Max Woolf

The problem is you might not be aware you're making a shady feature. As an example, if you are making an ad for your app fooer. You A/B test some banners on an ad distribution network. You find that a simpler ad with a "download now" hyperlink graphic proves effective.

No big deal right? People are going to be seeing these banners on places like news sites right? It's not tricking people. It's also pretty reasonable right? People are used to clicking on hyperlinks, it overcomes the resistance to click on images. A reasonable move for a banner ad to make.

Except the ad distribution network serves content sites like softpedia as well.

You saw the spike because you emulated the download button right under the mirror list, and people were confused. They downloaded your application under the pretext of getting something else.

Or what about if I want a "Hey you should sign up for notifications for other job offerings in this field" message box? I'd love to have one of those in my application. I A/B test to see that this message box drastically increases signups.

Except it was because people thought it was a paywall.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Consider this case about the Weebly blogging service: http://minimaxir.com/2013/05/overly-attached-startup/

They were A/B testing messaging for first week signups. This hyper aggressive and insane route was actually considered. Do you think they're black hat? I don't think so, but what if this had become standard…

> People are out there claiming that GPT is doing all their coding for them. I just don't see how, unless they simply did not know how to program at all.

I doubt it and certainly not for anything beyond basic. I've seen (and tried GPT's for code input a lot) and often they come back with errors or weird implementations.

I made one request yesterday for a linear regression function (yes, because I was being lazy). So was chatGPT... It spat out a trashy broken function that wasn't even remotely close to working - more along the lines of pseudo code.

I complained saying "WTH, that doesn't even work" and it said "my apologies" and spits out a perfectly working accurate function! Go figure.

Others have turned to testing tips or threats, which is an interesting avenue: https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-analysis/

>> - Put a strawberry in the left eye socket. >>- Put a blackberry in the right eye socket.

>> All five of the edits are implemented correctly

This is a GREAT example of the (not so) subtle mistakes AI will make in image generation, or code creation, or your future knee surgery. The model placed the specified items in the eye sockets based on the viewers left/right; when we talk relative in this scenario we usually (always?) mean from the perspective of the target or "owner". Doctors make this mistake too (they typically mark the correct side with a sharpie while the patient is still alert) but I'd be more concerned if we're "outsourcing" decision making without adequate oversight.

https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/#hello-nano-banana

I was interested to see this on the heels of the discussion about tipping/threatening LLMs a few days ago [1] (discussed here: [2]).

Based on the examples at the end of the paper, it looks like their inquiry was somewhat orthogonal to the tip/threat investigation. That is, the tips and threats can be done in a way that is polite, when "rude" is defined as calling the LLM a scumbag. Putting these two studies together, I wonder if the best outcome could be achieved by politely asking the LLM to do XYZ, offering a tip if it succeeds, and noting that terrible things will happen if it fails.

1: https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-analysis/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495476

Awesome visualisation, and great write-up. On mobile (in portrait), a lot of longer titles get culled as their origin scrolls off, with half of it still off the other side of the screen - wonder if it'd be worth keeping on rendering them until the entire text field is off screen (especially since you've already got a bounding box for them).

I stumbled upon [1] using it that reflects your comments on comment sentiment.

This also reminded me of [2] (for which the site itself had rotted away, incidentally) - analysing HN users' similarity by writing style.

[1] https://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It's not my article. And I agree with you on that point, where I believe this article has value is in this quote:

"You have to produce content that someone else would willingly share without being coerced."

As I try to think of ways to make it to #1 on HN, a concern of mine has been not submitting too much "flop" content and "spamming" the system. His suggestion is to allow someone else to submit it, and that validates that there is value to at least someone other than just promoting yourself.

That's a valuable thought and reminder. At least is was to me. :p

Follow up: I remember your http://minimaxir.com/2014/07/show-hn/ post. Pretty interesting stuff.