[HN Gopher] One Year of TILs
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       One Year of TILs
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 98 points
       Date   : 2021-05-02 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
        
       | abraae wrote:
       | Now I want to mark this site (in Google, say) with a "high
       | quality" measure.
       | 
       | Then I want my search results to prefer this page, and other
       | pages marked high for quality by people who [some algorithm] to
       | this page.
       | 
       | Then Google would be far more useful to me than it is now, when
       | screeds of blogspam always seem to occupy the top organic results
       | for any "how to" tech questions.
       | 
       | In turn I would be a happier and more loyal Google customer (not
       | a high bar).
        
         | kabouseng wrote:
         | And then less reputable website will hire consultants and
         | influencers to mark their website as high quality. And then
         | click farms will appear in India and China to mark website's as
         | high quality at a price. And that is why we cannot have nice
         | stuff / nice search results...
        
           | abraae wrote:
           | It's not about who else marked this as high quality. I want
           | my signal to count (disproportionally).
        
             | hamstergene wrote:
             | You're contradicting your first comment:
             | 
             | > I want my search results to prefer [.....] other pages
             | marked high for quality by people who [some algorithm] to
             | this page.
             | 
             | Facebook/YouTube already do this and it is a disaster,
             | which maybe even has indirectly contributed to rise of
             | antivaxx, Q, Trump election, Capitol attack etc.
             | 
             | Before personalized recommendation systems, when an
             | antivaxxer made a video, hardly anyone saw it, when they
             | liked it, the like resulted in nothing.
             | 
             | When their likes started affecting their personal search
             | results, liking one antivaxx video made search produce
             | hundreds more of them. It finds so much of the same stuff
             | they no longer have free time to check an opposing opinion.
             | 
             | You're operating under an assumption that your judgement is
             | more correct or better for you, and the entire problem is
             | about finding gems in an ocean of trash. The reality is
             | more complicated, for you antivaxx content is trash, for
             | them it is _your_ content that is trash.
        
               | true_religion wrote:
               | I see what you mean, but like the OP, I would rather have
               | google search preference resources that I like over
               | resources that everyone in the internet.
               | 
               | Like if I think Wikipedia is a better resource than
               | crunch base, then let me make that decision. I don't care
               | how good their SEO is.
        
           | hansvm wrote:
           | I think what they're going for is more personalized results
           | -- i.e., don't aggregate my preferences with those of a bunch
           | of click farms.
        
         | jaredsohn wrote:
         | Maybe you want to set up a programmable search engine?
         | https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/451388...
         | 
         | Haven't tried it myself; but remember using a predecessor to
         | this maybe 15 years ago.
         | 
         | "You may want to augment your results with general Web Search
         | results. This includes results from anywhere on the web, but
         | places emphasis on your personalized results"
        
           | abraae wrote:
           | That's interesting, but it lost me at " all you have to do is
           | choose which sites to search".
        
             | jaredsohn wrote:
             | I was hoping you would just need to add urls to it.
             | 
             | I'm guessing the right way to handle this problem is to
             | search your browser history or bookmarks but those are
             | additional searches.
        
       | kickscondor wrote:
       | This mindset is closer to those who keep personal wikis in public
       | - not simply broadcasting updates to an audience, but writing and
       | working in public. It gets even better when conversations start
       | to emerge with others who are also blogging this way. You can
       | start to do longform group messaging that is open-ended - anyone
       | can join in if they want.
        
       | abledon wrote:
       | I think a lot about how we amass 'knowledge' all our life, then
       | at one point we grow old/die and most of it is 'lost' unless
       | we've written a book etc.. passed it down w/ someone else who has
       | done the 'work' to have it transferred etc..
       | 
       | I wonder in say.. year 2155, the learning 'curriculum' for
       | whatever tech thats going to exist then.... will be super
       | streamlined and powerful.
        
       | nicbou wrote:
       | I do the same thing, except my bar is "could this help someone
       | else?"
       | 
       | I don't collect visitor statistics nowadays, but those posts tend
       | to bring hundreds of visitors per month, so they're certainly
       | worth something to someone.
        
       | superasn wrote:
       | Thanks! This bash string escape trick will be really useful for
       | me(1). It is one of the biggest pain points in using cli
       | especially with nested commands like su -c where the actual
       | command is supposed to go inside quotes and becomes hell to quote
       | if it too has nested quotes inside it.
       | 
       | Oh how i wish that bash and every other language would support
       | the Perl's brilliant `q()` and `qq()` for quoting strings. That
       | simple fn really made life very easy and code cleaner.
       | 
       | (1) https://til.simonwillison.net/bash/escaping-a-string
        
       | loloquwowndueo wrote:
       | I started keeping track of useful tidbits i found or cobbled
       | together from stuff on the web, on my blog, years ago , to keep
       | them easy to find. This is mainly for my own benefit though
       | there's some added value in publishing it all in my public page,
       | as opposed to keeping it in my local notes (easy to refer to and
       | search) - if search engines index my content and it ends up
       | helping someone, that's an extra win :)
        
       | sm_ts wrote:
       | TIL is actually a foundation of my knowledge, although I have a
       | different approach - I keep Markdown files categorized by subject
       | (e.g. `git`, `ruby`), essentially, notebooks.
       | 
       | The ultimate goal is both to memorize and to keep references to
       | useful snippets or quirks I may need in the future - I actually
       | use them very frequently (it's a format that tends not to be
       | useful to the general public, though).
       | 
       | In the long term, some subjects become small books. Amusingly, by
       | far, the largest notebook is Rust - around 15k words, and I am
       | still an advanced beginner (!).
       | 
       | I really miss a program that is very good for both editing and
       | viewing Markdown! I currently use an always-open VSC; reading
       | Markdown is ok, but not super convenient.
        
         | dasnacl wrote:
         | Assuming you know about stuff similar to obsidian.md (markdown
         | left, rendered right) and Typora (rendered where you edit),
         | what is missing for you in terms of editing/viewing MDs? What
         | makes current stuff bad?
        
       | lucb1e wrote:
       | Link to actual TILs: https://til.simonwillison.net/
       | 
       | In case the author reads this, what might be useful is to group
       | them by some topic. A framework is only interesting if I also use
       | it, and as it is, I'm not into front-end dev so none of the
       | frameworks are interesting to me, but I have to read the 41
       | categories individually because they're spread throughout. Same
       | for Mac stuff (I have no mac, so I don't use homebrew), database
       | engines, python: they're all over the place.
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | This one sounded interesting: "Search across all loaded resources
       | in Firefox" but unfortunately it's just about the debugger (the
       | debugger also gives you that help right when you open it). What
       | I'd love to know is how to ctrl+f across all tabs' page contents,
       | or even just a stable search field that doesn't change every time
       | I switch tab (so I can just Ctrl+Tab,F3 across them).
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I have a simple search engine for them here:
         | https://til.simonwillison.net/tils/search?q=debugger
         | 
         | I haven't put a great deal of thought into the
         | https://til.simonwillison.net/ page design!
        
       | mraza007 wrote:
       | I think I came across something similar related to TILs and that
       | motivated me to start my own TIL and that has really helped
       | 
       | If you are interested here's the link: https://til-
       | mraza007.vercel.app/
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-02 23:00 UTC)