skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If I disable JavaScript, am I worth less to advertisers?
The question was prompted by this HN post today (Browser Fingerprinting Without JavaScript)[1]. The article suggests I could still be tracked so I started wondering about the effects of JavaScript (JS) on advertisers.

Hypothesis: Tracking primarily benefits advertisers. Adverts are primarily delivered in the browser by JS. By disabling JS, my value to advertisers is diminished. As data collectors can't sell my data at a profit, they should stop collecting my data.

Is that hypothesis valid?

My own motivation for disabling JavaScript was simply to avoid experimental DHTML stuff (like wierd mouse effects) back in the day - not privacy or tracking - but I'm still really happy with that choice - I get to browse a quieter web. But has it made me less worth while to track?

If it was just me as a NoJS user, advertisers wouldn't bother about it. But imagine if Halloween was the start of an annual 'NoJS Week' during which everyone disabled JS. Would worldwide advertising spend drop and if so, by how much? 1%? 10%? 90%? And what kind of drop would we see in sales?

1. As a tracked human, do I have an advertising value?
2. Is my advertising value less than someone who enables JS?
3. Do advertisers measure this?
4. Are there just too few NoJS users for this to matter?
5. If I disable JS, am I still worth tracking?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29042791
There is no “harmlessly addressing” the trans issue.

People feeling uncomfortable with their bodies and performing mutilation is sad. Some people remove their feet as a kinda fetish. Trans people try to look like something else to make themselves feel normal (evidence is that’s not super effective, but that’s beside the point).

The main issue isn’t that. People can do what they want in my opinion. It’s the compelled speech that the ACLU is promoting. “You have to use someone’s pronouns” is the exact opposite of free speech. It’s about as authoritarian a position as you can take. Imo pronouns are even more insidious because (a) they can change by the day and (b) you rarely use someone’s pronouns with said person, so other people have to “enforce” the proper pronoun use.

No, civil liberties has nothing to do with people using someone’s pronouns. It has to do with the freedom to say what you want to say, not compel others. ACLU is now on the side of compelled speech.
It’s also one of the few things that lets me entirely unwind from other things going on and focus only on flying (technically and enjoying it).
Manipulation and Recycling of the Unified Patent Court (UPC)’S Impact Assessment
I edited this sentence to make it clear that I mean only it in the programming context.
I believe that we could use positive or neutral emotions instead of negative ones, at least in most cases. Curiousness instead of inadequacy as the drive for learning; humbleness instead of shame; desire to make something great on time instead of anxiety.
Of course, the more difficult question is how to do that.
Flash loans couldn’t exist in the traditional system
THEN this person has to hide/digest the guilt of their actions, knowing that they are immoral but still required by society. By hiding that guilt, this person becomes disgusted by people who don't commit immoral acts to pay their mortgages, since every good action reminds them of what they're doing wrong.
I don't sweat a massive amount from my face when working out, but my baseline level of fitness is relatively good.

They are introducing a new workout pad (the pads are super quick to interchange).
Because Apple could launch a competing search service, that would potentially be competitive, thanks to how many users and data Apple would get through it.

That search service could then spread beyond the iPhone, into Google's territory.
That's a different argument then claiming a metaversum can not work out of principle.

People have managed to create good apps for the Oculus Quest, too.
Bought 80% for cash then quickly paid the rest off - have since sold .
When it comes to houseplants you just have to ask my mom and you will know everything that’s to be known. If there is a problem she needs maybe 10 seconds to take a look and give you the solution.
If you thought the housing market in US is bad, wait till you see the housing market in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Netherland…

I happen to be unfortunate to be a Canadian who lives in a postal code where housing prices have gone up by 70% within last 2yrs. I am not kidding. When my tech salary isn’t even able to keep up with the housing market growth you have to question the reality of the situation.

We made peace we are going to be the forever renter. There is no way we will pay 1.1M for a 2bd condo. A side effect of that is to have to either delay having kids or have no kids at all which is sad but again a reality.

I wish I could move to US where at least it is not this out of control. There are still places you can buy in Washington state for 700k. Our liberal government has done nothing but propping up the housing market for boomer votes at the expense of the future of millennials and GenZ.
It was a plug for the new Stephenson book.
Anonymous voting of your representatives should never be a thing - you need to know their record to see if their values align with yours when going to the ballot box.
I like a lot of brutalist buildings.
If I could, I would build a brutalist building
for my home. I have my truly amateur drawings
ready. Given that I have 0 education as an architect
or civil engineer it would probably collapse before
it was ever finished.

I am only aware of one brutalist private dwelling in
Oslo, there might be more.

Another was planned but that is a long story, and it was not approved in the end.

Most brutalist buildings have some character and they
cannot be ignored

I fully understand that the brutalist esthetics is lost
for most people.

