skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, what I'm taking from this is that the author feels Microsoft should pull an IBM and basically completely withdraw from the consumer market. While it's true that Microsoft's best domain is in the enterprise market, I have to imagine there's more to it than them "wasting money" on IE, Bing, etc. AD is great, but even in the server space Microsoft has a lot more to offer than just one product.

I like the author's main point and I agree with it without hesitation, but I can't support the supporting arguments. Especially considering Microsoft is still a huge success in the desktop market (a market that isn't quite as dead as some seem to call it).
also sorry i can't give you a url to test, i haven't bought the domain yet so don't want to risk some ass squatting it when they see my site's name.
My wishlist

1. Ajax loader inside the modal (load modal first)
2. Pinterest like modal (aka modal with HTML5 history API /
hashchange / browser back button support)
I'm not familiar with big orgs. What does active directory facilitate mostly? Like seeing a list of other computers in the company and accessing their drives?
Thanks, now I get it. Having a UI cue when you're on the DDG website is a good idea.
You mean, some integers? 0 is perfectly representable. And so might be 1.
Have you tried the app? It is so different from radio content that I am a bit confused when people say that radio will be their competition.

I have two types of commutes with two very different sets of problems. I drive a car and ride the T (subway) in and around Boston/Cambridge.

When driving I (obviously) can't read. When riding the T it is usually a pain to read because there is no reception so the content must be preloaded and on top of that there are often no seats. It is not fun trying to operate an iPad[1] with one hand while holding onto a bar for dear life with the other.

Umano solves the car problem by having real humans reading to me and giving me the ability to queue multiple articles in advance. Once the app allows users to preload content it will solve all of my T pain points because I will be able get my news fix aurally without any reception needed. I would gladly pay for that.

Also, as others have mentioned, I see this as much more than an app for commuters. This seems perfect for the gym.

[1] I don't enjoy reading on the iPhone if I can help it because of the need to constantly scroll.
Single sign on, group policies, user account control on a global scale.
Unheap - A tidy collection of jQuery plugins
Bing already occupies that position.
Fired up IE9 to take a look.

One click on the search icon in the address bar and Bing and Ask.com (really?) are listed as two default search providers.

There is an Add button which takes me to an Internet Explorer Add-On page. DDG and Google are highlighted as popular options. Click on the "tile" and another click to install.

So 4 clicks for IE9.

It's 4 clicks in Chrome (Menu - Settings - Settings - Manage Search Providers, to get to the "Manage Search Engines" screen but DDG is nowhere to be found. YOu have to manually add it and it isn't very clear how to do it because the textbox is truncated for the actual url.
I set DDG as my default search in Firefox; the results were abysmal. It felt like being transported back to altavista.digital.com, wading through middling irrelevant links searching for info. I got fed up with having to put !g into every query to get a good result, I ended up switching to DuckDuckGoog instead (and this is my current search provider).
There's a DDG extension available for Safari, which will make DDG the default search provider.

https://extensions.apple.com/#search-extensions (it takes just one click to install and activate)
You guys are absolute heroes. The concept behind this site is amazing. Well done.
Reductio ad absurdum Latin: Reduction to Absurdity
The D Conference 2013 raises $30,000 on kickstarter.com
I was surprised to see such accurate depictions of airplanes. This was four years before the Wright brothers made their first flight.
I agree. I have tried DDG and found their quality and freshness are both much worse than Google. Bing at least presents a credible alternative in terms of quality, depth, and freshness, but DDG is only good for people who actually don't care much if they find what they are looking for.
Funny how predictions on the future are often just extrapolation of recent advances in technology.
64-bit Firefox discontinued on Windows
me thinks that is taking both the internet and open source for granted.
Many people like DuckDuckGo for good reasons but let's be clear:

It does not do any of it's own indexing.

It's just a frontend to other very very expensive backends that have millions of dollars behind them.

The entire company can be shut down overnight if it's data feeds are cut.
I've switched to using DDG over the past 6 months and use it as my main search engine because I think the results are as good as Google and there are less distractions, and I don't want my search history stored.

If I need to search for news, images, etc then it's back to Google. For me it's akin to using the command line for most tasks, but every so often opening up a cluttered but easier to use GUI.
I counted three clicks on Chrome:

1. Right-click on search bar when on duckduckgo.com
2. Click edit search engines
3. Next to DuckDuckGo (it's autodetected the first time you visit the site), click 'make default'.

It's more clicks than firefox if you do it via the extension, but google's stance on blocking third-party extensions by default makes sense when you consider the threat of malicious extensions, and how most people don't read the permissions prompt.
but DDG is nowhere to be found. YOu have to manually add it and it isn't very clear how to do it because the textbox is truncated for the actual url.

