What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-libraries-lost-when-they-threw-out-the-card-catalog/2017/07/07/5432821c-632f-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html <comment><USER2> I remember card catalogs. Modern electronic search is far superior. If searching the card catalog at the public library is "truly democratic," so is searching an electronic index at the public library. You can even perform full-text searches for words that the card-preparer might not have noted -- a huge advantage when researching niche topics that don't get their own books.

[https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced](https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced)

[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced)

[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced)

<comment><USER3> The Card Catalog in my opinion had one benefit - Discoverability.

In the libraries I grew up using, often the books had library bindings with no dust jacket. There was very little discoverability when you wanted to find something to read.. to explore. The card catalog filled that, and was all in one place, so I could sit there and thumb thru the cards and maybe find a couple-three books to go thumb thru to find something that looked interesting.

Yes, for research and for targeted searched of knowledge the electronic search is far superior - but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

<comment><USER4> >but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

You're describing getting a random selection from a section, something computers are excellent at. Or you're talking about browsing things as a list, something else computers excel at.

The biggest difference on doing this on a computer is a loss of a sort of grime based review system. Something that could be seen as a benefit or detriment in different circumstances.

<comment><USER5> The big difference is _potentially_ access to the "raw data" without being limited to the view someone has decided to grant access to. E.g many library search systems I've used would have been _able_ to offer this kind of view of the data, but _didn 't_. Then again others have offered far better views.

But I'd rather replace those bad systems with better ones than go back to a card catalog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.

I have them boxed up somewhere. They're not very interesting, all said, but I could certainly digitize them. I can't decide if that would be an insult or an enshrinement.

<comment><USER7> I think that would be entirely appropriate. A major goal of modern library science is to digitize rare and crumbling old books for the benefit of all patrons, present and future. I'm glad we switched to digital catalogs, but using the new methods to enshrine their own foundational technology seems deeply poetic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad. I look forward to being 90 and reading about people wistfully remembering the simpler and more cultured bygone days of smartphones and Facebook.

<comment><USER9> While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile)

I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)

<comment><USER10> I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought _Godel, Escher, Bach_ with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.

<comment><USER11> A huge advantage of libraries in general is that they are a curated collection of books on every topic. Typically the quality you get on any topic will be higher than the average new book.

Sometimes you can just walk through the library looking for something to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 ([http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar- stor...](http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-storm-hit- the-eart-1724650105)), which could knock out power for months or years at a time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20. How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is extremely dangerous.

<comment><USER13> To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days. We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)

<comment><USER14> In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them. Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you will be starved before your vegetables are grown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First comment on the article is extremely relevant:

> _It 's almost always non-working-librarians who evince such passionate > nostalgia for antiquated technology such as card catalogs, just as I'm sure > it's usually non-working-engineers and non-working-mathematicians who > passionately yearn for the days of slide rules and good old pencil and > paper, rather than these dang new-fangled computers. (Oh, and yes, just for > the record, I do appreciate card catalogs as beautiful and evocative > historical artifacts, but nothing more than that. As a working librarian, I > would _absolutely _not want to have to go back to working exclusively with > them. Take my word for it,_ no one _in my profession would.)_

That matches my experience. I've worked with librarians, and they are invariably excited about the power of computers and the internet. That's because their driving passion is free and easy information access for all, not nostalgia for the texture of the page and the smell of old paper.

<comment><USER15> I don't know why they are, they are increasingly becoming the equivalent to a free net cafe. It's a ridiculously underpaid profession, partly because computers cost so much to maintain and service for them.

<comment><USER7> There are still too many people who don't have ready internet access. Free internet, and a librarian to help use it, can be vital to a homeless person trying to find work, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > A national card catalogue system was the original "search engine" — one that > ... was truly democratic.

I don't think I get how a digital library catalogue is less democratic than an analogue one? Is this just a poorly thought out and tossed off claim or is there something I'm missing.

<comment><USER2> Maybe the author never learned that governments and academic institutions still catalog books and offer online search tools for book collections free of advertising or profit motive. The lamentations seem to come from an alternate timeline where Amazon bought all the public libraries and shut them down to push more Kindle sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone remember taking Library Class?

Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)

<comment><USER18> > difference between fiction and non-fiction

Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what "fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.

<comment><USER17> Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book

F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc.

Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And list why you would use that source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, years ago I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards.

So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've typed catalog cards. I've maintained a card catalog by hand. My memories aren't nearly as fond as the book review author's. An IBM Selectric is at least still somewhat familiar to me.

I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal yet isn't.

</comment><comment><USER21> The thing we _gained_ when we digitized a bunch of books is the ability to build new kinds of discovery engines, ones that don't just use the information on the card catalog cards:

[https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore- book...](https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in- the-21st-century/)

[https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/](https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/)

<comment><USER22> The engines we build nowadays are still mostly based on indexed collections of metadata, just as the old card catalogs were. The innovation was in being able to create new kinds of cards, and then compile catalogs of them automatically from the books (or whatever data sources one cared to use). This is a very useful thing to be able to do, but I'm not sure it can really be called a new kind of discovery engine, just a faster one.

<comment><USER21> The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences.

I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.

<comment><USER22> It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that, your agents would assemble what amounts to a fine-grained (and correspondingly large) card catalog of sentences, indexed by subject and year, which you could then search.

<comment><USER23> Have a look at the latest breed of discovery interfaces that do full text search on their corpus, EDS Discovery, Ex Libris Primo, Serial Solutions Summon. For academic work they are invaluable, letting students and researchers find snippets of related research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most of these comments seem to read more into the guy's article than there is. Nowhere did he advocate throwing away digital searches and returning to card catalogues. You can be nostalgic for something old-- especially just the aesthetic, which is mostly the case here-- without demanding it be brought back.

</comment><comment><USER25> While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan through the stacks like I was looking for something specific.

Improvements are always being made, but my memory of the first digital catalogs are that they were highly specific, so other than finding other books by a specifically searched for author, discovery was severely limited. I hated digital catalogs at first. And for many smaller libraries, I find walking through the stacks easier than trying to discover something via the digital catalog.

<comment><USER23> I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > "tagged" by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the > subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card > catalogue system was the original "search engine" — one that needed no > electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was > truly democratic.

Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote them. A small subset of the population.

Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago.

This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form) and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really interesting article possible here.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I think the problem I have with modern election search is that often presented with what I don't want and I have to craft my query to get a decent list of sources. Mind you, this was way back in 2009 at Wichita State but the experience always seem to come up even when I use Google Scholar or equivalent modern search indices. They always seem to be off in terms of accuracy and relevance on the searches (especially now that I'm getting back into shortwave listening, finding articles on antenna theory is like pulling teeth).

<comment><USER27> But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article, you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't going to find me what I'm actually looking for, I can quickly change my query and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for. Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years ago.

<comment> norea-armozel I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant (again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every possible case because it won't do its primary well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I saw a two man play at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood years ago called "Defiled" about a librarian played by Jason Alexander dealing with the loss of card catalogs to the computer. There were long soliloquies about niceness of the physicality of the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal classification and what not. I enjoyed the acting but could not empathize at all with the premise of the play or the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the main character.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think I'll check this book out. Taxonomy is still a hard problem in terms of digital information theory, so I'm interested in how it was managed in a system in which storage was scalability had much harder physical limits.

