The Rise of Airbnb's Full-Time Landlords - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-10/how-airbnb-makes-property-investors-rich-despite-the-neighbors <comment><USER3> > [Shatford] said a low-risk approach to investing in the industry is to build > a portfolio by signing yearlong leases instead of buying the properties. The > worst that can happen is a landlord who isn't told about the operation can > terminate a lease and keep the security deposit.

Wow, that's slimy. I assume the leases he's signing, like pretty much all rental agreements, explicitly forbid unapproved sublets or guests staying more than a few days a month. So his get-rich-quick scheme (or "business plan") is to sign contracts he knows he will break, and hope he doesn't get caught until after he has come out ahead.

<comment><USER4> The contract outlines the penalty (or cost) for unapproved guests or sublets. If the lessee is willing to pay the penalty, what's the problem? If the penalty isn't sufficient to deter the unwanted behavior, increase it until it is.

If we have an agreement that I give you $5000 or you can punch me in the face, and I choose to take the punch in the face, that's not breaking the agreement. You didn't get "cheated" out of $5000. I chose an option that was specifically outlined in the agreement.

<comment><USER5> In your sad, twisted world, only the lawyers win.

Rental agreements have already ballooned into legal tomes no first-time lessee could ever understand. If they now have to spell out penalty for a variety of different breaches, they will become much worse (why not a single, higher penalty? That will get abused to extort tenants who commit minor violations...)

IMO it should not be about contracts. You should enter agreements in good faith and there should be _social_ consequences for doing otherwise (reputation ruined, ... etc.). Be excellent to each other.

<comment><USER4> By all means, if you want to depend on social consequences to enforce business contracts, you are welcome to do so. Some people are able to operate that way in areas where there are limited players and everyone's reputation is well known or easily discoverable. Companies like Uber and AirBnB with reviews and ratings systems actually bring us much closer to this being a reality.

If social consequences were sufficient, we wouldn't have invented this whole legal system in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Rating system is actually the one thing that I _think_ is good about Uber (though firing your emp^H^H^Hcontractor if he drops below 4.3/5 is not).

Social consequences are not good for everything, but there are _a lot_ of areas when there are better than economic approach. The problem is that economic incentives are much stronger than social, so the latter can be easily destroyed by the former. The classic example would be the fact that you absolutely, positively don't want to _pay_ people for donating blood - <USER2> immediately leads to contamination of blood banks, as people replace the sense of duty with an opportunity for free cash, and thus stop caring about things like not donating blood when they are sick.

Since social incentives are fragile, you want to defend them in the areas they work better than economic ones - hence the opposition to AirBnB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was inevitable and it is going to drive real estate sale and rental prices up dramatically in tourist destinations. I have relatives who own rental property in Key West, they used to sign year long leases and manage the property year round. With Airbnb they rent the same property 1 week each month and make more money than they did with the year long lease. Ultimately landlords have little incentive to rent to locals. Airbnb means they never worry about have to go to landlord/tenant court to evict and never have to worry about getting paid monthly.

<comment><USER8> Which is in turn extremely damaging to communities where real estate is at a premium and even people who make a lot of money struggle to find housing they can afford. There's a reason full-time AirBnBing is illegal in a lot of these municipalities, and it's the same reason it should stay that way.

<comment><USER7> There should be some limitations in place but how would you enforce them? If your local government checks Airbnb regularly to find people breaking the law then people will just use some other method to do the same thing as Airbnb.

<comment><USER9> If I was the person in charge of enforcing it, I would probably do something like:

      1 - Make it illegal for Airbnb style services to operate in that area, including making a website available, advertising the service, taking listings in that region, etc
      2 - Threaten to jail or heavily fine senior employees if law broken
      3 - Offer a legal route which involves an audit trail of bookings being supplied to the local gov
      4 - Use audit trail to deal with rule-breaking landlords

Steps 1 and 2 are essentially how the US government deals with foreign gambling websites.

<comment><USER7> That's a lot to ask from a local government.

<comment><USER9> For New York state government (or equivalent) though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Santa Monica resident here. The local increases in rent around here have been astounding over the past 2 years and most of my friends who have had a life event causing them to have to change apartments have been completely priced out and forced to go to the Valley. I attribute much of this to AirBnB, having known a few people here that operate business models much like what is described in the article. We have the most expensive hotel rates in the state and vacation rentals are extracting a lot of profit from the market because of it.

I know a girl who rented three 1-bedroom apartments around Santa Monica. She would live in whichever of the three was fetching the least interest on AirBnB that month and put the other two up. Those two units were occupied about 10-15 days a month. After all expenses she netted about $1000 cash and free rent for herself every month. In return there were two more units taken off the market and the price of actual residential units driven up ridiculously.

L.A. Mayor Garcetti came to speak at our office last week and he said that there is one housing unit west of the 405 (demarcation of west L.A.) for every 4 jobs west of the 405. Turning so many housing units into short term rentals is making this far worse. I support Santa Monica's law even if it means that I cannot rent my apartment out while I am traveling this December. I don't want to live somewhere that only techies can afford.

<comment><USER11> Used to live in Sawtelle. This poster is totally correct. When I left, we paid 1200 for our 1 bedroom just off Santa Monica Blvd. Our landlord raised the rate to 3000 and it was off market in hours (we keep in contact with the super). West LA is insane, almost at SoMa levels now. I never saw too much about the AirBnB rentals, but boy did I hear about them from everyone. My heart goes out to all those UCLA students trying to get by in that mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can only say about my own experience, but in Brasília, Brazil, we now see the rise of Uber fleets.

Asking around, people talk about one guy who own 50 cars.

At Airbnb, it's easy to find some hosts with 10+ properties.

That being said, I think this is a natural outcome. People will invest in Uber and Airbnb and others, just as they invest in taxi licenses, hotels and restaurants.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't have a problem with someone that hosts a few guests in their home 2-3 times a month and having them around the dinner table (what Airbnb advertises in PR that they do). I do have a problem with people running illegal hotels and blatantly violating zoning laws (what the data says a lot of Airbnb folks are actually doing).

Sorry, but people don't want to live next to a hotel. These laws exist for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Scott Shatford, 35, said he's not concerned about a Santa Monica, > California, home-sharing ordinance that took effect in June. It prohibits > stays of less than 30 days in homes where the host isn't living, with fines > of as much as $500 per day. He said enforcing the ban will be difficult for > the city because Airbnb listings don't include addresses.

Shatford's going to be a bit upset when they subpoena AirBnB, I think.

<comment><USER15> Especially with an article in the press naming him, specifically point out he's breaking the law and putting a serious dollar value on it...

They may want to wait a bit to enforce to really rack up a big bill since the law only came into effect in June.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Schadenfreude.

Where I am from, American (and other rich tourists) make simple things such as groceries ridiculously expensive, and obviously the housing too. There's no peace to be had at nights, with loud beer-addled tourists shouting around well into the morning.

This will a) hopefully make clear to more people how such behavior is not cool and make them understand that 'but your people make their LIVING off us, you should thank us for that' is not really a good argument, and b) make more programmers realize that we are not machines, and you cannot 'hack' law/people like you can 'hack' into a machine. This will either end with people more conscious about their externalities on other people, which would make life better for everyone, or making life awful for everyone (if this continues) which would eventually make more people realize that what they _really_ care about is other people. The pure _homo economicus_ is a species you would rather not have in your neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER9> "The worst that can happen is a landlord who isn't told about the operation can terminate a lease and keep the security deposit."

I'm pretty sure the worst that can happen is an unsafe property leads to someone's death, and then, hopefully, the people involved going to jail.

<comment><USER17> Why stop at 1 death?

The worst that could happen[0] is someone does an unauthorized rental to a terrorist whom then uses a nuclear device to end all life on the planet.

0 - "The worst that can happen" is often used a little bit too freely ;)

<comment><USER18> The difference is that one of these examples is outlandish, and the other is a near certainty to happen within the next couple of years.

<comment><USER6> You mean we should pack our bags and get ready to board the International Space Station Ark Complex? Because I don't see the "people involved going to jail" lately in high profile cases, and if the nuke-wielding terrorist were to look for an appartment, an illegal subletting (preferably without paper or electronic trail) would be high on his list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't necessarily see the average user of AirBnB losing out in this situation (happy to be corrected) - but more houses and options seem like a good thing.

I think the big losers here, outside of hotels, are renters. As someone who is trying to rent/buy in popular areas of the country (Cambridge, UK), I can see how houses will no longer come up for rent - which sucks, as the article points out.

I guess there could (hopefully) be a point where there are so many professionally rented homes that it no longer represents such an attractive proposition and the first movers enjoying these fat years of high revenues eventually lose out.

Either that, or Airbnb will become the new way to rent, who knows...

<comment><USER20> As someone who has literally lived in AirBnB apartments for a bit over a year now, these situations tend to work out well for me. Most of my stays have been with people who manage a number of apartments on AirBnB to make their living, whether via owning the building, or, more often, by subletting a bunch if apartments (legally or illegally).

Making no comment on the effect of such operations on housing costs or other such matters, AirBnB, like Uber, has succeeded by making a uniquely good user experience, even as they flout regulations and the law in general.

<comment><USER21> Well, good for you. Maybe not so good for the neighbors in those apartments. They moved in not expecting a revolving door of strangers and late-night partiers. There's rules for zoning things, for a reason.