According to Wikipedia we are now in the postmodern phase of architecture.
The example buildings form makes me think that a lot of the world has not
made it that far yet.

Buildings being erected over the past 20 years all seem to be rectangular
boxes. If they want to be fancy its glass and steel.
Extremely generic. Some try to make up for it by having a lobby with a ridiculously high ceiling.

The open space is not used for anything creative or anything at all really.
The huge empty space speaks for itself.

I highly prefer the brutalist era.
If nothing else, it is less boring.
That’s your choice. I would imagine most people want things they cannot afford.
I think the point was that it is true specifically when it comes to housing (also income and wealth for that matter)
At $JOB, I've often pointed out that no-one actually knows if given a sufficiently bad issue and a reasonable timeline we even could bring it back up.

In power grids its called a Black Start, I think that's something we could nick as a concept.
> 1. Abolishing landlords is not the answer (I see a lot of people suggest this).

I am so baffled by this. Seems like a mental smokescreen for NIMBY homeowners to protect themselves from the realization that they are the problem.

If every landlord was murdered today and replaced with a homeowner, there would not be the slightest impact on either the home price crisis or its root cause, the artificial restriction in supply caused by NIMBY zoning and regulations.

In fact, the supply pinch would probably get worse. Big landlords can benefit from expanded supply if they own that expanded supply. Single-home homeowners see only the risk of disruption to their environment. A city full of single-home homeowners might never build anything, anywhere, ever again.

(Just in case anyone asks, I am not a landlord. I'd have to be a multi-millionaire to even contemplate it in my area.)
There’s no real obligation to view Zuckerberg as a success at anything.

Behavioral economics of the preceding decades trained people to sit and stare.

His success is due to a shared idea lots of money = positive contributor
Equating brain capacity to memory cannot be further from the truth. The joy of being intelligent is that one can pull out things from thin air without remembering anything.
I visited GAMI’s Ada, OK facility in early 2014 and got a demo of their fuel that was already flying (in experimental category). A lot of the hard work was done almost a decade ago. It’s frustrating to me how slow the approval process has gone, but it’s got to be 10x as frustrating to GAMI.
I would suggest to use procmon.exe, all file and registry accesses could have been monitored without any disassembly and the problem could probably have be resolved much easier.
Much like Microsoft's misstep in not taking the internet seriously in the 90's, and not taking smartphones seriously in the 2000's.
Basically a game designed (and harcoded to some extent) for 32 bit windows doesn’t work on 64-bit Windows. This is an old problem that a lot of software faced during the switch in the 00s.

Installing it in a VM on XP would have probably achieved the same result.
Yeah...we're an insecure lot.

I've learned not to slag others. I've learned not to say something like "X is bad," and, instead say "I don't like X, for myself, and here's why..."

A few posts ago, I said something about X Windows that wasn't really a put-down, but was not complimentary, and that was interpreted as a slag. Some of this stuff is really not worth the increased heart rate to argue about.

Apple tends to bring out the beast in people. We have some very strong feelings and opinions about it.

I do feel like my own approach to Apple is fairly balanced. I've had a lot of time to have the rough bits worn off.
This was a 5 minute job with windbg. If I was the author I'd be too embarrassed to post this write-up.
I was going to come in and rant that Internet in this context should be capitalized as it’s the specific Internet and not the general concept of an internet, but then I found https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet. Lol.
I watched a Robert Sapolsky lecture which made a lot of sense on this topic. His point was that our psychological reactions to things evolved because they were useful to our ancestors, but not necessarily because they are useful to us.

The classic example would be the stress response. It's perfectly useful to go into a flight-or-fight mode if you need your body to be ready to escape an imminent threat like a lion you spot in the long grass 100m away. But when you have the same physiological reaction for weeks at a time due to a looming work deadline, this is not something our minds and bodies evolved to tolerate.
Even Arch doesn’t ship the 495 yet. It’s coming though.
Like autocompletion, also syntax coloring becomes more important with verbose programming languages, to help distinguish the relevant text between the large areas occupied by keywords.
As if insulin had the same impact as the millions of ac units used to live in the middle of deserts
every time you hear from a realtor or read a site like this it’s “this is a HOT market, buy NOW” … the BS gets pretty tiring. this site is supposedly for the consumer to gain an “edge”, however, there is a big fat “find agent” button in the top right corner.
MuJoCo going open source is good for the open source community. PyBullet is build on top of a plain C API (wrapping C++ Bullet API).
Note that there is also Brax and Tiny Differentiable Simulator, developed within Google.
It proves he thinks everyone will follow along anyway

It proves Apple’s data labels and growing awareness digital ads drive little business, which proved Facebook is a non-contributor to the economy in a real way

Zuck is just looking to keep his good times rolling as interest fades. This isn’t courage, this is “the writing is on the wall, let’s try something sooner than later.”
> The shape of the metaverse will be formed by a new generation

Even this begs the question.

