I wish everyone used DDG for the sake of privacy, but I cannot. It just doesn't give me answers that I am expecting. It reads my mind less than Google and that's a problem.
I may be the only one, but I do think most companies don't use my data for evil purposes. For example, if a search engine can track me on the web, they can deduce which web page answered my query. Then they put that page near the top of the list the next time anyone runs the same query.
Furthermore: if a retailer can use my location data to predict demand, they can optimize their logistics and save fuel.
I’m no fan of privacy violations, but if everyone uses a little less fuel there are huge gains for our future, regardless of whether the cost savings trickle down to me personally.
Cheaper prices will always matter and will never cease to be one of the primary competitive angles.
Most of retail is notoriously competitive. The savings are likely to be passed down at some point. In general retail if you can persistently charge 5% less than the competition across the board, you're the next Walmart.
To offer an alternate experience, I use DDG for nearly everything and have for many months. I have very few issues with it. For the more esoteric searches, I do find Google to be slightly better, but for 99% of my everyday browsing, I have zero issues with DDG.
I have recently found myself forgetting that I’m even using DDG. The odd time it doesn’t return what I’m looking for I can try !g but it’s so few and far between that I almost forget that’s an option.
Same for me. DDG is my preferred search engine but it just don't give me such good results as google so I often searching a second time with google and directly getting much better/expected results...
If they need money, they can always have "premium" version with some non critical feature. Its privacy alone is worth paying for but as OP says, its accuracy isn't good enough for me to waste time everyday.
I wish this had better branding. You can't say "just DuckDuckGo it". It has to have a single, or at most a double-syllable name that is easy to remember. Like Google or Bing.
But maybe it's part of some sort of strategy where in the early years the branding is weird in order to gain notoriety, and then change it when the timing is right.
I think right now this is probably slowing growth. I wonder how much would duck.com cost.
I wonder if we can’t just all move toward “search”. It’s usually obvious from context, and with more and more search engines (whether they be whole-web or isolated to a given social network), it seems like a viable alternative.
Maybe we should separate the ideas of the search space (the web) and our access to it (the search engine). The destinations will exist whether google or whoever points to them or not. By making that distinction more obvious it might encourage people, when selecting their search tool, to consider the effect of corporate bias on search results.
i personally think it would be best to get away from having to have a verb that matches the search engine name.
there are quite a few search options out there these days so telling someone they should specifically search with X when their favourite is Y is being a bit too pushy for my liking. (i still mention ddg sometimes if i think they are using google or something similar)
the other thing is that DuckDuckGo might not always be around or might not always be the best. some new shiney search engine might come along in a few years that is miles better but then everyone would have to start using a different verb when they were only just getting the hang of the last one.
with the old reliable "look it up" or "search for it" you dont have to worry about these problems.
and anyway, did google become the best search engine because it had a good noun or was it because of other reasons? i would personally just like to see DuckDuckGo just focus on making the best search engine they can. that way we wont have to rely on a noun being the only thing stopping it from succeeding. if its one the best people will find it regardless
It's hard to get attention of average people with a weird name like that and the logo. Not to mention the abbreviation even feels longer to say than Google fully.
I am working in Tallinn. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say anything good about the salaries here. I'm happy with mine, but it would be 3x higher in US and Switzerland (I have also worked there). What do you base this opinion on?
If it made any sense to the common person, the front page shouldn't have "open source" in its description. Because your average grandma has no idea what that means.
It's an insanely hard market to chew into and thus I can say they've already lost.
It does not matter that the average grandma has no idea what that means. New products need early adopters, and the average grandma is not a potential early adopter, neither is the average grandpa or anyone average, really.
Any argument, including being Open Source, is good to get early adopters. Communication can change later on.
Too many products try to appeal to the general public too soon. This is not how user acquisition works.
You don't build a social network around tech, you bootstrap it with a community. Bootstrapping it with Open Source enthusiasts is fine. If you say "we're yet another social network" you have no value proposition. Not that I think that "we're yet another Open Source social network" is good either...
Also, the fact that a grandma doesn't know what Open Source means doesn't really concern me, but the fact that the children of someone who posts on HN and works at Google don't, does. Maybe that's part of the reason why proprietary, centralized services are winning.
