1,391 karma · joined December 20, 2009
We currently get the majority of our data from publicly available online listings (predominately from https://3taps.com/ and http://www.rentjungle.com/.)
Increasingly, we are also adding actual data from integrations with our customers' property management systems. We think this data set will be more accurate and more valuable, although it obviously takes a lot more work to build.
One of our goals is to be able to understand the difference between listed and actual prices in various markets.
Sometimes marketing is demonstrable uniqueness. Pedometers have been around a long time, it's the whole package that makes Fitbit shine. (I have a Fitbit One and I love it.)
I agree they are swinging for the fences though.
Yep, especially so for a startup who is still figuring out their place in the world. This is something that we constantly struggle with, and there's no solution other than putting in the effort to keep rebuilding your narrative as your audience changes.
When I look into other ecosystems, the amount of library support for building modern web applications just doesn't compare. I think it's this aspect of Rails that really helps get from zero to viable product so quickly.
That said, the performance issues do start to take a toll after a while. And forget it if you want to do something counter to the way Rails want you to do it.
Everything is a trade-off.
That should be a laptop sticker...
Pages are expected by the end user to change over time, but they also expect to access them at the same location each time.
2000000000000 - (.99999999999 * 2000000000000) = 20
Makes me feel pretty OK about having backups there.
"I then discovered that the site is loaded with a java script which, based on an initial analysis by my java programmer friend, is a 0 day java exploit with a cross site injection attack, which automatically started."
Furthermore, I believe the way it works is that clients make an SSL connection to CloudFlare, who makes another SSL connection to your service (using different key pairs.) Granted, they still get to see all your traffic unencrypted, but it all just comes back to trust.
Another piece of feedback: you should link to your startup's main page more prominently--I didn't find the link at first so I had to type in locu.com to see it.
This would be a pain for these clients, but if Twitter really wanted to do this they could probably justify that it's the price you have to pay for preferential access.
Edit: It just occurred to me that this might just be kicking the can down the road: you would end up with same problem authenticating with proxy server. It would have to be something along the lines where the proxy server itself has preferential access, but the clients to the proxy server do not (e.g. they are rate-limited by the proxy or something.)
I think the more interesting distinction between engineer and lawyer is that of the engineer being a "maker" versus the lawyer being a "protector" or "enforcer," or something more of that nature.
Take care when treating a high-availability set up such as this as a back up: if you are replicating all the changes between 2 database servers and an application error (e.g. not a database outage) causes some kind of data corruption, you are hosed if the corruption replicates and you don't also have some previous "snapshot" of the data that you can roll back to.
Sounds like they are stuffing as much data as possible into RAM for performance reasons, which causes the servers to be memory-bound, and as such they have more CPU available than they need relative to the amount of RAM.
I am (and I think a lot of other people are) in the same situation.
I think copyright protection is very possible without "abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy."
I suppose if I didn't then I would agree with you. I'm not so concerned with some individuals obtaining digital content without paying for it (I agree this would be basically impossible to enforce without trampling on civil liberties), as I am with companies systematically ripping off copyrighted work and re-selling it as their own. In the latter case, I would argue that copyright can quite easily be enforced by litigation within the existing system, without any threat to individual freedom.