<comment><USER22> Why is it assumed that all Airbnb guests by definition must be late night partiers, noisy and disruptive to the neighborhood? Seems like those types of comments are made by parties that have a vested interest against Airbnb in particular. I'll add my own one-point statistic: I rent an Airbnb while also renting out my house on Airbnb in another city. My neighbors where I rent out have not problems with my Airbnb guests, but ironically didn't like the folks that rented my house via the traditional broker/lease setup. In the end, it's just a marketplace for housing stock available to lease, both short term and long term. The traditional way of filling tenancy is seriously broken, with brokers taking a high up-front charge with no follow on service or help to landlords. Just look at NYC with their hate towards Airbnb. The rental market in that city is atrocious (exorbitant broker fees for tenants, poor presentation, shady brokers, etc etc)

<comment><USER21> No assumption by me. But what's the odds that _none_ of them are? Business travelers - maybe not. But vacationers are there for that intended purpose, right? And at least some of them will be annoying all-night partiers with no interest in pacifying neighbors they've never met and will never see again.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heroic: Spotify's time series database for monitoring - <AUTHOR> http://spotify.github.io/heroic/ <comment><USER2> I'll admit I found it a little tricky to orient myself within the Heroic docs. There are pages describing the high-level architecture, the installation process, then each aspect of the configuration has a doc page and an example. These are all fine, but I came away wishing there was also some kind of super- high-level introduction along the line of: "What exactly is this thing, what was the motivation for its development, who is it for, and what can it do?"

It turns out these do exist! But as blog postings you need to go searching for...

1\. Monitoring at Spotify: The story so far [[https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/16/monitoring-at-spotify- th...](https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/16/monitoring-at-spotify-the-story-so- far/)] in which they describe wanting to move from an approach based around the monitoring of discrete hosts, to one where they could be thinking in terms of the health of services across the entire infrastructure. Discusses various design/architecture decisions they took, specifically in terms of supporting _alerting_ and _graphing_ services.

2\. Monitoring at Spotify: Introducing Heroic [[https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify- in...](https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify-introducing- heroic/)] in which they discuss the "federation" features of Heroic, how it manages the collection of metric data from the hosts, why they used Elasticsearch and how they mitigate its known issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Found this on the architecture page:

> Elasticsearch has proven to have fairly significant stability concerns, but > heroic uses it in a way so it acts as a non-primary storage and can rapidly > be rebuilt.

What are these concerns specifically ? Is there a good read up ?

<comment><USER4> In this blog post[1], they link to one of Aphyr's "Call me maybe" posts, [https://aphyr.com/posts/323-call-me-maybe- elasticsearch-1-5-...](https://aphyr.com/posts/323-call-me-maybe- elasticsearch-1-5-0)

1: [https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify- in...](https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify-introducing- heroic/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks !</comment></comment></comment>


Apple is set to face an EU investigation over Spotify's competition complaint - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/apple-set-to-face-eu-antitrust-probe-over-spotify-complaint-ft-report.html <comment><USER2> It would be nice if, instead of a company fighting a much larger company, the outcome of this was that it is illegal to lock down a device so that one can't install software of one's own choice on it.

This is so usually framed as Apple being unfair, but the law will make them more fair, however, which is the wrong way to look at this, I think.</comment>


Top 25 Companies That Accept Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://edgylabs.com/2017/06/12/top-25-companies-that-accept-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> This shows the bitcoin is used for drugs or small purchases. Its a gigantic bubble right now. In the market right now $103,804,924,910, its hard to spend that on tripadvisor or wordpress</comment>


The mail you want, not the spam you don't - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you-dont.html <comment><USER2> > The Gmail Postmaster Tools help qualified high-volume senders analyze their > email, including data on delivery errors, spam reports, and reputation.

No clarification on who these qualified senders are? Not even a hint..? Why not all domains?

<comment><USER3> >Why not all domains?

One downside of opening this is that you'd let spammers easily figure out if their spam is being so detected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind of funny that they release this after a week with 2 articles of people complaining about it on HN.

But I would venture a guess that it's been in the works for a while.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool to know that my clicks on the spam button have an effect.

You hear that recruiters? When you say you've removed me from your systems and then 3 weeks later I get another non relevant spammy job offer you always end up in my spam.

I practice "Inbox Zero Tolerance".

</comment><comment><USER6> If only they provided tools for the recipients, too.</comment>


Joshfire: HTML5 open source multi-device development framework - <AUTHOR> http://joshfire.com/

<comment><USER2> Not sure I understand perfectly what this tech is doing. Running JS on cpu installed on devices ? The site is not that clear about that and the examples are mainly web apps.</comment>


JMESPath – A Query Language for JSON - <AUTHOR> http://jmespath.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am reposting this as, for whatever reason, JMESPath is not as popular as it should be. By the way, you can embed JMESPath queries out of the box in AWS CLI [0] via the --query switch.

[0]: [https://aws.amazon.com/cli/](https://aws.amazon.com/cli/)</comment>


Why privacy always loses - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79750/nude-breach-privacy-americans

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, I didn't know this link was partially pay-walled. I don't usually share links unless they're 100% publicly accessible.</comment>


We reduced our React Native app size by 60% with a few simple fixes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hugogrochau/how-we-reduced-our-react-native-app-size-by-60-with-a-few-simple-fixes-3d59adc2ed3d <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about how Mutual reduced the size of our app by 60% with a few simple objective steps. I tried to detail our reasoning and approach for each step of the case. Hope it can be of help or at least an interesting read. If anyone wants me to go into more detail into each of the steps let me know.</comment>


iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/205

<comment><USER2> This headline seems a bit misleading. The blog post is from today, describing a problem that the developer had brought to his attention yesterday. Perhaps this should be revised to the title of the post: "iTunes accounts hacked by shady developer?"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the situation has been like this for more than a week, I observed this more than a week ago, leading to the editorial slant.

Some proof, take a look here: <http://www.appexplorer.com/a/367996918/>

I actually started on June 14th, so about 3 weeks, without any reaction from Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To calculate the daily income of this guy:

$5 per app and he has 50 apps in the top 100. Daily sales are about 30 for each app, so total of 1500 sales per day. At $5, he's making $7500 a day.

In the 3 weeks he has exploited this hack: $157 Thousand dollars. I wonder who is paying for that.

</comment><comment><USER3> As another Book developer, this is probably true.

We have Free Books and Free Audiobooks, usually #1 and #2 paid book apps in the list. There is a bunch of fluctuation (competitors get featured, NYT plugs, etc), but the Top 20 is consistent. This is Weird with a capital W.

However, this is probably a very limited account breach- below #10 volume in Books is pretty low, 200-300/day or so. Top 5 is much higher, so it's telling that the hack didn't get apps into the Top 5.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yesterday there was an app called "A mirror" at the top of the Top Grossing list selling for $499.99. The developer, SufPay, has no website listed and has only released one app. The app displays images of picture frames that are simply black in the center; that's it. It's by a different developer, but it definitely seems to be part of a similar scheme.

I checked just now, and the price has changed to 99¢, but it's scary to think that a completely useless app 'sold' enough copies at $500 a pop to become the top grossing app on the app store.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I've heard of this trick. What the developers do is that they make the app expensive ($500), then they purchase it with promo-codes, leading to it going into the top-grossing list. Then they switch it to 99cents, but since it takes some time for it to slide off the top-grossing list, a lot of people buy the app. This gives it enough sales to break into the top 100 of the category charts, and it will then use that momentum to rise up.

Devs use such tricks - if you keep in touch with the forum, you'll see some crazy stuff people are doing to sell.

<comment><USER4> Well that's a bit of a relief. I thought they were actually charging $500 to unsuspecting account holders.

You're right about people buying the app after it drops in price. When it was $500 it had two obviously fake 5/5 reviews. Now it has an additional 40 reviews, 1/3 of which are additional fake reviews, 2/3 of which are 1-star reviews shocked that their iPhone didn't magically turn reflective.

 _sigh_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the mechanism speculated in the article is true (app developer hacking iTunes accounts and buying his own apps), then a crime has been committed, and It would be irresponsible of Apple to "respond" (in a visible way) until proper steps had been taken.

<comment><USER6> The only proper steps they need to take are to backup the situation before tossing the fraudster and his impact. That should just take a couple of hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I notice at the end of the article, the author states: "I hope someone at apple catches wind of this."

Which makes me wonder, have any of us contacted apple yet, or are we all just hoping they'll notice this on their own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple is on the case, if you read the follow-up. Also, the last time something like this happened, Apple was very pro-active, fixed the issue really quickly.

I think the problem was really just that Apple didn't know about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If apple would give more legitimate options of marketing apps in the AppStore devs would not stoop so low. There is no tracking, no in-store ads, nothing you can do besides playing the popularity game.

<comment><USER9> you could befriend some hipster a-bloggers that would cover your apps. (though I hate those bloggers)

<comment><USER8> And that's exactly what I _hate_ about the AppStore: it's one big popularity contest. I've had one of my apps dip into the US Top 100 this weekend thanks to a random mention in the NY Times. While the attention is nice, I experience the lack of control over these kinds of media events as truly depressing.

<comment><USER10> So why not try and take control of the media events?

This is why people have PR and Marketing staff... They go out and help create the stories and influence how the media report on product and services.

<comment><USER8> While that's nice if you have the cash to spend, for most indie devs that is just not an option. If you have suggestions on how to do this on the cheap, check out this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485783>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> apple will respond. they just need some time to take action. for mr nugyen it will end like for the last bunch of chinese guys who got all their apps thrown out, their licenses revoked and no money paid out.

