skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: App to enable social distancing in stores, contributions welcome
> Mostly academics like nutritionists, psychologists and so on.

So it's completely unrelated to the topics I refer to. What I refer to is:

https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Ob...

Claiming that the misinterpretation of science happened only in the distant past is intentional attempt to obscure the real problem.

There is objective truth and it is far from what some people with a lot of money peddle as the truth and what gets replicated across the media. And the media definitely don't cover what effectively advertising campaigns are as such -- paid disinformation for the benefits of some specific corporations or interest groups.
Everyone wants store owners/customers to follow social distancing, we built an app to help them. In this stressful time, waiting at a grocery store for your essential needs is not what a person looks for. Neither do store owners want a large number of people gathering at their store. We build a platform to solve this issue -

The app helps customers to see the nearby stores, how many people are allowed at the store at a given time and the number of people currently at the store.

The app allows a store owner to maintain social distancing at their shop by updating the number of people at the store at a particular time.
I see I'm not alone!
Why do you suppose that is the case?
The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.

1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.

Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.

The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.

I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
Wasn't Elon Musk going to make a website that rated the credibility of journalism somehow? What happened to that?
CamelCamelCamel Is Not Tracking Amazon Pricing Anymore
Barbara again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Boris Johnson has quite a lot of skin in the game now; he boasted about shaking hands with coronavirus patients a few weeks ago and is now in the hospital.
I found this to be a great method too. Especially for topics which I have been educated on in my mother tongue in high school. I know the term in Czech but I'd be unsure about the direct translation.
>> Emacs is the only way to access most of the functionality of an org-formatted file

> is wrong.

Depends on how you define "most of the functionality".
Org-mode is not just the syntax of org-files alone. It's mostly the tools generating and using the content from org-files.
$ date -R
Gets you very close with fewer characters
Half your searches? Isn't it a bit dramatic? You can always check your search history, but I seriously doubt 50% of your searches Google can not find anything - assuming data is somewhere accessible-. Tell us a few of the obscure things that you know exist openly and google could not find for you.

I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.
Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy, followed by the completely predictable bastardization of organic results by internal groups.

Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.

This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.

By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
Would be good to have search engine algorithm that searches on visible content only and places anything with ads and trackers last.
To a certain extent, any search engine will be "better" for avoiding some SEO tricks than Google since somewhere between most to all SEO people are only concerned with how things rank in Google, thanks to its overwhelming majority usage on the English internet - where their pages rank in the results of Bing or Yandex isn't a matter of concern to them. Granted, many of the tricks to satisfy Google are going to satisfy other engines too, but not all of them, and not in exactly the same ways or degrees. (Getting a different result page from Google and from search engine X can be a feature, not a bug.)

I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).
Can you find the exact search term from your search history?
Covid-19 Startups
Forgive me for asking what may seem like an obvious question, but is there a specific entry point for COVID-19-related ventures to apply?

I submitted an application "late" but was surprised to find no specific item on the company category pick list for COVID-19.

We have applied before (a few times!) but this application of our tech has only been around three weeks and is already deployed at one of the largest Fire Departments in the United States for tracking personnel exposures. Should underscore the need. Hopefully this will be of interest and we look forward to helping others build and deliver tools to enhance both patient and provider safety. Thanks!

http://www.prweb.com/releases/los_angeles_county_fire_department_deploys_mediview_trips_from_beyond_lucid_technologies_for_tracking_of_covid_19_exposures_among_sworn_civilian_staff/prweb17020996.htm
It is tragic that ballet requires such physical sacrifice, because it is such a beautiful art form.
Of all the conspiracy theories out there, the 'caused by 5G masts' is the one that confuses me the most. I get the possible aversion to 5G, but how does one make the leap from that to it causing COVID?
The author mentions XMonad, which does precisely that. However, you can update XMonad without "restarting" the program. When you update the config, which is just a haskell program - the config is recompiled and launched. The state of your current session is then passed over to the new config process, and the old one config process is discarded.
True, to use the full functionality of org-mode, you do need Emacs. As long as one uses a note-taking system that uses plain text, they are good. Saying that, org-mode has a specific syntax that all org files adhere to, so that you can re-format the files to any other format whenever you want (or use the in-built export options in Emacs/Org-mode to convert to Markdown/PDF/etc).
Hourone.ai used their synthetic video platform to turn the WHO FAQ into videos
It's not so much that you're competing with free, it's that you're competing with open source (which is also often free). The nature of open source is that it's very often better in terms of both quality and community. Add in the overhead of acquisition, and it makes it a no-brainer.