Unless you visit duckduckgo.com once, at which point it's added to the list of "other search engines" on that page. Which seems like a totally reasonable way to manage that list, since otherwise Google is responsible for pre-populating and maintaining a comprehensive list of all other search engines out there.

(This behavior was tested on Chrome 24, and I verified it by deleting the record for DuckDuckGo from my "other search engine" list, then visiting duckduckgo.com and reloading the list.)
Well, hotels on the room... we kind of have that with sleeper trains and bar services in wagons. Not too far :)

And playing sports underwater: already exists.

Net: we did not fail at everything.
I think the issue is that you're thinking of the customer as being a person, who you move along the sales process.

think of "Customer" in this context as being Customer with a Capital "C". The General idea of customers.

As in, "Who's your Customer". In this case it's almost interchangable with "Market".

What you're developing is who the customer of your product is. You're making a model of what the customer is like, what they want, and why. And you're manipulating that model as you learn more things about real people who might actually be a customer of your company later on.

Think of it as Developing the Customer section of your [business plan](http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/08/businessmodelcanvas/)
I think the author of this article is being deliberately obtuse and missing the point of the usability study.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was once asked what market research
went into the creation of the iPad.

"None," Jobs replied, in one of his most celebrated quotes.
"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

Market research is not the same thing as usability testing. It doesn't help to conflate the two. There's a major difference between the eschewing market research vs producing a product that your customers are confused by when you put it in front of them because you de-prioritized usability.

That's why the notion that users should be able to grasp the new Windows
interface right away is a recipe for incrementalism.

Not at all. The iPhone user interface was far from incremental. In fact, it broke many of the traditional UI paradigms found on phones and computers before its release. That doesn't take away from the fact that it was eminently intuitive, discoverable, and usable.

Then again, Nielsen's research and analysis led him to pan the
iPad's usability when it debuted two years ago, noting inconsistencies
in the way different apps work. Of course, that didn't stop consumers
from snapping up the device in eye-popping numbers.

The iPad study pointed out inconsistencies and usability flaws in third party apps, not the stock OS, many of which have been improved since. The study was focusing on usability, not making a value judgment on the iPad's potential for success.
This site looks cool. How do you keep track of some of the best jQuery plugins?
Following a curiously short discussion, and despite 50% of Nightly testers on windows using the 64-bit builds[1] and a Windows user demonstrating firefox using 10GB of memory[2] (above the address space limit of 32-bit), the 64-bit nightly builds of Firefox on Windows are to be discontinued.

_______________________________

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814009

2. http://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/29261499

3. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir... - Full discussion thread
Excellent PR efforts by DuckDuckGo.

But not entirely sure that the arguments presented in this article are valid and would sway a technical crowd.

Given how trivial it was just now for me to switch to DDG in Chrome, I don't see how that's anti-competitive.
To see the difference go to my search engine

http://www.verticalset.com/search

On Firefox, by clicking "Add to Browser" and checking "Start using Right Away", you can make it default.

On Chrome, if you click on same button there is no way to make it default. You have to find the list of search engines in settings and click "Make Default".

On IE, process is similar to Firefox.

It wouldn't be hard to make this similar to Firefox on Chrome, just add "Make it Default" check-box when adding new search engine, but that won't happen anytime soon.
DDG was in my list. Apparently it picks up options as you browse?
Really? That lacks every bit of common sense. Also, how folks (in fortune 500 companies) justify these decisions to their bosses?
I'm pretty sure God doesn't read HN. I guess maybe she might. I wouldn't rely on Him upvoting your comment however.

Also this isn't Reddit. So if you have like nothing to add to a conversation, exercise some restraint and don't post, for the benefit of everyone else.

Noise pollution is a real problem with documented health effects.[0] So either ignore it and contribute to the problem or make yourself aware of it and be a better person. I could care less, to be honest.

[0] http://www.epa.gov/air/noise.html
never heard of 'em.
I think we all see this as a marketing stunt from DuckDuckGo.
According to DuckDuckGo's FAQ you are wrong http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

The DuckDuckBot crawls and indexes the web.
http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html
Weinberg has absolutely no right to initiate force against Google. This disgusts me.
The whole premise of the post in the link is something that has been said a million times before.

Yes, execution is everything...
So what. Everyone already knows this.

It makes me wonder if all of us are trying to convince ourselves that we need to work in order to get work done...

What is so groundbreaking about this idea? As I said before, it has already been said. Many times before.
It is a search engine that allows you to find pages on the internet. The name comes from the misspelling of a large number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol
In 2006 I helped put in an OpenLDAP server in a medium-sized company (150 users). Once we'd gotten past the initial hump of configuring everything to work with it, it was really nice to have single sign-on and a list of users and permissions accessible from any computer on the network.