<comment><USER30> If that interests you, read more about S.R. Ranganathan, who introduced faceted classification and Otlet's work with Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification. 100 years ago it was possible to search ~10 million records.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the tip! Looking at the "Card Catalog" book on Amazon [0], I see it seems to be more of a photo book more suited for coffee table reading.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the first jobs I had out of school was transcribing hand-written catalog records for a then-new digital catalog. The big worry (this was well before Google, Worldcat, etc. existed) in those days was that much of the bibliographic metadata that had accumulated in the card catalog would be lost, because the effort to digitize it all would be too great. The new digital catalog only had a very simplified version. Over time, of course, the systems improved to the point where I don't think even librarians want to go back to the old way.

</comment><comment><USER32> This makes me think about lending books during power outages.

<comment><USER20> Oh, there are contingency plans for that. They're pretty easy. Writing down barcode numbers and then doing a mass "check out" event on a whole list when power is back covers things.

In an extended event, some backup supplies on-hand from Brodart to handle things Jersey-style with temporary card pockets is easily doable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Outside of university libraries with real books you have normal libraries. In these libraries the quietest and most devoid of activity area was anywhere near card index things. I am glad their meta data is superceded to some extent. Life moves on rather easily with these media format changes and not much is really lost, except for the likes of this author.

</comment><comment><USER34> One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...)

Library without catalog is, while not _totally_ worthless, _much_ more difficult to use.

The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives.

See: [https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as- existe...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential- threat/)

I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

<comment><USER35> If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

If a hacker manages to destroy the database, well it's a good thing backups are cheap these days and it doesn't take a trained IT person to implement them. Even Crashplan or Carbonite, or just periodically copying files to an external drive and then disconnecting it would probably do the job. If libraries have the money for hundreds of pounds of paper cards and the cabinets to store them in, plus labor to maintain all of that, they surely have the money for functional-if-basic backup infrastructure.

I'm all for securing critical infrastructure with analog systems/subsystems, but the only argument I could see for doing so with libraries is if said library is in the developing world where electricity is intermittent.

<comment><USER34> >If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

Well, yes. But a library rendered unusable is also a major problem, in the long run. And especially if it's not just the local library, but all of them in the country?

I would probably need to read the book in question to be able to do Fermi estimates on what kind of amounts of paper and space the old system would need. But if one already has the "this is a backup system for very rare, very worst-case events, not for active use" viewpoint, one is free to do changes and optimizations. For example, miniaturized analogue backup from which the full-blown card system can be reproduced if the need arises.

<comment><USER36> What do you mean by "in the long run"? Because a library being rendered unusable for a definite length of time wouldn't be a problem in the long run unless we're talking about a system with path dependence. And even if there is some path dependence, it's not quite obvious whether or not that's a major problem. For example, not being able to lend a book during a few hours could be only thing preventing some terminally-ill genius from solving some elusive mathematical problem before he dies, while everyone else can just try to check their books some other day when the power is back on. But so long as the problem can be solved, the solution might be found out later on by someone else.

On the other hand, if libraries are rendered unusable for an indefinite amount of time, or if they become so unreliable that they aren't even worth the effort, those would always be an issue regardless of whether there's path- dependence.

But it sounds somewhat far-fetched to create system to ensure the reliability of libraries in the event of say, a massive solar flare. Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I pretty much agree with scottLobster. Unless we're talking about developing countries, where electric power is not so much intermitent as unreliable - whereas it might take a hurricane to cause power outages in other countries, a gush of wind here will do - it makes sense to have a system like this in place.

<comment><USER34> >Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I'm not exactly sure if I'm following you, but the general idea of this kind of "resilience" is to introduce enough safety / backup measures at all points in the society so that there is less things that hinge on "single point of failure".

The scenario I had in mind was a national grid of a much smaller country going down. (Apparently bringing up all the power plants back online is not as straightforward operation as flipping some switches 'on'.) For example, in conjunction with other crisis (say, conventional war with cyberattack component) that would turn out to taking much longer than anticipated (because aren't they all "over by Christmas"), so there might be an adversary interested in keeping it down.

And the libraries are not the only institutions handling critical data that used to be stored on paper but now exist on computers. The particular solution of retaining backup paper card system might be silly or otherwise prove infeasible at closer inspection, but what kind of backup systems the current institutions have?

edit. Looking at the rest of the comments, smkellat might have provided a splendidly simple answer upthread. At least, concerning libraries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What an incredibly stupid article. The author is supposed to be talking about card catalogues, but then keeps talking about books and libraries. We're not getting rid of those, we're getting rid of card catalogues. Somehow I don't think we should force librarians to keep hand-writing or typing cards for every book, or deprive users of search functions, just for this idiot's BS Wes Anderson aesthetic.

<comment><USER10> You're really missed the point that was being made. It's not a paean to the superiority of card catalogs, but regret for the loss of a time when they delineated the scope of information storage relative to the scope of service provision (the library itself).

Librarians are rarely seen as custodians of knowledge, and their job has been downgraded to mere cataloguing. More troublingly, while the the physicality of a card catalog, and typewritten documents before that, imposed limits and therefore selectivity on what degree of information the government could store about a book (and by extension about you), that limit no longer exists so the amount of information stored has exploded while the amount of service provided has remained the same or even diminished, to the general detriment of society.

That erstwhile necessity to consult or at least cooperate with librarians also fostered a degree of politeness in social relations.

<comment><USER38> Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.

<comment><USER39> Nothing like the feeling of looking up words in a physical thesaurus. Digital ones don't give you that same sense of inflated intelligence.

<comment><USER40> Lo, the scourge of anti-intellectualism reaches HN! Looking through their comment, the only word that one would consider "big" might be "erstwhile". Even if they used big words, why use that to attack them instead of considering what they actually wrote (or taking a second to look them up)? This smug piling on is just toxic. People shouldn't revel in ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "A national card catalogue system was the original "search engine" — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic."

Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electronics. You have to be able to read the cards, and I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards.

And libraries provide local terminals, so service providers, broadband and smartphones aren't required.

As far as "democratic", card catalogs aren't bad -- if you can get to the library during operating hours and are physically able to use one, then you are good to go. But electronically searchable indexes are better. E.g., they allow for remote searching, can support accessibility interfaces, etc.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, this whole article strikes me as one of the "I don't fully understand modern technology so I wistfully recall the predecessor technology that I do understand" variety.

There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user) tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing. You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards.

I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative, constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance back the other direction could be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Not just the card catalog but the entire concept of library has been lost. Libraries have been transformed from places where people could come to read, research and explore into community homeless shelters that provide online porn access and bathrooms that are basically shooting galleries.

<comment><USER43> Where are you that your local library is like this?

I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see families in there picking out books together.

<comment><USER44> There are news horror stories about a few major metropolitan libraries in crime-ridden areas, and the grandfather poster generalized them to all 10,000+ other public libraries in the country.

