skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree with the premise, but seems to me that the article does not justify this. I can understand ads, but ads do not affect search results. If you move past ads now (which most users do as they habitually ignore the space where ads would be) even then you should expect good results.

SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams, opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for. Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]

Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well. Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.

If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.

[1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question: "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.
Reddit search is superior because the results are community curated and because, counterintuitively, the search algorithm is terrible.

It's doesn't suffer _as much_ from the deluge of garbage on there dead internet, and the search is good enough to discover what you're looking for while remaining bad enough to provide compelling surprises.
I did not have to flesh out my reply, what I meant was in an information theoretic sense. We have methods such as differential cryptanalysis that can operate with very few "hints" to start.
> Can people suggest good alternatives

I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended.

https://kagi.com/
A bit of both, I think, they feed into each other.

Google being useless for something like product reviews means that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the traffic they deserve, because they're being outcompeted by the ads and the fake review sites.

People still need the content, though. But how do you find that review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even though Google sucks for the general web, it's still very much useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi router is any good or not.

Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on those sites. If the place you can trust for networking equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you'll also comment somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets bigger still.
Ironically, I upgraded my Sansa clip+ to Rockbox so it could play ALAC.
Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product.

I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support.

The memes are true about this sort of thing.
So what is this 'collection' of universes called, and is that infinite?

"ooh... is that fairy cake?" [1]

----

[1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
If you are comfortable, would you mind sharing any reputable sites where this is possible?
To me the internet felt bigger in the early 2000s than today. I went to more individual web sites than I do now, though they had less on them, and there was more diversity in how individual sites looked than today.
I hope these companies are sponsoring the maintainer of the project, even though I could not find nothing of the sort in his sponsors tab on github.
> these squatters make me sick

That's only validating them. The whole idea behind the word 'domain' is that you own it. If they get scooped up by 'squatters' then they have every right to use that domain for whatever reason. I'm sure they scoff at all your 'side projects' that use cute domains too.
I think that might be more for the weather than economic reasons.
thank you! Haha I totally would, but I don't want to "self promote" on here too much
Customers don’t want notarization prompts for their expensive, custom-built software packages…
So even if the security benefit is negligible (I agree), if you want to play, you have to play by their rules.
Its not about reddit as a search, it's about using reddit to validate your search because the alternative would likely yield poor results. You could trust the 10 listacles that came up as the first results that all look oddly similar, or you can try and filter through reddit by including it in your search terms
> You don't own phone numbers

What about phone porting? [1]
It's ok for Google to refuse you service, but with something so critical it should be possible for other companies to pick up you account

Although having an @gmail account on outlook sounds weird

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-ph...
It seems like every critique around Google is immediately trending on HN. I wonder how long it will take to see significant market shifts towards competitors. DDG recently surpassed 100M search queries a day and I'm curious how their growth will accelerate.
As has been discussed and demonstrated many times before on HN, this doesn't always work. No one seems to understand why, but Google ignores quotation marks for some people and not others.

Moreover, how is a regular human being supposed to know this? How is this useful to someone not in the tech bubble?

Google's solution to the problem is to make people jump through a hoop. That's not a solution. That's a kludge.
Can I monetize my own version of Wordle
Ok, so ... I know that I can't just get the code of Wordle and try selling it. But what if I build my own version from scratch. Can I try selling it? What if I change it slightly, let's say I made the game with 6 instead of 5 letters?
Actually, provided you are legally temporarily importing your weapon for something like a sporting event, this happens all the time in (some countries) in Europe.[0][1]

[0] https://www.lufthansa.com/ba/en/sports-baggage
[1] https://www.pewpewtactical.com/international-travel-firearms...
Is this Different than how people looked for this in quora and yahoo answers?

Reddit does have a benefit of time decay for most topics.
I imagine the carbon content of the final steal output might still be hard to control. In which case further treatment would be required, though perhaps that could be done directly with the molten output from the cell (e.g. by blowing CO or O2 through the molten iron depending on whether carbon should be added or removed.
The CORAF covers federal and provincial governance, while the earlier Bill Of Rights (1960) was only federal. The latter has very limited usefulness today on its own, so has essentially been subsumed by the former. I'm not sure what you mean by the Constitution being "messy" so I cannot comment on that.
Even just putting half the key on paper and not putting the rest could make brute-forcing the rest feasible. Even knowing just 1 bit makes brute-forcing 2x as easy. 8 bits? 256x easier, etc.
On services where sessions have a lifetime for some stupid reason, entering your email and password gets really boring really fast. Even more if they use a username instead of an email. Even more if they require you to change passwords periodically.

