skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator.

Same here. I was perplexed to see undisputed leader of search engines (which nobody managed to successfully rival, no matter how many billions they threw at the problem) decline in this way.

But now I wonder: is fixating on the lowest common denominator perhaps ultimately the more profitable approach?

Compare this to Amazon. A decade ago, buying on Amazon used to be a fantastic experience; no other retailer could rival it. Now the experience is utter crap, as are many of the products. But that crap still outsells everyone else by a large margin.

Perhaps we are seeing a general shift towards a focus on volume, rather than quality.
To elaborate on what I mean... If the pictures are not uniform size you can't simply divide the wall dimension by the number of pictures. You'll want instead to calculate equal spacing between the pictures, or perhaps have the software configurable for proportional spacing/margins.
> I’m not talking about construction. I’m talking about destruction.

That's not very effective if you can fire and abandon, since it's very likely that someone could work out the locality of the origin, you have to assume there's no way to defend against that. So what? Another one pops up in a few days.

The only way to defend against kinetic bombardment is controlling material gathering/supply and pinpoint destruction and that won't even be an assured defense. In a year, someone could scrap together X materials to hurl another.
Does WiFi Direct et al even work? I've tried a couple of time to share stuff using a wireless methid from my android device to other Android devices and have never managed to do this successfully. What's the magic trick for doing this Android to Android?
Democracy in France started with plentiful use of the guillotine, and few would argue that democracy is a bad thing. If few are ruling many, they best tread lightly, or history may repeat itself.
Both camps tend to hold a Manichean view - they fight the other deranged party in the name of humanity and common sense. Both camps support the freedom of speech mostly when it is advantageous to their agenda. The media thrives on outrage. Representing multiple viewpoints is likely to get pummelled on the social media. This positive feedback loop is not going to end up well.

To see how much the political discourse has simplified, look up the old debates or political talk shows from the 60s-90s. Respectful disagreement and fact-based argumentation used to be common.
Thank you! This line about "unhealthy food is the most affordable option" doesn't really hold up in my experience.

Some "superfoods," exotic fruits, nice cuts of meat and fish, and certain vegetables are expensive, and that's a problem, but its a problem at the margins. The basic building blocks of a healthy diet are all widely available and affordable.

Some quick googling says the avg price for a dozen eggs in the US is $1.48. A can of tuna is $0.77. A pound of bananas is $0.57. A pound of potatoes $0.75. Dried beans/lentils/rice are even cheaper.

I understand there are complicating factors. You need a place to cook, and a big mac probably generally looks more enticing than canned fish, especially if you've spent all day on your feet at a job you hate. But these are separate problems, unrelated to the food supply chain.
It's time for a(nother) revolution with search engines.
The web is, more than ever, filled with affiliate links, retarded ads, and crappy sites that exist for the sole purpose of redirecting traffic.
Most of us browse less 2% of the web. I miss Archie and Veronica. I'm probably complaining too much and totally out there, but I miss discovering insane intellectuals, incredibly unique and valuable content, rebellious nerds, everyday. (Yes, I'm asking a lot).
There's many brilliant people writing high quality content online, but's too diluted, hidden, forgotten, invisible, lost. Sometimes browsing feels like changing channels on a tv. I feel trapped in a rotten loop. I need a search engine that will rock my world. Show me the real stuff - I know it's there. Rant over.
Not if you pass -Wconversion to GCC
I have observed this for the past 3 years now. For example if I search for "reddit best soup pots" and set the date filter to be within last year, it gives me results which are 7 to 9 years old. This used to work perfectly fine 3 years ago.
helllloooo ... does anyone from Google Search engineering, product management, and/or leadership have any comments on this ... if this is true, at this rate Google Search, the foundation of the whole Google / Alphabet enterprise, faces the existential threat of becoming irrelevant in the world of search
Death from any cause is unlikely in this age group. When the denominator is already small, small changes mortality can be cast as an alarming-sounding "40% increase" you really need to look at the raw numbers.
How are these sites created? Are they hand crafted or automatically generated with something like GPT?

From what I’ve seen, a lot of them just seem to copy-paste content from each other and sites like stack-overflow. I’m just curious whether a human does this or a machine programmed to game SEO.
The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search engines. Google came along with a better algorithm for sussing out the signal if what content people found useful from the noise of attempts to trick the browser into increasing relevance signal.

It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game.
Complaints need to require a small refundable fee to deter spam.
< and then some subgroup

I'm going to assume that you have good intent here, but usually "some subgroup" is dog whistle for a repressed group such as persons of color or gay people. I hope that marginalized subgroups continue to protest and get people canceled, and I intend to continue paying and donating my time and effort to make sure they can get the canceling done.

