Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of Digg - <AUTHOR> http://about.digg.com/blog/company-update <comment><USER2> I think if digg changed their entire concept around into one that takes all of the news and combines stories into threads, ala techmeme, they'd be a king again. I'd love to have the stories from TC, read write web, and all the other blogs on a particular topic consolidated into one story with links to the externals, an intelligent description created from all the posts combined, and maybe even a little meter to weigh the particular blogs/sites involved.

Right now Digg is just adding to the information overload. I think we're all pretty exhausted with information. I'll see something pop up on twitter, I'll see it here as well, or on my RSS reader from another site. We're all talking about similar things. We need a global sort of decentralized "permalink" concept. Digg has the resources to do this. They can "digg" the web, instead of me digging stories. They'll find out what's hot via continuing user submissions, observing the twittersphere, popular blogs, etc... and then report to me a summary of everything regarding, for example, OpenSolaris being canned.

Yet another chaotic "stream of conciousness" comment from me... but I'm just getting the discussion going.

EDIT: this could work for everything... I obviously care mostly about tech and shy away from politics, but it would be cool to have all topics of a particular issue, with their weight on the political spectrum. Just another example.

<comment><USER3> We need Google's "Priority Inbox" for RSS feeds. The signal to noise ratio in my newsfeed "inbox" is way out of whack.

<comment><USER2> I'm so sad that Google lags on deploying these features to the apps accounts. I'd love a "Give me all Gmail features, when they happen" option for my Google apps account. But, don't even get me started on how effed up the integration with all of that is. I want email@example.com to be my google ID, not some random gmail address I had to create. UGH.

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth, the Priority Inbox is supposed to be rolled out to Apps users at the same time as the general rollout in the next week.

<comment><USER5> I have the priority inbox in my Gmail and in my Apps right now. As far as my accounts go, they were rolled out simultaneously today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd say this is extremely poor timing considering the backlash that version 4.0 of digg.com has been getting. It reeks of knee-jerk-ism.

It really surprises me that nobody in the boardroom thought to say: "This might look bad. Let's hold off for a couple weeks until the buzz dies off."

<comment><USER7> I'm sure the option was on the table to "hold off" but in disaster-mode (which is what this is) one of the board's functions is to restore shareholder faith.

They aren't going to do that by sitting around, so decisive action was taken. As another poster in this thread noted, the search was already on for potential CEO candidates to replace Rose - that process probably got expedited to avoid a further downward spiral.

The problems with V4 are nothing to do with technology or audience fit etc etc, it's bigger than that - it's a management issue. Management launched a buggy product that nobody wanted. And management just got replaced.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. When in disaster-mode for a privately held company, the board should not be focused on restoring shareholder faith -- but in restoring user/customer faith.

<comment><USER9> Digg's customers are its advertisers, not its users. The users are the product they sell to their customers.

So Digg might in fact be doing right by their customers in this case. They're certainly bringing in more money than Reddit.

<comment><USER10> Good point that the users are the product...and no one would assume that you could keep customers happy without paying attention to your product, although I must say that Digg is doing a pretty decent job of responding to user concerns and clearly communicating the order that they will be implementing changes. I have noticed far fewer 'broken axles' and now everyone will be watching to see how quickly they implement features from v3 that everyone is clamoring for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems to me that digg is having a myspace moment. It's failed to keep up with innovation as the world has changed around it. Digg's value-add has been left in the dust by more targeted sites (reddit, HN, even twitter, facebook, failblog, 4chan, etc.), and they can't fix that problem without fundamentally reinventing digg.

<comment><USER12> 4chan and innovation? Wha?

<comment><USER13> At least when it comes to internet culture, it's where a lot of stuff originates these days--- the same jokes and memes will eventually filter down to digg/reddit/elsewhere a bit later. Sort of the role that SomethingAwful, Fark, and digg have played at various times, to various extents.

<comment><USER14> That's community, not tech innovation.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but digg (like most social media companies) has always been more about innovation on the social side than on the technical side. The actual technical meat behind digg or twitter isn't what made them successful; finding a way to make themselves the center of certain kinds of culture is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its not as bad as taking the MySpace CEO position, but what would Digg's CEO do to really grow a business like that? Could it ever be a $100M+ revenue, profitable company for the long term?

They have taken $40M in funding, have 50+ employees and I have no idea what their revenue is, but I bet its under $15M for for selling ads.

Good luck to them, hope he has the courage/support to do something radical.

</comment><comment><USER16> Digg never seemed like the kind of company that was run by an engineering culture. It feels like a MySpace type of company, where they have good marketing / media people but not about the technology and platform. One thing that suggests this is that most of the early engineering talent has left [<http://atomized.org/2010/08/they-can%E2%80%99t-go-back/>] , which is not something you see at Google, Facebook, or even Reddit. The new CEO might benefit from turning this around to avoid disasters like v4.

<comment><USER17> Google was founded to solve an engineering problem. Digg was founded to solve a social problem. Their respective cultures aren't surprising.

<comment><USER18> I doubt there's a correlation. Facebook is engineer-driven and was founded to solve a social problem. And the problem google solved was borderline social. Don't mean to be argumentative- I just think that it's a choice that leadership tends to make early on that's unrelated to the problem being solved, and that one of the two choices/cultures seems to do far better than the other. (could be confirmation bias, but I kind of doubt it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Poor Williams! So Rose says to the guy, "Here you go ... I broke everything and chased away our most loyal users and now I'm leaving you to stand behind it and defend it. Have fun!"

</comment><comment><USER20> This comic strip might be one of the most insightful contributions to the topic: <http://ncomment.com/blog/>

<comment><USER21> That is seriously incredible and brought me up to speed. Do you know if that was illustrated over the weekend or is a lot of it mash-up/collage? Either way - awesome.

<comment><USER22> it's old. pre Digg 4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They seriously didn't have v4 in beta long enough. I got accepted to the beta a little while back and it had lots of issues even then with the broken axle and other errors. For a change that substantial, they really should have had a very long beta period where they slowly brought people in.

I was shocked when I heard it was going live because I knew from the beta that it wasn't even close to ready.

<comment><USER24> They have been working v4 for a long time and yet the site is unusable. I guess the rush came from investors to push it out which was not a smart idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This shouldn't be of any shock to anyone. Rose is not a CEO type and has admitted so in the past. When he launched Digg he promptly went to his known acquaintance, Jay Adelson, to lead the company while he remained as the chief architect. It was only time until he found somebody else to take control of Digg while he led the charge in his prior role.

Is it a coincidence that the replacement came in right after a poor launch? We could speculate that all day but this CEO was likely already inbound before the launch. Today just marked it official.

</comment><comment><USER26> What a nightmare. I think Digg v4 should have been launched as a separate startup, helmed by Kevin ala Pownce. It's just too different, and it looks like they may have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. What a disaster..

<comment><USER27> I'm not really sure how golden those eggs were, truth be told. Was digg profitable? How profitable? Not enough for a company that has taken in $40 million in VC money, for sure...

<comment><USER26> It could have been profitable if it wasn't. Up until recently Reddit was being run by only two or three engineers on a shoe-string budget. Digg had way too many employees, way too much ambition.

<comment><USER28> At one point they have SEVENTY people! That's pretty insane for what Digg is if you ask me.

<comment><USER26> Seventy _paid (salaried)_ employees?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone please un-editorialize the title?

The CEO transition has been planned for months. It may be poorly timed, but the title of this link makes it sound like he's resigning due to the v4 launch issues.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's kind of telling that the digg blog now has the same blue that twitter's blog has. Hopefully the CEO can do something about the complete absence of original thought.

<comment><USER31> That's an interesting take coming from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If I go to digg.com, I get a message about digg having a broken axle (i.e. it does not work). Is that just me?

