skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to share a recent search I did through Google -- at work I wanted to look up how to implement conditionals in Microsoft Forms (i.e. the next question in the form is based on the previous answer). I searched for "microsoft forms conditional" (without quotes) and the first search result on Google was this page on how to "use branching in Microsoft Forms" - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-branching-in-...

That page doesn't contain the word "conditional" at all - the word that Microsoft uses is "branching" but Google deduced that it was the best result, which was perfect. The same search in either Bing or DDG produces results that all have the words "microsoft", "forms", and "conditional" in them and none of them link to the page I mentioned above, which I consider to be the best result.

Moral of the story? Search is hard, but Google does it better than everyone else.

Also, I learned via this thread that DDG is just a wrapper around Bing, which explains why the search results between DDG and Bing were near identical - they even have the matching video suggestions.
I tried it just yesterday when I wanted some real reviews for a product and it worked well.
Just install an adblocker for him.
If you're not sure what books to read, dig through HN or ask. I've learned a lot about productivity, procedural generation, and functional programming from sources linked on HN. Sometimes there are clever quotes from good books.

But you still have to read the book. If you have a book to read, read the book. If not, HN.
I just can't get past the narrative here. Sridhar basically builds Google's massive ad business from the ground up and then decides "ads are bad" and takes his ad money over to profit on the other side by selling a new search engine without ads.

Reminds me of "The Prodigal Techbro":
https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbr...
Maybe the vetting process only applies to peasants and not the likes of Sony.
Near the top of the slope: "open" sports divisions, allowing unlimited doping. Prizes awarded after six months, to any remaining contestants who still pass medical checkup.
What I want is a search engine UI that will guarantee that my search terms appear in /all/ of the hits. And allow me to specify terms that must not appear and guarantee that the hits do not contain those.

I'm semi-seriously considering writing my own.
We grasp it, but we went into this career so that we would have to do the bare minimum of it.
There was a time when I would've been all-out in favor for this because one of the most often used functions in Drupal had no less than seven arguments: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21common.inc/func... it being seven, the running joke was knowing the Seven Parameters Of L is our initiation rite.

Then the options collapsed into an array https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21common.inc/func... and that was in 2008.

And then URLs in 2015 became a value object and while you can still pass absolute => TRUE in options if you really want to, you can just call setAbsolute() on the object.

I guess if PHP core adopts this , phpstorm will quickly adopt as well and typing strpos( will immediately expand to strpos(haystack: , needle: so you can just fill that in. I guess? so maybe a reluctant yes but I am a bit wary of the APIs that will follow from this. I guess I have slowly grown fond of value objects? I must be getting old.
I guess the problem is that once there is a paid CLI tool, some other dev will make a clone for his CV / GitHub where even the compiled binaries are free. Now people have to choose between the OG tool and maybe pay for it or use the mostly feature complete (or feature complete for a specific use case) free version.
I would even go as far as the community will continuously switch to the free tool until the free tool has enough clout / traction to actually supersede or replace the OG tool.

Theory: At this point, tutorials which are consumed by the beginners in the field will select the free tool (because it has a bigger target audience, so better SEO), which makes this whole thing a generational thing? „Oh in the early days we had to pay for this, now we use XY which is newer and shinier and even free, thus better“
ITT, people hate on amazon without reading the article.
You can get by using the same 5 sliders for almost all your photos. The other sliders remain available for edge cases or when you want to go the extra mile.
generally yes, but specifically here typescript does not have named parameters (yeah you can emulate with a hack through object literals which is sad)
Ah, always nice to be downvoted. But if you say "this begs the question" it may be a common thing to say, but it is also incorrect.
> It's less a matter of efficiency and more a matter of whether service would exist at all. If serving small rural communities isn't profitable, why would a company like UPS or FedEx choose to do it? You'd need to compel them with regulation, they aren't charities.

To an extent, companies would charge higher prices for performing services that cost more.

> If each state did postal service piecemeal you'd have all sorts of nightmare state-specific pricing, size regulations, delivery schedules, etc. Nobody would benefit from that. Each state would also have to bargain individually with foreign nations about international shipping.

Why? They could still subscribe to common standards. Just like different paper mills still produce standard sized paper.

Similar for international shipping. Though individual bargaining might be an advantage, too.
Why on earth is that not the default?
>I mostly don't use bluetooth. I keep them wired 95% of the time (...)