<comment><USER11> Sure, take time to gather evidence, work with authorities and document the crime. But there is no good reason to leave those apps in the top seller lists once they've discovered the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please stop with the App store in the first position of HN. There are so much better article and stuff to know about. Thanks.</comment>


Show HN: JVine - Vine downloader and converter in MP4 and GIF - <AUTHOR> http://andrew.codeusa.net/post/72488717326/jvine-v2-did-someone-say-gifs

<comment><USER2> I hacked together a little Ruby script to do something similar a few months back, might be useful to somebody:

[https://github.com/space150/gifvine/blob/master/gifvine.rb](https://github.com/space150/gifvine/blob/master/gifvine.rb)

It runs server-side however, and requires several dependencies (ffmpeg, imagemagick) unlike JVine which runs client-side as a Java applet.

<comment><USER3> Seems like it be highly useful for sites that do backend conversion. Never been a big fan of ruby but its cool seeing its uses.

I've gone ahead and slapped together APNG support, which not only cuts file sizes down; but conversion takes about 5 seconds for the largest MP4 I tested.

[http://i.imgur.com/sCVBYC2.png](http://i.imgur.com/sCVBYC2.png) This came out to be 9.9mb while its gif counterpart was too big to even upload; even with its quality cut.

Sadly I realized not every browser supports APNG.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very upsetting that many people did not take APNG seriously. GIF is too outdated on this point.</comment></comment></comment>


Update on Taking Tesla Private - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-taking-tesla-private?redirect=no <comment><USER2> > I left the July 31st meeting with no question that a deal with the Saudi > sovereign fund could be closed, and that it was just a matter of getting the > process moving. This is why I referred to "funding secured" in the August > 7th announcement.

He has a waaaaaayyy different definition of "secured" than I (and I think the SEC) do. That tweet is going to cost Tesla and Musk big time.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, that sounds like a handshake agreement, right? I wouldn't balk at calling a handshake agreement "secured" given the context.

<comment><USER4> Between businesses, a handshake agreement means nothing. If the agreement is not committed to paper it doesn't exist.

However, a handshake agreement could be valid between individuals depending on the context.

<comment><USER5> It's funny. In Germany a handshake agreement between individuals is worth nothing but between businesses it's enforcable like a written contract.

<comment><USER4> We're not in Germany. Contract laws vary by country and by state.

In the US, the general law is that verbal contracts are worth the paper they are written on, which is to say, not at all unless other facts/circumstances support the existence of the verbal agreement _and its specific terms._ Otherwise anyone could claim to have a contract with anyone else.

For example, I claim to have had a verbal agreement with Mark Z for the development of a social networking site owned by me but built by him. In the absence of any other facts, no court would agree that such a contract exists. However, maybe I show copies of emails where we discussed the idea for a social networking site before it launched. That's some evidence that a verbal agreement might have existed, but not as to what the terms were. Most likely, the parties would settle without going to trial, simply because Mark wants to proceed with the IPO without the sword of litigation hanging over his head-- even though he would very likely win. The marginal cost of winning at trial is not worth the much larger cost of the harm to the IPO. (This is very loosely based on the Winklevoss saga.)

<comment><USER6> Your generalization is backwards. In general, US contracts do not need paper memorializing. The majority of transactions are not memorialized.

Specific types of transaction and certain value thresholds require memorializing.

Facts and circumstances are required to support verbal contracts, but _in general_ verbal contracts very much are enforceable.

<comment><USER4> Yes, of course. I'll ignore the law that I actually learned in law school and in the actual practice of litigating contracts for what some guy said on the internet...

There's a reason I brought up the falling apple example. Verbal contracts are enforceable--if they satisfy the same requirements as written contracts. On top of that, the terms of a verbal agreement must be corroborated by other evidence outside of the verbal agreement itself in order to survive litigation --and the trend in the US legal system is to require _more_ supporting evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Private companies are allowed to have up to 2,000 shareholders under they fall under the same SEC reporting requirements as public companies. Tesla could keep big investors and smallish investors with over $1 million in investable assets or yearly income above $200k if they accredited themselves.

Other issue is what kind of owner PIM is. In principle it's long term patient investor.

KSA has a new active prince/ruler that is self assured and proud. He is really sovereign and relationship to him must be well managed. We all know that Musk not a diplomat in his public or private communications.

Saudis have had little bit of cash flow problems because they have constant budget deficit is typically 10-15 percent of their GDP or ~$50B/year and it probably just grows in the future . On paper PIM has $2 trillion in assets, but most of it is Saudi Aramco. Aramco IPO would generate cash flow but it's delayed, probably because there is fair amount of air in the valuation. Saudi Arabia has previously inflated it's oil reserves as a political decision to match some OPEC agreements and real production capacity potential is top secret.

If KSA continues to have cash flow problems and Tesla is disappoints somehow, Tesla may end up at the hands of corporate raiders like Carl Icahn.

</comment><comment><USER8> $358 is what TSLA is trading at right now (30minutes after this blog post hit HN). I'm guessing the traders are calling BS on whatever Musk has in hands.

Imo, this looks like a stage to liquidate shorters (which Musk hates). Musk could have mentioned here that S.A. had "committed" in some way to a private deal. He didn't. They are still negotiating.

There is literally 0 reasons why the stock will trade below $420 if the funding was "secured" let alone trade 15% below that.

<comment><USER9> There's more to a buyout than the funding though; lack of board approval or any agreement on terms (i.e. not just financial terms) are obviously deal- breakers.

Certainly the market doubts whether this deal will go through, but it's not clear to me that it's all about Tesla's access to capital.

<comment><USER8> I'd like to be convinced otherwise (both because I like what Tesla is doing and I think Musk is a great executer) but I don't find anything on that blog post that suggest that "funding is secured".

<comment><USER9> Oh, I agree about that. I'm just saying that even if everybody felt that funding was secured, the price would still not be at $420, because there are other risks of a deal like this falling through.

<comment><USER8> Sure but this means that interested investors are willing to put $420 for Tesla. Which means its' price should be higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That sounds like a retroactive arse covering exercise.

<comment><USER11> Specifically the section on "funding secured". Any reasonable person would interpret that as Musk having a term sheet in hand. This sounds more like "funding potentially interested".

<comment><USER12> Especially since he later claimed: "Only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has approached me multiple times about > taking Tesla private.

Interesting to see countries most dependent economically on fossil fuels heavily investing in their energy nemesis.

Curious about the ramifications that might emanate out of partly giving away control of a large American automobile manufacturer to a foreign entity -- a potentially hostile one no less -- given how sensitive Tesla vehicles' proprietary technologies are from a safety/security standpoint.

<comment><USER14> > Interesting to see countries most dependent on fossil fuels heavily > investing in their energy nemesis.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been hedging against fossil fuels massively for many decades. It's been a driving force behind major regional conflicts with global participation, so it's kind of one of those things that people should generally be aware of.

> Curious about the ramifications that might emanate out of partly giving away > control of a large American automobile manufacturer to a foreign entity

You mean like when Chrysler got taken over by Fiat?

<comment><USER15> To be fair, FIAT was hardly ever under the sort of nation-state influence that a sovereign fund is. They occasionally made business that "pleased", let's say, the Italian government, but it was decades before the Chrysler deal, and it was pretty rare anyway. Usually the relationship was the other way around, with the state making moves for the company to profit from, which is expected for any company.

Sovereign funds are direct emanations of nation-states, which is different. When they buy a somewhat-strategic industrial asset, it is significant. The question is whether the US (and particularly this fossil-fuel-friendly administration) actually see Tesla as strategic at all - my guess is that the guys currently in charge wouldn't care one bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's disconcerting this is written in the first person from Musk and not from a communications team as a public statement from the company.

I think it's rather Freudian about his world view and behavior. He seems to have an opinion on everything and disregard experts left and right.

I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with this personality running a company this size. Some CTO/engineering role, sure, CEO and board member with everything that entails is a time bomb.

<comment><USER17> Have you considered the possibility that this blog article was reviewed by legal experts before being posted? I don't know of course but that's a possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is Tesla going private if the goal is for potentially _all_ its current shareholders to remain? Isn't there a limit on the number of investors a private company can have[1]? What if I own Tesla stock? Do I become a private shareholder afterwards? Does this just mean I don't get quarterly reports anymore? What if I still want to get quarterly reports? If I _am_ still getting the same reporting as before, in what meaningful way is Tesla private?

None of this makes a lick of sense.

[1] [https://blog.gust.com/limiting-the-number-of-shareholders- in...](https://blog.gust.com/limiting-the-number-of-shareholders-in-private- companies/)

<comment><USER19> > _if the goal is for potentially all its current shareholders to remain?_

Revise "all current shareholders" to "all current material shareholders" and Elon's tweets make more sense.

> _Isn 't there a limit on the number of investors a private company can > have?_

Not technically. But you have to do all the expensive things a public company does if your "securities are 'held of record' by either 2,000 persons, or 500 persons who are not accredited investors" [1]. Practically speaking, those are the limits.

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/secg/jobs-act- section-12g-...](https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/secg/jobs-act- section-12g-small-business-compliance-guide.htm)}

<comment><USER20> A tweet from him: "My hope is _all_ current investors remain with Tesla even if we're private. Would create special purpose fund enabling anyone to stay with Tesla. Already do this with Fidelity's SpaceX investment."

