Ask HN: What are some keywords you track everyday?

"Alcubierre": to track progress on warp drives

mkl · 4 years ago

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

suranyami · 4 years ago

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.

hjkl0 · 4 years ago

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 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"

xmonkee · 4 years ago

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

timoteostewart · 4 years ago

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.

scottmcdot · 4 years ago

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

timoteostewart · 4 years ago

Good call!

silisili · 4 years ago

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!

verhovsky · 4 years ago

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

klysm · 4 years ago

Including this?

It emailed me my comment, yea

KoenDG · 4 years ago

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

Neat to look over these threads every now and then.

themodelplumber · 4 years ago

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...

dmor · 4 years ago

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

defrost · 4 years ago

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.

canadiantim · 4 years ago

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...

lalwanivikas · 4 years ago

How/where do you track keywords?

LeonTheremin · 4 years ago

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

t0bia_s · 4 years ago

For example?

lothar_m · 4 years ago

This ^

beatthatflight · 4 years ago

"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.