I Spent $925 on a Fake Canada Goose Coat - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/counterfeit-canada-goose-amazon/581041/ <comment><USER2> Are Canada Goose coats really worth it in the first place ?

I don't own one, but it seems to me that they are very expensive due to marketing and being trendy, but that you could get the same quality or better for much less.

<comment><USER3> "Much less"? Not so sure. Good winter coats aren't cheap even when there isn't obvious branding. In any case, most clothing has both fashion and utilitarian aspects.

A friend of mine bought a coat from what is probably Canada Goose's main competitor in their Montreal factory store. It was expensive, even on sale, but it was also a very nice cold weather coat that fit well--in addition to looking good.

<comment><USER4> Which competitor is that?

<comment><USER5> Eddie Bauer, Patagonia, LL Bean, REI all make down jackets which are arguably just as good and are half to a quarter the price.

I always thought down was groace and sweaty myself. Even in super cold weather. Easier to adjust things using layers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a pro-tip for the apparently uninformed journalist: When you spent $1000 dollar on a fake coat and realized you were being conned the correct thing to do was NOT to go back to the same retailer to buy your next coat! I mean, really? If that's how you behave there's only so much sympathy you deserve.

<comment><USER7> Yes, really. It is essentially downside protection. If you find yourself in a uncertain situation, it is a reasonable strategy. She now already know that Amazon can handle a refund, what to look for when buying and got a recommendation from a friend for a jacket. Could she have walked into a physical store instead? Probably, but at this point she probably didn't want to buy an expensive jacket anymore which is also reasonable. You are the one not thinking.

I'll give you a different example. Say you are in a foreign city and you use Uber. After a while you have a bad experience. Say, the driver insists you pay something which should have beem included. You contact Uber and you get a refund. So what is the resonable choice now? A. Stay with Uber and be mindful of paying extra fees. B. Take other taxis which might be better, or just scam you without any recourse. For most people it would be A. Large brands win when the market is dysfunctional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very dramatic article. Author made a lot of assumptions, a common pitfall, and got a fake product. She reports she received a refund. I can't fault anyone but the buyer here.

<comment><USER9> If someone went on shadyripoffsite.cn and paid 1/10th the normal price for a counterfeit product then sure, blame the buyer for not seeing red flags. But buying a product on Amazon that claims it's by the official seller, selling at the normal retail price of the product, should be a trustable, reasonable exercise.

That Amazon lets anyone seemingly be anyone, even major brands, as sellers, and lets blatant frauds continue for long periods of time, is a _serious_ problem. This isn't the buyer's fault whatsoever.

Good they got a refund, but it's nice that they shine a light on it.

<comment><USER10> _But buying a product on Amazon that claims it 's by the official seller_

This is the key, at least from my perspective. If I go to Amazon (or any other online vendor) and an item is listed as being by "International Brand X", I expect that the item is, in fact, being sold by "International Brand X".

Amazon doesn't list the seller separate from the brand. The way the page is lad out, it is clearly meant to indicate the manufacturer is the seller.[0]

0 - [http://oi65.tinypic.com/30t2ykm.jpg](http://oi65.tinypic.com/30t2ykm.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first time I heard of Canada Goose was when I saw the Top Gear trio make their way to the North Pole in that red Toyota. Not long after I started noticing them more and more, and then recently they exploded. I wonder how much the Top Gear guys had to do with getting the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER12> > He reports that his team has also identified about 12,000 merchant accounts > linked to four banks in China, one of which just lost its Visa privileges > permanently.

Only one and only Visa?

If you buy a counterfeit product through Amazon and then do a credit card chargeback, does that hit Amazon or the seller?

<comment><USER13> It hits Amazon, because Amazon charged your card. There's no way to tell who Amazon gave your money to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Terribly overwritten article. The author bought a coat on Amazon. It was a fake. Got a refund. Amazon has a problem with fakes but this is not a very insightful article about the problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> So she blames Canada Goose because Amazon doesn't have proper quality controls around the vendors, then proceeds to buy another coat from Amazon (of course!) as a point of bragging?

<comment><AUTHOR> >So she blames Canada Goose

What gave you that impression?

<comment><USER15> The author chose to buy a coat from a different company and use their platform to encourage others to do the same. Buying a different coat is a totally reasonable choice, but had they bought from an authorized retailer, then this article would have had a much different conclusion. The fake vendor is obviously the bad actor here, but Amazon facilitated them, and Amazon is rewarded at the end with another purchase. The only party here that did not benefit is Canada Goose.

<comment><USER16> The author was unable to purchase a coat from Canada Goose so she went to Amazon. I assume by the time the whole ordeal was sorted it was still not possible to purchase a coat from the Canada Goose site. It's hard to support the company when they are sold out on their site . . .

<comment><USER15> There's 23 authorized retailers in New York according to Canada Goose's website. While it's possible they were all sold out, that seems unlikely to me, especially since some of those retailers include large companies like Bloomingdales with warehouses of their own and websites accordingly. They could have walked into any of the 23 and purchased one physically. If they wanted one, they could have gotten one, above board. The real thing that happened here is the author had buyer's remorse and had the opportunity to rectify the situation, and while that's completely fine, this article should be much more indicting of Amazon than it is as they're really the culprit for this author's problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Buying a Canada Goose jacket off Amazon... what could go wrong!? They have authorized retailers on their website for a reason. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wouldn't owning one violate the migratory bird act?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why are these articles in HN feed? Feed used to be great but there have been a lot of irrelevant content for the last month it seems to me?

<comment><USER20> Can I vote stuff like this (the article) down? Do I need a specific amount of points for that?

<comment><USER21> Submissions can be upvoted or flagged. There's no separate downvoting for submissions. I believe the karma threshold for flagging submissions is 31.

[https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- undocumented#flaggi...](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- undocumented#flaggingvouching)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Duplicate

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989132)

<comment><USER23> Not very useful. No discussion and no traction over there, whereas this made the front page and is attracting comments.</comment></comment>


Show HN: WebGL viewshed demo - <AUTHOR> https://www.monkeybrains.net/viewshed/ <comment><AUTHOR> Inspired to share this by [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852783)

Terribly unoptimized, but runs decently on modern Intel integrated graphics cards and iPhones.</comment>


The thought process that led Canonical to create Mir - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/113883146362955330174/posts/PXc93m8nKwk <comment><USER3> It's well known that Canonical likes to do things their way and maybe suffers from a slight NIH syndrome. But do people have to be so upset about it? Maybe Rogers explanation is completely wrong and the real reason is "we thought it would be fun to write a new display server!" Does it matter? Saying "you're increasing desktop fragmentation" is silly and implies that writing Mir is somehow worse than writing no code at all.

Graphics on desktop Linux currently kind of sucks. Windows and OS X are years ahead while we are stuck on X11 with flakey, sometimes-working, compiz-quality 3d effects. I think any effort to remedy that situation should be cherised.

<comment><USER4> As a non-Linux user, it's funny to me how Linux users complain about how this will bring fragmentation to Linux, when Linux is one of the most fragmented ecosystems ever. There are tens or hundred of different distros, and at least several different application packages, and I'm probably not aware about a lot of other stuff, too.

I support Canonical in this move, because they do need a very optimized display server and interface for mobile hardware, and they are also the ones who've pushed Linux the most into the mainstream, sometimes by taking steps that are very annoying to regular Linux users, but in the same time very pragmatic in bringing Linux closer to the non-technical current Linux user, or future Linux user.

<comment><USER5> Fragmentation can be very different. The sickest type of it is hardware fragmentation caused by incompatible drivers. The most obvious example is Android. Their choice of bionic libc makes running normal glibc Linux with Android drivers impossible (unless you attempt to translate glibc into bionic, like libhybris does). So this fragmentation creates a very strong barrier for using hardware and everyone would agree such kind of rifts are not a pleasant thing. Luckily in Mir's case Canonical seems to be interested in avoiding drivers fragmentation with Wayland.

<comment><USER6> Why is Android the bad actor for people writing non-portable software that relies on non-standard GNU extensions?

<comment><USER5> I didn't understand the question. libc lies in the core of the system, and if libc is incompatible it translates to non reusable drivers, which translates to "Android only" hardware. What do you call a "non-standard GNU extension"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Weston, the reference Wayland compositor, is a test-bed. It's for the > development of the Wayland protocol, not for being an actual desktop shell. > We could have forked Weston and bent it to our will, but we're on a bit of > an automated-testing run at the moment, and it's generally hard to retro-fit > tests onto an existing codebase. Weston has some tests, but we want super- > awesome-tested code.

I'd accept this as reason alone to go with Mir, assuming it's correct. My experience with window managers on linux has been riddled with constant bugs and regressions that are the hallmark of software that isn't adequately tested.

