Top all-time · #13631
Kyle Piira
Personal blog · kylepiira.comcultureprogramming
Kyle Piira's personal blog at kylepiira.com covers culture and programming. Since 2020, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Which Search Engine Has the Best Results”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kyle Piira's posts comparing search engine result quality, including one evaluation finding Ecosia 'better' than Google and DuckDuckGo, and a guide to converting Audible aax files with FFmpeg.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I am a graduate from the University of Massachusetts and former founder of the Hoxly Corporation. I primarily have experience with the Python programming language including many of it's most popular libraries and ecosystems such as SciPy (namely NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib), Django, Flask, and Ker
Most-linked posts?
- Which Search Engine Has the Best Results3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-02-12
- /2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-drm/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-16
What Hacker News says?
One evaluation found that Ecosia is 'better' than Google and Duck: https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
Comment linking /2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/
on “Firefox is showing the way back to a world that’s private by default”Submitted Why I Quit Using Google as a story · 378 points
HN discussionIn case you didn't know, you can use FFmpeg to convert Audible aax files to DRM-free MP3/AAC/whatever [0] (scroll down for FFmpeg instructions). This is useful if for some reason you want to archive them or play them in an app that doesn't constantly change its UI and bombard you with ads. [0]: https://www.kylepiira.com/2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-dr...
Comment linking /2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-drm/
on “FFmpeg 4.3”Submitted Which Search Engine Has the Best Results as a story · 17 points
HN discussionYou can use this to get your activation bytes from Audible servers: https://github.com/inAudible-NG/audible-activator Or this, to crack the activation bytes in an existing .aax file, offline: https://github.com/inAudible-NG/tables Both methods are easy. It's then a case of using FFmpeg with an -activation_bytes parameter to convert to MP3 or whatever (or just remux into an M4A/M4B without transcoding). Tutorial here…
Comment linking /2019/05/12/how-to-break-audible-drm/
on “The harmful impact of Audible-exclusive audiobooks”Submitted Spotify is trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish open podcasting as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is YaCy which has pretty terrible results but is P2P. There used to be a P2P search engine called FAROO that was better but seems to have been shutdown. I wrote a blog post comparing search results quality earlier this year. YaCy came in last, even behind Cliqz. https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
Comment linking /2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/
on “Cliqz is shutting down”Submitted Which Search Engine Has the Best Results as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are search engines that value your privacy. Qwant https://www.qwant.com/ Ecosia https://www.ecosia.org/ and Start Page https://www.startpage.com/ This page may also help... https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
Comment linking /2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/
on “Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam”Submitted Which Search Engine Has the Best Results as a story · 1 points
HN discussion