IMO this seems like a very big detail that should be included when describing your battery longevity.
I must confess that I expected an article about java bananas that taste like vanilla ice cream. Taking in mind the area and the carbon based development, maybe charred sausage would be a more accurate term. We can have it painted in brick red, can we? :-)
Given that we have AGI around the corner cough, building a model which discriminates SEO-spam from original content might be viable, don't you think so? Or for every new domain in the index you check whether it's legit or not by human intervention, then repeat each year and build a blacklist, similar to how blacklisting IPs works for Email (how do these sites even get listed? There should be networks apparent!). One could also put a button: "report abuse" and make a process to unblacklist legit sites (the same process for email works very well with most providers... except Google.)

My theory, why this is not happening: I guess that most of these SEO-spam sites are actually including Google-funneled ads, so this means there's something wrong there too...
I dunno.

Data can easily miss a whole lot of subtlety. Subject knowledge, theory, and intuition can capture much more of that subtlety, at the cost of being more vulnerable to bias.
Making decisions purely based on data misses out a lot. And can still lead to bias, not caused by the decision maker, but by the data gathering process.

In my mind, data exists to detect bias, and illuminate interesting phenomena. But decisions should ultimately be based on in depth knowledge and theory. And leeway should be given for those to be somewhat misaligned to data.
Sign in with Google = no thanks.
Formalizing and digitizing Africa's informal retail sector
> This is how a lot of subsidies work in the US. City-dwellers subsidize rural communities.

OK. Seems a bit inefficient and arbitrary.

I can sort-of get behind transfers from rich people to poor people. That's fine. But why subsidies people for being hillbillies?

> Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.

Sounds like a good thing?

> No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier:

Yes, that's a benefit.

> Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network.

You would obviously allow the state level agencies to compete out-of-state.
Africa is also on the map and that doesn't give China a claim over parts of Africa either.

I don't think anybody thinks that a place being on a map means the country where the map maker is from gets to control that place.
Spacecraft Headed to Mars This Summer
Earth is currently in the launch window to send spacecraft to Mars. China, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States are launching missions to the Red Planet; NASA’s mission is part of a much longer joint project with the European Space Agency, part of the European Union. This article describes what we Earthlings are sending.
Everyone seems to think you either WFH or in office all the time. Personally I hope this new situation will enable me to work in office for 1 or 2 days a week and WFH the other days.

It would enable me to live farther from my office, and thus buy a bigger house for less money. It still allows me to meet (new) colleagues and clients in person.

Personally I think either 5 days WFH or 5 days Office would be the worst of any situation.
Maybe the biggest thing in this psychology-type stuff that's come out recently is how bad people are at knowing their own wants. It's truly stunning for someone who's used to economic thinking - the orthodoxy is that agents know what's good for them - and demands we think about how that affects our economic thinking.
The icon showing up is the double circle one, not the mic.

Edit: can't remember that for sure, could be no icon then you'd be correct, not that it helps much (not sure which one would be worse).
I was just thinking a few days ago: Google is starting to resemble the last days of Altavista, where the results were full of junk.

If you use Firefox, some results that are full of a Firefox-specific scam where "you are the billionth search result" (maybe it also happens for other browsers). This has been going on for years now - I noticed it because scammers were scraping my blog for content and republishing it but making searches terms redirect to scam sites.
If they pay more, then they should get more. The USPS is not a welfare service. It is supposed to compete now.
Krita is free to download, so it doesn't really apply.
I have a PhD in mathematics, I am a software engineer working at Google, and have practical experience with programming language design and usage.

MathLingua is not a Google product and is not affiliated with Google in any way. Instead it is my own work I am exploring at the intersection of math, computer science, language design, and natural language processing.

It would be great to chat more over email. My email can be found on my github page https://github.com/DominicKramer. Let me know if you have problems getting it.
> Systems shouldn't be optimized for narrow edge cases, like incarcerated mail or mail in ballots

Millions of incarcerated, an entire state for mail-in-ballots--these are very typical use-cases.

> I suspect if you asked people to vote, they'd prefer Amazon packages get priority.

We've never voted on allowing anti-competitive behavior before, why start now?

You just really want your gadgets, don't you?
Ultimately every high level languages are converging to have the feature set of Kotlin, its nice to see them getting closer and closer.
I never understand why people seem to like the DDG results so much. I often have to go back to Google.
This argument was had when Jackie Stewart campaigned to make Formula 1 safe. Fortunately he prevailed, but there were plenty of people - even other drivers - arguing that the danger was an intrinsic part of the sport.
Shareholder capitalism is an aspiration. We have never really tried it.

In practice, companies are run for the benefit of management and other insiders.

> Whilst doing stock buybacks and dividends is best for the stockholders, it isn't best for the employees. Nor is it good for other stakeholders in the company.

