Ask HN: What are some keywords you track everyday? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some keywords you track everyday?

60 pointsfrozencell64 comments

What are some keywords (ie. "gnu", "word embeddings", "parenting", `${your_country}`) you track everyday and do you only use HN or HNAlgolia to watch them?

I found keyword tracking as useful as keeping a RSS list.

View on HN

I get an email from https://f5bot.com/ every few weeks when someone mentions https://curlconverter.com/ on HN or Reddit

Including this?

It emailed me my comment, yea

One of those things I wouldn't have thought to look for.

Neat to look over these threads every now and then.

Google Play Books...Keywords: Science, math, history, collection, classic, nuclear, atomic, pulp, cold war, cinema, Japan, North Korea, Soviet, comic, programming, Linux.

Settings: Use the app or this might not work. Set filter to Price Drops, usually constrained to $2 max for the first run. Make the deals come to you.

If you don't set it to filter for price drops there is a ton of noise with the signal, especially with classic texts.

Add to wishlist as you go. Then review later for purchasing. If there is anything looking amazing at first sight, buy it right then because the price drop sometimes disappears after you navigate away (!). Repeat until your library is full of amazing book deals with pretty covers and interesting titles...this works way better and faster IMO than shopping or browsing Kindle.

Realistically I search a different keyword every day and let a few days pass between same keyword searches.

For HN I have a different set of keywords but thought I'd share this since a lot of us are readers...

This is a fun question, and makes me reflect on how little I play in novel or whimsical ways with search engines anymore. Came to this thread for some inspiration, I hope others will chime in

I routinely pull "Technical Report" PDF's from https://www.sedar.com/new_docs/all_new_pc_filings_en.htm and generate summaries.

Eg: today Search Minerals Inc. released a Preliminary Economic Assessment on a rare earth project.

That gets tied into a GIS database of other projects along with timelines, tonnages, etc.

Do you have a name for your project or is any of it accessible to others? Have you automated parts of it? Always thought about doing something similar but never got around to it

Call it my "at home" continuation of a project I worked on 14+ years ago, now licenced and onsold to S&P Global as [1].

There's also a component of tracking every mineral related lease globally ( ~1.3 million in Canada alone) and tying those into public releases on the Canadian, London, New York, South African, Australian, etc exchanges .. and a fair bit of legwork in China, Russia, elsewhere.

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

How/where do you track keywords?

This ^

Web scraping that creates RSS feeds for any page with CSS selectors.

For example?

"Alcubierre": to track progress on warp drives

You track that every day? How much daily progress is there on something that will likely remain impossible forever?

FWIW, seems perfectly reasonable to have keyword tracking for something that has very little activity.

I understood this to be asking about something like a Google alert. I could have one for my name, even if it never gets any hits.

The daily part doesn’t really matter much, unless by “tracking” you mean “manually searching”.

I don't track it EVERY DAY, obviously. Just have keyword searches on Google Alerts.

And yes, if you were talking 10 years ago, when I started that keyword search, Alcubierre drives were seen as "not implementable even if we could use all the energy in the universe and it would have to be exotic matter with negative mass".

That's since been refined to "Only implementable with all the energy contained in a solar system, but still needing negative mass" about 5 years ago and then "Implementable with the energy contained in a gas-giant planet, like Jupiter, and not needing negative mass exotic matter".

So, you know, maybe not remain impossible forever?

There seems to be slow-but-steady progress happening over the decade scale, and I'm happy to be alerted to that when it happens.

The only downside to Google Alerts with this is that there are a lot of pop-science sites that trot out a "warp drives: might they be real?" article whenever it's a slow news week where they get an intern to gather up a bunch of links from wikipedia and google and regurgitate it into generic meaningless content. I don't have an answer for how to weed out those false positives. Keywords are a poor tool for the job here.

"flight sale". I'm constantly looking anyway and doing searches, but if some news outlet is reporting an Aussie-relevant one, I need to hop on that right away.

