> after 10 years or so of trying, you'd expect the results to be far better
Would you? Most search engines' growth, including Google, was fueled by advertising revenue. Obviously that part of the equation isn't really an option for DDG.
I wonder if they would be better off as a non-profit, like Wikipedia. I would donate to them.
At its peak, Yahoo!'s results were quantifibly better than Google's for over a year, but no one noticed/cared.
Google search has been "good enough" for years, and so has the competition.
Multiple companies have burnt billions proving that search relevance will not convert users on its own.
If you want to crush Google, you need some compelling reason for people to switch (voice? privacy?), or you need to maintain good relevance until Google screws up badly enough. Maybe they will fire half the search team during an economic downturn in the 2020's, for example. At that point, you can use cash reserves to poach most of the top 10% of the remaining team.
The problem with long games like this is that you might screw up or lose focus before Google does. This happened at Yahoo.
Switching industry sectors, Microsoft had tons of negative press about 8, 8.1 and then 10's force upgrade/privacy debacle. With a mediocre or better hardware launch, Apple probably would have cleaned up. Instead, Apple's MacOS lines happened to falter in the same years as Windows did. Now, Windows devices are earning lukewarm to positive comparisons against Apple devices.
Precisely. This is not what I expect to see on Hacker News. This isn't a discussion of DDG's abilities. It's simply an advertisement.
If this was a link to DDG's contribution page or some kind of information document or review, it would be different. However this just screams "USE THIS SERVICE FOR X REASON!"
Otherwise we'll project unrelated biases under the guise of science. Otherwise we risk unconsciously ignoring or lessening the relevance of facts that contradict those biases.
There's nothing sexist about studying the differences between male and female and learning about the biological/physiological strength and weaknesses of each. But there's little scientific justification in extrapolating that to unrelated conclusions.
Edit: Not to mention the fact that we know very little about the brain compared to literally any other internal organ, so attempting to draw conclusions about behavior or sociology based on changes in the brain in some women during pregnancy is probably a fool's errand.
It isn't sexist to study sexual dimorphism. It would be sexist to have a conclusion about the sexes and then cherrypick evidence to support it- but finding evidence and then drawing a conclusion is in no way sexist.
Difference is though that there's millions of free apps floating around. There aren't millions of free wedges of cheese.
To a lot of people, paying for software is still a pretty weird concept, and evaluating the "worth" of software is quite hard when there is so much free software around.
Out of curiosity, did you read those case studies? In the two listed, the children swallowed a single magnet, which is actually not particularly dangerous. More problematic were the button batteries these children also swallowed. Do we ban button batteries also?
Also, is there much evidence of teens actually doing this and accidentally swallowing them? I have no doubt that teens are playing with the magnets in stupid ways, but how many teens have swallowed magnets this way and had complications? The CPSC claims its happening but provides no breakout stats for this.
Also also, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the claims the CPSC is making. On the page I linked, they clam "22 reports of magnet incidents involving children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years old since June 2009" through Nov 2011 and provide a yearly breakout of all those reports. In the press release poison.org cites, they claim "CPSC staff estimates that small, high powered magnet sets were associated with 1,700 emergency room-treated injuries between 2009 and 2011." So they estimate two orders of magnitude higher than they actually have reports for?
I was referring specifically to the case studies listed on that page's sidebar.
Where did that 1300 number come from? I'm seeing so many random numbers for how often kids are swallowing magnets that I'm doubting the good faith of the CPSC now.
No; but if they do, it's the parents who should be held liable for disregarding important safety information.
This whole debate is symptomatic of some bigger cultural problem. It reminds me of when some kid shoots themselves with a gun and then the community is all 'too bad, so sad' and no charges are brought against the parent because they've been through the 'tragedy' of losing a child. Well that's tragic for them but it was fatal for the child, and dead children are not getting any justice when their negligent parents are let off the hook for causing the death of another person.
I mean, if I as an adult was hanging out with you and then I died because you handed me something that looked like a can of coke but was actually a hand grenade, then you'd be charged with manslaughter for failing to apprise me of the risk. But when small children get hold of guns and kill themselves (or worse, kill another kid) that's frequently just treated as 'the cost of our 2nd amendment freedom' or some bullshit. there are a lot of cases where parents get off with no legal penalty because the death of a child is so painful, even though they're clearly responsible. That does not make it OK to push the liability onto some third party who wasn't present and who supplied a a dangerous product with a detailed warning about the risks involved in it suse which people chose to ignore.
