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From my perspective, this ability was generally assumed to be true but confirmation is interesting. Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if

From my perspective, this ability was generally assumed to be true but confirmation is interesting. Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if you can look up something on her phone. Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month!

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
> Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month! Sure, google's search results suck nowadays, but she could always just go to the library.
- paleotrope 5y ago
  First 20 results are SEO sites with words Husband and Husbandry in them.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    makes perfect sense, there's lots of killing in animal husbandry.
rbobby 5y ago
> safe for the another month Not so fast there buddy. Best check what autocompletes for "how to dispose of a b..." and "best place to b...".
- jfk13 5y ago
  I get "how to dispose of a broken tv", and "best place to buy a used car". And your point was...?
  - rbobby 5y ago
    No body/bury = good
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Yeah, honestly, this kind of thing slightly terrifies me. I know I have definitely Googled for totally random things that, when taken out of context, would look pretty bad. I remember once watching a show where someone was knocked out with chloroform, and I googled something like "Does chloroform really work?" or "Can you really knock someone out with chloroform?" I turned to my partner and joked "You better not be huffing any chloroform in the near future." That's the light side of it, but the scary side of it, and why these sort of "fishing expeditions" are so dangerous, is that statistically it's probably the case that if you're keywords are pretty specific (googling a person's name or address in a very time limited window), that 90-95% of the time if someone popped up they were doing something suspicious - but that means 5-10% of the time you'd get a false positive. Given revelations of people who have been released fro death row for rather flimsy evidence, I don't have confidence that the authorities would do much besides try to find someone guilty once they got a hit.
- GordonS 5y ago
  I feel the same sometimes. Every now and then I want to Google something a bit dubious, but decide against it, just in case. I mean, I've no intention of murdering anyone or anything like that, I'm just just a curious soul.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Further, if someone were to train a machine learning model to predict which people googling "chloroform" actually went on to become kidnappers, you might find yourself at the front of the list -- not for a good reason, but because the term "MAC" is shared between tech and anesthesia, so some innocent fishing around for the OUI prefix on a smart fridge might be misinterpreted by a black box algorithm as the logistics of a kidnapper trying to determine the Minimum Alveolar Concentration of anesthetic required to accomplish their goals.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

> Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month! Sure, google's search results suck nowadays, but she could always just go to the library.

paleotrope 5y ago
First 20 results are SEO sites with words Husband and Husbandry in them.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  makes perfect sense, there's lots of killing in animal husbandry.

rbobby 5y ago

> safe for the another month Not so fast there buddy. Best check what autocompletes for "how to dispose of a b..." and "best place to b...".

jfk13 5y ago
I get "how to dispose of a broken tv", and "best place to buy a used car". And your point was...?
- rbobby 5y ago
  No body/bury = good

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Yeah, honestly, this kind of thing slightly terrifies me. I know I have definitely Googled for totally random things that, when taken out of context, would look pretty bad. I remember once watching a show where someone was knocked out with chloroform, and I googled something like "Does chloroform really work?" or "Can you really knock someone out with chloroform?" I turned to my partner and joked "You better not be huffing any chloroform in the near future." That's the light side of it, but the scary side of it, and why these sort of "fishing expeditions" are so dangerous, is that statistically it's probably the case that if you're keywords are pretty specific (googling a person's name or address in a very time limited window), that 90-95% of the time if someone popped up they were doing something suspicious - but that means 5-10% of the time you'd get a false positive. Given revelations of people who have been released fro death row for rather flimsy evidence, I don't have confidence that the authorities would do much besides try to find someone guilty once they got a hit.

GordonS 5y ago
I feel the same sometimes. Every now and then I want to Google something a bit dubious, but decide against it, just in case. I mean, I've no intention of murdering anyone or anything like that, I'm just just a curious soul.
jjoonathan 5y ago
Further, if someone were to train a machine learning model to predict which people googling "chloroform" actually went on to become kidnappers, you might find yourself at the front of the list -- not for a good reason, but because the term "MAC" is shared between tech and anesthesia, so some innocent fishing around for the OUI prefix on a smart fridge might be misinterpreted by a black box algorithm as the logistics of a kidnapper trying to determine the Minimum Alveolar Concentration of anesthetic required to accomplish their goals.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]