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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?

#241

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #236
notJim wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hide sites by domain This gives me the idea to build a search engine that only contains content from domains that have been vouched for. Basically, you'd have an upvote/downvote system for the domains, perhaps with some walls to make sure only trusted users can upvote/downvote. It seems like in practice, many people do this anyway. This could be the best of both worlds between directories and search engines.

You don't need an upvote/downvote. If someone searches for X and clicks on results you just record when they stop trying sites or new search terms as you can assume the query has been answered. Reward that site. Most of them are already doing this in some form.

Often you don’t know if a site is legit or not without first visiting it.

And new clone sites launch all the time, so I’m always clicking on search results to new clone sites that I’ve never seen before so can’t avoid them in results.

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

#242

Post by OJFord »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #241
ancientworldnow wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an upvote/downvote. If someone searches for X and clicks on results you just record when they stop trying sites or new search terms as you can assume the query has been answered. Reward that site. Most of them are already doing this in some form.

Often you don’t know if a site is legit or not without first visiting it. And new clone sites launch all the time, so I’m always clicking on search results to new clone sites that I’ve never seen before so can’t avoid them in results.

Yeah, when I get caught by these SEO spam sites it's because they haven't had a similar ranking to the SO thread that ripped off, so it wasn't immediately apparent.

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

#243

Post by acdha »

testudovictoria wrote: post #181
stevesimmons wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems. I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum ? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many…

I'm skeptical that it's all that much better for any group of user. I search for normal things all of the time and it doesn't do a good job at returning relevant results for things like businesses, recent movies / TV shows, etc. and natural language syntax doesn't make the results less bad.

What it looks suspiciously like to me is a lack of an effective feedback loop for user frustration — if it takes a number of queries to get correct results or someone doesn't stop using Google search entirely, this would be easy to confuse with improved engagement and I'd especially believe that managers whose job it is to get a number to go up are not in a hurry to question whether that growth is meaningful.

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

#244

Post by OJFord »

Retric wrote: post #231
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++

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.

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

#245

Post by wruza »

freediver wrote: post #176
charlesdaniels wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll see a comeback of hand-curated directories of content? I feel like the "awesome list" trend is maybe the start of something there. I would be willing to pay an annual fee to have access to well-curated search results with all the clickbait, blogspam, etc. filtered out. Until then, I recommend uBlacklist[0], which allows you to hide sites by domain in the search results page for common search engines…

You can access one without paying a dime. http://teclis.com Problem is people usually want one general search engine, not a collection of niche ones.

It’s not a directory. Hand-crafted descriptions instead of random citations and/or marketing from the site itself is what makes it a directory. This one is a search engine. Maybe it’s a good one for its purpose, but who knows, without an ability to navigate you can’t tell.

Problem is people usually want one general search engine, not a collection of niche ones.

In my opinion, the reason they want a general search engine is that they think in their box (search -> general search). What they really want is a way to discover things and quick summaries about them: “$section: $what $what_it_does $see_also”. Search engines abuse this necessity and suggest deceitfully summarized ads instead.

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

#246

Post by kdot »

leephillips wrote: post #186
enobrev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure! Thanks for the reminder. There was a point (as you may know) when the domains were saved into your profile, so you didn't have to add it.

I didn’t know.

When they removed the domain blacklist feature search went down hill fast.

https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...

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

#247

Post by boomlinde »

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.

If I can do it in a way that's better suited to my use case, learn something from it and/or entertain myself, that may not be as bad a tradeoff as it may otherwise seem.

Reinventing wheels out of plain curiosity has exposed me to a variety of problems and their solutions, and I believe it exercises my general problem solving skills.

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

#248

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

They're not wrong. When I build something, it's mine and I control it. I get to learn about all sorts of interesting stuff, making me a better programmer in the process. If I publish it on GitHub, it becomes résumé material, helps other people and might even start a community if enough people start contributing. I get to contribute to the state of the art in free computing, advancing it not just for myself but also for everyone else.

If I pay for something else, I don't get source code, I get borderline malware that spies on me constantly, I'm subjected to idiotic non-negotiable terms and conditions and I'm at the mercy of some gigantic corporation that can kill the product at any time.

We don't pay for "something better" because it's not actually better at all. We're not laymen, we actually understand the fact it's a shitty deal. We're not some mindless consumer companies can just dump these products on. We have the power to create. The more we use this power, the better off we are.

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

#250

Post by throwamon »

slownews45 wrote: post #204
randomluck040 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘m using DDG most of the time but when I have to use Google hoping the results will be better, I try to specify words that need to be in there. However, the more niche your problems are, the less you will find.

DDG is a gimmick. They claim to be running their own search engine, never checked out for me. More covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817576 Anyone seeing them crawling your site? Is bing the best alternative? I've seen some pretty compelling evidence DDG copies / uses / has a deal with bing.

You don't need to search for "compelling evidence", it's not like they're hiding it from you.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

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