I use Google Alerts. It's decent enough I suppose. Checking, it looks like I currently have 27 alerts reflecting various interests and avocations:

    "blend|portmanteau words"

    "bryan garner" modern usage

    "christian jargon"

    "christian platitudes"

    "christian slang"

    "christian-ese"

    "christianease"

    "christianese dictionary"

    "dictionary of christianese"

    "humor in the bible"

    "humor of Jesus"

    "jesus laughing"

    "jesus sense of humor"

    "jesus's sense of humor"

    "lexicographer|lexicographers|lexicography|lexicographical"

    "mixed blessings" "tim stewart"

    "mixed blessings" dictionary stewart

    "portmanteaux|portmanteau|portmanteaus" blend words

    "terri bednarz" "humor in the gospels"

    “Did Jesus laugh”

    “Jesus laughed”

    “Tim Stewart” Christianese

    christianese

    evangelical.buzzword | christian.buzzword | church.buzzword | pentecostal.buzzword | emerging.church.buzzword | charismatic.buzzword | protestant.buzzword

    evangelical.cliché | christian.cliché | church.cliché | pentecostal.cliché | emerging.church.cliché | charismatic.cliché | protestant.cliché

    humor "hebrew bible"

    radday brenner comic "hebrew bible"

Thanks for the tip. I've been on the internet for nearly 30 years, used Google since inception, and this is the first time I've heard of Google Alerts or even knew it was a thing!

Okay I need to know what's with the jesus laughing thing?

Hahaha! Right?! The Bible says twice that Jesus wept and nowhere does it say he laughed. I think some people have in mind that Jesus was mostly dour and stern, even morose. Whether he had a sense of humor and how he might have expressed it is a fascinating question for me. I think some of the things he said and taught might have a tinge of humor to them. Like when he called Peter a Rock, was that him ribbing Peter that he was a bit of a blockhead? I wonder what things he said that got people chuckling and guffawing. Maybe one day I’ll write a book. I am sitting on didjesuslaugh.com. :-)

Interestingly there is some scholarship on this question. I myself would probably write for a popular audience though, maybe with a bibliography in the back.

You might want to add "humour" to those variations too.

Good call!

* clearance sale $myTown

* closing sale $myTown

* going out of business sale $myTown

* everything must go $myTown

* loft apartment wood beams $neighbourhoodWhereIWantToLive

* $myGrandmasName $warThatMyGrandmaFoughtIn

The last one is because my grandma's service was significant enough that sometimes articles and blog posts are made about her, but a lot of the information gets fabricated or twisted in order to create a narrative of a sexy femme fatale. When this happens, I like to show up and correct it.

Interesting! Have the sale alerts ever netted you something of interest? I imagine one could have a decent side business flipping goods.

That's a good point, but actually not how I use the alert. I only use the alert so I can get deals for myself. It's usually clothing or home goods stores that show up on those alerts, and I have definitely got plenty of good stuff for super cheap, so it's of interest to me at least.

I used to have Google Alerts to scan for security/reliability news of my home's IoT products. Ultimately the firehose of blogspam and other false positives became too much. I then deleted the Google Alerts and got rid of most of my IoT products, which solved the problem.

If there's a low-volume mailing list out there for IoT security disclosures, I'd love to find it. Even better if users could sign up for the specific products they own. Could probably expand this to all kinds of software, hardware, etc... sign up with your specific model and/or version number, receive tailored alerts when urgent security/reliability news emerges. Sort of like "haveibeenpwned" but for all the software and devices in your life.

Sorry for the tangent, but I'm secretly hoping this already exists and someone will reply with a link, or someone else will get inspired and create it :)

Wouldn’t stuff like that end up as a CVE?

Probably a lot of it, yes. I'd also be on the lookout for things like unplanned outages, data breaches, and product end-of-life announcements. Filtering the CVE feed for specific products would be one step towards making an all-in-one alert service.