That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


Boeing employees mocked FAA in internal messages before 737 Max disasters - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/01/09/795123158/boeing-employees-mocked-faa-in-internal-messages-before-737-max-disasters <comment><USER2> Geez.

> "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," > says one employee to another, who responds, "No."

> Peter DeFazio, [D-Oregon], called newly released documents "incredibly > damning"

That's hard to argue with. You'd like to think this kind of thing would... leak. Who said conspiracies involving hundreds of people are impossible?

<comment><USER3> How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a _massive_ effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he's forced to live in exile. Sends a _very strong_ warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.

<comment><USER4> Eh. In that case, there _had_ been prior leaks, for years; they were just much less complete and taken less seriously. As far as I know, there was never a pre-production leak that Boeing employees thought the MAX was unsafe.

<comment><USER5> Yes.

For example, this report from the EU parliament from 2001: [https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN)

This details a lot of what we knew about ECHELON from the mid 1990s to 2002: [https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affair...](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_AffaireEchelon- EN.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other quote from the reuters article ([https://www.reuters.com/article/us- boeing-737max/designed-by...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us- boeing-737max/designed-by-clowns-boeing-releases-internal-messages-that- disparage-737-max-regulators-idUSKBN1Z902N?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews)) :

"I want to stress the importance of holding firm that there will not be any type of simulator training required to transition from NG to MAX," Boeing's 737 chief technical pilot said in a March 2017 email.

"Boeing will not allow that to happen. We'll go face to face with any regulator who tries to make that a requirement."

<comment><USER7> > Boeing's 737 chief technical pilot

He's one who really needs to go to jail. Why didn't they name him?

<comment><USER8> Because Boeing is a company of national importance and also a monopoly on home turf, vital to the US security and economy so they're untouchable in the US.

Just like how no VW employee went to jail in Germany for emissions cheating.

<comment><USER9> VW wasn't nearly as bad. People need to go to jail over those deaths and their legacy used as a reminder for those that come next.

Here is another damning Boeing message, follow the source for more:

[https://twitter.com/cedivad/status/1215558552229683200](https://twitter.com/cedivad/status/1215558552229683200)

<comment><USER10> As bad by what metric? VWs emissions overshoot has been projected to cause 1200 deaths: [http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature- deat...](http://news.mit.edu/2017/volkswagen-emissions-premature-deaths- europe-0303)

<comment><USER11> For most people _actual_ deaths are more immediately apparent than _estimated_ deaths. By driving a car, riding a bus, or taking a plane any regular person also contributes to some of those estimated deaths. But this is very different from causing direct deaths by knowingly disabling a safety feature on a car, plane, or bus for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in > these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company > is taking appropriate action in response."

Do you think this means:

a) Change the environment that fosters those kinds of messages?

-or-

b) Punish those who wrote those messages?

<comment><USER13> Both, but as a _higher_ priority, c) punish the exec team on whose watch it happened.

Bring back the concept of responsibility. They are paid to be in overall responsibility for anything that happens under their remit.

Time was such a behaviour in the department, or under their leadership would have ended a career. Realising the actions of a lowly engineer or janitor can end their gravy train, they might implement adequate oversight.

<comment><USER14> Why just end a career? Why not go to jail?

<comment><USER13> Well I did say punish not merely fire. I would expect that to encompass imprisonment and fine, depending on severity. Ending or severely restricting the career and income should be the bonus, lower standard of proof consequence merely for the event happening whilst they're in charge. Separate from a court fine of 5 years salary, all bonuses and share options, or given 3 years in clink. :)

With adequate penalty and frequent enforcement, usual behaviour would change...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I must say that seeing the SEC's handling of internal emails in the Tourre affair taught me a lesson about internal corporate communications. Some personal emails which were unrelated to the affair were published in the SEC report (clearly for the benefit of the front page of newspapers). The extract contained jokes where the sentence had been edited to alter the meaning of the sentence.

The published extract was "whole building is about to collapse anytime now. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab […] standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications"

Out of memory the […] that was left out by the SEC said something like "as kindly calls me xxx, but there is nothing fabulous about me, just a tender... etc". And that was an email to his girlfriend, nothing to do with any transaction.

Morale of the story: no jokes, even innocuous, they will be weaponised against you in bad faith. Stick to boring, neutral language. And no personal communications on corporate systems. Write everything on the assumption it will be published with bad intent.

<comment><USER16> It amazes me in this day and age that people don't realise that anything they say on these systems can be dug out and read by anybody, anywhere at any time ...

<comment><USER17> You're not thinking about this with every keystroke even if you know this. I certainly don't.

<comment><USER16> I absolutely do. If I'm typing it I'm checking myself just as if I were speaking across an open plan office.

The only way you'll ever know what I actually really think about something controversial is if you ask me face to face, or maybe, on a phone call.

<comment><USER17> > If I'm typing it I'm checking myself just as if I were speaking across an > open plan office.

I do _this_ , too. I would call this good manners. But that's wildly different from being aware that the contents might be used in discovery or being published out-of-context. Especially the latter provokes the Richelieu citation.

<comment><USER16> what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, this article is full of amazing quotes. I highly recommend reading the entire thing. My favorite one I haven't seen posted yet > "I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year," one employee says in 2018, referring to an exchange of information with the FAA.

Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else that's come out about Boeing recently.

<comment><USER19> > _Utterly unbelievable, yet also totally unsurprising given everything else > that 's come out about Boeing recently._

What amazes me is that the same thing is happening with Tesla, but HN hardly bats an eye, because Silicon Valley:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-push-to-build-a-self- dri...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-push-to-build-a-self-driving-car- sparks-dissent-among-its-engineers-1503593742)

Engineers speaking up and getting fired or resigning. What's worse is that, as opposed to having a _choice_ to fly on a 737 MAX, driving on autopilot on public roads puts other people at risk.

<comment><USER20> There is a very fundamental difference. The Tesla autopilot is a mere driving assist system. Like with plain cruise control, the driver is still fully in charge and needs to pay enough attention to take over at any moment. All accidents happened because drivers were not paying attention at all.

With the Boeing, the MCAS system put the 737 in a flight state which trained pilots couldn't recover from.

<comment><USER19> > _The Tesla autopilot is a mere driving assist system._

Yes, when you follow ambiguous instructions, which contradict things like, "Only waiting for regulatory approval!", or"1 million robotaxis this year!" or "Cars can drive by themselves coast-to-coast!"

<comment><USER20> The instructions given to the owner of a Tesla are not ambiguous. No where it is claimed that the Tesla drives itself without supervision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool how Boeing's response appears to be to find and punish those responsible for the communications, not those responsible for deceiving the FAA and regulators in order to certify an aircraft that never should have left the design phase.

</comment><comment><USER22> The cost (not just money) of this to Boeing needs to be way, way more than the cost of the additional training/certification/better sensors and software or whatever would have been needed to do this right to begin with.

We can't let this to come down to a cynical "what's the cost of a life?"-style calculation.

It needs to be much more consequential relative to the crime/incompetence than Equifax, Facebook, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> >>The language used in these communications, and some of the sentiments they express, are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response. This will ultimately include disciplinary or other personnel action, once the necessary reviews are completed.

