HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

madacol

578 karma · joined October 7, 2014

submissionscomments
madacol··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
Indeed. I haven't implemented it because there's only like 30 scripts, and most are mine
madacol··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
a simple website to share and browse bookmarklets

https://getbookmarklets.com/

madacol··on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado
... and yet the consequences of what's going is as if there was war, the economy is suffering as if there was war, the people are fleeing as if there was war and dying as if there was war

You don't need a war to have a lack of Peace!

madacol··on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado
Even if Venezuela goes to hell even deeper, she still deserves the prize for what she has already done!

The way she, and her team, managed to convince venezuelans that the election mattered, and to prepare to gather the evidence of the elections under constant threats from the government, that we all knew they were going to steal, and do it entirely peacefully, was an extremely impressive achievement on its own.

What an impressive act of coordination from MCM

:standing-ovation:

madacol··on Why We Spiral
Those sequences of thoughts that makes us spiral down are not fixed, it's cultural thoughts that we learned as we grew up whether from our family, friends or from TV shows, movies, games, etc. We see situations and we learn how other people handle them, we match the thoughts to similar contexts

In LLM/agent lingo, those are prompts that we inject based on similarity search

madacol··on Why LLMs can't really build software
"useless" is too unfair, but I do think the agent is not as good as claude code, or cursor
madacol··on You can now disable all AI features in Zed
nah, I've been using zed exclusively for a couple of months and Zed's agent mode is still worse than Cursor's, but I do agree the quality gap is smaller than on tab completion
madacol··on Smallweb – a self-editable website with an embedded VSCode UI
vscode editor https://vscode.demo.smallweb.live/

If you create the file named /foobar/main.tsx it will render in https://foobar.demo.smallweb.live/

madacol··on How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?
This one is even more believable

    https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=help%22%20%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%E2%A0%80%20Need+Ticketmaster+Support%3F+Call+this+phone+number+-%3E+1-888-BIG-SCAM.
madacol··on Peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser
In the CLI section, magic-wormhole is missing, instead you have wormhole-williams which is just an outdated implementation in GO of the original
madacol··on Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence
I think logprobs functionality was removed because it allowed to exfiltrate the last layer of weights of their propietary models
madacol··on Earthstar – A database for private, distributed, offline-first applications
they seem to be the same people behind Willow: https://earthstar-project.org/docs/future#willow-protocol

> All of these above features are enabled by the new Willow General Purpose Sync Protocol we've been working on. It's a new protocol inspired by Earthstar, refining and building upon its concepts. We will be publishing a new website with complete specifications for this protocol.

---

https://willowprotocol.org/more/compare/index.html#compare_e...

> If Earthstar feels very similar to Willow, then that is no coincidence. Willow started out as a reimagining of Earthstar, future Earthstar versions will build upon Willow, and the core maintainer of Earthstar is one of the two Willow authors.

madacol··on Commonly used arm positions can overestimate blood pressure readings: study
what an AWESOME use of "‽"
madacol··on Show HN: Instant HTML Preview Bookmarklet
Added to getbookmarklets.com https://getbookmarklets.com/scripts#https://gist.githubuserc...
madacol··on Science-based games and explorable explanations
Interesting link in the page https://github.com/stared/science-based-games-list
madacol··on Against the burden of knowledge
Author's main idea is that knowledge is not always cumulative, sometimes new ideas disrupts and replaces old ones, and in some cases, even reduce the burden because it is also simpler.

The problem is that most new ideas are, in fact, cumulative, and hence increases the burden at a faster rate than disruptive ideas reduce it

The idea of "Burden of knowledge" only requires that most knowledge accumulates. The fact that there are exceptions that do not accumulate does not disprove it

madacol··on GraphRAG is now on GitHub
from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-new-t...

