[HN Gopher] Googling for answers costs you time
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Googling for answers costs you time
        
       Author : mleonhard
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2023-07-02 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (prashanth.world)
 (TXT) w3m dump (prashanth.world)
        
       | gtirloni wrote:
       | I felt it wasn't fair to say the Real Python page about iterating
       | over dicts had "useless" content. It had a table of contents,
       | what's wrong with that? It's going into detail about
       | dictionaries. Sure, you just want a quick fix. That page is not
       | for you but there is no need to caption a screenshot with
       | "...so...much...nonsense". Nonsense is a bit extreme, isn't it?
        
         | bornfreddy wrote:
         | Especially as realpython is one of _the_ websites when looking
         | for anything Python related. Their explanations are clear,
         | concise and easy to read, not to mention that they usually
         | cover the whole topic, not just some minor aspect of it (hello
         | SO). When realpython is among the hits I know I don 't need to
         | look any further.
         | 
         | (not affiliated in any way)
        
       | lkgnabc wrote:
       | If you know the sites that have the answers, it takes 5 seconds
       | to get them.
       | 
       | Far faster than wading through the verbose and insufferable
       | output of some chatbot and your give the source of all that
       | knowledge some recognition.
        
       | amanzi wrote:
       | I'm sure there's an argument to be made about SEO fluff
       | dominating Google, but this article picked a bad example to prove
       | their point.
       | 
       | The author searched for: "python iterate over dict".
       | 
       | The number 1 result was an article called: "How to Iterate
       | Through a Dictionary in Python". The article doesn't have
       | obnoxious ads, has a clear table of contents at the top so you
       | can jump to specific sections if you don't need the full context,
       | and is written in a way that novices can learn the topic while
       | still providing all the technical details that an advanced user
       | would need.
       | 
       | Also, I'm not sure what resolution screen the author is using
       | (1280x768?), but on my 1080p screen I can see the top of the
       | table of contents so could jump straight to any of the methods to
       | iterate through a dictionary.
       | 
       | In my opinion, this is an example of Google providing a great
       | result.
        
       | add-sub-mul-div wrote:
       | 25 years in, how is it possible not to have mastered this like
       | muscle memory? You're supposed to develop skills to quickly
       | assess search results, scan a site for trustworthiness, find the
       | info you need on a page through heuristics you've either been
       | building for decades or have developed natively because you were
       | born into a world where it's a primary skill. It's become like
       | breathing, hasn't it?
       | 
       | I can't begin to describe how much it slows me down to have to
       | keep typing out my question repeatedly to an AI, only to be
       | robbed of the ability to judge the information in the context of
       | where it came from, and oh yeah, any confidence that it's
       | accurate.
        
         | earthboundkid wrote:
         | It's fun to ask ChatGPT CSS questions because you can quickly
         | try them out and see if they work. So far it has a .000 batting
         | average on CSS for me.
        
       | jacobxu wrote:
       | thats why chatgpt works so well, it literally replaced google for
       | searching basic syntax
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | It works really well for questions that have easy answers and
         | that are asked a lot.
         | 
         | It works less well when you have a question that doesn't have
         | an obvious answer.
         | 
         | For fun, try 'How can I write to a Parquet file in Java without
         | Hadoop?'. It will vacillate between giving answers that pull in
         | hadoop dependencies, and nonsense that doesn't compile at all.
         | 
         | (here's a useful proper answer:
         | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59939309/read-local-
         | parq...)
        
           | Closi wrote:
           | It also works well for questions that have easy/medium
           | answers and aren't asked a lot.
           | 
           | Complex questions that involve things that aren't well
           | documented are obviously going to be harder for an LLM to
           | answer, particularly when the LLM does not have a capability
           | to test its own code.
        
           | joebiden2 wrote:
           | That's ChatGPT-4's response to that question: https://chat.op
           | enai.com/share/72d490a9-2b2a-4120-9bb0-3a59d4...
           | 
           | I briefly checked if the mentioned dependencies exist (they
           | do). Too late over here to actually try the code.
        
