X.org lost $5000 from their Paypal account - <AUTHOR> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg/42541/focus=42548

<comment><USER2> Forget PayPal, what about the 5 grand that "vanished into the Brazilian banking system"? That seems like the kind of line-item that merits explanation.

<comment><USER3> Messages later in the thread say that it was money wired to two Brazilians that they were sponsoring to fly to the conference with the travel scholarships, that never got to the intended recipients. Unfortunately, money wires frequently have problems like that. The security is basically entirely at the receiving point, which is supposed to not hand over the wired cash to anyone except the person it was wired to, and is supposed to properly check IDs and such. But if someone else gets it, either because of lax checking, fake documentation, or unscrupulous employees at the bank, it's basically gone; unlike with credit cards and such, you can't chargeback a wire transfer (which is why 419 and Craigslist scammers ask for money to be sent that way).

<comment><USER4> After trying to pay a contractor via wire once and losing hundreds of dollars in fees after his bank botched the transaction (mercifully, I didn't lose the entire amount), I will never wire money again. I would recommend the same to anyone else. You don't even have to be dealing with a bad bank; it's just not a safe way to send money to anyone.

The funniest part is I only tried a wire transfer because I didn't want to use PayPal. After that disaster, I ended up choosing the devil I knew and sending all his payments via PayPal after that.

<comment><USER5> Postal money orders are much more secure if you're sending money within the US. I understand they can be a bit dodgy too though internationally, depending on the professionalism of the national postal service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone trust PayPal at all anymore? If you have _ever_ needed technical support from them you'll learn to hate them immediately. I once spent 2 days trying to talk to a real human about deductions from my checking account that had no corresponding line item in paypal. I finally got a human who said he'd call me back, and never did.

I eventually got it sorted, months later. Eff paypal.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to hear a little more detail than "$5k lost to paypal". When PayPal "decides you are scammers", they hold your funds for 180 days like any other payment service provider (as Visa and MasterCard operational regulations say they should, 180 days is the maximum time most banks allow for chargebacks)... then they return the money (less any chargebacks) to you. The money isn't lost, it's temporarily held.

<comment><USER8> Paypal's operating rules may have changed, but I've similarly been bitten by money lost due to Paypal.

Here's how the scam works: someone buys something from you on eBay, pays you via Paypal. You diligently send off the good, and delivery confirmation shows it was received. The buyer waits till the last day possible to report the item as not received, Paypal puts your account in the red and you're stuck with the bill.

<comment><USER7> You provide the tracking number of the shipment and you automatically get the money back. You don't even have to prove anything. Tracking number showing you shipped _any_ package to the buyer's listed address is all you need to be covered by the Seller Protection Policy. If you actually sent them an empty box, they'll have to sue, because PayPal will let you keep that money.

<comment><USER9> I bought a stolen laptop off ebay. Told paypal it was stolen and they gave me all the money back, just told me to keep the paperwork from sending it back to the owner incase the seller decided to object. I never heard from the seller.

<comment><USER10> So, did you find the original owner?

<comment><USER9> yeah, very easily. I sent the laptop back to him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> x.org vs. x.com

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like an awesome court case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the best alternative to paypal for accepting donations or small payments for content on a site?

<comment><USER13> In my opinion, there are none. Paypal sucks but it's also the best. I tried switching to alternatives for a while, like Paystone, E-Gold, etc. Sales plummeted as a result, they're too confusing for customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Warning: Confirmation Bias Hazard Ahead

Please do not forget to take into account all the other money that flow through the paypal channel, successfully.

<comment><USER14> Given that it is easy for human beings to fall into, I thought I might warn people about it.

Of course, it is "blindingly obvious", but that's because it is hindsight. If I have not post this warning, will a Hacker News reader goes on an rant or ancedote about the evil of Paypal? Who knows.

P.S, I recently got high off reading Black Swan, which provide a fresh perspectives on things in addition to what I simply already know.

<comment><USER15> Thank you for trying to protect us mere human beings from ourselves.

<comment><USER14> Naw, I am just a mere human being who just happens to be self-aware of his limitation at this time.

I deceive myself if I think I am not vulnerable to the confirmation bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hm. paypal randomly invalidates payments, but as far as I can tell, if I don't get the money, the person sending the money gets it. Hm.

<comment><USER17> They do this, but apparently they randomly freeze funds too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Haven't they heard of QuickBooks? This really shouldn't be this complicated for them to know where money went.

<comment><USER19> Does Quickbooks have a Linux based version these days? Shouldn't that be GNUCash?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> how does x.org and x.com have 1 letter domains but b.org and z.org etc are unavailable domains?

<comment><USER21> Because they were registered before IANA reserved all available single-letter domains in 1993.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second- level_doma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> never trust any Brazilian financial institution, they are lazy, bureaucratic and profit driven. whenever I need something "odd" from those institutions I spend about 4 or 5 days on phone calls and in-site meetings.

<comment><USER23> The Brazilian _banking system_ is actually pretty good. That's not to say that some _banks_ are bad. State-owned banks are usually like you describe, but private banks usually work very well. Bear in mind also that in Brazil financial institutions are the ones who invest the most on IT, by far.

After two years living in the U.S and having banks charging you outrageous fees for the most idiotic reasons, or having transactions taking almost one week to be completed, I can confidently say the Brazilian system has is pretty much first-class.

<comment><USER24> It's just quite annoying that the Brazilian banks are not in the IBAN system, and only some banks work internationally at all. There are a lot of regional banks you can't even use to pay in another region of the country...

<comment><USER25> I was mildly surprised to learn that US banks don't participate in IBAN either.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russian hacker release 1998 Blizzards Warcraft Adventures - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrollsoflore.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1511626 <comment><USER2> Unbelievable this did not get more attention. Maybe Dan can rescue it from HN limbo?

Anyway Mediafire killed the download.</comment>


Photo of Silicon Valley tech executives doctored to include women: report - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/448266-tech-titans-photo-doctored-to-include-women-report <comment><USER2> Buried half-way into the article:

> "Both of the women CEOs were reportedly at the event, their respective press > teams told Newsweek."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is non-news

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion, which was flagged for some reason, perhaps anti-Buzzfeed bias: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168340)</comment>


Warren Buffett says he dumped a third of his IBM stock - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/05/investing/buffett-ibm-sale/index.html <comment><USER2> A friend of mine was an employee at a technology support company that supported Walmart's servers, registers, and probably more that I was not aware of. That company recently lost it's contract to IBM. They offered many of the employees contracts at IBM, but the general feeling was that many of them are just there until they finish training their overseas replacements. I tried to find a source to backup this info, but did not find anything. My only source is a reference check from IBM for one of the employees.

I'm not sure how much of an impact a contract of this size has on IBM's value, but it indicates to me that their competitors are a contract renewal away from being absorbed by IBM.

<comment><USER3> Pretty common practice at IBM to get an account, migrate all the people over and then transition them to india, brazil, and mexico at dirt cheap rates. Only 1/10 of converted employees will be left after 2 years.

Watson is trying to force a solution to a typically unknown problem and not the reverse. Projects like this always fail. IBM has failed to make a cloud presence with there own products. Buffet's own investing rules is to understand the product, so maybe he's finally coming to his senses even IBM doesn't understand it's own products and the market demand.

<comment><USER4> Can confirm. I'm Brazilian and my first job out of college was for IBM supporting a US company systems. I was not even an employee of IBM, I was officially a contractor serving IBM serving a US company. Engineering was all in India and support in Brazil because we had timezone overlap and better English accent.

It's a solid business plan if you ask me. There's a lot of money to be made on outsourcing operations that don't need to be in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano Seems like Warren believes a big reason IBM hasn't done well is because of AWS:

"What they [IBM] have run into is some pretty tough competitors. And What I would say is Amazon, which, I've never seen a guy succeed in two businesses simultaneously that are really divergent in terms of customers and operations [Retail and AWS]"... he then praises Jeff Bezos even more.

Question/quote starting at around 11:00

[http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000616150](http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000616150)

<comment><USER5> He's wrong this time. The similarities were more important than differences. Amazon was a logistics company great at moving lots of stuff on the cheap. That made them a retail powerhouse. Then the did the same for server hardware, networks, and VM's. They already had a lot of that, too, from being big eCommerce site.