Since we could access the directory from perl it was easy to make a simple UI for the support team to make changes.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see Active Directory as being that big of an advantage over OpenLDAP. If your company is small, you'll do fine without any central directory. If it's large, the cost of implementing and supporting OpenLDAP should be less than the cost of the CALs for Active Directory.
> Funny how predictions on the future are often just extrapolation of recent advances in technology.

And then everyone looks at them through the lens of recent technology and hails the most idiotic predictions as visionary.
This http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html is a good place to place intelligent, constructive feedback.

The web community (that is, all of us) really, really needs an alternative to Google. I don't care whether you love or hate them. We desperately need an alternative.
"software will eat the world"
Because there aren't many dynamic tiling WMs on OSX. The only one I know of is TylerWM and last I heard it didn't work very well.
Tested with this comment and it works. Good job and thank you.
This is an interesting article for several reasons.

One is the immediate - more knowledge about mammography leads to scientists telling us to rely on it less -- and that will be a message that flies in the face of what women's organizations may want to hear.

Second, it's another example of a medical technology or science that upon further inspection, turned out to be not so scientific. It's something to consider when you hear or read a "Science, it works, bitches". It's something to consider when various groups are demanding some form of government action based on "Science, it works, bitches."
When Google testifies before Congress, they tend to mention "Bing and Blekko" or "Bing and DuckDuckGo". Since Bing is losing a lot of money every quarter, and is owned by a pretty big company (M$), it's useful to have smaller, newer competitors around.
I was talking to a friend recently about how little of the sea we had explored, and he wondered out loud why it seems like people tend to take a bigger interest in space than deep sea exploration.

I joked that it's because the sea is goddam scary and we're less likely to find things with tentacles in space.

But it's still a good question. Space exploration gets a lot more love from entertainment, pop culture, and news outlets.
Worst mobile experience ever.
Hi, author here. Thanks for the feedback!

You're right, the premise of execution triumphing all else is hardly new. Yet, the notions of NDAs and the like, at least in my experience, haven't gone away. So perhaps while people know that execution is key, they're letting preconceived notions about their ideas being stolen get in the way of that execution.
New Film Portrays Muhammad As A Child Molester And An Assassin
That adds a silly pop up button in the menu bar, and doesn't integrate with the unified search/url bar.

I'm using SafariKeywordSearch http://safarikeywordsearch.aurlien.net which means when I type "d ip address" it uses duckduckgo instead of Google.
Heh, that comment thread pretty much sums it up. Shame to see this happen.
Facebook Requests Comments on Proposed Data Use Policy
Because, when a smart person comes out in the open, he quickly gets labelled as a new money red neck, rapist, or raving homeless person.
That is the power of the opponents. They are able to manipulate the media outlets better.
Social TV Tools
> You can pull a 10 tonne yacht with one hand on a rope. Try pulling a 10 tonne truck...

This probably deserves a little more attention.

Having done a lot of sailing as well as ocean-fishing on different size vessels I know exactly what you are talking about. What you might be confusing is that at zero speed there's a huge difference between something floating on water and a truck resting on the ground.

In the case of a large boat floating on water, so long as you are not after making it move quickly you are almost just fighting inertia. So, yes, a fifteen year old kid pulling on a rope could make a large boat move.

When it comes to a truck sitting on the ground you have to contend with rolling friction as well as the static friction (because nothing is moving) and the viscous drag of all the mechanical elements, oil and grease in the drivetrain. It could take hundreds of pounds of force to get it to budge. Once your break through static friction then you have a much reduced dynamic friction and viscous drag (oil and grease in the drivetrain) --again, so long as speed is very, very low-- as well as the rolling friction of the tires.

If, on the other hand, that truck was resting on a frozen lake bed and if the tires are not frozen-glued into the ice, and, if the ice is not deformed under the tires, the same fifteen year old kid could move it just as well as he moved the boat. In fact, it might even be easier because there isn't a significant v^3 component to the power required to make it move.

Once you start to add speed to the problem it is easy to see that moving the same object through water will require at least 830 times more water.

At speed the power required to counter drag comes into play.

Power = 1/2 * fluid density * velocity ^3 * coefficient of drag * area

Here's an easy experiment: Take a tennis racket and duct-tape the strung area in order to make it a solid paddle. No air or water should get through. Now swing it in air as fast as you can. Now go into a swimming pool and try to swing it just as hard under water. Unless you are super-human you will not be able to. In fact, you won't be able to even get close to the speed in air. Again, simply stated, you need over 800 times more power to achieve the same speed in water with the same object.

If it takes one horsepower to move something in air at a given speed you'll need over 800 horsepower to achieve the same speed in water. It's the difference between a model airplane engine and a Formula 1 race car engine.

There's a good article in Wikepedia on drag:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)

Get down to the "Power" heading. That's the formula you want to look at.

