dbot

I was an early Airbnb adopter, but haven't used it in years...curious what types of travel people use Airbnb for these days?

For business, I would never use it - I need reliability, consistency, and a staff on hand if anything comes up. For a family vacation, I've been finding old school property management companies that don't cross-list on Airbnb actually have more availability, better prices, and good experiences overall.

I've had Wavians for a couple years. In our lake community, we get compliments about our gas cans. It's amazing how people respond when you build something well.

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Startups win on creating efficiency: saving time and/or money. Compare that to a hobby, almost the entire point of which is to consume time and money...

Wedding planning feels more analogous to a hobby. My wife and I enjoyed the time we spent together while planning...tasting cakes, "dates" at caterers, looking at flowers, picking out attire, etc. Yes, there were some stressful moments, but if we had a startup that was designed to "streamline" everything, we would have missed out on that experience.

Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.

I just bought one because Apple didn't refresh the MBP. It is nice - maybe I need to get used to it, but it's not a MBP. Continuity between my phone for everything - iMessage, clipboard, wifi networks - is something you begin to miss quickly. The Apple trackpad is also hands-down the best experience.

As an Atlanta resident, I find it a terrible place to visit but a great place to live.

Great cities have (1) cool places to visit; and (2) lots of hidden gems - parks, restaurants, etc. - that take years to discover. Atlanta lacks the first, but has plenty of the second. That combined with good weather, great housing options and a Delta hub make it pretty nice to live in.

My guess is that Amazon will want to effectively "own" whatever city it selects. Not only will they get incentives from government, but they'll want to have primary influence over the business and educational communities. So that when Amazon wants something, the city will go along. This will give them a laboratory for all sorts of experiments, which is both fascinating and scary.

While a city like my hometown Atlanta makes sense on paper - transportation, great schools, awesome cost of living - there are too many other big players here. I think they want a next-generation "company town."

I joined for about six months and dropped them last week. Third shipment in a row with missing ingredients.

On the plus side, it put me in the regular habit of cooking together with my wife. We love many of the recipes, which are freely available on their website...we've already started "re-doing" many meals by picking up the ingredients on regular shopping trips.

EDIT: One other thought - the whole market seems a lot like the GroupOn craze in some ways. It's an idea that consumers are attracted to, but the economics and excess competition make the whole concept fragile.

Please take a moment to notice how horribly unfriendly a deposition transcript is. Thousands of these documents are produced every day, in a proprietary format that is antiquated and near impossible to work with. The PDF is unusable given the line numbers, headers, footers, etc. The simple act of copying and pasting - for example, writing a brief, a blog, etc. - is painful.

I know developers could create an amazing solution, but the legal community hasn't asked yet, unfortunately.

Related, there's an iOS app called Mealboard which lets you plan out recipes for the week/month/etc. We've started using it all the time, mostly because it has an amazing in-app browser that scrapes web recipes and stores them in the recipe list. Really impressive tool.

Cooking involves 3 steps: (1) recipe selection, (2) ingredient acquisition, and (3) cooking.

Blue Apron takes care of the first two, which I don't enjoy, and let's me do (3), which I very much enjoy. A grocery store doesn't solve (1) and only partially solves (2) (often has item availability, too much quantity issues, and then I have to measure it, too).

Uber needs to focus on customer loyalty - having a base of loyal customers means they can engage in licensing deals with the true automakers.

How to build loyalty? Create a rewards/milage program similar to airlines. Most business travelers commit to one airline because of the status and perks they receive. Some Uber perk ideas include:

1. priority response during high demand

2. free "upgrades" from UberX to higher class vehicles when demand/wait time allows

3. partnership with airline lounges to get access when traveling

Most DMSes utilize a "check-in/check-out" process, meaning that only one person can work the document. Others can work on "copies," but there is no way to sync their changes back into the main document stored in the DMS.

Non-competes are tricky: they essentially try to extend trade secret protections to information that people know (which is hard to track), instead of information that's written down (which is easy to track, see Waymo). It seems most people on HN are fine with protecting the latter, but not the former.

In my opinion, a non-compete is something that needs to be separately negotiated and compensated, rather than lumping it into "employment." If you agree to a non-compete, you are paid $X in exchange. If you violate the non-compete, you must pay $X back (and there could be a negotiated multiplier, e.g. $3X). In the absence of agreement, the legal default should be 1:1. If you are paid nothing for a non-compete, it is unenforceable. If you are paid $1, you must pay $1, and so on.

This gives each side an opportunity to value and agree upon the non-compete apart from the job itself. Eventually, most industries would settle on standards.

Same. As an example of how Google enriches lives, my mom (age 66) just sent an amazing video of photos and video clips from the first year of my son's life, set to an amazing score. Google made that for her automatically, without prompting.

Agreed - I watch everything over Xbox since it streams audio to my headphones. Finding apps consistently took me weeks to figure out.