Much easier to just click a button.
Why People Use Smartphones in Social Situations
When I read Cryptonomicon I figured this was what gave him the idea for Epiphyte(2).
In case anyone hasn't mentioned it yet: another reason is the censorship. Mostly on the right, but also on the left: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html

They are even going as far as deleting Google Drive documents that contain things they don't like: https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/14908008941574676...
Critique of Blockchainism (via Cory Doctorow)
The algorithms haven't been over those specific subjects enough to "refine" them to modern "standards" and it's only a matter of time before enough people search 3 way solenoid valve to get it connected to the forever growing mountain of useless search terms. It's actively decaying.
The hardest thing is product. If you are starting with a product that is focused on non-enterprise users, you aren't going to have product on day one, and often what enterprises need is quite different from what startups or indies or consumers need. So, step one is doing a lot of discovery and talking with the market to figure out what to build.

Beyond that, scaling up a GTM engine (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) is a multi-year effort but it's a bit more formulaic than product, so there are a lot of resources and people out there you can hire to help you with that. Not a strength of mine so I lean on our COO and the rest of the team for that part so I can focus on product.
> The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that.

This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine?

Reddit has even more garbage than Google. The only difference is that people can say so on there, unlike on Google.

Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction.

https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone

Hence people use Google to search Reddit.
> doesn't change the fact that they are not "spending their own money" exclusively (or even majority)

You know you spend my money, right? I mean, I paid taxes, which government used to buy products from the company which pays your salary. So behave please.

:)
I would be very interested to hear about any empirical evidence…

Phew! I’m glad I included that No True Scotsman link.

But then again, that's the real advantage of…

Interesting that you’d say that, since the other Wikipedia link I provided talks about other cultures adopting parts of the “western” legal tradition.

Blue eyes and blond hair are 0 for 2 so far. ;)
Majority of Pregnant U.S. Women Were Already in Poor Health: Study
MSFS 2020 natively inserts traffic based on ADS-B feeds, and there are addons that do the same for Xplane too. It lends a certain level of realism, especially if you live under the flight path of the airport you're flying around in the game.
One group is protesting a permanent degradation of their home for the rich to get richer. The other is protesting temporary measures to protect the most vulnerable among us. Yeah, my sympathies are a not exactly even. Either way, invoking the emergencies act is stupid - if it wasn’t needed to arrest and remove pipeline protesters, it’s just theatrics now.
Why government action may be needed to push IPv6 adoption
Since this is decompiled, you really can't infer much from it, in terms of code quality. The original might have really detailed comments, and involve additional functions that have been inlined.
>most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust

I hadn't really noticed that my own search habits had slowly changed until this article. Appending "reddit" is now a fairly regular habit for me, for exactly the trust issue mentioned.
Although I like the idea of DDG's bang operators, I rarely use them (mainly !g when I'm feeling desperate).

What I would find useful is to be able to whitelist a bunch of sites on DDG, so that it prioritises results from them first, when I search.. basically most of the sites with ! operators I guess.

That way I wouldn't get all the SO clone-sites returning their rubbish.
I generally agree with the dimmish view of offering free stuff espoused on HN. However one upside is that grunts at largco can tinker on the side without contracts and all that drag. Diehard freeloaders will just keep signing up if you timebox it but it might filter out the casuals.
> So, no source?

[Gestures broadly at everything]

> You wrote a lot of text attacking a certain type of person

I "attacked" no one. If you feel an attack in it, you really need to reflect on why that makes you feel persecuted. Why a political demographic with zero historic interest in vaccines suddenly feels very opinionated about it is fascinating and disturbing.

I made a broad societal observation -- a plainly evident observation -- about tribalism overriding rational thought. And it's important to note that tribalism cuts all ways, and there are many cases of the "left" polarizing around something that is in no way a liberal or leftist value specifically because it's the tribal position.
A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it?

Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”?

It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.
Ask HN: How do you protect your source code?
After seeing this post [1], and old question came to mind and I finally decided to ask it: how do you protect your source code?

I like to write my games in JavaScript cause I like the language and it easy to "embedded" it into native apps. In case of Android, I can just write a JS Interface and access anything I need on the device (database, notifications...); and doing this way I have not only a web app game, but a game that with some effort could pass as native in other platforms.

So, I've been writing this game [2][3] and I want people to play it, so I can get some feedback, but if I release a browser version what would stop people from just copying the source code? Let's be honest, there's no secret algorithm or optimization in my code that is worth protecting, but its hard work. I know there's no REAL way of protecting source code, like we just saw with the source code post [1], but how would you go about protecting the code on shipping the game? Both in Android and Electron apps, the JavaScript code just sits there, anyone with a file extractor could navigate the folders and find the code.

Is that it? After I ship my game people with enough resource could just "own" the code? Should I just accept this and move on? Would you release alpha version of a project (web app in this case) knowing that if people just right click they can get the code?

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346414

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x--liapcOMw

3 - https://twitter.com/HoboHeroTheGame
No more chicken kievs (it's their only export)
Ask HN: How to Learn Linux Debugging?
What is a good way to learn how to debug Linux systems? There are plenty of tutorials to learn how to program but I've struggled to find good tutorials that teach effective ways to debug software in a Linux system.

For example - If I'm trying to help debug the bring-up of a new LCD display (as part of an embedded Linux system) the issue could be in the MIPI DSI driver, the Display driver, the GPU driver, gstreamer, etc...

