skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's mostly summarising the same points everyone else says about Google's search quality, but they're points worth remembering nonetheless. Google's relentless drive to get ad clicks, bring traffic to their products at the expense of other sites and SEO having seemingly defeated any means to stop it has led to a dire situation in search, with zero interest in actually fixing it.

Honestly, the fact they're so unwilling to drop the axe on large sites scamming them probably had the biggest effect here. If the likes of Forbes saw their whole domain get blacklisted, we'd see a lot less scammy bullshit end up on page 1. But Google don't want to do that, for various reasons.
You're getting disproportionately criticised and having uncharitable replies but, you're right.

Any serious psychiatrist will confirm that medication is immensely helpful to the majority of ADHD cases if not all. Our brains are just different, chemistry-wise.

I don't know why people get so offended by this notion.
https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest going nicely with restic

i do miss functionality of configurable full/incremental backups like in duplicity
It doesn't work for all streams but for the stdout/stderr case where they can be treated like file descriptors, I prefer this simpler approach over fiddling with the Streams API.

(If blocking the process on writing synchronously to stdout is indeed what you actually want...)
Awesome, I’m using BackInTime right now for ’snapshot’-like backups but I’m always interested in new solutions
Searchub
Why should we place a cutoff? We can discuss his behavior as of late, as well: Matt saw a successful corporation using wordpress, just like his own, and demanded that they give his own for-profit corporation a large chunk of their revenue. When they declined his request, matt started fabricating all these gripes about private equity and contribution level.

It's quite telling that we don't see matt attacking less successful companies which do the same thing as WPEngine, much less putting forth the same pretexts for it.

Should matt have such a veto power over what the community wants? Put another way, the community has tolerated matt's behavior, but he keeps digging more and more – how do we stop his bad behavior?

And back to the first question: "tolerated" by who? The community embraced WPEngine and their contributions to the community. It's matt that the community can't tolerate.
Not only that, but the article alleges that they couldn't catch the drones either

Begs belief, some information must be getting caught by a classification here
That's not really the case inside the defense-industrial complex, for better or worse.
Google search is absolutely terrible. There's just no alternative, so there's no reasonable benchmark (until ChatGPT)
My university's dorms suffered from no AC, black mold, cockroaches, and yearly floods. I couldn't imagine if teachers and TAs had to live in such slums in addition to being given such inadequate pay.
Providing housing is just treating a symptom - universities should fix this by paying their staff enough so they can even afford rent.
Supply and demand, the pay would increase if there was no one willing to take the job. Maybe gig workers and fast food workers and everyone else also should be paid living wage... I think they are lot more deserving and necessary than people working in universities.
You are aware that no problem was solved before it was solved, right?
I'm grateful for this advice. Will put into practice immediately. Death being a certainty, it is difficult to determine what time is actually worth using for. From an individual perspective, religion and knowledge are part of a conceptual world that will end with death. If there's actually anything post-death, it has to do with what it is here being called attention. Something beyond memory and thinking.
> I read the journals of Colombus

Perhaps not the most neutral source.

> At least in the Kantian sense, the guy was not really bad in that he didn't really intend to do much harm.

No, they just recognize him as someone whose torture and other cruelty and abuses as a colonial administrator were so severe and notorious that he got thrown in chains, dragged back to Spain, and stripped of titles for them, in late 15th century Spain, not exactly a model of moderation when it came to conversion of subject populations to Christianity or paragon of human rights more generally.
Show HN: Captchify.com – Affordable, High-Scale A/B Testing for Everyone
Hey HN,

I’m a Big Tech engineer turned SaaS founder, and I'm excited to share Captchify, an A/B testing platform I’ve built to solve a problem I experienced firsthand: all the existing A/B testing tools available external to big techs are either way too complex or incredibly overpriced.

Captchify is designed to provide a robust, high-performance A/B testing solution that meets Big Tech standards but is accessible to smaller teams and solo devs. With 99.9%+ uptime guarantees and real-time analytics, it’s built to handle even the most demanding use cases. The JavaScript SDK ensures low latency, with no impact on performance (as treatment allocation is done locally) unless you’re using our segmentation API, which is optimized with a p99 of ~30ms client-side. Basically make sure you allocate a singleton on your node server or prime it before accepting requests on serverless (use the preload feature I have in the constructor).

I also recently launched a WordPress plugin for easier integration, and I’m planning to add more low-code features to make Captchify even more user-friendly for non-technical users. For HN users interested in trying it out, I’m offering 50% off for life on all paid tiers (there is a free tier), plus I’ll personally assist with setup to make sure you get up and running smoothly.