Anyway, I do have concerns along the same line, not because "Open Source" is on the front page but because:
- The team is not diverse enough in terms of experience. The COO is an "information-security expert"; the CMO is a "security and international relations expert"; the Chief of Product is a "pragmatic software engineer" and "crypto-geek". This is a problem, even though not necessarily deadly.
- They plan to allocate 70 % of the budget to software engineering, and basically 0 % to marketing / user acquisition / community management. This is the biggest red flag for me.
Just googled the COO, she is pretty big in the security community. Also was CISO at a Dutch Telecom, and they have Phil Zimmerman!
Im not worried about the budget for marketing, they seem to have managed to get themselves into a few leading publications already and the early backers will provide initial beta users + word of mouth marketing.
What remains to be seen is if the team can execute, I guess only time will tell. Overall good initiative though.
Your average grandma will also be annoyed, when she learns that the website doesn't work without javascript, because she doesn't know what JavaScript is so she turned it off along with many other options she didn't understand when she combed through about:config after installing Firefox from source code.
I'd say to have a common interface towards hardware that is quickly becoming similar across smartphones, tablets, and even laptops (read Chromebooks)?
I think why they would _not_ have the same interface between similar hardware and similar applications is a better question.
As for the user interface and bundled applications, let's not confuse "Operating System" with that although it's popular for some stupid reason. The one and same OS could of course have e.g. completely different window managers adapted for different human-device interactions and use cases. But that's very distanced from the actual OS, that is pretty much only interested in how to run and expose the hardware to the software.
>And 'the Force' is fictional and does not apply to Carrie Fisher.
Its a metaphor for spirituality, and its pretty obvious that the strict deterministic materialist worldview is far from proven and that many people have spiritual beliefs that they feel 100% justified as having.
Not everything is horrible because we don't have immortality. If anything, we'll hit our extinction event well before then, assuming its even possible for complex mammals to have. No, we're not flatworms and can't have the aging solutions of flatworms.
I think its okay to feel comforted by death. When my dad died, it hurt, but I was happy his suffering has ended. I was happy he had a long life and raised three boys who loved him. You absolutely can accept and even welcome death in some ways. Life isn't all roses and chocolates. Death is currently the only solution we have to terminal suffering, for example.
Science (I will use "science" as shortcut for "deterministic materialist worldview") is not "proven": it offers (falsifiable) explanations to observable phenomena, and it does not concern itself with as-of-yet non explainable phenomena. It accepts, and happily adopts, corrections.
People have spiritual beliefs when they try to explain things that they can not understand. Other people abuse this by telling them that they have special knowledge and that they can explain those phenomena, or even more subtle, that there is somebody out there who can explain it to them, at some point, in some manner. All this without providing the slightest chance of falsification, meaning basically they can assert whatever they like.
So in my eyes, no, people are not really justified in having those beliefs: they could just as well accept that certain things are (now, and possibly forever) unknowable.
Except science doesn't support a basic Newtonian deterministic world. When you factor in relativity and quantum mechanics your worldview can't be purely a deterministic machine anymore.
You stated that the explanation we have is deterministic, I didn't. The explanation given by science is still falsifiable, though, which is what characterizes it. Other explanations ("beliefs") are completely arbitrary.
That said, relativity has nothing intrinsically non-deterministic about it [1], and whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or not is open to debate [2].
Death is change. Anyone who's witnessed the slow mental decline of a loved one knows that death is not black and white. Death is no more tragic than any other change--what was, is no more, and has transformed into something new. It is tragic only insofar as we resist accepting its ineluctability.
Sorry, it has not transformed into something new. Life has stopped and any residual potential has been lost. Death is nothing but pain and loss. If we can overcome it someday, it'll cause massive social disruption but massive long-term benefit.
While relative immortality (i.e. no death of natural causes) holds many opportunities for positive change (such as eliminating a short-sightedness and 'repetition'[0] of history due to our individually limited perception of history with a ~70-year horizon), I can only seem to imagine a world where death can be overcome as a dystopia rather than an utopia. The same forces that drive human conflict now will still exist and I think worsen.
If it's a procedure and not inherited, either it goes along with technology supplying humanity with cheap nigh-unlimited energy and thus space travel, uploading of minds or it's a two-caste world in which the same immortal persons hold the mortal masses at bay with any means necessary.
