w3pm

"I'm sure they deal with this with people wanting to stay beyond their trip date or trying to book directly, but Airbnb can easily track this stuff with the scheduling feature and seeing discrepancies when users try to go offline."

Just curious, what recourse does Airbnb have when discovering these discrepancies?

Irrelevant. How valuable is the work you do? You could go around 'pitching' your window washing services and land 5 out of 100 potential clients but you still aren't getting more than a few bucks per wash.

I guess I'm not following how they are unrelated. To really stress a system and find bugs, shouldn't you be putting it under realistic usage and load? In my mind using test data that closely matches real data is desirable for development purposes. I suppose I'm now actually disagreeing with the OP's statement -- that example was a specific circumstance where perhaps more care should've been taken, but for the general case I think it's actually desirable to use realistic data.

Plus I just think it'd be cool if you could use the same service/API for both use cases.

Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).

I think you misread the op's post -- the suggestion was, "would you work with them again." If they're lousy the answer is obviously no.

"Given the scale of the cash injection, the company might not have to raise another series round before going public, though a bridge round isn’t inconceivable."

Why does a company need to raise so-much-money before going public? Isn't the whole point of "going public" to raise money?

Except that go is a garbage collected language and as such will never be a replacement for C++. I could however see C++ dying, leaving C and go behind.

What about the author's complaints about exponentially increasing code complexity when introducing new features or new exception types? I feel like the author made an attempt to write c++ the "correct" way and found it unsuitable for the software's goals (zero undefined behavior).

The entire first half of the article is dedicated to why "C++ with exceptions" is not acceptable for software that strives to have zero undefined behavior. Your proposed "better title" doesn't make sense given the article content.

For a while I thought C + templates would be a great idea as well. In theory templates are a much more powerful and expressive way of generating code than macros/xmacros.

However after playing around with the idea in a few C++ modules I was writing I came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it. Part of what makes C so enjoyable to write is its relatively "weak" typing and the flexibility that comes with that, primarily freely casting between pointer types including void*'s where necessary. Templates fight against that at every opportunity and I found myself spending more time trying to figure out how to wrangle my code into the template type system than actually making progress on the problem at hand. Newer additions like C++11 constexprs take that type-system frustration to an entirely new level.

Many of these "I'd never have imagined you could get rich doing... (groceries|steel|lumber|shoes|silverware|bandaids|etc) examples take generations to build the business large enough to actually "get rich." They're definitely not "get-rich-quick" schemes but slow, methodical progress made on capturing a portion of industries with billions worth of turnover per year. Obviously counter-examples exist (Cotsco, etc.) but by and large these stories involve generational contributions to the business.

The intern bit is disturbing to me. The trouble is, he can't actually believe this is the best decision for these kids to make. He himself started a business while still in school; he didn't slave away for someone else as "low cost" labor. His own experience tells him that the best "career stepping stone" is to create things, with friends, for yourselves. Any truly "wicked smart" kids shouldn't be making this decision and he's not doing them any favors by encouraging it.

In my own experience, offering a fairly-paid internship (ie, what they would be making as a junior full-time employee), of a few months, is a great way to evaluate a potential hire down the road. Do I expect useful work to come out of these few months and build a business plan around it? Not really, and I believe it's dishonest to do so.