skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Which product has the best search experience you've seen?
I'm building a search-focused product and keep thinking about one I saw years ago. Its UX was _incredible_: typing something simple like `car` didn't just give standard autocomplete results—it surfaced meta-search options with sample results, like related tags or categories, right from the autocomplete box itself. It genuinely wowed me, especially given how basic most search UIs were back then (and are now). Sadly, it's gone now.

Which products today have the best or most surprising search experiences? I'd love specific examples!
An Implementation of J – Roger Hui (1992) [pdf]
They misspelled the name of their token woman.
> You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988

George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.
I can say that I would rather visit my friends and have a homecooked meal over a restaurant visit any day of the week. There is an intangible value to the combination of food and personal relationships.
People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then do equally horrible things in their current context for the same reason.
That's completely irrelevant. YouTube's advantage is its monopoly of user attention. If you want people to receive your message, no amount of money spent on alternative hosting infrastructure will help to get people to actually watch your video.
Another thing that comes to mind is the level at which one is familiar with a particular style of code organization & a set of abstractions. For example, Rails devs really have absolutely no problem getting up to speed with any given Rails app, but people who don't practice Ruby/Rails as their primary language/framework often complain how complicated and magical it is.
Nginx ingress has the same problem, it's just much faster at switching over when a pod is marked as unready because it's continuously watching the endpoints.

Kubernetes is missing a mechanism for load balancing services (like ingress, gateways) to ack pods being marked as not ready before the pod itself is terminated.
Yes one of the core challenges here is that we learn to read code. So what you learn to read and write shapes what you find readable. And lots of factors shape what you learn to read and write, including what you are trying to do, who you’re doing it with, what besides coding you knew how to do ahead of time, what other languages you know, etc. One stark possibility is that a lot of “readability” concerns after the low hanging fruit is gone (like don’t name variables with arbitrary irrelevant or misleading names) are really just about consensus building: maybe there are no right answers that transcend the particular group of programmers you are trying to work with.
We may understand how metformin lowers blood sugar, animal study finds
There should be a tooltip or an element (with text) displaying my current time in comparison to the already specified time, just so I can tell when that window would be in my local time, e.g. if it is at 4 am, then I will probably not even wait.
The majority state-owned (well̃, >30% federal state and >20% city) Frankfurt airport company has a holding... sorry, "management" company in Malta. Maybe they are doing just enough business in Malta to hold up to scrutiny. Most are based on no one looking too closely. But it's not a very meaningful difference. Heck, maybe I'd occasionally fly to Malta and work from there if that helped to "optimize" taxes like the big boys.
guess I misunderstood your question, and also went on a bit of a rant.

morphle said "you can write a complete operating system and all the functionality of the mayor apps (word processing, graphics, spreadsheets, social media, WYSIWYG, browsers) and the hardware it runs on in less than 20000 lines of (high level language) code. They achieved it a few times before in 10000 lines (Smalltalk-80 and earlier versions), a little over 20000 (Frank) and 300000 lines (Squeak/Etoys/Croquet) and a few programmers in a few years."

to which you replied "did they?"

to which I replied something along the lines of "you can take a look at Smalltalk systems" to answer your question. to clarify, I meant you can look at what the extent of what they were capable of is, and look at their code. which, again, to me is a bit apples to oranges, but is nonetheless something that ought not to be dismissed.

thanks for the links btw!
No,

They probably invoked very particular section of the law which gives a power to the US Secretary of State to take green card in extraordinary circumstances of danger to the states.

The provisions you keep citing most likely can’t be invoked like this, and must involve immigration courts. It’s much harder for the state to remove permanent residents than visa holders.
Mortality rate doesn’t paint a full picture of the effect on Ireland. Emigration had a huge effect on the depopulation too. (I don’t think you deliberately left this out or anything just wanted to provide additional context).

There were other crops in Ireland at the time that were exported under armed guard. A lot of the policy was driven by the fact that some British politicians saw the famine as a natural way to ‘thin the herd’ of the Irish populous.

