skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I game fairly regularly. I have given up on VR on Linux (valve gave up on it), and anti-cheat systems mostly do not work on Linux (valve is making some progress there). Everything else works perfectly for me, frequently with fewer crashes than the Windows systems of my friends.
Even the "walking is beneficial" part is not just "duh".

I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?

And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.
> The reality is that I (and others who are complaining, as well as many who have resigned themselves to their fate) are happy to have a website "track me", certainly if the cost of non-tracking are having to click away an annoying popup

The you should doubly blame the companies, because that's what do not track was for, they're the one who decided to make it not work that way and instead being ignored and not considered a valid option for the law.

> think that people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous.

You don't need a cookie for that, and what GDPR has told us is that we're not talking of that but about dozens or hundreds on every major sites so trying to frame it that way is disingenuous.
Hidden fees are bad because of the specific combination - the hiding, and the fees. Since tracking isn't hidden and isn't a fee, the analogy doesn't help to justify the EUs law.

People should have a default expectation that if they give their personal data to companies then it will be recorded. And if they don't want cookies then they should disable cookies. The EU's regulation hasn't revealed anything that is useful to know about.
Do you have /any/ examples of websites that don't have a bunch of 3rd party cookies that still have a cookie banner?

Middle managers absolutely love anything with charts and graphs because it makes their decisions feel more scientific. That's why they want tracking software included on their websites. And if the law requires disclosure then a cookie popup is the solution.
IMO cdm is a great resource for musicians. I have been reading it for close to a decade and have found many cool tools and learned a lot from it. I particularly like the DAW update summaries.
Procrastinating on my side project by torturing databases
That update doesn’t matter because the original has the same exception. I quoted it.
All arguments in regard to the original article apply though.
It doesn't matter if it is Heinlein's wife checking a box on an FAQ
and mailing it, or a script running on a computer doing the same thing?
Interesting. Clearly I am providing out of date information.
Electromagnetism is some 40 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. Also gravity only attracts, it doesn't repel like 2 atoms approaching each other. So it is really quite different.
hmm I disagree. I found the article, quite an eye opener for me. I also thought that he cookie banners is what the EU forced the web-site owners to show.. but it clearly isn't.
It is just about consent. This consent could be given in a non-annoying way, but clearly the involved companies don't want to.
I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago.

AI may very well plateau, but it might not.
Going by my (bad) analogy, in theory, yes, that is what that would mean.

More to the point, if we're not able to decide whenever it is exactly that an apple stops being an apple once we start eating it that could mean that the apple-ness of said apple has big chances of remaining intact (together with the underlying apple) irrespective of us eating it fully, and hence (theoretically) giving us an infinite supply of apples (or access to apple-ness, to be more exact).

But, going back to the Old Greeks, this is a very old question that we haven't been able to fully solve, I honestly think we'll never be able to solve it. Aristotle's focus on categories and especially his tertium non datur thing has allowed us to solve some practical problems (for example by allowing us to build a world that is based on techne, which among other things has allowed us to have this conversation here on the internet), but the bigger and more philosophical question of One vs. Infinity and everything in between remains un-solved.

Later edit: On Cantor vs. Aristotle, from here [1]

> Thus Cantor believed that Aristotle was quite mistaken in his analysis of the infinite, and that his authority was exceedingly detrimental

When it comes to the philosophy of mathematics and to philosophy itself I'm with Cantor on this. Could be that mainstream mathematics itself could benefit were we to ditch Aristotle and fully embrace Cantor, but I'm not a mathematician nor smart enough to say if that's in the realm of the possible.

[1] https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/Readers/HowManyAngels/Canto...
I find it annoying but I do the opposite. Don't give my consent for all the optionals and prefer not to get tracked. I don't believe all of that tracking is warranted in a significant number of cases. Websites appear to be still fully functional without all of those extras, too, meaning the website providers are also ok with foregoing it.
100%. There is only one way to drive; calm and considerate.

Need to do everything to make sure drivers actually drive like this.
Shopping carts, session cookies, or any other kind of functional cookies (including the one for "do not track" saving) do not require consent, and so don't require the banner. Github for example doesn't have it.

Please, read the basics about the law before disparaging criticisms, I constantly have to educate users on HN about this misrepresentation of GDPR and Cookie Law.
Thanks! The concern is how to uniformly uplift binary code from various architectures and configurations to the same IR like RzIL? Is there a method to automate the disassembly process reliably across these different systems?
Supply and demand aren’t observable though. Only their intersections, price and quantity, are observable.