When I hear of some new promising technology - a battery for example, search for it in Google News, setup an alert, and then forget about it.

I got this tip from someone on HN, I wish I remember who, but it's been great: I'm able to ignore 99% of the newly hyped technology without missing out.

I use it for new promising medical treatments as well.

When feasible I subscribe to RSS feeds by keyword(s) e.g. job openings by technology and city, one feed to multiple subreddits grouped by topics. I'm in progress to curate some inspiring RSS feeds to HN and Stack Overflow.

Mostly obscure things that dont have a massive interest or following. Other topics with more following tends to land on HN Front page or other form of social media feeds.

Crystal ( The Language )

JPEG XL

VVC ( The Video Codec )

CHERI ( Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions )

> do you only use HN or HNAlgolia to watch them?

This hints that you mean keywords on HN and not on the entire web? I think the title should be updated to reflect this.

I just started tracking the word "Autodromo" on the WatchRecon app---Autodromo's a watchmaker whose designs were inspired by Italian racecars. I'm interested in getting my hands on one of their Intereuropa watches, and because it was discontinued I'm hopeful that I can get it on a site like WatchRecon.

“emacs” and “org-mode”

I watch a few people on Hacker News, using hnapp.com to translate an author search into an RSS feed.

Example: Nick Janetakis has a ton of useful youtube videos:

http://hnapp.com/?q=author%3Anickjj

YouTube provides an RSS feed for channels.

An example:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCq6nWQ3...

Names of Top competitors of ours

Why not just focus on you?

This is a joke right?

Checking in on competitors is one thing, monitoring their every move seems borderline obsessive to the point you're not focusing on your own product roadmap.

I wouldn't want Google alerts about competition. That feels like paranoia.

edit: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1109220781035307009

> I wouldn't want Google alerts about competition. That feels like paranoia.

Just as with many other jobs and roles, this might not be what many (or even most) people would want to do, but having somebody (even if the kind of person who would be a good fit for it is rare) do it would still be a good thing for organisation as a whole.

Just focusing on yourself is fine if you're the underdog. If you're the incumbent, and you don't know what your competitors are doing, someone will eat your lunch.

https://www.google.com/alerts

"AI Test Kitchen App"

"personal A.I."

AI, LaMDA

(my personal email address)

geomagnetic, pulse, magnetic, field, pole

Ilya Lichtenstein

jack maller

paragraf

solar, flare, sun, storm, strong, severe, extreme

not google but on craigslist cars: "lotus", "lancia", "scca", "roll cage", "engine swap", "drift", "formula"

"nasa sls"

"gun violence"

Plus the name and relevant keywords of my employer, or, when I'm job hunting, prospective employers.

And my own name of course.

I use Google Alerts, but I'd love to find a better service.

“JavaScript malware” using Google Scholar and Google Alert.

“Linux macOS” - love reading about desktops and workflows

Google alert: my name, the names of familiy, friends and certain people. Also the village name I grew up in so I know what little going on there.

Just for completeness, I will mention the old saw—check the obituaries to see if your name is in it! Har-har

I run syften.com, I help people track keywords for a living.

Ask me anything!

"Havana Syndrome"

"Microwave Weapon"

"Silent Speech" Interface

"Lisp"

I don't have a keywords I look for, but I do have the opposite - a blacklist of words I block in my RSS reader for news sites. I only add word when it became obsession (by news sites, not by me) to a point that there are no longer news but only the topics the news are obsessed with. I read news to get, you know, news, not something that was beaten to death hundredths of times. So here's the blacklist:

