Mashape is taking part in two upcoming hackathons. We would like to thank our API partners who are offering free access or mini-prizes for the iCreate Mobility Challenge 2013 (Singapore May 17th) and APIDays Mediterranea (Madrid, May 30). See bottom for the list of APIs and their…
Very cool list from Mashape!
- face - Fuse two faces into one. That’s very FUN!
- Yoda Speak - Turn your sentences and webpage into Yoda-speak!
- ERMAHGERD Translator - This translates text to…
If you come up with any API-based instant-answers, please suggest them or develop them!
Help us tell lawmakers what any versions of this bill should include at a minimum.
Wikipedia defines Machine Learning as “a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data.”
Below is a compilation of APIs that have benefited from Machine Learning in one way or another, we truly are living in the future so strap into your rocketship and prepare for blastoff.
40+ Machine Learning APIs (including DuckDuckGo’s)
Libraries of THE FUTURE!
LibraryScienceList.com made this neat infographic based on Kristen Purcell’s keynote address for the 2012 State University of New York Librarians Association Annual Conference last June (pewrsr.ch/NhuKrs). Dig into the data behind the slides: pewrsr.ch/10B8PO0
Dear DuckDuckGo friends,
We’d love to hear from you! We made a very short survey that will help us get a sense of how we’re doing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDG.
You may have noticed a couple of changes to the right sidebar on DuckDuckGo results pages. Now, when you perform a search, you should see !bang suggestions on the right side. You can click on these !bang suggestions to immediately perform your search on that particular website. For example, on a search for Futurama (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=futurama), IMDB, Wikipedia and more sites are listed. Simply click the site name or the icon next to it and it will search that site directly.
These !bang suggestions are an experiment and we’d love your feedback on them. They use our !bang syntax, which allows you to do the same thing by adding a special keyword to your search. For example, searching for ‘weezer !amazon’ searches for ‘weezer’ directly on amazon.com. There are thousands of commands like this and many shortcuts too (e.g. !a for !amazon). The full list is at https://duckduckgo.com/bang/
Secondly, we added a section underneath the !bang suggestions with attribution to some of the sources we use to make our results. DuckDuckGo gets results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own indexes) like Wikipedia, and also sources like Yahoo!, WolframAlpha, Bing and Yandex. More information about how this works is athttp://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399
Previously we didn’t even have our name on our results pages :). We wanted to add that but also give you a more direct view into what sources (in addition to us) was used to generate a given results page. Nothing has changed in terms of how we operate. We just believe in transparency, and this change furthers that goal. We are also planning on adding more attribution for open source developers contributing instant answers through http://duckduckhack.com/, for example.
Finally, we’re grateful to continue to receive good press, most recently this profile on Neowin.net: http://www.neowin.net/news/meet-gabriel-weinberg-the-man-tak…
Thank you for your continued support!
-The DuckDuckGo Team
Check out our quick user survey and help us improve on what’s important to you at DuckDuckGo.
Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.
What Can Happen In An Internet Minute - 47,000 app downloads, 6 million Facebook views, 20 new victims of identity theft (wah-wah)
All the more reason to be more private online :)
CISPA is back and we need your help to shut it down for a second time. Use this link to alert your representative about the dangers of CISPA.
Also, check out this nifty infographic on how CISPA works (from 2012 but still relevant) (brought to our attention by Bodybuilding.com)
Google admits that it collected user-data (including passwords, email, medical, financial, and technical records) from homes with unsecured WiFi.
Additional write-up here: http://business.time.com/2013/03/13/did-google-get-off-easy-with-7-million-wi-spy-settlement/
Facebook Privacy Fail infographic from Top Web Design Schools
As DuckDuckGo continues to grow, I’ve been thinking about how to hire the right people. A strong filter we employ is only considering inbound requests. I’ve read all sorts of stuff on the topic ranging from the crazy “unicorn” theories to Orson Scott Card’s Developer Bees article.
A crowd favorite seems to be the 10x developer. The tech scene is pretty obsessed with the whole order of magnitude thing in general right now (moon shots). As usual though, there is no real measurement involved.
“Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; Maybe even 100:1.” - Steve Jobs
These multipliers are often unjustly converted to include a less valuable concept: productivity. This is a trap. As engineers, we are very sensitive to productivity and efficiency, but it’s not really what separates a good engineer from a great one. All smart people learn fast.
“I learned a huge amount in a short period of time […] basically doubling my programming skills in the space of six months, I realized how relative it all was.” - John Carmack
Great engineers don’t solve problems - they redefine them. In other words, great engineers deftly navigate false premises. This is an invaluable asset and is far more rare than a productive engineer. It changes the playing field entirely. If you’re not constrained by the problem, the solution can be far more valuable.
At DuckDuckGo we had a problem where we wanted to allow users to store their settings for the site on our servers (easy), but we wanted to do it without deanonymizing them (ouch). Maximizing for anonymity and transparency while explicitly retaining state for a particular user are not things that usually coincide.
Russell Holt, a senior engineer here, redefined the problem and just asked for a pass phrase - that way the users could remain anonymous. He even made up a clever way to check for collisions.
Solving complicated problems with simple solutions requires the ability to recognize false premises and jettison them (in this case the need for a UUID). In this way, the redefinition of a problem helps free you from being bound to conventional solutions that often don’t map well to the original problem.