< didn’t like their opinions

Very often these "canceled" opinions include one or more of the "big three": ideology that is sexist, racist, or homophobic. People espousing these beliefs should face consequences for their behavior; they should be canceled. Society does not have to accept the toxic notion that a system should be "fair and balanced" to accommodate poisonous, antisocial ideas and behavior.

The old system, the system that accommodated these poisonous, antisocial ideas was responsible for ruining many lives because people thought it was okay to say that people should not be able to get divorced, or go to college, or have birth control, or earn an equal living, or have a bank account or credit card. Or live in a certain neighborhood. And when it was okay to say it, it was okay to put it into public and private policy alike. You could be fired for being gay, or pregnant, or not hired. You couldn't live in a certain neighborhood if you were African American, unless you wanted to find burning crosses outside your house at night. You could be jailed for engaging in private, consensual gay sex in some US jurisdictions until 2003.

So forgive me if I take a little liberty here. I think it's totally okay for people to assemble and protest a speaker because they don't agree with their political views. It's equally okay for a university to cancel an appearance because they or their students or faculty don't agree with the political positions of the speaker. I can't remember a single instance in my life where I ever made political speech, or any other speech, that called for the repression of any group or sub-group of society simply because I felt like it, or because I read about it in some book written in the Judean or Arabian deserts several millennia ago.

Cancel culture is just the free market at work. I found that explaining it this way to conservatives helped them understand why it was necessary (and I am not assuming you are a conservative).
Time is a flat circle and humans will always recreate the same problems until they change fundamentally.

This is why I don't look to Mars as some Utopia. You will have the same shit there but infinitely more expensive.
For kitchen tools, there's America's Test Kitchen reviews (from Cooking magazine, IIRC). It's a limited segment but high quality.

On the other hand, it has the same problem as Consumer Reports: they only test and review a single model which will probably be out of production before you need one. On the third hand, if one manufacturer consistently gets good reviews (OXO Goodgrips, for example)...
> I agree the algorithm leaves something to be desired, but the only reason it is user-visible is the performance bug in Linux.

The only reason it wasn’t user-visible was luck. Robust applications don’t depend on luck.

Something tells me you’ll think twice before calling close() in a time-sensitive context in your future performance engineering endeavors. That’s because both you and I now know that no implementation of POSIX makes any guarantee on the runtime of close() nor will likely do so in the future. That’s just reality kicking in. Welcome to the club :)
I really agree.

I see no reason to progress toward the non-BASIC implementations until the modern BASIC equivalents have been accomplished as meaningfully as the originals.

Using FreeBASIC would be closer to the way it was universally at the fingertips of every single Apple II, TRS-80, and PET owner. Soon to be followed by Atari and Commodore 64.
Interestingly enough, I've been frustrated by this for years

https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/

I used to manage hnprofile.com which utilized a patent I wrote to target this exact problem. Effectively, Google optimizes for ads (as pointed out) and optimizes to ensure you have to click multiple links. In reality, we want to answer peoples question(s) right off the bat, i.e. no ads.

How do you make money then?

Well, that's why I created this: https://insideropinion.com (or https://metacortex.me/)

I think the only way to make profit off of it is by targeting corporations, where their revenue comes from maximizing productivity. I think it's possible to create a paid service ($5/month) for good search, but you'd still likely have to target companies.

At least that's the best I could come up with.
I've been playing around with you.com after someone mentioned on HN. I dig the layout/quality of results. It's kind of interesting to have it feel like you're netflixing your search results by source (reddit, stack overflow, etc.) I'm still toggling back and forth on you to google because i feel like i might miss out something. Surprisingly some the results have exceeded my expectations. We'll see.
As the owner of the cheapest Tesla ever sold in the US, let me tell you my story. I placed a day 2 reservation for the $35,000 Tesla. It took over two years, but the final price I paid excluding destination was $36500 and I was eligible for the tax credit at 50% off (3500).
If you get an account on you.com you can set that preference once and your preferred sites will always come up higher.
Our teachers used to tell us that picking either British or American English was fine, but we should make a choice and stick with it. In my opinion, what matters is being understood, and I haven’t really followed that rule.

I try to follow British spelling conventions, but for vocabulary, the American cultural influence is just so much greater that it becomes the natural choice.