And he's absolutely right. If code isn't designed ahead of time to be modular and decoupled (testable), you're going to have a hell of a time refactoring it later to get good test coverage.

I'm not asserting Weston is these things. But, accepting what Christopher says here, Canonical might actually be justified in creating Mir. I'd especially be interested in hearing if someone can refute the mentioned point.

<comment><USER8> kwin will be its own wayland compositor, gnome's mutter will be its own compositor. why didn't canonical create unity as its own wayland compositor?

(in other words: criticizing weston is a strawman)

<comment><USER9> The section the GP quoted was not the entire article. Rogers went on to end the quoted paragraph with the rhetorical question "We don't want Weston, but maybe we want Wayland?", and went on to address that question in the rest of the article.

Whether or not you agree with the chain of reasoning, pretending he never wrote anything other than a single step in it, and calling that a "strawman" on the grounds that it isn't a whole chain, is a little silly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it interesting in the comments that most people are claiming that Canonical's time would be better spent contributing to existing projects, but isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough?

Aren't these attitudes the basis of why many subsystems in Linux have been around for decades?

Others complain about fragmentation, which is another obtuse argument when you count the number Linux distributions available, the number of open source packages, and the entire nature of GitHub with their "please fork me" button. Open Source is by nature fragmented.

If they want to go run off and do their own thing, what's the problem? It's their time and money. If what they write is crap, no other distributions will use it. If it's awesome, it has a lot of potential, but the community should decide after it's released, not before.

<comment><USER11> _isn't the nature of Open Source to be constantly forking, iterating, and contributing new code when you think the existing stuff isn't good enough?_

You can always start from scratch if existing projects don't cut it. When talking about a windows manager (like Unity) or display manager (like Mir), starting from scratch is, financially, a pretty big decision, so you should make it an informed decision. The weird thing is that Canonical never even contacted the Wayland developers. It's weird because they should be interested in any mistakes Wayland made on their way (to not make them again), and because it's _so easy_ in the open source community. If you find a bug in your Intel graphics driver you just go to freenode and talk to the developer that _wrote that code_. Same for Wayland, and most other projects.

If they really want to be better than Wayland, they should learn from Wayland's mistakes, not make the same mistakes again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't get the answer. Why couldn't they work with Wayland to build the missing pieces? Or Wayland developers had some principal objections? It looks like Canonical didn't even make an attempt to collaborate. That's the main point of criticism.

 _> the upsides of doing our own thing - we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review_

That's exactly the NIH problem. So in essence - no real reason, except selfish interests.

 _> I'm particularly excited about our engagements with NVIDIA and AMD; although it's early days, I'm hopeful we can get a solution for "but what about proprietary drivers?" not just for Mir, but for everyone._

At least this part sounds good. If drivers can be shared - <USER2> fragmentation will be avoided - (i.e. Wayland will reuse the same drivers especially on mobile).

<comment><USER12> Shuttleworth actually goes on to say in the comments _"The very people protesting their super-collaborative credentials have a long history of being super-antagonistic to Ubuntu in practice."_

I don't think it's even the NIH problem it's just sheer delusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >4) We need server-side buffer allocation for ARM hardware;

Could someone explain why?

<comment><USER8> something was said about it in irc a few days ago. i am not competent enough to paraphrase the reason. so here is the quote from <http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1>

00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: why do you guys want server-allocated buffers?

00:15 <RAOF> Prf_Jakob: Mostly arm damage, there.

00:15 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: so thats whats its really about then? Closed source drivers?

00:16 <RAOF> No - arm hardware (apparently) has insane constraints that make server allocation more attractive.

00:16 <RAOF> eg - you have at most 6 buffers that are framebuffer-compatible.

00:16 <krh> we have those GPUs at intel too

00:17 <krh> weston runs on those

(note that daniel stone said:

00:35 <daniels> RAOF: fwiw, i've got a wayland backend for arm hardware which does server-side allocation right now. didn't require one single change to any of the clients, or even compositors. it's all internal to the egl stack. )

<comment><USER14> I have a bad feeling this G+ post is about to be ripped apart as badly as the initial wiki debacle.

I wonder when people will realize, though, that as Canonical tries to justify itself on technical merits and having to backpedal every time, their answer of "we want to control it so we can move it and change it as we want to without having to wait for consensus or forking" is not good, but legitimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> for the record. this:

       "ranging from the sensible (we want to write our own
        display serve so that we can control it)"

is sensible to him.

What the hell is going on at Canonical? I can't imagine how BADLY mir will damage desktop development in linux if Canonical actually forces its adoption and then holds the main repository.

It would have to be forked to get it away from them. Are we even allowed to fork CCA code?

Why do I get the feeling that if any of this happens, canonical is going to be suing linux end users.

what a mess.

<comment><USER16> So why does RedHat seem to get a pass with GNUists when they do similar things, such as with writing systemd instead of patching upstart?

<comment><USER11> Some core concepts of upstart and systemd are incompatible. Even if they patched upstart instead of starting from scratch it would now be a completely different system.

In his initial blog post about systemd, Lennart Poettering writes: _"Well, the point of the part about Upstart above was to show that the core design of Upstart is flawed, in our opinion. Starting completely from scratch suggests itself if the existing solution appears flawed in its core. However, note that we took a lot of inspiration from Upstart's code-base otherwise."_

Link: <http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html>

Unlike the Mir specs, this post is really detailed. Upstart is certainly an improvement on sysvinit, but falls short compared to more modern init systems like Apple's launchd.

<comment><USER16> Mir likewise states that inherent incompatibilities is exactly why they're creating a new project as well. Though a big difference being that Upstart is actually in use, whereas no one's using Wayland.

To be quite honest, a lot Poettering's rationalizations with systemd, especially when discussing other inits like launchd, seem to be purely NIH. He could do this work and organize with what's already out there, but he'd rather do our own thing. Instead of creating a system that is backward compatible, he's saying for daemon writers to write for a completely new specification, and to ignore any pretenses of compatibility, like not double forking. More discouraging are the intentional incompatibilities, and statements that they're only targeting the linux kernel and udev, and will reject patches that make it more compatible with other systems.

<comment><USER8> that's just not right.

see how many port activated upstart starting scripts there were before systemd entered the scene.

there is the difference as well, that mir has no solid reasoning (or its reasoning gets debunked shortly afterwards).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do wish that Canonical would fix their SSL issue. Here is what I see when I visit from Chrome [1]. This is particularly frustrating because when I click proceed, this is the next thing I see [2]. I surely am not going to make an SSL exception in our corporate proxy just because Canonical can't fix their certificates.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/UMST00Q.png>

[2] <http://i.imgur.com/iv4ZCaq.png>

</comment><comment><USER18> What will be the effects of this fragmentation? For example, will we see Firefox for Mir and Firefox for X and Firefox for Wayland? Is there a risk that one window system will be without applications? I am too distanced to draw these conclusions myself.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like it how Google Plus is being used as a micro-blogging platform

</comment><comment><USER20> "What can we do next to screw up Linux?"

<comment><USER17> No one can screw up Linux. It's open source and there's a huge and disparate community behind many projects spanning thousands of use cases. Even if Ubuntu somehow managed to go closed source and charge a mandatory license fee, Linux would still be Linux. Ubuntu is not the only project, by far. And you wonder why Shuttleworth is getting pissed at you guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mark is needlessly caustic in these comments, in my opinion.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't say it was needless. As far as I'm concerned, it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu. No matter what side of the argument you stand on, you can't deny that they have been taking a shit on the Ubuntu brand (although a lot of the worst comments have been deleted it appears). It is no wonder Mark is reacting in a caustic manner in my opinion.

<comment><USER23> > it is the KDE and Wayland guys who have come out screaming in a very public, > very vitriolic attack against Ubuntu

When blatantly false things are stated about your project by an organization as big as Canonical, one really can't blame them for expressing frustration. Especially when there is FUD about Wayland _everywhere_ you go.</comment></comment></comment>


An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://bookofbadarguments.com/ <comment><USER2> I've seen lists like these floating around the Internet.

While it's important to be able to recognize a fallacious proposition, it's equally important to realize that the presence of an _informal_ fallacy in an argument does _not_ imply that the argument is either invalid or that the conclusion is false. To give two examples: ad hominems are frequently used in moral characterizations, and most moral analogies are functional strawmen by virtue of exposing the circumstances under which a particular claim is weakest.

At best, the presence of _informal_ fallacies indicates that an argument needs more attention from its audience.

<comment><USER3> I've never found these lists particularly constructive. If someone makes an error in logic you should be able to take it apart from first principles. Memorizing dozens of vague "fallacies" seems more like a cheap way to try to "win" debates. It will not lead to better engagement with an opposing argument. Existential Comics had a pretty funny take on it: [http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9)

<comment><USER4> > I've never found these lists particularly constructive. If someone makes an > error in logic you should be able to take it apart from first principles.

