solveforall

Excellent feedback, thank you! I will work on this.

[Disclaimer: shameless plug, and also previously announced as a Show HN a while back]

I would like to mention my search engine as another privacy-focused alternative: https://solveforall.com/

1) Does not track user activity. Hosted in Canada. 2) Does not leak referrer to visited sites 3) No ads. Will be considering affiliate links, a paid API, and/or "good" ads -- ads people want that don't compromise privacy 4) Integrated feed reader which also provides search results 5) Activation codes (like DDG bangs, so ?g instead of !g) 5) Plugins written in JS/data to be searched can be added at any time. 6) Deep search -- get results from the search results page of several sites at a time. Try https://solveforall.com/answers.do?q=rx+480&client.kind=web&...

There clearly a lot more work to be done, and I plan on open sourcing this soon, but please try it out and let me know any feedback you have!

As a San Diego resident for the last 12 years, I have to agree it is not a good place for a tech worker. Salaries are quite low compared to other areas, companies aren't very many or particular successful, and housing costs in the good school districts are high (at least $600k for a SFR). Public transit is awful, and car traffic is quite bad as well. If I didn't have family here, I'd definitely move.

Whoa, that's the first job description that uses a 4-letter word that I've ever seen! Congrats on the chutzpah!

I have found San Diego challenging if you want to work for a big company with a good salary or get a contract at a reasonable rate. There are some startups in downtown SD though. Commuting is pretty tough without a car, unless you live near one of the few rail stations. And the trains are slow. If I were young and unencumbered, I'd definitely be in Seattle.

Really helpful feedback, thanks! It is true that the focus is on niches, like programming, deals, and politics. I'll be working to incorporate your feedback.

About the font, I think my taste in fonts is pretty much opposite of everyone else's. I wanted to do something more "stylish", but I guess I'll switch to something more professional. If you happen to have a suggestion, or just general guidelines, I'd love to hear it.

I assume your "try after google" list is figurative, not a real list on the web?

Thanks again!

Ah, I get it now. Thanks for the explanation. This is the problem with the "deep web" not being indexable by crawlers. I've started looking at how to make this easier for users. Basically I'm got some ways to detect which sites should be searched in response to your queries, based on the category of words in your query and the site. But then I need to do a real-time search of that site, that might require JS to run, extract the links, and present them back to the user. It might be slow, but it's easier for the user to wait for the cloud to do it than click the links on multiple sites himself.

Thanks for checking out my site. If you have any questions or have any trouble please let me know at help@solveforall.com. And maybe we can explore brainstorming/collaborating since you've clearly put a lot of thought into search.

To be fair, when I search I get a huge Knowledge Graph result on the right with a picture of the animal.

Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this.

What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings

Unfortunately, it's not there right now.

In terms of results from crawling, I would consider Bing a "serious" competitor, although still a distant second. They are well-funded, used in ~30% of searches in the US, and don't look like they're going away anytime soon. It would be sad if they did because Google would then be a total monopoly.

Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.

Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and start with a ?, like "?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would love to get any feedback.

Link to the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174127

Can you explain the image and what it's trying to show? That the number of text links should be more than the number of image links to well known sites? I'm asking because I do something similar on my site, solveforall.com, but to a much lesser degree of course.

Thanks for the feedback and the link! To answer your questions: 1) "I wonder what does it mean by "customizable"" You can add different plugins (that produce answers) and control when to activate them. You can also create mini-search engines that search specific domains. There are also a few settings about security that you can tweak. 2) "how is this different from DuckDuckGo with its duck.co" This search engine also includes a feed reader and get results from your feeds when you search. Also, the plugin system allows you to add data and plugins (written in 100% Javascript) instantly without anyone's approval. 3) "Why I should register for an account?" Since this includes a feed reader, you need to create an account to save your chosen feeds. Also by creating an account you can create your own mini-search engines and add plugins other than the default.