Why do people take it as a given that there will be a "metaverse"?

I mean, personally, I think that a genuinely interoperable, decentralized VR/AR infrastructure would be pretty neat—I have no idea if it would solve any specific real-world problems, but "decentralized and interoperable" is a world better than the systems we've got in the current internet.

But...that's just the thing. Where's the incentive to make it genuinely interoperable and decentralized, especially for a company like Facebook? They want things to be under their control, so they can mine them for data and sell ads on them.
CO₂ Free Steel Becomes a Reality at Volvo and Mercedes Benz [video]
Ohhh, where can I vote for that last item??
VR has much more feeling of "presence" than just video calling, or texting. I've been doing meetings in VR for a few months now and it beats Zoom etc. hands down IMHO, being able to look around, coalesce around a whiteboard, positional audio - it may look a bit cartooney, but for me it's less draining than video conference and more engaging.
> 2. Is my advertising value less than someone who enables JS?

Definitely. Because they have less information about you, and also because most websites don't even know how to display advertisement to people like us who don't use JS :)

> 4. Are there just too few NoJS users for this to matter?

I believe so. I'm no insider to this *** industry, but i believe they currently don't employ much noscript-proof fingerprinting. That's why they are currently moving to a model of serving their scripts from 1st party domain (via CNAME) to defeat 3rd-party origin blocking. If more and more people disabled JS, they would certainly care more to track us.

All in all, if you want a tracking-proof protocol, you should check out Gemini. If you want a tracking-proof web browser, you should check out the Tor Browser. If you're like me and would like some form of modern web minus client side scripting and without any tracking venue, i guess all we can do now is cry :)
There are far more Android phones which support AOSP-derived distributions. Have a look at the support list for e.g. LineageOS [1], it shows 27 brands with 195 models in total.

[1] https://download.lineageos.org/
This is mentioned and used in the article.
"Further, our results demonstrate that in the event of a stricter lockdown without early reopening, the number of active infected cases recorded on 14 July could have been reduced by more than 40% in all states considered, with the actual number of infections reduced being more than 100,000 for the states of Florida and Texas."
PhDs are an eccentric crew.

Without any malice. This sounds miserable but it is untenable - totally untenable - for society to go out of its way to make life easy for someone who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying minority ethnic groups in American literature from a position in the UK.

This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. It is very unlikely that there is a pay off from this degree in this field. Poor economic prospects are sort of baked in.
I just completed a work package that was bugging me for a while causing a lot of frustration.
There is a lot of happiness in getting stuff done.
Your personality largely determines your emotions and you can't generate them at will.

"Twin studies and other research have shown that about half of the variation between individuals results from their genetic inheritance and half from their environment. Researchers have found conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism to be relatively stable from middle age through old age" [1]

What if you don't feel any curiousness? Or you feel it for something that is counterproductive at the moment?

What if your desire of making something great clashes with your boss order to make some more boring CRUD software because that's what the client wants?

In these cases, anxiety and inadequacy could be the very emotions that recenter you on what you should to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
> only water the leaves

Doesn't this get a lot of water on the ground? Or do you keep your plants in a dedicated area, where water wouldn't be much of a bother?

In my case, the plants are in the living areas, on hardwood floors, where I usually walk. I'd hate to get my feet wet every time I walk next to them.
removing the realtors removes 6%
PlatformIO doesn't have an IDE, it's a dependency/compilation/flashing manager, and is fantastic. There's also PlatformIO IDE, which I've never used.
It will not clear doubts with everyone, cf jet fuel melting steel beams and the moon landing. I was implicitly talking about reasonable and rational people.
4 unit building?
Interesting point from (copied from the transcript):

"The International Energy Agency has suggested that HD-R technology will need to account for at least fifteen percent of all primary steel production by 2050, which equates to one new plant every month for at least two decades starting in 2030. That’ll raise electricity demand by seven hundred and twenty terawatt hours by the middle of this century say the IEA, equivalent to sixty percent of the sector’s total electricity consumption today, all of which will of course need to be supplied via fossil free energy sources like renewables and perhaps even small nuclear reactors, known as SMRs, like the ones that Rolls Royce are hoping to bring into reality by 2035."

Point being that perhaps large solar power plants in the Sahara could be used to generate Hydrogen local industry.

