skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances.

A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?
It's worth looking into. That period is why the American military is constitutionally dependent on the legislature.

If you will forgive me omitting many important details, Cromwell replaced a monarch and became a military dictator. Militaries and politics shouldn't mix.
Damn. That’s the wildest thread I’ve encountered on HN.
No no, I mean that if someone offers $100 million to kill the CEO of Lufthansa, that CEO is going to end up dead regardless of how hard evil we proclaim the killer to be. Much better to go after the guy offering $100mm.

Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact.

I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant
Website seems to be down at the moment, here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.histo...
> Everyone knew this was going to happen as soon as the sale was announced.

At least I feared this would happen; sad to see how it all went downhill.

To be honest I think the brand still sells products based on that feeling you got when you bought a ThinkPad 15-20 years ago. It was so sturdy, so nice to type on; everything just felt so solid. That is certainly why I've stayed loyal to that brand.
There was a very big discussion here that your search missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863672
The thing is, intent isn't always clear and oftentimes Github are unlikely to have all the context needed. It's easy to determine with simple examples, the real world is often messier.

For example in that first case, say all they had was a wave of people saying "x broke my application" it would look a lot like the case in the article, and they'd have to dig in to find out it was just a bad API change without semver being followed.

Also requires Github to have a staffed department to deal with this, now they've established themselves as the arbiters.

For me, there's a split between a repository (NPM) and a hosting company (Github). For this case I'd have forked the repo, rolled back the malicious change in the fork, and hooked the fork up to NPM, and leave the original GH account alone. That solves the problem of the breakage, without getting in to banning whole GH accounts.
Apart from the first Matrix movie, which is amazing, have the Wachowskis actually made any other good movies? Was it just the case that they were surrounded by talented people in the first movie and listened to them? Then after it was successful they were like "we got this".
> Be thankful that all he did was spam the console.

Why would I be thankful for that?

If you slap me, should I be thankful that my nose wasn't broken?
Since A. 1% of $10B is $100M, and B. 10% of $100M is $10M, who wouldn't take A?
You are writing in Text [1], where every program is a quine.

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Text
“The fucking article”
It manifested when a vaccine resistant strain did. The unvaccinated case rate was higher until after the omicron surge inflection point.
Fair enough, I assumed you were trying to differentiate it from private sector given the use of the quote about communism :)
Before doing anything else reach potential customers and talk to them.
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things

stupid comment of the year. We kill and eat animals, we sympathize with animals being killed, like where is the contradiction? How about sympathize with animals being killed unnecessarily? (I'm no longer talking about experimenting, just killing in general)

How about we kill other human beings in wars, in capital punishment, does that elude having sympathy for them?

> Human civilizations' current abundance of resources allows us the luxury to...

...kill in excess, bingo
I'm curious about the law that forced you to go to college and to go to Davis specifically and how those troublesome davis townies managed to get it passed and managed to make you subject to it.
I don't see how CO2 or any other exhaled gasses could possibly be an issue if the volume of air inside the mask is significantly smaller than the volume of a breath, which it is by a large factor.
What if someone wanted to get a large number of results, more than 300, for a common term found on the web. Is Google suitable for such a task.

How could this be proven. Search for the term "example" and see how many results can be accessed. Is it greater than 300.

By limiting the number of results that can be accessed, Google is "hiding" a portion of the web from the user. How do we explain this practice. Perhaps that portion is not deemed useful for user data collection or advertising purposes hence it is excluded. Perhaps Google wishes to prevent users from accessing large chunks of its index. Who knows.

We need a search engine that exposes the full web and does not try to guess what someone is searching for. If the user requests all pages with the term example, then that is what the search engine returns. Google is far too limited.

If one goes to a library and searches an academic database, she is never precluded from viewing all results. Even though she may only access the first few pages, she is always allowed to see all the results. She can view results that were low on the relevance scale to understand why they scored low. She can then subsequenty narrow her search. I have seen this implemented in non-academic databases as well. First a broad search is performed. It returns all results, not just a portion. These results are stored. Every single result is accessible by the user. (Not possible with Google. User only sees 200-300 max.) Then the user can narrow her search and search within those results. The user repeats using different searches until she has what she wants. The user controls the number of database items she wishes to search, based on the initial broad search. With Google, the user has no such access to all results from a broad search, nor the ability to search exclusively within that set. Google is extremely limited. Everything is geared toward user data collection and online advertising. It truly detracts from any search functionality they may have to offer. The user is the product, not the database.
One idea that I got with all these posts popping around is that could we recycle the "distro" paradigm to work with these language ecosystems? Basically that there would be dedicated group of people doing curation, maintenance, and integration work, being essentially a bridge between users and upstreams.