To get back to your yacht vs. truck example. What you would really have to experience is pulling each of them at 20 or 30 miles per hour with a rope (chain?). Of course, it would take super-human strength and endurance to be able to do that.
Search Provider is not an extension it is just a setting in your browser so I am not buying the argument that is is for security purposes.

Also, these three steps are not intuitive i.e. you can't ask user to click a button on your website to initiate the change. While on Firefox, clicking on a button, a prompt gets shown to make your search engine default one. Even in case of Firefox, user has to explicitly click on check-box to make your search engine default.

Try here http://www.verticalset.com/
William Gibson on science fiction:

[The] reason [science fiction is] powerful is
that it resonates of history. It doesn't
resonate back from the future, it resonates
out of modern history.

http://boingboing.net/2007/07/08/william-gibson-expla.html
I used to recommend DDG, but stopped doing so. DDG also blocked us for some unknown reasons. For examples, all of the following search terms I see results in Google, Yahoo/Bing in first top 5 positions for nixCraft, but not in duckduckgo:

"bash for loop"
"linux remove directory"
"grep command"

It appears that we are facing some sort of ban in DDG. I have already sent an email to DDG and now I am waiting for a reply.
Misleading headline and obviously you know it.
Nice. But at 36 pages of 20 or so plugins each...this is not a tidy collection. The category organization is definitely helpful...but what would be even better is some ranking of them, even if by github stars.

And a flat, text only table of the collection would be really nice too. I'm usually looking for just functionality, something that is better described in the author provided readme rather than a screenshot
Hmm! Simple Modal - http://simplemodal.plasm.it/ may be just what I've been looking for, for my project, as I've moved from Prototype to jQuery, but still have to keep to Prototype hooks around, to utilize Modal Box - http://okonet.ru/projects/modalbox/index.html - I like the OS X-like styling of the, "sheet" coming down from the top of the menu, and ability to load via Ajax.

Looks like I may be able to hack the same sort of styling into Simple Modal, and it's got load-via-ajax already built in. (any other options?)
I suspect it's trivial at best.

Every test search I've ever done on DDG shows near identical results to Bing.

I'd like to see a search that uses it's own data, examples?

Gigablast was the last serious third-party backend that had a chance for independent data. It's like old-school Google.

Gabriel should try to buy Gigablast and merge it with DDG so he has his own independent dataset.
Easy solution for Firefox:

http://superuser.com/a/181293
Again, in none of these examples is anybody saying that email is dead. It's writers interpreting Zuck words to mean that, but the BBC is doing the exact same thing as the people they're writing about, a commentary Ouroboros that is based on nothing. To be sure, Carr is even more of a hack than any of these people, but again: consider the source.
This is not a bad idea, but I would add that I think a better idea is that abuse of the patent system (resubmitting patents over and over with slight modifications to gain approval [0], non-producing entities engaging in jurisdiction-swapping [1], etc) need to be confronted immediately by judges or individuals with the spectre of sanction and disbarment by local and state bar associations boards of professional conduct (EDIT: I am generally against an activist judiciary but, this is certainly an area where such activism has sufficient merit).

This can happen right now. You don't have to wait for political reform or constitutional amendments. Disbar the people who are responsible for abuse. Then let the system work. Bar associations feel local pressure. They respond to it immediately, on the the timescale of months, not years. Remove the financial incentive to file obviously frivolous[2] suits, and the problem will go away. If the trolls can't find anyone reputable to represent them, we all win.

Just my $0.02.

[0] http://www.google.com/patents/US8086604

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_shopping
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)#Disbar...
I don't know what to say to you except "I'm glad this kind of story is on HN."
I do. Spectacle is much simpler. Having recently switched from Vim to Emacs, Slate's configurability scares me.
I'm at all convinced that this would be any truer had it actually happened.
Ah! There's also the project that was just submitted on HN:

http://jschr.github.com/bootstrap-modal/
A New Way to Get FaceBook Likes for your Business Page
Facebook proposes policy changes, kills user veto
But they are using legitimate means to provide search results. And feed(/API) providers are not shutting them out.

Same argument can be made about Google, they do not produce their own data just copy webpages from content providers. If content providers decide to block them from indexing their websites, Google would be irrelevant.
It's always nice to hear from people who are informed on the facts of the situation, who analyze things calmly and rationally and consider all the individuals involved. Thank you for participating.

BTW — you got all the facts wrong. Just in case that wasn't clear. And nobody was asking for your sympathy.
"YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID": RMS on most things.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/30612915.jpg
One way it separates itself from radio is that radio is pretty much a one-way street; you don't really choose what you listen to unless you change the station. What's nice about the app is that it is almost a cross of a high-brow Reddit with radio. You can select which stories you want read aloud after reading brief, one sentence summaries. It ends up sounding like a customized BBC news program tailored to user, though with American accents.
I think the Indiegogo is to find out why 2.4ghz was chosen over other possible bands.