That's fine but it also leads to a shift of burden of proof on the counter argument rather than the initial claim. In turn, this leads to "proving a negative" and it is generally quite impossible to do so. Therefore, one needs to be careful with the line of arguments.

Personally, I have also found that the best way to counter a fallacy is to ask the claimant to substantiate his/her stance.

<comment><USER5> Using the term literally is usually the irritating bit. Like responding with "appeal to authority" versus "Einstein wasn't an expert on xyz, though".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've found the No True Scotsman a hard one to judge. There's a grey area where both parties could argue that something is/isn't a logical fallacy.

Popular/controversial/recognizable example:

Terrorists are no true believers of <faith>.

Those in the 'you are committing a fallacy camp': The terrorists profess to follow the core tenets(perform the rituals, say the prayers, etc...) of <faith> and adhere to <faith>, therefore they are true believers of <faith>, therefore saying that they are not true believers of faith because of their terrorist actions is a fallacy.

Those of the 'not a fallacy camp': The in/out borders of religious groups are defined by consensus, it's normative. A large group of people may feel that <trait> is actually part of true belief in <faith>, then this is a truth for them. If a <trait> were to be abstinence from violence, then obviously terrorist are not true believers of <faith>.

Truly, language is too unspecific to properly pin down the meanings of normative/subjective facts. This fallacy can probably only truly be committed when one has codified a closed loop of rules, and then breaks those rules. But religion is too nebulous a subject to be clear about such things.

<comment><USER7> NTS is a form of moving the goalposts.

If you say "No X would do Y", and then after an X does Y move the goalposts to say "No true X would do Y", that's the fallacy.

If you simply stated in the first place that "No true X would do Y", then you're off the hook as long as your definition of "true X" doesn't apply to the particular X that did Y.

<comment><USER8> To me, moving the goalposts and equivocation are the most pernicious fallacies in online discussions. They happen all the time, and often take more than minimal effort to dispute. It's also really easy to take them as made in bad faith.

<comment><USER9> > and often take more than minimal effort to dispute

This is where _all_ ability to have a rational discussion breaks down in many cases, especially when people care a lot about their initial opinions.

Take an issue like evolution. You start with a source like [https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/evolution- an...](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/her/evolution-and-natural- selection/a/lines-of-evidence-for-evolution), which outlines a pretty good case for how evolution is supported by today's evidence. It gives plenty of lines to follow if you're curious to dig deeper, and absent other factors most people would just see it as a boring science thing that's probably true and they don't care much about.

But because some people are bothered by the idea, they've spent a lot of time thinking up objections. A _whole_ lot of time. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution) for summaries of just some of the complaints that people have come up with. These have all been thoroughly demolished, of course, but to do so often involves a lot of really labor-intensive science.

As far as science goes, that's all good - it's great to be detailed and thoroughly justify every piece of a theory, chasing any loose ends down at any cost. It's part of the job description.

But casual debate about the issue is devastatingly difficult, even if everyone is acting in good faith. All someone that has a problem with evolution has to do is throw out three or four big complaints (the eye! carbon dating! transitional fossils! micro vs macro-evolution!) and all of a sudden a proper response to their 3 minute "gotcha" attempt means a good half hour sourcing high quality rebuttals and summarizing them in the thread. Which will likely _each_ bring up three or four points which the anti-evolution person can quibble with (and they'll be able to do so quickly). Assuming you make it through that gauntlet and the person accepts that you've shot down those points, a list of ten more fresh "problems", each of which requires detailed research and attention to shoot down, is a low-effort Google search away (say [https://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/what_are_the_to_1/](https://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/what_are_the_to_1/)), so you can get "yeah, but!"-ted into oblivion until you're just not up to the task of responding anymore, even though you absolutely could address every complaint without difficulty, if you had the time.

Like you said, moving the goalposts. When you have an almost limitless sea of low-effort objections to draw from via Google (which you do, about almost anything, as long as a lot of people have spent time coming up with them), it's easy to put up a shitscreen so thick that nobody can ever break through, and not even realize that you're acting badly.

I know that rationalists very strongly believe that with enough good-faith discussion everyone's beliefs should ultimately align, and there should never be such a thing as agreeing to disagree, but I fear that in many cases the relaxation time to that state is prohibitively long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with list of logical fallacies is that people quote them in discussion without understanding what they exactly mean.

For example, slippery slope is only argumentative failure if the slope is implied without justification. If you can provide good argument that slippery slope exists, it's not a bad argument.

Good idea to name appeal to authority as appeal to irrelevant authority.

Appeal to relevant authority is often important shorthand. Some issues are too complex to or require too much domain knowledge to go trough. For example, I consider IPCC reports authoritative on the subject of climate change.

<comment><USER4> > The problem with list of logical fallacies is that people quote them in > discussion without understanding what they exactly mean.

Agreed. This is very very common unfortunately.

Generally, I classify any argument in a discussion to consist of two parts - about the central topic and off topic (much like ratio decidendi and ober dictum in case judgments). It is important to ignore "ober dictum" and concentrate on "ratio decidendi" much like in law. Fallacies should be pointed out in on-topic part of the discussion while the fallacies in the off-topic part may be used to point out a general pattern or behavior of the person at the other end of the table. It should be made explicitly clear that off-topic sentence fallacies have no bearing on the content of the on-topic sentences. The best strategy however, is to quote the on-topic part and ignore the off- topic parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always wondered about the usefulness of books that point out argument fallacies. The reality is that most people don't follow any rules when it comes to arguments. They just follow what feels good, ie what they(we) have learned via social immersion. They are as useful as using a tea cup to rescue a sinking ship. Recognizing an argument fallacy may make us feel good but it does little towards persuading someone towards your side of the argument. I can tell you that most people don't care about their argument fallacies they just know that they have chosen a side in an argument and they are right.

I'd like to see more books about how people actually argue in life and how to change their view.

<comment><USER12> Being able to correctly identify logical fallacies is an important skill in and of itself. Persuading someone that they are wrong is a totally separate exercise.

<comment><USER13> > Being able to correctly identify logical fallacies is an important skill in > and of itself.

It's not, really. A person who understands the notions of necessity and sufficiency, knows what a counterexample is, and knows their truth tables (with or without really knowing the textbook definitions of these things) should be able to function just fine without knowing the names of all the various fallacies.

(consider how many people who are inclined to complain about logical fallacies do not understand these things, and therefore misapply the labels)

<comment><USER14> You are confusing physics with biology, if you will. You could say the entire field if biology is redundant -- it's all consequences of basic physics -- and yet biology is a very useful science.

Arguments aren't presented mechanically step-by-step with a citation of rule at each step; they elide and summarize information, and skip logical steps. The fallacies show you where to look for insufficencies, to avoid being misled by invalid shorthand arguments.

<comment><USER13> Well, no. We can trivially identify the presence of a fallacy by knowing a few things about logic and so on. The same is not true of biology: an experienced physicist won't necessarily have much ability solving biology problems, as you know.

(I don't remember thinking about the individual fallacies by name very much at all except when I was learning logic, where they were used as examples. Once you're a little more experienced, it would be akin to saying to oneself "okay, now I am using the present tense" while writing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8061469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8061469) (3 years ago, 75 comments)

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of the "thou shalt not commit logical fallacies" poster:

[http://i1.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/531/718/f03...](http://i1.kym- cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/531/718/f03.jpg)

<comment><USER17> Are there well-defined categories to epistemology (if that is even the right word) ? Are _logical fallacies_ and _bad arguments_ distinct formal categories. It's doubtful since the poster and book have overlap.

Strange to see no mention of _confirmation bias_ on the logical fallacies poster. That would have been the first on my list.

<comment><USER18> Epistemology is the study of knowledge, which is (strange as it may sound) distinct from the study of logic. The best known example of epistemology is Descartes's "cogito ergo sum", "I think therefore I am".

This is both logical (because it follows that in order to "think", one must "exist") and known.

There are things that are logical but not known, and others that are known but not logical. Gravity, for example, is pretty well known. Does it follow as a matter of logic? Not that I'm aware of. We believe it to be true because it works.

The basis for knowledge is a complicated subject. One framework is that to truly know something, you must have justified true belief. i.e. You must believe the statement, you must be justified in believing it (so a fortune that turns out to be right doesn't count as knowledge), and it must be true. Naturally, thousands of years of debate continue as to what the definition of "true" is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really love these collections of logical fallacies. Knowing what to look for can really help in spotting bad arguments.

Has anyone built a similar collection for "bad arguments" that are logically correct but completely unpersuasive? I'm often frustrated with these coming from people I agree with, because a bad argument for something is often worse than no argument at all.