And that my friends is all that you need to know about the boeing of 2020.

<comment><USER24> About a year ago, I was considering investing in Boeing. I would have made a good chunk of change doing so. I'm glad today I decided not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting that Boeing apparently has a bigger issue with the language used than with the culture that fostered these communications in the first place. That is one sick company, trying hard to pretend it _was_ a sick company.

</comment><comment><USER26> The McDonnell Douglas leadership seems to have put business ahead of engineering (and safety) at Boeing (from other pieces I've read). There are at present just two manufacturers of big planes in the world (China may have a third soon I believe) so it would be terrible for airline safety/efficiency if Boeing did go bankrupt (which is still unlikely) and left just one company with no competition. I think what we should all hope for is a return to Boeing's engineering-centered roots. There are tens of thousands of people who work hard at Boeing, do incredibly difficult work and take justifiable pride in the amazing planes they build. It's a shame that some bad leadership has led to these tragically avoidable crashes. As disturbing and infuriating as these messages are, I believe Boeing if it is once again engineer-lead can get back to strong form and that's what we should all hope for.

<comment><USER27> Basically, aircrafts manufacturing is a duopoly: Airbus & Boeing. Isn't there enought market for these two as to not having to cut costs anywhere and airlines pony up with whatever price they set? I know we're talking big numbers here, but come on, Airbus can't produce enough aircrafts to satisfy 100% of the market, so why obsess with cost cutting in such ridiculous things like avionics or simulators?

<comment><USER28> It may be Exec culture or just culture in general. We all want to be successful/ better than the competiton. It attracts/feeds our narcissism and eventually gets buried by people who only optimize for profit, success on paper.

Can't we replace the finance folks with software yet? It seems that should be the easiest to automate. They can see it, but of course they are closest to the money, and can't let go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any internal correspondence can become public information in a disclosure proces.

~ first rule of corporate communications

<comment><USER30> Yup. Talk as much crap as you want in person, but what goes in email and web messages and pull-requests and code comments must be immaculate.

<comment><USER31> Why? I've ragged on my employers in DMs, and will often express very blunt concerns about quality/risks in emails or PRs. Providing my opinions in such channels is part of what I'm paid to do. If my employer doesn't heed my advice, manages to majorly mess something up, and my comments come back to haunt them, why is that my problem?

<comment><USER32> Because openness and transparency requires emotional security as a prerequisite. Surveillance and transparency are not the same thing. If you subject people to an all-seeing eye, people will default to covering their asses, and you will not get the information you seek.

Attempting to force people to be vulnerable by unilaterally being open about your own vulnerabilities is manipulative. You will get "my biggest weakness is that I care too much"-type deflective responses at best and a cold shoulder at worst.

In companies, a culture with emotional security is built first in private one- on-one meetings and spread from there - it never originates in a public (public within the company at least) setting.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure how this relates to what I asked at all. If something I said at work gets leaked to the public or a regulator, that makes my employer look bad, why should I worry about that? That sounds a lot more like their problem than mine.

> Attempting to force people to be vulnerable by unilaterally being open about > your own vulnerabilities is manipulative.

This comment makes no sense to me. Aside from not relating to what I said, I cannot possibly see how being open and honest is forcing anybody else to do anything. Personally I speak my mind wherever I work, and if my employer doesn't like that, I'm more than happy to find a new job. Ironically, the only people who have ever had a problem with it are middle managers trying to cover up after themselves, and incompetent people that were somehow promoted to technical leadership roles they had no business being in. People I have no problems upsetting.

<comment><USER32> > Personally I speak my mind wherever I work, and if my employer doesn't like > that, I'm more than happy to find a new job.

This is more or less my point. If your employer was happy with it, then your employer was the kind of employer attempting to build a transparent organization (and worked to build emotional security etc.). If your employer wasn't happy with it, then you and your employer have different opinions on the importance of transparency, which points to a cultural mismatch, which points in the direction of parting ways.

The key insight is understanding that it's the employer, not the employee, who have both the responsibility and the power to set culture and direction. So if the employer decides not to work on building transparency into the culture, the employer will get an opaque culture as a result. Maybe this results in the kind of problems that Boeing is suffering from now, maybe it results in bankruptcy, maybe not. The employer is responsible and accountable to decide. The employee's decision is much simpler - adapt or leave. Most people decide to adapt; the potential upside to leaving is a murky gamble taken on faith, particularly if people don't have a specific offer lined up at a specific place that seems to be a better fit for specific reasons. So it shouldn't be a surprise to you that employers get what they (intentionally or unintentionally) incentivize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think the only thing that can actually fix Boeing is bankruptcy, so I hope that people refuse to fly on the Max even after recertification and it ends up being too big of a financial blow to recover from.

<comment><USER34> I agree. I'll be boycotting the Max just on principle, regardless of what extra safety measures are implemented to get it re-certified.

I'm hoping (and kind of expecting) that people will build simple apps or websites to check whether an advertised flight is on a 737 Max. It should be quite easy for people to avoid/boycott this plane.

<comment><USER35> Not on Ryanair. The CEO explicitly said that their plane allocation is defined 24 hours before the flight and if the passengers discover that the plane is a max they are welcome to not fly but they won't get any refund.Ah, and they had the balls to rename their max planes to 737-8800 or something similar trying to deceive everyone. Result: it's almost 1 year that I don't fly with Ryanair even if before this I used it several times per year.

<comment><USER36> Classic Ryanair. You can't fault the consistency of their customer service.

Thanks for posting this, it's genuinely useful.

<comment><USER34> Interesting to note that Ryanair is currently exclusively a Boeing 737 airline. It has 367 Boeing 737-800 aircraft in service (the largest operator of this aircraft) and 135 Boeing 737 Max 200 on order. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Fleet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair#Fleet)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys"

In the moment, I would imagine this comes across as sour grapes. With the benefit of hindsight, that sentiment seems to hold some water.

<comment><USER38> It's about how bad the flight management computer is, the ridiculously short testing timeline, and how it is likely to never be fixed:

[https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/12154759339661926...](https://twitter.com/davidshepardson/status/1215475933966192640)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> With that pustule breaking up, releasing more and more of that really evil, stinking and ugly slime I start to wonder if that plane goes into service ever again.

Maybe the FAA will yield to poltical pressure. But I can't imagine any other certification agency accepting responsibility for any accident occurring on their watch now that more and more about the ugly, incompetent, fraudulent and outright evil engineering process for that death trap comes to light.

A plane only certified by the FAA is essentially dead.

<comment><USER40> It's like a 49 state emissions car or a Mexican market auto. Maybe the Third World will take it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I worked with Boeing during the 00's. It's when they started outsourcing everything including IT.

Holy shit this goes deeper than I thought and some people are heavily cleaning Wikipedia.

Didn't even know about this bit stealing rocket tech.: [https://www.justice.gov/archive/criminal/cybercrime/press- re...](https://www.justice.gov/archive/criminal/cybercrime/press- releases/2003/branchCharge.htm)

Also check out: Darleen Druyun [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- probe-intensifi...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe- intensifies-over-secret-lockheed-papers/)

Phil Condit was ousted over Darleen and that's why Harry was brought in... although the Wikipedia page doesn't mention any of this...fu wikipedia. He was not "retired" he was forced out and Boeing was banned from Space Contracts for 5 years.