<comment> tuna-piano I'd suggest that a big reason for the success of AWS is not the efficiency of their data center operations, but the quality of their software. AWS is a software company that happens to sell cloud software. The pricing of their core services is not necessarily lower than the IBM/Google/Microsoft equivalents. People choose AWS because of the breadth and depth of the ecosystem compared to Google/IBM/Microsoft.

The old quote "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" had some truth to it, as IBM was the safe default choice. In the cloud, the truth seems to be "Nobody ever got fired for choosing AWS". AWS is the safe default choice... you'd really need a good reason to go with IBM in the cloud.

<comment><USER5> That sounds true today. Didnt ot originally just have one or two services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess Buffet isn't that bullish on AI, Watson seems to be one of the leading contenders there.

Edit: Given that this is HN, I suppose I should clarify that I'm using "AI" as a catch-all term for Machine Learning/Language Processing/Deep Learning/etc. I apologize for any confusion or emotional distress my use of a commonly understood general term apparently caused...

<comment><USER7> Except Watson, Siri, Alexa, etc aren't real AI. They are very specific applications for a specific task. The idea that they are AI has been great for marketing and creating another "Strong AI is around the corner bubble."

But look at how slowly they have evolved. Siri is barely better than she was 5 years ago. I haven't seen Watson really do much beyond the same language processing and information lookup stuff it did on Jeopardy years ago. The other assistants are somewhat evolved versions of Siri. But they all require special coding to teach them any new task. None of them is really anything like true AI. They are AI only in the sense that they are programs which appear to exhibit intelligent behavior in a very narrow and specific role, like an AI opponent in a video game. But I strongly believe we are not appreciably closer to true AI than we were 10 years ago. We are just in another bubble like the 80s because the people with money don't understand the massive gap between Siri and Hal.

<comment><USER8> I guess you're one of the people to whom there is no "real" AI below general purpos, human-level intelligence. To me, the "simple" language processing and information lookup that Watson does is most definitely AI. Jeopardy is not an easy game and beating the best humans at it was an amazing break-through.

<comment><USER9> > Jeopardy is not an easy game and beating the best humans at it was an > amazing break-through.

The Jeopardy game was marketing. The Kasparov game was marketing. Both were very impressive, but they were marketing.

I think it is telling that whenever anyone mentions IBM and AI near each other in speech that mention of a public AI project (see:marketing demo) is usually just a moment away.

It would be much more impressive to me if someone once said "Oh Company X saves Y amount using Watson" or "Watson tech enables X" which are examples that are _easy_ to come up with when speaking of IBM's competitors.

<comment><USER10> >Both were very impressive, but they were marketing.

Determining product-market-fit, and go-to-market strategy are also 'marketing.' Most of the time (and, definitely in this case), when people use the term 'marketing' on HN, it is better replaced by promotional/advertising which are much more specific/ meaningful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised Buffet didn't dump all of his IBM stock holdings. When you have 20+ straight quarters of not making your numbers something is seriously wrong with the direction the CEO has charted. Ginni Rometty should have been fired long ago for her incompetence.

<comment><USER12> > Ginni Rometty should have been fired long ago for her incompetence.

Although I agree, I'm sure the 5 layers of clueless, infighting management deserve no blame. There's too much dead wood for even the best CEO to make a difference

<comment><USER11> They could always offshore their 5 layers of clueless management. This would enable better synergy between the offshore employees and the clueless offshore management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Buffett's holdings all see decreased IBM spending on the horizon. Buffet knows IBM will need a massive bond infusion as a life raft. Sell the stock now, lend proceeds back to IBM at 12% interest, and buy the shares back at half price.

<comment><USER14> In my opinion, there's no way in hell IBM will end up paying 12% interest on any bonds issued. 20 years ago, perhaps, but not today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "I think if you look back at what they were projecting and how they thought > the business would develop, I would say what they've run into is some pretty > tough competitors."

What market segment is he talking about, and who are the competitors?

<comment><USER16> AFAIK, he hasn't been any more explicit than that, but my guess is that he's talking about cloud providers especially Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

IBM made a push to be a cloud provider fairly early on. However, aside from the fruits of its Softlayer acquisition, none of that has really panned out-- at least not at a scale relevant to IBM's financials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> While IBM is rotating through futuristic themes each year (Smart Cities, Watson, Predictive Analytics), its enterprise customers are lagging behind. Attend an average IBM user group meeting in your area, and you'll see that these customers are busy maintaining core systems with an increasingly outdated tooling. They're struggling with more mundane issues such as integration, reliability, compliance - all of these under cost pressures.

Also, Power is not selling that well in the mid-range segment. The new workloads are being designed for horizontal scalability which is where Linux comes in.

</comment><comment><USER18> IBM could be the best cloud foundry in the world but they refuse to open their gates to hobbyists, ignoring that they will become influencers and influencers bring more users to their platforms.

If I was a Bluemix head honcho I'd create a twin foundry 'Hobbymix' free for all, no questions asked, no credit cards, no resource limits, watson enabled, just play and get addicted with all the cool toys. Then when you're ready, just transfer it all to our enterprise-ready, pro-version at Bluemix with pro level support.

That's how MS took the world by storm. That's how Android is taking it from Apple who's ignoring the poor bases focusing only in the 10% which in the long run will cost them the whole market. That's how Whatsapp took the messaging markets.

Technology is a winner takes all approach, like Google or Facebook. You have to have the whole world using your services no matter what, whether they bring money in or not. Then you can figure out how to milk them, how to show them your new toys and convince them to pay for them, or at least how to praise you for being the cool guy on the block. They have the resources, they need the vision.

I still have test pages I developed on Google App Engine a decade ago. It costs them nothing for I seldom use them, but they have a loyal follower and I go to them for my quick hacks. Instead, Bluemix first didn't allow me to have test pages, now they allow me but with a warning that they will be deleted after a year, plus they charge me for everything I try to use like databases. Bye Bluemix, moved to Heroku now for my tests with free space and free databases. Now you want me to use your new free database? Too late. See? Make it all free, everything, and I may give it a last try once again.

Some may say they focus on enterprises because hobbyists are an annoyance. Sure we are, but we also are the ones who write blogs, twits, who shake the social webs. And people listen to us.

Do you want to know why I learned Python? Because it was free on Google App Engine. Why I learned Go? Free on Google. Why Java? Free on Google. So with the tools I know, where do you think I'll go to try my next ideas? Yep. Google. Now, let me try Swift on Bluemix, then Kotlin, then Rust, then DB2, then Watson, then I'll go to build whatever new project I need on your platform, with your tools. I won't go before, I'll go during and after I learn them. But not on your platform if you won't let me try it.

So, tl;dr; open Bluemix for the whole world to try with an eternal free tier without limits or expiration dates and I'll go with you to try all your new toys. Then we'll help you conquer the world, again.

<comment><USER19> You're right, but it is not in IBM's business culture to give out free things like Google and the rest of others (think Apple).

<comment><USER18> That's exactly the wrong mentality in the business. How much does it cost to allocate a million dockers for a million developers to play? A million dollars? Take it as a huge advertisement billboard that will pay a million fold when they tell their bosses how cool that platform is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I get the feeling that he's using the negative publicity to get IBM to get their act together.

<comment><USER10> Wrong. Buffet (Berkshire) has to disclose its positions. Berkshire still has more than 50M shares. You can't just make shit up, and this crap being on HN is getting tiring.</comment></comment>


Icefilms hacked - <AUTHOR>

just when i was getting into The Wire, icefilms gets hacked. <comment><AUTHOR> Back up. must have been right on top of it.</comment>


Philosophy of Ghost in the Shell (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20120224113551/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell <comment><USER2> I still find it amazing how in 2002 — long before Facebook or YouTube existed — they got so much right about the emergent properties of social media (the Stand Alone Complex piece). It's a brilliant metaphor that just so happened to predate it's subject by a decade.

The anime has some problems; namely pacing and the density of narrative. There are two episodes dedicated exclusively to exposition with no action, and they can be really hard to follow due to the mediocre translation. But if you can see past the very real flaws, there is a gem of a story about the nature of what it means to be human in a connected society.

<comment><USER3> I had trouble getting into the series and was wondering if it was just me, but this makes me want to go back and try Stand Alone Complex again. I really did enjoy the movie. It had really good world building.