Since you've asked these questions, it's clear to me that I haven't done a good job explaining these things on my site. I'll be working on improving this. Thanks a lot for the feedback!

Hi, I'm the developer of Solve for All. I'm hoping to get feedback on this project, which I promise to consider carefully. I'm also hoping to get in contact with anyone interested in working together, sponsoring the site (which is ad-free), or any other reason.

A few caveats about the site: 1) I've made the settings a little less private for the sake of this Show HN. I don't share your search history with anyone, but with the current defaults, you'll be downloading images directly from the sites in your search results and feeds, possibly over HTTP. When I finally have a 1.0, I plan on securing all downloads for subscribers. 2) Sorry about the captcha when you create an account. Almost always the captcha is impossible when you first load it, so you have to hit the blue refresh button. I couldn't find a good solution that didn't require loading a 3rd party script (Google noCaptcha seems to work beautifully, but I'm wary of including their script). For now I'm using a locally downloaded copy of the reCaptcha script. 3) I'm not wedded to the name, logo, or the theme. Feel free to criticize any aspect of the site, I can take it! 4) I'm specifically looking for feedback on how to make this open source, but still making this a sustainable business. I am thinking of AGPL, or possibly something that would prohibit commercial usage without a license.

Thank you for any input you have!

I actually like their name when paired with the cat, which is a "hunter".

Now you can't submit something unless you're invited to the network and PH approves. Anybody want to help me out with an invitation?

I do. I don't like someone else deciding what sources I get my content from, but find it hard to remember to go to those sources directly.

Title is certainly weird -- his rant did not cause the user space to misbehave, the bad commit did.

Seems like he is having a very bad day. Still, I'm glad I'm not skilled enough to even attempt to work on the Linux kernel. I feel sad that others might be scared away, but maybe that's keeping the quality up.

I had a hard time using this product. I was trying to use another developer's APIs but it didn't seem possible. The one positive thing about the announcement, from the FAQ:

Will Palantir (or anyone else) have access to my personal data? No. All of your user data including names, email addresses, passwords and APIs will not be shared with anyone and will be securely purged from our servers on March 31, 2016.

https://www.kimonolabs.com/faq

That looks great, I am going to look into this at some point. Thanks a lot for the link and all your hard work.

215 million facts, that's impressive! Anyway, congratulations on shipping. If you ever want to collaborate on search, please let me know.

Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't seem to add much value is the NELL project one, which lists the type hierarchy. Maybe that could just be summarized to "Albert Einstien is a male scientist" ...

Of course autocomplete would be nice as well as more tolerant input acceptance.

I don't get the finder ... do you plan that people will register, then you can find other users that way? This is not a general search for someone by email, right? That would be cool...

I am looking forward to using your API as well! Do the endpoints on https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers work?

Anyway, cool stuff. If you want to discuss further with me, contact me at jctsay AT aim.com.

First they raised the prices by 100% ~ 500%, with very little notice, then surprise, surprised, everyone stopped using it (well I'm guessing here, but what else could have happened?). Then they backed off a bit and made it cheaper only for their ad partners. So you could only use their API economically if you display their scummy ads and get their blessing. And now it's just cancelled. The alternative -- YPA -- is a client-side Javascript solution unusable on the server side.

No wonder Yahoo is in such trouble -- lately, they've taken good products, ruin them or stop improving them, then cancel them due to everyone abandoning them (Mail, Maps). Or they just cancel good products without trying to monetize them (Pipes).

I switched my search engine to use the Bing API and never looked back. It's a shame that it is the only top-tier search API available now.

Thanks I updated my comment with the less than 2% part, makes it 50x harder to get close to the maximum safe dose!

Awful hit piece containing at least 2 exaggerations and lies:

"Canola oil [aka rapeseed oil, present in many foods] is one of the worst fats one could put in their body because it contains erucic acid that damages the heart."