Damn I wish I save all those news articles. Whoever said the Internet is forever is wrong! The Internet is fickle ...some things will be memes forever and others will be forgotten.

And here's what happened to Harry Stonecipher: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111019724886272076](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111019724886272076)

So much for "cleaning" up the company culture. F Boeing. The company not the engineers. I also know some very talented people there.

[Edit Note:1] The WSJ link should not be paywalled as it's an old article...at least it wasn't for me.

[Edit Note:2] The WSJ link is very detailed about what went down if it ends up blocked/paywalled I will...f'ck it I will edit wikipedia....grrrrr history is not fickle and Condit was and is an ass.

</comment><comment><USER42> From the rpr article, "This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys" This says a lot about Boeing's internals / culture. Probably their subcontractor interaction quality as well. While we can't take one comment in isolation it is a relevant indicator.

Its telling there were no[?] whistleblowers able to come forward beforehand. Consequences are too real and the search for the guilty talkers likely continues and I don't even think they were even remotely whistleblowers.

Perhaps technical prowess isn't as highly respected as it should be? Too many corners cut? Excessive priority of business over engineering? Timelines too tight? Budgets too small? Misallocations?

Don't know. Lots of symptoms of an unhealthy organization. It will become an interesting case-study regardless.

</comment><comment><USER43> This sort of stuff makes me freak out when I find out I am flying on a Boeing product. I expect people that are making aircraft to be better than when this NPR reporting purports.

<comment><USER44> It's panicking thought to assume that similar culture and malice doesn't exist at Airbus, just because they haven't had their public 737 MAX event yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If anyone is reading the original messages, this might provide some context for the comments mocking the competence and training of the FTC's AEG:

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/senat...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing- aerospace/senate-committee-opens-737-max-probe-over-whistle-blower-complaints- about-faa-inspectors-training/)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/faa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/faa- misled-congress-on-inspector-training-for-boeing-737-max-investigators- say/2019/09/23/05e9f986-de08-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know where we can read the actual documents? This article is missing a lot of information.

<comment><USER47> The Washington Post has them [https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/boeing- documents-reve...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/boeing-documents- reveal-internal-communication-among-employees-about-737-concerns-f- a-a/ad2f371a-8f0c-4615-9c08-2bd2c5e536b2/)

<comment><USER48> Direct link to PDF: [https://context- cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do...](https://context- cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/4a7b7481-6aa0-4821-bb23-39944c5df948/note/af453341-bce7-40e0-8da3-1a6afcbbd61f.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> >The monkeys will ruthlessly suppress any evidence

Yeah, I would even say that from the following part "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."

The Monkey will fire the clown, while still being employed and probably not being hold responsible for the shit they have done.

Management liability at its best.

</comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani might be a good candidates for a new management roles at Boeing!

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd like to know what they say internally about other Boeing planes.

</comment><comment><USER52> [http://archive.is/9fEvf](http://archive.is/9fEvf)

</comment><comment><USER53> scrap all those planes.. F-ing Boeing

</comment><comment><USER54> _' The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."'_

The company is taking action in response. Against its employees. Not the ones responsible for killing hundreds of people, but the ones who were calling the program out on its flaws that led to those deaths? If I were working on a safety critical program and I thought it was risking lives I'd lose my shit. The employees that said this should be getting an "I told you so" badge, and the executive team should be going to prison. Fuck Boeing for this.

<comment><USER55> That's just not how massive companies work. Sometimes the leaf-level employee knows a secret to improve the entire system in significant ways, but they'll never be heard. Sometimes the root employee (we'll say CEO) catches a earful from any given section of their company they don't like, regardless of how accepted or pervasive it the sentiment is, and that employee could be picked from the tree. It's just how it works in a massive structure. Someone at one end thinks the values and ethic is one way, and the people at the other end have an entirely different understanding.

<comment><USER54> There's a difference between knowing something that would improve a system and knowing that there are specific flaws with a significant degree of lethality. It should be acceptable to miss someone telling you the first (if perhaps a missed opportunity), but it's negligent to miss the second. It sounds to me that these people were taken aback and appalled by the cavalier attitude towards safety. If you have a decent number of professionals telling you something is unsafe and you ignore their cries, and then you kill people, you've fucked up in a big way.

Edit: more to my original point though, the response should be to improve internal processes to prevent this kind of tragedy again, rather than to throw the people doing the right thing by speaking up under the bus, saying it's against company culture to call out dangerous risks.

<comment><USER55> To me, your attitude is that problems shouldn't exist because we should solve them, as if there's a magical process that guarantees perfection. But what happens when we miss something? What happens when an employee has a thought about an engineering technique that maybe didn't quite make sense, but speaking out would disrupt an entire chain of command within the culture we invest into day-in day-out, and they get distracted by one of the million ways to do it these days and don't end up dealing with their thought? What if we miss this moment and some things get by that shouldn't. Is this not human to some degree?

<comment><USER56> We can cross that bridge when we get there. At the moment, getting there seems to be the problem because if you hide problems and you ignore the people complaining about them, then you get the situation we are in.

<comment><USER55> > if you're human, then you get the situation we are in.

Fixed that for you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> My favorite quote:

>The company official said the language used and sentiments expressed in these communications "are inconsistent with Boeing values, and the company is taking appropriate action in response."

Values? Your values appear to be maximizing profits at the expense of human lives. Your response to: "the guys developing our simulator were emailing back and forth they'd never fly on this plane" shouldn't be - let's fire them. It should be: how did management fail SO HORRENDOUSLY that the feedback from these testers wasn't pushed up the chain so we could build a reliable product?

The fact that we're this far removed from the accidents and they still don't get it tells me the company probably needs to just fail.

<comment><USER58> I completely agree. It's a great example that they are still incapable of owning their mistakes, and cannot be trusted without a significant dressing down. Let them fail.

<comment><USER59> Except American interests will trump all so they'll play as dirty as they need against Airbus and kill Canadian aerospace in the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> If it's not Airbus, I'm not going.

<comment><USER61> While I agree with this sentiment, buying tickets specifying Airbus, and having the airline switch them to Boeing one week before travel time (as happened to me this holiday season) means I wouldn't be able to do any long distance travel. Is there a way to mitigate this?

<comment><USER60> On AA, for example, you can improve your odds of getting an Airbus aircraft if you route through a former US Airways hub (e.g. CLT).

You might find similar patterns for other carriers if you search by city pairs.

Equipment swaps are pretty unusual for international routes, too, because it's harder to reaccommodate people. I think you were unlucky and shouldn't expect that in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is shocking. Said by a cynic.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think this is a reminder - do not say or do inappropriate things using company resources (chat, email, VPN, etc). Don't complain about co-workers, don't joke about breaking the law, don't say or do anything rude or disrespectful. You'll get about 5 seconds of happiness from a joke that can ruin your career.