How about teenagers who play with fireworks and die? Do we need to ban fireworks? Or do we just need parents to educate their children that fireworks are dangerous.
I bought some years ago, and had fun playing with them with my children. If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
And if your child (Lets say over the age of 3) is still eating random non-food items without checking with you, then you're not doing a great parenting job.
Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
>And if your child (Lets say over the age of 3) is still eating random non-food items without checking with you, then you're not doing a great parenting job.
That's just plain ridiculous. No amount or quality of parenting will prevent a child from occasionally doing something stupid, any more than it will prevent an adult from the same.
Which we accept as the natural form of evolution, but wholly reject continuing to act without recourse on our species. Unless you also dislike any medicine or safety measures.
OK but where does it end? Every time you strike a match you could start a fatal fire, but it would obviously be absurd to require people to take a safety class every time they strike a match. We settle for putting a generic warning on boxes of matches instead. Likewise you can buy gasoline and propane at the gas station without having to go through any bureaucracy, because it's assumed that responsible individuals know fire is dangerous and that refined fuels are highly-combustible, so as long as there are some warning signs up to remind people of the fact then the public interest is considered to have been served. And sure enough, millions of people buy and consume gasoline every day without injury despite the high risk potential.
Please stop offering false dichotomies like 'status quo (even when it's failing) or no regulation at all.'
as opposed to your slippery-slope "where does it end?" argument?
Unless you think that there should be no regulations at all, you agree that there is some line before which there should be regulations and after it there shouldn't, so "where does it end" is an actual discussion to have, not a non-sequitor to end the conversation like you're using it.
Oh no. you said 'Unless you also dislike any medicine or safety measures.' I asked you where the line of demarcation was for acceptable safety measures, and gave some examples for context, which is a totally legitimate question.
It was not a non-sequitur at all. I want an answer.
The answer is we have that debate as a society. I was asserting that there was a line of demarcation, because you asserted that there wasn't with your claim of "Darwinism".
I did not write the post about Darwinism (that was user jlgaddis) nor did I interpret his/her comment to mean that there was no such line.
Meantime, since we are already having that debate, I am asking you, personally, to go on the record on where you as an individual think that line of demarcation should be. I am all for safety labeling (up to the point where there are so many safety warnings that their effectiveness drops) but I am also all for people being able to buy potentially dangerous products that can be used safely by following instructions and the use of the senses by a person of ordinary adult competence.
In other words, if a supermajority of adults selected via a statistically valid sampling method were to examine a commercial product and correctly infer what degree of danger it might present (based on the packaging, direct observation of the product, and general knowledge) then that's Good Enough.
I don't think that we need to build all our theories of product safety and liability around the least competent people in our society. That imposes a large opportunity cost on people who do take their responsibilities seriously but whose liberty is curtailed in the name of safeguarding people who can't or won't take responsibility.
I believe that most people would probably assume that it's similar to eating a coin or other small piece of non-sharp metal -- it's not good, but it's generally not potentially life-threatening.
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about how strong magnets can probably attract each other through internal tissue, the risk makes sense, but it doesn't seem like something that's obvious, at least not to me.
This is one circumstance where awareness/warning labels are really useful, but unfortunately we hear so many frivolous warnings people are not likely to take them seriously. Everyone should know that these contraptions were literally banned at one point for the risk they pose to children, and the disclaimers encountered are not just generic CYA, but representative of a real risk to small children that has a real body count.
Like the GP, I'm glad that these are legal in the United States again, but we should not take the issue of informing parents of the risk involved with these toy-like objects lightly.
A similar issue is being posed by the small watch batteries included in many children's toys and remote controls these days. Children swallow these and they burn holes in their organs that result in serious disabilities. It's important that parents be aware of such non-obvious environmental dangers.
Small watch batteries are an interesting example, I don't recall seeing any warning stickers on these toys or their packaging. Perhaps something is buried in the back of an instruction manual, but that would be obviously ineffective.
The more dangerous case is those watch batteries are included in some greetings cards which play music or a recorded message etc. Very young kids can easily chew on a greetings card which isn't going to hurt them, but they may now swallow a battery as well, which may hurt them.
> If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
Of course you can't prevent every idiot from doing something stupid. But some things are dangerous in an non-obvious way. It's pretty obvious you can choke on small objects. It's not obvious that eating one small magnet is fine, but eating a second one after a while can kill you.
