skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: have Google search results worsened?
It seem like over the last 6 months to a year the quality of google search results has gone down significantly.

It's not really subtle either. I'm coming across outright broken links on the first page of results fairly regularly. Other times, the quality of the linked site is so bad that I can't even view the content (e.g. popups that obscure the entire view of the page that I have no way of closing, broken javascript that doesn't let me view the content, or forced subscriptions that prevent me from viewing the content).

Sometimes it's a little more subjective, but it's things like ranking spam, ad-riddled sites over official documentation when googling for exact API terms.

Has anyone else noticed this?
Interesting! However on Sigma-Aldrich website it says:
technical grade, 60%

How do you get from 60% to 99%? Do you have to (for pharmaceutical grade)?

What are the remaining 40%? poison? harmless byproducts?
“Dark Patterns” in Ecommerce
Have you tracked or checked how well bitwarden_rs keeps up with mainline Bitwarden on changes and fixes?

I’m usually concerned about these forks getting way behind or getting abandoned after sometime. At least mainline Bitwarden has paid subscription tiers to support ongoing development and maintenance, which may provide some predictable income for that.
> ignoring those negative emotions and keeping a "stiff upper lip" can lead to much bigger emotional problems down the road

To me, keeping a "stiff upper lip" isn't so much about ignoring negative emotions, but more about behaving in the right way even when emotions pull you the wrong way. In my experience, exercising that skill doesn't create emotional problems, but solves them.
Tangential, but has Facebook done anything to reduce the power-consumption in Libra?

I'm not enthused about supporting anything that worsens the global climate crisis and its irresponsible of large companies to support cryptocurrencies with its terrible power usage right now.
We moved our DNS from Dyn as soon as there was discussion of Oracle buying it. It's too bad really, Dyn was a decent provider. Maybe Oracle will let them continue to run on their own for a while. I can imagine them rebranding the DynDNS service at some point and offering different subscription fees.
Yeah, because everyone was so civil towards me and Cloudflare when Cloudbleed happened.
Bloom Indexes in PostgreSQL
I don't think this is really news, or surprising. At some point any cloud-based service supporting public sharing of user-generated content will be used, either obviously or non-obviously, for malicious purposes - content hosting, C&C, etc. For the service providers, this becomes a very difficult game of cat and mouse.
so the word you meant to use is ... impractical.
Is it though? I totally support the idea of the action, but it really feels like it should have come from congress. They are supposed to be the law makers. It feels like everytime congress fails, and we have to resort to executive actions to do every day legislation more power is being ceded to the executive branch.
Key Insights from Vue's New Functional API RFC
We used to boot entire operating systems full of applications off HDDs into <1GB of ram. Waste is waste, and it is a shame that developers think it is totally ok just because their company-bought workstation is top of the line and replaced every year.
Is that really truly settled by economists? Objectively. I mean there have sure been a lot of currency crisis and hyperinflation events in modern world history.
Then why are GroenLinks winning more seats with each election?

I agree our government could and should have done more, starting quite a few years ago. We are behind on our commitments. But I don't think it's fair to say "most people still don't care". Many Dutchies I know do care. Some just don't know what they can really do to help, or can't afford to do the things that would help. Even putting solar panels on your roof (an effective and economical thing to do) is beyond the financial / living situation of most people.

If we can just stop FvD's insane climate change denial that would probably help too...
Eliminate Limited Liability
There was a sketch show in the UK called The Fast Show, and they had a character in it called Colin Hunt who was the office "joker". One of the episodes showed him flying a female colleague to the Seychelles on a flight simulator in his living room. I wish I could find the video clip.
Of the drugs in Tanzania, how many were invented there?

It's typically US companies that take the brunt of the R&D costs to develop novel drugs. Then once they're developed, it's easy for them to spread to other countries for cheap.

That said I do agree the healthcare system is pretty messed up, and patents are part of the problem. But you have to recognize that R&D in this space is not cheap, and companies need some incentive to spend billions of dollars
> The only way to solve this is to basically invent another cross platform drawing layer. But why bother? HTML/CSS already exists. There's effort and tooling and docs and community and everything else you'd need for a successful framework. It's not worth the effort.

That's assuming we want that though. TBH I'm tired of web apps. I pay for a bunch of OSX native applications because it just feels better. I want to minimize friction for creating truly native apps. Not just for performance, but for visual consistency, OS features, etc.

I disagree that RN just breaks or looks weird. It does, yes, if you're trying to ignore platform widgets and make your own unicorn. I however am mainly speaking as a user. I want applications that feel like they are on my platform of choice, not some UI designers HTML page thrown into every OS.