Still doesn't really make sense to me though. Not sure how that would work.

<comment><USER19> > _A tweet from [Musk]: "My hope..._

Elon expressed a hope, not a goal.

Fidelity's SpaceX SPV is restricted to a small number of accredited investors. Goldman tried the "put investors in a box, put the box on the cap table, and call the box 1 investor" schtick when Facebook was private [1]. While Facebook went public before they fell afoul of the law, the authorities clearly expressed their views on such structures [2].

[1] [https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/facebook-and- the-500...](https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/facebook-and- the-500-person-threshold/)

[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704723104576062...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704723104576062280540485652)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Musk needs to step out of the limelight. It's obvious that he loves it, but half the news about him is the stupid things he's done or said on Twitter or on blog posts. It does him no favors and makes him look like a child who has just figured out he can scream, and that the world will react when he does[0].

Elon, go back to what you're best at: inventing, being in the lab, running the factory, making the world better with your mind. Stop trying to be famous because it does you more harm than good.

The biggest danger to Tesla today is an over-inflated ego.

[0](I wonder if any politicians have figured this out?)

<comment> knight-of-lambd I disagree from a practical standpoint. Personal infamy is essentially free advertisement, up to a certain limit. As long as Elon isn't perceived as running the company into the ground.

He spends a few seconds tweeting and suddenly his name and Tesla is plastered over the next news cycle. Great ROI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A Saudi government owned Tesla will lose me as a customer. If you're eager to do business with the Saudi government your moral compass is seriously out of whack.

<comment><USER20> Greater good? For all the advantages and potential success of TSLA, it is in a precarious financial position and could fail. If the Saudis want to dump money into it and accelerate the world's transition to solar and electric cars, seems like a net win to me.

<comment><USER23> If Tesla collapsed tomorrow, I don't see that that'd make a huge difference to adoption of electric cars in the long-term. Arguably, Nissan collapsing would be worse. The Leaf is a much better model for widespread adoption than Tesla's stuff.

<comment><USER24> I was going to say GM's Bolt/Volt since it was one of those 'best cars of the year'. If that fails + is electric, thats a bad indicator for the future.

Tesla gets a pat on the back for trying to be new/different. The quality of Tesla is nothing like established companies. You cant even blame Tesla, they dont have data like a company thats been around for decades.

<comment><USER23> > I was going to say GM's Bolt/Volt since it was one of those 'best cars of > the year'.

Barely available outside the US. There's the Opel Ampera, which is mostly a GM Volt, but it's weirdly expensive so no-one buys it. The Leaf is the world's best-selling electric car, for now (especially if you include its very close relatives like the Renault Zoe; I don't think that's precisely the same platform, but it's close).

<comment><USER25> GM doesn't get California credits for selling Bolts outside of California and the other states that follow the California standard.

Isn't the Leaf about to stop being the world's best-selling electric car?

<comment><USER23> It's possibly been replaced by the BAIC EC, at least for the first part of this year. That's unlikely to last, though; the Chinese market is too fragmented for that. The BAIC EC is also of very limited relevance worldwide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To me it seems that the deal relies on 2/3 of current investors being willing to keep their money in the company while losing any leverage they have to control Elon at least in some way. I wonder if these estimations are correct, especially for bigger funds.

<comment><USER27> Not at all true. if you have 20% of the stock of a private or public company is exactly the same voting wise etc. The only difference, is thats its publicly traded, and the pros and cons of that (very liquid, quarterly reports etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm wondering how Musk's compensation scheme will change when Tesla becomes private again. It was approved a few months ago by Tesla shareholders. It gives Elon Musk no salary, only restricted stock awards. They can reach a value of tens of billions of dollars. Restrictions for the full package: Tesla has to reach annual sales of 175 billion and the stock market has to give TSLA a market cap of 650 billion.

</comment><comment><USER29> __capital required for going private would be funded by equity rather than debt,

 __approximately two-thirds of shares owned by all current investors would roll over into a private Tesla.

Musk needs to find 23 friends willing to put $1b into a retirement-fund. The fund takes over the existing shares and buys whoever wants to exit at $420.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _the Managing Director of the [Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth] fund_

Does anyone know to whom this refers?

<comment><USER30> [https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp...](https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=241125061&privcapId=12455701)

that's what "PIF managing director" on google gives me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is strategic for the Saudis.

Other strategic investors and sovereign wealth funds that will not want to see Tesla controlled by a competitor for 10% over today's price.

Norway, China and Abu Dhabi each have SWFs larger than Saudi Arabia [1], and the energy implications of letting Tesla go would be strategic for each of them.

Tesla's market cap is only 6% of Apple's, and Apple isn't geopolitically strategic. We may see a bidding war for Tesla before they go private.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund#Largest_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund#Largest_sovereign_wealth_funds)

</comment><comment><USER32> > To be clear, when I made the public announcement, just as with this blog > post and all other discussions I have had on this topic, I am speaking for > myself as a potential bidder for Tesla.

Elon Musk sent an e-mail to all his employees on August 7th, and published the e-mail to the world. In the e-mail he made a number of quite worrying statements as the CEO of the company and some outlandish claims. One week later on August 13th, Elon Musk rips off his mask and cackles manically: Behold! It was me all along! Not the mild mannered CEO of your heart, but I have been secretly talking as a potential bidder for your company! Moohahaha.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd be interested to know who besides the Saudis are interested. Who are the biggest players? I'm guessing Elon has many, many wealthy friends with huge numbers of Tesla shares that are interested in this plan.

<comment><USER34> Maybe he could contact the Norwegian Oil Fund also. They should also be interested in something else than oil and Tesla sells a lot of cars there.

[https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/](https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/)

<comment><USER35> I cannot possibly imagine that Norway would gamble with such a large stake in a single company. Such funds usually have some strategies to reduce risk and thereby protect the wealth of their citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds like trying to get the SEC away.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm confused why elon says 2/3rds of shareholders would keep invested in a private Tesla. How would they ever get their money back out? Only if they went public in future or if they sold to another party? Based in their market cap compared to GM, Toyota, etc. that seems a bit crazy.

<comment><USER38> You can still trade stocks and there are events to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any idea why the Saudi (government) wants to buy Tesla?

Is it part of the oil conspiracy to kill electric vehicles?

Given how GM, Nissan, and others have electric vehicles, I dont think this could stop the new wave of buyers.

Anyone want to take a stab at why this is happening?

<comment><USER19> > _Any idea why the Saudi (government) wants to buy Tesla?_

They believe it to be a good investment and think (a) Tesla's management will do better without the public market's constant scrutiny and/or (b) their own books could benefit from less apparent volatility.

> _Is it part of the oil conspiracy to kill electric vehicles?_

Probably not. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund has been set up as a hedge against their oil-based economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Musk betting the farm on the Saudis basically saying 'Insh'Allah'

</comment><comment><USER40> Saudi Arabia? I know they have money but it's like selling your chicken coop to a snake

<comment><USER33> No, it's Saudi Arabia attempting to diversify its holdings. If they've seen oil-rich countries fall again and again to low oil prices, it makes a lot of sense for them to hedge their bets and protect against the future where solar (they're investing a ton in this) and EVs may remain supreme. If these investments don't pan out, they still have a massive amount of very cheap oil reserves and will keep those longer than most other oil producers.

<comment><USER41> >If they've seen oil-rich countries fall again and again to low oil prices

... especially in context of how successful they've been at lowering oil prices to hurt their rivals.</comment></comment></comment>


WordPress 3.0 available - <AUTHOR> http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/ <comment><USER2> If someone has a recommendation on the best method of configuring this for multiple domains (not subdomains) on a cloud host, I'd appreciate the pointer.

I've found this: [http://blog.mixu.net/2010/05/17/setting-up-multisite- wordpre...](http://blog.mixu.net/2010/05/17/setting-up-multisite- wordpress-3-0-with-multiple-different-domains/)

Which references this: [http://www.interconnectit.com/840/wordpress-3-0-multisite- wi...](http://www.interconnectit.com/840/wordpress-3-0-multisite-with- multiple-domains-setup/)

These assume you can edit your Apache conf, and many cloud hosts don't support that.

<comment><USER3> Wait, is the term "cloud host" now being used to define shared web hosting as well as everything else it already means?

<comment><USER2> In this case, I mean not shared web hosting in the VPS sense (one server, many customer sites) but web farm or web cluster (your site on many servers).

<comment><USER4> Sorry about the hijack, but you're not on Rackspace, are you? Wordpress sites there have been getting hacked quite a bit lately, it looks like they have a security issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I go a suitable period of time with no Wordpress 3.0 users contacting me for a de-hacking job, then I will upgrade. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but I'm just about done with Head First Wordpress ([http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-WordPress-Brain-Friendly- Cr...](http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-WordPress-Brain-Friendly- Creating/dp/0596806280)). It covers Wordpress 3.0 (although not the MU integration) and I've tried to make it more about using Wordpress as a content management system. This is exciting news from the WP team and there are a ton of cool new features in this release--my favorite being the menu admin and custom header images.

</comment><comment><USER6> I look forward to new 0-day hacks and admin vulnerabilities!

<comment><USER7> While I agree with you... what to use instead? It seems that all the other CMS/blogging platforms have the same issues...

<comment><USER8> MovableType seems to not have as many issues.

<comment><USER9> It also seems to have not as many users.

<comment><USER10> I'll take that over constantly having to upgrade my install or recovering from being hacked.