<comment><USER14> Why are you unpersuaded by a correct argument? Are you saying that you know you have irrational beliefs and are frustrated that people try to reason with you instead of manipulate you?

<comment><USER20> "Logically correct" and correct argument are oftentimes not the same thing. "Logically correct" but unpersuasive arguments oftentimes starts with wrong model of the world to which they then apply logical rules - e.g. ignores reality, rephrases 60% as "majority" and then proceeds to talk about them as "almost everyone", simplifies long complex theory into something misleadingly simple etc.

Kind of like when they logically explain you that x should be better then y, but you tried both and still remember x being a hell. May sound logical, but you know something is wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know if it's accurate to call these "bad" arguments. If we judge arguments by their ability to convince people, then many logical fallacies are actually quite good arguments. One need only watch a cable news debate or have a five minute conversation with a typical voter for evidence. Most people vastly overestimate their own rationality. Fallacies endure because they work.

Perhaps the idea is that they are morally bad arguments. Still I would rather call it a collection of illogical arguments.

</comment><comment><USER22> PDF version: [https://bookofbadarguments.com/AIBOBA- white.pdf](https://bookofbadarguments.com/AIBOBA-white.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> The real usefulness of such lists, of course, is not to use it to win debates or to recogonize them among your opponents' arguments. The real usefulness is to recognize them in our own reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER24> Those that rely on logic as a weapon in a debate limit their arsenal significantly. Logic and critical thinking are fantastic problem solving tools. Their utility in an argument are minimal.

<comment><USER2> If we're being strict, an argument can only be "won" if it's both sound and valid in the logical sense. Being able to intimidate or otherwise coerce your enemy into agreeing is otherwise a false conclusion.

On the other hand, the _practical_ value of logic in debates is subject to serious inquiry. If we readily accept that logic is the _correct_ way to "win" an argument, then why are we so categorically bad at applying it?

<comment><USER25> Various reasons, of course, but a key one is that we're lazy: formal logic needs to be applied to something, but apparently accusing the other guy of fallacies is more fun than the boring old job of taking time to define one's terms. How many arguments have you seen that keep going back and forth because each side is using slightly different meanings or understandings of some concept. Yet almost never does anyone stop to say, "Hey, what exactly do you mean by X? I'm using it in this sense…"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ali's followup is just published: [https://bookofbadchoices.com](https://bookofbadchoices.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> Excellent work and very entertaining. However... over the years I have read many similar books although not as fun as this one, and what I have found is that the people who most need to read and understand it won't and wouldn't. A man who I greatly admire once said "never argue with a stupid persons and never try to reason with an irrational one, both are a waste of time" (probably an adaptation of previous similar quotes admitted).

<comment><USER28> The Mark Twain version is great;

"Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

<comment><USER29> Learn from stupid people - bring people up to your level, and beat them with experience.

Otherwise - if they're stupid and they're right, they're not stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How comes there is no mention of "The Art of Being Right" [1,2]?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right)

[2] [http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/](http://coolhaus.de/art-of- controversy/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I love how on the "This tiny print serves no purpose" page it has:

        For more information, please contact JasperCollins Publishers, 99 St Marks Pl New York, NY 94105.

I used to live on this exact block in nyc, and that is _not_ the correct zip ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> My main problem when debating an issue with people, I believe are horribly wrong, is that people I generally feel that way about, simply aren't very intellectually curious. They are set in their ways and not willing to actually spend any brainpower understanding your argument or the depth of the problem.

Another common problem is that we use different associations or interpretations of a word.

E.g. I find discussing politics with Americans quite difficult because Americans have redefined the meaning of conservative, liberal, socialism and capitalism to a large degree.

Socialism e.g. seems to imply command economy and dictatorship, while capitalism seems to automatically imply freedom and democracy rather than merely describing an economic system.

This applies to many things e.g. when discussing programming languages, advocates of OOP programming tend to assume that encapsulation and polymorphism is uniquely OO concepts.

</comment><comment><USER33> My main problem with this book is that it looks like it's aimed at younger people, but the language employed could stump even some college graduates. I wish the author would have significantly simplified it.

</comment><comment><USER34> You can see more here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

</comment><comment><USER35> Understanding logical fallacies is useful, but an incomplete strategy.

As I've been exploring various topics of logic, argument, epistemology, propaganda, "fake news", and more, over the past several years, I've turned up a few concepts I'm finding particularly useful.

 _Dialectics vs. rhetoric._ There are numerous modes of communication. In exploring areas of disagreement or uncertainty, two principle modes are _dialectic_ discussion, in which _all_ parties are engaged in identifying the _truth_ of a matter, _regardless_ of their initial position, and _rhetorical_ discussion, in which _at least one_ party is engaged in promoting their _initial position_ , regardless of the _truth_.

There's a heated debate on the merits of both methods, going back to Plato (he had some very unfriendly things to say of the Sophists, who practiced rhetoric).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric)

The useful takeaway for me is to recognise _when I 'm in a dialectic or rhetorical discussion._ My own default is to engage dialetically (more chances to learn), though, as noted above, if any _one_ participant isn't playing the same game, they tend to spoil things for the rest. I'm _not_ aware of any way of ensuring that all are engaged in didactic discussion, though again, recognising the game you're in is quite useful.

There are a number of diversionary tactics which are surprisingly effetive at derailing discussion. Being aware of these, calling them out, and if at all possible, eliminating those who are engaged in such practices from discussions you're hoping to maintain as productive, is particularly effective. Several sets of common tactics (one attributed, though not confirmed, to Karl Rove) are listed here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_rea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_reactionary_political_debate_playbook_karl/)

There's another long line of tactics adopted by bullshitters here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/)

For those interested in epistemology and criteria of truth, I recommend Wikipedia's "Criteria of Truth" or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's "Truth" pages:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/)

This isn't a greenfield. There are authorities to consult.

<comment><USER14> How well does "create your own subreddit" perform as a blog platform?

<comment><USER35> Reasonably well. I'd really like to have embedded image support.

Otherwise, this old summary stands:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_reddit.27s_got_everything_you_couldn.27t_find_at_the_other_place.3F)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can anyone recommend any books/podcasts/blogs on improving in arguments?

</comment><comment><USER37> these fallacies are vague enough that most arguments can be twisted to be in violation of one or more of these and dismissed

</comment><comment><USER38> I have this book. It's cute.

</comment><comment><USER39> Just please be aware that knowing the latin name for a logical fallacy is not the same thing as an actual argument for or against something. Thanks

<comment><USER19> There's a fallacy for that!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does this include "Love it or leave it" ?

<comment><USER35> False dichotomy / excluded middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This crap is confusing!

<comment><USER42> Violations of this "crap" are one of the reasons we're in such a divided time politically. Outlets like Fox News make heavy use of many of these fallacies every day. Only when we understand these fallacies and how to stay away from them will we actually get back to reasonable discourse.

<comment><USER43> Notice how you off handedly scapegoated Fox News (not that they deserve acquittal) but no "leftist" media outlets in the context of political divides. I think that would be a sort of fallacy.

<comment><USER44> When the media gets called out, it issues a retraction.

When infotainment gets called out, it spins up a distracting, angering crisis and ignores the problem.

<comment><USER45> > When the media gets called out, it issues a retraction.

And by then it's too late: the headlines have been seen by the masses, and they're asking their friends, "Hey did you hear about...?", and they're adding it to their mental models of the world. The media source doesn't suffer; in fact they have already profited from the clickbait, so there's virtually no incentive to _not_ publish false or barely researched stories, even if they later put two sentences of "Note:" at the bottom, which they actively discourage people from reading to anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/2018/03/14/why-siri-is-so-dumb/#tTGSzkqaSZqB <comment><USER3> > "It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was > riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original > Siri team, certainly not me."

Wow. It those were his original words, I don't doubt a bit that this guy should be responsible for Siri being left behind.

<comment><USER4> So Forstall and his direct report were responsible for two botched product launches, Siri and Maps. This is a big blow to the camp suggesting firing Forstall was a mistake.

<comment><USER5> Siri may have stalled now but it definitely wasn't a botched launch. And Apple maps may not work great in all cases but it did succeed in forcing Google to provide decent maps on iOS. Before Apple Maps the vector maps were an Android exclusive.

<comment><USER6> Apple Maps is like Bing: almost as good as the #1 service, but almost is not enough to make anyone care.

Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently _better_ than Google Maps for navigating on foot and public transport.

<comment><USER7> In reality Google Maps is farther ahead of its competitors than most people realize.