Stockholders can invest the money returned to them again in more profitable ventures.
That's the only way to read I was able to find. What's the other?
I was moaning about this elsewhere on this site, how searching for exact phrases in quotes seems to now be a dead thing. Google and Amazon both just pick a couple of the words and shows you that.
Dammit, if i put multiple words in a quote search for that phrase. If you don't find much, then sure show the other thing.
Just being able to see something is just a small part of an eye.

You have "instant" focus, muscles that can turn the eye in almost every direction except where the skull is. We have self repairment to some degree if you get hurt. Automatic cleaning.

Sure other cameras that humans have built could be a good extension to the body if we somehow could send it wireless to our brains. Because all ways we have to date when it comes with integrating with biological matter is the part that is hard.

If we could have a chip inserted into our brains that accepted wireless communication, then sure it would be very useful. The issue is we have nothing that even comes close to that today afaik. Using glasses could also be a useful tool, but that isn't really "upgrading" the human body or being a transhuman in the sense that the article brings up.

My point is sure we have tools that could potentially upgrade our bodies but they aren't good and it seems it is a long way before anyone would operate some cables into their brain in order to accept infrared video.
Having lived in London for a decade, I have to ask: what do you mean "assimilate"? Because I'd point to where I lived as "it working demonstrably well".
yes it is? [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/nyregion/yale-in-debate-o...
The idea of paying for a superior level of service is exactly what net neutrality is supposed to prohibit, so your response just kinda lends credibility to the parent comments analogy.
> (I was too lazy to make getsum actually download the file if the checksum matches, but that should be trivial; for now just do "getsum $url && wget $url").

Please don't. Instead check the hash of the local file. A malicious server could serve a different file for getsum and for wget (bonus point: you won't have to download it twice)
I've seen this piece a few times, and it's broadly good, but I think it glosses over the fact that just because politicians want regulation or try to pass regulation does not mean it actually happens.

As a good example, we're now at the 10th anniversary of the original Digital Economy Act in the UK, the legislation that was going to disconnect persistent pirates from the internet and send out warning letters. This legislation passed. There was much writing at the time about how this was the end of the open internet, and from politicians about how this was the end of the wild west internet.

And yet, ten years later, not a single action has ever been undertaken under those provisions. No letters were sent. No disconnections ever happened. And that's because politicians ignored the complexity, declared something must be done and passed law that didn't actually parse into any real world actions. Primarily it was just completely barmy costs wise for rights owners to send letters, so they didn't and the regulator just quietly forgot about it after several consultations.

Much of this regulation feels very similar. Laws may be passed, but the vast majority of them will never result in any changes because frankly the quality of lawmaking in most jurisdictions is extremely poor. One or two bits certainly will, but most of it will fail badly.

Evans sets out the UK's Online Harms act as an example, but the Online Harms regulation is doomed for one simple reason - everyone and their dog in politics and lobbying keeps trying to project their problems on to it as something that will be solved. It's suddenly got to do a million things, while not having any resource to do so. It will inevitably collapse under it's own weight because nobody involved is brave enough to say it's scope is already too big to work.
Used DDG for two years. Now switched to Qwant. Much better and not US based.
Not to seem rude, but do you know about "https://www.google.com/advanced_search"?
I don’t know what you came across and what you didn’t so I can’t answer that question.

Technically, spans support affected many parts of modern .NET, both standard library, runtime and even language.
If you want to help people, it's more efficient to use a program that's financed by progressive taxes and targeted at the poor and needy.

Instead of a hodge-podge that's financed by city dwellers who need to send a lot of letters, and assists people who chose to live in the middle of nowhere even if they are filthy rich.

Yes, charging more to people who cause more costs would be exactly the point.

(The poor people could use the targeted help I talked about to afford the higher price. Or they could use that help to buy something they need more than sending letters. Like food or nice clothing for an interview etc. Or whatever they fancy.)
How We can collect product reviews through WhatsApp
> Sounds like a good thing?

Ahh, okay. Anything to save you a cent regardless of the immiseration it spreads. Good luck.
What has Meads vs. Meads wrought? (2013)
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-ame...
> Sturgeon is not generally very well known

This must be an example of Sturgeon's Law.
Implementing the “Defer” Statement
Just a comment:

Sounds like the results of a neural network: roughly approximating your intent and searching around that intent, in continuous space, to find other viable search terms and phrases. (This is one possible approach, given in broad strokes.)

That's a massive barrier to entry. You need enough data and compute to train a massive language model, more compute to run the model against all incoming queries, and then even more compute to handle the extra search load precipitated by use of the language model.

