skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is possible to make way, way better search engine because Google Search is no longer as good as it used to, at least for me.

I can no longer find anything remotely good quality, I discover new and quality stuff from social media like Twitter and HN.

The search results seem to be too general and too mainstream. Nothing new to discover, just a shortcut to the few websites like Reddit, StackOverflow for more techie thing and Wikipedia and the few mainstream news websites for the rest.

I usually end up to search HN, Reddit or StackOverflow directly as the resulting quality is better as I can get easily specific. Getting specific is harder on Google because it just omits or misinterprets my search query keywords quite often.
But don't forget that they also threatened to hold the entire aircraft industry hostage with a overly broad patent and then spent years trying to rewrite history so they got most if not all of the credit. Even their gift of their flyer to the Smithsonian came with strings attached about how the Smithsonian could frame other developments at the time.

http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_A...
>This has a stink to it.

TBH so does using market cap to dismiss criticism of Google
Implementing an Efficient LRU Cache in JavaScript
> Cancelled last May, so about a year and a quarter ago when I was abroad. Haven’t looked back and don’t miss it at all.

Huh, I thought the value significantly improved while I was abroad, for sending gifts with fast shipping.
There are approximately 500 million that want to come. It would be interesting to see how we would solve the housing needs while making their immigration economically viable for both them and the country as it exists today.
You weren’t totally wrong, just not the most correct :)

I looked up the numbers, in the US, it’s something like 70% burn on-site for electricity, 20% burn in some nearby use (e.g. process steam or greenhouse warming) and 10% was cleaned up enough to pipe into the natural gas grid.

That’s by facility count, not BTUs.
The U.S. wants to dump 1.5 tons of rat poison pellets on the Farallon Islands
I remember joining a major company right after it went public. I was shocked at how little oversight there was at spending. There were also a lot of people who just weren't pulling their weight in the company and soaking up the freebies.

About a year later, the CEO was fired and we had a less than AWESOME quarter. We needed to do some cost trimming, like all well-run businesses need to do.

(The obvious thing to do was to scrutinize costs, and offer a few people a generous severance.)

I was shocked that a bunch of employees (and my manager) rallied around getting rid of free soda. It was like they just wanted to extend the free ride for everyone, so they suggested the most obvious way to feel pain instead of finding something to get rid of that we didn't need.
"GNSS" just means satellite positioning systems in general, and e.g. "GPS" and "Galileo" are examples of GNSS systems.

At least regular receivers (e.g. in phones) utilize signals from multiple satellite constellations simultaneously, not sure if this is the case here as well.
Early diagnosis is much better than late diagnosis. Prevention with a healthy life style is even better.
I love this, what I really need is a back button or history though, what if i see something I love and then it switches before I think to hit the freeze button? It is gone forever? (As far as I'm concerned)
Except you're wrong in that you can't logically prove something doesn't exist. You can't prove that pink unicorns don't exist, just as much as you can't prove that political bias in the search results don't exist.

All you can do is disprove the claims of their existence. Someone tries to claim there's a pink unicorn in the garage, and you can check the garage and say that the it is pink unicorn free. Someone tries to claim political bias exist for hillary clinton in instant search results, and these articles disprove that claim as using cherry picked evidence.

Now, if you suspect that the instant search results are politically biased, then the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence of that existence - preferrably without cherry picking evidence to fit an agenda yourself. Otherwise it's just hand waving and click bait.
I thought by most definitions they won the Space Race, by being the first to have a habitable space station
Sorry, please explain to me if my interpretation is correct:

1. The cost of a false positive is low.
1a. The cost of a false positive is retesting (what is retesting? Re-mammogramming? Isn't healthcare in USA expensive?)
1b. Observe (so future re-mammogramming and hypervigilance).

2. Additional to the cost of 1a and 1b, cease consuming sugar. Which is a non-insignificant lifestyle change.

What I'm saying is... the statements "Rerun expensive tests and maintain hypervigilance seems like a low cost, in addition to major lifestyle changes that affect every level of one's socioeconomic place (eating out with friends/family, cost of food, food availability, habit breaking, possibly culture clashes, etc)." seems pretty much equivalent to absolute nonsense.
Pretty much, and the potential for criminal activity is astronomical if you give them access to an open index. Things like every website on the web hit with the same zero day on the same day for maximum profit. Build your own best kiddie pron site evah! with direct access to the index and your own ranking system. What your admin pushed a config that left the admin pages open? Go time!