Problems being that the coast would have sea water to produce the Hydrogen, but the steel could be exported from there.
Instead of Metaverse can we call it "Adverse" as in "Ad"-verse. You know there will be ads super-imposed on objects everywhere. Some obvious, some subliminal. It will be small at first until investors realize the potential benefits and then you will need some advanced AI/ML ad-blocker to virtually remove all the ads and that will be yet another artificial multi-billion dollar industry. AR/VR ad removal. This was depicted in a scene from Altered Carbon where officer Ortega had to put a physical ad-blocking patch on Kovacs neck to block the insane ads. I predict AR will eventually be outlawed in vehicle use when enough distracting ads cause car accidents. Will people draw the line at ads being super-imposed on their families faces? Will ads below the neck be permitted or will consenting adults opt-in to full body ads?
Hi, author here. Unfortunately not.

Ubisoft changed the reg key of the base game from it's retail key to "Uplay Install 87" and the expansion had no idea to look for that key at all. If you used the Ubisoft copy of both games, the expansion pack would never have found the base game.
Man charged with hacking MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL user accounts to stream games
Equating is stronger than what I said. I simply claimed that space/memory is a huge part of what brain function is.

And those who can come up with totally new, orthogonal ideas may just have a better compressor :p
There are more to this than housing becoming an investment tool. I would argue the endless money printing and negative real rate has made saving pretty much useless. Hard assets are only going to keep going up. And then the government guarantees that housing market should never go down. Here in Canada many politicians have publicly stated they wouldn’t stand housing market going down. And of course they aren’t going to make zoning laws any less stringent.

The solution isn’t that hard. Raise the real rate. Let’s see how many people can keep buying their third and fourth homes once the rates go up by 5%.

Oh but we can’t have that. That will cause the economy cough cough stock market tank. So we have to keep making the bubble bigger.
Sorry my bad it is the very last tool used, which does in fact lead to success, I guess documenting all this other stuff might help somebody somewhere, or at least persuade people to skip the superfluous efforts and just go right to procmon
Why Ruby is an Acceptable Lisp (2005)
If there was a heinous criminal and they were using Signal, I wonder if law enforcement could get a warrant to push an update to Signal (or even OS push services) through the Play Store/App Store, just for that user. Wouldn't that work? It's the same legality and hoops to jump through as a wiretap, it seems to me, and it solves law enforcement's problem.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced they could do this, but they would rather not because it's much harder, since it requires a special warrant with high evidence thresholds for each user. This reinforces the claim that what they really want is an ability to get any messaging data without a warrant, but they don't want to say so.
A lot, we only had 640KB to play with on most MS-DOS, Amiga and Atari computers, and 8bits had 64-128 KB.
The images are more than 8mb each! Crazy...
Given the credibility of American governance, no.

Frankly I would not trust most Americans to host a bbq without lighting someone on fire these days. There’s no way I’d sincerely trust their dogs.

Those in policing are barely better educated than the dog.
Substitute "blood tests" for "internet" here and you've got what a lot of people said about Theranos in 2014.

Big wigs with lots of money can't be wrong!
Back in the early 90s (late 80s?) Ford published a lame video game promoting (I think) the Mustang. It had a minimal feature walkthrough (now featuring 6 speakers!), terrible graphics, and a very limited driving simulator that was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Metaverse version would no doubt look a lot better, but it'd be no more real than Ford's early attempt. Maybe as adware it'd be functional at selling some units, but only with people who were already invested enough in Ford to be able to engage with their ad.

I'm also reminded of the US military's funding of FPS games like America's Army (and at least involvement in Call of Duty) as recruiting tools.
Don't worry! It will get better around 2040!
> This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy.

Not really, no. Studying requires time but little resources. Is there a reason we don't have more free time? At the end of the 19th century, anarchist thinkers predicted with modern techniques we'd be down to 10h weekly work. Instead, society took the wrong turn and doubled down on "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber) and the social control apparatus (police, surveillance industry, private security).

If we shared work equally and stopped working for greedy soulless corporate overlords, everyone would have time to spend on a PHD!

EDIT: If you doubt how much work is required by capitalist society but actually useless by any meaningful standard, remember what happened during the COVID lockdowns. Most jobs are not "essential". If you work in an office, you're mostly (if not entirely) useless to society as a whole.
Exactly.

All the well paid white collar professionals have dumped a fat pile of money onto the housing market in any given urban area.

Before you needed to be fabulously wealthy to own real property in Manhattan. Now you need to be fabulously wealthy to own real property within an hour of Manhattan (though there's probably a few edge cases)
It's not always so obvious when you are trapped. How can we say he is acting truly freely, versus digging deeper?
“News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.”

I’m not sold on this. Twitter is more of a mechanism for group totalitarianism than productive conversation.
For those needing an EGL LEG-up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGL_(API)
Most of these devices don't "support" LineageOS though; rather, LineageOS supports them. As in, they are not designed to support custom OSes, but people make it work anyway through bootloader unlock exploits and other weird hacks, which may introduce security issues. Using hacks to install a custom open-source OS might be better than sticking with the proprietary one it came with, but ideally your device would natively support custom OSes.