<comment><USER4> I recommend watching the original Japanese dubbed version with English subtitles. At that time translation was rough in most anime but this has since then improved.

(For German readers I recommend the German sub, the used the same people who dubbed the Stargate series which did a really good job in both cases.)

<comment><USER5> Just a nit pick but the original Japanese version isn't a dub, it's the original audio. I totally agree it's the best version though.

That being said the English dub is pretty good too.

<comment><USER6> >original Japanese version isn't a dub

Unless SAC is one of those incredibly rare pieces of Japanese animation where the voices were recorded prior to the animation being completed, the Japanese voiced version is just as much a dub as the English version.

>[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dub>dub](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/dub>dub) verb (2)

>dubbed; dubbing

>Definition of dub

>(Entry 4 of 5)

>transitive verb

>1 : to add (sound effects or new dialogue) to a film or to a radio or television production —usually used with "in"

>// They dubbed in the music.

<comment><USER2> The voices may not have been recorded, but the script is almost certainly better in Japanese. The English dub is a static script, but the fan-created subtitles are usually a much better translation than the official ones from that era.

<comment><USER6> I agree completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of my favorite little nuances in the original GITS anime is a scene in the middle that immerses the viewer in the world. This video[0] goes into detail about this and how it relates to aspect-to-aspect transitions in comics.

Comparing this element alone with the nature of the 2017 Hollywood film really has helped me identify so many other similar events in media where I previously would have struggled to pinpoint why I felt certain responses to something I watched.

The most recent example being the comparison of the pacing of The Mandalorian with The Rise of Skywalker.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw)

<comment><USER8> One of the strongest elements in that scene regarding the concept of 'identity' is completely missed by that video: Kusanagi briefly sees someone in an office building that looks exactly like her. It's a great nod to the book, which briefly explains that her face is made to look like a cheap factory-line model, belying the astronomically expensive military grade hardware she's made of. Nothing better than having a bunch of people look exactly like you to make you believe in dualism, if only as a straw for your identity to hand on to.

<comment><USER2> In the Stand Alone Complex timeline, Kusanagi is literally several different people throughout the story. She assimilates memories from a few different sources (the tank in episode 2, the Laughing Man, and Kuze, Puppetmaster in the SAC:SSS movie). It's implied (and made explicit in other GitS timelines) that the only reason she is able to do this and maintain her sense of self is because she was "cyberized" as a young child and had to figure out the answer to the question "who is Motoko Kusanagi?" independently of her physical form.

She even has a line towards the end of the SAC:SSS movie that says something like "next time you meet me I might be a completely different person". But there is indeed a "base" personality that she tries to hold on to (e.g. via her watch) despite the wide range of memories she acquires.

<comment><USER7> The second manga explores this in detail as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "...if the right kind of people begin to believe it was arson, caused by deliberate action, the threat that more arsons will be committed increases drastically.

What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that there is no real originator of the copied action, but merely a rumor or an illusion that supposedly performed the copied action."

<comment><USER10> Also a true pearl:

"...A key point is that due to the electronic communications network that is increasingly permeating society, more and more people are being exposed to the same information and stimuli, making the overall psyche and responses of large groups of people increasingly similar, the result being that the potential increases exponentially for copycat behavior that forms a Standalone Complex. There is no original Laughing Man, no leader. Everyone is acting on their own, yet a coherent whole emerges. There are people who employed the copycat behavior before others, but what started the coherent whole is indefinitive."

<comment><USER11> this runs contrary to the mcluhan-inspired idea that has gained popularity recently — that media fracturing and echo chamber effects are shredding our shared identities and political control structures. i find this idea more convincing; we may have access to the same information flows but everyone has their own bubble, typically part of an ideological camp.

<comment><USER12> Yeah I think the AI's monologue from Metal Gear Solid 2 (basically an anime) cut closer to our present reality:

> _" [...] You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All > rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested > truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the > sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into > their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside > their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing > cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash > nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural > selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." > [...]_

The full version is something like 20 minutes long, but basically the AI argues that digital communication leads to the decentralization of 'truth' and that the solution is employ narrative shaping algorithms against the general public.

<comment><USER13> That was eerily on point for how old that game is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you only watched the rather recent movie: know that they spun the story around 180°.

The original is more of a love letter to technology [SPOILER] and ends with the first merge of human and AI in to something new [/SPOILER] (it's not about technophobic humans policing the bad runaway machines).

<comment><USER15> The original Ghost in the Shell has been one of my favorite films since the first time I seen it. To be honest, there's no other anime I've seen that I actually enjoyed apart from the Cowboy Bebop movie. So I don't consider myself a anime fan. The original GITS is a brilliant film that is beyond a specific genre.

<comment><USER12> You might like the Patlabor series/movies, directed by GITS's director Mamoru Oshii. Particularly the first two movies, which have a more serious tone than the rest of it. And imho the animation and aesthetics of the first two Patlabor movies is right up there with GITS.

<comment><USER5> Honestly I wouldn't recommend Patlabor to someone who only likes the GITS movie and Cowboy Bebop. It's going to feel too slow and cheezy (in a way many anime fans including myself enjoy).

I'd probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.

<comment><USER12> I think the aesthetic/pacing/art of particularly the first two Patlabor movies would probably be appreciated by somebody who's a fan of the first GITS movie specifically. There is a common cyberpunk thread running through both those Patlabor movies and GITS. Patlabor 1 has a plot that easily could have been a GITS plot and spends a lot of time dwelling on the ways apparent progress leaves many people feeling abandoned and worthless.

The Patlabor TV show is definitely much lighter material, a lot more accessible to children.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely check them out. Maybe it's my age, but a lot of what I have seen like Deathnote or even the GITS SAC didn't click with me. Cowboy Bebop was just fun, and I forgot I was watching an anime.

I think maybe it's the high-concept, almost frightening, aspects of GITS that resonated with me. But I understand why it's not popular with most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think my favorite part of Stand-Alone Complex by far (aside from how incredibly prescient much of it is) are the Tachikomas. I really love the idea that the first AGI we develop will necessarily have to pass through a pretty childlike level of understanding about the world while having some unsettling levels of intelligence and competence in some aspects. I love the episode where they're trying to hide the fact that they're developing individuality/sapience but are fairly inept at doing so.

Also, just the psychological warfare aspect of having a military tank with an adorable personality is great.

</comment><comment><USER17> For those who are wondering why it's no longer on wikipedia: "Non-encyclopedic content; a personal essay, a hotchpotch of fan speculation and original research."

</comment><comment><USER18> This used to be on it's own domain as well but it looks like that's gone too now:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180514064448/http://ghostinthes...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180514064448/http://ghostintheshellphilosophy.info:80/)

Looks like the following is the original author. They mention it on their portfolio page:

[https://www.michaelolaya.com/portfolio](https://www.michaelolaya.com/portfolio)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article was deleted from Wikipedia in 2017. There is some deep irony in that fact considering that GiTS has numerous instances of memories being erased or modified.

Thankfully, the Wayback Machine preserved it.

<comment><USER19> Archive.org modifies the memories it stores. But I don't find much irony in the article being deleted. It seems more appropriate as part of a larger article on Ghost in the Shell. It's an aspect of an imaginary world not something that stands alone in the context of general shared experience. An accurate understanding requires boiling all the oceans of Ghost in the Shell. As a standalone, it's more like an academic paper.

Incidentally, to the degree there's irony here, archive.org's modification of the content seems more relevant than it's deletion. Forgotten isn't wrong, it's just forgotten.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find the fact that Wikipedia deletes content to be almost offensive, especially when there are so many 'stubs' and other one-paragraph articles all over the site. It's supposed to be a free encyclopedia that catalogs the world's information.

If there is a serious issue with an article, then fine, quarantine it or somehow set it aside. But to remove a well-written, well-cited and interesting article for dubious reasons really seems unnecessary. Maybe if they had incorporated it into the regular article on GiTS, it would make sense. But there is zero mention of the philosophical content:

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

<comment><USER20> Wikipedia had a 180 degree change in its stance on works of fiction in the last decade.

Character pages were deleted in bulk even when they were properly sourced, individual episodes pages were all merged together.

Administrators and moderators are pushing all this stuff to Wikia/Fandom, the sister project that is riddled with advertisement, user tracking and bad design.

