skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do a lot of product research on Google, and in the past few months I have noticed a significant and worrying reduction in quality of search results for detailed queries, for two reasons.

Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold).

Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query.

In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words...

While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?
They don't mention them because their focus is on other aspects of safety.
US, Europe and almost any country have police using fake cell-site, some also have mass surveillance program.

Why blame only the Chinese when "3-letter agency" might be as happy to have possibility to snoop on 5G traffic?
> Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.

I tried this. The wikipedia page for "computer" was the second result. Above that, oddly, a store page for "computers" at Best Buy. Above that, some suggested questions like "what is a computer?" ("A computer is a machine or device that performs processes, calculations and operations based on instructions provided by a software or hardware program.") And above that, at the top, several advertisements and a map of where the advertising locations are.

I don't understand what you think should come up in a search for the word "computer". I already know what a computer is, and I think it's safe to say that's true of almost everyone using the internet.
Lol ok
Being a Berliner, on a personal level it would have been nice for me to have a Google office where they would have been.

But I'm very happy about people standing up for their neighborhood and actually protesting. Having a Google office with >400 decidedly well-compensated people move in would very much change the neighborhood and not for the better.

People fighting for their own local interests is what makes Berlin great, and it is _so_ refreshing after having lived in North America where no-one protests anything and letting corporate interests dominate yours is the norm.
"because the worst can happen is I will get more interesting ads" -> euphemism of the year.
Brilliant post — very informative + clearly written.

> What goes unsaid, is that only the actual partners in the fund get any carry, associates just get a comfortable salary and the prospects of becoming a partner (at another firm obviously)

"(at another firm obviously)" — I've heard this in other discussions about VC careers too. Why is it the case?
I was talking about voice assistant in it's current context.
I disagree, I don't think it's unfair to say at all. It is simply mismanagement to input resources into a language rework that is dead on arrival, community wise. This is of course par for the course for big tech research orgs where big names get a lot of free rein, but that does not mean it's not a strategic mistake here.

This is simply about focus as an org, and this is the reason why PyTorch is getting so popular.

There seems to be a massive lack of focus and direction in the TF org, too many egos wanting to put their stamp all over the APIs and subsystems (tf.keras anyone?).

TensorFlow eager with autograph or Pytorch solve all differentiation problems as far as researchers and practitioners are concerned.
I'm nearly 20 years in mid to large companies, I've never seen an AMD cpu on a desktop, laptop or server. Its almost like nobody ever gets fired for buying Intel.
In addition to the excellent replies so far, there's a compounding problem: The long delay means that new safety regulations for new buildings apply, and so they have to iterate again.
I honestly though that was already a thing!
Neat. Yes there are legitimate cases in which politics should certainly enter the workplace (legitimate labour disputes definitely being among these). These are disputes that are more or less employees versus employers.

But I don't see how anyone can reasonably make the case that (much of) the recent political activism at Google has been an example of defending general workers rights against abuses. It seems more like an attempt to push group politics (the group in question not representing the viewpoint or interests of all employees) onto an institution.

As a rule of thumb, if the idea of the opposite side of your stance doing the same thing, with the same tactics, makes you feel uneasy - you might think twice about setting the precedence.
But physical access is everywhere, as these charging points show. And a USB drive is really easy to hide and stick into anything. Automatically trusting something that's super common and easily compromised is a really bad idea.
Authorship is not a very well defined term, but I'm quite sure that by no definition can you be an author without actually contributing to the piece.

I think we should allow to water down the term 'Author'.
Every article on this content-farm site is ripped from other sites without attribution.

The original is here:
https://news.bitcoin.com/spend-10-cryptocurrencies-with-thes...

They didn't even notice the obvious typo "toped" and repeated it verbatim.

Please flag down plagiarized content from sites trolling HN for clicks.
wow! that was really civil and non-violent. no military style attack like some other videos i've seen of american police
I am referring to the US. I have never received any actual proof that the theoretical separation of a datacenter from the mother US-based company will make it immune from the US' draconian surveillance laws, therefore I should assume that it's not trustworthy. Given past experience, I think this is a reasonable stance to take.