529, 5g, 737 max, aboriginal, abortion, abortions, absentee, afghan, afghan interpreters, afghanistan, afghans, against asian, against asians, ahmaud arbery, amazon fire, amazon fires, amazon is burning, amazon is on fire, amazon rainforest, animal populations, anti-racism, anti-semitic, anti-vaxxer, anti-vaxxers, antibody, arctic, armenia, armenian, asian man, asian widow, asian woman, assisted dying, autism, autist, autistic, autists, azerbaijan, azerbaijan-armenia, azerbaijani, b.1.1.529, baffling neurological illness, ballot, baloch, banning nuclear, banning plastic, bannon, bans travel, barrier reef, batteries, battery, bed occupancy, begum, beheaded, beheading, beyond meat, biden, biological diversity, black lives, black man, black woman, blake shooting, blender, blm, bolsonaro, booster shot, booster shots, boris johnson, boy scouts, boys scouts, breonna, brexit, bushfires, butterflies, california fire, california fires, cambridge analytica, cancer, cannabis, carbon, carbon capture, cascadia, cbd, cbds, cdc, child pornography, child sexual abuse, china, china-india, chinese, chlorinated, circumcise, circumcision, circumcisions, civil war, climate, climate change, climate-change, confederate, contraception, contraceptives, conversion therapy, cop, cops, coral reef, corals, corona virus, coronal mass, coronavirus, counterprotests, covid, covid-19, covid-19-related, covid-negative, covid-positive, covid19, critical race theory, critically endangered, critically-endangered, cuomo, dailymail, david attenborough, ddt, dead calf, decriminalize, deforestation, delta, demonstrators, desalination, destroys planet, destruction of nature, die-off, digital currencies, digital currency, disease, djokovic, donate their organs, drought, drug resistant, drug-resistant, earthquake, earthquakes, ebola, eco disaster, ecosystem, educators, election, ellen page, elliot page, emissions, epstein, equal pay, ethiopia, euthanasia, extinction, extreme heat, extreme right, extreme-right, face masks, fascist, fascists, fauci, fda, female genial, female genital mutilation, fgm, flu, flying car, flying cars, fonseca, forced surgeries, fort hood, fossil fuels, free period products, free sanitary products, frozen land, fusion, gallons of oil, gay, gender, genocide, george floyd, ghislaine, glacial, glacier, global warming, glyphosate, golden dawn, gpt-2, gpt-3, graphene, greece extreme right, green hydrogen, greenland ice, greenland melting, guaranteed basic income, gulf stream, has mutated, hate group, hate groups, heat dome, heat domes, heat wave, heatwave, heatwaves, hemp, herd immunity, highest temperature, highest-ever temperature, hindu, hiv, homophobic, homosexual, homosexuality, hong kong, hospitalizations, hottest april, hottest august, hottest day, hottest decade, hottest december, hottest ever spring, hottest ever summer, hottest ever winter, hottest ever year, hottest february, hottest january, hottest july, hottest june, hottest march, hottest may, hottest november, hottest ocean, hottest october, hottest on record, hottest record, hottest september, hottest temperature, hottest year, huawei, hurricane, hurricanes, hurricanes, hydroxychloroquine, ice cap, ice detention, ice melt, ice sheet, ice sheets, ice shelf, iceberg, icu, ikea, illness, immigrant, immigrants, incel, incels, india-china, indigenous, inflation, influenza, insulin, iran, iranian, islamic, islamist, islamists, islamophobic, israel, israeli, jacob blake, juneteenth, kabul, kabul, karabach, karabakh, kenosha, khashoggi, kimberly guilfoyle, kremlin, kushner, l.g.b.t, lambda variant, land burns, laser fusion, lesbian, lgbt, lgbt, lgbtq, lgbtq+, lgbtqia, linkedin, lockdown, loneliness, lukashenko, magic mushrooms, magnitsky, mail sorting, mail-sorting, malaria, manafort's, marijuana, mask, masks, measles, melting glaciers, melting ice, melting of ice, menstrual, microplastics, migrant, migrants, migratory bird, migratory birds, miscarriages, mohamed, monkeypox, monsanto, mosque, mulan, mums, murder hornet, murder hornet, murder hornets, murdoch, muslim, muslims, mutant variant, myanmar, mysterious