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madibo3156

132 karma · joined April 14, 2026

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madibo3156··on Web Search API
However, so-called AI crawlers are not the same as crawlers of yore. They hit live pages every time a user prompt triggers a web search.

This Web Search API, unlike an AI crawler, only fetches periodically. It feels like a step in the right direction for managing resource strain across the internet. If only the LLM giants could do something similar.

madibo3156··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
Thanks for your reply. To me, kidhood is a developmental time where self-destructive habits have more time and malleability to course-correct. On the flip side it's a breeding ground for addiction.

I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.

In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.

madibo3156··on A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
`maximum-scale=1` on the meta viewport tag.
madibo3156··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
madibo3156··on Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'
Maybe it's something like "make purchasing decisions that maximally bolster your local economy, in aggregate, in the long term, where you deem it suitable for your needs"? Doesn't roll off the tongue though. Buy local.
madibo3156··on What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
The mechanism is interesting, but I'm not fully understanding the importance. We say it was done this way because a user would appreciate the speedup. The difference is one traversal versus expected one and one-half traversals. How slow was this traversal at the time for this difference to be significant?
madibo3156··on Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
Part skeptic and part zetetic, what prompt would you have used?

My impression is that this is an oversimplified demonstration of what can happen when you prompt Claude in a system with many more variables (than two buttons and two colours).

If I want the button to turn blue and that's it, what instead do I ask? Even in a complicated system with many levers, what do I request other than the desired end result, hoping that Claude pulls the right levers to produce something acceptably close to what I think I asked for?

madibo3156··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
It's not stated plainly in the article what the problem is, so here:

Each participant rolls a die. For there to be no possibility of a tie, no die can share a face number with another die—every face across all dice must be unique. For it to be fair, the distribution of numbers across all faces must be such that no die has an advantage over another die—the odds of rolling the highest number must be exactly the same for each die. The problem is in finding the combination of faces across five dice that satisfies these constraints. One difficulty of this is that each added player changes the whole equation—the odds get recalculated and new faces must be chosen. The secondary goal is to minimize the number of faces on the die.

madibo3156··on Stopping the smart TV from being used against you
> Amid the overall electronics boom thanks to A.I., … one piece of electronics is almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor.

…is the full quote. Come on, guys.

madibo3156··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
Is it sophisticated? Maybe. Is it the alignment problem? Exhibits qualities of it, yes. Is it surprising? No.

The event strikes me as reminiscent of one's first go at programming, without familiarity of computer code: Tell the computer to do something obvious. Why the heck did it do that instead? Over time, one learns how the computer thinks. Apply this to any novel system. Or perhaps aptly any system with capabilities that are yet to be well understood by its user.

The article is trying to spin mystic out of simple bullcrap. Maybe that's just my viewing through turd-tinted lenses after the last few years of reading this drivel on repeat. More plausibly it is true that we've forgotten our own baby steps.

madibo3156··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
Nobody's said it in this thread so I'll drop it here where you ask "Why save physical books?"—

The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.

Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.

madibo3156··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
But Wikipedia has done a good job of it. If Google's AI summaries could actually provide correct answers with verifiable sources without so-called hallucinations, it would be good. You could argue that people don't actually check Wikipedia's sources. That's because Wikipedia has built, and worked to keep, its users' trust. On the other hand, what is Google doing?
madibo3156··on How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
This guy is severely milking it now. If learning means building an inaccurate and incomplete understanding of the topic then go hog wild. Otherwise https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209049 sums up my feelings about the author's attitude.
madibo3156··on Stolen Buttons
It sounds like you're talking about the "gloss" era with "juicy" buttons, which some people are retroactively referring to as Frutiger Aero. Yes, things definitely look more 3D in that design. It's currently considered out of mainstream fashion, which explains the lack. Will it resurge?
madibo3156··on Elixir-lang.org has a new design
Yeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com does this too.
madibo3156··on Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
And just as quickly he was pulled back into the crab bucket.
madibo3156··on Abject Praise
This is all very deep in the weeds, biased and opinionated, so it's hard for me to draw my own conclusion with all the missing facts that may or may not exist from Apple's side. What I will say is that it's very funny that Apple, on all of its browsers, does not currently support the squircle corner shape—a piece of flair that is iconically Apple.
madibo3156··on Amazon without the knockoffs
> Amazon has excellent and consistent customer support

We've been dealing with different Amazons. Also, credit cards in my experience are built to deal with that stuff. Have you encountered protection issues by using your credit card? The only chargeback I've initiated was against Amazon and my credit card company handled it swimmingly.

madibo3156··on If you're a button, you have one job
That's a good example of bad UX, and, in a way, counter to the article.

It sounds like Android needs a middle state indicator. When your action is in a pending state, the state indicator should not be the same as the previous state. A common pattern is to show a pending animation.

While this animation is running, what should happen if the user presses the button?

madibo3156··on Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game
The share images showing where putts landed is super cool.
madibo3156··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
My friend, I know you think you're defending your position well, but you've done the opposite. Scrolling to the bottom of the comments and seeing this response from you is like speedrunning your books' one-star reviews and coming to the definitive conclusion that it's not for me. Thanks for saving my time.
madibo3156··on Surprise, pay $1000
As a consumer, I can appreciate your focus on support. I get a monthly $0.00 AWS bill on an account I've lost access to. However, because I have no outstanding balance, support is unable to assist me (is their claim). So I enjoy one monthly spam email from them, which I neurotically read in case one month the balance for whatever reason exceeds 0. Still less stressful than trying to resolve the issue with them.
madibo3156··on The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
The proof is that you Google this right now and find multiple corroborations across the web from today.
madibo3156··on How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
Top researchers say AI will automate all cognitive labor by 2045 at the latest. 5 years ago I would've thought you're joking. Today, I think you're being serious, but I still think you're wrong.
madibo3156··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
In theory you're right, in practice you're not.
madibo3156··on Language Models Need Sleep
I find this annoying too. "Sleep" is okay, but the quippy headlines ("need sleep"—short, snappy and vague) infiltrating journals bother me. I've seen it well before LLMs, but as an example, there is a long list of title snowclones of the famous attention paper: https://github.com/vinayprabhu/X-is-all-you-need.
madibo3156··on A HN post with negative points – how?
Pointers are hard
madibo3156··on What we lost the last time code got cheap
Comment reads at least partially like human writing, for it is terse and does not try to make a point.
madibo3156··on Zed 1.0
I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.

I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.

madibo3156··on AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
AI to write code makes more sense because the grammar is almost infinitesimally smaller and of all the practical repercussions that come with that.

Think, yes, verifiability, but also tone, terseness etc. and how big those "problem spaces" are in written language versus programming language.

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