Google Maps now provides wholly personalized points of interest and attention affordances in its UI. It's also well on its way to 3D scanning and annotating POIs in every structure in the world, including very large pedestrian-only interiors. It also has realtime transit and traffic feeds, and more pedestrian trails and venue detail than anyone else. All of these are areas where its competition is not just behind, but falling further behind. But the personalization combined with superior POI search really illustrates how Google's competitors don't even have the platform to properly conceptualize the type of product Google is building, much less build it.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if I'd say most of these things matter enough at the end of the day, just to cherry pick, Apple has 3D, interiors, traffic, transit and pedestrians. Not everywhere, but it's a problem which time and money can fix. Both of which apple has in abundance.

Also anecdotally I'm not sure if I can agree that Google's POIs are vastly better, mostly just different but of a similar low quality (which is to say neither pleases me).

<comment><USER9> I can't speak to your usecase and preferences, but a cartographer points out how much richer Google Maps are here: [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google- maps-moat](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something always make me scratch my head. Is there any proof that actual people use and value Google and Amazon assistant more than Siri? Or is the leadership only designed by autoproclaimed experts and funky ad-hoc metrics?

I totally confess that I use Siri for only 3 things:

-Desactivating all wake up alarm during my morning poo

-Setting timers while baking

-Sending a « I'm coming » text to my loved one before riding my bike home

Yes, this is a very dumb and limited usage. But I don't see Android users around me doing incredible things that I could be jealous of with their voice assistant. I am missing something? Or maybe it's because I'm not in the US and we still have to catch up with the trend of using voice assistant more?

<comment><USER11> Google's voice recognition is excellent. I trust Assistant to help me throughout my day with a number of things now:

\- Cooking & laundry timers

\- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home)

\- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc)

\- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today)

\- Initiating phone calls (Call X)

\- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?)

\- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml)

\- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price)

\- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)

Additionally, I've found myself using Android's voice recording capabilities to dictate text all the time. It's just so much faster than typing or swiping.

I haven't an iPhone for a few years, so I can't compare with what Siri is capable of today.

<comment><USER12> All of those Siri can do. Anything else?

<comment><USER13> This is strictly anecdotal but a friend of mine is an exec at Facebook and we were recently discussing phones. He had an iPhone for a few years and has now had an Android for a couple years. He said that by far the most drastic difference between the two platforms is Siri vs. Assistant (or whatever Google's assistant is called in the phone). He said it is no contest how much more useful and functional Assistant is, compared to Siri. We did not dwell on this discussion and I otherwise find him an objective, un-biased user of the two platforms, so there you have it.

<comment><USER14> Obligatory question is why? What usefullness or functionality made that much of a difference to him?

<comment><USER15> Cant speak for the other person, but as someone who's used iPhones exclusively since the original, Siri makes mistakes with sufficient frequency that it's subjectively just bad. I can't quantify what percentage of requests fail to be understood correctly, but it's sufficiently high that the frequency is annoying. It's even worse when using the Apple Watch (Series 3).

Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too. "Hey siri, turn my lights <pink/orange/purple/blue/red/white>" has on multiple occasions been interpreted as "Hey siri, turn my lights", which then results in the lights being turned off. This is hugely entertaining when you're demonstrating your new Philips Hue bulbs over FaceTime, and the person on the other end now just sees your camera go black instead.

<comment><USER16> I often want to set a timer for exactly 50 minutes so I know when my laundry is done.

But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any accent? By that I mean are you a second language English speaker? I just presumed that it couldn't understand my accent heavy speeech.

<comment><USER16> I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can probably point to a lot of quality failings at Apple as starting with Steve Job's death. Apparently he failed to teach and instill a culture of high quality and instead just focused on micro-managing everything himself. Steve Jobs may go down as both the best and worst CEO Apple ever had.

<comment><USER19> Not true at all. Look up the story of Apple University. Jobs can't run Apple from his grave. He tried his best to leave Apple with the right culture and leadership in his view. And for the most part, Apple has done really well since he passed. No one is going to get 100% of things right 100% of the time, and Jobs is no different; things would have inevitably gone wrong under his leadership, too.

<comment><USER20> Exactly this—a particular anecdote from the biography describes his motivation. Apparently when the HP Touchpad failed, Steve Jobs viewed it as a tragedy more than a triumph:

 _> "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands, but now it's being dismembered and destroyed. It's tragic. I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple."_

In creating Apple University he was really trying to instill a legacy that would outlast him. That said, when pulling out the "Steve Jobs never would have let this happen" card, it's also important to remember that MobileMe happened on Steve's watch, as did the iPod HiFi.

<comment><USER21> I still have a working HiFi in my home gym. It's a solid piece of engineering, especially for its time. I don't know why people love to hate it so much.

<comment><USER20> I feel like sentiment toward the iPod HiFi is less _" hate"_ and more _" why does this exist"_. It was a perfectly solid piece of hardware, but Apple tried to enter a market that was already saturated (iPod docks) with a far more expensive product that didn't offer any significant advantages.

<comment><USER21> It was one of the very few that didn't suck, IMO. That's why I bought it. And IIRC it wasn't the most expensive option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow so much Siri bashing in here. I'm a daily driver and I suppose an outlier working on a now aging 6S+ but Siri has been way reliable and generally fast outside of what I'd call "harsh" environments like outside on a busy street or with poor reception.

I'm able to consistently perform:

\- Reminders with or without location tags "add eggs to grocery list" "remind me to check oil when I get home"

\- Calendar events "create event about mr Smith tomorrow 2pm" "create meeting with bob March 12 noon" ("with" spawns an invite, I use "about") "move my 2pm meeting to 4pm" "what's going on tomorrow"

\- weather "what's the weather like this week" "what's it going to be like in Manhattan beach on Saturday"

\- Calls, by name, number or direct to speaker "call my brother" "call 213-555-1212" "call my dad on speakerphone"

\- FaceTime "FaceTime my mom"

\- Email "Email my brother" Subject? "take out" Message? "Grab me a burger" ready to send? "Yes"

\- Messages, one liner or conversationally "tell my brother I'm running late" ready? "Go" or "message my sister" message? "Call me." Ready to send it? "Affirmative"

\- Math "what's 128 times 10 million?" "What's 10 days from next Tuesday?"

\- Time "what time is it?" "What time is it in Florida?"

\- Location "where is my sister?"

\- Automation "living room lights blue" "goodnight"

\- Dictation "blah period new line I swear exclamation mark new paragraph furthermore comma open parentheses really close parentheses all caps cats are all caps really all caps really cool question mark" I frequently do complicated technical dictation using Siri, it's not a problem in fact this particular sentence was composed entirely with Siri with zero post correction.

All of these work consistently and reliably, for me, using either PTT style hold and speak, long-press and wait for the beep, or "Hey Siri" invocation.

Seriously, I use all of this all day every day on an old iPhone, I'm not blind but if I was I'd consider it reliable enough for those purposes.

I don't do a lot of location, navigation, or searches with Siri because generally, performance is not optimal and you're not able to focus the intent domain clearly enough with consistent verbiage.

<comment><USER23> I use it to set the alarm, a pretty basic task. Works in 6/10 cases. This is totally unacceptable in the age of "smart".

<comment><USER24> Are you doing it wrong? I set my alarm every night with Siri in my 4-year old iPhone 6 and I can't recall ever having an issue...

<comment><USER25> In 2018, the only two ways you can do something that simple wrong, is by 1) not speaking English at all or 2) say something else completely.

<comment><USER23> Neither, nor. The loading bar or what that is called that appears after the text is recognized but it's waiting for a response just never finishes. And yes, I'm online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The cofounder/CEO of Siri contests the depiction of the scalibility issues in the original Information article:

> This statement, wholly false, was made by the architect and head of the > biggest launch disaster in Apple history, Apple Maps. In reality Siri worked > great at launch but, like any new platform under unexpectedly massive load, > required scaling adjustments and 24 hour workdays.

[https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737](https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737)

</comment><comment><USER27> Siri is very dumb. I use for for reminders and alarms.

I speak fr-ca as opposed to fr-fr, and some conversations go like this:

      Siri, call X on cell
      Sorry, can't call X
      Siri, call X on mobile
      Calling X on cell

In fr-ca, we talk about cell phones. In the contact app, the mobile phone is registered as cell phone, but in fr-fr, they use mobile.

I also sometimes have this conversation:

      Siri, rappelle-moi de mettre des mouchoirs sur la liste de matériel du camp
        (Siri, remind-me to put tissues on the unit's list of material)
      Do you want me to create a list?

I only have one list, on purpose. I have no way to tell Siri that I never want to create new lists.

It appears to me as if some words have more importance than others, such as the word « list ».

Those are my biggest annoyances with Siri. I will continue to speak and use my iPhone in fr-ca, to promote my language and improve the software by providing data points about which languages are used.