As someone who was operationally responsible for a search index (formerly VP Ops at Blekko) the kinds of things crooks tried to do was pretty instructive on how they use search in advancing their efforts.
Tulsa Teacher discovers calculus flaw
Some of the accusations are pretty thin too, this one included. Last I checked, Google doesn't make money off of organic Google Maps results, except inasmuch as Maps acts as a halo product.

What exactly is Google supposed to do here? Are they to require a validated business license to update one's listing on Google Maps? Besides the non-trivial expense associated with that, it would act as a barrier to entry for smaller businesses that don't have one, and you can bet there'd be articles on here hating that too (just like there have been about the GMail API changes).
> There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on

I've heard that you'll get raises for working on new things. That's why Google launches so many new projects (and closes so many of those projects) and that's why old projects are constantly rewritten/redesigned instead of just imprpoving and bugfixing. I don't like it as a user, I want to use the same interface for 50 years and I want all bugs to be removed, rather than learning new interface and new bugs every few years.
> The other is a raw materials subsidy for manufacturing paid by the taxpayer.

Municipal recycling programs are often a profit center for the municipalities running them.
Clickable link https://appnitio.com/
“Farmed content is fine”. I thought that was one of the major (intentional) victims of the Panda update. https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-panda
When you're boycotting company A for doing bad thing X, but then using the services of company B for doing bad thing X, then that's hypocritical. If company B were doing different bad thing Y, then that's a different story.
> It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.

This is clearly both necessary if they want to retain their "all our people are among the best (and therefore have lots of options if they want to leave)" workforce and harmful to their projects. There's plain flakiness to their approach to things that's at this point a distinguishing characteristic of Google products. Even things that stick around long-term and don't get cancelled outright show heavy signs of no-one wanting to do the boring work, and no-one making them do it. Or of half-assing the boring work and then never fixing it.
I'm legitimately surprised to see so much good will towards Epic and Tim Sweeney here.

I'm happy about their revenue share and was excited when they got started - until it became obvious that their tactics didn't align with their PR.
Big news and small news alike have both been viewing Google with dollar signs in their eyes for the last 10 or so years, believing that their failure to adopt their business models to the internet is somehow Google's fault.
Probably because the benefits heavily outweigh the negatives. Combine that with the cultural/historical significance of coffee and tea and I think we have a solid explanation.
Interestingly enough, Google responded to that with a product offering: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+certified+locksmith

Not sure how well it works, as I haven't needed a locksmith in a long time. But for what it's worth, there is that.
There other ways to do it, but they tend to be less efficient.

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator
I don't do Mechanical Turk, but I've worked online for years and had a corporate job previously.

I made about $100/day at my corporate job and at least $20/day went towards costs involved in having the job. I don't have that kind of overhead with the work I do currently.

Freelancers don't charge $8/hour, but it's not at all hard to google up "client from hell" stories where they spent so many hours trying to get their pay that it was only like $2/hour by the time they were done or they didn't get paid at all etc.

I don't really want to argue this. Someone asked a question and I answered it based on first-hand experience making often nominally low hourly pay. And now people are nitpicking my reply, presumably because they've got relatively cushy lives and this type of assessment is alien to their experience.

If you make $100/hr at a salaried position, like a lot of programmers do, you probably don't need to think too hard about "But after my commute, etc, what's my real hourly wage?" If you make a lot less than that and want to survive, you absolutely need to think about "But what am I really making after x, y and z?" And the counterintuitive answer turns out to be that a nominally low hourly rate without a whole lot of unbillable time burden, like a commute or chasing your pay or looking for work, can be far better in real terms than a nominally higher hourly rate with a lot of hidden time burden or other costs.

Something I wrote a while back:

http://writepay.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-value-of-not-chasin...

If your life works just fine, good for you. But there are clearly many people willing to work for Mechanical Turk for nominally low wages. I'm sure every single one of them would love to have a higher hourly wage. I'm just trying to cast a little light on why people do this.

Everyone on HN can sneer at it all they want as stupid and not making sense etc. That doesn't change the fact that lots of people are working for nominally low pay via various online services. At best, it will just discourage me and others like me from bothering to answer questions here about it.
The title makes it sound like this is a Germany wide thing. It's 'only' the state of Hesse which is around 6 million people. The responsibility for the education system in Germany lies primarily with the states.
It's better for the environment to market useless bunches of bytes that useless blobs of plastic.

Especially when they use some of that money to support useful bunches of bytes like Blender!

(That said, I sure loved my Star Wars action figures!)
The other 50% is divvied up into rooms with much smaller volume and exposed surface area.

Unless we're going to recreate and replicate the dystopian Kowloon Walled City this seems pretty wasteful and will only exacerbate warming with all the increased energy requirements.
I have a problem with this vision.

