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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

(1) You refer to your "apartment", which by convention refers to a domicile that you are leasing. While other HN readers will contest this point, I'd be willing to put money on the fact that you violated your lease by renting out your apartment on Airbnb at all.

(2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies, and while I didn't flag this post, you shouldn't overreact if it is killed. Nobody is trying to censor you; if it happens, just move your post to Tumblr.

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> (2) HN is not a forum for complaints about YC companies

The user in question looks like he/she has been here for a while, so isn't just someone signing in to bitch about a company. People also regularly use HN to complain about Google, since they are generally not that great at customer service, so it's hardly a precedent.

Ultimately, you are correct that it's not the purpose of this site, but as long as it's an occasional thing, done with respect and tact, and aims to improve the service, I don't think it's such a bad thing. I'm not sure this post is the best example of all those qualities, but AirBnB is also big enough to handle it, too, no? It's not like he's picking on someone just starting out.

You win some, you lose some. I was in the middle of a bunch of other stuff and dashed off a comment that got itself taken in ways I didn't intend. Sorry! :)

Your comments always make me smile Thomas, you seem like the real life embodiment of the "Lawful Neutral" alignment, always following the letter of each rule. My lease allows subletting, but there may be a provision which I'm not following, I can double check.

If this post gets killed, that's fine. I was hesitant to write it, but I thought it might be valuable to share. There's a fine line between useful critique or sharing an experience and ranting/complaining, perhaps my post leaned too far to the latter.

>Your comments always make me smile Thomas, you seem like the real life embodiment of the "Lawful Neutral" alignment

I've been trying to think of a good label for him for a long time, and I think that hits it on the nose.

I always kind of thought of myself as Neutral Good. I'm not a believer in rules for their own sake, but the good that comes from ignoring a rule should outweigh the harm incurred by surreptitiously changing the rules on everyone else. The most pernicious harms caused by breaking rules are the ones that aren't obvious, but rather confer an advantage to the parties that broke the rule that the rest of society can't easily detect, until those unscrupulous first movers have managed to roll the advantage up into a competitive moat.

I'm only commenting because I think it's interesting to think about why we think the things we do. I think it's a weird that anyone would want to fit an AD&D alignment onto me. :)

I can tell you why: You're clearly a (very) net positive contributor, however "strident" is a predictable default for any post of yours that's overly anything, combined with writing in a classical style.

Why people are trying to label you is you're hard to characterize yet are notably present.

You might want to check the zoning laws for your area too, that's another potential legal problem for this kind of thing.

(1) is immaterial to the topic at hand, which is AirBnb's customer service and unresponsiveness. That is between OP and his/her landlord.

edit: nevermind, beaten to the punch.

Please explain how (1) is relevant to the complaint at hand.

It's not, except to the extent that it might be hard to feel sorry for someone who is taking unfair advantage of his landlord and cotenants and then complaining about the poor customer service that he was provided when doing so.

Again though: it's not. It's a mostly orthogonal point.

> "except to the extent that it might be hard to feel sorry for someone who is taking unfair advantage of his landlord and cotenants"

The morality and ethics behind AirBnb is far from clearcut. The landlord-tenant relationship is also not so easily moralized - I'd take a flying leap off the high horse unless I knew more.

I'm sorry you felt like I was rebutting the complaint with the landlord thing. I'm not.

Then it was irrelevant.

I don't know about OP, but I've always assumed that by 2012 people would have the common sense to ask their landlords first for permission (either one time or recurring). I haven't listed on AirBNB but have sublet my apartment and that was obviously step one. Are most of the people using the site not doing that?

#1 is a common assumption, but really condos are a subset of apartments. "Apartment" can refer to a leased unit, a co-op situation, or an owned condo unit. The only thing that defines an "apartment" is that it is a housing unit contained within a larger unit.

sorry to side-track, but it looks like i've misunderstood american english. i thought "apartment" was american for "flat". but apparently it means "rented flat".

so what do you call a self-contained living area (several rooms - like a house, but it's not stand-alone) in a larger building if you own it?

it depends on the ownership structure, but usually a condo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condominium 'Colloquially, the term is often used to refer to the unit itself in place of the word "apartment". A condominium may be simply defined as an "apartment" that the resident owns as opposed to rents.'

In some places, you'll run into co-ops (cooperative). For example, New York City. Their prevalence elsewhere has, I've heard, generally declined in favor of condominium charters. (A major factor, I vaguely understand, being the increased autonomy of the members.)

I'm not versed in the details, but in co-ops, group administration seems to have a stronger role. For example, you may need formal approval of the co-op in order to sell your unit, with respect to the particular sale at hand. In other words, if they don't like the prospective buyer (and can argue this on a non-discriminatory basis, I imagine), you have to find another buyer.

Some friends bought into a co-op, and I was solicited to write a letter of recommendation. In addition to a good and well-worded argument for their tenancy, I "punched it up" by placing it on company letterhead and emphasizing the formal role. Apparently, that did the trick. My point being, they had to sell not just the owner but the co-op on their purchase of the unit.

As I think about this, I imagine many co-ops might have some strong opinions on their members' prospective use of AirBNB.

A "condo" or "condominium", for something like an apartment that you own the interior of, or a "townhouse", for something like a house that is attached to other townhouses. There's considerable overlap and general fogginess between the two.

yeah this is a pretty classic example of what startups have to deal with: irrational customers.

the guy is getting $3k from a transaction that breaks all kind of rules, and is upset that a _SCAN_ of his Driver's License might be intercepted in a "man in the middle" attack on a sent email!?!?!?

And if I weren't upset with it, someone else on the internet would be calling me stupid and telling me I deserved it when my identity was stolen or some account was compromised because I was sending things over unencrypted email. Some days I guess you just can't win.

Again though, issue number 1 is unresponsive, unhelpful technical support.

The irrelevance of (1) aside, you are making a huge assumption there. In Ontario for example, you need to tell your landlord, but they basically can't refuse.

There are circumstances in Ontario, mostly relating to trying to terminate tenancy, where the landlord can't reasonably refuse a request to sublet the place. I believe the intent is that you don't get trapped in some lease when you've lost your job and have to move cross-country. The landlord is obligated to mitigate losses, and subletting covers that.

I'm going to assume "temporarily leasing my place to make $3,000" won't qualify, but I'm no lawyer. There are liability issues associated with people subletting, and I'm doubtful AirBnB has all those bases covered.

I've been a landlord in Ontario for 10 years and had a sublet request a few months ago. In Ontario, there are 2 stages: a tenant has to make a general request to sublet, and then a specific one. They can break the lease if the landlord refuses at either stage, but otherwise they have to provide a legitimate replacement tenant (as opposed to putting a random person forward as a pretext to break the lease) or stay until the lease ends.

Of course you could just stop paying rent and your tenancy will be terminated much faster and you won't have to go through the hassle of finding someone to sublet.

Edit: The above applies in the case of legitimate sublet request - a two week AirBNB guest wouldn't count.

The Landlord and Tenant act is the relevant law, and doesn't make any distinction between short term and long term sublets. You say you are subletting, and the landlord can refuse only with a compelling reason. There is nothing special liability wise, you are still liable for damages because you are still the one leasing the apartment.

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