<comment><USER64> I'd blunt that with: It is still appropriate for you to respectfully raise concerns with coworkers, management, etc using company resources. That especially includes if you suspect something may actually be illegal, in violation of a contract etc. Basic human decency and ethics aside, getting fired is still better than going to jail as a scape goat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Someone once gave the sage advice of never using the word 'kill' in your code base. 'm_Object.KillListeners();' can sound pretty bad in court. A lawyer can try to make your source code a legal matter, and a jury is free to interpret 'm_Object.KillChildren();' as being proof of willful negligence. Of course, this doesn't really matter when you're actually exposing willful negligence over your internal communication channels.

<comment><USER25> > man kill

        KILL(1)     User Commands                    KILL(1)

        NAME
           kill - send a signal to a process

        SYNOPSIS
           kill [options] <pid> [...]

Probably not a unix user then?

<comment><USER66> That's exactly his/her point.

To a techie it's obvious what it means, but if the code runs on some hardware that ends up killing people for real and the code gets inspected during discovery, having words like that could be a liability since jurors are less likely to understand the technical meaning.

I worked in the automotive industry for a few years, we where told not to use the terms "crash","kill","die" and a few others anywhere in code or documentation for exactly this reason.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What did you name your username after? - <AUTHOR> Can be your HN username or a username for a different site.<p>Example: SMUSH is a common acronym for Super SMaSH bros Ultimate and I happened to purchase that game the same day I created a fresh HN account. <comment><USER2> Based on a name I made up for a character in a story I was writing many, many years ago. The name just stuck with me.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Newspeak phrase "Double Plus Good Duckspeaker" from George Orwell's 1984.

</comment><comment><USER4> The origin is a long story, but I've been using it online for 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER5> Randomly generated so as to not be associated with my real identity.

</comment><comment><USER6> SSMSHU?

SMUltimateaSH

Somehow this one is lost on me.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a perfect acronym. I didn't come up with it either, but for some reason the games have had the following shortened forms:

Super Smash Bros. -> SSB or SB64 Super Smash Bros. Melee -> SSBM OR SMMSH Super Smash Bros. Brawl -> SSBB OR SMBSH (pronounced sm-bush) Super Smash Bros. for 3DS / for Wii U -> SM4SH (the 4th Smash Bros game) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate -> SMUSH

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> After my personal blog.

</comment><comment><USER8> Guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> Der Spiegel but attached to a trijet airplane?

I have no idea.

<comment><USER8> That's a better story than reality.

It's from Cowboy Bebop actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> n-gatedotcom N-gate.com</comment>


ILoveSketch: As-natural-as-possible sketching system for creating 3D curve models (+amazing vid) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~shbae/ilovesketch.htm

<comment><USER2> The display looks like a 21UX: <http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/21UX.cfm>

Maybe the software's available for academic/research use?

</comment><comment><USER3> Now that's just not fair, I want it, but it's not for sale.

<comment><USER4> I shared the exact sequence of impulses after viewing the video. Someone please put a price-tag on this.</comment></comment>


How to politely request customers use alternate services? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have an online service where users can ask questions to a particular kind of expert.  User can then pay to unlock the answer and read it.
Normally questions are answered by first-come-first-served expert.  Some users ask for specific experts to answer and I make a case-by-case exception.  However experts may not always be active so I need to warn users that getting an answer can take a while.
Also the support burden of questions to specific experts is a lot higher and I want to encourage users to either opt for "open questions" or try other sites that allow this option.
So, this is how I have worded it.
> <service> is a self-serve platform that is designed to work with open questions. Questions to specific <experts> can take longer (days or weeks). We are unable to provide much support to help users with such questions.
> We encourage users who want to pick <experts> to try out other sites <link to alternate> which allow this choice.
Today I got an angry email from a user calling this "arrogant".  How would you have worded this ? <comment><USER2> Raise the price!

Add a premium service where the user can request who will answer the question. In case the expert is not available for some time offer to get the answer from another expert in exchange of something (like reducing the price??? or some free questions for next month???)

Are you paying the experts? Can you pay them more for answering premium questions?

Do all the experts have the same level? (obviously no) How much difference is there in the quality of the answers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments.

> Add a premium service where the user can request who will answer the > question

I have considered that. However, since the support burden alone is maybe 5x of normal questions, I might have to raise prices by 2-3x at least. I might have to also add features to the site that don't exist right now. A premium service is certainly the best option going forward.

> Are you paying the experts? Can you pay them more for answering premium > questions?

Yes they are paid. I already pay more if users ask for specific experts. But I still find it difficult to guarantee if a specific expert will bother turning up.

> Do all the experts have the same level? (obviously no)

I suppose that is subjective. But there are objective metrics that allow users to choose better.

> How much difference is there in the quality of the answers?

Experts with same rating / peer-rating are of similar quality.

\---

Thanks for the detailed comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's the customer who is being arrogant by demanding that a company change its business model because he doesn't like it. If that customer wants to have their own expert on call during hours that are convenient, they should hire an employee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're being polite. Don't change course based on a complaint from a single grouch. If you find it's a theme, then act.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. You are correct - is not a theme - just a one off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That doesn't sound arrogant to me, it sounds like you are trying to be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comments.

My intentions are a bit less noble though. By listing alternatives, I am trying to draw attention to the pricing (my service is much cheaper) and to set expectations to match the pricing. I think some users might see this as a taunt of sorts.

<comment><USER5> I understand. You just had the one comment, right? You are fine. :) Keep on creating :)</comment></comment></comment>


