HN user
Where is "Try this search on:" box that used to be on the right hand side? I found it extremely useful.
Also the dropdown in search button that allowed to, say, sort the results by date. (I often forget query parameters)
Overall I like the esthetic direction ddg is taking, unfortunately I found two good features missing.
As long as a more equal distribution of wealth would reduce suffering, we can certainly consider wealth inequality harmful.
First you would need to prove that.
Consider a world with perfect income equality. In such a world, there is no economic incentive to work at all.
Second, how do you plan on equalising the income without committing an act of aggression against innocent people?
One would have to have rather alien values to think that luxuries for a few are preferable to food and health for all.
That's a false dichotomy. What if, say, everyone gets poorer in the process of making it less desirable to be rich?
(something that I've often thought might work pretty well for programmers)
As long as it's voluntary of course.
Perhaps.
Some things are hard to copy though and would take time to reproduce by others (if ever).
And how do you know it would result in a net loss for consumers? I guess by assuming that iPhone's form factor would not get invented, if others were allowed to copy it. But how do you know that it wouldn't? And what about all the other things that would get invented, because people were allowed to reverse engineer stuff or develop other, currently patent protected technologies?
More competition is always good.
Also, if iPhone's form factor is actually better, then it would only benefit customers if other companies would adopt it.
He obviously did use violence. However, are you suggesting that you need government violence to minimize goverment's involvement in economy?
And now think that quite the opposite idea, the post Pinochet free market economy, was what made Chile the richest country in South America.
As a rule of thumb, good intentions bring very bad results if you need government violence to implement them.
I, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.
This reminds me of Lockhart's Lament, which I highly recommend reading http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...
"Zimbabwe suffered from the second worst hyperinflation on record; it reached an absurd 231,000,000% in the summer of 2008. That means that the price of goods doubled every 25 hours."
Unless the hyperinflation lasted only about 3 weeks, then that statement is obviously wrong. 2^21 * 100 = 209,715,200