Hacker News Reader

Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Google's "answers" feature was already unreliable enough when there was only one AI involved (the one picking the answers) - I remember it once said that the capacity of an Amiga floppy was 1760 KB, because the Wikipedia page it picked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga) failed to mention the capacity of the "standard" floppies and only provided a number for the (non-standard) HD floppies.

View on HN

I once googled a niche question, liked the instant answer, saw it was on HN. Clicked on it. It was me. I wrote the answer to my own question, and I guess forgot 5 years later.

Was that the "how knowledgeable person that must've been" moment for you, before you noticed? :D

I didnt even notice till I saw I couldnt do the normal upvote / save comment, then I looked at the username lol!

That's a kind of "google instant answer to my question is an article from my own blog" situation.

That reminds me of Twitter user @foone who often goes on deep dives on random tech and old chips, and on several occasions the top Google result for a chip serial number is one of their old tweets

Has happened to me on StackOverflow multiple times. Always hilarious and makes one reflect.

Had a boss who needed some obscure regex, it had 1 minor bug, he fixed it, whenever he needed it again he'd find the question.

Always fun when you go to upvote an answer you found useful, only to be told you can’t upvote your own answer… definitely a pensive moment!

I see what you did there.

Reflect. A mirror.

Is it knowledge (gleaned from the world) or just a reflection?

Well if you're looking straight at it then it's pretty obvious whether it's a mirror or not. But add a couple of filters and suddenly you're having a conversation with yourself like a crazy person.

I had a similar experience trying to find a justification for a “House rule” we use when playing Catan (aka “the penny rule”).

In trying to find a reputable source, the first result was to an HN comment… that I wrote.

The folks we were playing with were not convinced.

Thats even better than my experience lol! I was just like "WOW THIS IS COOL, but... nobody will ever google this lol" I dont even remember the question, I just know it was some shenanigans with Rust and various other languages.

How are you supposed to help it if _you’re_ the authority?

Searching for it now there's also a Reddit post mentioning it, but that might also be from you/your friends. I like that rule, but I can see it being hard to convince people to use it despite it obviously making the game more fair.

Well at least we’re talking about it now! What is the rule?

If you don't get resources in a turn (and didn't get robbed) you get a penny. You can trade pennies for resources, but the exchange rate gets worse the more victory points you have.

I once googled same question, got lead to same Reddit answer where some twat just says "google it". Ended up commenting in that thread with actual answer just so when I land there for 3rd time there is actual answer available

I had a similar experience recently. I started working for a firm that has some legacy Perl code still in service, and in the process of Googling I was presented with one of my own answers on perlmonks.org from over 20 years ago. The emotions were complicated.

This is what made me start taking notes and saving snippets in Obsidian. The number of times I googled something I struggled with and found a Reddit or other post (from myself) where I edited in my answer after getting no help was ... interesting.

One of my favorite examples was this story of someone who tried to correct the answers for how to carmalize onions. Google got the last laugh by citing the text on their page that had the exact wrong answer they were trying to debunk in the first place https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...

And since 2021, Google also places scraped Wikipedia articles from possibly shadow, low-end colleges operated by the same marketing group, higher than Wikipedia itself; despite these sites forget proper attribution to original Wikipedia texts [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...

Yeah, I remember when you searched for the Dalai Lama, and returned "Nationality: Chinese".

I remember searching for the Rainbow Bridge and learning that it connects the USA and Canada while being guarded by Heimdall, the Asgardian.

That’s pretty funny, at least.

I remember, when it was new, it was claiming that Neil Armstrong first walked on the Earth in 1969.

Search: "first baby boomer president".

Google knowledge panel's answer: "Harry S. Truman".

The correct answer is Bill Clinton, born in 1946.

Truman was president from 1945 to 1953, so he was the first president in office during the actual baby boom, when the Baby Boomers were babies. So there seems to be a connection, it's just totally the wrong one.

ChatGPT:

> The first baby boomer president of the United States is Bill Clinton. He was born on August 19, 1946, which places him within the demographic cohort known as the baby boomers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com