             | marginalia_nu wrote:
             | Main.java:27:33       java:
             | org.apache.parquet.io.OutputFile is abstract; cannot be
             | instantiated            Main.java:29:17       java: cannot
             | access org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path         class file for
             | org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path not found
             | 
             | It basically solves the problem by not importing hadoop
             | dependencies (despite needing to), and hallucinating
             | classes.
        
       | raldi wrote:
       | This article was written in 2020 and it shows. I type these
       | queries into an LLM now and 95% of the time within seconds it
       | outputs outstanding answers.
        
         | LordShredda wrote:
         | If you have such simple questions then thanks for not wasting
         | people's time on stackoverflow
        
           | raldi wrote:
           | It works for impressively difficult questions, but even for
           | simple ones (like this article is about) they would surely
           | already be already answered a decade ago on Stack Overflow so
           | there would be no need to ask them anew.
        
       | cratermoon wrote:
       | Cooking sites have been this way for a long time. Google for a
       | recipe for something simple and the top results are long articles
       | about the foods, the process, and so on. At least the better
       | cooking sites put a link to the recipe near the top.
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | I take the point, but a developer with any experience is able to
       | use google as a portal to get to the relevant SO or documentation
       | page very quickly in spite of whatever shenanigans google+seo
       | tries. It's not like every time you google some syntax you're
       | actually distracted by tutorialspoint or whatever garbage. These
       | sites must just feed on people who are in the first day or two of
       | their careers, after that you don't even seen them.
        
         | inetknght wrote:
         | > _a developer with any experience is able to use google as a
         | portal to get to the relevant SO_
         | 
         | That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically been)
         | terrible.
         | 
         | > _or documentation page_
         | 
         | Ironically, documentation pages exist and many of them are
         | terrible. But even the great ones aren't linked to in code
         | snippets. Got a squiggly line? It would be handy to have a link
         | to documentation!
        
           | bornfreddy wrote:
           | > That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically
           | been) terrible.
           | 
           | It still is. There is a trick though - start typing a new
           | question and it will suggest you possible duplicates. Works
           | like magic, they really did a great job with this "search".
        
       | cassianoleal wrote:
       | DuckDuckGo gives me a relevant StackOverflow as the first result.
       | Furthermore, it displays it on the actual search page, on the
       | right-hand side.
        
       | FrenchyJiby wrote:
       | I highly recommend using local solutions to this local issue:
       | Zeal[1] (aka Dash[2] on MacOS)
       | 
       | Load up the "docsets" of your languages (lightly edited HTML docs
       | for indexing purposes) and use a global keyboard shortcut (F8 for
       | me) to pull up Python/Postgres/Terraform docs, searching for the
       | right function without internet query.
       | 
       | This isn't straight up applicable to all questions of course, but
       | "How do I search regular expressions in Python again?" is now as
       | easy as <F8> "re" <ENTER>
       | 
       | Note that the docsets can be converted from normal HTML ones via
       | doc2dash[3], especially useful to load up custom docs like
       | private providers.
       | 
       | [1]: https://zealdocs.org/ [2]: https://kapeli.com/dash [3]:
       | https://doc2dash.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/
        
       | thyrox wrote:
       | The longer you stay on a webpage, the more favorably Google
       | perceives it. Even if you're frustrated sifting through spam, if
       | you find your answer quickly and spend less time, it doesn't
       | count as a positive quality signal.
       | 
       | To counter this, websites employ a strategy known as the "Bucket
       | brigade" to ensure you spend at least 30 seconds on their site.
       | It's a basic principle of website optimization and it's just the
       | tip of the nasty SEO iceberg.
        
       | willsmith72 wrote:
       | 100% agree, and not just on programming searches. That's why it's
       | so easy for my to justify gpt plus to myself. Could be
       | programming questions, holiday planning, business advice. Just
       | about anything
        
       | BestGuess wrote:
       | Don't know if it helps but some people sent me these and I think
       | it might help https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-
       | operators/ Think it got posted here couple times? found one
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989922
       | 
       | I don't know if anyone asked and I don't know if it can be
       | figured out but I was wonderin are the bots any better than
       | figuring out them search operators?
        