For pronunciation, I generally tend more toward British, and I make an effort to avoid typical Swedish-English mistakes that can impact your ability to be understood (th, sh/ch, voiced s, schwa). But beyond those few items, I don’t go out of my way to avoid influences from my native tongue. Having a natural flow is more important than imitating a specific accent.
https://alex028502.github.io/snakes-and-ladders/ to play
https://github.com/alex028502/snakes-and-ladders/ to see how it works
I see bits and pieces of this idea floating around, but I don't think anyone has combined them into a complete platform yet.
It would be difficult to make it illegal in all jurisdictions in the world, so a 51% attack by a fed up nation state or states working together could shut it down. I am not an expert by any means, but it seems within the realm of possibily.

With a per-unit consumption of 3250 W, that would put the electricity capacity needed to power all those ASICs at ~4.4 GW of power. That limits the possible candidates to pull off such a huge endeavor to powerful nation states who would work in coordination with large energy producers. (Jan 2020)

https://braiins.com/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-to-51-attack...
huh, I thought New Zealand was the preferred bug-out island.
we're going to have pograms over the next 5 years and we'll blame the people who fight back.
In typical papers, what the abstract says contradicts what the graphs say, and what the conclusion says; and the graphs contradict the conclusion.

Papers where they all match are exceptional and precious. But we cannot trust that just any paper is among them, even those published in Nature.
Quite obviously they should have got about 43% of the seats. They might still have got a majority by teaming up with other parties to making a grouping of over 50%, but they would have had to moderate their policies for that. (Almost every other party in the election opposed a hard Brexit and wanted a second confirmatory referendum so that would have been different, and better).

There was indeed a referendum and predictably many voted against because it wasn't pure PR, not realising that this would later be used against them, as you are doing now. This doesn't change the fact that FPTP is objectively the worst form of democracy.
This is a great historical account.

The promise of laboratory computing was so profound.

I'm going to use this material to no end.

So many of the things they were striving for as pioneers have still not been achieved or have drifted further out-of-reach over the decades.

I wonder if this is where LINC/Quantum descended from?
The original WebWormhole, from before its name got stolen and productized, is still available and open source:

https://webwormhole.io/

https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole
How does this relate (even remotely) to my comment?

Killing is illegal. Buying electricity is legal. Aluminum smoldering and gaming and heating and everything else are equally polluting per kW used.

And FYI I haven't mined for a long time. And if I ever do it again, it would be to preserve my GPU, as the heatshocks between gaming and not gaming might reduce its lifespan, which would cause me to replace it and thus pollute more due to the amount of raw materials used when making electronics products.
At this point in my life I've mostly given up asking employees questions. There's only "fishy" answers to be had in retail and there's not generally a competing store with more knowledgable employees. It seems like most of the time I can choose between bad and another brand of bad. Think Hobby Lobby vs. Michaels or Home Depot vs Lowes, Target vs. WalMart, Sams vs. Costco, Macy's vs. Dillards, Dicks vs. Academy Sports, a Ford dealer vs. a Toyota dealer, or worse they've consolidated operations like Bass Pro vs. Cabelas. There might be reasons to choose one over the other for reasons like employee welfare and return policies, but typically prices are all in line with each other and the retail staff are equally useless.

There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those options and they might as well just buy online.

Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend towards having more passionate employees that might have an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but it's still pretty infrequent.
Trash study. 12 weeks. N==1. Non-blind. No calorie control.

I would go vegan myself if I didn’t feel like Vegans were always lying to me.
This is the answer thats getting little attention. The SEO game didnt just give us hidden keywords, there are hundreds of millions of 'sites' and blogs for all these topics that are basically crap. Google can't tell the difference anymore. the majority of the internet is now mostly hidden (except during search) spam.
Yeah we, Brits, wouldn’t “take a lift” in a car either. We’d “get a lift” or “got a lift with so and so”.

If we were using a lift as in elevator we’d “get in a lift”.
I feel like a lot of people are somehow angry that this new tech stack’s slug seems to have settled on the “web3” keyword, which they don’t like. I don’t know a single person in the space that cares enough for how its named.

There’s also the armchair argument that this doesn’t work for ‘reasons’ which is what you also find in posts with research papers where a random commenter is lecturing on how they should have done it without actual involvement in the space.