<comment><USER21> [https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Philosophy](https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Philosophy)

<comment><USER20> Nice find!

I wonder if the people removing articles on fictional works are moving it to Wikia by themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Edison's revenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/power-transmission <comment><USER2> If the miraculous ABB breaker is like any of their other equipment, it'll be quickly deposited in the rubbish bin along with the sanity of most electricians once they start trying to roll any of this out.

<comment><USER3> I suspect its the principle that matters. If they discovered a design that hits the goal someone else can build on the concept (once patent becomes available, if not before then through licensing) and build it efficiently and properly if ABB is incapable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can 50Hz frequency be similar to a frequency of a human heart? I cannot read this rubbish.

<comment><USER5> Its been a while since I tool biomedical electronics, however suspect the current research is still fairly much the same. Muscles are basically ionic pumps. when electricity moves through the skin this transfer from electric to ionic energy happens. originally sodium chloride (salt water) was used to help with this transfer with some of the first ecg machines. The frequency that current can be highly felt (and and also interact highly with the heart) is between 50 and 60 hz. I remember a discussion in class that happened during a lab where the students were wondering why 1000hz wasn't used instead since the chance of biological interaction would have been much less dangerous. At the time I believe the ad-hoc conclusion that was arrived at was that until switching power supplies were invented the transformers for that frequency would have been too large and expensive comparatively and motors and lighting of the day would have required these kind of transformers to work properly.

<comment><USER6> Actually, required size of the transformer drops with the frequency. Mains switching power supplies still use regular transformer for isolation which run on comparatively high frequency and thus can be very small.

50/60Hz mains is motivated by compromise between visible flicker from lightbulbs and required frequency for practical synchronous motors with useful rotational speeds (some electrified rail systems use lower AC frequencies because they are better match for motors). Also, significantly higher frequencies will cause even relatively short mains runs to behave like a (RF) transmission line and also cause more significant skin effect.

<comment><USER7> Agree on that generally for electical equipments size falls off as square of frequency, the main motivation was the light bulb flickering 50/60 times was close to human persistence of vision which allowed the light bulb to appear constant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the Economist's dry sense of humor (italics are mine):

"That could lead both to cheaper power, and to the burial of many of the pylon-borne power lines that disfigure so much of the rich world's countryside. _In a deeper, sense, then, perhaps Edison will have the last laugh, after all._ "

</comment><comment><USER9> This article is not actually very well written. Definitely the author doesn't understand some of the stuff he's writing about. The section describing the interlink between Japan's different power systems is especially awkward.

</comment><comment><USER10> I believe this will be used first in datacenters, if not already being tested.

AWS and Google seem likely candidates to test this out.

<comment><USER6> For a very long time it is possible to buy almost anything data center-worthy in version with 48V DC power supply (although often with significant premium) and most collocation facilities provide 48V DC power. This has nothing to do with efficiency but with 48V being the standard voltage in telco environments, because it's 4 car batteries in series. Phones need DC and until about 50's it wasn't economical to rectify mains AC with enough power to run phone switch and without harmful noise and AC ripple, so phone switches were generally battery powered (today it's typicaly generated by rectifing mains with battery backup). Servers and networking equipment around these switches generally shares these same power circuits. Problem with 48V is that for any significant powers the wires get very thick very quickly.

Many larger server installations noticed that (1) normal AC server SMPS will happily run from 150-300V DC without any modification (reliability is an issue, omitting input rectifier and PFC is good idea) (2) there is almost nothing in today's servers that need any other voltage than 12V. Thus there are various approaches to DC power (for increased efficiency, not telco compatibility) in datacenters:

* DC power supplies with DC voltages around normal mains voltage (IIRC Facebook) * power supplies with inputs for two different voltages (AC mains + sub-100V DC for backup power from batteries) * battery backup inside the server on 12V power bus (Google) * shared 12V DC power supply for multiple servers (almost any blade solution, although I've seen that done with normal 1U servers) * also I vaguely remember some proposal to replace local 12V->something buck converters in modern server with larger input voltage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would gladly have read this, except some piece of javascript kept redirecting me to the top of the page. Tried multiple times, but sadly unreadable.

<comment><USER12> Same here. Click the "print" link in the upper-right area to get a bare version of the article.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/power- transmi...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/power- transmission/print)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Obligatory Oatmeal: <http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla>

<comment><USER15> ... which is not really bad... but not really good either. Too exaggerated and populist to be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Saw the world 'electrocuted' being used incorrectly and got annoyed.

For the record, here's the definition: "Electrocution is death caused by electric shock, either accidental or deliberate" (taken from Wikipedia. Google includes injury). Sure the elephant could have been injured or killed but the article seems to imply that it wasn't.

The correct term, by the way, is 'electric shock'.

<comment><USER17> Don't know where it implies in the article that the elephant did not died, but it did in fact. Here you can read more: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)></comment></comment>


It's Watching: Gmail Can Now Tell Which Of Your Contacts Are Awake - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/08/gmail-can-now-tell-which-of-your-contacts-are-awake/ <comment><USER2> Best of luck to it: I doubt that its guess about whether _I_ am awake or not will be very accurate unless maps _my own_ behavior over time. I'll bet this is true for a lot of hackers as well.

<comment><USER3> A better way would be to monitor when you are active in gmail. I bet that a pattern would emerge. If you're a nightbird your gmail activity would reveal this. If you go swimming every wednesday from 9 to 11 it would also show up. Combined with timezones and some statistics this could give a much more accurate picture, not only of when you're awake but when you're actually at your inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish there was a device I could wear, maybe like a wristwatch, which could track whether I was awake (which is probably possible based on pulse and/or movement). It should tell my phone my status, and my phone would automatically go into silent mode while I'm asleep. It might as well display on Facebook and GChat too.

If it was accurate enough, the data on my (and everyone else's, if they chose to make it public) sleep patterns could be very interesting and even medically useful.

<comment><USER5> Something like this?

<http://www.fitbit.com/>

<comment><USER4> That looks great! Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You could always set your alarm clock on Twitter

<http://sleep.fm/7am>

Besides clicking to set it... your friends/contacts know when you will be available to respond & chat.

</comment><comment><USER7> Timezone seems like a really poor way to do this, given all the other methods Google has for tracking their users' activity.

<comment><USER8> But this can 'track' your contacts who merely email in to your gmail account without using any other Google things at all.</comment></comment>


Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices - <AUTHOR> https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/09/29/a-note-from-chris-oneill/ <comment><USER3> I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything.

Support acknowledged it was a bug and told me that there was nothing they could do. They didn't even offer to let me have a few months free to catch back up and re-create my notebooks.

<comment><USER4> I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application.

If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you please with tools of your choosing. But if the application owns your data—if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly—then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If there's a bug, your data can disappear. If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If the product is discontinued, the same. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you'll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software.

It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I'd be OK with losing.

<comment><USER5> I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of:

"I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?"

"No. We don't store your data, we never even see it"

"What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to _random escalation person_ "

99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). They want us to be able to undo their deletion, find their data when they forget where they moved it.

So it's users pressuring suppliers in the wrong direction, it's not all one way traffic.

<comment><USER6> (Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc)

We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.

This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!). So it makes sense for them to offer a different feature set, and accept that it's not going to be suitable for some people.

<comment><USER7> > We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your > data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you > can do any of that better.

This is exactly the right solution, and credit to Google for providing it.

> This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would > exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of > time and development!).

I'm surprised you say that; it doesn't seem to me that 'dump this user's dataset to JSON/XML/whatever' should be very hard to do. Admittedly I've never worked on anything at Google scale. What am I missing?

<comment><USER6> > What am I missing?

To pick a few things I can talk about - sufficient replication to not lose data, data security that actually works (small companies can't - and shouldn't - afford disk shredders and internal access audits), targeted obliteration of customer data on request (including getting it out of the backups without rendering the backups worthless), and making sure that your exported data dump which contains massive amounts of personal information is only ever released to the correct user.

Doing any one of these things in isolation is not all that hard, because you can trade off against the others (for example, it is dead easy to do a data dump if you don't care about data security). Doing all of them at the same time is a large, expensive development project that would sink any startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Evernote's strength is in its core: notes, sync, and search. That's where > we're going to focus.

