rickdeveloper

I have seen the term "zero player game" used for this. There is even a short Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-player_game.

There's an iPhone/Android app that does something similar: https://stats.fm

Here's one that goes from right to left:

  (2**(64 - i)) & (t*10)

Great read.

I think this is a good place to reference Tiny Projects [0], which to me are a manifestation of what is described here.

[0] https://tinyprojects.dev/

He live streamed himself writing a lot of that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwmke957ki4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZpMMDvB1M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAyw7OAcXDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb2KwcnDKrk

The author did an AMA on Reddit 9 months ago that I think is relevant here: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

In particular:

How they remain free: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

On his salary: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll add that in a future version.

Author here. Thanks for submitting this project! I made this because I thought it would be funny if publisher websites had SciHub links that look like they belong on the website [0]. I didn't know about the bookmarklet when I started this. Maybe I should have used that instead. Oh well.

I'm currently waiting for Mozilla to accept this into the add on store. If that passes, I will submit it to Chrome as well.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/GP7rm43

Author here! It’s currently in review for Firefox and if that passes I’ll submit it to chrome as well.

I think a lot of this is due to Google both owning search and the ads on the websites (AdSense). There’s an incentive for them to prioritize click farms (and other sites filled with their ads). I think in general there may be a correlation between the number of ads on a site and its usefulness to me, which is inverse to its usefulness to google.

I’m curious what would happen if those products were split up into 2 separate companies.

NP :) It's exciting to have people using & commenting on something I build.

I will look into fine tuning it for my needs. It is an interesting approach to a very annoying problem.

If a premium version were available with a customizable whitelist, would you pay for that? The API is around $5 / 1000 searches so it would cost about the same.

Good idea! Would you pay for a premium version where you can customize the whitelist (and additional features) if it were available? Bing charges around $5 per 1000 searches, so I guess it would cost about the same. (Google's API is limited to 10K searches / day, even when paid)

Yes! Maybe I'll build a premium customizable version out of it. Do you think that'd be useful? Bing charges around $5 per 1000 searches, so the premium version would be around the same (with caching covering hosting, maybe).

If only I could get NTS to whitelist my domain name

There is a form [0] on the about page that allows people to suggest websites to add :)

p.s. OP this is amazing! Would love an article explaining any backstory and details on how you made this (or setup / configured it).

Thanks! I think this is gonna be disappointing from an engineering perspective, and certainly not article worthy :) As further explained in my other comments, the website is basically a wrapper around google programmable search [1] where I whitelisted a set of sites I found useful personally, plus some suggestions from other users. It's really easy to set up.

As to why, I will quote some other comments of mine:

"I built this website a couple of months ago because I was annoyed by how hard it was to find useful things on Google."

"to find things more easily while programming or studying (I study biology, cs and ai; and philosophy in my free time, so expect the best results for queries related to those subjects). ... When I'm not doing those things, I just use Google or DDG because they have better results for day-to-day queries."

Let me know if you have other questions!

[0] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdf8lAoShQz7Wjl9h60...

[1] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview

Here's a pastebin of the list I made yesterday [0] in a format that allows uploading to your own instance of programmable search. I have updated a few things since (like removing w3schools :)).

[0] https://pastebin.com/qLC0wQ0t

Thanks! Yes, it's configurable in a private dashboard.

I created a pastebin with all sites at the time of writing this comment if that's helpful: https://pastebin.com/qLC0wQ0t. If you're looking to create your own search engine, go here: https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/cse/all.

"It's a feature not a bug" (TM)

The site uses a whitelist of URLs to (attempt to) keep results relevant to science and programming. In the context in which I'm using this search engine, I have no interest in (reviews on) 3 hole punches. (That's not to say I never do, but in that case I'd use Google, Reddit, etc.) The fact that results don't show up here means that they also won't show up when I'm not looking for them, which is 100% of the time when I'm using this search engine. That's a plus for me personally.

Best case would be to have relevant results in a single search engine, but that's not what I intended when building this site.

