[HN Gopher] How Bad Rails Conventions Got Me a Weekend Stay with...
___________________________________________________________________
How Bad Rails Conventions Got Me a Weekend Stay with the CEO of
Airbnb
Author : steventey
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-11-08 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.josephofiowa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.josephofiowa.com)
| davetron5000 wrote:
| 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.
| ericol wrote:
| Obviously I didn't RTFA, but without this comment I wouldn't
| had understood what that title was about. Thanks. (English is
| funny)
| wilg wrote:
| 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.
| gaogao wrote:
| 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).
| david_allison wrote:
| They also leak metrics (#of registered users)
| simlevesque wrote:
| Also, competitors can analyze your growth more easily.
| cartothemax wrote:
| 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...
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| 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).
| thrownblown wrote:
| Incrementing a URL can (and has) get you prison time.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2012/11/att-hacker-found-guilty/
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| 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.
| ric2b wrote:
| In the same way that squeezing on a hunk of metal that some
| may call a "trigger" can get you convicted for murder.
| ulizzle wrote:
| There's no engineering analysis in this post, so those of us who
| were looking for that, let me save you the click
|
| Be born to the right people and toe the party line. That's what
| Brian's story will show you. But that's basically a cliche right
| now so I doubt you're in any way surprised
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| I'll be damned, billionaires are normal people! (or at least they
| want us to believe it)
| polishdude20 wrote:
| "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 more treatment of housing as an investment.
|
| Sometimes, Brian, your mom is right.
| filoleg wrote:
| > 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.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Oh yeah he will be of course. It's the rest of the world that
| won't be.
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > Sometimes, Brian, your mom is right.
|
| I'm sure Brian's mom is happy she was wrong and doesn't share
| your negative assessment.
|
| > Removing homes from the rental market, increasing housing
| prices. Encouraging more treatment of housing as an investment.
|
| This is a policy failure. We need to build more housing.
| Zoning, taxes, and NIMBYism are to blame.
|
| Supply and demand curves are the law of the land. Add more
| supply and the problem is solved.
| drstewart wrote:
| >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?
| erulabs wrote:
| 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.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| How much was his cleaning fee? I imagine Airbnb employees are
| very different hosts from the average one.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| 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 in my view. Do you really think
| you will be in the company of a billionaire (and CEO of a PUBLIC
| company) without even basic vetting? Give me a break.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| I did look for his airbnb listing at one point, after a
| previous broadcast that he was putting it up, and there was no
| way to book it. (I think not because it was already booked.)
| elzbardico wrote:
| And out of sheer coincidence, one of the guests is from the
| small founders club world. Small world indeed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would expect every CEO to use their companies products. Even if
| they have no use for the product/service, their time using the
| product has to pay off in terms of better understanding the
| difficulties/challenges faced by the real users.
|
| Sure, they could pay a study group to do that. But doing it
| themselves will probably let them make better decisions overall.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-08 23:01 UTC)