onemorepassword

I wonder what part of this comment was a reason to slowban me?

So basically people are learning that the first Google result, especially if visually "enhanced", is usually irrelevant advertising?

That would concur with my personal experience, and is pretty much the same as what happened to standard size display ads.

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.

How about, sit back, watch what happens and learn.

Even if one of us calls it right, which is sheer luck with so little information, the OP clearly has most to gain from experience.

That is the only way to learn to correctly identify problems, and perhaps more importantly, what is the best way to deal with for you personally.

Or you could just do that. I once had a junior dev that showed up in a suit (okay, no tie) every day.

And this in an Amsterdam broadcasting and advertising company, the kind of place that makes the way people dress in tech start-ups look conservative.

After two weeks, people would stop making remarks. After a month, people stopped consciously registering it. It was just the way he dressed.

It takes balls and requires your coworkers not to be total dicks, but people can pull it off.

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.

I think most people here got that.

Learn English like a Dutchman and end up with a really confused British/American hybrid accent... ;-)

Seriously, subtitles are the main reason most Dutch people speak English, traditional education has very little to do with.

I did exactly this, almost instantly, and the next first thing I saw because of that was this comment...

I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?

Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?

"Hand over your wallet with your ID and the pictures of your kids and loved ones, your diary and your address book, or else you can't shop here."

Please, f* off.

"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.

You're my new hero.

A 40 year old degree in anything alone isn't good enough to stay employed in any field. Except maybe teaching.

Wait, wasn't the discussion about Wordpress themes having to be GPL (being purely derivative works) over and done years ago?

You create a derivative work of GPL-ed software and call somebody else a thief for doing the same to you?

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.

Not all disruption is good.

> "illegal theft of intellectual property"

Say what?

Such bizarre phrases make me seriously doubt the intelligence and education of the people who wrote this.

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.

How does an incoherent paranoid extremist rant make it to the top of this thread?

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.

To me, Jaron's arguing for a robust middle class seems more like an opportunistic smoke screen than the actual core of his argument.

Especially if you look at his utterings from the point where he first "turned against the internet" (he used to actually see piracy as good thing!), which initially solely consisted of ranting against piracy and anonymity. It was only later that he came up with grander social theories to justify his rants.

Yes, the man is smart enough (certainly smarter than me) to identify some actual social and economic problems caused by the free flow of information.

But he's not interested in constructive solutions, because he the solution he has in mind was his starting point: re-establish the reign of copyright, abolish anonymity and stop the free flow of information.

And of course, micropayments to make sure he gets his share. It's funny how it always comes down to that one solution: hardwire micropayments into everything.

Does that sound like something that will solve the "surgeons replaced by robots" problem, or any of the myriad of other jobs replaced by technology, or just his personal problem?

Lanier would like to make a living as a musician the old-fashioned way, by selling albums through the music industry.

Since the copyright-exploitation industry has been under threat he has cobbled together all kinds of far fetched "visionary" theories as to why we should go back to the way things were, or else there will be doom.

Never at any point has he come up with a solution, or even a direction in which to look for a solution. Or at least anything that can be taken seriously:

"But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for."

That's the logic of an 8-year old. Basically his entire vision comes down to "we are doomed, and the only way to save us is to artificially re-create scarcity, but fuck if I know how".

The robotic surgery example (which has fuck all to do with free and open information) shows how sickeningly selfish that is. We may be able to live without musicians, but people are fucking dying because of shortage of surgeons. But Mr. Lanier prefers a world in which surgeons are, like himself of course, part of a well-paid and taken care of middle class, and fuck everyone else.

Doesn't that "gross an unappealing" apply to most US advertising.

I don't know about you, but I thought commercials in my country (Netherlands) were stupid until I watched US television. I felt my IQ dropping with each commercial.

Also: advertising prescription pharmaceuticals, and in a way that would embarrass your local street drug dealer...

If people would actually read what he writes on twitter instead of the sensationalist blog posts derived only from those tweets, they would get a much more nuanced picture.

This is an argument on par with "they hate us for our freedom".

This kind of intellectually lazy and arrogant attitude will only serve to alienate SV further from the rest of society, which, not coincidentally, is one of the core arguments of most recent criticism directed at SV.

Zooms just fine in Firefox. Seems like a Chrome issue to me, afaik no site should be able to override zoom.

It can be cost effective if there is currently no way to fully monetize the full productivity of the team, and the company is trying to survive without lay-offs.

The only issue is that if you have a valuable workforce that has the option to leave instead of desperately needing the job, you need everyone's buy-in, or at least full understanding of the circumstances.

Apparently that hasn't been done, which is incredibly stupid, especially in such a relatively small company, but not uncommon.

A simple alternative would be to let one programmer go, and start hiring again when business picks up. However, once you go down that road, it's a lot harder to rebuild the team again. With that as the alternative, it shouldn't be too hard to sell, at least not in the short term.

I hate this fucking excuse, and I killed it in my current company because it leads to administrative overhead and all kinds of bullshit discussions about who contributes how much, just to save a few bucks.

Yes, the company has to pay tax over the free food we give our employees because it's considered part of their pay. In the grand scheme of things: big fucking deal.

It's cool in a larger company where you have a well-stocked cafeteria where you can buy good food at heavily subsidized prices.

But in small companies this micro bean counter attitude in order to avoid taxes is actually more demotivating and divisive than not providing free food at all. Especially if you're in the middle of the city and people have dozens of options to go out for lunch.

Tip for all founders with employees from someone who's worked for start-ups for decades: fucking delegate!

And I don't just mean the work, that's the easy part. Delegate parts of the decision-making process you don't have the time for to get into properly. Yes, even if it involves spending money.

If I have to report to, talk you through things on multiple occasions, have to keep reminding you of them, and all the while my team is waiting for a decision, that process does not only cost you a lot of time you should be spending doing other things, it actually often costs the whole company more money than we're actually talking about spending!

If you don't trust the people you've hired, you're doing it wrong.

Equating ordinary swearing to "vulgar" is an American thing.

I find it rather uncomfortable to repeatedly see threads in which Americans judge others (and each other) based on utterly irrelevant puritanical values rather than their contributions hitting the front-page of HN.

Especially the utter irrelevance bothers me, this is not about stuff like government regulation or privacy or women in tech, where there are valid ideological differences to discuss.

This is just about shaming people because they have different values. It's pathetic. We might as well be engaging in celebrity gossip.