<comment><USER33> I guess he pulled the plug on the way out

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone have insight into the timing of this? I understand they have been looking for someone for a while and this timing may simply be a result of an ongoing process coming to a close... but at the same time I'm sure there has been a lot going on internally at Digg since the launch of v4. Either way, the recent Digg events have been very public and very interesting. I think there is a decent amount to be learned from all this, or at least that is how I am rationalizing closely watching this all unfold.

<comment><USER35> Pure speculation: they'd been looking semi-casually for a while, interviewing prospects, etc. The VCs were probably hoping Kevin would pull a Steve Jobs comeback. Then the Digg v4 fiasco happened. The VCs pulled the trigger and fast tracked their most promising candidate.

<comment><USER30> They said before the launch that they were going to announce the new CEO this week.

<comment><USER36> But, that doesn't sound dramatic enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What a cop out. Kevin Rose has been hyping Digg v4 for months. He should stand behind his product, his vision, his creation. He should go down with a fight.

<comment><USER38> To be fair, he'd always planned this to be temporary. In his podcast with Tim Ferris just a couple of weeks ago, he said he'd be stepping down pretty soon.

<comment><USER37> But he is leaving at the worst possible time. A big upgrade requires months of follow up work and he should know that.

I'm not usually an internet tough guy, but this is outrageous. If I was a digg engineer I would be livid. The captain sailed into uncharted waters and then abandoned ship. He should protect his crew. He should do everything in his power to save the ship.

<comment><USER30> There's been a steady stream of digg engineers (and product managers, dbas, sysadmins, VPs) heading out the door for at least 2 years. So the ship is long since abandoned, the "captain" stayed on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> One of these sites just needs to install a sliding bar at the top. All the way to the left is Failblog pictures. All the way to the right is academic articles. Build this.

<comment><USER40> This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. You're essentially going to have to rely on your users to categorize things, which they probably won't do.

One person's academic article is another person's lolcat picture.

This was exemplified to me recently on <http://newslily.com/>; We had a new user who was constantly submitting things that he thought were appropriate for "science" or "medicine", but they weren't (at least not in the opinion of most of the users). To him, this was hard science; good stuff, but it was mostly things that we weren't interested in. How would the slider work for him?

The solution (one that is similar to what digg did [although we've had this for about a year, humph]) was effectively user-whitelisting. Now, what you see on the front page of the site is things that our moderators have approved, and what you see in the various categories (or "upcoming" section) is things from users that you have whitelisted.

A major misunderstanding (and why I think that user-whitelisting is better than what reddit or HN do [and is also why I think a control like what you're talking about wouldn't workd]) is that people are _not_ all the same; this is why I like the idea behind what digg did (hey, it's worked for facebook and twitter, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I feel bad for Kevin, to be stepped down from his own startup, it was his idea, it was his money, and now some VC guys just throw him out of the window. I don't believe Kevin just stepped down because of the V4 fail. Specially when he just became CEO again a couple of months ago.

Digg just became a zombie site, as a user, everytime I visit I feel like i'm visiting my RSS reader, it just doesn't feel to have any human interaction except for the comments.

Would it be pretty bad if they rolled back to V3 ? I mean...this version 4 is really not working out for anyone.

<comment><USER42> Kevin said right after Jay left that he was only a temp CEO. Did you even read the other comments on this story?

<comment><USER41> you mean read > 50 comments ? Sorry but no. But thanks for the update tho ;)

<comment><USER42> Yes, I can see how taking the time to educate yourself would slow down your hobby of spewing out libellous crap on the Internet

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Geez, I didn't know that linking to Reddit from the Digg front page was that big of a deal.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just like Technorati, Digg's failure at coming up with a business model that doesn't annoy it's entire userbase has rapidly faded it into irrelevancy. Does Digg have a lot of hardware? I hope they use dovebid, so I won't have to register with a new auction site for the bankruptcy specials.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is old news, he submitted his resignation to Reddit a few days ago. (/I know I know, old joke, mod me down.)</comment>


Trump Trade War iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/video/trump-says-tariffs-could-placed-220137843.html <comment><AUTHOR> Well, I guess Foxconn can move their manufacturing to Vietnam, just like Samsung did.</comment>


The man behind Yahoo's plan to become the most 'trustworthy' tech company - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/05/29/the-man-behind-yahoos-plan-to-become-the-most-trustworthy-tech-company/ <comment><USER2> Today, Yahoo changed the pricing for their BOSS search API from free to $1.80 per 1000 queries (the main data source of DuckDuchGo search, and other startups): [https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/](https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/) and [https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/terms/product- atos/bo...](https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/terms/product- atos/boss/pricing/index.htm) (the free API "Limited Web" has been discontinued as of June 1st, 2015)

<comment><USER3> It will be interesting to see how this will play out for duckduckgo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do they have a business model other than selling user data to advertisers? No? Then it'll take more than a "plan".

<comment><USER5> Yahoo has actually regressed in that respect. Previously, Yahoo mail, like Hotmail, did not mine your email content for displaying targeted ads. In 2011, Yahoo changed their policies and started displaying "relevant ads".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be great if they could start by fixing their API and actually repond to developers on their forums: [https://developer.yahoo.com/forums/#/discussion/7106/social-...](https://developer.yahoo.com/forums/#/discussion/7106/social- api-issue-yahoo-developers-please-implement-this-suggested-fix-no-access- control-allow-orig)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad that someone sees demand for privacy. I wish Mozilla would brand itself the same way; with their non-profit, public good mission, few could compete with them for user trust. That's how they can compete with FirefoxOS, Firefox for Android, and other products, IMHO -- it would be hard for Google and Apple to convince the public that privacy is their priority after all these years.

Based on my limited knowledge, more and more consumers are looking for privacy options. If and when demand for privacy takes off, Mozilla and Yahoo would be in good shape if they were already established in user's minds as the 'trustworthy' vendors.

<comment><USER8> What is your beef with Apple about privacy?

<comment><USER9> it's very popular to hate apple for privacy.

it seems odd that the same people flock to google for privacy when google's entire business model rests on selling or farming it's users data in various ways. (where-as apples is selling products which you pay for)

I've said before that Apple has a business model that is capable of being privacy conscious- so I'm more willing to trust them than google.

it just seems like some very well placed propaganda.

<comment><USER10> For some reason every time somebody criticizes Google, somebody ends up making the argument that Apple is worse and vice-versa.

I don't really get it. Is it because you feel the need to root for your favorite or something? Either way, it's a fallacy that brings nothing to the discussion.

<comment><USER11> If it were a fallacy, that'd mean it wasn't true.

It's more propaganda than fallacy, but I'd agree it is questionable what it brings to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if they would attempt to acquire Duck Duck Go. It would be a smart move for them on many levels

<comment><USER2> They have done the opposite as of today, the changed their BOSS API, the main data source of Duck Duck Go, from free to $1.80 per 1000 queries: [https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/](https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/) (There is a section "Who's using Yahoo BOSS" -> Duck Duck Go, and a "Pricing" section below)

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a good (but dirty) move if they want to purchase it cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I enjoyed listening to Alex Stamos on this forward-looking multi-part discussion on cryptography from Blackhat 2013:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33RbRid1deo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33RbRid1deo)

</comment><comment><USER15> They should start with the shitstorm that is their comment section, I'm all open for a public forum, but holy shit its a cesspool.

</comment><comment><USER16> Easy to be snarky about this as Yahoo really is drowning in its own shit and daily bad decisions, but I really like the guy's approach. He'll be at Microsoft or Google in a year.</comment>


Study shows e-bike riders get more exercise than cyclists - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/08/11/electric-bike-riders-more-exercise-than-cyclists/ <comment><USER2> > The survey took place from November 2014 to January 2017 in seven European > cities: Antwerp (Belgium), Barcelona (Spain), London (United Kingdom), > Örebro (Sweden), Rome (Italy), Vienna (Austria) and Zurich (Switzerland).

(From the linked study.)

This leaves out the Netherlands and Denmark, two countries with a well- established habit of riding bicycles and world-leading, exemplary infrastructure that focuses on cyclist and pedestrian safety.