I think Anaconda is pretty much exactly this idea, so it's not entirely novel concept. If you squint a bit, you could also see traditional linux distros being this sort of thing for the C ecosystem and then gotten extended to everything. Big question is how could we encourage more of those? Because package maintenance I imagine is pretty unglamorous job, getting volunteers could be tricky. But maybe these problems with npm etc are becoming so aggravated that enterprises could be willing to chip in?
The article totally misses the point. Yes, for the digital morons (their turks) google may work perfectly fine. However, for people who actually look for real content google gets worse and worse. All the good material gets far lower ranking than the repetitive low quality medium posts with identical and non-existing content.
... So nobody should put up security cameras outside their house? That's what these are, that's it. In such a situation most people would consider security cameras a pretty good investment.

I think it's also worth considering what can happen if there aren't cameras - eye witnesses suck. What if someone (or more than one person) claims to have seen you walking by a house that got robbed, and there's no video to prove your innocence? If people are hyper-aware that crime is happening they're going to be paying extra attention, while probably still doing a very bad job of determining what's actually going on.
Given that it was just a conjecture, why is it worth noting? Getting back to the main topic, it wasn't only conjectured, but also proven.
Thanks, I'll watch the video when I get a chance. My idea was to basically reproduce the setup in Joel Amilcar's PhD thesis (https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2002/) using an off the shelf air quality sensor (PM2.5 with the hope of being able to extrapolate below that size), using a salt spray nebulized with vape gear. I didn't have any good ideas about how to control the particle size (this isn't my area at all) so had hoped to get some advice at some point (let me know if you have any thoughts). I had remembered reading about a guy on Youtube who did some tests like that but never managed to find the channel. Maybe it was yours! Someone else here mentioned Aaron Collins so I will have to check his videos too.

I think it would be great to have easily reproduceable, low cost test equipment available at shops and clinics because the quality of masks (even of a specific make and model) is likely to vary between units. You might find a good mask with your tests, and then find that your next order of the exact same mask is crap. So you have to keep testing. Maybe it is less bad now. I was interested in this more when masks were in very short supply, but then I managed to get a few boxes of them, and set the testing idea aside.
Intent is what matters, was it meant as an attack - and it kind of was but Joe Developer Schmoe really just got caught in the crossfire of some guy who watched Mr. Robot one time too many.

To answer your question directly, I think the jury’s still out and it will depend on the repercussions. So far it seems to have been a nuisance at worst.
The iPhone house - in which only a limited set of objects pre-approved by the manufacturer are allowed in the front door?
I mean, there are plenty of outlandish stories of people from the other side. Doxxing, finding out where you work and getting you fired, burning and looting small businesses, setting up your own “autonomous zone”, getting incredibly worked up to the point of near mental breakdowns on Twitter over very minor issues, vandalizing property over “environmental crimes”, innocent people being accosted, harassed, and assaulted for wearing a red baseball cap with white letters on it or having a Trump bumper sticker, and so on.

It goes both ways but the media tends to sugar coat and/or gloss over one side more than the other.
> The Signal protocol is neither an open (you cannot propose changes or extensions in an open process) nor has it been submitted to an standards body.

Who defines "open standard" in the first place? There is no global definition for this.

> With Signal ... With XMPP ...

Another person just claimed comparing both is silly. There are already other comments addressing the rest of your statement.