Well, like many others, I've been wishing Evernote would drop all the auxiliary stuff and focus on their core product. Hopefully that's exactly what will now happen. Evernote has become an absolutely critical part of my life. Even though I use it for business (along with everything else) though, I have no use for the majority of the new features they've added over the past few years. Of course, not every feature will be useful to everyone, and just because I don't use something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. However, when you see significant bugs languish for years while niche features get priority, it suggests a problem. I really hope this signifies a change in direction (as opposed to a milestone in the current, downward, one).

<comment><USER9> It would also be a huge plus if it didn't take 5 seconds to load every time I opened the app. Not sure how a company with so many competitors can survive long-term with its product in such a state.

<comment><USER10> Agreed; Google Keep has become my preference for immediate note taking. I think a major factor in Evernote's long-term survival is the friction of switching to a competitor (in conjunction with getting a lot of early traction with power-users).

<comment><USER11> What I find missing is a native Windows client. For me, "immediate" note taking means that I just hit ctrl-alt-N (or click Evernote icon in a tray), and I am immediately writing. In Google Keep, you basically need to visit a webpage, which is just not immediate. Or you use it only on mobile device?

<comment><USER12> You can install keep as a native looking desktop app by using the google app launcher, then you can open it like any other app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Evernote is a note taking app in 2015. While slack and hipchat are somewhat iconoclastic, they have network affects and boost productivity. Evernote is competing with apple notes, google docs, whatever microsoft has, every password keeping app, a notebook, a text editor and using a blog. This is something that will likely happen to dropbox and box. You provide storage. Simple math will provide you with the cost of storage in 5 years and it is not a lot. Further, similar to evernote, it solved a problem that had a lot of friction and was novel a few years ago, but is standard now.

Syncing. This is a default piece of all browsers, the 2 main operating systems win/os x, and comes standard on most phones. This is like the browser, you can have it for free so you stay in our ecosystem. Mega GIVES you 50GB of storage completely free NOW, and it is likely more secure. I don't know enterprise as well as I know consumer, but at some point I would imagine the choice is between buying a few SSDs and having an internal server, or setting up your own secure system via VPN. There can't be much room for this.

<comment><USER14> Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.

<comment><USER15> OneNote is now completely free and available on iOS as well (where it has a full 5-star rating). As much I love Evernote, it's going to be an uphill battle for them. (And not to mention the handwriting experience and integration with the Surface Pen - which are killer features for students)

<comment><USER16> Nice thing is that the desktop app can sync/save copies locally and does private backups, but you can also save/sync and store data in OneDrive, private server, or corporate internet via a samaba share (Free version only syncs to OneDrive, but IIRC does local backup in desktop app).

Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.

I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.

My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.

It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.

Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.

It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.

If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.

My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.

<comment><USER17> What is inking support?

<comment><USER18> It has really good pen/stylus support. It has completely replaced handwritten notes for me.

However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with.

* It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers

* It crashes _constantly_ when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection

* Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial merging and doesn't handle sync errors nor errors in general well -- all of these usually end up with handwriting layered on top of itself

* Syncing is basically out of your control, you can't do partial syncs when you really need a section/page fast, and large notebooks with handwriting can take hours to sync completely. I've basically resigned to splitting my notes into many smaller notebooks.

* Handwriting on the "Desktop" version is a complete joke and so you're constantly switching between the that and the app to get good handwriting and more features.

So it's great, until it doesn't work then it's a nightmare.

<comment><USER19> OneNote works fairly well on Windows. The main issue I have with it is usability. Performance on Macs and iOS is fairly terrible though, from syncing lag, to input lag, (on an iPhone 6) to long load times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem with Evernote is with the way they treat data. I found a really interesting guide hosted on Evernote[1] and I tried to download it. But no, I couldn't, because, they took the pains to block someone from downloading their notebooks and made my life so difficult in the end that I not only gave up on the conversion, but also stopped being their customer. I couldn't even print the damn thing! Ironically, they called it a shared notebook. What a joke!

I refuse to stop paying for any service that doesn't believe in open sharing through widely accepted/popular formats. The internet is alive today only because people believe in sharing information, not holding it back behind such a walled garden.

I refuse to support such companies. Not in 2015 atleast.

[1]This is the notebook in question and mind you, it's a "Shared" notebook: [https://www.evernote.com/pub/contentblueprint/thecontentmark...](https://www.evernote.com/pub/contentblueprint/thecontentmarketingblueprint)

Ever since I left Evernote, I created a private Wordpress blog and used their sharing bookmark to store notes, snippets and everything else.

I also use Google docs and Apple Notes app for other kinds of data and it has served me well. I understand this wouldn't fit everyone's bill, but it definitely fit mine.

So, adios Evernote! Hope someone replaces you soon!

<comment><USER21> > I refuse to stop paying

I'm not sure you meant that

<comment><USER20> Hah! You got me :) I meant the opposite, thanks for pointing out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> businessinsider had a great article on evernote here, "Evernote, the first dead unicorn", which really foreshadowed this: [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead- un...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead- unicorn-2015-9)

<comment><USER23> My prediction, the next dead unicorn: Dropbox

They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.

<comment><USER24> Another prediction: Twitter.

2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while.

Declining signups, declining engagement.

Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role.

I don't see how this ends well.

<comment><USER25> It's so hard for me to imagine a service like Twitter crashing.

<comment><USER24> I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night).

But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.

Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?

So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In the last 5 years I've accumulated some 8 000 notes in Evernote, which I would love to move to a safer platform/format in light of recent evidence of data loss and speculation concerning Evernote's longevity. What are the alternatives to organizing this second brain/memory?

50% are < 1000 words long texts written by me, transcribed from an audio/video/paper source or saved/clipped/copypasted from elsewhere

20% complete webpages or complete articles deemed important enough to save a copy for later 10% graphics, annotated images and PDFs 10% oneliners and quotes 10% todo-lists, task lists, shopping lists, etc.

Every new piece of information I have been exposed to and deemed important enough to return to later has gone into my Evernote inbox, from where it would be weekly sorted into an appropriate notebook by subject, life area, etc. Most important ones are tagged for regular review. Everything else gets some regular dedicated random browsing time, and is often discovered in research when preparing presentations, writing or thinking about any particular topic. There are 80+ notebooks in 10 sections.

Organizing this corpus efficiently and engaging with it with an appropriate interface would effectively be a multiplier for the ability to utilize knowledge and experience. Interacting with such data accumulated over decades through a combined voice assistant / mind map / dashboard / big screen (Microsoft Surface style) is a futuristic idea of knowledge work - the only question is whether there is a large enough consumer user base for such an infovore/generalist/researcher approach to information.

<comment><USER27> While I think OneNote is a superior product to Evernote, its organization abilities leaves much to be desired. For instance once you get more than like 10-15 (depending on resolution) pages within a second you now have to scroll and its a tiny list. More than, say, 2 sections on mobile means horizontal scrolling. It's all awkward and cumbersome.

But I have yet to find another product that is better than Evernote and OneNote or even just a single, other product better than Evernote. if you find one let me know. I love my OneNote but the organization drives me nuts (I love the tagging abilities in Evernote).

<comment><USER28> Ah whereas I find organisation in Evernote not to work. The tagging feature (on Windows at least) is buggy, and I often end up with half-word tags; they can also be 'lost' before the note syncs. I have notebooks full of disorganised information which I can't find -- this is what I view as Evernote's biggest weakness.

<comment><USER27> Fair enough; when I used Evernote I subscribed to the "tag everything" way of organizing stuff which worked fairly okay but yeah the interface even on Mac OS X is very buggy. I couldn't consistently create nested tags and tag nesting is a UI only feature; there is no actual hierarchy that can be searched for which is immensely disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chris-at I was a big fan & paying customer of Evernote until they lost my data and then blamed me for syncing from two devices.

<comment><USER29> same thing.

even had the audacity to keep charging me

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have recently moved to Quiver. Its user interface is very similar to Evernote. But it has support for Latex, code highlighting, and markdown! In addition, you can specify the location of library as a Dropbox folder, where data is written in JSON. Here is the data format [https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data- Format](https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format)

Lack of Latex support, being able to export raw data easily, and long startup time which renders notes unaccessible are my three problems with Evernote. These problems don't exist with Quiver.

