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Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#51

Post by lucaspiller »

dvirsky wrote: post #48
lucaspiller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you not get sick of being stuck in the office for 8+ hours a day? I like lunch as it gives me a break to go outside for a walk :)

As I said, it's also a credit card, so we can go out with it as well, most restaurants in the city accept that card (it has a credit of about $12 a day payed for by the company, and if you use more than that it gets billed to your personal credit card. Most restaurants price their lunches to fit into this budget). Sadly there's only one restaurant within walking distance, and it's inside the same building. But I do t…

Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I just thought you meant it was paid for by the company. That sounds pretty cool!

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#52

Post by dvirsky »

lucaspiller wrote: post #51
dvirsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, it's also a credit card, so we can go out with it as well, most restaurants in the city accept that card (it has a credit of about $12 a day payed for by the company, and if you use more than that it gets billed to your personal credit card. Most restaurants price their lunches to fit into this budget). Sadly there's only one restaurant within walking distance, and it's inside the same building. But I do t…

Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I just thought you meant it was paid for by the company. That sounds pretty cool!

Yes, it is. The daily credit changes from company to company, of course, $12 is on the higher end, but not the highest I've heard of (plus you do pay part of it out of your own pocket, as it is taxed to some extent).

When I used to work in an area with a lot of tech companies, there was a daily ritual of walking together and picking between about a dozen restaurants, and you'd see tons of geeks doing the same thing every day around noon.

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#53

Post by underyx »

Here's what we used at Allmyles: https://github.com/underyx/footlong

There's an Android app that lists the daily menus in Budapest, Hungary, where we're located. From there it was just a matter of finding the internal API of this app, and hooking it up to HipChat. We migrated to Slack and haven't yet got around to updating footlong to post the results there, though. I checked our HipChat yesterday and it was practically nothing but footlong posts.

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#54

Post by stephenr »

jasonkester wrote: post #44
stephenr wrote: post #11

This sounds like a uniquely American thing to me. I've never heard of this concept anywhere except California. Everywhere I've worked on-site, if people wanted to eat together they just did that weird thing people do and talk to one another .

There's a delicate art to these negotiations if you want to end up going someplace good. You can't just come out and say where you want to go, because it will get swatted down by everybody else who wants the Barbeque Joint or Sushi House or Rubio's Fish Tacos or Thai Garden. You have to let them wear each other down for a while until all the good options are off the table and everybody is resigning themselves to comp…

As I said. If you want sushi and no one else does, just go get fucking sushi and let them eat each other's toe jam if they want.

Why must you eat lunch with your coworkers every single day?

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#55

Post by stephenr »

Rafert wrote: post #37
stephenr wrote: post #11

This sounds like a uniquely American thing to me. I've never heard of this concept anywhere except California. Everywhere I've worked on-site, if people wanted to eat together they just did that weird thing people do and talk to one another .

It's probably an extremely Dutch thing to do, but we have fresh bread delivered daily and sandwich filling in the fridge. On fridays some of us eat at various places near the office.

Sounds like an amazing place, frankly.

One thing I miss about Australia (I live in Thailand now) is places to get good fresh bread/sandwiches etc., at short notice.

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#56

Post by stephenr »

ajkjk wrote: post #42
Kalium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... at my office this leads to endless amounts of bikeshedding, because the goal is consensus and everyone gets a veto. We would wind up at the same three spots every damn time. I shortcut this by appointing myself lunch dictator.

That sounds annoying. It's not hard to not care where you eat on any particular day.

I'd counter with it's even easier to just eat what you want, alone on a particular day.

Re: Ask HN: Did you implement a lunch picking app at your startup?

#60

Post by JasonH09 »

I created an app for just my group of friends to pick where to go to eat.

It had tags for different places and would narrow the selection down and ultimately pick one. You could say where people in the group had been recently and they would be removed, say which area of the city you wanted, delivery, take-out, dine-in, fast food, and other properties. People also had profiles where they could choose restaurants they didn't like and when you went through the picking wizard, you would indicate who was going and it would discard any restaurants that those people disliked from the potential pool. A random number generator would then make the final decision from the possible options.

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