> non-identifiable phone number ... random username

You compare distinct properties in your own statement. "non-identifiable" isn't the same as "random". If you want to get a random phone number, you can just buy any SIM card. Is this nitpicking? Maybe, but nitpicking is also including in dozens of "XMPP is better than Signal" statements in the comment section. There are already other comments addressing the rest of your statement.
> A solution would be exactly as the problem states, one officer, with one rank, on one square, so I don't think the 'Quantum Solution' is actually a solution

That's equivalent to saying that the square root of -1 is not actually number i, because negative numbers don't have square roots. Although it is proven that a solution to the original problem as stated is impossible, putting concepts in a new light expands the possibilities of the original formulation into new interesting areas.
Was the developer doing something "outside what they should be allowed to"? No. It's their package. I would argue that intentionally introducing a breaking change (I would count "go into endless loop" as "no longer performing the same semantic operation") should also be coupled with a "bump major version".

Was the developer being an arse? Yes, definitely.

Technically and morally correct are two very different things. And doing this sort of thing does have an impact on your reputation I suspect that the dev now have limited at least a few possibly-lucrative jobs down the line.
What if it's a compliance problem?
This is The Onion article, right?
Minimal: Every page I visit grab headings (easy) / major themes (harder). Add these to a local searchable db. Type ahead interface showing summary info.
Bonus points - automatic summarization (GAN based perhaps?)

My Pipe dream...
I wonder what the actual quantity of unique text a human actually sees in their lifetime. Could this be easily stored? Like every word I ever read anytime?
Fresnel Lens and Parabolic Reflectors
Depends on who owns the rights. Most UGC sites terms give them perpetual rights to distribute content as part of their services. Some take ownership of the IP. Most also let you remove your own content.

If the performer owns the IP then they are completely within their rights to remove it where others infringes them. Whether that’s to protect their own commercial operation or because they don’t want those images in public anymore.
> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet

> a wonder of the ancient world

Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet.

Not just contemporaneous: we are the same.
Read their methodology,

> A good example of this is in the text written on the front of N95 and KN95 masks. The standards for each of these masks demand that very specific information be printed on the device. If a KN95 mask does not have the manufacturer name and the standard number they are meeting (GB 2828-2019 or GB2828-2006), then they cannot be considered KN95 masks

Such masks are marked failed. My guess is thats what happened here.
The standard recommendation is https://matomo.org/. I’ve used it in production once (when it was called Piwik) and it seemed reasonable, but I’m not sure how it stacks up right now.
> No, it's caused by modern desktops being composited. Changing a single pixel in a window requires a full surface flush of that window to the GPU.

So evolution.
Does this mean that a laptop with lower screen resolution has better battety life ?
It explaines why Win 10 is so crappy with screen and cursor updates.
Common crawl is just a dataset, not an index. The difficulty is not finding a sufficiently large haystack, it's getting at the needles.
Block Stack Overflow/GitHub spam results in Google search
Yeah, but the average American also isn’t making $50 million donations to keep a pet project going.
I think sharding to multiple drives would be more decentralised.
Isn't this just the software engineering equivalent of the fundamental attribution problem? My backlog is long because I have important stuff(TM) to address, whereas their backlog is sign of dysfunction.
> For people aged 18-37, risk of getting hospitalized is 10x if unvaccinated

I'm sorry, I had to sort of chortle at this one.

According to that doc, the chance of hospitalization is 0.00037 instead of 0.000036 in the age group you mentioned for the unvaccinated.

Sure sounds a lot more scary to say "10 times the chance!" though.
> The EDPS made it clear that even the placement of a cookie by a US provider is violating EU privacy laws.

Does that mean that even if you click "Accept" on the cookie consent pop-ups, the website could still be fined? We could see a sudden rush of companies updating their websites to no longer set cookies for US-based services, and hopefully they'll get rid of the unnecessary pop-ups while they're at it.
David Madore's treatment [1] is my go-to introduction to quines.

[1] http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/quine.html
Around Feb 2020 at the peak of then Wuhan, there was an accidental reporting on one of the news channel there showing 200K death. Even subsequent body bags order urgently from Taiwan seems to account for that huge numbers. And many reported for days the sky has strong ash smell, with all crematorium working non-stop for months. It is possible the numbers are in millions as there is also reported telco subscribers lost a lot of subscribers there in the range of millions. Considering health care in China sucks if you're in rural and about 40% still in rural, plus babies died because refused admission to hospitals for hours, many believes death number are way higher than those in USA and EU. Even today, China own education system don't mention much death of "great leap forward" which actually put Mao way ahead of Hitler in death counts.
I'm sure its fine for most situations, but you should be aware: below that entry it states that elastomeric respirators (like you are using with P100) are not included in that category:

> Until more is understood on exhalation valves, elastomeric respirators with unfiltered exhalation valves should not be used as source control in surgical and other healthcare settings due to concerns that air coming out of the exhalation valve may contaminate the sterile field.
And the essence is still true today. If you want to recover a lot of data from a backup service, they mail you a drive.
Quines (Self-Replicating Programs)
It's not like they lived in a world of takeaway bags with paper cups and disposable cutlery.