<comment><USER11> Really? You will take a less vibrant, less helpful, and less forward-moving community over WP because you cant set it up right?

<comment><USER12> How forward-moving do you need a system that allows you to manage content within site templates to be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking forward to using custom post types and the integration of WPMU and WP. Wordpress is really coming into its own as a CMS.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wait 24-48 hours for 3.0.1 (and then another few days for 3.0.2)

I'm not being funny, it happens with nearly every WP release because they do everything last minute.

<comment><USER9> I bet you $10 it won't this time. :)

<comment><USER14> Considering there was code added/changed during the "code sprint" the morning after Wordcamp SF while y'all were likely hung over, I'll take that bet ;-)

If I win, you have to drop everything and fix the backtick code bug on bbpress.org

ps. I also consider the bet won if there is a major issue posted on TRAC within a week, even if you delay a bugfix release.

[http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/1?asc=1&sort=sever...](http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/1?asc=1&sort=severity)

<comment><USER9> I believe I won this one. Drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice! With WP MU built-in, now a 100 Posterous clones can pop up.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm so glad they have merged MU and Wordpress!

Now if I could just figure out how to get the darn thing to work properly.

</comment><comment><USER17> How do the new feature in WP3 compare to similar features in Drupal?

<comment><USER18> I can almost assure you that they're probably easier to use. That's always been WordPress' strength, despite its weaknesses.

<comment><USER19> Drupal 7 should be out in a few months and will address ease of use (along with some major advances under the hood)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hopefully the settings to enable Mu functionality isn't easy to get to, or else millions of people are going to upgrade and turn that on because they think it'd be cool and "I'm sure other people want to blog on my site!" and then get spammed to hell by parasite hosting spammers.

<comment><USER21> No user interface for the multisite/multiuser functionality appears until a constant is set in the configuration file. So most users will never see it, and those who do _really_ wanted to. :-)</comment></comment>


Podcast Stats - <AUTHOR> https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/ <comment><USER2> While it's interesting to see how many podcasts there are in general, it would be more interesting to know how many dormant podcasts there are and how long the average podcast lasts. The original podcast, The Daily Source Code, is still technically active (there is an RSS feed that works) but you cannot download the history and there aren't any new shows (mainly because the RIAA threatened to sue Adam Curry out of existence if he published another one).

<comment><USER3> They did? I can't seem to find anything about that on Google. I wonder which other podcasts have disappeared off the web. I'm a paranoid bastard so I have complete archives of several shows I used to listen to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > best podcast search engine and database

Interesting - I had never heard of this particular search engine before. All I really use is iTunes and (rarely) spotify. And the occasional cross-promotion from within a podcast.

Of particular interest from their dataset is the "Dead" vs. "New". It's interesting how the "Dead" is level around 30k, while the new is a simple exponential curve.

</comment><comment><USER5> With no commuting, I have stopped listening to podcasts. Is that showing up in the data?

<comment><USER6> I listen to mine when doing chores, or any low-concentration task that I used to listen to music during. This has not completely replaced the time I used to spend commuting.

<comment><USER7> Working out, walking the dog, doing chores, putting the baby to bed, while playing games with no big story element. It's less total time but I still go through quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The high figure compared to other medias need to be put in perspective. It's possible that a lot of content is just a duplication for different languages.

Where a movie can get subtitles or dubbing, where a music don't need any translation, an English podcast will only be listened by people fluent in English and will need to be adapted for other languages, either by the original podcaster or by a local one without any fear of copyright infringement.

Thus it's hard to directly compare movies, music and podcasts figures together.

<comment><USER9> I listen to podcasts in other languages and have never encountered translated podcasts, or rather, I don't think your hunch explains any significant numbers. Edit: I just looked and lost interest before I could find a single example of what you're talking about.

You may get spin-offs for other languages like Radio Ambulante (Spanish) for NPR. But that's a whole other podcast in its own right, not a translation.

The difference in numbers should be obvious to you: anyone can start a podcast that lands on podcast aggregators, and the production is just recorded voice at minimum. Few people make movies or music that lands on imdb and spotify, and the production is more than just recorded voice at minimum. Why wouldn't you expect podcasts see much higher numbers in its stats?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I found it very satisfying the perceptual lull I felt between essentially stopping listening to podcasts between 2009 and 2012 echoed a period of slower growth after the explosion of 2004-2007. Somewhat disappointing the charted data only goes back to 2007 but very interesting just how dominant the United States it when it comes to sheer volume.

Given how similar the current podcast "cultural gold rush" _feels_ compared to the way it did slightly more than a decade ago, I can't help but wonder if we're heading for another bust. The economic boomtimes that created so many willing sponsors of the last four or five years are coming to an end, and the onrushing economic difficulties are driving more and more people into podcasting as a potential source of income. Can a whole industry support itself on the pockets of Squarespace and Casper mattresses?

<comment><USER10> I've heard podcasting called the slowest-growing new medium of all time... The exponent for number of podcasts seems to be much higher than the exponent for number of podcast listeners, for example.

[https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and- podcasting/](https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/audio-and-podcasting/)

<comment><USER7> Doesn't look too bad. Monthly users are up 3x from 2008 to 32% of Americans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised English and the US are that dominant. Assuming it's not a data problem, does anyone know why this is? Do other countries have different outlets for a random person's "I want to make a show" impulse, or is it just not really a popular idea outside the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> The data only include publicly accessible RSS-based podcasts, which is a very narrow definition of podcasts.

There are exclusive "podcasts" on Spotify that are not publicly accessible and not distributed via rss.

There are other forms of spoken audio contents that are publicly accessible but not distributed via rss.

Open RSS-based podcast ecosystem is less developed outside US, for countries with comparable (or larger) population.

There are many walled garden audio platforms in countries like China. For example, probably most of you haven't heard of Lizhi FM [0], a "podcasting" platform from China that just went public early this year. Most of its audio contents are not distributed via RSS.

[0] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783407/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1783407/000119312519276047/d762894df1.htm)

<comment><USER12> _There are exclusive "podcasts" on Spotify that are not publicly accessible and not distributed via rss._

An audio program that isn't published via an RSS feed is no more a podcast than the proprietary pages that AOL use to host are "web pages."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought the UK would have been higher up, I wonder if the fact that most people use a US based host skews the results? I don't know how listennotes do heuristics for "podcasts by country" but I'd be interested to see.

In terms of dead podcasts, most podcasts don't actually set the complete tag (most likely to leave the door open for future eps) they just stop. So that figure will be way higher in reality. When crawling Podcasts I came across a lot of RSS feeds that were still up but hadn't had a new episode for over 3-5 years etc

</comment><comment><USER14> We recently published a study on the podcast market based on Apple Podcasts [0]. I'm surprised by the numbers they claim as we see around a half of those numbers across Spotify and Apple, but we deduplicate them, so maybe that's why.

In any way, very interesting statistics.

[0] [https://blog.pex.com/podcast-growth-doubles-every-year- over-...](https://blog.pex.com/podcast-growth-doubles-every-year- over-7-million-hours-uploaded-in-2019-acbcba8c4a70)

</comment><comment><USER15> Semi related, I find it fun to look at patreon top creator stats, which includes a lot of podcasts: [https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon- creators](https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators)

Notable are Chapo Trap House, a communist/socialist podcast making nearly $2M a year, and Cum Town, a low production value comedy podcast pulling in almost $700k.

<comment><USER7> Patreon seems much better than the ads model. Maybe the next generation of tech and media companies can finally break the century old shackles of ad- driven businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The podcasts-over-time statistics remind me that podcasts are like the new blogs.

</comment><comment><USER17> wenbin, for stats on hosting providers, when it's like podtrac, do you count both podtrac and the real host?

<comment><AUTHOR> If there's redirect, then we use the final destination url, e.g., [http://feeds.podtrac.com/fRt6e7vOZ-19](http://feeds.podtrac.com/fRt6e7vOZ-19) redirects to civilbeat.org..., so we use civilbeat.org

If there's not redirect, then we use the exact url, e.g., [http://feeds.podtrac.com/nice-peter](http://feeds.podtrac.com/nice-peter) doesn't redirect, then it's podtrac.com</comment></comment>


MultiXml gem has same vulnerability as Rails' CVE-2013-0156 – patch now - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/d7f6d9f4925f413621aa

<comment><USER2> Hmm, I'm not sure you could say it has "the same vulnerability".

It has the same vulnerability if you pass untrusted input to it, okay.

But the point of the Rails vulnerabilty is that every Rails app, by default, was set up to accept external user input and run it through an XML parser. Even if you didn't realize it.

If you are using MultiXml, you may or may not be passing untrusted user input to it, depends on what you did with it.

Right?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is the same vulnerability at a fundamental level (it's virtually the same code), but it isn't exploitable out of the box in the same way Rails was, at least not on its own. However, there is a web framework, Grape, that was exploitable in exactly the same way that Rails was due to MultiXml's vulnerability.

And, really, technically, it was ActiveSupport that had this vulnerability. Even outside of Rails, had you used Hash.from_xml on untrusted user input you would have run into exactly the same issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yo dawgs, the mailchimp, aws-sdk, jenkins and twilio gems use HTTParty which uses multi_xml. You should look into this.

<comment><USER4> Quick clarification: The multi_xml gem has _not_ been updated, so there is nothing to upgrade, correct? Just the monkey-patch fix?

