that if you really want ramen, you can make it cheaper yourself. And more healthily ().

() Except for the salt levels.

Agreed. If you want to have a well performing body, put performance fuel into it. In other words, good food.

Good food is, unfortunately, highly debatable. Organic or non-organic - I'd still have to suggest that starting with any fruits and vegetables, for example, would be a huge step up in the diet!

As a med student, I have to agree - cooking yourself ends up teaching people more about the food they eat than almost any prepared/prepacked food.

And yes, ramen is also possible to make from a bag of flour, salt, baking soda, and water. No palm fat, no other stuff. Just takes a bit of skill in putting together the soup...

Alongside my basic diet was simple vegetables and meats (cheap cuts and basics like boiled potato and pumpkin), and other budget specialties like tuna and pineapple mixed together and eaten straight from the can(s). And a lot of rice.

I never, ever ate junk food simply because the cost wasn't worth it. Unless I happened across some great pizza coupons, then I would be all over that.

So while I ate a lot, it wasn't the only source of diet, to be fair. And I used to put in a big knob of butter, and specialised in the curry flavours. That makes it taste a lot better.

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