<comment><USER28> Seeing that Alexa only works in English and German ([https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=202207000))

Siri is still better than Alexa for most of the world....

<comment><USER29> Eh, I'm not sure. The percentage of iPhone users worldwide who can speak some English is probably pretty high. As a non-native speaker myself, I'd certainly prefer a reliable assistant in English over an unreliable one in my native language.

<comment><USER30> FWIW the assistants probably would not recognize most of these people's accents. Not to speak of whether people would be inclined or not to make the effort to speak a foreign language to their assistant.

I'm French, have a good level in English, all my OSes are set in English. I used to use Siri in English but stopped cause it was weird. The ability to select a different language for Siri than the system language is a blessing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The title seems poorly worded to me. I read it as "Why Siri underlies Google Assistant and Alexa," as if Siri were the backing technology. Should say something more like "Why Siri is lagging behind Google Assistant and Alexa."

<comment><USER32> Or the actual article title, which is "How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Siri's amnesia is the biggest painpoint for me. Lack of context and compounding errors when I can't extend an initial sentence makes it entirely unusable.

Anything useful requires speaking a longer sentence. Siri will interpret most of it but get one (key) word wrong, but Siri won't let me clarify my statement or add a statement without starting all over again. So I can't use Siri on top of it not understanding my accent (I've tried Australian, America and English accents and using "G'day Siri").

I know there is an NLP engine in the background deriving entity relations - just let me add some more to the same context and remember it for 30 seconds and I'll use Siri a lot more.

E.g. "Hey Siri, search the web for minumum cut graph algorithms." Siri: "Now searching for minumum cut Graaff I'll go rhythms." Me: "Graph, not graaff." Siri: "Hello, I'm a web server!" Me: _throws phone out of window_

</comment><comment><USER34> After switching from Android to iOS one of the things I missed most was Google Now in comparison to Siri. Before I was far more likely to say "Okay Google" and get surprisingly contextual results.

</comment><comment><USER35> I will believe that someone is trying to improve Siri when the implementation is updated so that the time between when I push the button and when I can start speaking is reduced to the minimum possible with a only a short reliably deterministic delay length.

The inability of Siri to provide me a way to know when I can start talking absolutely (waiting for that horrible beep is just insanely terrible) completely breaks the experience. The fact that no one seems to have noticed this flaw enough to figure out a fix suggests to me that the people developing the project do not have sufficient understanding of the interaction model to ever improve it ...

There should be zero network requests that need to be complete before I can start talking. If Siri is unavailable for network reasons tell me after (or during) my query — but don't slow down every single interaction and add ridiculous amounts of uncertainty to the responsiveness of the interface for the sake of the uncommon cases ...

<comment><USER4> You don't have to wait for Siri to respond and you haven't had to for a while. Just say "Hey Siri" followed by the command with no pauses and it will handle it just fine.

<comment><USER36> This isn't true. On iPhone 6, running the latest iOS version, with a brand new battery, there is a significant delay before you can speak. Instead, you have to hold the home button down.

[https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/](https://david- smith.org/iosversionstats/)

<comment><USER4> Hey Siri doesn't work on the iPhone 6 if it's not plugged in. Only the 6s and later do, and it's enabled by a specific low power chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Team dysfunction seems to be a part of it. The 'head' guy for Siri, Dag Kittlaus left Apple to start Viv Labs in about a year since Siri was released. Their assistant Viv, looked pretty okay[1], and was since acquired by Samsung[2].

I feel if he had stayed on, Siri would have been better.

Samsung seems to be trying pretty hard to get people to use it[3]. It's relatively new so I'm interested to see where it goes, especially since it has the lowest market share.

[1]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI07aeZqeco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI07aeZqeco)

[2]: [https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/28/samsung-paid- around-215-m...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/28/samsung-paid- around-215-million-for-virtual-assistant-startup-viv/)

[3]: [https://youtu.be/zlesUiYkp_4?t=55s](https://youtu.be/zlesUiYkp_4?t=55s)

<comment><USER38> Not to mention Williamson shit-talking the Siri team to this reporter:

"Williamson denies the accusations that he slowed Siri development down and instead cast blame on Siri's creators.

'It was slow, when it worked at all,' Williamson said. 'The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me.'"

<comment><USER37> There's a rebuttal too

[https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737](https://twitter.com/Dagk/status/974047743596404737)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Siri has the best language support. Siri is infinite times better than any competitor in Finnish because nothing else knows Finnish at all!

<comment><USER30> I concur. It's amazing how tech is blind of the world beyond the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Siri: I've notice a massive slowdown in the speed of Siri and an actual deterioration in voice recognition (but I've just assumed that this is just part of the general deterioration of iOS)

I would say that Siri has not only fallen behind but gone backwards.

I'm still running an iPhone 5s ;) because i dont like the direction of Apple have taken certain things (and Android terrifies me with the sheer volume of personal data collection)

<comment><USER41> Yes the data collection volume is pretty massive. I run a raspberry pi at home running pihole to block DNS requests and the amount of metrics and dialling home devices do is pretty staggering.

That being said, my Windows 10 and Apple devices all do a similar insane amount of dialling home all the time so I don't think it is unique to Android.

In fact, you should probably run O&O ShutUp10 on Windows to disable all the telemetry (does it really need to know how you're using your keyboard?????), GlassWire or NetLimiter (not tried them) and install Little Snitch for Mac (I use this and observe much dialling out).

A sad world we live in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> >>"It was slow, when it worked at all," Williamson said. "The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me."

As Steve Jobs said, once you become a VP you can't make excuses anymore. You have crossed the Rubicon and need to start taking responsibility for the failures of your team.

This guy has a lot to learn about leadership.

<comment><USER43> I know, right? I read this and instantly thought "man, I never want to work for this guy"!

<comment><USER44> The upside is that without answering the question, he answered the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The title of the article is

"So this is why Siri is way behind the Google Assistant and Alexa".

The submission title should be changed.

<comment><USER46> Mashable A/B tests their headlines. The original headline is one of the candidates.

<comment><USER45> I opened up Firefox and loaded the link and I actually saw the other headline for an instant.

Edit: Actually it happens on every refresh in Chrome as well.

<comment><USER47> Good A/B'ing sets a cookie in your browser so that you don't screw up the numbers by reloading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's sort of sad to read a story about a story, and not be able to figure out which problems were created in the source vs. the retelling.

Mashable: "Right now, it looks like Siri won't be blown up and a [sp] rebuilt". Yeah, well, that'd most likely be a huge mistake[1] depending on your definition of "blown up" and "rebuilt", and also Siri's already been rebuilt twice.[2]

The Information: "One of Apple's original plans was to launch its speaker without Siri included, according to a source." Of course — there are always contingency plans. To me, this is a much more damning comment about the Siri team than Apple's "vision".

[1] [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you- should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never- do-part-i/)

[2] Mesosphere blog post, definitely reviewed and approved by Apple: [http://archive.is/YNMLh](http://archive.is/YNMLh)

<comment><USER49> Regarding [1], the move to Mesos was not a rewrite. Some core components had to be improved, but [2] was primarily an infrastructure upgrade that happened to make Siri considerably faster by ditching hypervisors. It was a massive feat that was accomplished by relatively few engineers.

There were always many components under review for reengineering; keep in mind that Siri was released before WebSockets was a thing, let alone RFC.

The snowball effect of Siri's failures originated from iOS Program Management pushing us to expand into as many other languages as soon as possible from the beginning, thus diverting resources from implementing or polishing original "Siri, Inc." features and various "nice to have" improvements to en-US usage.

Source: I worked on Siri from the moment it was acquired, and no longer work at Apple. Richard Williamson's recent comments are pathetic.

<comment><USER50> I always wondered how much of a toll Apple's multilingual support was compared to the small number that Google and Amazon have.

<comment><USER51> Google supports all of the same languages as Siri, and also supports Brazilian Portuguese. Amazon supports 2 languages

<comment><USER52> Plus is actually far more functional in the languages compare to Siri.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> How/for what do people actually use Siri, or Alexa for?

I mean I can't think of having seen anyone use them for a long time for anything but to either test them out for curiositys sake, or for demoing their new Alexa controlled drapes.

Hopefully this wasn't too off-topic. Maybe HN should have an ability to create a poll and attach them to a thread. ;-)

<comment><USER54> Having two newborns has made me come to appreciate Alexa in a whole new way: my hands are almost always full with one (or both) babies and being able to use my voice to control the lights, play music for them, set reminders or alarms for myself, has been a godsend.

While my wife was bedridden after her C-Section surgery, she loved being able to use Echo's ability to call other Echo's in the house (or outside the home) when she needed something. Kind of like an intercom system. The problem with the iPhone is that it was usually either on the charger, or battery was dead, or it was left on vibrate. The Echo was always 100% reliable for her, which is really critical when you can't even get out of bed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is a voice assistant the killer app for anyone? I haven't ever used them, and I've only ever seen someone use it as an ironic 'look at me' at a party.