Of course, Houses of Parliament records show that there were British politicians that were morally aghast at this, but unfortunately they couldn’t have enough of an impact.
A video game is a very well-defined problem, and usually comes with simple metrics for success – health, time, or in Factorio’s case, ultimately science per minute (or per minute played, for AIs?). Real world problems are much harder to define, they are embedded in a very complex ecosystem, and it’s not clear at all what to optimize for.
How could they then tell to what distance they're focused?

I used to have two Ultrasonic lenses, the 17-40/4L and the 17-55/2.8. They both had distance scales which would move around as the lens focused.

My current Olympus lenses have a focus-by-wire manual mode, with a distance scale on the barrel. The camera also reports the focus distance in the EXIF. Are these just vague ballparks?
"put the right signals into my train network"

Not even humans can pass this benchmark.
I actually don't see any value in it. Code readability is similar to language readability in that it is mostly a concern for people who don't know a language and can be addressed by spending time with it. The real issue of programming is code complexity which you cannot determine from metrics about individual pieces of code. The problem exists in the relationships between functions rather than the implementation decisions in the bodies of those functions.
Yes, but different kinds of weird. There's dem's "be yourself" kinda weird that supports queer people's right to exist, and there's the GOP "passes laws that require genital inspections of children in the bathroom" kinda weird that Tim Walz was calling out.
Ok, the costs saving was promised by the populists Kurz and Strache. No further questions. Thanks for the link, tho!

I am not saying Germany should merge all insurances into one, but I still think 100+ is one order of magnitude too much.
"Training fodder" is a new one.
All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.

It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control over the direction our governments take, and not have to rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that forces us to deal with compromises. And not only compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the groups make with eachother.
> Do you realize that if the USA had been run the way you advocate that you'd never have lived there in the first place?

Of course! But I’m not a child and I’m capable of conceiving of what would be “good” separate and apart from what would be “good for me.”

Indeed, as someone with a large south asian family that immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia, and who is especially well acquainted with Anglo-Protestant culture, I’m particularly well positioned to form the opinions that: (1) assimilation is slow and doesn’t happen completely; and (2) even high skill immigration, at scale, isn’t conducive to maintaining our american participatory democracy.
So the core insight was that we can take over the Factorio console remotely using RCON over TCP. From this, we implemented a server-side library of tools that run inside the game. We then implemented a client-side Python library that can invoke these tools - resulting in a Python API for the game. A nice side effect is that creating new tools is really easy, and they can be hot-loaded into running game servers (unlike the traditional Factorio modding approach).
What are talking about?! That's my favourite part when reading code! :P
> as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.

There are other ways of doing voting and organizing a democracy that are less prone to this winner take all dynamic. The foundational principle of democracy is consent of the governed. The details of how that's achieved can vary widely.

One is to do the vote differently, such as with ranked choice voting where voters are free to choose the candidate they actually want without "wasting" their vote.

Another is parliamentary style systems with proportional representation, which allow more than just two parties to have a voice and require the parties to form coalitions to govern.

Lastly, you can vote on actual policy proposals instead of just on politicians and parties. It's not either-or -- it's possible to have a system with both representatives and direct voting on major points of contention.
I think things like Halstead complexity or cyclomatic complexity are more heuristic than law. To read code, the most important thing to me is the abstractions that are built, and how effectively they bury irrelevant complexities and convey important concepts.

As an example, I recently refactored some Java code that was calling a service that returned a list of Things, but it was paged: You might have to make multiple calls to the service to get all the Things back. The original code used a while loop to build a list, and later in the same function did some business logic on the Things. My refactoring actually made things more complex: I created a class called a Spliterator that iterated through each page, and when it was exhausted, called the service again to get the next one. The upside was, this allowed me to simply put the Things in a Stream<Thing> and, crucially, buried the paged nature of the request one level deeper. My reasoning is that separating an implementation detail (the request being paged) from the business logic makes the code easier to read, even if static code analysis would rate the code as slightly more complex. Also, the code that handles the pages is fairly robust and probably doesn't need to be the focus of developer attention very often, if ever, while the code that handles the business logic is much more likely to need changes from time to time.