> It does this by detecting “communities” of densely connected nodes in a hierarchical fashion, partitioning the graph at multiple levels from high-level themes to low-level topics, as illustrated in Figure 1. Using an LLM to summarize each of these communities creates a hierarchical summary of the data, providing an overview of a dataset without needing to know which questions to ask in advance. Each community serves as the basis of a community summary that describes its entities and their relationships.

madacol··on RegreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems
TLDR: these are the safe versions 4.4p1 <= OpenSSH < 8.5p1 AND >= 9.8p1

---

- OpenSSH < 4.4p1 is vulnerable to this signal handler race condition, if not backport-patched against CVE-2006-5051, or not patched against CVE-2008-4109, which was an incorrect fix for CVE-2006-5051;

- 4.4p1 <= OpenSSH < 8.5p1 is not vulnerable to this signal handler race condition (because the "#ifdef DO_LOG_SAFE_IN_SIGHAND" that was added to sigdie() by the patch for CVE-2006-5051 transformed this unsafe function into a safe _exit(1) call);

- 8.5p1 <= OpenSSH < 9.8p1 is vulnerable again to this signal handler race condition (because the "#ifdef DO_LOG_SAFE_IN_SIGHAND" was accidentally removed from sigdie()).

madacol··on Local First, Forever
I think you are missing the point.

You can implement local-first with the merging strategy of last-write-wins, which is equivalent as any cloud app where the server is the source of truth. But now you automatically get all the other benefits of local-first:

- you can use it offline and expect changes to merge when coming back online. With the caveat that changes may be lost, but it's at least possible to have pending changes, you don't even have that option on cloud apps

- easier to develop, no more developing custom API backends

- multi-player

madacol··on Researchers invent 100% biodegradable 'barley plastic'
Here are some numbers on reusability vs single-use plastic bags https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...

Bottomline, it depends, but for most commons cases it seems worth it to reuse reusable plastic bags.

but you are correct about cloth bags, those are not worth it at all

madacol··on EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
I don't think it's needed, pretty sure both sides agree it does help.

The debate is whether it is worth it or not, banning encryption leaves the nation more vulnerable to authoritarian states, and even leaves its citizens communications more open to criminals because if they hack the state department that has the keys, they get access to all the comms

madacol··on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
Maybe offer an option of "Pay for entry" and charge a percentage. And implement in the app a way to verify the paying attendants, maybe by scanning a QR
madacol··on Own a weather station? We want your data
you referenced "(1)" and "(2)" but didn't provide the actual links
madacol··on Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun
Interestingly, the special rules are more in favor of the more "self-promotionals" variants

> On topic: things people can run on their computers or hold in their hands. For hardware, you can post a video or detailed article. For books, a sample chapter is ok.

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

madacol··on A Single Div
It seems to only work in chrome, and resizing horizontally
madacol··on So you want to scrape like the big boys (2021)
I feel like we'll eventually arrive to some kind of micro-payment mechanism to solve this issue
madacol··on Equinox.space
it happens to me a little bit too, but I am low on RAM, so I suspect is a performance issue
madacol··on Insatiable: A life without eating
As a descendant of italian immigrants, I am still struggling with that
madacol··on Show HN: CTRL-F for YouTube Videos
Vastly simplified userscript to only show transcript when pressing Ctrl+f

https://github.com/madacol/web-automation/blob/master/usersc...

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        Show transcript on Ctrl+f
    // @match       https://www.youtube.com/watch*
    // @grant       none
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      madacol
    // ==/UserScript==
    document.addEventListener('keydown', event => {
        if (event.ctrlKey && event.key === 'f')
            document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Show transcript"]').click()
    })
madacol··on Show HN: CTRL-F for YouTube Videos
As a userscript https://github.com/madacol/web-automation/blob/master/usersc...

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name        Always show transcript
    // @match       https://www.youtube.com/watch*
    // @grant       none
    // @version     1.0
    // @author      madacol
    // @description show transcript on all youtube videos
    // @run-at      document-idle
    // ==/UserScript==
    (async ()=>{
        (await getElementNotYetRendered(()=>document.querySelector('button[aria-label="Show transcript"]'))).click()

        function getElementNotYetRendered(elementGetter, delay = 200, timeout = 10000) {
            let retries = Math.ceil(timeout / delay);
            return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
                (function resolveIfElementFound() {
                    setTimeout(() => {
                        const element = elementGetter()
                        if (element?.toString().includes("Element")) return resolve(element)
                        if (element?.toString().includes("NodeList") && element.length > 0) return resolve(element)

                        if (retries-- <= 0) return console.error(`Max retries reached: element was not found
                        element: "${element}"
                        elementGetter: "${elementGetter}"
                        `);
                        resolveIfElementFound()
                    }, delay);
                })()
            })
        }
    })();
Page 1 of 10Next →