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

blog.josephofiowa.com

41–50 of 68 posts

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

#41

Are there people who really think this is not a PR stunt? Pardon my cynicism but I call bullshit on all of this not being organized/orchestrated by publicist. > It's wild (vulnerable, transparent, kind, generous, and humbling) for the CEO of a $60B company to welcome complete strangers into his home to host them – including cooking together and showing them the city – for a weekend. This phrase is outright insulting…

And out of sheer coincidence, one of the guests is from the small founders club world. Small world indeed.

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

#43
post #32

"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…

AirBnB is not the cause of housing scarcity, the under building of Hotels to meet short term stay demand, or the economic conditions that facilitate a lot of travel. If it weren't for AirBnB other players in the short term rental business would likely ave moved into the same niche.

And the price is probably a really good signal of unmet housing demand, which has (probably) caused a lot more units to be built than would have otherwise.

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

#44

"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…

>Removing homes from the rental market, increasing housing prices.

Wow, I didn't know this! How are housing costs going in cities that have banned or highly regulated Airbnb, like NYC or Paris? I suppose these are highly affordable cities with falling rents?

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

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incrementing a URL can (and has) get you prison time. https://www.wired.com/2012/11/att-hacker-found-guilty/

The incrementing itself wasn't the issue! It's all the other stuff around their scraping and apparently their provable desire to harm AT&T that got them convicted.

Definitely not going to argue with you on that. But it did all start with the simple addition to the URL.

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

#48

Are there people who really think this is not a PR stunt? Pardon my cynicism but I call bullshit on all of this not being organized/orchestrated by publicist. > It's wild (vulnerable, transparent, kind, generous, and humbling) for the CEO of a $60B company to welcome complete strangers into his home to host them – including cooking together and showing them the city – for a weekend. This phrase is outright insulting…

[deleted]

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

#49
post #30

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 as…

If you come from a privileged background then what are you risking really? Maxed out credit cards can easily be repaid by your rich parents/uncles/whatever.

Though perhaps there are things they risked that I am not familiar with.

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

#50
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They also leak metrics (#of registered users)

I think this is the only downside.
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