Launch HN: OpenUnit (YC W20) – Software for managing self-storage facilities - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm Taylor Cooney. My co-founder Lucas Playford and I are launching (https://www.openunit.com) - software for managing self-storage facilities.
Lucas and I met 5 years ago at a startup in Toronto. Since leaving the startup, we've been looking for ways to "get the band back together" ever since. I would hack on side projects, such as an order-ahead food app and applicant tracking system for recruiting tech employees, but most of these fizzled out after a few weeks.
Despite our best efforts to get something started, we quickly realized that good startup ideas don't just happen out of nowhere. Or do they? 12 months ago my landlord came to me with an offer: they wanted to sell the place I was renting, and they'd give me a surprising amount of money if I could be out with just a few days notice. Pulling that off though meant finding somewhere to keep all of my stuff while I looked for a new place to live. Within the first hour of searching, I discovered how antiquated the process of finding and booking self-storage is.
After digging in, I found that for many facility owners having the time, technical skills, and frankly, money, to piece together a system that lets customers rent online, is hard. If you've ever tried to find self storage yourself, you probably noticed that many of the small operators have horrendous websites that are slow, non-responsive, and don't give you the ability to rent without picking up the phone. After talking to self storage owners directly, I also learned that they spend hours every single day doing back-office work that really should, and could be automated.
Since I was actively working on side projects, and I had just had this terrible experience trying to rent a storage unit, I decided to focus my time diving even further into the self-storage industry. I took time to research the tech used in the industry and connected directly with storage facility owners and operators to get a better understanding of the pain points of this large and, what appeared to be, technologically-backwards industry. Wanting to take the idea of "building something people want" a bit more seriously, I joined the Y Combinator's online Startup School program (before it became a Continuous Program) to work more formally on what would later become OpenUnit. After Startup School, I was invited to take this idea out to Mountain View for an interview with YC. Two months later Lucas and I had quit our jobs, the band was back together, and we were on our way to California.
The initial idea was to build a marketplace that makes it easy for people to find and instantly rent a storage unit online. But after speaking with more storage operators and hearing the same themes over and over again, we thought, why not be even more ambitious? Why not build a product that solves the problems of the renters AND facility owners? It turns out that self-storage generates $48 billion in rental revenue a year. But, while you might see big players - Public Storage, Extra Space, CubeSmart etc. — in downtown cores, 74% of all self storage facilities are small and self-reliant. And they can't afford expensive software.
As a result, the bad software they end up using creates terrible business inefficiencies and a lackluster customer experience. When I rented my storage unit, I experienced this firsthand. For the most part, large enterprises can spend enough money patching together systems to deliver an acceptable customer experience. But, for mom-and-pop operations, that is done with shoe leather - or it's not done at all. Instead of just building a marketplace, we were going to build a truly affordable, all-in-one management ecosystem.
So here we are. We provide self-storage facilities exactly what they need — merchant solutions, lease agreements, websites and more to provide an amazing customer experience. We designed OpenUnit so that a typical facility can get up and running fast and with zero paperwork. We also tailored the features we're offering to meet the unique needs of small operators first. As a result of this, our hope is that the entire experience is less overwhelming than competing management tools. Our enterprise package for facilities with >5 properties is 15% more affordable than anything else we've seen in the market and customers get a lot more than what's included with the other storage solutions.
Surprisingly, we're seeing an increased level of interest due to coronavirus. Many operators and facilities are looking to adopt a contactless move-in process (think eSignatures for rental agreements, with customers managing their own profiles/information and payment methods), which is something we've kept in-mind, and can be accomplished out of the box with OpenUnit, keeping employees and customers safe.
As a team, we're firmly focused on the web: the core technology that powers our applications on all platforms. It's hard to pin down a name for this stack, but it's a majestic monolith, built using Ruby on Rails. We embrace a "HTML over the wire" architecture, of server-rendered HTML, and "sprinkle" bits of interactive JavaScript. Season with Redis and ElasticSearch, we should have all we'll ever need. For the foreseeable future anyways. We're taking a privacy-first approach to customer data and use lockbox, which aims to make encryption as friendly and intuitive as possible for Rails.
If you have experience or if you have close friends, relatives, or colleagues that are in the storage space, please reach out! We're keen to get the community's input, in the comments below or at firstname.lastname@example.com. After reading this, don't be surprised if you start to notice the number of self-storage facilities in your city.
Thanks so much, and we can't wait to hear your thoughts! <comment><USER2> Great to finally see some competition in this space.

Like a lot of other lesser-known industries, private equity has consolidated all the top self-storage software management solutions.

SpareFoot acquired SiteLink[1]. The combined SpareFoot and SiteLink were acquired by Cove Hill Partners[2], a private equity firm founded in 2017, and merged with storeEDGE[3], a third company, to form Storable[4], the company behind SiteLink, storEDGE, and SpareFoot. Storable just acquired Easy Storage Solutions[5], a fourth company, a few months ago. SpareFoot, SiteLink, storEDGE, and Easy Storage Solutions are now all the same company.

[1]: [https://www.sparefoot.com/self- storage/blog/20604-sparefoot-...](https://www.sparefoot.com/self- storage/blog/20604-sparefoot-news-2018/)

[2]: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/cove-hill-acquires-sparefoot- si...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/cove-hill-acquires-sparefoot- sitelink-1522350278)

[3]: [https://www.storedge.com/merger](https://www.storedge.com/merger)

[4]: [https://www.storable.com/](https://www.storable.com/)

[5]: [https://www.insideselfstorage.com/suppliersvendors/storable-...](https://www.insideselfstorage.com/suppliersvendors/storable- acquires-self-storage-software-provider-easy-storage-solutions)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this post. I own a self storage company and use Easy Storage Solutions and had no idea Storable recently acquired them. I enjoyed working with a smaller, privately owned software company. Knowing this has peaked my interest in Open Unit. Taylor - this could be a good marketing angle to take.

I have submitted multiple feature requests to Easy Storage Solutions but none of them have been acted on. If you guys are open to feedback I'd love to get involved. We could use my facility as a testing ground. I have 250 units over 15k sq ft.

<comment><AUTHOR> We should connect over the next few days. I think this warrants a further conversation between our groups. Please send an email when you've got a moment - I can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com. Since Day One, Lucas and I have included operators in the discussion to dictate the functionality and we'd love to have you included at the table as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent some time working for a company in this exact space. My recommendation would be to integrate a 3rd party accounting/ledger management product rather than building your own. That stuff gets messy real quick and next thing you know you're dealing with accounting more than actually improving your core value offerings.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got pretty in-the-weeds with the accounting stuff[1], and had thought about reaching for a 3rd party ledger, like Gnucash[2] or beancount[3]. The basics are pretty simple, but I've tried to be thoughtful about the kinds of details that most companies get wrong when they're trying to do things like track balances: using floats for money, allowing transactions to be amended or deleted[4], etc. There's two parts to this puzzle: the accounting method you employ that keeps an audit (whether it be single or double entry accounting) and the rules governing accounting events that get trigger by the system.

The latter is where real difficulty and liability lies; an event, such as a rental payment, triggers a series of transactions that must be financially sound and sufficient for meeting the expectations of an audit. There were a few other considerations but that really is the core framework. Where the real work begins is implementing the triggers, or events (like I mentioned above), that sets off a set of entries and making those financially sound. I've been able to achieve some basic rules exclusively for the self-storage space whose types of business transactions are very similar, but the truth of this can only be revealed by third party auditors. It leads me to believe that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a universal system for all businesses and industries since the events that trigger entries are specific to each system.

Happy to riff on this a little more if you're interested!

[1]: [https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.ht...](https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html)

[2]: [http://www.austintek.com/gnucash/ncsa-gnucash- talk.html](http://www.austintek.com/gnucash/ncsa-gnucash-talk.html)

[3]: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/100tGcA4blh6KSXPRGCZpUlyx...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/100tGcA4blh6KSXPRGCZpUlyxaRUwFHEvnz_k9DyZFn4/edit)

[4]: [https://medium.com/@RobertKhou/double-entry-accounting- in-a-...](https://medium.com/@RobertKhou/double-entry-accounting-in-a- relational-database-2b7838a5d7f8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see some work in this area--seems like one of the few industries still dominated by 'mom and pops' (my parents run a self storage too!).

Definitely nice to see a company with a more creative business model than just charging $10/mo for some feature set, too

</comment><comment><USER6> Platform makes sense to me, great work putting it together. I notice that you're only charging for basically stripe's transaction fee. Can you provide a bit more color as to your monetization strategy?

