161–170 of 188 posts
DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself with https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.
The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.
I don't actually use DDG for privacy primarily. I use if for the instant answer and !bang goodness. If you're a developer, both of these are indispensable. If if the results don't work, you can always !g.
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> when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers Does this happen even if a user is not logged in to a Google account?
And not just logged in. The user also has to have browser sync for passwords enabled.
I use DDG a fair bit but I feel like without revisiting that assumption that a single context-free text box is even desirable, ditching the tracking (which I am totally in favour of) feels like they are dooming themselves.
I've played a little with running Yacy locally and directing it to crawl only sites I care about. So far that habit has not stuck.
The bangs are a step in the right direction. Suggesting additional search terms isn't quite right, and neither is doing a site specific search since I don't know what site will have the information.
Maybe a "metabang" where you search all the bangs in a category? "python !!tech"
Anyway, its good to see DDG growing.
The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.
Then use Ghostery. Or Privacy Badger. Also, I don't think the fonts can track YOU, unless google's got your IP. Which they won't, unless you log into your account. Which you won't, if you care about security. And if you don't, than why are you complaining?
Also, I'm not complaining at all, I am just stating that the privacy is almost completely useless. I do have a google account, google mail, and so on. I don't have a problem with it.
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>Maybe everyone complains about bad behaviour of their insurance company, but that does not mean they'll take a higher premium Exactly. >There's something here about "consumer" psychology and choices that is hard to capture in the concrete terms economists like to formalize using. That some/most economists like to use. There is a huge field in economics (and econophysics and stuff) that focused on actual irrational b…
"My god the rational agent model is so bloody stupid but it makes calculations feasible, that's literally the only reason we use it nowadays ..." I find myself surprisingly often having to remind people that a world in which 64GB of RAM, 16 cores, a dozen terabytes of storage, and programming environments that let people harness all of these things, can all come out to a budget within reach of a middle-class individu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"My god the rational agent model is so bloody stupid but it makes calculations feasible, that's literally the only reason we use it nowadays ..." I find myself surprisingly often having to remind people that a world in which 64GB of RAM, 16 cores, a dozen terabytes of storage, and programming environments that let people harness all of these things, can all come out to a budget within reach of a middle-class individu…
Agents are not just irrational, but also acting with limited information and limited computation. Amusingly, we have trouble getting a few hundred agents to act reasonably in RTS games, modeling 100's of millions of people for long periods of time is just shy of ludicrous.
People on HN, not being economists and usually in a polemical mood when this topic comes up, generally strike me as thinking that "people are not entirely rational -> people are entirely irrational -> all possible theories of economics have now collapsed to the very simple thing I already believed", especially convenient when the latter amounts to "the benevolent state should manage everything because people are dumb". ("And let's not think about the fact the benevolent state itself is made out of people.") But that's wrong; humans are not "generally" irrational, they are specifically irrational in very human ways, and the introduction of non-rational agents greatly expands the possibility space of economic theories, it does not contract it to an obvious point.
You could narrow it back down to roughly the same sized space as we started with if you could precisely characterize the exact ways in which the agents are irrational, but we can not currently do that. There's a long history of the very irrationality of humans getting in the way of determining what behaviors are irrational! Or, in other words, it is not necessarily obvious what is irrational. A simple example is loss aversion; is it irrational? Well, when you consider that in the real world, "0" can mean "starving to death", suddenly taking small, safe bets in preference to large, unsafe bets even when the latter nominally has a larger expected payoff can end up being rational, inasmuch as the former actually results in a longer expected lifespan. Determining "rational" is really quite hard, and I rather expect more "human irrationalities" to be determined to be "more rational than the putatively-rational simpler model" in the future. Along with a heavy dose of "yes, this is irrational, and we have this in the species because it was harmless up to about 100 years ago".
You can't map irrationalities to macroeconomics with anything less than this scale of simulation; the entire point of the rational agent was to make simple equations model things, the very point of abandoning that model is recognizing that the economy can only be modeled by more complicated models that aren't captured by those equations.
Unfortunately, the universe does not have a law in it that says we will have the power to know what it is we want to know in any practical manner.
And 100s of millions was just an example. Just as rough in the 1980s would have been the lack of practical programming environments. You can still do 100,000 agents today with a reasonable amount of state in a simply NumPy script that runs on your local desktop. That was not true up until fairly recently, because there would have been no solution as powerful as NumPy running on modern hardware.