As programmers, we have to deal with a very long chain of abstractions, from CPU instructions to network calls to high-falutin' language concepts all the way up to whatever business logic we're trying to implement. Along the way, we build our own abstractions. We have to take care that the abstractions we build benefit our future selves. Complexity measures can help measure this, but we have to remember that these measures are subordinate to the actual goal of code, which is communicating a complex series of rules and instructions to two very different audiences: The compiler/interpreter/VM/whatever, and our fellow programmers (often, our future selves who have forgotten half of the details about this code). We have to build high-quality abstractions to meet the needs of those two audiences, but static code analysis is only part of the puzzle.
Poor abstractions. Good abstractions make it easier to change things, by decomposing the code into cohesive pieces with low coupling so that you can swap them out and having to think about the surrounding pieces beyond their interfaces. A good interface is small and logical.
lol, the last year on that list is mostly a pitiful collection of minor tweaks and “plans” to do stuff in the future. Any day now, I’m sure.
> China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness

Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different.

In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government.

In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.

The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization.

That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics).

Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
Are we talking about AlphaFold? It did not use RL, right?
It is worth noting that these topical applications are quite controversial in the medical literature. The evidence supporting a dermal absorption of magnesium (or other electrolytes) is pretty poor [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5579607/
Why aren't there more commercial programming languages?
Many earlier programming languages were non-free. TURBO Pascal, Visual Delphi, Visual Basic, Visual C++.

Many of today's popular programming languages are free. Java, C#, Python, OCaml, C, Rust.

Why aren't there more non-free, paid, programming languages today?
I think you are making a good point but if this function is only used in one place I would personally prefer to just use a variable:

something_is_valid = something > 0 and something != foo and something > bar

if something_is_valid:
# do stuff

That way you can document the intention of the condition using the variable name while at the same time keeping the locality of the check.
There are some situations where layoffs are unavoidable. That's fine.

What's infuriating is a business culture that includes layoffs for outrageously profitable companies. I work at Google, which made 100 billion dollars in profit last year. More than $500,000 in profit per employee. Google is still conducting layoffs.

Layoffs are used as a tool of capital against labor. Amongst other things, it generates unemployment and people who are willing to accept lower pay due to the precarity of their situation (everybody needs to pay rent and eat), pushing down pay for the entire industry.
I beg to differ! But it takes a while for it to become intuitive. »Chain in, rail out« gets you 90% there though.
We once saw GPT4o spend something like 100 repeated interactions trying the action known not to work (before snapping out of it). My intuition here is that this is a result of target fixation - the more repetitions of something it does, the more likely it is to keep repeating it, because it occupies more of the context.
I don't think algorithms are the problem at all...they only magnify existing biases and prejudices. We didn't live in some magical fantastical happy-chappy world before the Internet where people didn't beat their wives and any foreigner they could find, try to kill the gays, etc.
It is worth noting that these topical applications are quite controversial in the medical literature. The evidence supporting a dermal absorption of magnesium (or other electrolytes) is pretty poor [1]. In that sense: yes, it would be exceedingly difficult to overdose using them.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5579607/
While I think that there is no harm in longer functions as long as the code is linear, I think the the problem is that people abstract the wrong way.

The main issue I see is people writing functions that call functions that call functions. No. Don't. Have one main function that is in control and that calls all the sub-functions. Sub-functions do not call functions on their same level, ever. Yes, those sub-function could have their own helper function and so on but the flow always needs to be clearly one-directional. Don't go across and create a spaghetti mess. Trees not graphs.

Keep your code structure as flat as possible.

> massive pile of lasagna full of global or shared state.

Yeah, the skill is to avoid shared state as much as possible. Handling state centrally and opting for pure functions as much as possible.
I met my now wife (!) on seven39. We got married on a whim in LV after poking around in there. Fun site!
If the goal is to measure things operating at the individual level like poverty then internal differences matter even when comparing countries.

