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Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

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Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#251

Post by jpindar »

christkv wrote: post #109
BLanen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to keep giving more and more confidence in their language semantic ai. Quoted words in the search should return only pages with that actually on the page. That used to work. Now it often shows pages that don't contain it all, not in the search results page itself, nor on the page when you go there. So you'd think it just ignored the quoted text and gave me results without it instead, right? Wrong. Removing…

I just want a search engine that will let me mark sites and links and let me search in that subset when I want so I can add curated sources to my little index.

https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/

I have stack exchange, github, and all the canonical documentation sites for my projects in mine.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#252

Post by motoxpro »

WhisperingShiba wrote: post #230
motoxpro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets dont work when everyone knows what I am THINKING. i.e. If I know with 100% certainty you are going to buy something for 1$ I just bid 1.0001. Same with Google search. If I know with 100% certainty that you rank pages in a certain way, I can game them. Markets only work when all data is available but no all opinions. Introducing random elements just makes it worse for everyone.

So why was google more effective before? Is this is product of the financial struggle of our society, or do you believe it is an inevitable consequence of a dominant search engine?

It is a lot more effective for me. I usually find what I am looking for in the first few results, there are flights, calculators, wiki pages, etc. So I disagree it has gotten worse.

The task of search has gotten exponentially harder as well. There are billions more website pages, more spam, more sophisticated attacks, more gaming of the system, etc. They could have gone from a 80% relevant result to a 99% relevant result and you perceive at 10% drop in relevancy. It's a hard problem.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#253

Post by donmcronald »

ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

I guess that explains why I've been seeing so many results that are nothing more than scraped content lately :-(

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#254

Post by freediver »

dorkwood wrote: post #212
1_player wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was. And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets…

If I search "who gave away Anne Frank's hiding place?", Google confidently gives me the answer "Miep Gies". I don't know why Google would even suggest this -- Miep was one of Anne's helpers. Imagine all the other people out there having their names unfairly smeared by Google's algorithm.

Happy to report that Kagi Search (a newcomer and one of the three search engines that can answer questions like this) gave the right answer. Both Google and Bing got it wrong.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#255

Post by freediver »

nerdponx wrote: post #172
MiddleEndian wrote: post #18

uBlacklist is a great tool to block sites you don't want from showing up on your search results on google (and a couple others including bing and duckduckgo). It supports regular expressions as well, I use /pinterest\..*/ to block all pinterest-related content. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

It'd be pretty neat if DDG let you configure this as a setting. They don't have "accounts" as such, but they do provide users with a one-time password that lets you save and restore settings. Alternatively, if they at least supported "do not include" filters in regular searches, you could build a client that stored those kinds of search defaults locally. The best you can do now is strip out those results on the clien…

We built this into Kagi Search, natively, I invite you to try it out. You can both “mute” and “prefer” domains in your searches. Currently in beta!

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#256

Post by Retric »

OJFord wrote: post #244
Retric wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good programming books are some of the highest information density of any writing you can find. College professors tend to prefer the lower density versions which might be biasing people.

Is that true? Or even your actual experience? The recommendations I got from lecturers at university were thick academic textbooks. The 'good programming books' popular on HN etc. - without taking anything away from them - tend to be more waffley blog-turned-book type things. Aside from classics from the former category that are also popular in the latter. Sipser, the dragon book, Spivak, etc.

This comes to personal preferences, I generally prefer reference books vs educational books. Find a good fit between what you’re working on and what the book is trying to do and they can be extremely helpful

Best example that comes to mind is the first edition of SQl in a nutshell. It was thin reference that covered SQL and the major differences between different SQL databases that I picked up back in 2002 ish. Quite useful if your working with several at the same time, but not something to teach you SQL. I haven’t looked at a recent edition because I am not in that situation any more, but I presume it’s still useful for that purpose.

Granted most books are significantly more verbose, but the physical limitations of books can promote extremely precise writing with minimal extraneous information.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#257

Post by selfhoster11 »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #225
john-tells-all wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I train programmers, and strongly recommend they buy books or do other types of money/time investment to make themselves better (and more highly-paid programmers). They won't do it. I've had multiple programmers literally shocked and avoid my outstretched book. Once I got a question, said "I just read the answer to this in this book right here"... and the programmer refused to read the book to answer his question. I…

Maybe books are too low density. Like the “quantity of information” per amount of words is lower than a blog post for example. I dunno, I’m not really a reading type but I do own programming-related books. It’s the only type of book I own. I learned a lot from books like The Clean Coder, The Pragmatic Programmer and some 90’s book about Design Patterns with c++ examples and I don’t even write c++

If anything, a good book (or video course) will be a high-density, concentrated pill of everything you need to know about the subject to know what everything is and how it interacts. By comparison, reading blog posts and random YouTube videos is more akin to "grazing" - sure you can learn, but not as fast and you'll be missing context until the lightbulb goes off.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#258

Post by selfhoster11 »

OJFord wrote: post #244
Retric wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good programming books are some of the highest information density of any writing you can find. College professors tend to prefer the lower density versions which might be biasing people.

Is that true? Or even your actual experience? The recommendations I got from lecturers at university were thick academic textbooks. The 'good programming books' popular on HN etc. - without taking anything away from them - tend to be more waffley blog-turned-book type things. Aside from classics from the former category that are also popular in the latter. Sipser, the dragon book, Spivak, etc.

It's my experience that this is often the case. I don't like high-theory books, so that means that things like the dragon book aren't likely to be in my sample.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#259

Post by selfhoster11 »

ahepp wrote: post #214
andai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

The content I want already exists. It’s provided for no charge on stackoverflow, reddit, Wikipedia, cppreference, and a handful of other high quality sources. All of which do not charge users a fee, most of which obtain the content from users in the first place. So as far as I see it, the problem is not that the content is uneconomical to produce. The problem is that searching doesn’t discover the content I want. It…

Precisely. For me, the value in paying for a course or a book is not that they produce this knowledge, but that they collate it, filter through subject matter experience they already have to remove misleading additions, and add in any missing parts that may take a long time to grasp without a "Eureka!"-inducing explanation.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#260

Post by selfhoster11 »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #222
andai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

Most developers will rather spent 2 days to build something than pay $60 for something better.

Teenagers are likely to do just that. Their money is expensive, while their time is cheap. If they get to learn in the meantime, even better.
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