Nobody disputes that, but a) once it has been explained via a warning, why should responsibility remain with the manufacturer, and b) once someone of ordinary intelligence plays with the magnets and sees how strong they are then it is obvious. Neodymium magnets will pinch your fingertip painfully if you're not careful. If it can hurt your finger it could hurt other parts of your body.
I agree. I don't know why some people act as if it's astounding and something you would never think of - that swallowing magnets can be pretty dangerous.
> If you need a warning saying that eating a magnet is dangerous, you're not very clever.
I don't think non-clever parents ought to be punished via their children. That seems a little Old Testament biblical.
> Don't you think the whole "put a warning sticker on everything" is getting a bit ridiculous?
That's pretty good late 90's standup material, but I'm not sure if it's factually supported. Are there too many stickers? Are they effective or not effective at preventing harm? Do they incur more costs than the harm they prevent?
Non-clever parents don't deserve to be punished, but nor do the rest of us deserve to permanently obstructed by rules designed for the least competent members of society.
I argue that there are too many stickers, that they become less effective through profusion, and that in some cases the cost does exceed the benefit. For example, in California a 1986 ballot initiative called Proposition 65 mandates that businesses put up a sign on any building that contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Unfortunately this definition is very vague, since many common chemicals can be carcinogenic in sufficient quantities. As a result, virtually every business in California displays a sign warning that the building contains cancer-causing chemicals, completely obviating the utility of warning the public about hazards because it's impossible to distinguish what the actual level of risk is. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the signage provision actually helping in any way, but it's been a goldmine for signmakers and attorneys who file nuisance lawsuits over the non-display of these useless signs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(198...
Note that I'm not arguing against regulation here, I'm arguing against ineffectual regulation whose discernable costs exceed the discernable benefit.
I would say that when you buy an inflatable pool ring, if more of the area of the pool ring is taken up by warning messages, than isn't, then we've gone too far.
Stickers or labeling on packaging sounds pretty inexpensive and straightforward. For sure, too many stickers and labels turns into noise but I would argue that we aren't there yet, most of the toys I purchase for my children are relatively bereft of warnings.
http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/ shows for 2002 that there were ~320 cases of magnet injuries (nature unspecified) in home/leisure scenarios vs. ~12000 coin injuries.
However that doesn't help us much. Strong magnets are far more prevalent now and the specific toys that caused most injuries weren't around in the UK, I think (?), back then.
Moreover, that probably makes magnet injuries per item in the home massively outweigh coin injuries.
I looked for EU IDB stats too but didn't get anywhere, my starting source was http://www.rospa.com/resources/statistics/ which lists some other potential data sources at the bottom.
>How many kids are hospitalized/die from swallowing batteries?
For button batteries:
poison.org[1] lists 54 fatalities since 1977; the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has a page [2] that mentions "Fifteen children have died — 11 of them within the last six years" but it isn't clear when exactly that page was published.
It costs money to fight it, but Zen Magnets will probably make a killing because of this. Maybe the Kinder surprise company will be more interested in fighting the ban now.
I think the Kinder-surprise company[0] has a lot more money than the magnet-surprise company, and my first guess would be that they don't think the liability risk is worth the effort.
I feel like some people don't understand the gravity of what he did. He edited someone elses comments. What is the point in being part of a community where the website owners may be editing random comments? It undermines the whole thing.
Let me ask a question. If it turned out that Google had started selectively "editing" peoples email coming from Gmail, would you still be fine using Gmail?
There is no gravity. People are overreacting, that's all. Spez simply did what other sites are able to do but never admit if they do or not.
GPG sign everything online if you're concerned about your data changing. Even HN could change your comments if they wanted. What's stopping people? "Trust"?
So the answer to censoring is more censoring, let's nuke an entire community just because I'm on a moral high horse!
Also I fully understand what Spez did and I find it not OK. If you don't agree with what an admin did, you could ask for the respective admin/CEO to resign. The answer should not be to delete a community that you don't own on a whim.
If Google started modifying my emails, I would stop using Gmail and advise my friends not to use Gmail. But I won't ask for Gmail to be killed/deleted just because I don't like it or I don't agree with it.
"and I only included subjects who appeared to be a white man"
Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all.
What a pile of rubbish. If you take offense at words, things are going to get progressively worse for you as more and more automated bots enter the scene.
The answer of course, is for people to stop taking offense.
Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy? What's the point?
If a statement is absolutely fine if the person saying it is black, but absolutely offensive and racist if the person saying it is white, then it's the person taking offense who is the racist one...