People living in Alaska are a lot poorer than their income suggests because of shipping and heating costs.
That is why my wife won't use the pihole on my network - things like Google map links to hotels, Amazon shopping links, even target app pictures didn't work out of the box.

I have a button on my stream deck to enable/disable pihole but I totally understand that is an annoyance for others!
Is air quality a problem in the city where you grew up?
They spent $35 million in 2022 to establish a venture capital fund... they are definitely using a lot more than 10% for BS not related to developing Firefox.
I suspect it's because this site is mainly targeted towards technology and engineering, but somehow world news keeps making its way in here and people are getting bored of it
Thank you! Very much a labour of love. The next step for us is to try and build a paperclip maximiser in FLE.
Despite agreeing with the rest, should the kid who graduated high school 2 months ago (1) earn as a grocery cashier to support a family of four, including medical and education, (2) should they not work / not be employable, or (3) is there room for a minimum lower than this definition?
Spitefulness in Conspiracy Ideation and Covid-19 Conspiracy Beliefs
Holy cow, I've been doing kubernetes for 8+ years at this point. No idea why your home IP address would change a single thing in kubernetes.
A moving window would be just like what you already get with somewhat global communities. E.g. hn while Europe and Africa is mostly sleeping vs hn while the Americas are mostly sleeping. As I understand it, seven39 is not so much about only being allowed to chime in during a specific time window, but about it being offline outside that window. You could have multiple instances from date line to date line, but they'd have separate content and user identities (even if some people might have accounts in different timezones).

What I really don't get, it completely blows my mind: why hasn't this concept been completely chewed through, explored to hell and back, back in the days when everybody and their dog tried to invent some new variation of social media website (and get bought up by Yahoo when they ran out of runway or grew tired of it)? Age of the yo app? Feels almost as if the convertible wasn't invented before 100 years after the automobile.
The Chaotic State of GPU Programming [video]
The usual claim is that the people who are involved do have power to effect policies (mostly by deciding what to throw money at I think), and that that's where they meet to bounce ideas off eachother and generally get all on the same page.

It's the "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" thing.
In simple terms: because it is a tool everyone uses and knows to some degree. It has all the bells and whistles to do pretty much what you want with it. And, I guess one overlooked fact: the data is portable, everyone* in the world has Excel.

My view is that if you switch companies, and at the last you used SAP and the new one you have to use Oracle, it is going to be a learning curve with very little added value for you (except the fact that now you know to proprietary systems). With Excel, well, it is going to be the same Excel, just different data.
Sounds like X nowadays xD
We cannot because the funds cutting DO create Drug resistant strain..

Not directly, but by creating the exact scenario that cause then to be created..

The USAID funds cut will cause patients to have to stop their treatment half way because there are no more money to buy the drugs required to their treatment..

This is the basic recipe to a drug resistant viruses...

When you start a treatment the first to die are the copies of the virus that are susceptible to the drug while the more resistant copies take longer to die..

This is why is so important to keep a treatment even after the symptoms ended, there will still be copies of the virus in your body that are resistant to the drug but not enough copies to cause the disease..

If you stop the treatment half way the copies that are resistant have the opportunity to multiply again, but now the drug will have less effect on it..

Repeat this process enough and you get a strain of the virus that is immune to the drug..

Repeat the process again and again with other drugs and you get a strain that is immune to everything..

With the number of patients affected by USAID cuts means it is practically guaranteed that a drug resistant strain will happen..
I used to think that but newer models' increasing coherence coupled with the astonishing success of RLHF makes me think that LLMs that can effectively intuit "reality" will emerge fairly soon.
I'd love to finally see interesting (non-predictable) AI opponents in games like StarCraft and Age of Mythology!

Since a good AI is too likely to beat humans due to high APM, don't limit their intelligence, instead limit their APM...
Yes we tried that - as well as a few other visual DSLs for spatial reasoning. They didn't seem to help much, i.e there were no failure modes that this approach solved compared to the simpler approach. As ARC-AGI results showed - there don't seem to be many 'free lunch' solutions to this without actually training.