The other problem is that there is no unified control scheme for streaming apps. In theory, you are giving each app flexibility to create a unique experience. But in practice, you need to learn the random button mappings for FF, REW, etc. on every streaming platform.

I was in Charleston this weekend. On East Bay Street, I was connected to a driver who was 11 minutes away and had another fare. I canceled immediately and tried Lyft. After agreeing to a 450% surcharge, it reported a 12 minute wait with the driver also carrying another fare.

I looked up from my phone and found a cab within 10 seconds. $8 ride. Nice guy.

Unfortunately, we are starting how easily small changes to the business model can impact user experience at companies like Lyft and Uber. Ride surcharges, cancellation charges, getting connected to over-busy drivers...It seems simple in concept but the execution is really hard, as taxi cab companies are aware. They just don't have billions in VC money to cover up the problems.

Uber reached its current success with a first mover advantage.

But I think the real reason is that everyone building self-driving cars today - including the big car manufacturers - will have little interest in selling to Uber. They will be running their own Uber-style Car-as-a-Service.

There is a reason that safeguards like attorney-client, priest-penitent, and spousal privilege exist. For most of civilization, these are the people with whom we entrust our deepest secrets. Society doesn't work if these relationships aren't respected.

Today, our deepest secrets are usually stored somewhere on a hard drive. When we turn them over to the "priests" of PC repair, there is no real protection beyond the terms of a one-sided, clickwrap contract. I've never used a repair service for this reason - I'll either fix the problem myself or throw the device away. It sucks, but articles like this suggest it's not a bad idea...

How do you avoid the issue that home cleaning companies encountered? Namely, once they use your service to create a relationship, the customer can contact the mechanic directly and cut you out?

Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers.

Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.

EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.

Getting in front a jury means surviving summary judgment. A good contract is designed to allow any disputes be resolved at the summary judgment stage.

It's been a while since I've looked at the enforceability of clickwrap class-action waivers, but it's either enforceable or not as a matter of law. No factual issues in dispute = no jury required.

I've seen similar logos pop up during commercials - this seems directly related to that marketing effort. Still, I wonder who would rush to get out their phone and open up Shazam, just to learn more about this product/service? It's not any easier than a Google search. It's basically an audio version of the famous tech flameout "CueCat."

To see if there is interest. I believe HN has a rule that a "Show HN" can't be just a landing page. This is just a landing page without the "Show HN."

Not justifying the behavior in any way, but the reason is that almost every car rental agency has certain quotas for extra coverage, upsells, etc. that they must meet every week. The pressure to meet these are enormous, which can lead to the behavior you mentioned.

One major social network that rarely gets mentioned is NextDoor. Unfortunately, they've just begun doing ads, too, and I already hate it.

It's disappointing because they have such a natural starting base for generating revenue: collecting neighborhood dues. It provides a useful service, would likely increase dues participation, fits within the value-proposition of the product. Lots of opportunities for premium features paid for by neighborhood associations, too.

That's why it's sad to see NextDoor chasing the same ad revenue of every other social network.

If you are a large purchaser, you can almost always get a better deal opting out than letting the class lawyers represent you. With your own attorneys, you can negotiate cheaper fees and more creative settlement arrangements, like discounts on future purchases, etc. There's some risk to opting out and it requires more active involvement, but smart law departments can really contribute to the bottom line instead of being a cost center.

Source: Lawyer who used to do this sort of thing.

Hmmm...are you mostly using the private room or entire home/apt?

I've found that if you are looking for just a private room, you can get a deal. But then you are also in a stranger's house, which as a 30-something I'm not always that comfortable with. When I travel with my wife, it's not even an option.

When I look at entire home/apt listings, the prices are often very comparable to nearby hotels, and often I can get a cheaper hotel using an "opaque" service like Hotwire or Priceline. As between the two, I'd much rather stay in a hotel, since they are set up for travelers and I can get whatever extra towels, amenities, etc. that might be missing from an AirBnb.

Two thoughts:

1. The plaintiff exploited a loophole in the Indiana small claims rule regarding "res judicata," which normally acts to prevent a party from re-litigating a decided matter.

[The rule states](http://www.in.gov/judiciary/rules/small_claims/), "A judgment shall be res judicata only as to the amount involved in the particular action and shall not be considered an adjudication of any fact at issue in any other action or court.

So the plaintiff lost a $6,000 claim in small claims, but somehow he was not barred from bringing claims in superior court on the same set of facts for a larger amount of money. I think the judge should have seen through this...

2. Requests for admission are the most abused discovery tools in modern litigation. There is no limit on the number of requests for admission. They are designed to streamline and focus areas of dispute, but hyperactive litigants are always trying to sneak case-killer facts into them to get "admitted" either by accident or failure to respond, the latter of which happened here.