6chars

(In my experience at least. I'm open to recommendations!)

Google is the worst search engine besides every other one

Maybe an enhancement would be to have it look at the edit history and use the most recent URL that has remained on the page for at least X hours/days

The old Jawbone Up fit the bill somewhat, but I don't remember exactly what features it had. I thought it was a great product and hoped to see more like it.

*President Garfield

Yep, and I'll admit I love being this guy!

I suspect you don't hate to be that guy all that much

So true

Discounting the fact that humans aren't coldly rational is irrational. People love to hide behind "logic", but poking a bear and expecting it not to attack you because that would be an "irrational" emotional response is not smart, it's wishful thinking. I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.

No question, but I just want to sympathize with your distress over receiving the original email. It's impossible to say for sure because I didn't receive one, but I think I would have reacted the same way. I am also very frustrated on your behalf with the way people in these comments are talking about you and others who read this email as a legal threat.

It's telling about many HN users' capacity for empathy that they think their reaction, real or hypothetical, has anything to do with whether this was a bad thing. Regardless of how any of us would react, it's clear from the many people who lawyered up or experienced anxiety because of the emails that this study had victims. Not seeing them as victims because you would have disregarded the email reveals what I'd consider a solipsistic mindset that causes them to regard others' experiences as less valid than their own.

Thank you! So many hindsight fortune tellers here.

If I keep guessing coinflips, I don't have knowledge of the answer 50% of the time even though I can predict them that often.

Sorry to get off topic, but I think this is an interesting way of thinking about this. I wonder if it represents any kind of larger difference in our worldviews. I would say that we have knowledge of the answer 0% of the time. If we guess and it happens to be correct, that's a coincidence, not an indication of knowledge.

IMO this goes hand in hand with thoughts I've had about the concept of mistakes. When I used to dabble in day trading (I've been clean for a few years now), I gained and lost and gained a lot of money. Whether any particular gamble ended up as a gain or a loss, I consider them all mistakes because I had no rational reason to expect any of them to pay off.

My uneducated hypothesis is that whether somebody thinks of a successful gamble as a mistake or a good decision could be a decent predictor of certain personality traits and political views. Maybe the same applies to the question of whether being correct implies knowledge.

I could use a new technical book to read. Is this the one you're referring to? https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/thean04c-...

I wonder how much this has to do with their being a Norwegian company. I have no idea what the expectations of customer service are over there. I'm just going on my experience working at a Scandinavian company and the incredulity I've heard Europeans express about the US's "the customer is always right" attitude, so I apologize if this is extremely ignorant. Regardless, they have a lot of room for improvement.

Have you tried giving feedback directly to the company? They feel like a small enough operation that they may actually listen.

Seems like it. I imagine there were a lot of people at Paramount who were unhappy with this, but who weren't empowered to stop it from happening. I want to believe that Paramount is a good steward of the franchise, so I'm hoping we'll eventually get an explanation of how this was somehow unavoidable because of how Netflix does business or some weird contractual stuff.

The timing was so abrupt that I really doubt this was just a horrible rash decision. That's totally still possible though.

Wow, that's a really crappy experience. Personally, I had a pretty good experience with their customer service. My stylus broke after a few weeks (just stopped working for writing entirely). They sent me a new one right away and didn't require me to mail mine back.

I think the way they do returns is pretty unfriendly compared to other electronic companies I've gone through this with. I was going to exchange my tablet after I bricked it, and they wouldn't send a replacement until they received and processed the return. Based on the label, the return center is in Hong Kong (IIRC), so it probably takes a while to get the replacement even if everything goes according to plan. I ended up recovering the device myself (that ordeal's another story, but that's entirely my fault) so fortunately I just had a week without use of it, not a month+.

I would expect it to be beneficial to them to send the replacement first along with a return box, then charge for a whole new device if the return isn't received on time. Maybe that only works if you have the scale and resources to build such a system that companies like Amazon have.

