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I'm talking about the cleaning fee specifically being part of ragebait. You are paying for the cleaning service and whatever operating costs an Airbnb or hotel has otherwise they wouldn't be in business. Whether they put "Cleaning Fee" on the checkout page or not is arbitrary and a total psychological effect, that's it. Hotels were doing the same thing with "Resort Fee" or whatever else they have. It's a ploy to show you a lower price on the search page, get you to the checkout screen, and shrug past the hidden costs once you've already committed to buying. It doesn't change the final price you ultimately paid, just how its presented. And yeah it's a shitty practice and I'm glad its been going away.

I don't know where you are using Airbnb, but seems statistically odd that 100s of stays have been miserable for you. If it were that bad for everyone nobody would be using it and yet Airbnb is still growing YoY. Pretty much everyone I know (including myself) has maybe 1-2 bad experiences over dozens of stays. And sure some stays are "fine" and not exceptional, but that's true of anything. Hotels are not necessary much more reliable these days either - I've had to leave more hotels in the last 2 years over broken/missing amenities, smells, dilapated rooms, etc than I ever have Airbnbs honestly. Many don't do daily room cleaning any more. It doesn't really line up with the rosy view of hotels that proliferates on here and they have far fewer excuses with dedicated staff, spare rooms, etc.

You realize the cleaning fee is entirely psychological right? If it were always part of the nightly rate (it has been for over a year) nobody would be talking about it. This is getting at my point about rage bait - you’re complaining about stuff that isn’t even around anymore.

That use case is absolutely better suited to hotels btw. I’ve stayed in many cheap Airbnbs while traveling myself and didn’t have that experience myself.

Wow edgy!

As a host, I feel like this issue is mostly just ragebait for TikTok. Same for the cleaning fee complaints (which has been gone for over a year but you still see ppl talking about it). There are absolutely bad hosts out there (I've dealt with it as a guest myself), but most hosts are totally fine and the guest review system absolutely works to filter out egregious behavior.

There's also quite a big perception bias towards guests when it comes to discourse about Airbnbs. As a host I have to deal with so many unbelievably disgusting and disrespectful people renting my places on a regular basis, but nobody is ever talking about that. Social media would have you believe all guests are victimized angels and hosts are greedy and evil. I would love to see some of these people host and find out what it's really like. If you've worked in retail or hospitality you know.

Airbnb has actually gotten extremely sensitive about this perception the last couple years. They've changed a lot of policies to bend over backwards for guests to avoid the PR. Any guest you see complaining online about a recent experience should be taken with a _large_ grain of salt because Airbnb very rarely sides with hosts anymore and it likely means the guest did something very egregious to get penalized.

That was entirely on Airbnb for presenting it that way. Hosts would enter in their per-reservation cleaning cost so it could be integrated into the price paid by guests, but Airbnb stubbornly itemized it on the checkout page for years. I believe they finally did away with it (in favor of building into the nightly rate) about a year ago.

Smaller users aren't likely to be persuaded to give up free GitHub Actions and larger customers are likely already using their own custom deployment. So it's a weird middle ground that doesn't have a huge market unfortunately...

I don't think it's necessarily the right response either, but I don't think the current reaction to ICE is productive either.

IMO the knee jerk reactions to ICE the last few months have reached neurotic levels... not a fan of some of the shadier practices the Trump admin is prescribing, but ICE has been around a long time and this kind of thing was going on even in the Obama era. I don't think we should be losing our minds whenever we see ICE agents (in fact if they're identifiable that's probably a good thing).

Setup a modern, portable development environment? I don’t know anyone who works like this in 2023.

I mean it’s really not that hard. I find this complaint kind of comical when the real issue is that she’s refusing to research and adopt better practices to make her life easier.

She’s more than capable of figuring this out she just doesn’t want to.

Doing microservices from the start is fine if you know what to expect. Having worked with massive monoliths, there are cons that people don't consider longer-term and the longer you dig yourself in the harder it is to pull yourself out.

Honestly I think the realistic advice should be to go monolith if you or part of your team aren't experienced with microservices or if your app is simple / you'd be overengineering it otherwise.

If you're starting a SaaS company, you can envision the moving pieces, and will be growing your team quickly microservices properly in the beginning can have a lot of benefits.

Just feels like another one of those dogmas people just mindlessly scream on the internet all day without considering all the cost/benefit analysis for each particular case.

> Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.

Absolutely true.

> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.

And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.

But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.

People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.

There are a few "hardcore" staff/prinicpal engineers at my company (a well known tech unicorn). They are basically OGs who were a big part of the company's early success. Really smart and saavy guys who are left alone to focus on executing on big stuff.