<comment><USER56> For users who have reasonably functioning products, yes. For Siri users, looks like not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> In my opinion, the problem with these assistants is that interacting with them using voice give you the impression that they're intelligent, but it's just a trick.

When it works, it can be useful for certain tasks, but when it doesn't work, you lose trust in the system pretty quickly, especially if you're in a situation where you expect and need the assistant to work, like when driving.

<comment><USER52> Would agree with Siri but the Google Assistant is pretty incredible at figuring out what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Are we surprised? Apple is not a software company, and has never been good at it. Apple is a design company, they make pretty things. Their hardware and software looks pretty. They figured out how to make their hardware robust. Their software not so much so.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's what happens at large orgs, esp ones with leadership problems - <USER2> can't move fast to improve products, even when something is obviously not working.

The only thing I use Siri for is on the desktop for starting apps - I've hooked it up to a keyb shortcut. I find its a bit faster than fumbling around spotlight or the dock. Alfred would possibly be even faster.

Google assistant has the best knowledge graph for generic questions, and much better machine learning models for voice recognition and language parsing. I primarily use it for route finding, finding out opening times, currency conversions, sometimes calling people.

Alexa for almost only music, and timers, since it's hooked up to my kitchen speakers. It's terrible for general knowledge questions.

</comment><comment><USER60> Siri has 20x more active users than Alexa. Not sure about Google.

While they are perceived as having fallen behind, Apple is still way, way ahead.

And when she works, like driving directions, people aren't even aware they're using Siri.

Damned impressive given the car is moving through a vast network of roads/traffic/construction while instructions are being given.

Meanwhile, Alexa gets to sit at home and help with baking timers...

The competition will help everyone (no matter what platforms you choose).

<comment><USER52> What? Think you drank the Kool aide and then poured it all over yourself and took a bath in it.

I carry both a iPhone and a Pixel 2 XL and there is no comparison between Siri and the Google Assistant. Now a bit of a Apple fanboy but can be realistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Siri to me is just useless most of the time.

I can ask it to set a timer and 8 times out of 10 it'll think I just said "poop" and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER62> All the known techniques for NLP and NLU are mediocre. From Apples perspective, it makes a lot of sense to not invest so much money for such little gain. Google Assistant is supposedly better, but I don't notice/care. Google/Amazon pour a lot of money into their personal assistant tech, but the end result is hardly noticeable or useful.

<comment><USER63> TL;DR I don't find it useful so it must be the same for other people

<comment><USER52> Problem is people that put Siri in the same bucket as the Google Assistant and assume they are all not helpful. The issue is how bad Siri is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Say what you will about Siri, but it was the watershed product that unleashed a new generation of mass-market voice assistants, including later bloomers such as Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. Yes, it was (is?) relatively rudimentary technology, but the founding team was visionary. As for the mismanagement, Apple's bureaucracy is to blame.

</comment><comment><USER65> I haven't use Siri, so I am guessing here: Perhaps a major advantage of Google Assistant is that Google has more aggressively worked towards recognising and speaking regional accents. Assistant in India quite reliably understands Indian accents and speaks in an Indian 'News' accent.

<comment><USER66> And Google was working it that space _really_ early. Did anyone here use GOOG-411? A service you could _call_ way back in 2007, before most people had smart phones, and ask natural questions and get search results back.

Obviously that was early Google Assistant prototyping, and also a huge wealth of voice data to mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Not being able to flag requests that Siri failed to parse tells me that the Siri team isn't serious about making Siri better.

Just adding a small "That isn't what I asked" button or letting me say something like "Hey Siri, you got my last request wrong" would give Apple a mountain of usable data.

<comment><USER54> There's actually a way to do this, for a long time. In older versions, you'd see a wavy underline on certain words it was less confident about, letting you choose alternatives. The current version has a "Tap to edit" link.

Problem is discoverability. And having a mountain of "this request was wrong", without knowing what the answer should have been, would require too much manual sifting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Short version: they did not push updates to Siri often enough, waiting for major versions of iOS.

</comment><comment><USER69> Not only Siri, Apple went downhill on a lot of other features after Jobs passed away.

</comment><comment><USER70> I wrote this a few years ago:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234)

 _If Steve Jobs still ran Apple_

</comment><comment><USER71> If the Siri infrastructure is so bad I don't understand why Apple doesn't already have several skunkwork teams trying to create a fresh alternative for the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER72> There should be an open standard to use whichever assistant you want, not limited to OEM one.

</comment><comment><USER73> Apple fell behind in voice on Jobs' watch and prior to the Siri acquisition. In fact, it's probably more accurate to say that Apple was behind on iOS progress and facing a ho-hum 4s launch. Hence, the quick 8-figure Siri buy and hurried integration that put them behind the 8-ball on voice ever since.

The broader context is that Apple doesn't seem to get: "It's the 'AI,' stupid!"

As an aside (OT), it's interesting the way Mashable essentially republished paywall-protected content. If there was new reporting there, I missed it. But that's the nature of modern media.

</comment><comment><USER74> How much of Siri's failure is due to the fact that Apple was strangled by the industire's monopolist (Nuance)?

</comment><comment><USER75> Was?

<comment><USER76> The article URL slug is "why-siri-is-so-dumb" so clearly someone over there agrees with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> So the takeaway here is that it was dumb because was poorly built?

Also, how different is that "Information" report behind the paywall? It would not surprise me to see Mashable rewriting an article but to do so with paid content seems inappropriate.

<comment><USER52> Do not think anyone can really explain why Siri is so bad. Just that it is really bad compared to the Google assistant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> It's hard to imagine Steve Jobs ever allowing a hit piece like this to get published while/if he was alive.

<comment><USER79> It's hard to imagine anyone, SJ or otherwise, having enough influence to control freedom of the press to prevent any article from being published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I'm going on the record as not actually liking the name Siri. Pithy though that sounds, it's the Sharon or Ralph name in digital assistants and I don't even like saying it. Try saying "hey Siri" in a quiet room sometime and feel the awkward.

Also it doesn't work.</comment>


Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to know how much effort is put into making a good emulator. Especially the part with reverse engineering the coprocessors inside some of the cartridges:

 _> LLE is also a very expensive operation, monetarily speaking: to obtain the DSP program code requires melting the integrated circuit with nitric acid, scanning in the surface of a chip with an electron microscope, and then either staining and manually reading out or physically altering and monitoring the traces to extract the program and data ROMs. This kind of work can cost up to millions of dollars to have done professionally, depending upon the chip's complexity, due to the extremely specialized knowledge and equipment involved._</comment>


Precious photos disappear - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/02/BUG7QB3U0S1.DTL <comment><USER2> Another argument for not relying too heavily on the cloud. Keep local backups and tell your parents/grandparents/whoever to keep local backups.

<comment><USER3> Local backups and a few offsite backups, too. Recently paranoia has hit, and I'm planning on storing everything that I hold dear in at least two online locations and two local ones.

<comment><USER4> This brings up a new question to me. How to decide on the number of and kind of backups?

<comment><USER5> Before my son was born, I just backed up everything on my local server, as well as one of my webservers. Since a few of my close friends now have children, we all host local backups of each other's photos. We started that after a friend had a house fire and lost all their photos stored on a local server.

I also do a yearly photobook with DVD(s) for my son. The photo book has the best pictures, with the back story for each. The DVD(s) has all our family pictures and videos worth saving for that year. I send out copies to my son's grandparents and great grandparents.

<comment><USER6> Wow, it's the buddy system for backup! That's a great solution to the psychological barrier: usually, no one but you can tell you to backup your personal data.

I went to a Christian college where everyone was issued laptops, so several of my friends used a special program to share their web histories with "accountability partners." Then they could monitor each other's porn use, ideally to keep them from looking at any porn. Having backup buddies reminds me of that (without the scary religious suppression of natural urges).

In fact, I might be better at making sure my friend shows me photos of _his_ family than making sure I back up my own. Of course, that's one thing cloud computing was supposed to solve in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From this article, I'd take this user experience lesson: "It does, and in fact may start alerting members to the looming demise of their photo albums when they log on to the site -- a much more consumer- friendly approach."

You can't always rely on the email address you have on file. Since she was still using the service, doubling the message on the UI would have worked.

</comment><comment><USER8> And people wonder why some pay money for Smugmug when there are free options available. I don't: they're pretty fanatical about making sure that this never happens to them.

I can't remember the blog post about it where they discussed how many redundant hardware installations they had prior to moving to Amazon, but their sales page conveys the general impression:

<http://www.smugmug.com/photos/photo-video-backup/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Make multiple copies of everything.