<comment><USER3> Oh hmm, I guess that's a good thing to point out. Yes, the multi_xml gem has not been upgraded, and the listed dependencies for httparty and mailchimp haven't changed either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I strongly recommend loading something like this in your Ruby applications: <https://gist.github.com/4507129>

It will prevent YAML.rb from instantiating arbitrary objects, which will close off this entire class of problems.

Obviously, if you _do_ use YAML as a serialization format for arbitrary objects, this won't work, but odds are you aren't doing that.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this patch works in Ruby 1.9, where YAML is actually the Psych module. Any Psych experts know how to make this 1.9-compatible?

<comment><USER7> It doesn't work for me either on 1.9 - anyone with an explanation?

I commented here:

<https://gist.github.com/4507129>

<comment><USER8> The patch I applied does not use YAML.tagged_classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Grape is also affected:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ruby- gra...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ruby- grape/qX38Iy1Bwo8)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A version of multi_xml with this fix has been pushed:

<https://rubygems.org/gems/multi_xml/versions/0.5.2>

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm keeping track of a list of vulnerable gems here: <https://gist.github.com/4532291></comment>


Evernote's 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/05/evernotes-5-problem-offers-a-cautionary-lesson-to-tech-companies/ <comment><USER3> The problem with evernote is not too many features.

The problem is the crap architecture behind its synchronization model that leads to a sub-par user experience.

Often times on iPhone it only syncs new hyperlinks added after I explicitly open the app.

The thing has no proper handling of simultaneous edits on different devices - leading to conflicts - after all these years with so many programmers there's still no merging algorithm.

The versioning is based on taking snapshots every couple of hours last time I checked. For real??!

Is this the best a billion dollar company can do?

There monetization strategy is not coherently supported by their product implementation.

If business use and collaboration is what they aim to monetize - why such weak and limited features for that? (Sharing notes are very basic, again the poor handling of simultaneous edits...)

Apple is mentioned as another company with many products - but the overwhelming majority of both specific products and specific features work really well.

The same goes for Google.

These companies don't have to cover up for poor 5-10 strategy by pretending they are working of some mystical 100 year plan.

<comment><USER4> I think the poor architecture is a direct result of there being too many features.

Evernote has shoved so many features into the product that they haven't been able to sufficiently hone individual features. This leaves them open to competitors who focus on a subset of features but do a much better job of implementing those features.

Apple and Google get around this in different ways. While Apple has a broad set of products and features, they're pretty conservative in their pace of releasing new features. So they have plenty of time to hone and integrate new ones.

Google seems to have solved this through radical decentralization. They don't really require that different products form an integrated whole. This allows individual teams to focus on delivering high-quality products without the architectural overhead of bundling everything into one product.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps ironically, Evernote alienated thousands of power users when they did their big 2.2-->3.0 rewrite a few years ago. Evernote 2.2 on desktop (+ the browser extension) was tremendously awesome, and then they rewrote the whole thing in .Net and basically made the desktop client a webview, in the process removing about 90% of the features people loved while causing all the sync and stability problems people are still complaining about.

I want to love Evernote because having a centralized, cross-platform, easily searchable repository for both binary content and text is hugely powerful, and there aren't really any viable competitors in this space. But, I don't trust the company and I don't trust the product, so I won't use it, and I'll stick with several different other products that together mostly fill the same use cases for me. One of those is Google Drive, but it's even clunkier than Evernote (although sync works great!).

<comment><USER6> They fell into the big rewrite trap ... possibly driven by developers hoping to clear out some cruft

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html)

<comment><USER7> The article is dubious at best. You hear about the big failures or notice when rewrite releases take forever, but you never hear about the companies that slowly lose opportunities or fail to keep up with innovators because they keep trying patch a crappy codebase. Nor do you necessarily hear about the successful rewrites since they just happen under the covers.

<comment><USER8> One of the major points of the Joel article is that the best option is usually one you didn't name; incrementally fix the "crappy" codebase. At no point do you do a "big rewrite", at no point do you have a big step back, at no point do you lose the ability to make forward progress because the new code isn't ready and the old code is deprecated, etc. Even if it may take somewhat longer to get there, the integral of value over time often still comes out larger for incremental improvement.

Developers want the default answer to "abandon the old mess and write a new one" (snarkiness fully on purpose); Joel's point is that the default answer ought to be incremental improvement. Not that it's _always_ the right answer, but other answers ought to be scrutinized more closely than developers might like.

From a professional point of view, it's actually _perfectly fair_ to consider that greenfielding a new project with hot new tech (or even "newer"-but- established tech, my personal favorite choice) is more fun than trudging through old code. Human factors matter a lot. But we are also professionally obligated not to overprivilege it.

Besides, if you treat it as a serious project instead of a series of hack jobs, in my experience, very serious incremental improvement still offers a lot of engineering challenge and fun. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is to prejudge incremental improvements as a hack job, when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

<comment><USER9> Incrementally fixing the "crappy" codebase is great in some cases: Michael Feathers's book on rescuing legacy code is fantastic. However, the limit comes at the language barrier.

Consider a COBOL codebase on a mainframe where you cannot find developers interested in learning the language and developing against the mainframe is convoluted -- you may not be able to pay talented people enough to toil in those coal mines, and you have to have to overpay subpar talent (or chase after the handful of expert mainframe COBOL developers.)

<comment><USER10> You can incrementally rewrite, just like you can incrementally refactor. Stick an API gateway in front of your COBOL mainframe that responds the same way it does, and then stand up a new well-architected service, microservice by microservice, that has a good API—and have the API gateway query the new service (using its nice API) whenever clients make calls to what they think is the legacy service, passing whatever calls you _haven 't_ re-implemented yet through to the legacy service.

Eventually, everything will be on the new services, and you can shut down the legacy COBOL system and just keep the API gateway there to pretend. (If you can get clients switched over to consuming the new APIs directly, you can shut down the API gateway too—but good luck with _that_ ; their side probably has mainframes too.)

<comment><USER9> It's called the strangler pattern by many. (You probably know that, but our dear reader may want to follow up.)

It also assumes that you have a proper API to start. It assumes that you have the organizational maturity to handle synchronizing two separate systems and the distributed transactions that entails.

The other problem not mentioned in the rewrite/refactor conversation is that the most common reason for rewrites is that the business has backed itself into a corner and the assumptions under the first system do not apply to where the business wants to go.

<comment><USER8> "It assumes that you have the organizational maturity to handle synchronizing two separate systems and the distributed transactions that entails."

Well, to be honest, when we're talking about proper maintenance and advancement techniques, we must by definition be discussing the topic only for those with the discipline to correctly implement relevant techniques and policies. If your developers or management choose not to, be it for whatever reason up to and including total lack of requisite talent or experience somewhere, you've already lost and the only thing that can possibly save you is to address that problem first, and if that's not possible for whatever reason, you've simply already lost.

As a result, it turns out not to be an interesting case to discuss. Even if it is, probably, the dominant case in the field....

<comment><USER9> I think it makes the most interesting case. How do you level up an organization? It's a very hard problem that hasn't been solved yet.

In some markets, the talent to handle this type of project doesn't exist. In other markets, the cost to acquire that talent is more than the marginal cost of rewriting the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Evernote's killer feature for me was searchable OCR of photos, and the ease of sync between phone and laptop. But it's been displaced for me by more specific apps.

I used to keep tax numbers, the occasional bank account number, passport details and so on in it. They're now all in 1Password.

I used to keep credit card bills in it (searchable images!), but now I just download transactions in to MoneyDance.

I used to keep business receipts in it, now they just go straight in to ReceiptBank, and a human processes them, and I can import it in to my accounts.

I used to keep documents I thought I might need "on the run" in it, but now there's Dropbox.

I used to keep a diary in it, then I started using DayOne.

I used to have a shared notebook I'd clip interesting articles for my wife in, but actually Instapaper is better.

I used to take pictures of events I'd see flyers for, now I just say "Siri, remind me to research event x" and I don't even have to type - it just shows up in Things.app.

I used to write occasional notes to myself while on the go, but iCloud sync + Notes.app is better for that.

I still have a few recipes in it, but I have few enough that I'm not looking for anything specific to handle those. I tried to see what I'd uploaded recently, and it turns out I haven't installed Evernote on this machine, nor logged in to it since I got a new phone, which is a bit damning. The cost of having many specialized apps is very small, and I wonder if there's still room for generalist platforms like Evernote.

<comment><USER12> > I used to take pictures of events I'd see flyers for, now I just say "Siri, > remind me to research event x" and I don't even have to type - it just shows > up in Things.app.

How does that work? Does Things look in the Reminders app to find new items? Or does it somehow hook into Siri?

<comment><USER13> [http://support.culturedcode.com/customer/portal/articles/183...](http://support.culturedcode.com/customer/portal/articles/183236)

Looks like it accesses Reminders.

<comment><USER11> That's how I have it setup

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I'm a bit annoyed about this contemporary mentality that if an idea can't be explained in five seconds or doesn't fit in a tweet, there is something wrong with the idea. There are, and have been, lots of companies that have succeeded selling very complex products where people only use a subset of features (Oracle, Microsoft, Autodesk, MathWorks, Native Instruments, to name a few in the computing world). Of course the business model of do one simple thing and do it well can also succeed, we all know that, but it's not the One True Way as many people seem to think nowadays.

Evernote is doing badly because the product isn't that good, not due to this postmodern babble.

<comment><USER14>
      > I'm a bit annoyed about this contemporary mentality that if
      > an idea can't be explained in five seconds or doesn't fit
      > in a tweet, there is something wrong with the idea.

