arindone

Anyone going to say it? DuckDuckGo searches are still really low quality. I WANT them to be a legitimate competitor in the space (in fact, I've been having similar hopes for Bing for years) but it's just not there yet.

I'm surprised not many people are pointing out the antitrust concerns here...There are a few competitors in the space, but there may be a strong case that Google is essentially buying out that Waze's capabilities and niche are only rivaled by that of Google.

This is junk -- there is absolutely nothing that the companies can say to satisfy the critics. We're not going to get at the truth via conspiracy theories and making connections in the language of the denials. "Non-denial"??? If you were in the CEO's shoes, and knew that the PRISM issue was false, what would you say DIFFERENTLY?

What frustrates me is that this comes from the assumption that Yahoo & co. are absolutely without a doubt guilty.

To be honest I'm still catching up on a lot of the details with these stories, but it's this comment that made me wonder if there is a bit of hyperbole going around. Companies make leaks all the time on the most mundane things (hell Apple can barely contain the new iPhone that is usually coming out.) I'm hesitant to believe all the conspiracy theories going around that the companies willingly did this, or that it's as easy as it sounds.

I don't think this is helpful or productive -- it's not the companies at fault, but rather the government that is making this compulsory.

I agree 100% in theory -- but it's still a nice essay to have on HN given the million of other blog posts about the complete opposite reaction to Facebook that get upvoted to obilivion when they're also all pretty much annecdotal.

Essentially I upvoted the article because it's nice to know that HN isn't completely a sound-proof echo chamber =)

Agreed -- and I find your use case interesting, because when I hear of some obscure new social network that only works on web or some has some crazy obscure features that only rich white tech people care about, I think about the case of someone from Bolivia/South Africa/Phillipines who uses Facebook, can access it on pretty much any phone, and finds it valuable...a problem that many products/networks (outside of maybe Twitter and Evernote) have successfully solved

There are too many people commenting on Techcrunch that are almost rooting for Zynga to fail and/or finding it amusing -- there are a still good number of people working at Zynga (with families and livelihoods at stake) and I hope they can right the ship and figure this out.

Not necessarily true -- you can report/dislike ads anytime/anywhere on Facebook and Twitter (maybe Google+? I don't use it really)