You're right in cases where app devs are trying to make cross platform apps without actually making what I view as an application. They're just wanting to put their webpage onto the users computer. However I'm not wanting that. Luckily for them they already have that; It's Electron, and it works great for them. You're right we can minimize how awful Electron is, but I want native apps to feel good, feel native. I pay for apps that are more than just HTML.

Lastly, I think you sell RN's design short. Making two separate apps with RN involves a lot of code reuse. It's the same codebase, with two different binaries effectively. You can abstract a lot of logic to a unified layer, the majority duplication ends up being layout and widget choices. You're in the same language the entire time, using all your helper libraries and in general it feels identical (speaking from my experience, at least). Compare this to writing an Android app and a iOS app using their native languages. RN's developer overhead is miniscule by comparison. This gives users a native feel with a minimal amount of developer work.

I'm saying we need a RN-like solution to minimize effort for developers who desire to give users a native experience. I also greedily hope that in a world where this exists, HTML on my desktop won't be used as much.
In practice I've found that to be incorrect. Prices quoted to me are either wildly inaccurate, or end up being the minor percentage of the total cost.
I'd not call the borrow-checker "productivity-consuming" : it is indeed a tough challenge for somebody learning the language, but in the medium/long run it becomes totally transparent when you've internalized its expectations. I've been working in Rust full time for one year now, and the only time I really had to think hard about "how to write this piece of code while complying to the borrowck rules", I was really happy to have it, because I would have written a nasty memory bug if nobody told me that I was doing something stupid.

It comes with a steep learning curve though, and I remember giving up three times in two years when I decided to give Rust a try. It eventually clicked on the fourth attempt(Idk if the docs had evolved between the third or fourth time or if it's the result of the slow progress I made through the three first try) but now, I really happy with the language.
The ACA had a "chargemaster" rule that required hospitals to post a list of standard charges for treatments, but this doesn't include charges for office visits or elective procedures.

More importantly though, these standard fees do not include any negotiated rates between insurance providers and hospitals, making it effectively impossible to comparison shop. A hospital's chargemaster price for procedure X might be $10,000, but might be only $2,000 for a particular insurance provider due to negotiation.

That's the difference between the ACA rule and this EO; the EO forces hospitals to post the real prices for each insurance provider.
Well the author is certainly privileged to not have to think about his own mental health very much, considering who he is and what he does for a living.

The real thing that's happening with mental health in the US and probably the UK is that people aren't so much deciding that their personal problems are diagnosable psychiatric conditions as they are deciding that they would like to become mentally healthier and are seeking help. And the medical profession, being ill-equipped to actually provide a means to change, is turning to psychiatric medicines to control what are essentially patterns of thinking and being. At the gym it would be like people seeking to become better and instead of receiving personal training they would be given steroids.

I was one of those people who wanted to change how I thought about things and how I acted. And so I sought therapy not necessarily because I had a clinical disorder, but because there were a lot of probably sub-clinical issues I was having with my thinking, and having someone rational and well-trained helped me change my thinking and my behavior so it was no longer causing problems for me. Frankly I was nearing a meltdown of some sort.

It's not the same as needing psychiatric care for a personality disorder or for Schizophrenia or for any number of treatable, identifiable psychiatric disorders. But he's standing up this straw man that people like me are just wimps and they just need to suck it up and have a cup of tea or something. It's pretty patronizing.
We shouldn't, but the more efficient, cheaper, long term, structural way to fix it is to create more educated consumers. Teach children in school how to make proper comparisons, how to avoid sales tactics, how to figure out the bottom line for them.

How would you even police something like 80% off a "fake" retail price? Create a database of all transactions for all items and compare to the historical average in x amount of days? Force all sellers to maintain records of their sales to compare against, and then go around doing spot checks?

Why not just have the government buy up billboards and TV ad spots educating everyone not to fall for the discounts and to compare the bottom line number they pay, and reward sellers that offer price transparency with their business?
> No government is going to let FB and any coalition do an end run around their national currency and their banking institutions.

That's the point of confusion. This is not an end around. This is about extracting tolls - slivers - from economic activity. They will all comply with the status quo, they will say what needs to be said, they will bow as they need to bow, they merely want to get their little cut on a billion transactions. It's nothing more than an attempt to layer another transaction processing fee-based system into/onto the global economy. There is no other point, it's why Facebook has partners like Visa interested.

These guys could not care less about replacing national currencies or doing an end run around of political control. In fact it's the exact opposite: they would want the regulators to make sure Libra is the standard that they can properly exploit, and raise the walls to other competition. That is how these companies always behave, it's rather obnoxiously predictable. They will be thrilled to work with regulators to keep things exactly as they are, with a little exception for their new baby parasite that gets 0.3% of everything (and please regulators, while you're at it, make it really hard to compete, make the regulations impossible for everybody else to comply with).