I would love to know what the increasing popularity of e-bikes does here in the Netherlands, because as a casual observer it seems to me that a lot of people who use them hardly pedal at all; depending on battery power for what seems like the biggest part of the load.

While there are indubitably a good number of folk (elderly in particular) who can now stay mobile using e-bikes in a manner that stimulates using your muscles for much longer, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that there is a large group of people who uses e-bikes to stop using quite as much energy as well — to the detriment of their health. I.e., most people in developed countries don't meet the daily minimum of exercise; the Dutch habit of riding bicycles for almost anything that doesn't require distances over 10km keeps a lot of people on the healthy side of that requirement.

E-bike are attractive, because parking cars and mopeds is much more bothersome; bicycle racks are everywhere.

<comment><USER3> If the Netherlands is not the flattest country in the world it's very close to it. Denmark is the same story. Either way, both countries are extreme outliers in this category. E-bikes remove the most daunting barrier to cycling for many people: the difficulty of hill climbs. So it makes sense to leave out the flat countries and focus on those with rolling hills and mountains.

<comment><USER4> NL does have wind to make up for it. Of course there is also rain, heat and cold (both with high humidity)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a pretty classic correlation != causation issue.

Yeah, may be true what they found. But may also be not very relevant. It absoltely doesn't say that getting an e-bike will make you exercise more.

Here's a theory what might be going on: E-Bikes are relatively expensive. So if you buy an E-Bike you're probably relatively determined to actually use it. There are on the other hand plenty of people that own a cheap bike and use it very rarely.

There's no real reason not to do a proper study on the question: Take a reasonably large number of volunteers, randomly assign them to "we give you a fancy bike" or "we give you a fancy e-bike" group and then measure their exercise and health levels. There are situations where doing such a randomized trial is unethical or pracitcally impossible. Here it really is not. If someone's doing a study with observational data where you could do a randomized trial you should be skeptical.

<comment><USER6> Your trial sounds expensive, maybe 50 times as expensive as the version where you just talk to people, for the same statistical power. So that's at least one reason not to do it.

And you still end up measuring something different from what you want. Just as in your theory about people committing to use their e-bike more when they've spent a lot of money on it, people behave differently when you give them things for free.

<comment><USER5> > Your trial sounds expensive, maybe 50 times as expensive as the version > where you just talk to people, for the same statistical power.

It is, especially if you do it with proper statistical power. Though I'm deeply convinced that it would do science a lot of good to do fewer more expensive, but meaningful trials instead of more meaningless ones.

Your concern is somewhat valid, as you can't "blind" the test, but by using similarly priced bikes you could at least cancel out a price bias. Still there might be a "new tech" bias towards e-bikes. But then we're at "this is the best we can do" and there are limitations of how good we can study things. The study quoted above is not even near trying to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > As it turned out, electric bicycle riders ended up slightly edging out pedal > bike cyclists in terms of total exercise each week.

There was no correction for selection bias so you can't make any assumptions.

For example; it's likely that e-bike riders are older and have more spare time. How much would a regular cyclist exercise with the same spare time?

<comment><USER8> Article: "Users who reported any use of non-electric bicycle (including city bike, mountain bike or bike-sharing) but not e-bike were categorized as cyclists, those who did not report any bicycle use, as non-cyclists."

Aha! So, we're comparing mountain bikers and bike-sharers with e-bikes (which belong in the category of electrified city bikes). That alone should raise some informed eyebrows.

<comment><USER9> Kind of tells me they don't understand how much effort and energy goes into mountain biking either.

I can only going mountain biking on weekends, but it's far from a low effort activity, I'd be willing to bet that I expend more energy and get more exercise than someone who trundles around the city on an e-bike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is true for me. Since I have a e-mountain bike (a e-bike designed for offroad cycling), I sometimes bike up hills where I live just for fun and I would never have thought I would do this. The electrical support is awesome and a hell of fun. Then back at home I discover myself sweaty and tired.

I turn off the motor when biking around in the city (which is flat) so I don't get used to the boost. This is a trick I play on myself so I don't lose the fun.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like electrek, but the editorializing here on their "take" is quite cringeworthy. I recommend skipping it.

<comment><USER12> Disclosure: I ride a conventional bike. I thought the gratuitous, divisive jabs against conventional cyclists were over the top. If e-bikes are a good idea, which I think they are, they should stand on their own merits as a technology.

Amusingly, with the proliferation of e-bikes, I actually find myself on the defensive about riding a conventional bike. People ask me why I haven't switched yet.

<comment><USER11> As an e-bike rider, whole heartedly agree. Getting people out of cars and onto any form of pedal power is a net benefit, there's no reason to be divisive.

<comment><USER13> The only thing I worry about is people with poor bike handling skills getting an e-bike that suddenly lets them ride as fast as a pro cyclist with little effort. If you watch people getting on rented bikes at a tourist destination, you see a lot of wobbly riding. Plus the fat comfort seats that people use make it even harder to control a bike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess it really strongly depends on if the person just used an e-bike to replace their ordinary cycling habits.

I can see how it being easier causes people to take the bike out more than the would ordinarily.

<comment><USER15> I own an ebike, and I use it for journeys that I wouldn't even consider taking an ordinary bike on. To be honest, I don't even think I'd ride an ordinary bike to the top of my road. It's a bit of a hill, and riding a bicycle up a hill without electric assistance is extremely unpleasant.

Ordinary cycling is just _too_ tiring for non-cyclists to want to do. An ebike makes it workable.

<comment><USER16> Going uphill is my favorite kind of biking. Uphill, your speed is linearly proportional to your effort. On a flat road, it's proportional to the cube root of effort. So it's more motivating to work hard going uphill.

A more forward posture (which you get with dropped handlebars) and clip-in pedals help.

<comment><USER17> >So it's more motivating to work hard going uphill.

This is a feature in a sport, but a bug in a transportation method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> E-bikes are a funny thing. Living in Seattle, they were everywhere. Having now moved to the flatlands of Chicago, I see more Ferraris than e-bikes. I'm a "conventional" cyclist but totally get the appeal of electricity in hilly terrain. Not everyone enjoys that kind of battle.

Having said that, the two (soon to be three) days I cycle the 30 mile round- trip to work leave me feeling great. Would recommend to anyone. Combined with riding Metra (our commuter trains) the other days, traffic becomes a spectator sport.

</comment><comment><USER19> > But if you ride a pedal-assist e-bike, which is pretty much the only type of > e-bike that is legal across Europe, then you can take comfort in knowing > that you're likely getting just as much exercise than if you were on a pedal > bike

Pretty sure that isn't implied by the study. Even if e-bikers get more exercise than cyclists, that doesn't mean switching to an e-bike causes you to get more exercise, the study didn't show causation. I ride recreationally, for a fixed amount of time. If I switched to an e-bike, I would just work less hard during that time, and get less exercise.

</comment><comment><USER20> Speaking about cycling. Something I don't understand about bikes and e-bikes is their price. Why are they so incredibly expensive? How come economies of scale haven't made them dirt cheap?

<comment><USER13> Bikes are kind of a strange industry, at least in the US. Almost all of the big brands steadfastly refuse to embrace online shopping, so you're paying at least a hundred or two for brick and mortar bike shops.

Second, cycling in the US is mostly for sport, so bike shops mostly sell road or mountain bikes, not utility bikes. And people who ride for sport are willing to spend a lot on this year's new tech and lighter bikes.

If you want a cheap, reliable bike, buy used. Try to find an older chromoly steel mountain bike with name brand components, for example Bridgestone. It will have fender and rack mounts, and clearance for wide tires.

<comment><USER21> I work as a bike mechanic at one of the largest Specialized dealers in the US. A couple of times a week we have people that come in with bikes they bought from direct to consumer brands and attempted to assemble themselves. People regularly make serious errors when they assemble a bike themselves, and they're often dangerous and sometimes expensive to fix. Unless you're 100% confident in your bike mechanic skills, you'll likely spend all of the money you save buying online at your local bike shop to have them fix your own mistakes.

