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Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

blog.josephofiowa.com

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Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#21

Post by WendyTheWillow »

wilg wrote: post #9

This article doesn’t make good on its claim to explain why this “Rails convention” is bad. It’s probably actually good. I wouldn’t have clicked on it otherwise. Rude, IMO.

It's "good" if you're enumerating a potential target!

Otherwise, you typically either want to make your URLs intuitively discoverable or not discoverable at all. An incrementing ID like this is neither, so it sits in a weird middle ground that probably satisfies nobody (except those trying to get things done who don't care, I guess).

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#22

Post by filoleg »

polishdude20 wrote: post #20

"If Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO at Airbnb, listened to his mom, Airbnb wouldn't exist today. Or at least according to her: "I told him it's a bad idea. I didn't think it was going to work, and I didn't really understand it. If he listened to me, Airbnb wouldn't be here now."" I mean, in the end, isn't it turning out to be a bad idea? Removing homes from the rental market, increasing housing prices. Encouraging mo…

> isn't it turning out to be a bad idea?

Not for Brian, no.

Even if Airbnb ceases to exist tomorrow, I am fairly certain that Brian is gonna be in a better spot than he would have been in if he listened to his mom.

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#23

Post by cartothemax »

gaogao wrote: post #10
wilg wrote: post #9

This article doesn’t make good on its claim to explain why this “Rails convention” is bad. It’s probably actually good. I wouldn’t have clicked on it otherwise. Rude, IMO.

It's pretty common outside of rails too, like https://facebook.com/4 Some main weaknesses, if I recall correctly, is that's incremental ids make scraping pretty easy, or guessing content outside of a URL given explicitly by the service (like here).

Yep, you're correct. Panera had an issue where folks could scrap every user profile due to sequential profile ids. The bigger part of the exploit was they just openly exposed user data but making the profiles ids sequential made it really easy to scrap

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/panerabread-com-leaks-mi...

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#24

Post by WendyTheWillow »

netsharc wrote: post #3
carabiner wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Article: >It's (still) all about your users and customers > Brian volunteering to host and entertain total strangers represents the importance of placing your customer front-and-center at every company stage. Brian could be "beyond that." He's not. He wants to see the details of what being a host is like so he can improve his product. So much simping... a CEO of a small company worships at the altar of a CEO of a uni…

Did you read the notes?

> As a startup CEO of a company much earlier than Brian's – yet with plans to eclipse the success of Airbnb

Plans to eclipse Airbnb? Ok man, we get it. Mamba mentality, whatever.

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#25

Post by thrownblown »

WendyTheWillow wrote: post #21
wilg wrote: post #9

This article doesn’t make good on its claim to explain why this “Rails convention” is bad. It’s probably actually good. I wouldn’t have clicked on it otherwise. Rude, IMO.

It's "good" if you're enumerating a potential target! Otherwise, you typically either want to make your URLs intuitively discoverable or not discoverable at all. An incrementing ID like this is neither, so it sits in a weird middle ground that probably satisfies nobody (except those trying to get things done who don't care, I guess).

Incrementing a URL can (and has) get you prison time.

https://www.wired.com/2012/11/att-hacker-found-guilty/

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#26

Post by jtriangle »

polishdude20 wrote: post #20

"If Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO at Airbnb, listened to his mom, Airbnb wouldn't exist today. Or at least according to her: "I told him it's a bad idea. I didn't think it was going to work, and I didn't really understand it. If he listened to me, Airbnb wouldn't be here now."" I mean, in the end, isn't it turning out to be a bad idea? Removing homes from the rental market, increasing housing prices. Encouraging mo…

I mean, the guy has a net worth of ~$9 Billion, so, I think it's worked out pretty well for him, you know, being squarely in the tres commas club and all.

And we can say good idea/bad idea all you'd like, that's just opinion at the end of the day, the truth is there was a market for his idea, a huge one, and the market isn't mound by any sort of moral or ethical or even logical means, so applying those things in order to support a notion of 'good' or 'bad' isn't going to yield truth by any measure.

I think what you're seeing, mostly, with short term rentals, is a lack of housing inventory being created. We've got plenty of space to build, but, for a litany of reasons, it's not being built, and in a general sense, the solution to this problem is to solve those problems that're in the way of adding inventory.

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#27

Post by ericol »

davetron5000 wrote: post #5

To save anyone a click, the author figured that AirBnB's urls had monotonically increasing numeric ids, which is the Rails default, and figured out that the AirBnB CEO's id was 3, and got the direct link before it was shared publicly.

Obviously I didn't RTFA, but without this comment I wouldn't had understood what that title was about. Thanks. (English is funny)

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#28

Post by polishdude20 »

filoleg wrote: post #22
polishdude20 wrote: post #20

"If Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO at Airbnb, listened to his mom, Airbnb wouldn't exist today. Or at least according to her: "I told him it's a bad idea. I didn't think it was going to work, and I didn't really understand it. If he listened to me, Airbnb wouldn't be here now."" I mean, in the end, isn't it turning out to be a bad idea? Removing homes from the rental market, increasing housing prices. Encouraging mo…

> isn't it turning out to be a bad idea? Not for Brian, no. Even if Airbnb ceases to exist tomorrow, I am fairly certain that Brian is gonna be in a better spot than he would have been in if he listened to his mom.

Oh yeah he will be of course. It's the rest of the world that won't be.

Re: Bad Rails conventions got me a weekend stay with the CEO of Airbnb

#30

Post by erulabs »

The tone in here sure has shifted. I remember Brian showing us his binder of maxed out credit cards they used to bootstrap the company. I remember the early version spitting unicorn errors every few seconds.

A few things can be true at the same time:

- Airbnb is an inspiring story for any entrepreneur

- it has had arguably detrimental impacts

- the founders came from privileged backgrounds

- they also worked their ass off and are fiercely intelligent and risked plenty

On the tech side - it’s always funny to hear the (correct) critiques of early Rails. It reminds me of when I was talking trash about Java as a kid. My boss laughed and said “Java bought me my house, so it’s good in my book”. Or the first Tesla I ever saw with the license plate “PHP LOL” in the Facebook parking lot.

Pragmatism must beat idealism. In business and in database primary keys and everything in between.

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