I agree that not all products should be explainable in five seconds. But their _value proposition_ should be explainable in five seconds.

And if the product can't be explained in five seconds to someone who is not a specialist in the field, or a regular user, so be it.

But if someone has been using the product for a year, they ought to be able to grasp and articulate the value proposition. If most of your long-time users can't explain what the product dos for them, you have a problem.

Finally, if each long-time user articulates what it does for them, but every explanation is different, you have a coherence problem. That's fundamentally what is being explained in the post:

Evernote itself can't explain what it does, and each happy user has a different explanation, based on the 5% of the product they happen to use.

This makes it nearly impossible to focus efforts on giving any one user an amazing experience.

<comment><USER15> Explain Wolfram Inc's value proposition in five seconds, or two complete sentences.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps you should ask someone who uses it.

<comment><USER8> I'm also at a bit of a loss of what point "There may be a second product in the world that is similarly unfocused" is supposed to be making. Yes... Evernote isn't the only one...? And...? (I mean, literally, I don't even know if it's intended in support of your point or in disagreement.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author takes examples of Google Yahoo and other companies about "5%" problem, but conveniently forgets about Microsoft.

Microsoft infact is a fine example of how to milk a complex & diverse product portfolio and how to adapt to market trends. Office itself (which is/was notorious for the "5%" complexity) is one of the healthiest business for Microsoft today.

<comment><USER17> Microsoft provided something that didn't exist at its time (the most user friendly productivity software on the largest OS platform). If you provide something that's immediately useful and there's not really much of an alternative, people will use it no matter how complex it is. Coming back to Evernote, it doesn't have a single competitive advantage and it doesn't own any platform. There are tons of simpler alternatives for each of its features. It's a different story.

<comment><USER18> What did Microsoft provide that didn't exist at its time?

Ami[1] was the first word processor for Windows, and Lotus 1-2-3 was available for Windows 3.0 (the first commercially successful version of Windows).

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%AD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%AD)

<comment><USER16> To further add to your point..

XBox (when PS existed), Azure, CRM, SQL, and many others which little bit of research would show up.

<comment><USER17> How many meaningful competing products does Xbox have? You can count with one hand. Same goes for Azure. Now think about how much competition Evernote has. There are tons in each category. Heck I can even build my own note app in an hour using Dropbox, iCloud or any other cloud storage providers (which by the way are much more stable than Evernote) Lastly I don't know what you mean by CRM and SQL (since they're a category and not exactly a product) but basically all these enterprise products from MOS were successful because they already owned a successful platform--Windows. Evernote doesn't have any successful platform and its product had too much competition with little competitive advantage.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft CRM & Microsoft SQL are products.

Gartner- Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are leading the way as two of the fastest growing CRM providers based on 2013-2014 findings. [http://ledgeviewpartners.com/blog/market-share-analysis- from...](http://ledgeviewpartners.com/blog/market-share-analysis-from-gartner- shows-47-of-crm-systems-saas-based/)

XBox came in when there were very few competition to PS. PS was the platform of choice (for game developers). Microsoft created an alternative platform (it is like someone else creating an alternative to Windows today).

Evernote had all the advantages when they launched, they over took Microsoft's OneNote in no time in terms of mindshare. Infact when Evernote launched there were hardly any cross device note taking app (other than Microsoft's).

Evernote was darling of investors, had the field wide open, but they had to dig their own grave by not paying attention to product management and engineering (the fundamentals).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm actually more alarmed by the apps they use as an example of focused approach:

>During an appearance on stage last year, Snapchat CEO Evan >Spiegel said his company rejects the overwhelming majority >of things his teams build.

>"I would say we'd probably release about one percent of the >products we're working on," Spiegel said. "We build stuff >all the time that's never released. It's just terrible."

If that is to be believed, it would seem that Snapchat is spectacularly poor in their design and planning efforts. Can you imagine Toyota discarding 99% of their R&D?

<comment><USER20> Maybe.

I'm not sure you can compare Snapchat to Toyota, though. Perhaps Snapchats strategy is the right one? I could imagine small groups of engineers working on small self-driven features being more effective then the "lets sit down and plan this out with gantt charts and focus groups" approach. Specifically for a company like snapchat serendipitous feature creation is valuable even when so much work is being "thrown away".

<comment><USER21> Doesn't sound like the CEO thinks so. "It's just terrible" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I used Evernote for over three years but, recently stopped using it

1\. Because it quite bulky now. Takes too much time to load on Mac and Android. Its a note taking app. I should be able to load it in seconds 2\. Lost lot of data (untitled bug..) 3\. Bugs and Syncing issues... I often see 5 version of the same note.

Nowadays, I occasionally load the web version, just to load my old notes. That itself looks crazy with the latest confusing UI

<comment><USER23> I'm in a similar position. I've been using evernote for a while , and have a lot of notes in there but I find my usage tapering off recently.

Thing is, I'm not sure what to replace it with. There's lots of apps that try to tackle one piece of the puzzle each, but I really liked having on "bucket" to put almost everything into in a relatively unstructured way. I've even been thinking about building my own replacement, with the workflow tweaks and slimmed-down feature set I actually want/use.

<comment><USER24> I would suggest OneNote. They have an app for every platform (not sure about Mac, but the web version works nice on Chrome), and the sync is totally solid. It has everything Evernote has, and then some more. I use it like a scrapbook where I can keep my to-do lists, reference info that I want access to later, a few links, even a bunch of scripts that I need to run sometimes.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the recommendation. I think I had tried OneNote on iPhone a few months ago and dismissed it because I didn't like how it was laid out or something.

I just installed the desktop version and wow, it's really nice.! I particularly like how the rich-text editor works. Seems to capture the spirit of Evernote quite well.

<comment><USER25> OneNote thirded. Switched from Evernote a year ago. I love it. And it's from MS. Weird. Good weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I want to like Evernote, but it's a pain to use. I open it up every year or so to see whether it's improved and it never has.

Maybe it's not designed to do what I want, which is to be a simple digital shoebox into which I can constantly shove stuff and have it searchable and available. For all its visual design polish the core functionality is frustrating and I object to being bugged to buy overpriced desk furniture by a notes app.

I call it Skypeification. A simple utility - making calls, taking notes - <USER2> bloated in features and UI until it takes far more space and resources than it should. At it's smallest window size, Skype takes up almost half my laptop screen to display nine interface elements. There's no excuse for that.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think this is off-base though. The core of Evernote is to act as your brain's extended memory. Notes, tags, and while it's a new feature, I'd also say reminders. Roughly everyone uses that, and it's far more than 5% of the feature set. Maybe 50%. Then there are a number of other features that are probably useful to many people, like web clipping, and storing (and perhaps annotating) attachments such as PDFs. Maybe even shared notebooks.

Then, there are a bunch of features which I expect are each used by a tiny subset of users, but perhaps a larger chunk of users who would be likely to attend an Evernote conference. Things like work chat, food, hello, penultimate, scannable. I'm not saying any of these things is worthless, but they are each useful to only a small subset of users. For some incomprehensible reason, all the focus seemed to be on these types of features for quite some time. Hopefully that is now changing.

<comment> mark-r There's the elevator pitch. Wonder why they don't emphasize it more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this article is overreaching trying to draw a general lesson from evernote, Google, apple, etc. Google and Apple are much different cases than evernote. Theres no reason to talk about them in the context of Evernote's problems except that everyone knows them and the author thinks he understands how they work well enough to make a comparison.

</comment><comment><USER29> I can only think of Microsoft Office when I am hearing of this 5% problem. At the same time, the rest of the 95% became a road map of all things I could become an expert on.

And I did become an expert, but with some help: I took a basic keyboarding class in high school which taught me how the secretary industry uses MS Word. Otherwise I don't think I could have ever become the expert that I am.

If Evernote is going to become a full productivity platform, shouldn't this bloat be a requirement? Or is it because Evernote is a "startup" bloat overhead fat should be cut? Meaning SaaS companies can't be having bloat overhead fat, aka full utility of features?

</comment><comment><USER30> I am one that never understood Evernote. I tried it once for college notes, went to create my "notebooks" and stuff. But it was not much different for me of a Google Doc, or a .doc or .txt file on my Dropbox. For tiny notes and lists, my Windows Phone One Note is all I need, and it works great.

So I just couldn't see what was all that about. I'm assuming here I was just looking at 5% of the product. But I still have absolutely no idea what else could Evernote do. The UX was all confusing and messy and hard to discover new things.

When people talked about how important Evernote was to their lives I would feel myself as I imagine how my father feels regarding the importance on my mobile phone on my life. He just have no clue what I do on my smartphone, and where he have clues (like brownsing the internet), it is just not that important to him.

</comment><comment><USER31> I use it, but I think Google keep does a better job than Evernote. Couple of things in Evernote annoy me:

1\. App start is slow

2\. Update process. It should be silent. I dont want to read update release notes. Just update it.

3\. Remove unwanted features. Have Fewer buttons.

4\. Editing in mobile app is big pain. I use android.

5\. In general everything must be quick, smooth and Easy.

Positives

1\. Rich text editing

2\. File attachment with notes

3\. Plugins etc.

<comment><USER32> Wait, what?! For me Google Keep is just post-its with the checklist option and some reminder functionality. The location reminder is nice, but it's really not that much! To be sure, I myself don't need much more than that...but it's just weird to see it compared to Evernote, which I always thought was more fully featured.

