Airbnb's concept, however wonderful it may be when it does work, is full of practical and legal holes which are now beginning to emerge.
The big question is: can Airbnb close those holes without significantly reducing the usefulness of their service?
I very much doubt that. Hospitality is an industry with a long history, lots of regulation and self-regulation (which is not just corrupt government protecting incumbents), and disrupting that means tackling a huge range of issues an liabilities which Airbnb heavily oversimplifies.
I expect an increase in regulatory intervention, horror-stories in the media, lawsuits and Airbnb becoming increasingly more bureaucratic and complex in an effort to handle that.
Part 32904 in the continuing saga of "my stand-ups suck, so all stand-ups suck".
Sorry, not even going to bother with non-snark response. I did that the 32903 times before, and someone else already took the bait.
But I'll bite on this though:
> All meetings are terrible.
Meetings can be awesome. I've been to meetings full of great new ideas. I've been in meetings that saved companies. I've been in meetings in which shit was actually decided and followed up on!
I've been in meetings that lasted for days(!) but eliminated months of painful processes and left people feeling exhausted but victorious.
Meetings can be great. Meetings can be fun. Meetings can have a purpose. Meetings can have results. Meetings can change the world.
It's badly organized, forced and unproductive meetings with the wrong people that suck. Guess what, that applies to virtually any activity with a group of people. Including orgies. Especially orgies.
I see you're new to the internets. Sorry, that was cheap.
However, in your haste to patronizingly chastise me you're making multiple faulty assumptions.
a) I'm not new to HN. Just this account is.
b)"Please, f... off" was descriptive reflection of the way I would respond to the fictional analogous request which you have so conveniently omitted from this quote.
It was in no way intended to address the developer, but rather as a way to illustrate how I feel developers who use access to my personal information as the entry fee to their product treat me.
"Our template has as we speak been sold a 361 times within half a year and it's still increasing. Themeforest rated our template worth a $17."
Yes it is. Which basically means the author is refusing to acknowledge the copyright of the WordPress authors and the license rights of the ones he's calling thieves.
There's one pirate here, and it's StampReady.
Also, I think Email on Acid have a good case for libel. This is willful public defamation.
Edit: Apparently, I'm wrong about this being a WordPress theme. My apologies.
AirBnB may be the canary in the coalmine for tech, maybe more than the privacy issues surrounding the majority of the current tech business models.
The industry idolizes "disruption" without taking any responsibility for the negative side-effects. However, in the case of AirBnB, these side-effects don't just affect an incumbent industry, but the private lives of completely innocent ordinary people, who live in the same buildings that are used as makeshift hotels.
Illegal and semi-legal subletting is a big enough nuisance as it is in major tourist destinations (I live in one), and AirBnB is making the problem exponentially worse.
A similar narrative applies to the presence of Uber in places with a decently regulate taxi system.
I'm tired of these kind of generalizations. Our open plan office is geared towards developers and quiet and peaceful 95% of the time. Standing rule is, you wanna talk, you take it outside into the kitchen or the meeting room. Simple.
Also, people can work from home whenever they want. Most prefer to be in the office because it's nice and quiet.
The problem isn't open spaces, the problem is the people in it.
My body language will tell you if I want help or not.
What phrase is used to initiate that interaction is completely irrelevant, but attempts to entrap me in an interaction I don't want will always yield a negative response. Just the level of awkwardness may very.
On the one hand, I agree with the notion that "working with the established market" is a better business strategy.
On the other hand, kissing up to reactionary incumbent market forces and even compromising your product to appease them leaves me feeling really, really dirty.
It's a pragmatic choice. If you can afford to and still come out on top, I would prefer kicking their asses over kissing them.
This has been an issue since the day I started programming for the web, back somewhere in '95.
It has regularly come up on HN, and pretty much any programming related forum I've used since the mid-90's.
As an industry at the heart of the information society you have to wonder what the hell we are doing wrong if we cannot stop this constant regression into well known bad practices.