<comment><USER13> There's always idiots, but there are probably tons of people who have BikesDirect or Canyons and just never go to bike shops because the experience is more often than not bad and/or intimidating.

Even with good bike shops, the experience of simple things like buying parts really sucks. I can't search QBP, I have to ask an employee to do it for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should a small high school manage data? - <AUTHOR> We're a small public high school. Our main student records are maintained by the department of Education in a database that's difficult to access and out of our control. At the moment we run a violent disarray of google sheets and docs trying to manage all the different types of assessment data, compliance records, notes from meetings and professional development and teachers calling home and safety issues and attendance...
And it's overwhelming; I think what we need is a database so I started teaching myself about how to build them from scratch- and my vision, what I think we need, is a staff-only subdomain where teachers can access a dashboard of information about students and input new types of information-- and I'm caught; building our own solution seems like the only viable option at the same time as seeming like a huge mistake.
How do you approach planning for a data management problem like this?
Do you know of any (inexpensive?) services that we can look at for relief / support / guidance? <comment><USER2> My son's school just uses Renweb: [http://www.renweb.com/](http://www.renweb.com/)

They have a website and Android and iOS apps for it. The mobile apps charge a membership fee, but website access is free for parents and students.

I used to write web apps, I can tell you that you no only have to build a SQL database to store your data in, you also have to build web apps that work with almost every type of web browser. You never know when a parent will use Opera for example instead of Firefox or Chrome or Safari or gasp Internet Explorer.

You will get stuck at certain points and things will break, you'd best have a development system to work on before moving changes to the production system just in case something messes up.

If you are a small high school it might be just you who is developing such a system and it really takes a team of talented people to develop such a system. Even then there are going to be problems that need solving.

When you build your own system, for example, you might not know how to plug security holes and students or hackers can break into it and modify data. Even worse they can delete the entire database.

Let me give you this website on how to prevent SQL injection: [http://bobby- tables.com/](http://bobby-tables.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, security is a big concern and as a school we don't have access to a huge amount of technical resources. My goal is to develop a storage system which will help us maintain collections of accurate and normalized data to support our students; if I'm the gatekeeper that might be the way it plays out. Much better to create something other staff can interact with via an interface- but I'd never even attempt to support use by students and families; as you say, the surface area is just insurmountable.

We're a fairly new school, but I can't fathom how other schools must be running their infrastructure even after having numerous conversations on the topic with other schools in the district...

<comment><USER2> Small nursing homes are in the same boat. My wife works for one such small nursing home and they had to hire a contracting company to develop software for them to move everything from paper to electronic forms. None of the employees know how to write code and they have to have an electronic system to comply with federal laws.

I myself am disabled, but I used to work for a large law firm in developing apps and web apps for them. I wanted to develop software for small law firms, but it never went anywhere. There was never any interest in it and I assume most small law firms keep data in Excel sheets and use VBA macros to automate things. Stuff they wrote themselves. I tried to write a prototype app in Visual BASIC 6.0 in 2003 but never got any interest in it. I never modernized the app to modern technology either.

I've found that many small businesses exist that need solutions and might not be able to afford to pay to develop software for those solutions. Which is why I wanted to develop open source business apps and web apps so they at least have something they can download and customize for their use. But I never got around to it, been busy with real life stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


John Nese: Soda Pop Guy - <AUTHOR> http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/soda_pop_guy/

<comment><USER2> I got to see this guy in person last week (w Peldi from Balsamiq). He's awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get a list of all registered domains - <AUTHOR> Currently I am downloading and parsing the .com TLD zone file and extracting all mapped NS records. However, this doesn't cover cases where a NS record isn't present.<p>What is the most reliable/accurate way of determining all registered domain names (.com TLD only for now). <comment><USER2> Consider the rapid7 FDNS data[1].

1: [https://opendata.rapid7.com/sonar.fdns_v2/](https://opendata.rapid7.com/sonar.fdns_v2/)</comment>


Redesigning the airport boarding pass (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://passfail.squarespace.com/ <comment><USER3> Although this blog post is a few years old, I'd like to shed a little light onto why boarding passes haven't changed in years.

To redesign the boarding pass, you have to understand how the data is processed and presented. Often the terminals and printers are shared between airlines, so there has to be a standard.

Each airline uses something called a PECTAB. This a basically a template that has coordinates of where the data is to be printed (text & logo). It's loaded on the printer each time the airline terminal application (such as Sabre, Amadeaus, etc.) connects to the CUTE (Common Use Terminal Emulator, IATA standard) API hosted on the computer which acts as a gateway to the printers, OCR scanner, etc. Did I mention this is a shared terminal by several airlines that have completely different applications? :)

A lot of the BTP (boarding pass) printers either use the older dot style printing, but the newer thermal (GPP) printers are becoming more common because they are cheaper to maintain.

Unfortunately, the terminal emulators and CUTE standard hasn't kept up to date with the available technology, a lot airlines are still running on mainframes from 25+ years ago.

<comment><USER4> Great comment, and informative, but...

>a lot airlines are still running on mainframes from 25+ years ago

That's really not related to this topic at all. The TPF mainframes have little to do with how the boarding pass looks. That functionality is in other systems/code.

The TPF mainframe for most airlines at this point is just a big nosql database, surrounded by a bunch of other systems that aren't old. If you replaced it, the customer facing stuff wouldn't look or act much differently.

The sprawl of the applications around it, and the lack of consistency across those is actually a bigger problem than the TPF mainframe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like that we are integrating more and more well designed products and utilities in our day to day life; beautiful, easy to use objects are no longer a luxury. That by itself is a glorious win.

People, however, tend to forget the old but gold adage: "Form follows Functionality". I mean, this talented designer ventured into poking fun of the work of other people without even taking the time to understand the problem, the proposed solution, and the constraints that were/are in place.

Yes, his design is infinitely more good looking. But did the designer took into consideration how applicable is it in the real world, with real logistics and real business scenarios? No. Of course he didn't.

The reason I'm saying this is because I suffer those atrocities every day in my work, were I'm tasked with the coordination between journalists and designers for a business magazine.

Where I work, we believe that infographics' main mission is to help readers wrap their heads around things they wouldn't if we presented them as text or tables. That's the point of them being there in the first place. Making them pretty is just a way to make people look at them, and be happy while they learn something new. It is so satisfying to create such pieces.

Designers, however, seem to discard all of that, caring only about how trendy the damn gradient is. I was even called ignorant and 'noob' by a designer, one that I fought to recruit a week earlier, because I suggested making numbers readable, something he deemed old-fashioned and would ruin his master-fucking- piece.

I really hope that people will be more aware that design is not a goal by itself; it's a tool to make people care, learn and be more happy.

Edit: OMGrammar!

<comment> et-al > Designers, however, seem to discard all of that, caring only about how > trendy the damn gradient is. I was even called ignorant and 'noob' by a > designer, one that I fought to recruit a week earlier, because I suggested > making numbers readable, something he deemed old-fashioned and would ruin > his master-fucking-piece.

I suspect a lot of designers are really just designing for dribbble/Behance portfolios so they can finally climb the ladder to Art Director.

<comment><USER6> Now you have a scenario to screen the next designer you interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find the tall skinny letters are much harder to read and random elements like the country map just add clutter. Giant color backgrounds are also distracting and probably make printing more expensive while lowering quality for people who print passes at home.

Overall I prefer existing boarding passes, which aren't actually that complicated these days. Also many people now use digital passes on their mobile phones that are much easier to use with built-in intelligence and real- time updates.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the new design is worse than the old design. Not a fan of the narrow font, crowding, and tiny labels (following, not leading, the numbers) for category. Am I flying from gate 22A in seat 11B or vice versa?

The labels for what the number IS should be nearly the same size as the number itself.

The departure time is listed, but the boarding time is not. The boarding time is more critical to know.

