Hacker News: IndexPointer

A South Dakota county drove away millions in solar energy

IndexPointer — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:02:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/10/south-dakota-solar-energy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244165

Points: 23

# Comments: 5

New comment by IndexPointer in "Nobody cares"

IndexPointer — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 22:03:20 +0000

A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.

They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?"

IndexPointer — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:34:16 +0000

Do you have an example query? Quotes for literal words work for me. Domain search was always with with site:domain.com and not quotes and works fine. I think bing/ddg removed that feature recently?

New comment by IndexPointer in "Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?"

IndexPointer — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 13:26:37 +0000

I strongly recommend installing Spectacle for Mac, which does window snapping with a hotkey.

Apparently it's no longer maintained but works perfectly fine right now, and there are alternatives i haven't tried, like Rectangle.

Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past

IndexPointer — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 16:14:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63830490

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34467416

Points: 12

# Comments: 2

Transform your voice using AI

IndexPointer — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 03:14:11 +0000

Article URL: https://koe.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32820290

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by IndexPointer in "The Federation Fallacy (2019)"

IndexPointer — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 14:22:14 +0000

She seems to assume that federations are supposed to be small groups where everyone knows each other. Has anyone claimed that?

Email and the web are the perfect examplea of federations, because they are not controlled by a single company; they are interoperable. From Gmail I can send an email to a friend who uses Outlook. That way I'm not forced to use outlook if I want to communicate with him and I can use any email provider I want. The fact that Google and Microsoft are trillion dollar companies is irrelevant here.

Same with the web, I can change my ISP and keep accessing the exact same webpages as before because the web is federated, and not controlled by my ISP. The fact that I use it to visit pages controlled by other large companies is irrelevant.

Facebook or Whatsapp, on the other hand, are not federated. If I want to communicate with my friends who use Facebook or Whatsapp I have no other choice than to use Facebook and Whatsapp.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

IndexPointer — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:56:17 +0000

Any simple heuristic has false positives, meaning they'll end up taking down legitimate sites that had repeated content for a good reason. Say, for example two sites quoting text from the us constitution. The second one to be crawled would be considered to be spam copying the first one and removed from web results. Then you'll get comments on hacker news complaining that Google is censoring it for political reasons.

And any simple heuristic is quickly reverse engineered by SEOs, who will find a way to mask it as legitimate.

tl;dr it's a hard problem.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

IndexPointer — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:43:47 +0000

There are billions of dollars on stake from both sides, search engines and spammers, in an endless arms race that has been going on for more than 20 years. Trust me, it's beyond naive to say fighting webspam is a low hanging fruit problem.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

IndexPointer — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:21:53 +0000

Unrelated, but your website is down right now.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022"

IndexPointer — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:19:29 +0000

It's much better than any other article I've seen on hacker news about it.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Apple becomes first company to hit $3T market value"

IndexPointer — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 20:35:10 +0000

Why not?

New comment by IndexPointer in "Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping"

IndexPointer — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 20:32:36 +0000

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Search engines and SEO spam"

IndexPointer — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 13:52:32 +0000

What do you mean by demonetizing forums?

I had £1.6milion worth of ape NFTs stolen in the worst night of my life

IndexPointer — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 12:12:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/17201300/ape-nfts-stolen-worst-night-hacker-attack/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29793954

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by IndexPointer in "Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2021?"

IndexPointer — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 15:45:36 +0000

Wow, I opened this to recommend Fall of Civilizations, but I'm glad to see it's already recommended by the OP.

New comment by IndexPointer in "The messy future of social media"

IndexPointer — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 20:40:47 +0000

Adversarial interoperability is the only solution.

Make the new networks compatible with the current ones, even without their authorization.

New comment by IndexPointer in "Bash patterns I use weekly"

IndexPointer — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 01:26:20 +0000

Try GNU parallel.

New comment by IndexPointer in "How to build a second brain as a software developer"

IndexPointer — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 04:41:52 +0000

Chrome mobile saves to mhtml if you download a page. Chrome desktop can save to mhtml if you select "webpage, single file". And of course they open the files fine. But it's not compressed, so you'll end up with smaller files if you use pdfs.

New comment by IndexPointer in "How to build a second brain as a software developer"

IndexPointer — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 22:34:57 +0000

I can't believe I never thought of this. I keep a huge bookmark folder with "things I might need 10 years from now", but finding things becomes a torture if you can only search by the title and not the contents. And after a few years it's likely that the page will be gone.

But why save pdfs instead of downloading the webpages?