Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 265 posts

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#211

Post by UncleMeat »

gooseus wrote: post #200
dhimes wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hopefully typing &pws=0 at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.

This is what I was hoping to find... of course knowing how to do that is completely esoteric. I don't know why they couldn't just put another button next to I'm Feeling Lucky that says "Pretend you don't know me". My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it".…

Because it is another premier feature to maintain. Because more buttons mean more people accidentally hit the wrong button and then complain about shitty search results.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#212

Post by leephillips »

jon_richards wrote: post #176
busterarm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail doesn't play well with plain text emails. Even if you manually select Plain Text to send, it still reflows lines at 78 characters by manually inserting linebreaks and adds its own special characters where it feels like. It also doesn't follow a handful of RFCs specific to email. There is no workaround for the forced hard-wrapping of lines in Plain Text. It will not let you use format=flowed either. Plain Text m…

I get furious that it threads conversations automatically instead of with the "reply-to" built into the email protocol. It usually just threads emails with the same subject, but... It sometimes doesn't thread emails with the same subject, but after someone else has replied to the first one. You have to put "Re:" in the second email, since the reply automatically added "Re:" and I guess that's too different for gmail…

Another option is to use a non-broken email client, like mutt.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#213

Post by akerro »

moultano wrote: post #136
akerro wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful inf…

Do you happen to remember the query so I can debug? (Check your search history if you have it turned on.)

No, sorry I was something with icon styling on TabActivity, I was adding some shadows and animations. It was over 1.5year ago.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#214

Post by ddnb »

moultano wrote: post #174
pdpi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

I honestly doubt the use of certain words are going to limit your search results more than the way google is 'personalizing' search results by looking at your history/interests and basing it's results around that, do you have any sources for your claim?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#215

Post by UncleMeat »

jawilson2 wrote: post #205
astura wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the to…

So, you call the pizza place and say "Do you deliver to X? No? Oh, but your other location does! Thanks!" Or, go to the company's website and figure it out. People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

Are you kidding? Of course I'd rather have the service tell me directly what pizza places deliver to me. I'd need to call each one and ask individually? How on Earth is that a better service?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#216

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

fredley wrote: post #92
jf wrote: post #11

I'm relived that at least some people are leaving social media. "Gamification of personal interaction" certainly degraded my health. Quitting Facebook "cold turkey" is the best decision I've made this year.

I've quit, but not entirely. I just unfollowed everyone . My newsfeed is blank, it doesn't even have ads amazingly. Without the feed, I still get the upsides of Facebook (I can communicate with people on a platform they almost all use, I can organise events easily), but (along with a suite of tracker-blockers) remove almost all the downsides. https://blog.mamota.net/posts/solving-facebook/

Same here, and added the FB Purity extension on top of it. It's glorious to visit FB today and see the same 3 posts I saw yesterday (I follow a few media co's). It's slowly gotten me out of the habit of randomly checking in to see what's going on; when nothing is going on, you start forgetting to check in.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#218

Post by pdpi »

moultano wrote: post #174
pdpi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

Maybe. The naive approach definitely has a strong filtering effect, but there's more than one non-naive approach, though. Some of those are narrowing, and others are widening. Google seems to prefer the narrowing ones.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#219

Post by joshcanhelp »

BucketSort wrote: post #178

I disagree with mostly everything here, which surprises me since I'm usually in line with most highly voted opinion pieces on here. I'd like to say something in particular about Facebook. I maintain a strict rule of only being friends with people I care about. It allows me to keep up with my family and friends, discuss local community events and news, and keep up with the local music scene. My belief is that a lot of…

N of 1 here but I am in the category of people who hate Facebook (been off for a year) and very much miss the pictures, invites, and updates from people I love. When I used FB, I unfollowed/unfriended folks I didn't care about, really curated the experience as best as I could. I truly miss the interactions with people.

But what I read over and over about the amount of data being collected, combined with the very strong feeling that my worldview was being solidified (I don't want news/articles tuned to my worldview, I want to be challenged) and the desperation at which it tried to drag me back in, made it impossible for me to use FB any longer. Twitter at the same time. Instagram took longer but I'm off (again).

"I choose to focus on the positive and refuse to harbor such negative feeling" - I do too, can't speak to the author. Getting off social media because of the negatives has brought a lot of positive to my life:

- More in-person interactions - More checking in over phone/text/email directly (still electronic but one to one) - More to talk about when I see people (I don't already know every little thing and people are excited to actually tell you about what happened) - More time reading books and long form articles - More time working on things I care about - Less news and "news"

If social media brings positivity into your life, great, enjoy. But YMMV. This is a bit like telling someone not to leave an abusive relationship because they're only focusing on the negative and, hey, your relationship is great!

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#220

Post by joshuamorton »

jawilson2 wrote: post #205
astura wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the to…

So, you call the pizza place and say "Do you deliver to X? No? Oh, but your other location does! Thanks!" Or, go to the company's website and figure it out. People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

It's useful, therefore people use it. You're asking for people to accept a clear decrease in the utility of a service. Because ????
Post reply on HN