The GDPR isn't very topical here, because big conglomerates have been violating it since it's inception. Until the teeth have been enforced, we have to assume that a US company is not only shovelling all of your data to every government agency (which would happen even with the GDPR being followed, as you say) that blinks at them a few times but is also selling it to every marketing agency that is capable of paying.
If it doesn't say [flagged], it was not flagged. All comments posted by this account start out [dead], i.e. they're banned.
Does this apply to webpages? As someone who installs barely any apps to what extent is this impactful?
Algolia is in-memory & sorted. So it can do A LOT of early termination of queries and no sorting on query-time.
My bog standard two year old sony's android says "allow data connection?" when the phone is plugged into something that has a data channel. I'm assuming it's essentially in "charge only mode" until I tap "allow".
Updates to the Git Commit Graph Feature
How much better would Berlin do, if it wasn't the capital of Germany with all the downsides of it?

I'm from Rome, being the center of the national political activity is a net loss for the city.
Developing open-source FPGA tools
Can't; they're storing all the unsold VW cars there: https://www.dw.com/en/vw-finds-a-use-for-berlins-unfinished-...
It is worth recalling that the world is large and unjust things happen in every country. The biggest issue with China is that her citizens are going to be actively hampered if they try to figure out the extent of activity like that and organise to stop it.

There is no point having a censorship department if it doesn't censor videos like that.
But they never said that they do not init camera in the background?

Or did I miss some part.
I’ve long suspected this as the Facebook app in particular causes the phone to get hot around where the main camera module ic is located. It is also a battery drain. They appear to be doing this in collaboration with Apple as the battery usage for the camera does not increase despite the camera constantly being initiated while using the Facebook app.
I’ve also noticed that when certain ad platforms inject their code into Safari taboola/outbrain the same heating occurs. This would make sense as taboola and outbrain appear to be linked to Israeli intelligence.
I guess they not only don’t care about our privacy they also don’t care about our battery life / health of our devices either.
It sort of reminds me of how windows would spin up your HDD In the middle of the night and scan through your entire hard drive causing it to prematurely fail. All under the guise of windows update or whatever the cover was for what I consider criminal damage.
A federal republic is a form of federation, so calling Germany a federation of states is not wrong. Neither is calling it a federal republic more correct; just more specific.
And to the extent that this was practical, they have always been used for surveillance.
You have to apply your argument to yourself, which is "are you responsible for creating any of the value you create?" If you didn't exist there would be another you, so luck and society made you. But you know that is not true. You are where you are, and you can step away at any time.
You know how banks have someone who's job title is something like "Head Of Fraud"? Who's role is to work out what a "reasonable" allowable amount of fraud is, small enough that it can be de-risked and budgeted for, but not so small it becomes "more expensive that it's worth" to fight it? An then to put processes in place to monitor fraud and ensure no more fraud occurs that planned for?

That's what _I'm_ imagining a "VP of Integrity" at Facebook does.
Within EU, immediate local demand is barely relevant compared to labor and manufacturing conditions, for setting up a factory. A Tesla factory in Germany will obviously supply at least the whole EU.
Because it takes 10 or more years for one fund to run its course. If the associate stays with the VC firm, it's a long uphill road rising to the top. The fastest shortcut is to jump over to another firm that needs that associate's skillsets, and might even be open to issuing a profit's interest (split off of carry).
OpenBSD is very well documented. The kernel and software stack is integrated. They care about security and write a lot of secure stuff used in other systems. There is usually one way of doing things. You do not need StackExchange.

Just try it.
> (at another firm obviously)

I have no insider knowledge but I guess it might be due to glass ceilings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling
I've sometimes wondered if transitioning from CTO to VC makes sense/is possible, has anyone tried that?
The JavaScript Library Distribution Dilemma: NPM or URL?
Don't they have to present a warrant in the US if they decide to detain you in the middle of the night?

They presented nothing of the sort in this video, and even hesitated to tell the reason of the arrest.

I come from a post-communist country, and this video sends chills down my spine.
> Why won't they implement proper metaprogramming support instead of proliferating the core language?

Proper metaprogramming support is hard. Polluting the language with special case hocus pocus is relatively easy.
> definitely sounds more natural to native ears.

Well, when I described the system to my friend, her very first response was to ask 不应该叫天龙翔，玉龙平吗 ["shouldn't they be called 天龙翔 / 玉龙平?"]. So based on my single informant, I don't quite agree that the system in the novels sounds "more natural" to natives. Something can be good style without being the most natural way of expressing the concept.
Well if we didn't have an economy that makes us replace everything every year (an exaggeration but you get the point), we wouldn't care about the expensiveness.

