What are people doing? Live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics (humans.maxcomperatore.com)

On the topic of search engines, I really liked classes by David Evans. The task was also building a simple search engine from scratch. It's really for beginners, as the emphasis is on coding in general, but I've found it to be very approachable.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/courses/

ktallett · 44m ago

I always wonder if the days of search engines for specific topics could return. With LLM's providing less than accurate results in some areas, and Google, bing, etc being taken over by adverts or well organised SEO, there feels like a place for accurate, specialised search.

datadrivenangel · 40m ago

The curation of an index of resources is what's needed for niche search

dcist · 34m ago

WestLaw and Lexis Nexis provide this for legal search, but quite frankly, these services are subpar. It's amazing that these two companies rake in hundreds of millions but they are both slower than Google, Bing, Yandex, or any LLM service (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) while scouring a universe of text that is orders of magnitude smaller. The user experience is also terrible (you have to login and specify a client each and every time you attempt to use the service and both services log you out after a short -- in my opinion -- period of inactivity, creating friction and needless annoyance to the user). There's an opportunity there.

ktallett · 28m ago

I haven't personally used the mentioned services as they aren't in my field, however what is the accuracy of their results? Are they double checked? I don't find LLMs particularly accurate in my field (that's being kind), if anything I find they make up sources that simply don't exist.

I mean poor UX has no excuse but slow speed can be reasoned if it makes the quality of the service better.

ordersofmag · 12m ago

Here’s a place to start if you want to go down the rabbit hole of how search at places like this is approached. https://haystackconf.com/us2022/talk-12/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vCMFIJRiKk

fanwood · 15m ago

I already directly search on Wikipedia for most topics (with a search shortcut on URL bar)

ktallett · 13m ago

Wikipedia is useful up to a point for sure. I feel whether it could be a expansion of Wikipedia in it's current use case, but for emerging research and niche topics it can sometimes be less useful.

The emoji problem (2022) (artofproblemsolving.com)

A simple search engine from scratch (bernsteinbear.com)

Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025 (noelberry.ca)

Ogmo – free, open source, 2D level editor (ogmo-editor-3.github.io)

Show HN: Text to 3D simulation on a map (does history pretty well) (mused.com)

DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage (micahflee.com)

Have I Been Pwned 2.0 (troyhunt.com)

Firewalls and BIOS's and Coreboot (2020) (hagensieker.com)

Show HN: JavaFactory – IntelliJ plugin to generate Java code (github.com)

Compiling OCaml to the TI-84 CE Calculator (farlow.dev)

Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge (trenvista.net)

Jules: An Asynchronous Coding Agent (jules.google)

Why Does the U.S. Always Run a Trade Deficit? (libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org)

Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (deno.com)

GitHub Copilot Coding Agent (github.blog)

What are people doing? Live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics (humans.maxcomperatore.com)

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source (blogs.windows.com)

Experts Have It Easy (boydkane.com)

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype–here's what it taught me (understandingai.org)

The behavior of LLMs in hiring decisions: Systemic biases in candidate selection (davidrozado.substack.com)

Claude Code SDK (docs.anthropic.com)

Launch HN: Better Auth (YC X25) – Authentication Framework for TypeScript

Run GitHub Actions locally (github.com)

Kilo: A text editor in less than 1000 LOC with syntax highlight and search (github.com)

Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning (github.com)

Biff – a batteries-included web framework for Clojure (biffweb.com)

Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a 'Hoax' (scientificamerican.com)

Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game (ncase.me)

A man who visited every country in the world without boarding a plane (2023) (theguardian.com)

Imagine a drive where every file exists as all file types all of the time (anydocai.com)

Ann, the Small Annotation Server (mccd.space)

Solving physics-based initial value problems with unsupervised machine learning (link.aps.org)

The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008) (vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com)

xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure (techcrunch.com)

Remarks on AI from NZ (nealstephenson.substack.com)

Terraform MCP Server (github.com)

Too Much Go Misdirection (flak.tedunangst.com)

Zod 4 (zod.dev)

A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization (abstractnonsense.com)

Memory Consistency Models: A Tutorial (jamesbornholt.com)

Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden (thewrap.com)

Patience too cheap to meter (seangoedecke.com)

WireGuard vanity keygen (github.com)

Glasskube (YC S24) is hiring in Vienna to build Open Source deployment tools (ycombinator.com)

AI's energy footprint (technologyreview.com)

Mary Queen of Scots Channel Anamorphosis, a 3D Simulation (charlespetzold.com)

Austin's Reign as a Tech Hub Might Be Coming to an End (wsj.com)

In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder (eff.org)

Precomputing Transparency Order in 3D (jacobdoescode.com)

Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy (chipsandcheese.com)

A simple search engine from scratch

Comments (8)