<comment><USER7> Great question. We recognized revenue from the difference between the volume discount we get on our negotiated interchange rate and what is charged to the customer. For larger customers with more than a couple of facilities, we have SaaS fees for gated and premium features as well. Because our focus is serving the long tail of the self-storage market - mom-and-pops - we understand that much of the software currently available to them is either too expensive or too complicated for their smaller operations. We want to make sure that they have a simple pricing model that doesn't nickel and dime them for the core features that they rely on to run their businesses.

<comment><USER8> Have you talked to mom-and-pops about this pricing model? Though "2.9% + $0.30 per transaction" isn't difficult to understand, if they've never heard of Stripe, it is difficult to understand _why_ that's what they're being charged. It might be easier to digest if given a flat monthly fee based on usage (e.g. $X for 100 units, $2X for 500 units, whatever)

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been exploring pricing based on the square footage of the facility for larger operators. Generally, real estate operators think of costs in terms of square feet rather than number of units. But I agree that there may be an easier way for operators to digest this, especially those that are not familiar with Stripe that may question the "\+ $0.30 per transaction" structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a great experience with Safeguard Self Storage in Cutler Bay, FL in the Miami area. The only thing lacking that I could see was their website and automated emails sucked. It might be worth trying extra hard to get them as a client! I was just a small single-unit customer and didn't know them personally. They just did well on a bunch of points: proper billing, easy move out, security, cleanliness, price.

<comment><USER7> We will definitely check them out. Thanks for the heads up!

There are so many operators out there that are amazing at providing stellar customer experiences in spite of the tech challenges that they are facing.

Many of the operators that we speak with just want to work smarter and not harder, as the old adage goes.

Unfortunately, when your tech stack is lacking you end up working harder to provide a great experience for the customer.

We designed OpenUnit to deliver on both ends of the equation with awesome customer-facing touchpoints and backend tools that automate workflows to help operators get back to provide those amazing personalized experiences like you had at Safeguard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I notice you guys mix the .com and .ca version of the domain on your site. Might be worth running through and converting them all over to the .com .

<comment><AUTHOR> It took us a while to get ahold of the .com from the owner in Michigan. After numerous attempts to reach the owner - including a Postmates order, a flower delivery and a hand written Christmas card - we bit the bullet and grabbed the .ca to start. openunit.com eventually expired, went live on the GoDaddy auction site and I was able to pick it up for $400 after a bot tried to outbid me. Over the next week weeks I'll consolidate the two domains - if developer operations is of interest, please reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com and let's talk DNS records.

<comment><USER11> congrats on the domain Taylor! Way to go man.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should hear the story about how we got the Twitter handle. It starts and ends with Argentina...

<comment><USER12> What's your twitter handle so I can follow you on that platform. Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our twitter handle is @openunit ([https://twitter.com/openunit](https://twitter.com/openunit))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like McAfee has listed it as a parked domain:

Your requested URL has been blocked by the McAfee Web Gateway URL Filter database module. The URL is listed in categories that are not allowed by your administrator at this time. URL: [https://www.openunit.com/](https://www.openunit.com/) URL Categories: Parked Domain Reputation: Unverified

<comment><AUTHOR> Woh, are you familiar with this? I've never had to navigate around a flagging like that. Thank you for bringing this you my attention.

<comment><USER13> Looks like its still blocked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My first professional software job was writing a windows version of of self storage management software in the 90s. It was pre-internet so the last thing I was working on was using pcAnywhere to connect to a central location to upload the nightly changes in the database.

I also remember connecting to the gates was tricky.

<comment><USER7> That's amazing!

You'd be surprised (or maybe not), that there's still quite a bit of legacy software kicking around on stand alone desktops out there.

Most facilities have shifted to the cloud, but there is still the odd facility that runs everything locally and processes their monthly rent roll manually.

Gate and security system APIs are also much easier to work with now for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having gone through the process of self storage recently I am surprised and not surprised to see this. It sounds like such a compelling product and I can imagine you're going to make the lives of the small business owners running facilities very happy. Great work peeps :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hello, I tried emailing you @ email@example.com and got about bounce back from google. That address isn't setup for outside addresses. Regards

<comment><AUTHOR> This is working now. We use G Suite to create email aliases, and for some reason the permissions automatically set to "Private".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Beautiful design, btw.

<comment><USER7> That's our man Taylor. We'll be building out the rest of our design team in the near future.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, looks terrific. I found one small spelling error - "Digital recipets" \- when I was looking through the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> We now offer "Digital receipts" (I just pushed up the fix)! Thank you for catching that.

<comment><USER19> couple more small copy suggestions:

\- In large top image of dashboard, tab says "Reccuring" ("Recurring")

\- "security right out-of-the-box" (not typically hyphenated)

\- "Custom to-do's lists" ("to-do lists")

\- "Integrated per-transaction pricing we don't charge different rates for different credit cards." Should there be a period after "pricing"?

\- you don't have consistent usage of the serial comma (or lack thereof)

\- "...designing OpenUnit from the ground-up" (not hyphenated)

<comment><AUTHOR> You rock. Thank you.

<comment><USER19> Glad to help. Main site is beautiful and product seems like a great market fit. This kind of review is something I really enjoy doing (weird hobby, sure, all hobbies are a little bit unusual). I'm always available for more of this kind of thing. Email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The trend of taking proprietary, close-source software and slapping an "Open-" name on it is bad form, but otherwise this looks like a good solution.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is this open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not open source at this time but if there's a large demand from facilities we may consider open sourcing certain parts of the product (such as the CRM or bookkeeping).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Big HN Energy! Congrats to Taylor & Lucas - one to watch, for sure.

<comment><USER7> Thank you. Appreciate the kind words.</comment></comment>


Netflix prize tribute: Recommendation algorithm in Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smellthedata.com/2009/06/netflix-prize-tribute-recommendation.html <comment><USER2> Really cool blog. I'll add it to the other good ones I typically read: flowingdata.com and datawrangling.com.

I wonder why he chose to use PMF. There are seemingly less complicated algorithms (PCA/SVD/LSA) that appear to do the same type of thing.

It also looks like PMF uses expectation maximization, which is quite common but not necessarily scalable (although I could be wrong). This would probably take quite a bit of time to run on the whole dataset and unfortunately he doesn't give any specs!

<comment><USER3> SVD doesn't work when you have a sparse matrix as input. You could use some sort of imputation method (like EM) to fill in all of the missing values then run SVD, but this would be extremely inefficient, since only a tiny fraction of the user x movies matrix of ratings is observed. It also probably wouldn't work very well, because your true signal from the data would be overwhelmed by all of the missing values that you'd somewhat arbitrarily filled in.

PMF is a generalization of SVD that is able to work directly on the sparse structure of the input. It does gradient descent -- modifying the low dimension latent vectors directly to minimize error, and never does any imputation of missing values. This makes it very efficient, and it can easily handle millions of ratings. See <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~amnih/papers/pmf.pdf> for an application of PMF to the very large Netflix problem.

<comment><USER4> Another reason he uses PMF is probably because Danny Tarlow (post author) is a student at UToronto. Russ Salakhutdinov and Andrei Mnih, the authors of the PMF method, are also students at UToronto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the same algorithm and other variants implemented in Matlab/C++ (can be run on Netflix-sized data): <http://www.cis.hut.fi/alexilin/software/></comment>