We already have good enough technology that a phone should last us 10 years at least without having issues with the performance. The only problem is having replaceable batteries.

We need to move back towards things that last and backwards compatibility. Then it would make sense to pay $1000 or even $2000 on a phone, since you know it works perfectly and it'll last you 10-20 years.
You can always put a project into a reference class consisting only of failed projects. You can also put this project into the class of Tesla factories, none of which failed so far.
Or, you know, delete the demonstrated-untrustworthy app from your device...
There's a deeper problem: anonymous commenting doesn't prevent tactical commenting, in the same way that anonymous voting doesn't prevent tactical voting (Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem).
Being intolerant of intolerant actions is what is necessary to maintain a tolerant society. If you tolerate intolerant views, the paradox doesn't arise.
"The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...
A Code of Conduct in 2019
I have not tried it but I have seen it done. Some VCs like to have in-house technical expertise to better assess candidate companies. I'm not sure if it would be a clean transition but there definitely seems to be a pathway for it.
Mercedes-Benz/Daimler also opened a software company in Berlin ~two years ago (MBition GmbH) that's in fast growth mode.
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403655
Certainly because they have to cache results to load the results as fast as they do.
That is really interesting. What expertise are you speaking from?
Some background for the non-German readers: Within Germany there's still a very noticeable divide between east and west, with average waegs, for example, being considerably higher in the west. This goes back to the different ways the two regions were managed after WWII.

So when a big (and presumably well-paying) company is going to create lots of jobs in the country, whether this is in an eastern or a western state is indeed a very important question.

EDIT: Please note though, that it's somewhat controversial how relevant the divide really is these days. Some will tell you it's 90% in peoples heads, others will tell you that there's still a long way to go before we can really call the german reunification complete.
> Having a Google office with >400 decidedly well-compensated people move in would very much change the neighborhood and not for the better.

i don't understand this. so berlin would rather have poor citizens? how is that better for the city?
and how would >400 "well-compensated" people affect the city in anything but a positive manner?
has there been any sort of study as to how better wages affect a city?
“Conventional white milk”?

When is milk any other color?
Ahh, so we don’t have punitive damages. IANAL but as I understand it, it has to be a reasonable estimate of the financial loss caused. So if he was off sick from work with stress I’m guessing it would be the difference between sick pay and full pay for the period he was off. Reputation damage would need to show you lost your job or lost clients, since he probably worked for the NHS and I’m guessing he didn’t get fired or suspended this would not be a major amount of money.

You can’t even put punitive damages in a contract, so for example if you hire a builder and write that the house must be finished by date X, or they have to pay Y per week. You can’t select any figure for Y it has to be a reasonable estimate of how much it would cost to deal with the situation i.e rent another house temporarily, pay removals company twice etc. If it’s too high you run the risk of having the term struck out as punitive and therefore getting nothing.
It's interesting that contractors have gained access to so much information. When I was a contractor for a brief period in 2004, contractor access to information was very limited and full-time employees had access to a lot more information (which they weren't allowed to share).
The state of Berlin wholly owns the area since 2009: https://www.berlin.de/senuvk/umwelt/stadtgruen/aktuelles/de/...
Ah, yes, a bug, how unfortunate.
thank you!

I had an Illustrator convert my vision into a reality
What's concerning is if FB could potentially target users based upon interests/variety of other user data to "introduce" these types of "bugs".

Not trying to start a conspiracy, but given the data and reach FB has, they could potentially target unknowing/non-techy people somewhere in the world and do it without their knowledge/care.
Your thoughts about why taxes are usually raised are opinionated and don't really offer anything of interest in terms of logical foundation. Your hypothesis that things that people want are already paid for of their own volition conveniently forgets the fact that running a country is not the core competency of the people paying the tax. Thus, they are almost guaranteed to not know what to pay for. They will also not pay for things they do not yet know they need.

All of the competency arguments aside, this smacks of a "the free market will solve it" argument. These arguments are tiresome because the one example raised for the best evidence of this is the US, which is to all the rest of the world (and more than probably some of it's inhabitants) a policy tire fire.
Paul Graham essentially went this route, no?
Hopefully this is a sign that Google is changing course and focusing on providing value.