[http://happenapps.com/#quiver](http://happenapps.com/#quiver)

PS no relationship with either Quiver or Evernote

<comment><USER31> It looks exacly like the kind of tool I have been looking for for years, albeit for linux/windows

<comment><USER32> [http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/](http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/)

I've used it for a couple of years, it's excellent and insanely quick once you learn all the keys plus you can just dump the database to Dropbox and have easy syncing.

No mobile client so I use other stuff for that (Wunderlist is my favourite on Android) but for work stuff/projects it's spot on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Evernote's former CEO promised to focus on core features last year[0]. After 18 months with no improvements, the new CEO makes the same promise of focusing on core features. Seems like a sinking ship to me.

[0] [https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software- qualit...](https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-quality/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I wish they would ditch the business focus and return to plain old "remember everything".

Who on earth needs features like "work chat"?

<comment><USER35> Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way to organise my stuff!

<comment><USER36> > Couldn't agree more. I remember when I first started using Evernote, the > FAQs specifically said "you can't share your notes, that's not the point". > Now it's all social and businessy, but I just want an easy and private way > to organise my stuff!

This[1] article makes the point that they realized they needed business users to make money, and they were trying to appeal to them.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead- un...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead- unicorn-2015-9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note- taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it.

[1] [https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/)

<comment><USER38> Serious question. If you are just making plaintext notes how come you are not just using your text editor of choice? Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom etc etc

<comment><USER39> This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support.

Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.

Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).

Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.

(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)

<comment><USER40> I love Dropbox, but is it a platform for an investment-worthy business? Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that have a free account that's completely full and have no intention of paying $99 a year and would probably need to have their password re-emailed to them. I agree that there are potential (and actual) great apps, but this kind of onboarding experience restricts the audience greatly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe now they'll fix sync and iPhone editing? I've pretty much stopped using Evernote because the whole point was universally synced notes and todo lists but every time I would edit something on my iPhone I both had to deal with the formatting bugs in the iPhone editor AND the very high likelihood I'd end up with a "Conflicting Modifications" regardless of how many times I clicked sync.

As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.

</comment><comment><USER42> > This team has achieved three incredible feats: they've created one of the > most important productivity tools in history...

That's a very, very bold statement...

<comment><USER43> Yeah really, ease up there buddy. How about the steam engine, the cotton gin, the printing press, the computer, etc. I would argue more important than Evernote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I know that it is the common vernacular, but you didn't let them go, you fired them. Surely they would prefer to not go and continue to pay their mortgage.

I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision.

Edit: Would you all prefer the word "Terminated"?

<comment><USER45> It's more than common vernacular in English.

"Fired" implies wrong-doing on their part.

"Laid off" or "let them go" means the company couldn't afford to pay them, or didn't need them anymore. It leaves no black mark against their name.

<comment><USER46> I've always found it striking to note how laid off has migrated over time. When my grandfather got laid off, there was an expectation that he would come back to the same job with the same company some time in the near future.

When I get laid off there is no expectation that my job will come back.

<comment><USER47> The term for that is furlough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Bullet lists - I literally left this app for One Note because Evernote COULD NOT properly handle bullet lists. The following is not my post but as of my time of leaving the app, you STILL couldn't properly manage a bullet list. There are dozens of posts asking for bullet lists to be fixed.

I used 5% of the overall features - all I want is to take notes and have them indexed. There was so much bloat and I couldn't make a proper bullet list, so I had no choice to switch. I never understood why people paid for this app.

[https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67060-list- functionali...](https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67060-list- functionality-such-as-bullets-and-numbers-are-a-categorical-nightmare/)

<comment><USER49> For indexed bullet list you should try Dynalist, demo here: [https://dynalist.io/demo](https://dynalist.io/demo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ah, the death of a unicorn. The operational end is doing fine: _" Our paid subscription growth is very strong and almost entirely organic; the number of new paid subscribers is 40% higher than this time last year."_ But the hype has faded, the $1bn valuation is down, and there's no greater fool available to fund them.

This is a problem with too much funding. You have to pay off the investors, which requires rapid growth, which often requires buying market share at a loss.

</comment><comment><USER51> "Making great products means making difficult decisions," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin. "Our choice was between great user experience, and new features. We are proud to announce that our next release will have many new and exciting features."

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been a stalwart supporter of Evernote for quite some time now. I've pushed through when feeling like the platform got slower and slower as time went by. I pushed through when it felt like their focus was scattered, like the core offering was being surpassed by other platforms.

Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.

It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.

Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.

Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.

While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.

If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.

I got faith Evernote. Come back to the light.

</comment><comment><USER53> I switched to OneNote very recently, and the biggest reason was that I was fundamentally fed up with all the extraneous features:

[http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/08/16/1800#onenote-to- ru...](http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/08/16/1800#onenote-to-rule-them- all)

</comment><comment><USER54> Anyone know which offices? How many employees does Evernote have? Were layoffs mostly from closed offices?

Edit: the Business Insider article (which maybe should be retained as the link?) has some of the information: 13% of workforce let go. Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow offices closing. I couldn't tell if the 47 were from these offices mostly. I wouldn't think a note-taking app/website would need to be too dispersed around the world.

</comment><comment><USER55> Alternote is what the official Evernote client should been. It's the only thing that keeps me on Evernote, since the official client is horrible and slow.

Let's hope Evernote stops messing around with useless features like "Work Chat" and start improving their clients instead. It's kinda silly that a third party can make a client vastly better and more pleasant to use than the official one.

[http://alternoteapp.com/](http://alternoteapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER56> If anyone is looking for a possible alternative for notetaking that is not OneNote, I like nvAlt: [http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)

I have exported from evernote and moved to nvAlt and gone back again...

It takes a little work to set it up to sync to mobile but it is doable with dropbox.

It does not have the same 'notebook' concept that evernote does, but that might not matter to you.

</comment><comment><USER57> "Evernote, The First Dead Unicorn" [https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55e1beac15970d6c01395d9d](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55e1beac15970d6c01395d9d)

<comment><USER58> great article! ;)

<comment><USER59> (Sorry for posting off-topic but I know you wrote the syrah platform and I can't find an email address for you)

Could you please remove this bit of CSS. I'd like to be able to see my scrollbar:

       body::-webkit-scrollbar {
         width: 0!important;
       }

<comment><USER60> lol seriously. What crosses your head when you just remove the scrollbar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I've founded a startup that wants to tackle the digital notebook and save-for- later problem, for any content - not just web stuff. What's your wish list for your ideal notebook?

<comment><USER62> I like something that I can buy and host myself so that when the over-valued company decides to stop making it I can still use it. Then again, I'm probably not a target user base for somebody looking for the next big thing.

<comment><USER63> I thought many times about building this kind of self-hosting note taking app, but what's stopping me is that it's not very useful without all the mobile and desktop clients, and that's very hard to develop. That's probably the reason why there's currently no good open source solution for this.

<comment><USER64> tagSpaces does a fairly decent job of it. its only missing a few hundred features compared to evernote but its mainly just one guy making it for the last few years so its fairly impressive at the same time. hopefully more features will be added eventually like a proper tagging system and stuff like note links, better search etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Wow that's rough. Taiwan is in the middle of a Typhoon lashing. Hope the people in their Taiwan office is doing ok through this traumatic event - at a time when most would be relying on their business life to carry them through the physical disasters.

</comment><comment><USER66> I cannot help but think about the article last week about WhatsApp needing only 50 engineers for over 900M users. Evernote just let go that many people and their software is bug-ridden next to WhatsApp. Seriously, what do all of these engineers do?

</comment><comment><USER67> Just started using Evernote after a coworker shared a note with me the other day.

After years of using notepad, notepad++, sublime text, and now atom, I feel like the plaintext experience is severely lacking.

Select all the text in a note, mark as plain text, copy something from any site, paste, formatting is ignored. Paste with source formatting should be the exception, not the norm.

The lack of headers and other basic formatting options is also frustrating. Wordpress does a better job with it's editor... and it's a web app!

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm a very casual Evernote user; I only use the free version, every few months, to sync basic things (e.g., shopping lists, or directions) between my desktop and phone.

A few months ago, I noticed that there were suddenly _lots_ of ads within Evernote, encouraging me to upgrade to the paid version. I'm not complaining, since they need to make money, but it did strike me as being more aggressive than before. Now I understand what was (is) happening.

<comment><USER69> I have the same feeling with you at the moment(s) every time I open Evernote it prompts to ask you to upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm a long-time evernote premium customer who is saddened but not even slightly surprised by this.