Its features include
- Up to 255 variants/treatments per experiment
- 2 Stages of Beta/Prod where you can chose to allocation dimensions for
- Segmentation based on global, region, country and device type (if they conflict the most granular dimension is chosen)
- Exposure control to ensure proper experimentation ie (50/50 test for 10% of the population that ensures the same users see the same treatment always)
- Custom dimensions where you can use a string as a dimension and determine segmentation on your side. (basically rather than say using US-All you can make a dimension called my_custom_dimension that you can allocate treatments against and handle who belongs to it on your side)
- Metric tracking, submit any type of metric you want to track for an experiment. Captchify supports three type of aggregation (sum, average, and percentile which tracks p50, p90, and p99).
- Real time analytics (one I get a enough data I will show you the results in realtime) which produces a table Real-time analytics with Bayesian inference for the selected metric, presenting probability to be the best, credible intervals, and means—data retained for up to 32 days.

So its designed to be a super flexible core engine that does everything you need to do for proper A/B testing for a very modest price at scale.

If you’re looking for a simpler, more affordable way to do A/B testing at scale, give Captchify a shot. I’d love to hear your feedback and answer any questions you have. You can check it out at https://captchify.com.

Thanks, and happy testing!
That reminds me of the spotlight bar on a Mac that could also do maths, except that if you used . instead of the regionally correct decimal separator ",", it would ignore it, so e.g. 123.7 + 4.50 became 1687.
I’m confused. If process.stdout.write() returns false when the pipe is full, do you not need to loop and call it again or something analogous? Or does it continue operating on the write in the background and that’s why waiting for the .finished() event works?

Is there a reason it doesn’t use standard nodejs promise semantics (await process.stdout.write)? So probably best solution is util.promisify()?
It is a state commission composed of political appointees. It's unlikely it has the jurisdiction over Vandenberg to ban any activities, except when such activities violate state environmental laws. Even then, the federal government might be able to override them. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).
I've only skimmed the article/paper and I also dont' understand, so I'm just as ignorant as you, but there is such a thing as a Tesla valve that is a static object that allows water to flow in one direction [0]. I would assume that maybe they can make little vortices of air/liquid (as the comment by kylebenzle suggests) that are dynamic and create a similar structure as it evolves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_valve
I went into a Safeway the other day and it had Boar's Head plastered on all the walls around the deli. It makes me not want to even go into that grocery store.
This article is also from before the release of any test results:

“Normally, you send your article to a scientific journal,” he told El País. “An editor is then assigned to the piece and at least three independent reviewers examine the work and decide whether it’s scientifically valid or not. If it is, it gets published and so the rest of the scientific community can say whether they agree with it or not.
That's a Turkish&Bulgarian thing, many other languages with inferentials have inferentials with aorist aspect, not ones with preterite aspect.
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
Army Corps of Engineers does a lot of work on protecting communities from flooding (and restoration afterwards), so this is in DARPAs baliwick. If Oyster walls are as effective as concrete seawalls, it should be a big improvement where they can be used, because concrete seawalls tend to move tidal problems rather than resolve them, and they also tend to have negative impacts on local ecology.
Not private world, public military. Under the previous admin, in 2017 climate change was removed from the National Security Strategy. Budget can be affected, etc.
We live in a day and age where it seems that all the innovations we see now are new tech that has to do with electronics.

Good to see some good ol hardware breakthroughs in another industry.
"The average tradesperson in a HCOL is a millionaire by age 40 ...."

This is a pretty bold claim that I'd like to dig into. Do you have a reference or source for this? What HCOL are you referring to?

I'm quite interested in this whole topic of earnings and wealth in the trades. I am quite skeptical that any non-business-owner trades person is going to have a significant net worth (or earnings) above the general average locally, but maybe you can point me at a specific HCOL where the trades are more heavily unionized or something that would tell a more interesting story.
Google News directly linked to this page (on Hacker News)- I've not seen that before.
When I worked on WiFi at Microsoft, we discovered that Apple was cheating. Apple was implemented a random backoff timer to have less range than the spec, which would mean that Apple devices win most contentions.

We decided not to copy this into Windows, since it would be a race to the bottom.
This is a weird post. I'm by no means an expert but I've read some papers on HRV and this is extremely well known in HRV research. So much so that these facts (and others) are basically copypasta at the beginning of a lot of papers. People have definitely quantified this before, like a lot. Also, the general advice is that it isn't expected to be "accurate" and the measurements are relative anyway (both to the individual and to the standard of measurement.)