disease, mysterious illness, mysterious skin disease, mystery illness, n-word, n95, nabarima, nagorno-karabach, nagorno-karabakh, narcotics, navalnij, navalny, navid afkari, neanderthal, neanderthals, netanyahu, netanyahu, new drug, new variant, new variants, nft, no code, no-code, noon-consensual surgeries, north korea, north korean, north koreans, nuclear fusion, nuns, ocean circulation, ocean current, ocean currents, officer charged, officer's, oil drilling, oil spill, oil tanker, olympics, omicron, omicron-related, open-ai, openai, orcas, oxford attack, oxycontin, ozone hole, palestine, palestinian, palestinians, pandemic, pandora papers, pangolin, pangolins, paternity, pathogenic, pegasus, period poverty, permafrost, photovoltaic, photovoltaics, plague, planet is dying, plastic pollution, plastics, pneumonia, polar, police, polio, polluters, pollution, postal, postal union, postmaster, pregnancy, prince andrew, prince harry, protester's, protesters, protests, proud boy, proud boys, psilocybin, psychedelic, psychedelic-assisted, psychedelics, psyliosibin, puberty blocker, puberty blockers, qanon, qanon-backed, quakes, racism, ransomware, rape, raped, record temperature, record temperatures, refugee, refugees, remote workers, renewable, rents falls, right to repair, right-wing, rioters, riots, rittenhouse, rohingya's, rubella, same-sex, sars-cov-2, saudi, save nature, school reopening, school reopens, school shooting, school year, schools reopen, schools reopens, sea level rise, sec trafficking, sex abuse charges, sex assault, sex trafficker, sexism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual-harassment, shamima, single use, single use plastic, single-use, smallpox, snowden, solar cell, solar flare, solar storm, solarwind, sold children, sollar cells, south africa, southern africa, species extinction, statue, statues, students kidnapped, subduction zone, subway, subway bread, supersonic airline, supervolcano, supremacist, supremacists, taliban, tampons, tampons and pads, temperature rise, temperatures in history, temple attack, test positive, tests positive, theranos, thunberg, tiger mosquito, tiger mosquitos, tigray, tigrayan, tigrayans, tiktok, time crystal, time crystals, toxic chemicals, trans, trans boy, trans boy, trans girl, trans girl, trans man, trans man, trans men, trans people, trans woman, trans woman, trans women, transfobia, transgender, trench fever, trump, tygray, tygrayan, u k variant, ubi, uighur, uighurs, uk variant, unemployment, unidentified disease, universal basic income, universal-basic-income, unmarked graves, unvaccinated, usps, uyghur, vaccinated, vaccination, vaccinations, vaccine, vaccines, variant, variant is spreading, venezuela, vertical farm, vertical farming, vertical farms, viral, virus, volcano, volcanoes, voting, war on nature, warmest on record, warming, water shortage, water shortages, waukesha, weather disasters, web3, whale, whales, wildfire, wildfires, wildlife, wooden satellite, world war ii bomb, ww2 bomb, wwf, xinjiang, zte

Wow. It seems like you are blacklisting any current concern in the world. There are some very general terms here. With such a list, why bother and not stop reading the news altogether? It seems like you don't want to hear about anything going on. What do you expect to find in the news?

I'm surprised not to find Ukraine in this list (btw, for some reason, Firefox keeps crashing when I try to search on this comment).

> With such a list, why bother and not stop reading the news altogether?

I think they're probably going to avoid most ragebait with such a list. Not all news is political.

Because the person you're responding to is Russian and wants to keep an eye on how the invasion is going.

I'm not Russian, I'm Slovak. Before the war Putin was on the list but I removed him because I want to hear when that monster finally dies.

What about kotleba, caputova, babis...?

They are not in the news I read, no need to block them

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On your work machine, I take it?

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