They do not want the political power, responsibility and conflicts that come with national currencies. They want the money, the fat juicy profits, that come with extracting high margin tolls. It's ideal to leave the national fiat currencies intact, so they can extract additional fees everytime people want to change their money. Libra is a rider, national currencies come and go.
Cameo raises $50M to deliver personalized messages from celebrities, influencers
Without a breakdown of what you're doing in that browser, what you have customized in terms of config and extensions, etc. there is literally no information for others in a statement like that; this is an anecdote.

It's not even clear if you're being disparaging or whether you intended to follow this up with "and that's why I'm glad people reuse that stack instead of adding yet more bloat to my already struggling machine in the form of a home-rolled sub-par UI rendering stacks".
<ad type="e-postage-vendor" />

<ad type="wysiwyg-website-builder" />

<ad type="overpriced-mattress" />
I wonder if architectural diversity will increase even further than it has.

It's already increased a bit in the microprocessor world with the rise of GPUs, but that "just" puts supercomputer-style vector processing in SBCs and laptops. It isn't as new of a concept as systolic arrays, for example; those can be fast even on slow hardware if you pick your problem right, just like how GPUs are only speed demons on certain tasks. Well, if we can't beat problems to death with increasing scalar speed, it might give us more incentives to design ever-more-specialized chips which solve specific problems extremely effectively even if they're comically useless for general-purpose computing.
> In the absence of meaningful quality of care information

Except that quality information gets provided quite satisfactorily in plenty of industries, even ones that might appear otherwise quite opaque. Sure, sometimes it is done in distorted and counterintuitive ways (many marketing practices, including many kinds of advertising, are ultimately reputational games that are designed to signal quality), but meaningful info is far from "absent"!
How to Label Data
Max is a visual programming language[1] (arguably the most popular/relevant one?). There are some good screenshots of what it looks like here https://cycling74.com/products/max/ It requires using the Max app, an IDE-like environment, to use. The `.maxpat` files are JSON but not meant to be edited by hand (although I do it all the time).

Reaktor is also a visual programming language. Both cost money, a lot actually, I think Max and Max for Live (which you need to run plugins in Ableton and is sold separately) are $600 or so total.

Visual programming languages are especially popular for synthesis, I'm assuming there's a reason for that, but honestly I've never tried doing this stuff in another language (most "native" VST-style plugins are written in C++), so I can't really compare it to that or give a real explanation for if it's better. But it is simply an environment that brings me joy to work in (despite its warts), so beyond doing a bit of work in Reaktor, I've never even looked into other ways of doing these things.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
I actually do this with the subkeys I put on my Yubikey, and thanks to the NFC capability, I can use it on Android.

I've been wanting to switch to a Yubikey with USB-C, since both my laptop and phone have that port and I don't have to rely on NFC, but this has been working fine so I can't really justify the cost.
Startup Seed Raising Skills
Monzo actually has chat integrated and you can go back and see all the instant messages between you and them. Much easier to ask a chat message about a transaction and receive an answer with a push notification when everyone is read to discuss (i.e. at 4am you might well have to wait til the next day but no big deal).

I have to say the best thing about Monzo is their customer service, it's really fantastic compared to other banks. I have other problems with them though - I won't use them with their 50p per day overdraft charge, even if you only go slightly into it; this persecutes poor people - it's much fairer to charge a flat percentage.
Yes, I think that is true, and you can see this in a lot of green parties in Europe.

To be fair to them, environmental damage is very widespread and goes a long way beyond climate change, we do need to rethink quite a few things to protect ecosystems and avoid continued mass death of wildlife.

It’s a shame though that they are often not very scientific or practical about how to go about this. It’s why it’s so important for mainstream parties to embrace action on climate change and tackle it in a pragmatic way.
I do like the atlantic but the way they rewrite their headlines as the page loads is super distracting. I assume they are AB testing which title is the most effective, but I see the switch and its jarring
This is pretty much what I do. I ran into issues getting the browser autofill stuff to work so I've been copying passwords manually, but it's still better than typing even if I could somehow memorize them all.
> Electron allows you to hire cheaper, less-experienced frontend engineers.

Do you mean that the front end developers are cheaper or you mean even the less experienced can code in Electron? I have issue with both but I need to understand what you mean first.
I think Apple is going to purge them from iOS apps over time, they've already started with kids apps.

To be clear, Apple isn't purging apps that protect kids in favor of its own apps.

Its my understanding that Apple is purging apps that take over the phone entirely (including the ability to remotely control the camera and microphone) by misusing enterprise certificates. There are plenty of kid protection apps out there that play by the rules and will continue to work.
The high risk drug market? What are you talking about there's nothing high risk about the drug market. Their profit margins are enormous, absolutely gigantic. If you are under the impression that the people setting drug prices are good people trying to make an honest living then you are very, very confused.