       | reaperman wrote:
       | > * But to me, the user, it feels like I'm paying for my answers
       | with my time pointlessly scrolling around the page to find the
       | answer I came to the site for. I can't stand it; I feel like I am
       | being duped, misled, being taken for a ride, just so I know how
       | to make pancakes, or how to do a simple thing in common
       | programming language.*
       | 
       | Absolutely agree with this. I strongly prefer reading the
       | official language API documentation directly, which makes me very
       | sensitive to the quality of the documentation.
       | 
       | I have also replaced my google searches (which usually are more
       | along the lines of "what's the most idiomatic way to do x?" or
       | "what's the most correct way to do x in $LANG?") with ChatGPT.
       | It's super fast, generally pretty good for the types of style
       | questions you'd usually have learning a new language, and I can
       | directly query it about what tradeoffs different techniques have
       | in various common situations.
       | 
       | ChatGPT has finally gotten me off Google's Wild Ride.
        
         | Shawnj2 wrote:
         | I like to use the Bing AI for that because ChatGPT can
         | sometimes hallucinate while Bing will use its knowledge + stuff
         | from websites which makes it a more reliable source for things
         | which should match reality.
        
           | reaperman wrote:
           | On the contrary, I find all the LLMs (including ChatGPT
           | browsing beta) which search to find answers repeat the same
           | blogspam as everyone else. They save time by parsing the
           | blogspam for me, but it's still low quality.
           | 
           | Phind gets an honorable mention though - if that's the style
           | you prefer I'd strongly recommend it.
           | 
           | ChatGPT does hallucinate all the time, but for "learning a
           | language from scratch" it's very very very minimal. I can't
           | recall a single time it gave me a response to "idiomatic way
           | to do x in $LANG" which included hallucinated information.
           | Just can't back it into a corner trying to get it to
           | customize something that needs rigorous optimization for your
           | use case.
           | 
           | Overall, the large innate knowledge base of ChatGPT-4 seems
           | to contain a great model of the modern features of most
           | programming languages and their packages (popular PyPI
           | packages, Spring, Boost, Qt, etc, etc). Once I let it browse
           | the internet, quality goes down and roughly matches Bing and
           | Bard.
           | 
           | Phind I think gets around this by having a custom ranking of
           | sources or something. Not sure what their secret sauce is but
           | it mostly works pretty well.
        
             | Shawnj2 wrote:
             | I don't think I've ever gotten language syntax wrong but
             | ChatGPT will happily tell you to use functions that don't
             | exist or use them incorrectly. Also yes Bing sources aren't
             | necessarily quality sources but they are more aligned to
             | reality than what ChatGPT will give you
        
       | hourago wrote:
       | By the author's metric is even worse to read a book. If you are
       | looking for the exact answer to your exact code maybe that is the
       | problem.
       | 
       | To get free training so you can solve your problem yourself and
       | understand the overall situation seems a very good deal. The
       | example to complain about seems very badly chosen.
       | 
       | I think that Google is getting worse and that advertisements in
       | webpages should be regulated. But to complain that you are being
       | taught to fish instead of given a fish seems too entitled.
        
         | LordShredda wrote:
         | A book has an index, a bunch of sources at the end, and maybe a
         | further reading section. The book tends to be more thorough
         | since it doesn't have word limits or up votes to cater to. I
         | wouldn't use the book example here as they tend to be more of a
         | reference if not a how to guide for a very specific topic
        
           | hourago wrote:
           | How is it different that the page linked in the article? I do
           | not see why that page is so bad, it looks like an average
           | page from a book with a linked index at the top.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | There's a world of difference between a well-written, well-
         | edited book and SEO spam. The latter is not making a genuine
         | attempt to actually teach you, that's not the point.
        