Not to mention the years of R&D that go into these models and their associated tooling.
Homemade 10000W Electric Surfboard
Did you mean we need to remove registered, priority, overnight, EMS, SAL, etc? After all, all delivery must be equal.
I find this sort of issue very encouraging. You sometimes think, how am I ever going to compete with someone like Google? They can hire more PhDs per day than I can write lines of code.

And then this. An unsolved problem that they could have solved 20 years ago - recognising that pages are not necessarily one atomic unit and that different parts can be updated at different times. Or more generally that different types of websites require slightly different approaches to search.

It's not a trivial problem if you think about it. But for a search company to get this completely wrong even for a global top 100 discussion forum requires a severe lack of incentives.

And that's where I get the sinking feeling that I shouldn't be encouraged by Google's failure at all, because those incentives are difficult to fix for anyone. I'm pessimistic about Ramaswamy's approach. Putting a paid ad blocker on Bing isn't going to fix this.
Affordance means that the interface of something indicates clearly how it's supposed to be used and for what purpose. This is broader term and it applies to physical stuff like door handles or knife grips too. It's intuitive enough which is probably why previous poster was confused about your question.
Actually the whole point of having a helmet is to not have your head track its movements - if the acceleration transferred to your head would be the same as that suffered by the helmet, you might as well not wear one at all. Same as with old cars with a stiff body, where in an accident the passengers were subjected to almost the same deceleration as the front bumper. Using the front portion of the car as a crumple zone to reduce the deceleration of the passenger cabin was one of the first major safety improvements...
It's a hand-made design object sold for a high price. That's a luxury good. They don't need to scale. The limited availability is part of what they sell.

It's a niche market. Sure, it won't make you a billionaire as is but you definitely can make a very decent living this way.
No, it was a mix of opcodes and text, from "The Complete 48K Disassembly"

"1B17: THE 'MAIN PARSER' OF THE BASIC INTERPRETER"

https://speccy.xyz/rom/asm/1b17

"1A48: THE SYNTAX TABLES"

https://speccy.xyz/rom/asm/1a48

You can read about "The Complete 48K Disassembly" on a recent HN post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23757449

Now, the Timex 2068 was a bit different, because its had more capabilities than the 48K, including a proper sound chip, the 48K compatibility was achieved via an extension Eprom.

Like these ones, https://k1.spdns.de/Vintage/Sinclair/Software/Timex%202068%2...
> People! Let the users help. All the best content sources on the internet are either experts or communities with voting / submissions.

There are over 1.7 billion websites [0], so the task of ranking content, the way algorithmic search engines do it in a matter of milliseconds, is not as easy as it sounds when you add humans into the mix. It would only end up the way Mahalo did [1].

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/how-many-websites-are-t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
I'm not sure I'd search on reddit if I wanted quality results. ;)
prior discussion on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23961881
I've heard about how terrible this is for a long time, so I just went and checked your first link there, and it says that the cost is about $5.5B per year. It appears that the USPS has about 497K employees[1]. So it seems like that is around $11K per employee per year. That doesn't sound particularly out of line in magnitude.

The rhetoric about paying for the next 50 years sounds like somehow the post office is being charged at more than the amount necessary to maintain a steady state. Is it that they would be paying $5500/year/employee, but they have to pay double that for 50 years?

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what exactly is the problem and where the unreasonableness lies. I'm sure a Republican would say that the problem is the amount of benefits, and I can imagine that might be disingenuous, but I don't honestly understand what's really going on despite hearing about it for years and years.

Maybe someone can ELI5 why or how there's a gap between the long run average cost of the retirees and the payments.

[1]https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/employees-s...
Food is a different matter in many ways that don't make it a good point of comparison with the USPS. For example:

Many foods and ingredients can be stocked up on intermittently - say, once a week - and will last for a good amount of time in the fridge or freezer. So you can take a trip to a grocery store or other distribution facility a few times a month, even if it's far from you. You can also pretty safely and legally have a friend pick up groceries for you if you don't have a car or are unable to leave the house, but having someone go deal with your mail would be considerably more difficult (for legal reasons and otherwise).

Lots of mail is time sensitive - even if that ballot you're being mailed won't melt in the distribution center like a neglected package of chocolates would, there's a fixed deadline for you to fill out the ballot and a fixed deadline for it to make it to the processing facility. If delivery of that ballot - or the pick-up and return delivery - is delayed, it's worthless. As such, daily mail delivery is essential in many ways even if people don't receive mail every day. Incidentally, we've had widespread issues with ballot delivery and postmarking in the last year or so, so it's a real problem and not a hypothetical.

On that note, the government has to send mail to every citizen multiple times a year, they're going to have to pay private mailing services for it anyway... How much taxpayer money is actually being saved by privatizing it?