One copy on your media server - you know, the one you access via the PS3 or some other UPnP client in your living room.

One copy on a USB drive stored in a bank safe, ideally not too close physically to your home.

One copy (or more) distributed to your parents, in-laws, etc. Bonus points if they live in a different area.

Synchronize copies once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the deal with the second half of the article?

<comment><USER11> I noticed the same thing in an LA Times article: [http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la- sp-r...](http://www.latimes.com/sports/custom/morningbriefing/la-sp- random4-2009feb04,0,366994.story)

Maybe it's search engine crawler food?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> HN needs a "blast from the past" category or something.

Yes, there are valuable lessons here, but I was still in my twenties when this article was written.

With the price of cloud storage these days, there's no reason to delete a user's data because of inactivity. We don't do it at nextproof–then again, we charge based on storage.</comment>


Ruby was a lisp, originally - <AUTHOR> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/179642 <comment><USER2> I have been programming in Lisp languages since 1980. To me, Ruby and Haskell feel like lisps, and JavaScript feels a little bit like a lisp.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's mostly a joke - not more.

If you actually hear talks from Yukihiro Matsumoto, you'll see that he learned some stuff by looking at Emacs Lisp and its implementation.</comment>


We relaunched similarity-search based on Y Combinator feedback. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.eser.org/usa/en

<comment><AUTHOR> We received a lot of valuable feedback on our similarity-search engine, which we launched a few days ago.

Based on your feedback, we've made some major changes to improve recall. Specifically, we've begun to include data from our web-crawler.

We've also started to prune many of the similarity-search results in order to improve precision.

Finally, we cleaned-up the UI to make it more clear what the website does. I think that we still have some work to do in this area, however.

Unfortunately, many of the changes we've made to the algorithm have _dramatically_ slowed down performance. Most searches now take over a minute to complete!

We're hard at work on fixing that, though. Specifically, we're playing around with implementing multi-level counting bloom filters, count-min flajolet- martin sketches, and quntile fm digests.

We should have some major performance improvements up over the next few days.

We're also looking at launching a pre-alpha of a stand-alone software package that implements the ESer algorithm so that people can run similarity-searches on their own private data sets.

Please comment with your feedback.

Thanks again!

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW, I want to apologize for how slow searches are running! We're going to work on this until it's fixed.

It should probably take about a week to see an improvement -- we don't want to sacrifice recall or precision to improve performance.

So, we're going to try to have our cake and eat it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It starts out pretty good, but gets kind of bizarre by the last 20 or so results. Pretty cool idea though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it's a contextual ranking algorithm -- it ranks links based on how "similar" they are to what you typed in.

So, the further down the list you go, the lower the rank is -- the less "similar" the links get.

We actually compute a numerical "similarity score" for each link. Perhaps we should show it?

Thanks for trying it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of adwords keyword tool. Fun. Good luck.</comment>


Why Was Winter in Venture Capital Funding So Short? - <AUTHOR> https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-was-winter-in-venture-capital-funding-so-short-40138f426f39#.7j8ikq399 <comment><USER2> An interesting article. The most interesting point to me was the effect of global capital injections. I had assumed that the main reason why SV VC hasn't slowed down was because rates were still low, and the Great Capital Clog is still in place (see below). Because Trump appears to be trying to fix the economic problems of the heartland through trade and immigration policies, economists and the Fed don't expect to see the kind of growth that would lead to a need to raise rates, so the existing conditions remain in place.

By the "Great Capital Clog", I mean the systemic effects that cause the money injected into the economy by Fed policies to be allocated primarily to geographic regions with a strong financial industry. This has led to a divergence of macroeconomic conditions with easy-money inflation in some areas and deflationary effects in others. Normal macroeconomic theory says this clog should not exist. I'd love to find a good strategy for arbitraging the difference, because there is a lot of money to be made there.</comment>


Meet Namly, the worlds first conversational search engine - <AUTHOR> https://blobcity.com/namly.html <comment><AUTHOR> Namly is a search engine, but one that you can talk with and it talks back to. It helps you easily find what you are searching for on the open web by being contextually aware.

      Me: How do I install a Facebook Pixel on my blog

Fetches results, now user can amend the search in the same context by saying:

      Me: I am not a coder

Namly will now fetch results for installing a Facebook pixel without coding skills. But it occasionally converses back to help you narrow the results further.

      Namly: What language is your blog in?
      Me: PHP
      Namly: Do you have CPanel access?
      Me: Yes
      Namly: Here you go. Showing you the most relevant results.
      Namly: All the best with the Facebook pixel setup

</comment><comment><USER2> > "A full feature search engine that you can converse with"

Except I can't, because the site is just harvesting emails for their beta waiting list.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are currently in private beta. The engine is not fully ready for GA. We would be pleased to have you in the beta to help us improve the search results.</comment></comment>


Inside the Go playground - <AUTHOR> http://talks.golang.org/2014/playground.slide

<comment><USER2> There's also this extensive blog post on the topic: [http://blog.golang.org/playground](http://blog.golang.org/playground)

</comment><comment><USER3> Rust has a similar website, [http://play.rust-lang.org](http://play.rust- lang.org). Internally this uses playpen to sandbox compilation and execution, [https://github.com/thestinger/playpen](https://github.com/thestinger/playpen).

</comment><comment><USER4> All I see is three slides that tell you nothing. Either this site is broken or has one of the worst designs I've ever seen.

<comment><USER5> Hit <space> to advance slides. I was also confused when scrolling only showed me three.

<comment><USER4> Ahh thank you. I was using my scroll wheel.</comment></comment></comment>


Instagram down (5xx error) - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/ <comment><USER2> Me too - for the last 10 mins in Los Angeles, CA on iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same. Sacramento, CA - Android</comment>


Death row inmate describes the convict snitch code - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwky5k/the-brutal-politics-of-snitching-in-prison <comment><AUTHOR> Feels accurate, though they're called narks where I was raised.</comment>


Google buys what's left of defunct search startup Cuil - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/20/google-buys-cuil-patents/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 <comment><USER2> I know Cuil is the poster-boy of how to suck at launch but it really is a pity they didn't succeed. With Bing powering Yahoo there are really only 4 players in the English language index space, Google, Bing, Gigablast and Blekko. Add in the non English ones Yandex and Baidu and there really is a lack of companies to compete with.

Its because of this I want DuckDuckGo or another company to eventually do its own deep indexing to avoid the very singular view of the web we are presented with.

<comment><USER3> <http://commoncrawl.org/>

Common Crawl is a non-profit that maintains a big crawl dataset.

<comment><USER2> That's only the first portion of the problem, and in my opinion not the most difficult. Anyone can write a web crawler since its essentially,

while(links) { get(link) }

With a little xargs or parallel magic + wget you can suck down billions of pages with little effort.

There is more to it then that to keep things fresh but its not that hard to just kick it off now and then. The thing that's difficult is taking that data and turning it into an index able to span multiple machines.

If it was that easy DuckDuckGo or someone else would have taken that data and done something with it by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't though about Cuil since reddit used the term as a measure of randomness. <http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory>

<comment><USER5> Me either, if you're not familiar with it this part is worth reading:

One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.

Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.

1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.

2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don't really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.

3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe.

5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children's laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.

6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it slips through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat. Children everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch with the background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the earth. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small dog is fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter- dimensional void between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he walks toward the stairway where his father stands.

<comment><USER6> Looks like Some "Inception" thing going on here...pretty interesting though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My schadenfreude gland really needs to know the purchase price.

</comment><comment><USER8> > a once-promising search startup

Really, I never thought so. I remember them being DOA.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cuil seems like a case study in launching too soon. There was nothing wrong with their offering, as such, but they launched before it was ready and paid the price. Shame.

<comment><USER10> _"... There was nothing wrong with their offering ..."_

except it didn't work ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2710119638/> a quick search for common words I knew of revealed little ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/cuil/> and the HN verdict at the time ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737>

<comment><USER9> "Offering" was probably the wrong word. What I meant was that there was nothing wrong with what they were trying to do, but that they launched too soon, and not working is part of that rather than an intrinsic flaw in their mission.

<comment><USER10> _"... there was nothing wrong with what they were trying to do ..."_

you're right, as an earlier post suggests it was half-baked & released much too early. How much of the web surface has google indexed compared to what is there?

<comment><USER11> Once someone who worked at cuil told me their index got corrupted the day before launch was scheduled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So Google have bought up a bunch of patents for search UI. Presumably Google won't use any themselves -- they're just storing them up as legal weapons.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article really gives the impression that Cuil was a bigger deal than it was.

</comment><comment><USER14> Good news for the guys at Volunia, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER15> LMCTFY (Let me Cuil that for you)</comment>