           | hourago wrote:
           | This is the link: https://realpython.com/iterate-through-
           | dictionary-python/
           | 
           | It does not look like SEO spam to me. The site seems actually
           | nice and well produced.
           | 
           | I may be missing something, thou. Why is that page so bad
           | that the author does not want it in the list of results?
        
       | liorben-david wrote:
       | The proliferation of SEO fluff makes it way too convenient to use
       | ChatGPT instead.
       | 
       | I'm well aware of ChatGPT's ability to confidently say wrong
       | things, but the cost of reading SEO fluff is so high I'm more
       | than willing for that tradeoff.
       | 
       | Interestingly I've found that GPT also tends to use SEO fluff,
       | likely because its trained off SEO-fluffed content.
       | 
       | The difference is that I can just tell ChatGPT to be concise and
       | the fluff is gone
        
         | eastbound wrote:
         | SEO is already full of ChatGPT answers. SEO is kind of a
         | snapshot of ChatGPT...
        
           | liorben-david wrote:
           | SEO fluff in my experience predates LLMs -- But you're
           | absolutely right how GPT is used to mass-produce SEO fluff
        
         | ineedausername wrote:
         | Wait, do you just tell it "please be more concise" to whatever
         | you ask of it?
        
           | liorben-david wrote:
           | 100%.
           | 
           | I preface all prompts with "Be concise and ask follow-up
           | questions if you need more information" -- Greatly improves
           | the output
        
           | rockemsockem wrote:
           | Not OP, but yeah if you tell it to be concise it will be.
           | With GPT4 you can even prescribe a maximum number of
           | sentences and probably words too (haven't tried this one
           | specifically). It will do it. It's a great tool!
        
             | RobinL wrote:
             | With code questions I usually say: 'code only no
             | explanation'. It gets a bit tiresome to type every time,
             | but gpt4 is too slow to wait for it to 'type' the
             | explanation
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | The number one reason blogs do this is because of links, which
       | are very hard to build. Actually, these days nobody gives a
       | flying fuck about linking to anyone else's site anymore and
       | Google knows this. They've openly stated that they want to
       | devalue backlinks as a ranking metric.
       | 
       | So, what is the alternative? You plaster the page with an eBooks-
       | worth of content because that satisfies Googles EAT (something
       | something topical authority) signals. It's that simple.
       | 
       | In many ways you can steer Googles results in a direction but
       | developers are too lazy to make a /link section on their blog and
       | save a bookmark once in a while. It actually helps the people
       | whose content you like and it costs you absolutely nothing.
        
       | blindseer wrote:
       | People that are saying this is SEO, in my opinion, haven't read
       | or used RealPython. It is genuinely one of the best Python
       | learning websites out there. Their articles are written by people
       | knowledgeable in the field, and usually comprehensive and
       | thorough, while still being easy to understand.
       | 
       | I also think Google's ranking is fair in this case, assuming you
       | want to know most high quality information about "how to iterate
       | through a dictionary". I certainly would prefer this kind of a
       | RealPython article with a table of contents so that I can find
       | exactly what I am looking for.
       | 
       | I do think Google (and the web in general) has started to suck
       | because of SEO spam, and generally agree with the authors
       | premise. Searching for recipes suck, searching for reviews suck,
       | searching for places and events also suck.
       | 
       | I just think this particular instance is a bad example.
       | RealPython values your time, and I wish there were a lot more
       | websites that valued my time too.
        
       | userbinator wrote:
       | I absolutely hate the SEO crap that shows up these days, so much
       | that I've become accustomed to immediately scrolling down past
       | the first few results.
       | 
       | In contrast, I read all of K&R before writing a single C program,
       | and when I had to learn PHP, I went to the official documentation
       | (it was a downloadable .chm) and read through most of it first.
       | It's a larger upfront investment, but I think taking the time to
       | understand the language first instead of "JIT'ing" knowledge is
       | worth it.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | While you're right, of course, it does depend on whether you
         | expect to be spending enough time on the language to be worth
         | the investment. Anecdotally, a lot of developers will switch
         | technologies or languages every couple of months or years;
         | there's few left who say "I am a $language developer" and stick
         | with that for, say, a decade. So for them it doesn't feel worth
         | investing the time.
         | 
         | And also, googling for something has a high hit rate; nine
         | times out of ten, googling 'how to sort in python' gives a good
         | result.
         | 
         | And also also, these questions are often one-off; you need to
         | look up how to do X in $lang, then either you can copy / paste,
         | or you never touch it again; why put in the time investment if
         | you don't need to rely on your memory?
        