For a glimpse of the future if course is not changed, take a look at ABC/Disney, where the whole org has bought into partisanship so much that they are now tearing the whole company apart trying to find a the person responsible for leaking the video talking about their Epstein cover up.

> The source added ABC investigators have been rifling through staff emails, news logs and grilling staffers. The company has been isolating certain employees and putting them under pressure to turn on their colleagues in a bid to find the culprit, the source also claimed, adding the investigation reports back up to the very highest levels at HR at ABC’s parent company Disney.

https://pagesix.com/2019/11/12/abc-scrambles-to-figure-out-i...
I see Tesla fans emulate Elon's thin skin; how on earth is "relax" an insult?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/14/atatia...

EDIT: they don't need a warrant if they have reasonable suspicion or doing a "wellness check"
I was trained, by the Army, on the M16 as a teenager. We send teenagers to war zones right now.

There’s a very real possibility that a teenager with an AR15 is literally part of a well-regulated military group protecting the county.
Why is Go so special that it needs to be mentioned every time there's a project using it?

"written in go" comes up 540 times in the search results, vs only 196 times for "written in javascript" even though the latter is way more common than Go.
Is there already some documentation on how to play with it?
Apart from "written in X" is kind of clickbaity I find it useful after all. I think that Go code is clear and readable and so it would be much easier to add missing feature and use if I had such need.

Where "written in Rust" is almost a show stopper for me because I just can't read through the source despite numerous attempts (not saying that Rust is bad of course, it's just subjectively hard to approach for me)
You'll have to excuse me for being at least a little suspicious when one of the biggest surveillance capitalism companies on the planet ships an app version with a "feature" that looks a lot like surreptitious surveillance.

Facebook have demonstrated capability to do accurate face recognition, and it's hardly a stretch to assume they couldn't do enough object and possibly brand recognition from a live video feed from you phones camera as you're using the app.

Perhaps people might not make assumptions or jump to conclusions like those, if the company was one that had a solid track record of respecting user privacy and getting the protection of privacy right. That company is not Facebook...

But what would I know, I'm just "a dumb fuck"...
Mojave security "enhancements" kept the imac's I/O ( even with a SSD ) crawling, with the beachball hanging even on the most trivial I/O operations.
Do you reject the entire concept of gentrification or is there something about this particular instance you have trouble understanding?
I've been doing this for years now, it works even better for niche products (or not massively produced). The last example was the Smarthalo, a friend of mine asked me what I thought about it as I'm into biking, I had seen some ads and their Kickstarter campaign but didn't give much thought, the only way I could find reliable user reviews was by appending "site:reddit.com" after my Google Search as the other user reviews would be from Amazon or other e-commerce websites that I really don't trust.
Why would it kill you? Cultures that consume yogurt generally have a higher than average life span. The protein and fats in yogurt are healthy for you.
From the article:

> But the problem with that argument, the appeals court ruled, is that courts have long held that police cannot be on the hook for property damage caused in the process of trying to make an arrest.
"Trust" isn't really that binary. I trust smart cards and key fobs much more with not leaking key material than generating said keys in a safe fashion.

That specific best practice might not be the most important for most people to follow, compared to other things on the list, but it is definitively a good idea and has saved me before. Random number generators on embedded devices aren't always the best.
Do you have any other google apps installed in your phone? Apps from the same developer can share information.
Both forms are literal mind control, but one is more devastating than the other due to the consequences that follow.

The point is, data collection at such scale is unprecedented. And what we do know from history for sure is such dragnets tend to get abused by the ones who have access to it (propaganda is one such form of abuse and hence the outcry). Unforunately, there are no philosopher kings around anymore to trust with global scale surveillance.

This can only end one way: Disaster. It is a matter of when and not if.
iOS 13.3 Supports NFC, USB, and Lightning FIDO2-Compliant Security Keys
I have heard that a working legal system is one way for a country to attract long term investment. There is less risk that some politician's friend ends up claiming your factory grounds.

There are ways yo try to "hack it" like subsidies or having personal relations with someone high up but I don't know how cost effective and long term they really are.

So if people want long term improvement, they should vote for a strong legal system instead of "I personally brought this factory here".
Moving Away from Moment.js with Dayjs