You can be told the risk factors for everybody, but when you are told the risk factors tailored to you it becomes dangerous? Should we tell everyone they're going to live forever so they live in ignorant bliss while healthy?

I can see being unprepared for having that information, but I don't think the solution is not having the information.
It seems that decompressive explosion and people killed after being sucked by a broken window is still an unprobable but lethal risk, unfortunately

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380
What is HTTP 2 and should I care?
Azure Service Bus supports scheduling messages for future delivery. It's a first class citizen via the API when you drop a message in a queue. You can see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging... for more details. You can also use Azure Scheduler which integrates with Service Bus to directly drop a message in a queue at a specific time on a reoccuring schedule.
There is nothing to reconcile because murder is against the OT law and the penalty is death.

The 10 commands are a simple summary of OT law. They are a good guide, but the full OT law is (as any set of laws) complex and messy. The full law if you kill someone you will be killed in return, with a very complex set of exceptions for accidental killing.
>When Isner asked for Alabama’s death row execution protocols, she had to give a reason on the Department of Corrections’ public information request form.

>Isner has strong opinions about the death penalty (like a lot of people do). She’s an ordained minister, although she doesn’t lead a church (her husband does, though). Later she would run for Congress against Rep. Martha Roby (Isner lost).

>When she filled out the form she said what a lot of politicians and preachers say when confronted with a prickly question: She wanted to pray on it.

>Next to “Proposed Use of Records” she wrote: “As a member of the clergy, I feel a spiritual obligation to pray over executions. To do this most effectively, I need to have a detailed understanding of how executions are carried out.”

Can you indicate which bit of this is confusing to you?

And did you just conjour up the bit about her wanting their names, entirely from whole cloth? As it is nowhere is the text.
Strongly seconded. Reading "Artificial Life" in my teens was a formative experience for me. Reading about Tierra[1], in particular (and being an assembler program who also played "Core War"), filled me with wild enthusiasm. I even went so far as to try implementing something similar on my own (albeit I never did get it into a finished state).

re: this article - I was surprised to see somebody thinking about modeling evolution in computers all the way back in the 1950's.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)
Why would you move to Canada instead of purchasing insurance?
"“Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem,” said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games."

Contradictory sentiments like these are what lead me to believe this grant is mostly for marketing purposes. (tin-foil hat mode)
What specifically prevents entanglement for being used in communication?
This depends on the type of cancer. In the case of a slow-growing cancer like prostate cancer, early detection can find cancers that would never be a problem (you'll die of something else first).

This has to be taken into account when deciding how much screening to do.
Crawling is tricky but it's been commoditized. CommonCrawl does it for free for you. If you need pages that aren't in the index then you need to deal with all the crawling issues, but its index is about as big as the one most Google research was done on when I was there.

$50 gets you basically a Hadoop job that can run a regular expression over the plain text in a reasonably-efficient programing language (I tested with both Kotlin and Rust and they were in that ballpark). $800 was for a custom MapReduce I wrote that did something moderately complex - it would look at an arbitrary website, determine if it was a forum page, and then develop a strategy for extracting parsed & dated posts from the page and crawling it in the future.

A straight inverted index (where you tokenize the plaintext and store a posting list of documents for each term) would likely be more towards the $50 end of the spectrum - this is a classic information retrieval exercise that's both pretty easy to program (you can do it in a half day or so) and not very computationally intensive. It's also pretty useless for a real consumer search engine - there's a reason Google replaced all the keyword-based search engines we used in the 80s. There's also no reason you would do it today, when you have open-source products like ElasticSearch that'd do it for you and have a lot more linguistic smarts built in. (Straight ElasticSearch with no ranking tweaks is also nowhere near as good as Google.)
Birth of the iPhone: How Apple turned clunky prototypes into a magical device
This. "Skeuomorphism UI is so bad, OMG" was just a journalistic fad/bandwagon when there was too many years of it and people who just get their opinions from op-eds. It will make its cycle back to fashion in the future.

In the first years, Aqua UI was praised as "lickable" and extremely pretty, and iOS skeuomorphic UIs wowed the world (and and where copied far and wide by competitors) for 5-6 years before any complaints.
This is great! I've been wondering for a while how to efficiently load a comment tree without spamming the Hacker News API with hundreds of requests, and this seems like it would work nicely.
> Is marketing a useless blob of plastic to kids any different to marketing a useless bunch of bytes?