<comment><USER9> I totally agree. The text was hard to read. I thought that Timoni West's design was much better than what exists today, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A far better attempt at redesigning the boarding pass was done by Timoni West:

[http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical- boarding-p...](http://blog.timoni.org/post/318322031/a-practical-boarding- pass-redesign)

Unlike the author of this post, West actually endeavored to understand the constraints and requirements before undertaking a redesign. That's the mark of a truly competent designer.

<comment><USER11> This is listed at the end of the author's page fyi, he lists a bunch of other people's designs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I dislike his redesign, because most of what he does is fix the fact that it's ugly. Large-printing the numbers is pointless when the labels are still teeny- tiny and the layout of the tearable stub doesn't match so it's non-obvious that it contains the same info.

Imho, the tearaway should clearly repeat the layout of the big one so the reader can see "this is the same".

I'd sort the data in order. Putting the zone at the end is wrong because you don't use it after the seat. First you need flight number and time, then you gate days where to go, then your zone says where to go, then your seat says where to go. It seems obvious to sort the data like that.

<comment> et-al > I'd sort the data in order.

Yeah, I liked Julian Montoya's design the most because its vertical layout immediately conveys a hierarchy of data (though the gate number is omitted). The other designs, while aesthetically novel, required my eyes to jump around to gleam meaningful information.

<comment><USER12> My problem with Montoya's design is that he used 3 letter abbreviations for the cities... You need the full name. 3 letter airport abbreviations are jargon that should not be the core of user-facing interaction.

<comment><USER13> They can be important. It's important to know if you're flying to LHR or LGW (for London), esp if you're at an airport where planes of the same airline leave to both. Identifying the flight by flight number is often problematic if it's a codeshare flight (displays at the airport only show one or switch infrequently), so identifying by airport and flight time is easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing that these types of articles tend to overlook is consistency across the different types of boarding passes.

You have home printed boarding passes that will be printed on all sorts of awful printers, with bad settings (like printing color to a b/w printer) and poor resolution.

Then, some will be printed on thermal printers at airports, and some on airport controlled thermal printers, some on airline controlled thermal printers. Different models, with different stock, etc.

Finally, the mobile boarding passes.

The employees checking these do better if there's some uniformity across the various formats. Similar for customers.

So, there is a bit of "lowest common denominator" in the current designs. It's on purpose.

<comment><USER14> Meh, the employees will just scan the barcode and look at their computer anyway.

<comment><USER4> The gate agent can do that. Flight attendants can't. Same for the ticket counter.

<comment><USER14> I guess that depends on where you're flying from. The only airport in the last couple of years where I've even had a boarding pass was RIX, otherwise it's always just stored on the frequent flier card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The paper itself is another problem with modern boarding passes. I miss the old-style boarding passes (the kind you'd find a magnetic strip on), when they were printed on thick cardstock (that wouldn't rip if you put them in a pocket or in between the pages of your passport) and not the thin and squicky BPA- infused thermal paper that almost rips on its own.

<comment><USER16> I still get the thick card stock ones fairly often I think it just depends what airport and airline maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What for?

I mean why do you need one? Most of the flights I take in Scandinavia don't have boarding passes I just use the credit card I used to buy the ticket. If a boarding pass is needed I can get it in the form of a QR code on my mobile when I check in online.

<comment><USER18> I personally avoid the mobile app. I have no data plan on my phone, and airport WiFi is not exactly known as the best (or safest). I also have this (probably unfounded) fear of my battery failing and having to go through a bunch of extra effort to get a printed one anyway.

<comment><USER19> I always make a screenshot of mobile boarding card, plus additional one with full-size QR code. Or just keep one as pdf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that the pass has the boarding gate printed on it. I've only flown in Europe (and only started around six years ago), but the gates are available only half-hour or so from the closing time. Is it common in the US to know the gate in advance?

<comment><USER21> Almost always. It's nice because the terminals can be rather large and if you're going to grab a meal prior to departure, you'd want to go to a restaurant that is near the departure gate. Also, different gates used by the same airline are sometimes in totally disjoint post-security areas. Are these things not problems in Europe?

<comment><USER22> Europe has airports ranging from some of the world's biggest (LHR, CDG) to some of the smallest.

At some airports, all flights will be international (e.g. Shannon). At others, all flights will be domestic or within Schengen.

Some airports are almost entirely used by budget airlines (London Luton), others have very few budget airline flights (London Heathrow).

That leaves plenty of flexibility for how the airport is operated. I'd expect a gate printed on the boarding pass as the larger airports with longer, non-EU flights. I'm not surprised when a Ryanair flight only announces the gate a short time before departure, since they have such a short turn-around time everything seems to be last-minute.

<comment><USER21> Makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The main issue I have with this design is that it doesn't account for the cost of implementing the proposed changes.

For paper boarding passes, it's prohibitively expensive to upgrade the printers and self-check-in kiosks to support new-fangled boarding pass layouts. Plus, you have to do it at every airport around the world.

It would be far cheaper to have some professionally printed full-color paper templates to feed into the printers (see, for example, Virgin America boarding passes issued at SFO).

Plus, iPhone Passbook tickets are uniformly designed, and have the key information (seat number, boarding time) in slightly bigger bold font at the top. It would be far cheaper to get an airline to install eTicket readers (aka QR code scanners) at the few small airports that don't have them, and then to upgrade their mobile apps to support generating Apple Passbook boarding passes for the remaining ticket types that don't work (e.g. group fares).

</comment><comment><USER24> Let's look at this from a tired traveler perspective. Not sure whether you had the joy of being on the other end of a transoceanic flight but typically by that time you have been up for too long, stressed from packing, passing security, immigration then sitting 10-12-16 hours in an overpressurized dry aluminium tube.

Your brain wants to shut down. You are staring at this piece of paper which has the flight number, the gate number and the seat number in roughly the same size, the same font and in every which way visually the same.

I did get dangerously close to mixing up my gate with my seat. More than once. It's an atrociously bad design.

And it's not that hard to improve. All it needs is more folds. First fold, flight / gate. You don't give a shit about seat so hide it. This doesn't require new printers , new standards or shit. Just one more fold in the paper. Is that so hard?

</comment><comment><USER25> As someone with a suffix in their name, I'd like if the name portion could just stop corrupting my name. IIRC, the last airline took:

      First Name: John
      Middle Initial: Q
      Last Name: Smith
      Suffix: III

as input ( _in separate fields!_ , and in the above order) and printed that as:

      JOHNIII SMITH Q

Note the lack of space separating the given name and the suffix, the odd positioning and ordering of _all_ of the elements of the name…. This is nowhere close to how its represented on my legal ID, and I've never in my life written my name that way.

Then you take this boarding pass to security, where a TSA agent squints at it thinking to himself "this is definitely fake", until the barcode scans and it comes back as good.

</comment><comment><USER26> _> This is the actual boarding pass I got from Delta. It's a nightmare. Note all the random alignments and spacing issues._

What on earth made him assume that these alignments and spaces were random? I bet the scanners that read them think they're gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER27> The first thing I couldn't help but notice was how much _ink_ these new designs would use! That seems like a major design flaw for an industry with such tight margins.

<comment><USER28> Plus, white on black gives a dope contrast but that's real expensive to print at scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thoughts on having one "website" for a blog post? I think its kind of cool - gives more weight to the post. But it definitely creates a disconnect between the author and the post.. I can't navigate to the author's site for other work, or to find this blog post again, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't we get rid of the boarding pass altogether?

I mean, I'm always carrying two things around the airport: my passport and the boarding pass.

I think this can be reduced to one thing: just my passport, by letting the airport deal with boarding electronically.

<comment><USER30> >I think this can be reduced to one thing: just my passport, by letting the airport deal with boarding electronically.

What if you don't have a passport? Add a smartphone dependency?

<comment><USER31> credit card? driving license?

<comment><USER32> Not everyone is flying on a ticket they paid for.