There weren't a bunch of researchers (or even biohackers) walking around who thought SDNN or RMSSD could be substituted for EKG.
GitHub Awesome Lists
Someone should make a search engine for these.

Edit: Someone already made something, but it is crappy: https://legacy.awesomelists.top/#/
I don't understand why half of these aren't optimized by the compiler automatically. (x - y).norm_squared()? Why is f32::clone() not just an inline mov? Begging a lot of questions.
‘Police force has expanded recently in this city.’
I tried search "how to secure my data". Both my logged-in and incognito desktop sessions return an LLM-powered summary followed by relevant (but doubt if it's high quality) organic search results, but no ads. I failed to get a single ad from this query on any of computing environments that I own. These are the top 3 on my logged-in desktop.

* 101 Data Protection Tips: How to Protect Your Data (https://www.digitalguardian.com/blog/101-data-protection-tips-how-keep-your-passwords-financial-personal-information-online-safe)
* Protect Your Personal Information and Data (https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/protect-your-personal-information-and-data)
* Tips for Securing Your Data (https://www.it.northwestern.edu/security/protect-information/secure-data-tips.html)

So the problem is not something universal but it is also true that we have many data points that proves Google's failure on providing consistent search results across all areas, languages and form factors. As I see more of these kinds of discrepancies, I began to wonder if Google search is actually trying to improve this situation but those developers are somehow isolated within some sort of echo chambers driven by badly defined metrics?

I have no idea which metrics they're using (and it might be sophisticated enough to justify itself), but I imagine that they could optimize it for revenue per ads or whatever so # of total ads actually are decreased but concentrated on very "high value queries" which users actually care about, so the public perception on # of ads is getting worse and worse. And we know that this kind of "feeling" is very hard to capture.
"Susie in the Lye with Diamonds"

Picture yourself as the goal of a problem
With cut-driven search and definite clause
Somebody calls you, you answer quite "no"-ly
A girl with Kowalskified eyes...
Gnawing on wood is good for your teeth, study in mice shows why.
I think the guy is an idiot

You've got to work really hard to maintain such an opinion, given that:

1. Musk arrived in the US with a couple suitcases, and had so little money he stayed at a hostel

2. Musk worked low wage dirty jobs for a while

3. Musk started multiple industry leading companies, becoming the richest man in the world

The US could use a lot more idiots like Musk!
Same in Turkish, we call them "eylemin zamanları" which stands for "times of verbs".
Yes, that is why, instead of using a payment network, they choose to use an app, which still needs one to transact within the financial system and lets the government adjacent company run arbitrary code on one’s phone.
Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, study finds
Yeah, I think that’s the sentiment. I do wonder how true it can be, however.

I wonder how it is in various states, but at least where I live the actual plumbers get licensed, not the plumbing company. So what can they do to stop it? NDAs? Non-Competes? The state also takes a dim view on such things until you are paying someone a significant amount of W-2 money.

SEO? Brand recognition?

Well anyway, a few months ago I shared a table at a restaurant with someone that worked at a family office, and was buying up landscaping companies. I asked some questions in a polite and friendly manner; nothing too pointed or invasive. But came away with the idea that there is a lot of money out there looking for something to do, and not a lot of good ideas.
Bing is an alternative to Google Search, that took billions of dollars to build

I used it, it's OK, not really any better overall. Slightly worse in some areas and slightly better in others

The problem seems to be that the incentives set up by Google flooded the web with low quality information

Also, some people probably LIKE some of the low quality information ... but I still think there was a fair amount of mismanagement
https://youtu.be/jrFv1O4dbqY a cute music video lamenting the downfall

That was a pain in the ass to search for
Good contractors are hard to find. My longtime one retired. For a bathroom refit a few years ago, I eventually booked through Lowe’s. He got the job done but communication was terrible and his plumber was awful. I live in a fairly small town and I can probably get decent recommendations through Facebook these days.

For recent remodeling though it turned out my housekeeper’s husband is a carpenter and I just coordinated a number of things myself.
Isn't that more like how you make bombs than armors more effective - with backside spalling and secondary fragmentations?
there's nothing more classic than this.
Hi Breck, it's a nice coincidence to see an author I recently discovered through breckyunits.com, now reviewing one of my essays :)

You never know how paths might cross.

I think the information you shared about the tabs is worth mentioning. I'll reference your video and the tabs info you provided in the addendum.
“Sorting is hard in other languages, so I would like to force everybody to only use the characters from my language, no characters from any other language. This will make it easy for me.”
They also abstain from drinking water.

