Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but I think you are vastly underestimating both the accuracy and benefit of branch prediction. Yes, CPU's track that much about branches. Your suspicion that this is false is misguided. Here's Dan Luu's 2017 overview: https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/.
Given the title "Search Results Gone Wrong", I'd like to take this opportunity to try to shame Kagi into fixing the search results for the "More results" feature. This simple feature is broken in that it often gives you repeats of the same initial results it gave. That is, instead of giving you "More results", it gives you a lot of "Same results".
I reported this as a bug about 6 months ago, and was quickly told it was planned to be fixed. But it hasn't been fixed. I checked in again a few weeks ago to see if there was any progress, and apparently they've given up because it is too hard: "Apologies, seems I forgot to update the thread. Unfortunately it is in fact trickier than it looks to dedupe these results. Mainly this is a result of how we work with results from upstream sources, and deduping is heavily complicated by caching issues."
Kagi, you're generally great. I'm usually happy to be a paying customer. But I refuse to believe that deduping a list of URL's is actually too hard for you. Maybe I'm one of the few users who actually cares about searching for web pages, but for my use cases my search results would be much better if you actually gave me more results when I click on "More results". How is this not considered core functionality for a search engine? Please fix this!
I feel like that is either hubris (they are overconfident in their ranking) or they have some other reason. Now you bring this up, and it seems to fit with the same kind of thing.
It reminds me of this article which brings up a bunch of suspicious things about search engines, and talks about how weird it is that so many engines limit how far you can go into the results: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
Somewhat related, Reddit has been broken for me in a very similar way for more than a year now. Whenever I scroll down to load more pages, it will populate with about 80% the same threads as it loaded on previous pages. Over and over, such that by the time I’m on page 6 or so, I will have 6 of the exact same thread.
Really stupid bug that probably only happens with old.Reddit or RES or something. But it’s nice in that it keeps me off of Reddit I guess.
Common bug for caching lists that are reordering all the time.
Unlikely to be fixed though since it causes you to very quickly skip the repeat content (without having to serve you more than headlines) and see more ads. The "bug" multiplies the value they can get from each post which is a very important metric especially as llm slop has started to destroy perceived value from random posts from strangers (reddits only resource).
I'm not saying they introduced it on purpose the way Google intentionally showed bad search results to encourage a second query but I'm not confident that fixing it will be high on the priority list until it makes people leave the site.
> They know I'll be net healthier with the vaccine, therefore more profitable to them.
How do you square this with the fact that in the US the same profit-minded insurance company is limited to a fixed profit margin based on the amount of claims paid? By law, they need to set their rates such that they pay out at least 80% (or 85% for some markets) of the premiums they collect. Practically the only way for them to make more money in the long term is to pay out more in the short term.
Personally, I'm not sure how to answer this question. Over time, insurance companies benefit more when medical costs for their customers are higher, not when they are lower. Maybe it's that they actually think that keeping you alive and paying premiums longer is better for their bottom line than having you die quickly? But I don't think it's as simple as thinking that they benefit more if you don't get sick.
I notice this paper is from April 2025. Do you know if this group has done any updates in the intervening 6 months to show how well their model seems to be working? For example, are they able to determine yet in Table 2 what portion of the costs are being borne by consumers versus businesses?
Trump has sown chaos by altering tariffs on a whim, and that messes up the economy worse than predictably high tariffs. Businesses can function under high tariffs, but if tariffs change and there is constant uncertainty, low-margin businesses can make profits only by accident.
After a quick glance at your submissions, you seem to be submitting things mostly to promote your own projects or your own writings. Posting things primarily to generate traffic to them generally isn't accepted here.
The "AI Guide" looks to have been automatically marked as dead, probably because so many of your earlier posts were flagged to death. I vouched to revive it because it seems like it might be of interest, but it's still another self-submission.
Overall, I don't know. It's on the edge. My guess would be that HN might not be a great fit if your goal is primarily self-promotion. You might email 'hn@ycombinator.com' and ask for their opinion.
Yes, the actual refrigeration and heating cycles are always based on compressing and decompressing a gas. But the gasses used differ based on temperature range, and further you can have air to air, air to water, or water to water for the heat transfer. The overall costs are the system can be very different based on whether you have a split unit that requires a single wall penetration, a central unit in the basement with ducting, or a geothermal system that requires digging deep trenches or wells. It makes for difficult conversation when some people are talking only about air to air minisplits when others are including all of these and more.
While technically true, I think that's in tropical Africa. Are there also diseases that they carry in North America? Even without disease, I tend to agree with the OP that black flies are worse than mosquitoes, and don't think I've ever heard of anyone getting a disease from a black fly bite in the US or Canada.
You're mostly correct, but apparently not totally :) - I did think that it was further north, but the human cases are usually only in south and central america and africa.
Nonetheless, there are some.