           | userbinator wrote:
           | _a lot of developers will switch technologies or languages
           | every couple of months or year_
           | 
           | That says more about the horrible state of the industry than
           | anything else. Big languages like Python won't be
           | disappearing anytime soon, so even if I might not be doing
           | more of it for now, learning the language more thoroughly
           | will pay off again in the future.
        
         | rkagerer wrote:
         | I miss chm!
        
       | Cthulhu_ wrote:
       | > How is this the number one link on Google?
       | 
       | Because it's rich in content, it's long, has a table of contents,
       | the whole site is relevant to the search query, etc etc etc; from
       | a search engine's point of view, it's more authoritative than
       | Stack Overflow where the authoritartativity (?) is debatable at
       | best, decided by consensus otherwise.
       | 
       | What should happen is that the community behind Python (in this
       | case) works their ass off to make authoritative sources, like MDN
       | did for web standards. And they had to work and fight for years
       | to overtake w3schools.
        
       | TillE wrote:
       | I've noticed the same thing recently: Googling for common
       | programming stuff (in a language I don't normally use) will turn
       | up results that usually answer the question, but they're bloated
       | with preamble and filler.
       | 
       | I wonder how far Google could get with manual curation. Like if
       | they said, these sites (eg, Stack Overflow, official
       | documentation) have been around forever and have high-quality
       | content, let's crank up their rankings for the appropriate
       | classes of queries. That has its own problems, but it's gotta be
       | better than the status quo.
        
         | bun_at_work wrote:
         | The thing is, even if Google _could_ they aren't incentivized
         | to. They are more incentivized to show the ad-ridden content,
         | because often the websites are using Google itself to display
         | the ads.
         | 
         | In the case described in the linked post, Google potentially
         | benefits twice, financially. Why would they want to reduce
         | their profit by showing the more relevant posts (those that
         | quickly get to the answer)?
         | 
         | I don't know though, maybe StackOverflow also uses Google for
         | their ads, but a quick looks suggests they simply have less ads
         | than the results above them in the article's example search.
        
       | aaron695 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | johnfn wrote:
       | I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think one of
       | the most underrated advantages of ChatGPT is simply that it says
       | everything in exactly the same tone and style. When I google for
       | things, who knows what page I'm going to land on. It could be
       | full of ads. It could have tons of content I have to parse before
       | I get to what I care about, as said in OP. It could be written
       | clunkily, in a way that's hard to parse, or it could be littered
       | with spelling mistakes. It could be overly verbose, or explain
       | things that I don't need to know. All this creates high variance
       | in the actual time it takes to parse out what I need.
       | 
       | When I ask ChatGPT it'll always give me the answer in a few
       | paragraphs, and it's always written in the exact same way. What a
       | boon!
       | 
       | > How is this the number one link on Google?
       | 
       | It's the number one link on Google because one proxy Google has
       | to know if you got a result is that you lingered on the page for
       | a long time. This is also, tangentially, why cooking recipe
       | websites are so long. If you bounce immediately off a website,
       | Google thinks that means that you didn't find it to be useful.
       | ChatGPT does not have this problem.
        
         | iambateman wrote:
         | It used to be why Recipe websites were so long, but that's no
         | longer the case.
         | 
         | There's three reasons...(1) ad revenue, (2) there's a belief
         | that the extended life stories confer copyright to recipes,
         | which otherwise cannot be copyrighted and (3) everyone does it.
         | 
         | Source: I made SimplifyRecipe.com, which requires diving into
         | the minutiae of recipe authors.
         | 
         | Otherwise, I agree that getting consistent results from GPT is
         | super useful.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | Yes, who cares if the answer is hallucinated, as long as it's
         | easy to read and stated in clear, confident-sounding language.
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | I agree in general, but part of what makes ChatGPT great for
           | coding is that I can test the answers. They either work or
           | they don't.
        