And children don't have drivers licenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is the boarding pass for the last flight I took: [https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg](https://s1.postimg.org/7z1w2wwm7/IMG_0048.jpg)

It has some of the changes seen in his redesign, but still a lot closer to the original one from Delta. I think it's perfectly fine and practical, despite not being exactly visually pleasant; all the information I care about is in big bold letters at the top, without any strange codes or abbreviations.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's great that so much thought has been put into the design that is printed on boarding passes, but one thing that's always bothered me about them is the physical size.

Every passport is the same size, and you almost always are carrying your passport while flying.

If boarding passes were the same size as passports, they'd fit inside much more easily and make it a lot more convenient to carry.

Sure, the design printed on the paper is important too, but IMHO the size of the pass is far more important!

<comment><USER35> >you almost always are carrying your passport while flying.

What? Flying internationally is a rare event even for rich people (business travelers excepted). Most of us will do it a handful of times, or not at all. I'd estimate the vast majority of flights to be domestic. You just use the photo ID that's already in your wallet.

If you don't want to carry an additional object, just put it in Passbook on your phone using the airline's app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's a purely practical thing that these need to deal with: sometimes when you board you hand over the end stub and keep the large portion, and sometimes you hand over the large portion and are given the stub .... This means that all (or enough) information needs to be on both bits .... You can't just put the seat number on one bit (or the flight number on one bit, as you may need it for customs forms later) etc etc

</comment><comment><USER37> I like it, I think it's more readable compared to the one that they show as a current one on the top. It took me a while to find a departure time and gate number on the original boarding pass. All the important pieces like flight number, seat and departure time are really easy to read compared to the original.

The problem on the original is that they don't emphasize the important information pieces, all is printed in the same font style and size.

<comment><USER38> I really dislike comments that are negative about design when someone has spent a lot of time researching the problem and the commenter has not. With that said, here is me doing that exact thing:

I agree with usaphp. With equal visual hierarchy, it's dismissing the fact that you care about some items 0% of the time and some items 100% of the time. And this difference between these states can change in minutes. For example, I don't care at all what my seat assignment is until I'm on the plane. I don't care at all what zone I'm boarding until I'm at the gate. I don't care at all what gate it says because gates change all the time. Even if I used mobile kiosk for check-in and it gives me a gate, there's a non-trivial chance that by the time I get to the terminal, that gate has changed. I do not rely on the gate assignment on my boarding pass, ever.

Similar items are not grouped when they should be: such as boarding time and gate.

And the font is not glance-able. It's a nice font that takes little width, but unless they start changing code share codes to "DL50,381,172", there's a ton of extra space that could be used. (of course whitespace is valuable too, but squishing information together for the sake of squishing it together is not a wise design decision.

Regarding someone's comment about color/shitty printers - this kind of design would require two designs: one b/w and one color. The strength of the reds and blues would take over the important information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Meanwhile for Qantas in Australia on domestic flights, you just tap your frequent flyer card to check-in and scan it's barcode at the gate to board. It does print a small slip with your seat allocation on it at that point though.

Now someone just has to build e-Ink into the card.. which I know has at least partly been done by some of those virtual credit card startups.

</comment><comment><USER40> I know KLM recently introduced boarding documents you can print and fold four- ways so that it was pretty much the size of your passport and if you have a two-flight connection there would be one on each side. The overall details are pretty well laid out as well.

I'd post an example, but the only one I have is my own boarding pass, so that's not really an option.

<comment><USER41> Virgin America's are similar[1] and I really liked the way they did it.

1: [https://www.subtraction.com/2014/10/13/virgin-america- boardi...](https://www.subtraction.com/2014/10/13/virgin-america-boarding- pass/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish someone would add the departure time (origin TZ), flight duration, arrival time (origin TZ) and arrival time (destination TZ).

<comment><USER43> Amen brother. I often ring to get a taxi to meet me at the arrival - <USER2> current design I have to look it up separately as opposed to on boarding pass... Also an indication of predicted flight time is really useful (even if subject to change because valid at time printed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The design is worse to me. Black background for reading is a bad idea, and there's a lot of things competing for attention because everything is so big. They could do with better font too... way too hard to read and thin.

White background + gotham font + white background + proper spacing + a splash of color = win

</comment><comment><USER45> "So I took out my Moleskine and started sketching."

You lost me with your hipster pretentiousness.

</comment><comment><USER46> I really like the human text design, it's the only one that's a real improvement and easy to process.

I feel a lot of the others are swapping practicality for looking like an infrographic, prettier but just as difficult to process

</comment><comment><USER47> This article is from 2010. The "designer"* loses credibility for not having a date on his blog post (at least the boarding cards have that).

*Using a bigger typeface is "design"?!

</comment><comment><USER48> Why don't you just use an app that displays the barcode? It's been a while since I've boarded a flight using a paper ticket.

<comment><USER42> If you have checked luggage, they print boarding passes for you and stick the baggage tag labels on the pass. At that point you have a paper pass so using the mobile one doesn't make much sense.

Also, if you are traveling internationally, the boarding pass is mandatory for the various security and immigration stamps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's interesting that since 2008, almost a decade ago, basically nothing has changed with respect to boarding pass layout and design.

<comment><USER20> For reference, here's Ryanair's current paper boarding pass: [http://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/wp- content/uploads/2017...](http://travelupdate.boardingarea.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/RyanairQuad2.jpg)

I find it quite usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Title should include date for a 2010 blog post.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd like for boarding passes to fit in my passport without folding them or hanging out.

</comment><comment><USER52> Apple Wallet does a pretty good job of displaying boarding passes.

No ink, no paper, and easy for me to read.

</comment><comment><USER53> ffs stop using 12h time

</comment><comment><USER54> Boarding passes used to be on glossy cardstock with preprinted designs and lots of color. Now they're basically thermal printed on receipt paper because it's cheaper.

Depending on your airline and class of travel, sometimes you can still get a nice boarding pass.

</comment><comment><USER55> this is so old (2008, with updates till 2010).

why is this up again?

must have been on HN multiple times now.

<comment><USER56> > must have been on HN multiple times now.

It has been posted 8 years ago [1], then again twice 7 years ago [2,3], then 3 years ago [4].

        [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029181
        [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1278476
        [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549613
        [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7791097

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Designer should understand that boarding pass at today, should no longer be designed, instead, software should be written to handle those things automatically.

The technology to automate boarding is already there and are very mature.

<comment> martin-adams Not sure I fully understand what you're concluding. If it's handled automatically, how do you get the passengers at the right gate, at the right time and in the right seat?

<comment><USER57> Google now already can infer those information from emails.

Just pass a UID of the ticket information, and any decent software company and given you phone app that automate _everything_...

<comment> martin-adams Right, so essentially pushing the presentation of information to third parties. I understand what you mean now, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows Beta coming in Early 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2009/11/11/cloud-servers-for-windows-beta-coming-in-early-2010/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome news, I was asking them about it for some time now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder why they don't offer 256MB instances.

<comment><USER4> I have a hard time imagining how a Server 2k3 or 2k8 instance would be useful with only 256MB of RAM.

<comment><USER5> Sarcasm...</comment></comment></comment>


GM's Stock Buyback Is Bad for America and the Company - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/03/gms-stock-buyback-is-bad-for-america-and-the-company <comment><USER2> > Taxpayers and workers brought GM out of bankruptcy, yet it is the hedge > funds that will reap the biggest rewards. Taxpayers and workers should > demand that open-market repurchases by all companies be banned. Stock > buybacks manipulate the stock market and leave most Americans worse off. In > this case, it is clear that what is good for the hedge funds is bad for the > United States.

Stock repurchases are just a different way of paying dividends. Nothing scary about them.

<comment><USER3> Stock repurchases are a different way of paying dividends IF the stock is undervalued. Is GM undervalued?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't matter if the stock is undervalued (which is a strictly subjective premise anyway - undervalued by what measure?). If it's overvalued that just reduces the value proposition of the buyback. The value proposition is always positive no matter what price is paid (that however says nothing about the specific value proposition, merely that it's a positive number).