Not sure about the "worst fats" part, but what about palm oil, lard, etc.? It is true that erucic acid has been shown to be harmful to animal hearts, but at high doses. According to Wikipedia, In Australia, the maximum recommended dose is 500 mg/day/kg, and that's a safety factor of 120 over what is considered safe. Also canola oil has a maximum of 2% erucic acid, so you would need to consume 1/2% * 70 kg (about 150 lbs) * 500 mg/day/kg = 1.75 kg of canola oil per day to get the maximum safe dose. I don't think people eating Soylent are getting anywhere close to 1.75 kg a day -- that's a lot of oil to be in a food.

"Studies have shown that dl-alpha tocopherol (synthetic vitamin E) is linked to increased cancer rates."

The cited study:

There were no significant differences (all P>.15) in any other prespecified cancer end points. There were statistically nonsignificant increased risks of prostate cancer in the vitamin E group (P = .06) and type 2 diabetes mellitus in the selenium group (relative risk, 1.07; 99% CI, 0.94-1.22; P = .16) but not in the selenium + vitamin E group.

Conclusion Selenium or vitamin E, alone or in combination at the doses and formulations used, did not prevent prostate cancer in this population of relatively healthy men.

-- So basically cited study says that synthetic vitamin E did not PREVENT cancer -- quite different than causing it!

Also,

" In the same regard, Soylent 2.0 uses vitamin K1 instead of K2."

Vitamin K1 and K2 have different functions in the human body. K1 (the plant form) helps with blood clotting. K2 is related to cardiavascular health, strong teeth, and healthy skin (not sure about the cancer prevention mentioned in the article). While it's true that K1 doesn't do these things, some does get converted into K2 by the gut. I haven't read that K2 can converted to K1, so using K2 alone would seem to be worse than just K1 (obviously though, it's not binary). That K2 might prevent cancer does seem to have some evidence, though not particularly good:

---

We observed a nonsignificant inverse association between total prostate cancer and total menaquinone [the most studied form of vitamin K2] intake [multivariate relative risk (highest compared with lowest quartile): 0.65; 95% CI: 0.39, 1.06].

-- From http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/4/985.full

Key words being "nonsignificant" and a pretty large confidence interval.

I could probably go on, but basically, it's a bunch of lies and exaggerations wrapped in scientific mumbo-jumbo. I have never had Soylent and have no interest in it, and also have doubts about how wise/healthy it would be to rely on a single food source, but pieces like this just make legitimate critics look bad.

My personal philosophy -- pretty much anything in high doses has been shown to cause cancer, so don't worry about it that much. Eat a lot of different things, and don't eat too much of anything, and especially cut down on the ramen (who knows that the hell they put in those spice packets, find another food to eat when you're poor) and processed sugar.

I stand corrected :)

No, the prof I was referring to was Chinese. It's pretty hard to identify that one prof who can't speak English and can't teach, when there are so many to choose from.

That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.

You have accomplished your goal, avoided humiliation, and have saved money.

Ah, sorry didn't realize that. Thanks for pointing that out.

As someone who is perpetually terrified to do a Show HN, congrats for shipping something. I also don't think this idea is much better than inline style attributes, but it's something different at least. You seem to take constructive criticism well and that's a good sign. My advice (worth nothing since I haven't shipped) is to learn from the feedback and come back with something else.

Also, I should mention I did have a use for something like this. On my site, I sanitize HTML generated by user plugins, and to ensure the HTML doesn't mess up other parts of the page, I would provide a set of allowed CSS classes, but disallow inline styles. The CSS classes would not include "position" properties, so "position: static" wouldn't be allowed. Later I was able to use phloc to parse the inline styles but prohibit "position", so I didn't need a huge set of CSS classes anymore.

So basically enough to pay 3-4 fully loaded developers in SF. Also it's interesting the 7.75% decrease in Gold after in Aug 2015, after the Victoria Taylor firing.

Given the absence of a clear uptrend in the last few months, I think it's fair to say Reddit Gold hasn't succeeded yet.

Kudos for the transparency though.