There was a time when you'd return bottles to the manufacturer and they were seen as responsible for what they chose to manufacture.

Somewhere down the line, all of this, 100% of it was placed on the end user - as if the billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and control of an international supply chain has no agency whatsoever to make any decisions at all and they exist as mere errand boys of the supposedly all powerful consumer.

None of these things will be fixable until we collectively stop fantasizing that someone paying $1 for a soda has more power in the fundamental decisions of how it's manufactured than the company's board of directors.
Maybe I should have been more clear. I meant that as long as you uphold the standards you can connect to any network.
I'm advocating for a massive mandatory vaccination program, which goes against conventional liberal/libertarian standpoints - even though all of the vaccines have proven their efficiency and safety in militaries worldwide and up to now, no one has complained.

We are losing a lot of wealth, a lot of life simply because politicians are afraid of anti-vaxxer propaganda and because prior generations have abused minorities for medical experiments (e.g. the Tuskegee syphilis experiment) or vaccination programs for military purposes (e.g. the Bin Laden discovery).
That is a polyglot which is written in two languages.

It is written and interpreted using the cat language, which is an interpreted language in which every possible byte stands for a self-printing action, and those actions are carried out in order for all bytes of the input.

It is also written in the hash-bang language, which is placed into a file to specify to the OS kernel what interpreter to use for the file.

So first this is interpreted as a hash-bang language statement, which then causes the cat interpreter to be applied, causing it to be a cat language statement.

The hash-bang interpretation is what induces the binding between the cat interpreter and the hash-bang statement, evoking the cat language interpretation.

:)
Yes, you are right! In fact, to people working in foundations of mathematics it is routine to compile away any explicit use of the golden ratio in Conway's proof and thus obtain a proof which only refers to the integers. However the resulting proof will be less perspicuous. I don't know of any transparent proof avoiding the golden ratio, though it definitely could exist.
Sure, but on the other hand if there is one thing Apple (as well as Tesla, Facebook and Google) are known and loved by the stock markets for, it is vertical integration to an absolutely insane degree.

Apple would literally capture the entire value chain of the iDevice ecosystem with such a stunt, not to mention have yet another steady stream of income.
> By then, capitalist countries are much more tame and humane

How would you classify the countries where starvation is common right now on the communism-capitalism spectrum? [1]. I'd say most of them are more on the capitalism side.

> Communism still did intentional famines

Introducing another variable (we only count "intentional" famines now) is just a way to distance the "capitalism" brand from famines in capitalist countries. BTW - there's a humanitarian crisis and possible famine in Afghanistan[2] which was recently destabilized by the tame and humane capitalist countries (including my own). It wasn't a great place to live before, but at this point it's hard to argue we improved things. But you can always say it wasn't intentional so it doesn't count.

That's the issue with ideologically-motivated branding I was trying to convey. You choose examples and adjust definitions to fit your cause.

I'm mostly fine with that, communism really sucked when it was introduced in my country, and I don't want to play the devil's advocate for much longer, but I hate it when people put their biases out there as objective truths.

[1] https://www.scoopwhoop.com/world/countries-starving-to-death
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/11/11/afghanistan-facing-famin...
I am sure you can switch off that 'extended view' border, but even a few minutes in that hurts my brain.
I very warmly recommend the book "Sex, power, suicide" which explores different theories on how we came to have mitochondria and their impact and role. Dense reading but I learned something on every single page.

The author more or less concludes (highlighting also limitations of the science and current knowledge) that our cells were arachea which absorbed a methanophile bacterium that became both our today's mitochondria and a parallel process for the chloroplasts in plants (with possibly a common ancestor if I remember well).
A federal judge rebuked Trump's lawyer's claim