It's very hard to tell ahead of time that a paid library is going to save you X programmer days. You'd really need some way to convince someone that you are best-in-class in documentation, in community, in stackoverflow answers, in plugins, in features, in customizability, in debuggability, before they even start the painful and lengthy requisition process. And dedicated support is nice, but is it better than being able to google the answer to every question?

Now of course if you pick a small niche and no strong competitor exists, great, it's pretty easy to become best-in-class with your thousands of hours. But pick anything that is used by FAANG, and now on top of the community contributors you've got dedicated engineers they've assigned to invest in their investment.
i've been saying "not more dangerous than the flu" before it started really going to shxt in europe, because to be honest, the epidemic doesn't look that dangerous if you're in general good health, just by looking at the numbers from a distance.

The fact that most people seem to not have anything worse than a few days of fever (some having even nothing at all), while at the same time others simply die very quickly to it makes it a very peculiar epidemic. And i think this is the reason why even amongst the medical professional i've talked to, they first seemed not too worried at all.

As for the number of death, let's not forget the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that is with people getting vaccinated. It made me realize how getting vaccinated for the flu as soon as you reach 50 may actually be a pretty good idea..

Another thing that i haven't read a lot, is that the WHO have been alarming people in the past with previous epidemic (srars, mers, ebola, etc), and nothing "special" happened (i suppose partly because people correctly dealt with it, but also because of the nature of the virus). It actually made me realize how the whole world has been completely desensitized to catastrophic predictions.
The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum game, this perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But I'd believe Google's ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple keyword density, passing links. What I've noticed is it now gives much more emphasis to user experience. (With metrics like bounce rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for and went back to search results)

We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.
I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps.

"In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps
i have a lot of complaints about nintendo, but nintendo's only console to be well ahead of their competitors' offerings in terms of hardware was one of their worst competing consoles, in terms of sales. and that's the gamecube. so it hasn't made and doesn't make commercial sense for them to heavily invest in the underlying hardware.

ever since the gamecube, and maybe before then, nintendo has been on a divergent path from the likes of other console makers. they do not seek to compete in hardware power.

nintendo's true problems lie in online and cloud services, like account management and online multiplayer, and just pure laziness in game development and implementation. they get away with it somehow.
For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends (2018)
It kind of ruined content too.

Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.

Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.

In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.

¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?

Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.

Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.
Disappointingly politicians and their supporters pushed the narrative into blaming X or Y.

I would politely ask HNers who were in the is just the flu camp to reflect (please don't comment, just reflect) why I was wrong, what bias or whatever flaw my thinking had and avoid blaming X or Y for your mistake. Btw I am not accusing people here, I also was not anticipating things to go like this.
I find sprite's content so enjoyable that I would still check on his website monthly even if it had www.tic.com design!
DDG doesn't work for me either when it comes to more general, not tech-ish stuff. One thing for news I found was https://yetigogo.com
Art Helps Science Advance
People are being entertained not informed.
To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO.

- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.

- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)

- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
Well, he didn't take full advantage of the hardware - he changed significant part of it (raising total final price by 1/3).
Nevertheless I agree - it is very impressing ! :)
It isn’t intended to be an insult. This thread is veering way off topic but if you think you can learn everything that you need to know by reading a few blog posts and Wikipedia articles, what’s the point? Why ask on HN if as you say everything you need to know you can find from a few blog posts?

As software engineers, we tend to be told especially when we are young that we are all “smart people” (tm). We start to internalize it (believe our own bullshit). But the longer your career is, you realize that the world is full of “smart people” and that your coworkers also came up thinking they were the smartest people in the room.
No Covid-19 testing at home yet but quicker options coming
It's four years old so the page HTML structure must have likely changed. I'll take a look at it when I'm free and update the script. Thanks for your PR, I'll review and merge the two open PRs as well.