I firmly believe that Evernote raised too much money, at far too high of a valuation, and they fucked themselves. They did not have the product and market to justify a $1B valuation. They just didn't. They bet huge on their ability to invent whole new markets that sound like they're related to evernote, but aren't, really. And unsurprisingly, that didn't pan out.

Now the core product has been stagnant for years; gaining "features" like work chat which were clearly dreamt up in a silo, completely disconnected from the market's needs. And now the troops will pay for management's complete and total fucking incompetence. And yes, I know one CEO is gone, but the new CEO is an absolute fucking joke as well.

And long-time customers like me... we keep hoping that OneNote or some similar product will add an "Import from Evernote" button. So that we can escape this mismanaged, formerly great product.

<comment><USER71> Why do you say the new CEO is a joke?

Incidentally, speaking of recent changes - one thing I _have_ noticed over the past few months are constant reminders and emails to "Upgrade to Premium". I wonder if this was the immediate focus of the new CEO: to convert free customers to paying. After all, an important point was stressed in the CEO's letter - that their paying subscriber count has increased by 40% YOY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I think why news of layoffs is so disconcerting is that it can be really, _really_ hard to differentiate between what's fat and what's muscle in the business. A lot of "cost centers" like development end up meaning a lot to brand perceptions, which isn't valued correctly in the traditional P&L hierarchy and can have a significant time lag.

</comment><comment><USER73> From my perspective (as a UX'er). I'm seeing more and more projects & organisations need a 'vision' of what the product should be to help them focus product/feature efforts. There seems to be an underlying 'enabling' of superfluous dev effort due to the proliferation & ease of user of stacks/libraries/platforms.

<comment><USER74> More so, VC funding and the push to become highly valued (gotta win that unicorn lottery) drives scope and feature bloat. Every company has to grow, grow grow. Every product has to expand and scale up until it's everything to all people.

Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.

<comment><USER73> You can still keep focus tight and do the unicorn thing. Snapchat comes to mind, there are plenty other examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I personally struggle with Evernote - not in the utilization aspect as I use it multiple times a week, but rather, on its lack of focus on addressing & fixing the features its users really need & want: i.e code formatting, inconsistencies between formats across mobile, web & app, and oddities when copying/pasting content into notes & it breaking the rest of the note are just some of the minor issues I personally struggle with. Features such as presentation mode and larger transfer size are fine and all, but neither of which I personally care for - I primarily take text notes and have some images embedded here and there, so I'm not necessarily asking for a major shift in features. I want to find reasons to pay for Evernote as I depend on it so much from a notebook aspect, but alas, I haven't been convinced that they necessarily care about addressing these pain points.

</comment><comment><USER76> I almost got used to the old interface, it was pretty much the same for 7 years so I had plenty of time, the new one introduced this year I can't seem to adapt to. What were all those employees actually doing?

A blessing in disguise is that this made me find an alternative which was trusty Atlassian Bitbucket, along with their free private repos each can be accompanied with a markdown tolerant wiki, sure it's not quite the same but as a developer notepad bitbucket wiki has worked out quite well.

The latest news just locks me further into migrating all remaining bits from evernote, then again if the 47 employees let go were responsible for web client new material UI (there is no support linux client) and the remaining employees rollback and want to do as little innovation as they did between 2008-2014 then perhaps I'll reconsider

</comment><comment><USER77> I rely heavily on Evernote. I actually thought about making my own notes system before, but the native apps and doing synch right is a hard thing to do, especially when talking about a complex system of notebooks, notes, tags, file attachments, search, etc. You don't get that with a file system.

</comment><comment><USER78> I've tried evernote as a consumer and couldn't quite figure out where it fits between dropbox and other "cloud" providers such as gDrive and MSOffice 360.

It seems like a smart move to focus on the features that are most useful to their core users instead of trying to be everything to everybody.

</comment><comment><USER79> You know what _really_ sucks about this? They're closing off the API & got rid of their evangelists.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a source for that? Closing the API seems crazy, since if done right it should provide far more value at far less cost to the Evernote team than many other features. Will this mean that all the 'Share to Evernote' integrations from email clients and other apps will cease to function?

<comment><USER80> Open, developer-friendly APIs also have the ability to fragment core app usage. That could be a big motivator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> A bit surprised no one has mentioned SimpleNote (www.simplenote.com) - <USER2> stripped down note taking service.

<comment><USER64> i dont know what the financial situation is with simplenote or how it works but after the whole springpad thing im not in any rush to get into bed with some service that might not be around in a few years.

<comment><USER81> It's a fair point - I'm going to wait to see how Notes syncing works with iCloud on Mac/iPhone but that is most definitely not an open solution. To date I've used Google Keep and Google Docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> I'm a long time Evernote user (I think I got an email stating I was in the first 3k users) but I'm also seriously considering migrating away to something else. My company is moving to Office365 and with that I've been exposed to OneNote and it looks like a good alternative (though the lack of a Linux client is a big problem).

The other note-capture tool that I've used religiously is "The Brain"[0], it's great for bookmarking and visualizing relationships (I even use it as my address book for contacts), it handles notes, links to files and URLs and can be synced with Dropbox or via their own cloud service.

[0] [http://www.thebrain.com/](http://www.thebrain.com/)

</comment><comment><USER83> I've had a love/hate relationship with evernote since forever. The idea of storing everything in evernote really appeals to me (invoices, receipts, warranty, contracts, ...) but yet scares me too since there are wild stories of evernote just loosing stuff.

On the other hand for simple note taking evernote really sucks, it's too cluttered and it's editor is subpar.

A few years ago I was an avid springpad user before they shut down, but they suffered from the same issues: too bloated, not really good editor. But it worked beter for me than evernote.

To me it feels like evernote tries to solve 2 separate problems: taking simple and small notes, archiving and indexing important documents. Unfortunately it fails at both for me :(

</comment><comment><USER84> I used to be a customer for a while. Then went with org-mode + git and never looked back.

<comment><USER85> Interesting. I used both Evernote and DEVONthink on OS X before. Now, I'm storing all my notes in plain text org-files on my Dropbox - but without version control. Do you share your git-repos via Dropbox or somethink like that? Or do you have a git server somewhere else?

<comment><USER86> I've been using org-mode and git myself. I've used the bundle command to back up repositories in Dropbox, but for things I want to use on multiple computers, I set up an account on BitBucket and just push and pull my changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> The only thing I use Evernote for is for indexing research that I do for work. I got burned early with their tool for writing, but it was still compelling for that use case. The tagging & search is fast, their web clipper is best in class and annotation capability works great.

But there's a cost. I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.

My guess is if the new corporate direction is to monetize/nickel&dime, I'll take on the lift to moving. I can get 90% of the functionality that I need in the native OS X filesystem with spotlight comments and little helper apps, and I have a work Mac now.

<comment><USER88> > I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very > difficult to extract.

Why do you say it's difficult to extract? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.

I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to _many_ competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not "very difficult" to extract your information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Ah, this explains all the notifications I've been getting trying to get me to go premium. Not that it's a big deal—I can't blame them for trying to monetize—but I had noticed they'd gotten a lot more aggressive lately.

</comment><comment><USER69> \- The Windows version sucks: I have a really long note and now I cannot open it, the whole program just crashes. \- The Mac version is OK. Still running fine. \- The Web version looks cleaner, but it doesn't have a __highlight __tool??!!

Another major complain is that it's really difficult to store code in a note.

I started using [WizNote]([http://www.wiznote.com/](http://www.wiznote.com/)) recently and it seems really good: markdown, free, multiple directory support, comments, etc

</comment><comment><USER90> IMHO Evernote is feature complete. It would be great if the company for a while switched focus from growth to support and just collected revenue. However who knows maybe revenue is not their goal and they just wait to be bought by Facebook.

Btw does anyone remember this article? [https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes- quest-t...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-to- become-a-100-year-old-startup) Have they changed their mind yet?

</comment><comment><USER91> It's worth noting that even after letting 47 people go, they have positions open on their careers page. New CEO trying to make his mark by dealing out a bit of worry to the underlings.