If it's immortality for all (say through a virus that spreads naturally), it's a world where people have to be naturally sterile and only the priviledged get to have children, you get to wait thousands of years before you can procreate due to a place being free because of accidental deaths or no one gets to have children (but a governing body through technical means, arifical wombs).
Also, I can imagine relative immortality would render global nuclear war an inconvenience, with proper protection you could maybe wait out the aftermath and start again?
I have to respectfully disagree with you here. Death is most definitely NOT nothing but pain and loss. For those living in chronic pain, it is release. For those of us who manage to live our lives forgetting those who have hurt us as a coping mechanism, death provides an opportunity to grieve properly, when it was not possible in life. Residual potential lives on in the survivors ability to find inspiration in the lives of those long-since dead. Would you argue that Einstein's residual potential has been lost, if his work and his legacy is still inspiring people to explore the limits of human knowledge?
Our triumph over death will be met with a similar awe as our successful invention of the hedonovat, a device that suspends a living creature in goo while supplying everything it needs to live forever and supplying sensory inputs of nothing but pleasure and happiness.
Einstein's residual potential has been lost, because he is dead. He was still writing papers in 1955, when he died. If he was still alive, I hope he would still be publishing.
The idea that "residual potential lives on in others" is irrelevant - there should be no need to die to inspire someone else. Moreover, even if inspired by Einstein, no-one will not produce exactly the same work as Einstein would have, had he lived. So that notion is refuted, and would become ever more definitively so over the accumulated years and contributions of an indefinite lifespan.
Solving the problem of death includes removing the overwhelming preference for death in cases where it is the only relief from a terrible quality of life, so your chronic pain example gets swept aside.
The is no such thing as a "hedonovat" and your depiction of it sounds frankly ridiculous. Hoping to enable an indefinite human lifespan with a high quality of life is not ridiculous.
The hedonovat was a construct of the American pragmatist John Dewey to understand at a relatively simple level, what motivates people.
Why would you want to live forever? The human condition is predicated on birth and death. As an academic exercise, I think birth without death would be a bit like moving from a northern climate to a southern climate, where work ethic goes out the window because there is no season in which work cannot be done (winter).
If we live forever, at what point do we taste the urgency of living?
Historically, as a guideline, you'd have made about 7% p.a. on average, well above inflation. The question is whether you can handle the drawdown (can you keep your nerves during a crash?)
then again: beware of averages. Historical PE ratios are quite high (though EV/FCC would be more instructive) - so it is unlikely that the next couple of years will bring 7%. We're living in a world of free money: if central banks change interest rates the party could come to an end.
Right. If interest rates are increased, that's a sign of a stronger economy and the market might go up in response. On the other hand, traders might decide the Fed is mistaken, the economy is not in fact stronger, and they'll react to the higher interest rates by taking fewer loans and the market will go down.
Basically, the change is already priced-in and you shouldn't worry about timing the market. Buy and hold.
There's no guarantee at all. In a really bad year (2008?) you might get -50% or worse. Then you might get some really nice returns in the years after (or not!). If you average over several decades, historically, the returns have been around 7 or 8 per cent per year, but the standard deviation is enormous. Just look at a long-term chart of e.g. the S&P 500 at https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/%5EGSPC - click "Max" and "Settings" -> "Logarithmic" (you'll want a logarithmic axis so that equal percent changes are equal distance on the plot). You'll see that on average it went up over the decades, but between June '07 and February '09, it lost over 50%, and tripled since then.
I encourage you to read up on this, but someone else with more knowledge should recommend some books.
All of this is correct, but the standard S&P 500 index doesn't include dividends, so your typical index fund will (should) do 1-4% better each year than the S&P 500. The S&P 500 does have a lesser-known version that includes the total returns: https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXSP%3ASP500TR&ei=WWJNWK...
Banks operate on a completely different model so it's not a useful comparison, but the answer is that they are borrowing at ~0% and lending 2%+ so they view the world differently
banks are heavily regulated and cannot just put deposits (the money you put into a bank constitute a loan to the bank) into stocks. They have to invest more conservatively, e.g give money to solid companies or hold low risk bonds. See Basel-rules to learn more about risk weighted assets (RWA): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III