The reality for other staff engineers here is exactly opposite though - you're not allowed to just be "executing" and your day consists of being stuck in meetings, doc writing, and management-lite. Honestly it's so bureaucratic and so far removed from the actual tech I really got turned off from that career path as I got more visibility into it.

For smaller companies it's probably much more fulfilling though.

I mean, he might pay very close attention to everything at his company. That doesn't mean he's deeply involved with the engineering.

For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.

At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.

The model is only one feature of the site, you realize right? Have you read anything else they put out besides the election forecast?

I am really disappointed to hear this news - by the sounds of it their entire office was gutted by layoffs. I have to say that as someone who follows politics, 538 is a unique source of insightful and data driven political coverage without wading into the mindless editorialism that plagues other major publications. Their coverage during election seasion is consistently fantastic and they've had a great long-running podcast covering lots of political topics as well as diving into how they model election forecasting.

Silver has publicly mentioned several times he hates covering politics and sounds like he will be taking his forecasting models with him once his contract expires. There are other news sites taking similar data-driven approaches but I've never found them to have as much transparency or volume of rich discussion as 538 has over the years. And of course his popular election forecasts are pretty much the gold standard.

Massive loss for political journalism if Silver chooses to walk away from politics as a result of this.

Tbh it does seem he was bit naive of what he was doing at the time and of the consequences. He wasn’t just some rando out there cracking software for personal use - he should’ve expected the government would be going after and throwing the book at people like him. It’s puzzling he didn’t take security more seriously or just stopped doing it entirely earlier.

The shocking part for me though was reading about how he was put with violent offenders and experienced being sent to “the hole”. Like what the fuck? Does the federal prison system not separate white collar criminals from high security prisoners? Honestly insane.

If you're letting yourself get used like that not once but multiple times I don't know what to tell you lol. Do you also give money freely to scammers on the street?

Why would you not report that? Airbnb would bring the hammer down on that host so quickly it wouldn't be funny. I'm serious, they would not tolerate that whatsoever and would get you compensated and moved to another property.

Hosts don't have any say in the Airbnb pricing model, I don't know where you're getting the impression they are in cahoots with hosts.

Airbnb simply makes more money and gets more bookings with the "hidden" fee structure for obvious reasons.

Yes, absolutely this. Once you hit senior ranks in engineering at a big tech firm, it's actually very difficult to move upwards. Very few people are ever made principal engineers or senior staff or even staff level for that matter. The jump in technical ability for those levels is quite large as well and can take many years to get a single promotion since openings are pretty slim as well (some orgs will only get 1-2 staff engineers).

If you switch to becoming a manager, your salary increases a lot and you have many more opportunities for promotion. So a lot of engineers hit senior and say "screw that, I can just be a manager" which is a much easier path to high salary.

It's very common and we need to incentivize people to stay as ICs.

For 1-2 nights? Probably not. I don't think having access to a kitchen or sitting area is a "massive luxury" for someone staying a week or longer for a vacation, work, etc. though.

The point is you get these amenities (or at least of them) for around the same price as a hotel room.

In some big markets (New York City or similar), it might be above a hotel room rate, but still a really good deal if you consider the value.

Yeah but those aren't as commonplace. And I'd still say good Airbnbs would have much better amenities (and charm for that matter).

Eh. As an Airbnb host, honestly I've never been given any slack by Airbnb. Maybe they've made some recent changes, but in my experience they pretty much always side with the guest even over minor things and I'm the one that has to fight tooth and nail for fair treatment when a guest abuses my house or breaks the rules.

Hotels are definitely nice if you like the pampering they provide (e.g. clean your room everyday), but the value of Airbnb is getting amenities and space of a house for an affordable rate. Good luck booking a hotel suite (w/ kitchen, common room, etc) without paying insane rates north of 1k a night. That's where Airbnb shines.

Can't speak to your experience, but there are heavy, heavy penalties for the behavior you're describing - you can't just do that carefree as a host. I would probably lose my business if I let that kind of stuff happen even just once or twice.

That being said, shitty hosts are out there. If they have extensive review history and positive remarks (over ~4.7/5.0 rating) it should be fine. I've honestly never had a bad experience as a guest over 5+ years of staying at Airbnbs with that criteria.

Honestly, pretty disappointed by the mass derogatory comments and trolling. We should be very happy about the transparency and RFC on a crypto bill, even if the first draft is not good.

Kinda afraid they just won't bother next time.

They could just note to flight attendants that there are passengers interviewing w/ the airline and have them raise any red flags pretty easily.

So in fairness I haven't followed this in the news very closely, but after initially feeling negative about this decision I've started to come around to it.