<comment><USER71> It is possible to reduce employees in one area while hiring in another (after all, your company's focus may have changed). These two events are not mutually exclusive. After all, they're not reducing their workforce by...10%, maybe more?...because they're losing money hand-over-fist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> > I joined Evernote as CEO two months ago

> Today we let go of 47 people from the Evernote team and announced the > closure of three of our global offices. We are grateful for the immense > contributions of each and every affected person.

So, new CEO gets appointed and starts torching the place. I suppose that will help the bottom line short term. But I'd really like to see the number of resignations in the next days.

</comment><comment><USER28> Hopefully we will now see some competition in this space, rather than "Evernote" being the answer to "Why aren't you launching?". Though given their finances, I suspect not...

[https://transpose.com](https://transpose.com) is an interesting start, but needs a big cash injection to make it better - and suffers from data lock-in again.

</comment><comment><USER93> Anyone knows which non-core features will be affected by this?

Evernote Food was already shut down ([https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/09/16/better- brainstorms...](https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/09/16/better-brainstorms- with-scannables-newest-update/)) a couple weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER94> Evernote feels like the Microsoft Office of the Notetaking world: it's huge, it's bloated, and it seems to be continuing to focus on stuff that the vast majority of its userbase will never use.

At some point I installed Google Keep, which is lightweight, easy to use, and syncs, without feeling like I just installed an entire suite simply to jot down some quick notes.

<comment><USER95> Last time I tried Google Keep is too simple for my taste. It maybe a good todo list to post-it note maker, but not for permanently notes that have reference value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> I reckon Evernote would be good bolt-on for a cloud collaboration company like Huddle or Box. The problem is that it's not worth $1bn to a company like that, so any acquisition would result in a paper loss for those who invested at a $1bn valuation (not to mention the founders and employees who would probably get screwed by liquidation preferences).

</comment><comment><USER11> I am also worried that Evernote didn't innovate in the recent years, but I still consider it a best notetaking application on Windows. (and I tried several others like ResophNotes, Onenote, etc). I can quickly add new note by clicking on tray icon or by global shortcut, filter notes by tag, and Search is also spontaneous.

</comment><comment><USER97> Does anyone know an online doc editor like Google Docs but one that lets you create sections within the doc and move them around?

I write a lot of articles and I have to constantly rearrange sections to achieve a better flow. It's getting annoying to constantly copy and paste chunks of text to move them around.

<comment><USER98> great question. Also similar I have been seeking an equivalent online docs product with built-in flows from draft to review to approved

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> The problem with Evernote is they lack vision. Or maybe focus. Not sure which one. I understand selling socks makes money but ...

I was under impression that Evernote will evolve into something like RealTime+Word+Powerpoint - but no :(

I think Evernote is done. They lost their mojo and there is no way to get it back :(

</comment><comment><USER100> For those looking for an Evernote-to-OneNote migration utility, see my comment in this thread at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10301284) \--- it seems to work fine.

</comment><comment><USER101> ...and then there came OneNote and syncing was even better, features even more, collaboration best, and it was free and I started using it and soon after I never accessed Evernote again. And many, formerly hot loving Evernote fans in my peer group changed, too.

</comment><comment><USER102> I was thinking to get an account (free one), but after reading many "negative" comments I'm rethinking it. Will probably give it a try anyways... At the moment I'm only using it as a FF plugin for "cleaning up" blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER103> So what is are you paying for at evernote that you cant get (or get well) elsewhere. I haven't used it myself for more than a few minutes and didn't see it but obviously there is something there. Curious to understand what exactly that is?

<comment><USER104> I use it for everything I want to remember, on all the different platforms I use, stored in one place and easily retrievable. Interesting articles, web pages, quotes, network settings, mails, recipes, shopping lists, to-do lists, pictures... It's available on Android, iOS, Windows, in different browsers, in different apps or software. Everything is searchable, even images thanks to OCR. And I can keep a local copy of my data.

Once you're hooked, you just keep using it, like extended memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Issues I had with Evernote which made me switch to Trello:

* Rubbish font handling and formatting

* Superfluous functionality when it doesn't get the important things right

* The new beta interface doesn't give you a nice general overview of your notes. I preferred the old interface.

</comment><comment><USER106> If I could find something that did image and PDF OCR as well as Evernote, I'd probably migrate, but for now, I'll risk the data loss for the ability to search everything so easily. I certainly welcome recommendations though.

</comment><comment><USER107> Is there a solid way to type/paste code and format it properly in Evernote finally?

Last I checked that was near impossible despite it being a largely solved problem in every other text input service out there (Slack, forums, StackExchange, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER108> I wonder how effective their free to paid conversion is. I have never felt the need to move off the free account. I liked OneNote better but it didn't have the same reach as evernote at the time.

</comment><comment><USER109> I use evernote for shopping lists and logging my workouts - not exactly mission-critical stuff. It is buggy and I frequently find my last amendment reverted. I cannot imagine using it professionally.

</comment><comment><USER110> I am a premium member and I stopped using Evernote when I understood how their versioning works! Seriously, they should rename it to regular backups at 8hr intervals.

</comment><comment><USER111> I would gladly pay for Everynote Premium if they had automatic backups. Why isn't this an option? I just want to be sure my stuff never disappears, regardless.

</comment><comment><USER112> The real question is - will Chris O'Neill listen to what core paying users have been asking for with regard to keeping the basic application functional.

</comment><comment><USER113> I thought it was weird that Springpad, a much better alternative to Evernote just randomly gave up.

Maybe note taking apps just have no money in them?

</comment><comment><USER114> For people looking for replacement ideas: I use Zim + Syncthing. Works on my Linux machines, and Android app works OK.

</comment><comment><USER115> I used Evernote for a few weeks & it lost a bunch of my work. I can't believe they are still around.

</comment><comment><USER116> I used to be a evernote user for a long time then last year moved to OneNote, OneNote has come a long way.

</comment><comment><USER117> I wonder if this is a prelude to some acquisition or merger to make the company more sellable.

</comment><comment><USER118> The first two charts in the "Growth" section has significantly different scaling!

</comment><comment><USER119> the only thing that keeps me using evernote is the ability to forward emails to it and then merge similar ones.

If something else did that I would swap in a heart beat and for my other notes I'd convert them to google docs.

</comment><comment><USER120> Do they really have a "Go Premium" CTA at the end of this blog? Wow.

</comment><comment><USER121> And so it begins...

</comment><comment><USER122> I wonder if this is why I saw so many notifications from Evernote lately for me to verify my e-mail address trying to churn up some apathetic users?

</comment><comment><USER123> And the death of the unicorns begins

</comment><comment><USER124> Why did they have so many offices?

<comment><USER125> "The three offices that closed were in Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow, according to a company spokeswoman. While the Moscow office was more development-focused, the other two were concentrated on sales and marketing. All of its Asian operations will be relocated to Seoul, South Korea, although it will maintain an office in China." [http://uk.businessinsider.com/evernote- layoffs-2015-9?r=US&I...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/evernote- layoffs-2015-9?r=US&IR=T)

Mind that "an office" can be only one or two persons doing some local marketing work or do some specific feature implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> Url changed from [http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote- layoffs-2015-9](http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-layoffs-2015-9), which points to this.

<comment><USER127> That article includes some pertinent information that's not in the blog posting, though (which offices are closing, one of the products that's being discontinued).

<comment><USER126> I'm sorry I didn't see this sooner. We might have changed it back. It's often non-obvious what the right call is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> what's evernote again? I keep hearing about it but never seen it or have used it.

<comment><USER129> Something that came pre-installed on my last phone and couldn't be removed, and obnoxiously kept updating itself and asking for more permissions.

No idea what it does, that annoyed me too much to ever find out.

<comment><USER128> that explains it. I feel like a lot of these startup companies cater to SV because outside of SV people are completely unaware or unappreciative (doesn't see any disruption in note taking move along).

Makes me wonder how many SV unicorns will flop next year. My prediction is Twitter and Hoosuite.

<comment><USER109> Twitter? The media darling twitter, that is used by every celebrity, artist and PR person? Of course not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TypeScript: O que são tipos genéricos? - <AUTHOR> https://blogdolipe.com.br/typescript-o-que-sao-tipos-genericos-ckcmg1scs004umfs1hk8sh3nq <comment><USER2> This looks on topic, but this forum is in English. Content in other languages is usually ignored of flagged, unless it is very good and there is no equivalent information in English. Do you have a translated post in English? It may get more traction here.</comment>