The industry is thick and rife with corruption and greed. Their paying off politicians and doctors left and right. Have you any idea the kind of people your defending? Go discover a cure for cancer tomorrow, you will be dead by Monday. They will pay to have you killed, that's the kind of people your defending.

Skin in the game? Anyone who is dependent upon drugs to live already has skin in the game, I already have skin in the game. If they so choose any one of us who is depend on these drugs to live could be dead within the year, how's that for skin in the game?
It's essentially encrypted text, which Git handles just fine.
To expand on this, check out some of comments that have been purged by Medium, many of which are pretty mild:

https://cloverchronicle.com/2019/06/24/here-are-some-of-the-...
I use numpy/scipy for everything I do by default, but not all operations can leverage it unfortunately.

So what I mean is that the python program leveraged numpy to the greatest possible extent (that I know how), but was nonetheless 1000x slower than the C++ program that produced the same output. I am not making any claim that particular operations like summing up an array or doing an FFT is 1000x faster in C++ than in numpy. Of course it's not. In this case, numpy calls were certainly not the bottleneck, so it would be wrong to say "1000x faster than numpy". But it was, on the whole, 1000x faster than Python leveraging numpy.
The 5 dimensions refer to the precise control of 5 degrees of freedom of nanogratings. 3 degrees of position in spatial coordinates and two degrees of polarization aspects. It’s in the paper and not phony, although the word “dimension” might be better replaced with some other word that doesn’t sound like 5 spatial dimensions - which is not what is intended. Before saying something is phony you should probably read the paper(s). That is from one of the top optoelectronics experts in the world.
Sometimes I feel like I'm forced to take verbatim notes on my computer, even though I know that's bad for my learning.

Specifically, I'm reading a very detailed textbook on databases. I feel that if I don't take notes I will forget most of the content in the textbook because the textbook is so information dense, but at the same time, whenever I take notes they end up being word-for-word copies of the text because the textbook is already so concise/word-efficient.
The legislative branch has ceded most regulatory authority to the executive branch. Telling companies what to do is a major part of that.

If the Department of Health and Human Services was given this authority, and the President is in charge of that department, then how would an executive order be inappropriate?
Yes but they all require a ~1bn dollar investment by somebody. Let's not forget the price alphabet is paying for this. And they have already agreed that they would not have IP level access to any of the data collected. Nothing personally identifiable. And all data goes through a 3rd party committee over which they have no control. I'm not sure what would lead somebody to vandalize the sensors besides ignorance and paranoia. What people fail to realize is that mass data collection, when done right, can be an extremely useful tool in improving convenience and efficiency of service. While alphabet may have a dodgy history of collecting information they had no right to, they are not Facebook or Equifax. As far as I am aware they havent mishandled or abused the data they've collected and it genuinely seems like they are committed to honest data collection this time around. Honestly I'm more concerned that the privacy committee that Toronto puts together will botch the data collection/storage end up leaking the data. And most likely they will blame alphabet for it in an "see we knew this would happen" kind of way. I lived in Toronto for a decade. Maybe it's because of Rob Ford but I have zero faith in the competence of Toronto city politics and fully expect them to over involve themselves beyond their capacity and royally fuck things up and then shift the blame to somebody else. #blockthesidewalk really says it all.
What's really interesting is that you can capture amazon-dns traffic. This is gold for security purposes.
Is Facebook a Platform or a Publisher?
Humans are humans. Living creatures driven by emotions and irrational behavior. Each person has his/her own psychological weaknesses. You included. Hardcore capitalists included. These kinds of marketing techniques take advantage of those weaknesses to increase their revenue. I would argue that similar weaknesses drive sick people to do horrible stuff to increase their wealth and power.

Blaming consumers for their lack of self control is pure hypocrisy. Where do you think sellers got their desire to get so much money ? From their own lack of self control.

A rational mind does not need or desire millions of dollars. It needs what it requires to live a happy life : food, health, social interactions (quality & quantity). Anything else is pure irrational, pulsion driven excessive desires.
The Last of Its Kind: Caring for the Last Survivors of a Species
What GOFAI technique got even close to 80% of the way? Maybe pathfinding, if I'm being particularly generous?
The purpose of the program is to help grow the economy by supporting development of innovative and risky new technology. The regular SBIR program is not about building something specific.
Teslas instead of Ferraris. Electric aircraft or electric trains instead of jets.
If we ever figure out how to transport ordinary matter across interstellar distances and make a profit, we'll most likely have magic that makes transporting matter obsolete.