US politics has become extremely draining, divisive, and aggressive - particularly in high partisan-lean areas. It's flat out exhausting talking with people about politics, even those who I agree with, and it just gets worse every year. Polling has shown people sort themselves by political ideology first and everything else in life second. I see fewer and fewer options available, but to just run from it. I don't see it getting better any time soon.

The company I previously worked for spent an enormous amount of time (and money) facilitating discussions appeasing these divides and focusing on social justice, etc. Not only is there no hope for any given company to realistically solve for societal-wide problems or find an approach that satisfies everyone in this manner, but it's painfully obvious they don't truly care about these topics either. Having people come "talk" about racism or putting on inclusion workshops doesn't result in real action. Things like "diversity" are mangled and manufactured into company metrics where data is awkwardly bucketed by "ethnicity". Are we expected to believe HR departments who group half of the world together as "Asian" as taking diversity seriously? I've come away from every company I've worked for with the cynical impression that that their "social justice" efforts are simply to minimize inner anger, strife, and liability. And for leaders, if you commit to being a "politically engaged" workplace it means everything you do is twice as vulnerable. You are walking on eggshells even if you aren't instigating any sort of animosity - what if you weren't paying attention to the news and didn't speak up about a particular political event? What if you didn't say enough? What if you were misinterpreted? I can understand why Coinbase doesn't want to go there anymore - they can achieve the same goal if nobody says anything at all.

I'm not arguing nefarious forces don't exist or aren't important. I care deeply about many of the commonly-discussed social issues that we're dealing with today. I've personally witnessed blatant racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination first-hand at work. But those things can be solved for at a company level - trying to treat our general political environment is well beyond anything any corporation can manage nor should we expect it to be their responsibility. Companies should focus on refining things that are in their control, like practicing transparent & fair hiring, enforcing anti-discrimination policies, and ensuring equal-opportunity internally. But I think you can fairly draw the line there.

What does this have to do with living in a free country? This isn’t the US government arresting someone because they’re pro-life. It’s a private company firing someone who disrupted their business interests. Pretty sure the US government is still one of the most fierce protectors of free speech and natural rights among developed nations last time I checked.

Your qualm is with cultural intolerance for conservative ideas. Which I agree is valid. But yeah, sorry, if you’re running a business and can’t understand that your business partners will be potentially offended by your own political statements, you deserve to get fired. Let’s not pretend this was some no-name engineer at a tech company in SV who got canned because they expressed a normal political opinion and their coworkers “just didn’t like it”. He’s the CEO and is the ultimate ambassador of the company and has a responsibility to read the room. Would you expect BMW or Mercedes to keep their CEOs if they made political statements about the human rights abuses and economic sabotage conducted by China? Let’s be real.

Do I sympathize with him that he freely spoke his mind and was inherently punished for it? Yes, in principle. But he’s a complete idiot for thinking he can do so without consequences in his position. There are always going to be cultural factors intwined in economics and sometimes they are not fair, but that’s the way the world has always worked.

Of all fields, do these students _honestly_ expect that going to a 6 figure film program to will turn them into a successful filmmaker? Look around. All the people who have made it in Hollywood did so through via nepotism/cronyism or by busting their ass making their own movies and getting lucky.

You probably have more chance of success investing all your time and money into real projects and trying to market/distribute them than spending years in school and drowning in debt.

Easier said than done, but there's no way into that industry that isn't tough and an MFA degree isn't going to impress anyone.

Oh my bad. I scanned his blog post to see if this was indicated and didn't notice any mention of it being an op-ed. Well to be honest in that case, I guess ignore what I said about newsroom standards - he may have a point against the Intercept if they're arbitrarily holding him to a higher (newsroom) standard than they normally would for op-ed pieces.

I read through Glenn's draft after seeing the outrage on this thread and... it reads like a generic opinion piece.

I think he makes some good points and some dumb ones, but that's besides the point in all honesty - most of the article is him just complaining about the state of the media, making accusations of double-standards, and full of inflammatory language. There's little investigative journalism, no interviews with backing sources, no new facts laid out, just complaining about supposed wrong-doings and coverups. Some of which can be easily refuted.

Look I don't read The Intercept, but this is not newsroom material. I'm not journalist or have any kind of editing experience, but I wouldn't even run this in a school newspaper if I was put in charge. This is editorial material, pure and simple. The fact that he's complaining about censorship is eye-rolling.

I think it's pretty clear that most people here don't understand that the op-ed page and newsroom are different organizations, run by different people, and have different standards, even though they appear on the same newspaper. it's scary that these lines are being blurred more and more by the day.

But honestly, what's really probably going on is that Glenn Greenwald is tired of The Intercept and wants move full-time to his substack page. To do that he's bootstrapping his audience on his new site by manufacturing outrage. I would think most people should see through this...