             | latexr wrote:
             | > They either work or they don't.
             | 
             | Or they work for a selection of cases but not others. Or
             | they seem to work in a limited number of tests but aren't
             | truly doing the right thing. Or they do work but have a
             | security flaw that makes your service vulnerable.
             | 
             | Coding solutions have tradeoffs and subtleties which go
             | beyond "it did the thing right a couple of times when I ran
             | it". If that's all it took to verify code is good, there
             | wouldn't be any bugs; you can test code a person writes
             | too.
        
               | Wowfunhappy wrote:
               | Yes, ChatGPT can't do all the work for you. You have to
               | know how to test the code thoroughly and think of edge
               | cases and performance tradeoffs and all those other
               | subtleties.
               | 
               | But contrast this with other types of information. If I
               | ask ChatGPT "how hot is the surface of the sun?" and it
               | answers "15 million degrees Fahrenheit", I have zero
               | ability to verify that information. As a result, I don't
               | find ChatGPT useful for most informational searches,
               | except the ones related to coding.
               | 
               | (The example answer is wrong according to
               | https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html,
               | albeit in a way that I could see potentially confusing an
               | LLM.)
        
         | renegat0x0 wrote:
         | The real problem is ad business. If chatgpt becomes monopoly we
         | will see many ad banners. After several years of monopoly we
         | will see chatgpt anders lacking so that you will have to see
         | more banners in response. After some time quality of answers
         | will depend on the amount of money you put into your chatgpt
         | subscription. You will not be able to go back to google. There
         | will be no google any more.
        
           | EA-3167 wrote:
           | The only really workable solution imo is that search
           | companies need to make their money on searches, not ads;
           | something like Kagi I guess. Any perverse incentive is
           | inimical to a really good search engine.
           | 
           | I think the internet is going to start to stratify into paid
           | and "free" tiers going forward, and honestly it's about
           | goddamned time.
        
         | Maxion wrote:
         | Especially for these type of simple syntax questions that
         | autocomplete or copilot isn't getting. It's so so quick to ask
         | ChatGPT for the answer, rather than finding the documentation
         | for the thing you're looking for and parsing it.
        
         | eastbound wrote:
         | Can't wait until they (actually) monetize ChatGPT and maximize
         | the time spent on the website, like Google. Can't wait until
         | ChatGPT says that, when their grandma went to school, they too
         | needed to mentally add 26 + 13, and the teacher would always
         | frown on pupils when they gave the answer 31.
         | 
         | ChatGPT's strength is that it's new on the market, needs to
         | build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean,
         | devoid of gaming.
         | 
         | Same as Google, up until 2008.
        
           | johnfn wrote:
           | I'm not convinced this is the case. Unlike Google, ChatGPT
           | has clear monetization channels which are not advertising,
           | like ChatGPT+, which is already doing very well, and it's
           | easy to imagine further channels which allow access to
           | specialized models. Additionally, unlike Google, you can only
           | really get away with making your service crappy when you have
           | such a strong moat that it's still significantly better than
           | the competition. The only moat OpenAI has is its model, which
           | is proving a lot easier to replicate than Google circa 2008's
           | moat.
        
             | add-sub-mul-div wrote:
             | Cable TV has a clear monetization channel, surely there are
             | no ads there.
        
           | upmostly wrote:
           | They have. We pay $20 per month to get priority access.
           | 
           | A lot more than I've ever paid to use the Google search
           | engine.
           | 
           | Paid for service over ads is the new way forward.
        