I'd argue that GM is closer to undervalued than anything else. It's capable of yielding at least $6 billion in net income over the next four quarters, giving it in the neighborhood of a 10 multiple. The economy looks to remain strong'ish over 12 months, the consumer is spending and able to borrow at low rates, which will continue to float GM's sales.

It's also worth noting it's not enough to only take the over / under valuation of the stock into account when doing a buyback. You have to account for use of cash - that is, what's the best use of your cash holdings. If there are no great alternatives - for any number of reasons - there is nothing wrong with doing stock buybacks when the stock price is richly valued (especially if the cash held is producing mediocre returns, as cash does today). Buying the stock back may be a vastly superior choice to sitting on the cash when it comes to producing returns for shareholders.

Chipotle is famous for doing this despite their very hefty valuation and relatively rapid expansion. Has turned out very well for shareholders.

<comment><USER5> "It doesn't matter if the stock is undervalued."

Warren Buffett has written the opposite of this numerous times. Paying $1 for something that is worth 80 cents (even if it's your own stock) destroys shareholder value. The math and logic behind this is so basic, I don't understand how anyone could believe otherwise.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't matter if the stock is undervalued for this narrow question of dividends vs stock repurchases.

If an outside investor buys stock, of course, under/overvaluation matters.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes it's easiest to illustrate the flaw in a theory by using extreme examples, so please forgive me for the hyperbole.

Let's say you have a company with only $100M in discounted future earnings (and no significant balance sheet assets), but it is trading on the market for $1B. This 10x intrinsic value scenario isn't common in real life but we definitely see examples like it during market bubbles.

The company wants to distribute $1M back to shareholders. If it pays a dividend, shareholders receive the full million less taxes - so perhaps $600-750k in their pockets.

If on the other hand the company buys back $1M in stock, they are buying 0.1% of $100M in future earnings, or $100k.

If my post doesn't make sense, google "Buffett on buybacks." He's written about the subject in a number of his annual letters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Share re-purchase actions take money held by the company and transfer it to stockholders. It's a statement by management that "we don't have good ways to _invest_ this money in building the business further, so we're gonna just return it to shareholders."

That in itself is not a negative statement to make. There are market conditions in which a company simply cannot effectively invest $1b productively, or $5b, or $8b.

The author of the piece doesn't address this. What is his alternative plan for where to put the money? He says "if the old GM had 'saved' money...." it would have had more to withstand the eventual downturn in 2009. Well where exactly would GM save its money today? In a bank? Investing in someone _else 's_ shares?

GM has been ramping up production (building factories) in China but that looks like a huge risk given the proven willingness of the Chinese government to seize foreign commercial investments.

Should GM be building more factories in the USA? EU? Should it be investing in massive new electric vehicle research? All interesting possibilities.

but Mary Barra doesn't have a plan for the money, which is why an activist investor asked for her to give it to the owners of the stock. If she had said - "look, I understand you want the $5b, but it's better for the company long- term if we invest it in developing XXX" \- then the shareholders might have sided with management.

</comment><comment><USER7> The author makes some valid points, but instead of banning stock buybacks for all companies, I think there would be a stronger case for banning stock buybacks for companies that have been beneficiaries of bailouts with public money.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a new leaf for HBR arguing for the general public over the hedge fund.</comment>


What went wrong with Pokemon Go? - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-19/what-went-wrong-with-pokemon-go/7942726 <comment><USER2> Did anything go wrong? It was always going to have a short shelf life.</comment>


One dead in early morning shooting at Seattle Capitol Hill protest zone - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/one-dead-one-critical-in-early-morning-shooting-at-capitol-hill-protest-zone/ <comment><USER2> Follow Justin Carder on Twitter for more details: [https://twitter.com/jseattle](https://twitter.com/jseattle)

Justin is the publisher of [https://www.capitolhillseattle.com](https://www.capitolhillseattle.com), which has been the best source of news for Capitol Hill for over a decade.

</comment><comment><USER3> Without ad-blocker blocker: [https://outline.com/RH7feg](https://outline.com/RH7feg)

</comment><comment><USER4> And the crowd _still_ opposed the cops?

This seems just plain crazy. I suppose it will take more violent deaths before people begin to realize a giant block-party isn't a good model for government.

<comment><USER5> Failing to be perfect is not the same as failing to be better.

Honest question: is this event statistically significantly out of line with historic trends? Is it better or worse?</comment></comment>


Codebender: Online development and collaboration platform for Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://codebender.cc/ <comment><USER2> This looks great. We launched an event tracker for the Arduino Tracker a while back[1] and have struggled to bring it to the attention of the Arduino community - so any equivalent to Rubygems or LuaRocks for Arduino would be awesome.

[1] [https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-arduino- tracker](https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-arduino-tracker)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this mbed for Arduino?</comment>


ThingieQuery: $19 SQL IDE for Excel - <AUTHOR> http://www.thingiequery.com/ <comment><USER2> Dude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least half the companies I work with (oil & gas companies—they are addicted to Excel like it's crack or something) would buy this for quite a bit if it were marketed at them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and business.

<comment><USER3> Just a thought, you may want to think about changing the name if you're going after enterprise. Feels a bit amateurish/not serious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely true. Having trouble coming up with a name. Open to ideas. Currently I'm thinking "Tabularity", I've bought the domain. Not 100% set on it, but I'm definitely set on changing the name.

<comment><USER4> SQExcel? The domain sqexcel.com is available.

<comment><USER5> I'd advise against using the term 'excel' in the product, unless you use it as 'blah for Excel'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not every day that you come across such rave comments about a "Show HN" kind of thing. Congratulations to the dev.

I'm not familiar with enterprise / Excel requirements & use cases. Could someone explain why is this such a great product [1]. I wrongly assumed that excel champs won't be comfortable dealing with SQL because they are either non-engineers or have been away from programming for way too long.

[1] No offense to the author, I'd love to understand what the enthusiasm is all about.

<comment><USER7> Excel superuser here. There's a lot of excel users who aren't comfortable with SQL, but I think they're a dying breed. The SQL you need to know for about 99% of your workflow is something you can learn in a couple of weekends. Most of the younger people I know learn SQL basics in college (I'm talking about business people, not just engineers).

Spreadsheets are just really terrible at data manipulation. Good Excel analysts know this and understand why a query language is so useful.

Data usage is exploding and business users want to roll their own analyses and not wait around for an IT ticket to be filled. So having business users able to easily use SQL in Excel makes things a lot more efficient.

Using VLOOKUP functions and pivot tables is just not an elegant solution to a lot of data problems. A SQL script would be much more useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Little bit of advice:

1) Obfuscate your deliverables

2) Don't store the Licensing information in plain-text in a XML file; it's trivial to create a generator to generate a valid license for the current product. Make sure to use a public/private key you sign it and check it, not giving the client the information to create a valid license if they know the CPU Id, Hdd s/n's and Nic Mac Adresses.

Other than that: well done, looks great and as others have said: market it for enterprises and buy a boat :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

1 - much debate about this, it's certainly safer to do so

2 - if you take a look at the license again you'll notice the digital signature field, to make a generator you would need my private key:P

Boat is good, I like boat. :)

<comment><USER5> OK, good; I just did a quick decompile and skip through the code to see; glad you have it covered :)

It's cool to see you stuck with it; looking at your history, it really is a shame it hadn't got the attention it deserved earlier on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=anakic)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it was fun, I felt it was the type of tool I would want for my self in Excel. Also, not liking ones regular job goes a long way to fuel enthusiasm for hobby projects:) And it did hit the front page when /u/petepete crossposted it from reddit last year, which was a big moral boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every now and then one sees something on HN that makes you think "why didn't I think of that?" This is one of those ideas executed very well. My prediction is this guy makes millions and is eventually bought by Microsoft for a ridiculous sum of money.