Is there a "best practices" for systematically attacking Linux system issues?
Fraud proofs and virtual machines (2021)
I hate titles, hate naming files, hate moving files around in folders.

Sure, much of these are abstract things which could end up with you doing the same stuff but a different way. But I find that changing a path in front-matter is less painful than moving a file. And I can put a thing in multiple paths.

I use the Obsidian Zettel note to automatically name the file and I shove them all into the same directory. I then use the Dataview plugin to run queries for what I need.

I have MD files strictly for navigation, as if they are part of a static site layer. These files contain the links to go further into the navigation. It's basically all index files.

I keep everything together in the same vault, because so far I don't see a need to do any different. I just want to be able to navigate through the thing so that I'm not seeing a bunch of unrelated junk to distract me.

I do use directories to separate very different types. Like PDF's and Epubs go into one directory. Images go into another directory. MD files go into another directory. I don't know that I even need to do this, but I haven't run into a problem.
In particular for “free, paid by data” services, things won’t change unless there is regulation enforcing ownership. Because email is the central hub for managing identities, I’d therefore always opt for paid services with a proven track record, and also not use social logins.

Personally I use my own registered domain for email and would encourage anyone to do so.
You don't target cheap steel market with this, you go after VAR, and ESR steel.

> Among other benefits, you're now only heating the material once instead of 2-3 times, and as a result, you actually consume less total energy in this process even though you have to reach a higher temperature in the single heating.

Combined steel+iron plants were around 60+ years
Me too. I discovered my local library has a pretty decent digital magazine and newspaper selection available to patrons for nothing. They are readable on tablets and work pretty well. I like to read them on my 10.3" eInk one. They don't have everything like the NYT but they definitely have a lot of stuff people have heard of.
I remember when searching for vacuum cleaner recently. Google 1st page is 100% SEOers gaming search to earn money on affiliate links. On reddit you can find comparisons like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/VacuumCleaners/wiki/recommendedvacu... . That's a clear example of what article is talking about.
You can though, put quotes around it.
There's also this for the Python fans:

https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk
There’s something sad and ironic about using Google to search Reddit. One, I mostly dislike using Reddit - I only want to see specific discussions very occasionally. Two, what is the state of the internet if I have to use the best search engine to find content on a website I mostly dislike? Haha.
Permit.io raises $6M to make permissions easier
> My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff.

This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?
Your manager is supposed to manage you. In your situation, your manager is not managing.

My rule in situations like that is: I only do work that comes from my manager, or trusted people that my manager has directed me to work with.

All other requests for work (that don't come through my manager or people who I am actively working with) are either: responded to with a polite 5-15 minute conversation where I give information / advice and make no commitments; directed to my manager; re-assigned back to the person who assigned them to me; ignored; or I will say no.

(IE, if you use a system like Asana, and someone you don't have a working relationship with assigns a task to you, just re-assign it back to them. Then, depending on context, either offer to have a short Q&A or suggest that they seek out your manager to determine who should complete the task.)
The story sounds super fictional to me.
In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum.

Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) is buried under 10+ pages of "fresher" content, no matter how disconnected it may be from the search.
I am soft-launching unfluence.app in the coming weeks. It's live now, though not yet marketed.

It is a platform for finding and sharing recommendations within your own trusted network. I'd love to hear your feedback!

You can read more about it on the home page[0], from its inspiration, comparisons with existing solutions, to a down-the-road monetization model that aligns with the network.

It is being built by Kujo - a brand in the lawn care industry, and so is seeded with products and brands for that community. The initial launch will be within the lawn care community. However, the platform is community-agnostic and supports creating communities for any groups.

[0] https://www.unfluence.app
> That’s not entirely true: They cannot extract information that the company doesn’t have

For that data, you're not trusting the company with it either since they don't have it.
I try to use DuckDuckGo exclusively, but the results are often poor enough that I have to switch to Google.

Just to be clear, I totally agree with all the criticisms of Google here; it's also awful and I'll often end up just doing site: searches, which Google seems to be better at than DDG.

It feels a bit like the search engineers have lost the war with SEO.
That’s great, I’ve never thought of implementing “process refactoring” as a standard recurring process, but I will now.
Hasn't Mastodon always been transparently anti-free-speech? I thought the whole point of it was people who thought there was too much free speech on Twitter and wanted to be able to create a more censorious platform.
A bit offtopic, but has someone implemented a structured regex awk? I'm constantly hoping it will become a thing.
It's really more about what kind of things people were posting from that VPN IP in the months/years before you. The abuse detection system will say "the tshirt spammer is back, flag this account" just because you used the same VPN as them.
oh man, on point. I literally just did a day of picking a new gas range and finally the best results were Reddit. Trying to search for information on through google and general sites was so infuriating. It sucks now.

I would seriously pay $10 a month for a search engine that worked really well and wasn't in the ad game. But I guess that's not a common stance.