To clarify for anyone in the US, this applies to everyone _outside_ the US. Previously, Paramount released Star Trek: Discovery on Paramount+ in the US and Netflix everywhere else. Now it's Paramount+ everywhere, only that doesn't exist everywhere yet.

It's amazing to me that the company feels that the benefits of this outweigh the goodwill it costs them among the fanbase. Trekkies are going apeshit over this. It makes me more hesitant to buy Star Trek media in the future, and I'll admit I'm not one to change my buying patterns based on companies' behavior ordinarily.

Ok fine, let me choose a different example. Has someone who became a millionaire daytrading crypto contributed more to society than almost* every nurse?

* there are probably a handful of millionaire nurses out there

Edit: to be clear, I'm not arguing that the market doesn't reward people for providing economic value to the world. I just disagree that that's the type of value that's relevant when discussing whether someone is virtuous. If two people make the same amount of money selling vacuum cleaners, but one kicks an orphan every time they make a sale, I don't think many would say they're equally virtuous.

If you're rich, it means you have provided a decent amount of value to society somehow.

Yep, a toddler who was born into an aristocratic family has provided more value to society than any public school teacher ever has.

E.g., no one needs more than ±10 million dollars.

I don't know about you, but I need more than -10 million dollars.

I'm not saying they aren't. What I'm trying to get across is that people are more used to and, therefore, inured to their dark patterns. There's a learning curve for navigating any website's dark patterns, so I'm more comfortable using a site whose dark patterns I believe I can recognize and avoid than one I haven't used before and am consequently more likely to be victimized by.

I'm definitely overestimating my own ability to avoid Amazon's scammy tactics. I, like most people, am reluctant to admit that I'm vulnerable to manipulation by things like these dark patterns (and ads, PR, etc.). But since I'm talking about my subjective feelings towards the websites, I think how good I _feel_ I am is relevant.

I totally agree with everything you've said, but just want to clarify my initial comment. I'm not trying to let Amazon off the hook, though they are less problematic than almost all of the other examples in the article.

I don't have any evidence to back this up, but in my recollection, that is the case. But it's hard to even compare e-commerce now to back before Amazon, when the web was much more niche and a lot of dark patterns weren't even technically possible yet.

It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.

I believe this kind of thing is a big contributor to Amazon's hegemony in online shopping. I'm reluctant to order from other sites because there's a whole new set of dark patterns I may fall victim to. At least I'm familiar enough with Amazon to know I'm not getting charged for things I didn't intend to order, the low stock warnings are somewhat legitimate, etc. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't have its own issues, but at least it's a known quantity.

If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...

I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.

That I can see. Or he would fixate on the fact that someone else does know how to use them and get competitive about it, trying and failing hard to show that he's also worldly.

I don't think the author really understands the characterization of Michael Scott. I can't imagine the hypothetical scene of Michael Scott taking pride in knowing how to use chopsticks. That sounds way more out of character to me than having him not know how to use them. Hard for me to take the article seriously when it has to make up character traits for Michael Scott to make its point.

I believe that the type of person the author thinks Michael Scott is exists and sucks (and I'm probably one of them), but I don't think Michael Scott is one of them.

I don't even remember what Google is

If DDG has such severe memory-related side effects, I'm not sure I want to switch.

It would have been a courtesy to Teams users too, not just MS. I don't see the downside of going through the proper channels before disclosing this publicly unless the goal is some kind of "revenge" for the bug.

20 years is quite the tenure for a president

I've lived by this rule too ever since I got a bottle of "One A Day" multivitamins that invariably made me vomit 10 minutes after taking one. (Embarrassingly, I didn't give up on them until maybe the fifth time it happened.)

I'm uncomfortable with this rehearsal analogy. I'd rather have a company pay me to learn new things than spend my free time coding when I could be seeing my family, pursuing a hobby, or vegging out. From my employer's perspective, I agree that boring is usually better, but as an individual, I'd rather learn on the job than having to feel the need to "rehearse" for my job.

"oftentimes they're contractually forbidden from disclosing it"

Is that true? That sounds illegal.