Most of us work on things we find interesting and feel like it could work (those lucky enough at least), which as some pointed out could just be us being dumb, but at the end of the day, if anything comes out of it, and it’s useful, no one is going to care how its named except the people that don’t like it.
>multidimensional point in the current manifestation of what we think as web3/metaverse

But this is useless. The video is available with or without the blockchain. If you have DRM on the video, then you don't even need the blockchain. The blockchain can't actually do anything outside itself, and if you are trusting Metaverse.inc to enforce ownership, why can't you trust them to store it too?
This isn't something you need to explain to people here. It's like responding to someone's comment about unpleasant weather by suggesting that they could wear different clothes.
Cosmic rays can be all of the above. It's a term describing the source of the radiation, not a particular type or quality of radiation in itself.
> I've watched friends try Go and immediately uninstall the compiler when they see that the resulting no-op demo program is larger than 2 MiB.

That seems a bit extreme

> Overhead breeds complacency — if your program is already several megabytes in size, what's a few extra bytes wasted? Such thinking leads to atrocities like writing desktop text editors bundled on top of an entire web browser

I'm still on board
For the record, I interpreted it as a joke, but also somewhat of a inspirational challenge. But I don't care enough about downvotes to try that hard, so yeah. Also dang says it's never been against the rules to downvote because of disagreement.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772167
I’ve been worried about this for many many years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9883769
It would be interesting to study the metabolisms of animals that live entirely on sugar. Hummingbirds, nectar eating insects, sugar cane weevil.

How does insulin work for them? Do they get intense blood sugar spikes whenever they eat?
I get your point, but there were a handful of people present that were armed in some form. That said, breaking into the Capitol Building was not a peaceful act.
Of course. That's why Marjorie Taylor Green shouldn't have breached her user agreement.
Yes. In fact, we decided to go blockchain way (for now) with some hesitation. It just seemed like the best way to address the decentralized identity piece for now. But there are downsides, for sure.
Well, there are at least two separate, though not unrelated, problems:

1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a living instead by influencing what other people buy, in exchange for kickbacks from the sellers.

2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the sellers offering the best value for money, because if they are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward overpriced junk in heavily advertised products.

3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to the product shills instead.

I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3, problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude without significantly reducing the other one. In particular, we might not be able to completely solve the SERP quality problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we could improve it enormously just by writing a better search engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire economy.

I'm sorry to hear you're back on the streets, and I hope your situation improves before you die. I'm glad you're not dead yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new year!
Ask HN: Learn multiple languages daily in parallel or not
I need improve programming skills in multiple languages(4 of them), in the past I focused on one language for 1~2 weeks then switch, however by the time I return I forgot many nice details already.

Then I tried to spend 1 hour on each daily, that context switch seems not working very well either.

What's the best approach to master them together? In the project I work on I need use them whenever a feature/bug that needs attention.

Each language has its own ecosystem/modules/libraries/communities and is quiet demanding alone. I don't want to get burned out, meanwhile the product does require me to be competent on them all.
That reminds me how (Immanuel) Kant is correctly pronounced like "cunt" (in German) but English speakers pronounce it like "can't".
What's their preferred energy source on overcast days without wind?
> If not, where do you draw the line, and who gets to interpret your prescription?

These are both things to iron out in law later, not now in some philosophical way.

Incandescent bulbs have been banned in countries around the world because of energy concerns. It's pretty clear that Bitcoin's energy usage is likewise a problem. Throwing our hands up and labeling calls for regulation around this a slippery slope doesn't help our climate criss.
Something I have noticed lately is that when searching for technical information I often get result near the top of my search that are crappy skins of StackOverflow, usually with many more ads. Has anyone else noticed this too?
Naphtha is a bulk petroleum hydrocarbon commodity found in numerous grades.

It is a major highly flammable component of gasoline but has low octane rating on its own. So to make it into gasoline they boost it with major percentages of high-octane blendstocks and ethanol plus detergent packages and additives for motor fuel use. This is the type of naphtha where things like the benzene and sulfur content are present but not in excess of the agreed amount. For fuel use the color of the material does not need to be as water-white as it does for paint.

Naphtha itself is supposed to be a clear distilled petroleum product that evaporates without residue and there are grades for use as paint thinner having various evaporation rates to choose from. For decades in places there have been restrictions on things like benzene in paint materials so there are naphtha grades certified to meet these requirements, unlike for fuels benzene is usually then certified as being absent, and "odorless" varieties will have little to no sulfur.

The barbecue fluids, which are mostly slower-evaporating, I wouldn't think would be recommended.

Regardless, any (potentially undesirable) thing the solvent picks up on its way to the test tube or evaporation dish will end up in the residue at its final stage.

Alkaloids OTOH would not be such a short message . . .
I believe theres a lot of processing before you get the maple syrup that you find in stores so its not really found in nature