They never claimed such a thing, only that a specific race had to be chosen for the experiment to have a comparison. Also, really funny how you tell people to stop taking offense at words while simultaneously doing that exactly. By your own logic, why would you get offended if someone said only white men could be racist? They're only words after all.
> Ah yes of course - racism can only be carried out by white men after all.
No one said that. Just that racism is an oppression where whites are the top caste. Blacks can be racist against blacks too, for example internalized racism.
However, blacks being racist against whites is an odd statement, like homeless people being classist against the rich. Race is pseudoscientific classification of people to justify entire economic systems like slavery, and still lives on like awful backwards compatibility.
> Do these people get offended at spam emails suggesting they need viagra or a fuckbuddy?
Companies like twitter are far more aggressive at fighting spam than physical threats. To the point where people simply reported abusers as spammers at one point. That's why no one bought them.
Oops. Maybe they should've been less arrogant to their embattled userbase; so-called "social justice warriors" turned out to be normal people just trying to help them make money. What happens social media companies refuse to learn things like sociology. http://www.businessinsider.com/disney-twitter-acquisition-tr...
This idea that there is a single, global caste system which is applicable in all situations makes me very uneasy. For example, a white person being beaten up for going into a black gang area I feel would be racism, because that is a space where black people are at the top of the pyramid. A male stay-at-home dad being scorned by female counterparts would be an example of female-to-male sexism, because that is an aspect of society where women are considered to be superior.
The trick is understanding who holds the power in the situation.
> However, Blacks being racist against whites is an odd statement, like homeless people being classist against the rich.
I get what you're saying, but this just isn't a very pragmatic perspective. It's clear that white people have major hegemonic advantages over minority groups, but at the end of the day, the left (of which I am a part) needs to acknowledge and reject the damaging effect this kind of rhetoric has on racial discourse. As an extreme example, a statement like "fuck white people", is clearly racist regardless of who is saying it. It is difficult to fight racism if we give casual observers ammo to reject the left as hypocrites. This doesn't mean we have to pretend that the impact of racism affects all groups equally, but in order to see progress we must condemn hateful speech in all forms instead of dismissing it just because the speaker hails from a disadvantaged group.
How often is it happening that the rich are being ambushed by groups of resentful homeless people? Is this a significant and recurring problem in your country that existing policing is failing to address?
I use mbasic.facebook as my main was of interacting with Facebook. I acknowledge that my choice to disable JavaScript is unusual and will jump through some hoops because of that, but it's not excusable for a website to display /nothing/ pre-script like the OP does.
The great thing about this is that it's paginated. You can literally "scroll infinitely" through feeds without creating a ridiculous scroll offset and filling up browser memory (or losing Ctrl-F functionality due to Facebook's complex memory-saving exercises)
There is a place for JS but most sites don't need it or at least don't need to drive the entire site. The problem is that Jquery now is 'bad' because it, what was it again, is not suitable for structuring big apps (ofcourse it is not; it's not meant to be an MVC or whatever framework; it's helper library to make Javascript easier to use). So it is obvious (and I see it all around me) that people build sites now like they are building Facebook, even though the site might have only 1 or 2 pages and no interactive functionality to speak off.
Still, this guy did it (took a long time between this site being up and the post on HN that instigated it) while the rest of the readers in that thread who thought it would be a good idea, including me, didn't. So kudos for 'just doing it' anyway.
Edit: I checked hours ago and then it was clean but apparently there is no moderation on it either... So this site would've taken literally less than an hour including hosting setup to put together? Still I didn't do it while I did like FuckedCompany and think it's good to have something like it.
See http://webassembly.org/ . While not raw assembly, we have to because of the js nonsense. This will ofcourse also increase the jsnonsense, cause now everything will be more efficient so we can put alot more crap.
In future publishers will probably use web assembly for DRM, for example, to render decrypted article text on a canvas so that it cannot be copied, zoomed, read aloud or viewed without advertisement and annoying popups. Maybe you will change your mind about Javascript then.
You jest, but in one of the discussions for EME, that exact case was brought up.
Only they wanted to drm javascript sent to the browser. We got rid of Flash only to see a new hydra head emerge. People clamoring for javascript applications should be careful what they wish for. They just might get it.
I don't think this is a fair argument. Writing web pages as single page JS apps is _harder_ than writing them as server-side generated html responses. And in many cases (this one as a great example), the user experience is worse for having done so.
I think the search engine space is very ripe for a startup, but duckduckgo isn't it IMHO.