Medical science has clearly shown that this is bad for your kidneys. Possibly catastrophically bad.

Who should I believe, science or medieval superstitions?
What do you miss about it? In restic, every snapshot has the speed and size of an incremental backup, but the functionality of a full backup.
Been using Restic for a while but I was wondering how does it compare to:

- Rustic https://rustic.cli.rs

- Kopia https://kopia.io
This is not remotely true, there are plenty of search engine options. There are just not any that are dogmatically infused into society. Stop saying “google it” and it won’t be so socially ingrained that laymen only use Google. Stop letting them monopolize mind share.
With all due respect, the innovation side of Tibetans is also appreciated in "The Nine Billion Names of God" [1].

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>
Ask HN: Chrome won't browse to site on same subnet. Safari will, ICMP works
Weird one that seems to only have begun within the last few Chrome updates:

My IP: 10.78.16.20

I want to open an app at 10.78.16.30. Chrome tells me ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE.

Yet Safari can open it. ICMP, SSH works.

What gives?

Trying to search for an answer to this is painful between all the "check your network, check your modem, restart Chrome" useless answers.
It's really annoying, Canonical pretty much has no true competitors aside from Red Hat, and they seem to have only recently started becoming a mainstream desktop choice.

But than Canonical reinvents wheels, which is like, the one thing you should almost never do, if you're trying to be the one size fits all choice for those of us who hate heavily customized systems.

Whatever Red Hat does seems to always win in the end, and it's generally great once it's established, but Debian is the standard on a lot of of things, and it's nice to have everything in one family, so everything works the same on the server as on your dev machine.

All the distros besides Red Hat stuff and Ubuntu seem to be either unpopular, or trying to stick to a Unixy kind of experience to some degree, or they have their own uncommon incompatible stuff added on, like Mint with Cinnamon that's not quite as nice as GNOME now that GNOME has kind of got their crap together again.

Maybe just vanilla Debian with Gnome will be the way to go now that Flatpak seems to be winning...
Reminds me that Warren made a talk about prolog term domains to study resolution over infinite branches.
Nvidia has done work in AI driven character animation too.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring22-d...
Thanks for your observation! The greyscale values were designed to meet the needs of UI designers for both light and dark modes, with a tighter grouping at the lighter end (from 25 to 200). However, as you move towards the darker values, they become more spread out. So while there is some clustering in the lighter shades, it’s not as pronounced at the dark end. The sigmoid pattern you noticed seems to be purely coincidental, but it's interesting how such patterns can emerge!
I found Jeff’s Bezos interview with everyday astronaut really illuminating on this topic.

Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.

You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.

I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.

So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.

At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.

Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.
An amazing guy, and not much of an attention seeker. That he stayed at IBM all his productive work life (1968-2012) says something, especially as "His last position with IBM was field technical sales specialist."
If anyone has an idea how in the modern day one could run a search engine, be sustainable and provide quality results without being influenced by advertisers, SEO hacks and also maintain security around it all - infected pages etc. - they are not on HN and are probably too busy implementing their idea. Kidding aside as a thought exercise what can people think of to kind of sort of make modern search engine work?

I am asking because I get the feeling that there's not much you can do and Google's way is the only thing anyone can do and still be in business. Now how much they rely on ad revenue and how much more they have to compromise is another story. Probably Google should be thinking of including better search to paying Google One customers?

Biggest problem is inertia - that would have to be solved - one way is that Google search gets useless and people have an option to move to something better. I doubt this will happen. Other way is someone builds not just a marginally better product but a 10x better product and people move there - I don't see that happening anytime soon either.
Asking your dev team to prioritize deploying updates to your markdown site is also intimidating. In most companies, everyone outside of engineering has a view of engineering that “Developers hate to be interrupted and need everything scheduled in a sprint 2 weeks in advance” - when marketing teams decide between Wordpress and a markdown system managed by the dev team, the choice is obvious (avoid anything that requires dev getting involved)

Easy GUI for writing and publishing to production, with no-code installable plugins that extend functionality, is exactly what Wordpress offers that markdown does not.

Webflow has a very similar value prop.
There is no universally correct layouting. I for one absolutely detest epub versions of scientific books. Even if they are the official variant and not a generated one from some other format that understandably sucks, diagrams will be all around and I have to go back and forth and lose context. PDFs for all their shortcomings are a godsend and they do their single job perfectly. I much rather zoom in on my phone to a paragraph than look at a badly placed diagram taking up half a page in an unrelated context.