Thanks!

Ads are added automatically by Google. The whole thing is little more than a wrapper around the 'Programmable Search Element Control API' which is an HTML element you can just insert into any site, like an iframe. Unfortunately this is the only way to make Programmable Search available at scale as the API is restricted to either 10 sites or 10K queries / day, even when paid!

There is a paid version for the HTML plugin, but that would leak the API key and so it wouldn't work as a business.

There is an option to get a share of the revenue generated by a search engine. Maybe it's time for me to figure out how that works.

I was thinking of making a hosted, ad free, customizable version where people upload their own keys. Not sure if people would like that.

As a side-note, it's super easy to remove ads with 1 line of CSS, but I wasn't sure how Google would feel about that so it's not in the online version. TamperMonkey is an extension that allows people to insert their own CSS on different websites. Hmm.

You can view all offerings in the docs [0].

[0] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview#su...

(obviously: this is subjective, so what's significant to me may not be to you.)

Honestly I just created this search engine for myself to find things more easily while programming or studying (I study biology, cs and ai; and philosophy in my free time, so expect results the best results for queries related to those subjects). I think those subjects also appeal to the HN audience, that's why I shared it here. When I'm not doing those things, I just use Google or DDG because they have better results for day-to-day queries.

That being said, I'm definitely interested in helping improve other people's search as well (reason I'm posting at all), so let me know if you have suggestions for sites to add!

Glad you're interested in the source code!

As explained in my other comment, this website is a wrapper around google programmable search. The actual searching happens on Google servers, and I can see why people have problems with that. The code you see on the website is the same as the repo, though. It's actually hosted by GitHub! You can verify this by opening the web inspector in any browser or looking at the `.github.io` portion of the URL.

You can learn more about Programmable Search here: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview. NoTrashSearch uses the 'Programmable Search Element Control API', which is documented here: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/element and can be used with very little code!

I built this website a couple of months ago because I was annoyed by how hard it was to find useful things on Google. As "Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories" [0] is currently #1 on the front page I figured I'd share this project again. I hope it's useful to some people.

'No Trash Search' is very focussed on STEM and not "for daily use". It's surprisingly good when you're looking for certain kinds of information. Under the hood it's little more than a programmable search engine [1] with a whitelist of ~120 sites.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136

[1] http://programmablesearchengine.google.com

I actually created "my own search engine" because of this: notrashsearch.github.io.

It uses Google search tech under the hood (which I've found superior to other search engines), but filters results with a white list. It's only ~100 sites long & very focussed on STEM, but the results are surprisingly good.

If anyone has suggestions for site to add, please let me know!

If you want "spies" to use it, you don't want them connecting to known gateways.

The best place to hide a tree is in a forest.

If you have both 'normal' users and spies connecting to this host, who will tell who's the spy?

Where?

Is MIT truly beyond saving?

I really liked Digital Computer Electronics by Albert Paul Malvino.

Related thread from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086290.

Off topic, but that podcast is amazing. Stories, guests, production quality, narration, music, everything. It's one of the only worth listening to at 1x speed. I highly recommend it.

Related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891316.

~This is a really bad idea in my opinion because the total cost of operating the App Store would be equally distributed amongst all apps, which hurts small developers and benefits big corporations disproportionately. An app like Facebook, which is downloaded billions of times, does cost Apple significantly more than a small indie app used by, say, thousands. You can't get around that. Having the small indie app paying for Facebook (indirectly) is a lot worse than the current system. Worse, Apple is unlikely to decrease its profit margin. This would mean small developers and big corps pay an equal share in the profits Apple is going to make.~

~A better idea would be to have a free tier and take a percentage above that. The first $1000 are a lot more valuable to the creator than everything beyond that.~

edit: OP said per download, misread it. That makes sense.

I made a camera version of this a few years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEUrMbx_uac) using QuickDraw to train the model. I generated thousands of paper-like backgrounds (grayish noise) and pasted the raw drawings on top of it to generate JPEGs.