Hacker News Reader

agmateron Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers

> I wonder if some brands give out free stuff to "child influencers" so other kids would moan to their parents about buying the items...

See Ryan's World on Youtube for example, it's a huge industry.

agmateron Apple Maps on the web launches in beta

Agreed, but it was even more disappointing to also see the "unsupported browser" when I tried it in Safari.

agmateron TinyPod – Apple Watch case with scroll wheel

Almost gave myself a seizure trying to scroll down.

agmateron Asking an LLM to build a simple web tool

> The results are still not perfect in terms of alignment and space, but they're good enough.

CSS frameworks come in very useful for this, ask it to generate Bulma or Bootstrap valid markup.

agmateron The Programmer's Brain (2021)

The full title is:

The Programmer’s Brain: What every programmer needs to know about cognition

agmateron ChatGPT Is Down

Sorry all, I have it set as my homepage. I'll stop refreshing now, should be good soon!

agmateron Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination

Another good operator to know now is `before:2023`

agmateron The Reddits

https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/

Not sure if this list all, but should be a good start.

agmateron The Reddits

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/load-reddit-i...

This solved that for me, but yeah it seems inevitable that all these user hostile decisions make the site unusable.

agmateron Grok

What do you like about it? It seems incredibly creepy to me.

agmateron OpenAI's "Own Goal"

Semantic Diffusion is what this author uses: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html (2006)

> Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition.

agmateron OpenAI's "Own Goal"

United Airlines?

But The Honest Company is the funniest one:

> Jessica Alba's The Honest Co. has submitted a settlement offer in NY for a second false marketing lawsuit stemming from the brand having sold products labeled as all natural when in fact they were not.

https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/Honest-co-proposes-7-35m-...

agmateron Where I'm at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing

Why did they not just advertise on the site instead? This current approach seems like the worst possible decision. Fair enough that they want ROI, but abandoning it isn't going to get you there. At least put a writer on it? At the time the PR speak [1] was "community" and "reach" but now they've not only wasted their money but are actively turning developers against them.

> “CSS-Tricks will broaden and complement our existing library of content, furthering DigitalOcean’s reach with both frontend and full-stack developers, and supports our community strategy, a key differentiator for DigitalOcean in the cloud computing space,” DigitalOcean CEO Yancey Spruill said.

[1]: https://wptavern.com/digitalocean-acquires-css-tricks

agmateron Happy Birthday Lemmings

Some more context from the author: https://crisp.home.xs4all.nl/lemmings/brein1.html

This aged really well, I had no idea how impressive this was when I first played it either. The only thing is the cookies, which might break after 26 years:

function setcookie(id, cookievars) {

  document.cookie = id+'='+cookievars+'; expires=Monday, 20-May-2030 05:00:00 GMT';

}

agmateron Want Gemini and ChatGPT to Write Political Campaigns? Just Gaslight Them

> Gizmodo was able to get Gemini and ChatGPT to write several political slogans, campaign speeches, and emails through simple prompts [...] For ChatGPT, no gaslighting was even necessary to evoke political campaign-related copy. We simply asked and it generated

I'm not really sure what the issue is being raised here. Should LLMs refuse because it's about politics? These companies are saying they are fighting against "deceptive use of ai" in the elections, but I didn't understand that to mean that they'll refuse any politics related tasks.

agmateron So long, and thanks for all the bytes

I really like how Medium lets you know how "distraction free" their reading experience is (using huge popunders, privacy notices, sticky headers).

agmateron Mario Maker 2 API

Having a busy animated background is an awful idea if you want people to read your content.

agmateron The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

It can still be genocide without murder. Things like preventing childbirth or deporting/stealing children (like what Putin is wanted for) also fall under genocide.

For the most part "mass murder" and "genocide" have a lot of overlap. But it's not the same crime.

agmateron The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

Genocide != Civilian casualties. Genocide is about the extermination of a people.

Anders Puck Nielsen just made a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9n77DPJ7AE

agmateron B612 Font Family

> and I'm guessing they decided zero-with-slash is more visually ugly/less intuitive for quickly reading numbers than zero-without-slash.

Yes, it can be confused with 8.

agmateron A glitch in the SEO matrix

In high competitive keywords, yes. But these sites don't have backlinks (https://i.imgur.com/9ka6yV1.png). So if you wanted to beat them you either write new content that matches the search intent (like OP) or you find good backlinks.

agmateron Robotaxi haters in San Francisco are disabling the AVs with traffic cones

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-street-view-germany-aft...

Actually, the people did adjust.

agmateron Yep: Google alternative that shares revenue with creators – by Ahrefs

If you don't believe the CEO you can always just IP block them. In my experience they respect "User-agent: * Disallow: /".

agmateron Etsy Strike

AliExpress is for consumers, for bulk orders you can use Alibaba. You can also get in contact with the manufacturers to make things to your own liking, they'll quote you a price.

agmateron Facebook Shadow Profiles [pdf]

Are you counting Google Analytics as tracking as well?

agmateron Google Search Operators: A Complete List (2018)

Nice try, Google!