         | penjelly wrote:
         | even the fact that you always go to that same window, with the
         | same format and interface lowers cognitive load imo. Of course
         | chatgpt hasnt been a magic bullet for me yet, but it definitely
         | eases the pain of developing things outside your usual perview
        
         | radres wrote:
         | Definitely the fact that I am not going to deal with ads when I
         | am looking for something is a gamechanger.
        
       | dragonwriter wrote:
       | Better title: "not knowing what a table of contents is costs you
       | time" (the one article that this entire piece rests on has a
       | table of contents at the top, but the author counts page down
       | keystrokes to get to a heading that you could get to from there
       | with one click.)
        
       | altcognito wrote:
       | Cheat sheets are the best for this sort of thing. Every language
       | probably ought to have a set of them.
        
       | IshKebab wrote:
       | > And I know the reason - ads and SEO.
       | 
       | Wrong! At least in the case of Python. The main reason Python
       | search results are so bad is that the official documentation is
       | _really badly organised_. People literally can 't find the
       | answers they want there because everything is on one mega-page
       | with a bunch of unrelated concepts. So Google ranks it badly.
       | 
       | The author's example ("python iterate over dictionary") is a good
       | one. I tried that search - doc.python.org is _NOT IN THE RESULTS_
       | (at least for the first 3 pages).
       | 
       | It's not hard to see why - the closest answer I could find is
       | here:
       | 
       | https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#loopi...
       | 
       | but it's on a page that also talks about lists, tuples,
       | assignment expressions, nested list comprehensions, etc. No
       | wonder people don't want to read all that!
       | 
       | And it doesn't even answer the question what `for x in somedict:`
       | does - for that you have to go to this mega-page:
       | 
       | https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesmapping
       | 
       | and see that `iter()` is "a shortcut for iter(d.keys())".
       | 
       | Compare it to Rust "rust iterate over hashmap".
       | 
       | The 4th result is https://doc.rust-
       | lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm...
       | 
       | It's just about hashmaps. The example at the top has iteration
       | over one.
        
       | earthboundkid wrote:
       | Real Python is a great site. Why are we reading someone who can't
       | tell good content from bad content?
        
       | acaloiar wrote:
       | I've been using Kagi [1] for both technical and non-technical
       | searches recently, and not having to mentally filter ads out of
       | results is a delight. The top result is almost always very good.
       | 
       | [1] https://kagi.com
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | raybb wrote:
         | Also love being able to prioritize or downrank sites in results
        
       | muscaw wrote:
       | For cli calls, I have been using a handy website called cheat.sh
       | 
       | Basically, just go to cheat.sh/git and you get a list of useful
       | examples for how to use the git command.
       | 
       | I have it mapped to a small bash function so that I can just type
       | 'cheat git' and I get the content right in my terminal.
        
         | S04dKHzrKT wrote:
         | A similar project is tldr.
         | 
         | https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
         | 
         | https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer
        
       | dvt wrote:
       | This is literally above the fold[1]. The Python website linked is
       | actually pretty good, what a dumb click-baity blog post. I'll
       | probably get downvoted by the "I use ChatGPT daily and it 15x'ed
       | my productivity" crowd, but every time I have this debate, I get
       | zero salient examples.
       | 
       | [1] https://imgur.com/a/KFJ9DrB
        
         | Hikikomori wrote:
         | While search results have degraded OP certainly picked a bad
         | example.
        
         | WarOnPrivacy wrote:
         | _This post may contain erotic or adult imagery. By continuing,
         | you acknowledge that you are 18+ years of age._
         | 
         | I am declining your promise of erotic imagery but thanks for
         | thinking of me.
        
           | Vecr wrote:
           | That's a boilerplate disclaimer. There's nothing in the image
           | other than a screenshot of a webpage showing only text.
        
       | LatticeAnimal wrote:
       | Should have 2020 in the title
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | buy a book, use the index
        
       | cleandreams wrote:
       | This is SEO. I read a food blogger on this. She had to make her
       | recipes long, long, long with lots of fluff or it wouldn't get a
       | good ranking.
       | 
       | Google should stop this. It's just going to make ChatGPT more
       | attractive.
        
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