charlesism

Am I doing your comment an injustice if I paraphrase it as follows?:

- Ads do not adversely affect customer satisfaction.

- The combined forces of Microsoft, Apple and others could not create a serviceable search engine (despite Microsoft alone having already made one).

If not, let’s just agree to disagree :)

Your generation had "Don't trust anyone over 30!”

We should revise the message to be “people of all generations make lousy decisions” and leave it at that.

If you mean “conflation of what customers want and what companies need” that is another way to express “customer focus”

If companies like Apple and Microsoft care about providing a great user experience, Google search is risky. I think users would prefer not to see ads when they search, or worry about Google harvesting their data. If this is so, it might be worth it to fund some sort of independent “search foundation.”

I reckon a simple text-only search engine – like Google before it jumped the shark – would actually be quite cheap to develop and operate.

HN is “social”. It’s just not so “social” that I want to throw my router off the balcony upon reading it.

I don’t know about ideology. I know Gawker alerted Torontonians to the fact that their mayor was off his gourd on drugs, hanging out at a crack-house. That seems like a public service to me.

Oops, I forgot about that guideline. Won't be a problem in future.

Thanks! If someone linked a NYT recipe for chicken soup here, it would be full of "fake news" comments. [edit: speculation removed]

Considering Hollywood’s low tolerance for risk, this young trend is going to be huge, and permanent.

I can’t help but be excited to see new movies with old stars, but I can already tell it won’t be fun for long. A decade from now, we’ll pine for the days before dozens of trash movies ruined the memories of our favorite actors. I don’t want to associate Jimmy Stewart with the 25th Fast and Furious sequel, etc.

    > “I thought it was essentially game over for Apple,” 
    > Silverberg told me, recalling his thoughts about 
    > Windows 95 at the time. “I didn’t see how they 
    > could compete.”
    > 
    > Fortunately for us, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

I guess the author assumes the reader understands that Apple did, in fact, nearly go out of business before...

    > Two years later, Steve Jobs was back at the helm 
    > and the rest, as they say, is history!

Without Steve Jobs and an entirely new OS, it’s hard to see how Apple would have carried on building computers past 2000 or so.

Imo, this article crosses the line into spam territory. If there's a tool with which the HN audience is already familiar it's the text editor. This article seems like a random list. That might be okay (barely) if the first entry were Emacs or Vim. But it's Atom, and there's no good explanation as to why.

There are two big problems with these algorithms.

Problem one is less controversial: small groups of propagandists game the algorithms to gain more exposure than they could get organically.

Problem two is less comfortable: sometimes content that appeals to the majority does so at the expense of a minority. An algorithm that is purely democratic is only as fair as the majority is altruistic.

    > YouTube is merely a mirror of our societies.

Youtube hasn’t affected the world? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me.

What does “allowed to have a past” mean?

What a person does today can have long-lasting ramifications.

If you decided to chop off your own hand, for some misguided reason, ain’t nobody ever growing you that hand back. The permission to “have a past” is not absolute.

Great point. I made some assumptions without taking a mental inventory. The issue is disproportionately an Apple issue (and even then, an issue with programs that rely on Apple APIs).

The paradigm programmers deal with today is demoralizing: it’s lousy to know your work will disintegrate in five or ten years.

For a while Mac OS 10 had support to run Mac OS 9—- via nicely integrated emulation. Then Apple removed it.

I’d just love it if the current OS supported all previous versions, via emulation.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And yet https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/opinion/jeff-bezos-spend-...

Well, it is often useful to ask why a user wants to do something a particular way, and commendable to inform them if it’s bad practice.

The trouble is, if you’re going to reply that way, you should strive to first answer the question, as asked. If the answer is bad practice, of course, you should mention that.

That’s the respectful way to handle a misguided question, in my opinion. Give the reader both solutions, explain why the alternate is better, and leave it to the reader how to proceed from there.

Is consciousness a binary state? There are many examples that suggest it is not: toddlers, the dream state, computer programs, communal endeavors (such as a scientific inquiry), not to mention animals. If consciousness is something that is a question of degree, it makes sense to think of the entire universe being conscious to some degree or another. I’m not a very spiritual person, but I find this train of thought hard to avoid.

Read between the lines: "Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Lower Customer Satisfaction." That's less obvious because Amazon traditionally has been a customer-focused company, and this is a step away from that.

Imo, the shark-jumping moment for any search engine is the day when they deprecate the "0 results" page. I mean, when the user searches for "alice bob" and the search engine pretends the user searched only for "alice" to avoid showing an empty page. Google certainly started doing that earlier than one year ago.

    > Has anyone found that recently Google search 
    > is becoming more and more useless?

Absolutely. I use DDG now. Google spams me with ads, and ignores my search terms.

This 'search disease' seems to be spreading, too. Retailers like Amazon, NewEgg, Ebay, and others happily insert results that they want the user to buy, instead of putting the user in control. On Ebay, half the time they remove filters I want to use. Amazon haphazardly injects their off-brand products into my results, even if I sort by price. NewEgg and Walmart show me results of partner retailers whom I don't know whether to trust.

Maybe this state of affairs works for the average user. It doesn't work for me. It mainly causes me to wade through pages of useless results, trying to filtering them out by eye.

If it's difficult, as opposed to unrealistic, then it's a good opportunity for a third party (or a google spin-off) to wholly dedicate itself to solving. Also, PageRank is easier to game because Google must stick to existing rules (eg: if it's on the web, Google is supposed to index it). When it comes to a service tied to a user account, the site operator has more agency to impose its own rules.

Unless the Wikipedia article claims Dan Rather has an ability to telepathically beam messages into his viewers' heads, I don't see a strong connection.

It's only "too big to fix" because Youtube insists on fixing it centrally. They could fix it by delegating responsibility to creators, and implementing some sort of "user-rank" to avoid moderating every single bit of content via paid employees.

If Google were serious enough about the issue, there's an opportunity here. If they created an effective enough, and flexible enough, distributed 'content moderation' back-end, they could probably offer it as a service to other businesses, too.

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.

It’s not a convincing argument to say a society shouldn’t fight unwanted behavior unless it can be completely eradicated. That’s akin to saying there’s no point advertising a product unless it results in 100% of the public buying it. If 80% of 8chan users “just go elsewhere” that could literally save a few lives.

That occurred to me, but is "unneededly" a real word? The ambiguity is partly why the typo distracted me so much. The final sentence of an essay is a bad place to derail a reader’s train of thought like that.

Is “unnededly” in the final sentence meant to be “needlessly”? I enjoyed the article, but it would be a more satisfying read without that typo.

I've been waiting for an excuse to compliment the mods here, without it being off-topic. They do a great job! Of course, it also helps that the community here is more reasonable than most.

If we're being pedantic, aside from "Harvard," it wouldn't have screamed much to most people in 1974: "What are all these acronyms, and what on earth is an 'operating system'?" This resume was written three years before anyone normal had access to a computer. I'm not even sure how many bank branches and travel agents had a terminal yet.