<comment><USER33> if you use evernote like a scrapbook (where you have pics, snippets copied off the internet, files etc), then keep doesn't not compare - it's just too bare bone. But if all you do is keep small notes like todo lists, or quick thoughts, with very little media, it's quite good imho. Sharing a keep list allows other people to edit it as well, so it's a poor man's collab/mindmapping tool

<comment><USER32> I can understand that, thanks, I think I just thought EN was more fully featured, like endlessly nested items, maybe some Readability type archiving, links between items of disparate collections, etc. That could just be backwash over old comparisons with omnigraffle, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Lotus 1-2-3 had the same issue back in the day, although they framed it as everybody only liked 3 of the top 15 features, and it was a different 3. They did fine; they only lost to Excel, which was a better version of the same thing.

A few years later there was a new management team, and Lotus was even more confused about Notes. That did fine too.

The key, I think, is to already have a decent business model around the core of your product-use. Then if the sizzle is 97 additional features -- well, that can be OK.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is fixable.

Lots of companies try to become platforms that shouldn't. Evernote IMO is in the opposite group. It's basically a database for my mind. They should package their core offering (notes + notebooks + tags, ie. a text-editor w/ dynamic file system) into a sleek, simple product. And then build an ecosystem of add- ons people can choose from that are tailored to the many different ways people can use Evernote.

This also enables experimentation, without messing with the core experience.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think the "5% problem" is a problem for Evernote. To be honest, I don't think the 5% problem is a real problem for anyone other than designers and programmers.

Everyone bitches about too features until they need something. Evernote's tagging capability and ability to capture, categorize and find information on all major platforms is best in class. They bolt on lots of features because people use that core function for lots of stuff.

Example: My sister used the Evernote web clipper to gather research for a big school project. She used tags to organized and had todo lists, etc linked to the subjects and cross-references.

Example 2: A friend did what my sister did, except the research was embedded in something like 40,000 pages of scanned paper that was OCR'd, annotated, etc. All in Evernote.

At it's most useful, Evernote is something that you use for everything. The problem is _it 's not reliable_. It's too easy to lose data, and impossible to get data out.

</comment><comment><USER37> The basic problem was there is no way Evernote could ever generate the revenue to support a unicorn valuation. It doesn't matter how many users you have or how much they love you in the end it all comes down to revenue.

</comment><comment><USER38> I must be a minority here, but I still consider Evernote to be the best notetaking app. Using keyboard shortcuts, I can instantly start entering new note, instantly search for notes, and very quickly find anything I put there, even years later. This is exactly enough for me. But I admit that I mostly use it only for text notes, and only use Windows client. Tags also works as it should, and the application doesnt force me to categorize the notes, like Onenote for example.

</comment><comment><USER39> I hadn't heard of Evernote untill my android phone replaced their native notebook app with Evernote. Since then I just figured it's a notebook app.

So this 5% problem definitely applies to me, and with me probably many other users who had their simple notebook app (unsolicitedly) replaced with Evernote.

</comment><comment><USER40> Evernote's problem is that their product is frustrating and crappy. It solves a major problem, so people use it despite the frustrations, but they don't love it, and later they abandon it.

Since they have spent billions of dollars trying to build it already, I will go out on a limb and say that they will never improve, and that they will slowly (quickly) burn money until they either IPO (and then continue on this trajectory but with more money to waste) or run low on cash and fire-sale to Google, who will just move their users over to Google docs after a year or two. Evernote is just going to burn cash at some rate until they run out, the only question is how much cash they will be handed.

</comment><comment><USER41> something is wrong when you try to pivot to selling actual notebooks

<comment><USER42> At first the idea of the notebooks intrigued me, and I almost bought one, but then I really thought about what I would be doing with it... sure, sometimes writing with a pen is more enjoyable or more fitting to a task than typing, but then you have to go _take pictures_ of what you've written. That's way too much of a barrier between writing thoughts down to organizing them.

Something like the boogie board sync[1] is exactly what evernote should have made instead of the physical notebooks. It feels enough like paper and automatically uploads when in range.

[1] [http://www.myboogieboard.com/shop/store/sync](http://www.myboogieboard.com/shop/store/sync)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> There is a lot of "hate" out there but EN is great: In my case for GTD[1]. I'm a daily user of their windows desktop app.

IMO the sweet spot of EN is that it is a generalist app. With an email client they would become even more generalist. I hate switching apps continuosly. If they could integrate a fast & bullet-proof email platform I would be happy to ditch gmail. This could be an interesting path, Gmail doesn't have strong competition.

[1] [https://github.com/we-build-dreams/hamster-gtd](https://github.com/we- build-dreams/hamster-gtd)

</comment><comment><USER44> For me, the biggest problem of Evernote is it lacks some critical modern note taking features such as Markdown, LaTeX and syntax highlighting. Its edit functions have been primitive for many years.

If Evernote supports the above features in the Premium account, I would be very glad to pay and upgrade. Now, my only reason to upgrade to Evernote Plus is for 1 GB sync quota. Other features such as PDF edit or offline access are just useless.

I like Evernote but I do hope Evernote can put more strength on their essence, i.e., note taking functions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Evernote is a great product that fits an valuable niche for many people. The only problem is that it got trapped within a venture capital ecosystem that wants it to be more than it should be.

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember bookmarking Lifehacker posts on how use Everntoe better.

That tells you a lot about Evernote's feature bloat. A note taking app shouldn't require reading a 1500 word article to use

<comment><USER46> It's never been just a note taking app. It was always billed as place to "dump your life".

There are many different ways to organize things via tags or notebooks. A lot of people implement various paper productivity tools in sw like Evernote. At least, that's the type of posts I've read.

Regardless, I've started dumping most things into a Cabinet notebook and rely on search, which is the big win for Evernote (it also integrates w/ google search to show you related items in your Evernote collection).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Having read this article, I would be very interested to hear what the author (or anyone else who has the same views) thinks of Amazon. To me, Amazon seems to be an example of a company that does NOT have a focus (or has been widening it's focus from books, to online selling, to pretty much anything) but which has not been suffering for it. Why not? What are they doing right?

<comment><USER48> Probably because they sell everything individually to you. When all of your products are sold separately, it is really easy to see what is making money and what isn't.

I think you are just forgetting all of the failures they have had like the fire phone.

<comment><USER47> Of course they have had failures -- but the company does not seem to be suffering from them. Why not? If (as this article suggests) broad focus means that the company will have problems, then here's a company with an absurdly broad focus but few problems: the fire phone being a perfect example that cost money, but apparently didn't distract the company in any particular way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Twitter may have the same problem. The core Twitter experience was popular. Most of the additional features, not so much.

<comment><USER50> The core experience of Twitter is real-time, and we're just getting started with the potential of Video now that we have higher bandwidth & image quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Evernote Problem for me: Linux - I hated it when Phil Labin would say that Evernote making its own Linux client was the anti-Linux way of doing things. That the community making clients was much better.

</comment><comment><USER52> I am thinking that I need to start migrating all the stuff I have on Evernote to somewhere else. I am not convinced of their longevity given the recent press I have read.

</comment><comment><USER53> Its also starting to irritate me.

I just need a structured way to store simple text & search. Yet it feels cumbersome even for that.

</comment><comment><USER54> And when Evernote was at the height of it's popularity, the same article would have been written "How to succeed like a unicorn: Be 5% to EVERYONE!".

</comment><comment><USER55> There are too many free apps that are easier to use than Evernote. Google Keep comes to mind as they have made a bunch of improvements over the last year, the big one being sharing.

</comment><comment><USER56> I find myself using google keep much more often for taking simple notes or setting up reminders. Somehow I find the workflow to be much simpler than in Evernote...

</comment><comment><USER57> It's always very easy to criticize when we are looking in the rearview, so I can do it too.

Adding too many features is very common on tech. I don't know what happens in the dark meeting rooms of these companies, I can just imagine they are trying to keep growing and not satisfied with what they are.

Too many features makes things complicated, the first thing you learn when are trying to open a business is to be the best solution for just a persona, and not to be a swiss knife. Swiss knife does many things but doesn't do none very well.

I like iPod shuffle, they just play music, but does so well. Apple has other versions with more features, but not killed the shuffle. Tech companies usually kill the software you like to replace with another with more and more features.

I have a simple software with some paying users, and a lot of times appeared the opportunity to add more features to get more users, this happens all the time, and I didn't do it because this would change the core idea of my software. If I want to add more features to get a new niche, I plan to create a new product based on it.

<comment><USER58> > I can just imagine they are trying to keep growing and not satisfied with > what they are.

I think you are right about that. A year or two ago I was filling out a survey for some web service I use (I think it was Feedly). They were asking what features I wanted and I returned it with the comment that the product seems like it is complete and just needs to go into maintenance mode. They didn't take my advice.

I've sent that feedback to other companies as well that have excellent products.

For Evernote, I think I would resubscribe as a premium user if they offered a stripped down version of their client. Store notes, images, and pdfs, make syncing work and have excellent search. Get rid of chat, and sharing, and even notebooks and stacks (double down on tagging and make a great search UI). The problem for Evernote is that every user has a different set of features they would remove. Try to get to a place where you can shrink your team.</comment></comment>


Top Android Tips you should know about - <AUTHOR> http://techcookies.net/top-10-android-tips-you-should-know-about/

<comment><USER2> Its great to have all of these tips in one place. Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it! :)</comment></comment>