I think he'd be a shoe-in for YC, but I also think that'd be a waste now - with a product like this he can easily show it off to investors and raise money, if needed, or just bootstrap off his own revenue. $120K for 7% is not a good deal with a polished product like this - I think it would be easy to beat.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is an awesome product, but: the name and price-point will not encourage customers to take the product seriously.

For a while I've been thinking about how hard it is to wean corporate analysts off Excel (it's their frame of reference) and on to something more 'Enterprise-y', and the solution is to go the other way and scale Excel instead.

This product is an excellent start at that.

<comment><USER10> Strongly agree on scaling Excel. Excel is deeply entrenched in corporate environments because it's the go to tool for users when IT depts can't or won't deliver what they need. Consequently there's a huge amount of Excel based end user generated solutions out there that are business critical. Looks like ThingieQuery has hit a sweet spot for power users working on Excel-as-a- DB type problems. Another outfit taking the scale up Excel approach is BlockSpring. Thingie could add a lot of value manipulating BlockSpring imported data. My own interests lie in Excel-as-calc-engine rather than DB, and I think there's a lot of value to be had in scaling up calcs by serverizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is AWESOME! Nice work!

If I can offer a button nitpick - I suggest "Try it out for free!" in big text, and "Version 188.8.131.52, 2016-04-26" in small text. Maybe as simple as wrapping the version info in a <small> tag.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, I'm pretty proud of it!:) That's a good point, the version isn't really the important part, will do.

<comment><USER12> Wow I just checked and you already updated - fast work!

Also this is a really nice piece of work, great job

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it was simple enough to change and VS was already open, so I figured why not change it right away... Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This ought to be a part of Excel. Microsoft, bring out your wallet for this fine gentleman!

<comment><USER14> At least Excel 2013 and above has the ability to build models of related tables, but not full SQL afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is amazing. Microsoft is going to buy you for a TON of cash. I said it first! (?)

<comment><AUTHOR> If it happens, I will find you and make sure you get TONS of beer delivered to your doorstep:)

<comment><USER15> I am so down for this. I'm also down to grab a beer at any point on your journey. You should be really proud of what you've built.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds awesome! Send me some contact info and I'll get in touch!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This provides a lot of value for businesses - therefore I'd definitely charge more. I would also consider changing the name to something else - "Thingie" might cause some friction in purchases.

As to setting the price - I'd look at comparables such as Sublime, JetBrains IDEs/Resharper. I'd be looking at charging at least $49 - but I think $79 to > $100 would feel right to me.

As to a long term enterprise pricing plan, I dunno - but I'd definitely be looking at it.

Good luck and well done.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks great, but your pricing sucks. $19, seriously? Multiply that 10-20-50 fold.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your comment:) That's the home version of it, the commercial is $149/year per machine. Basically I need traction, and a community of users, so I'm aiming for it being affordable for people to use at home. I'm hoping this will transfer into people wanting to use it in their companies which is where I charge money. As I mentioned before, I'm a complete noob in business and marketing so I might be going about this very wrong. In any case, I'm very open to suggestions.

<comment><USER18> Get rid of the "home" version. Your market is business. Up your prices 2-3 fold per license. Rename it.

P.S. And quit claiming you're a noob. You're in business now. So get to reading on positioning your product and doing some direct outreach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, all very good points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I fully agree that enterprise version would be in high demand. I work in a business org at a large tech company. Everybody is an excel user, most are sort of familiar with SQL but aren't great at setting up ETL jobs. This product is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you support the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLEDB, it's worth mentioning. That opens up a bunch of additional data sources for folks, potentially including Active Directory, and suddenly you're (maybe) getting the attention of enterprise IT folks as well as the business side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't support it yet, did not think to use it for directory services, that's an excellent idea! PowerQuery can query ad already though but still, it's worth investigating. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just an FYI...Exact software offer a similar tool like this to enable power users to query their data. It's not fully loaded as this so you might be up for grabs if the price is right. Why not connect with them after you review your value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any idea what the tool is called? Can't seem to find it on their website

<comment><USER22> I think he's referring to Power Query / Get & Transform

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a heavy excel user this is tremendous. I've always wanted to be able to run SQL queries against a Range.

However: from much experience working in gigantic firms where Excel forms the core of a like a gazillion work flows and is the default analytics platform - sadly most users just aren't technical enough for this to be useful to them. There's probable a niche 1% who'd get value from this. Most people do not understand databases, SQL, and have little/no experience in any kind of coding including VBA.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google Sheets has a "query" function in which you can write out SQL-like scripts and I have found it to be tremendously useful. I've been disappointed that a similarly easy-to-use function doesn't exist in Excel. This is a solution to that problem.

At first I thought this might not be all that useful given Excel's Power Query functionality, but then I realized there are still a lot of use cases where this could come in handy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (I'm the author)

<comment><USER24> Tried downloading without giving an email addy and it threw "The parameter 'to' cannot be an empty string." with a stack trace - might want to check inputs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is quite impressive! Congratulations! Its cool stuff such as this that makes the life of a lot of people easier. Good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's the plan! And hopefully to earn a decent living while I'm at it:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Incredible! I wish this was out before I switched roles. Would've been extremely useful especially for advanced pivoting.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks like it is Windows only. Is it likely that there will be a Mac version in the nearish future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately no. The way it integrates into Excel is only available in Excel for Windows. Excel for Mac just doesn't have many ways you can talk to it (that I'm aware of).

<comment><USER28> super bummer! I clicked on purchased with paypal and then decided to check and make sure if there was mac option or not. It's too bad there is not. I was ready to buy. That said, great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the thought that counts:) Yeah, it's a shame there's no way to integrate with Excel for Mac, not a small market either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow this is excellent. In telecom, _everything_ gets passed around as Excel sheets. And people spend non trivial effort screwing around in it. This would have saved so much time.

Like everyone else said, your pricing and marketing is aiming too low.

</comment><comment><USER30> Am I misunderstood somewhere? Did you provide a sql interface to excel? are you asking a DBA to use excel instead of a real database?

For me, it seemed to be more interesting to provide an excel interface to database.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both really. Some times you don't need the overhead of a database, you just want to do a damn join in Excel or something.

But also, it has the option to connect to an external database. When connecting, you can pull Excel tables into the database as temp tables, do queries (or import the data from the temp tables into permanent tables), and write results back into Excel. What's more you can automate this, even without VBA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very very well done! I have no use for this right now but I'm buying it anyway because you deserve the support. Congrats on launching!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, much appreciated!:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Are you open to re-selling? Maybe white label it? If you don't want to talk about it publicly please email me (check profile). :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would have to think about it, I think I'd say yes to re-selling, not sure about white labeling though, to be successful with it I need to build the brand. Too late here to say anything more, barely awake at the moment:)

<comment><USER32> I will email you. Thanks for the response. Go sleep. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dayummmm..!!!! (y) That is soooo awesommeee..!!! :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Can I use window functions like partition by?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you connect using a SQL Server instance yes, with the built in database - no, SQLite doesn't have them yet.

I've added some of my own functions to the SQLite engine though, e.g. ElementAt(pos, elements, orderElements) will return the element at position pos in a group, ordered by orderElements. Not exactly window functions, but close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So... pivot tables?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're good for aggregating data, but they're not designed for precise querying, manipulating and cleaning data. If they were, we'd likely see powerpivot replacing sql server management studio:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> On HN stories are treated as dupes if they have had significant attention in about the last year, which [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9783022) did. If there's something significantly different, it would be best to post specifically about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Dang. That's true, it's been less than a year:( It was a hobby project back then and I've switched to full time now. Trying to launch it properly now. I've done serious work in the meantime and lowered the price, and I think it's worth another go. Rules are rules though. Should I remove it?

<comment><USER36> Ok, we restored the post and put the price back in the title. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Gosh, analytics instantly going up:)</comment></comment></comment></comment>