Btw, good work on your JS solution. It's great that it just works without requiring any download or installation. :)
Open VSX Registry
Sidekick is a high-performance sidecar load-balancer
Gluing + painting models and miniatures! I've been bad at manual artistic things always, so I kinda combined my passion for the history of warfare with that thing I'm lacking and... here I am, gluing German tank models :)
This isn't the only project to hack the Frekvens. Here's code + instructions (not mine) for hacking the box with an Arduino + AdaFruit GFX library: https://github.com/frumperino/FrekvensPanel

It seems fairly approachable if you don't mind the disassembly / reassembly required.
Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE
It was "lord of war director's commentary". I thought it was because many more people were googling for the game, but I just tried and Google is still doing this!
Your mistake is assuming people are using reason to come up with that theory :)
If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be "shallow". SEO and commercialization have led to a world wide web where I can easily find 100 shallow, keyword-optimized articles on "machine learning for IoT" published on high-ranking websites, but not a single page with actual in-depth information about the topic.

But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.
For a much more interesting (but similar) bit of kit, see the Pixoo (http://www.divoom.com/product/pixoo.html)
I see mainly two problems:

- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.

- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.
Great question! It really depends on what you need: Webflow, Zapier, Retool and Human Lambdas (disclaimer: what I'm working on) are my favorites.
This is correct. DuckDuckGo is finally better.
Choices like wrapping a C library from Java in order to use CSound and using CSound to play WAV files in the first place seem very against the grain.

A project about playing back recorded audio with interactive control should be feasible in Java, dispensing with CSound and JNI complications entirely, while a project to do something with CSound could focus on the strong points of CSound and avoid technical hurdles (e.g. Java programs that generate highly complex CSound code for highly complex music).
I’ve also had this issue and I’ve decided to simply give up on these people. In three weeks time, they are going to be eating their words anyway.
> Yes, on average it works

Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.

For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.

So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)
I want to expand on that refreshing the stockpile idea.

The equipment is perishable (on the range of years) and should be rotated. Most things probably are.

Any such stockpile should have a half-life rotation period, where items at the half life are sold in to the market at a slight discount and the stockpile continually refreshed. Ideally the government should also be buying or making in bulk and thus their discounted price might actually be competitive.
I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f.
You can buy links from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money.
You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it.
There are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up for SEO purposes.
Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned.
But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting.
No wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero regulation.
Show HN: A web page to demonstrate that files can be thought of as numbers
Pro tip: anytime you think something is easy, be concerned. You haven’t learned it at the depth that you think you have. Keep living....
Thank you for mentioning John Gottman this looks helpful.
I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
Show HN: An interesting markdown note taking application in browser
> Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.

Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.

I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…
He acquired the infection weeks after the handshake comment. It seems unlikely the two events are linked.
Google usually shows a link to "search for x instead" when that happens. And let's be fair, most people searching for "Lord of War" are probably really searching for "God of War."

Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
Musk is still actively downplaying the severity of the situation. Recently he's been signal boosting the idea that many more people are infected than we think and therefore the alarmism is unwarranted
Some humans won’t change their mind regardless of how much soft evidence they’re presented with. This is good because we need variability. Evidence might be wrong, or it could be right, but following it could turn out to be worse a posteriori.

This idea helps me provide a plausible explanation to some behavior I find counterintuitive.
Just look up a recipe for something and this fact instantly becomes apparent
Setting Up Remote Teams During Coronavirus
Making art with After Effects. If I really get motivated I'll move my experience into doing Interaction design with Lottie and bodymovin, but for now it's just a nice way to blow off steam during this difficult time.
Show HN: GetMyEIDLGrant – Send Requests to the SBA for EIDL Advances
Hey Hackernews!

There have been a lot of small businesses who have not had great communication from the SBA in regards to the EIDL for Covid-19. Especially in terms of how the EIDL Emergency Grants work.

I put together this site to help automate sending faxes and certified U.S. mail to the SBA in order to request EIDL advances as outlined in the CARES act.

It's not pretty, but it will get the job done!

P.S. I welcome any and all feedback and suggestions.
The intended audience is people who are just learning about programming. I made it after trying to explain this concept twice and completely confusing everyone both times. Any suggestions or things you notice that are wrong or aren't clear?
The incubation period can be two weeks and time to hospital is also usually a couple of days after symptom onset. So saying it's unlikely seems weird