The physical blob is, well, physical. It exists for longer, and 20 years later you may dig it out and relive some of childhood memories. Bytes in the cloud tend to have much shorter life, usually defined by how long the vendor bothers to keep the server applications up.

EDIT: Funny I managed to post an exactly opposite opinion to 'DonHopkins at the same time :). Let me just clarify: I prefer no marketing of useless anything, but for toys, I think physical beats digital because digital is ephemeral.
Since you listed linked lists first, here's a fun little tidbit from my early days: I couldn't understand that until I first understood the recursive structure of binary trees. Only afterwards did I have the realization "ohhh, it's like a tree with only one child at each node" and suddenly understand the recursive structure in linked lists.
can confirm, currently maintaining presence and interaction on two accounts for each of facebook, twitter, and instagram, in order to not out myself to family and prospective employers
Kit looks interesting. Anyone have any experience or comments?

> Kit is a “Compiles-to-C” language. It is strong, and statically typed with many modern language features like type inference, algebraic data types, pattern matching, generics, implicits, while still having low level features like raw pointers, and manual memory management. Kit is written in Haskell. notes.

https://www.kitlang.org/
Dnsfs. Store your files in others DNS resolver caches
Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
I agree with their stance that exclusives are the only way to break the hold Steam has on the market.
Bear in mind that if everyone gave canned food, there likely wouldn't be a charity in the first place. Someone has to run things, and that someone generally needs to get paid for any sizeable charity; it IS a full time job.
Sure -- we actually already have an OpenWhisk backend. The IR is sufficiently stupid that it's pretty easy to write a new backend.

At least a low-performing one -- it gets harder if you want to use (a) persistent workers [instead of invoking a new platform worker for every "thunk"] and (b) direct inter-worker networking [instead of putting every intermediate result in a storage medium].
Let's pretend that's explicitly the case. Is there something inherently wrong with that? How many open source software developers would love it if instead of "please implement x feature" it ends with "...and here's $1.2 million to finance the development of it" at the end?

End users get new features they may actually use, massive OSS gets funding. Win-win for all parties.
>Lonsdale on Monday called Palantir “probably the most patriotic in the Valley.”

He's really stretching the definition of "patriotic" with that one. I tend to think of a patriot as someone who loves their country, not someone who assists their country's government with domestic spying.
Pingfs: A filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself
California has created a dns database by dna sample from every newborn child. And sells drivers license photos too.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w...
Possibly controversial, but I don't believe there are that many situations in data analytics where you really need realtime/streaming analytics. It usually comes at the cost of significant additional complexity and maintenance, that ultimately hurts reproducibility and agility.

Having said that, we are working on triggering table builds from watching changes to consumed data sets, which paired with an incremental table build would allow you to reliably achieve latency of under a few minutes.
> it's roughly feasible

What do folks even mean by "Google's index"?? Google results combine tons of signals, including personal histories for each user. Sharing metadata for the top billion urls wouldn't cover half the functionality, or make a competitive engine. And on the other hand, there may not be a single other organization in the world prepared to manage a replica of the entire data plane that impacts seatch. The proposal is somewhere between underspecified and nonsense.
Not only that, but it is interesting to see the multiplier effect of those overhead funds. If a charity redistributes 90% of donations to their cause, can they raise twice the amount of money by increasing their overhead by 5%? It is well worth it to pay someone a mid 6 figure salary if they are really good at bringing in funds (value) greater than their pay.
Right, and further observations show that it's not unique to Hillary Clinton. This means you can discount the claim since it uses cherry picked data.
I can believe Google is attempting to de-emphasize scandals on both sides. As an aside, I do get "russia investigation" as autosuggestion for trump.

I think the bigger problem is that these adjustment appear to be done manually. We know that's what they're doing to avoid racist autocomplete phrases (and reasonably so, I think most people would agree). Having such judgments made on specific political topics/events/scandals will inevitably result in political bias, especially in an organization whose workforce is so politically skewed to one side.
I think the videos are fleeting by design
I've heard conflicting stories about this. Sometimes it is phrased as delivering us from the vengeful god of the OT, other times it just embraces and extends.

I'd love to hear something official just to know how best to criticize the hypocrites...
If that were what it does, I'd agree.

It isn't.
> The only way I can think of a competitor stepping in is if they target an underserved demographic and focus data collection and monetization there, and DuckDuckGo is close by targeting privacy conscious power users.

The irony there is that DuckDuckGo can't collect much of that data precisely because of their privacy focus.
But it's not dismissing criticism. It's acknowledging that other big companies that have pretty similar issues are not coming under fire for the said issues.
I Break My Bike in the Middle of Nowhere: A Travel Blog