Honest question: if we don’t know the shape of the curves, if we can’t observe them, and if they shift around according to unknown dynamics, what good are they?
Maybe if you change the fabric they might like it more?
At the end, in many real time situations, yes. Just look at what is recommended month after month for top gaming PC builds. Intel stuff is there 'just if you really have to go Intel way, here is worse, louder and more power hungry alternative'.
No but it is exactly the same attitude - so-called "tiny" perfomance hits for developer convenience.
"Retina" Macs were introduced 12 years ago.
So what should Apple do? Expend serious time and engineering effort to fix problems with hardware that's far behind the times? Nobody's calling for the return of MCGA graphics so it's clear there's a cutoff needed somewhere.
He's not saying there is though? The "cookie law" is 14 years old now, and it looks like the proverbial Brussels effect failed to change how the whole industry operates, except we now have cookie banners.
> JACK/ASLA/PulseAudio/GStreamer audio madness shouldn't be forced on mortal man.

So last decade.. PipeWire is the latest game in the town.

On a more serious note, PipeWire has worked really well for me and it really aims to unify all the previous usecases to one. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
"Number of visitors" does not constitute tracking. The tracking in question here is to discover who you are specifically and the absurd amount of detail about your online activities collected and shared with data brokers for aggregation and resale.

A few of these cookie prompts during the day and they'd be able to tell everything from where your kids go to school to the kind of prn you prefer to watch on weekdays and everything in between.
I don't think most typical GDP models are designed for situations were large parts of the population will die. Models are also likely not to be designed to accurately reflect the result of a large nuclear war, for example.

Typical models will account for energy price and elasticity, though, and if you want models for more catastrophic situations then those exist, but it's a different type of modelling.
This is copying, not stealing though.

But I agree, taking advantage of me telling you personal info by selling it to externals is unfair without consent
That’s the easiest part of the job, yes.
That’s why there are so many tutorials on getting that stuff set up
you could have tried writing him a letter ;-)
I'll have to read first what Claude 3 is. Thank you.
Timestamping Through the Singularity (OpenTimestamps)
Lots of people can read a supply and demand curve.

Very few organizations can measure a supply and demand curve accurately.
Our lawyers told us otherwise.

Regardless of the answer here, the fact that there's still a debate about what basic functionality requires a cookie banner is really a testament to how bad this legislation is. How long has this been around, 20 years? And there's still widespread debate and lack of understanding as to what specific functionality requires a cookie banner?
Advertising can be more targeted (and thus higher paying) when paired with tracking.
Does it become less ridiculous when your browsing history is sold to insurers, who use it to raise your rates.
I’m not surprised. This is a “hot take-centric” platform issue, and a laziness in trying to understand him too. Or.. two people on the street yelling at each other but not listening.
What’s rapid acceleration? What’s hard braking? Are the cars measuring it accurately?

Why do I want my property reporting this data without my consent?
Journals publish articles beyond primary research: https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...
It's not a real letter. It's an (implicit?) open letter that is just a self published article, with the hidden threat that everyone will see it [1] so if they don't agree they will look bad.

[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
I came here, also, to comment on complex trauma. However, I have a different take. Formerly traumatized children, even those with treatment-resistant personality disorders, can improve how they work with their system through therapy. Experiential therapies like IFS are proving to be groundbreaking modalities with great outcomes. They also reframe the goal: the goal is not to heal, but to understand, work with, and create space between the self and the system that creates automatic responses to the world at large. In doing so, one expands their window of tolerance over time. I actually found this article to be very inline with trauma healing and my own personal experience of healing complex-PTSD.
https://youtu.be/THJP_HB5HEk?si=gmdl6vIBVREc5rpA

Link for the lazy
The "fee" isn't the cookie. It's the obnoxious popup.
> people who compare a website wanting to know the number of their visitors to "hidden fees" are kind of being ridiculous

Is counting visitors all that sites are doing with tracking info?

They're not selling it to ad brokers, insurance companies, governments? They're not matching your name, address, and phone number with your web activity (including sexual interests, "anonymous" embarrassing stories, health concerns, etc)?
I was referring to star to star collisions, which I understand is incredibly rare (but not impossible).
> “I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Ask your data protection specialist.”

Ironically, the author felt compelled to announce that he’s not providing legal advice. There is also no need for him to make that disclaimer. But hey, why take the risk?
That article reads to me as if that theory is outright incompatible with the experimental evidence. Like: tired light predicts the wavelength of light from distant sources gets increased. Expanding universe predicts that—and additionally, that distant objects will be appear to be undergoing time dilation, by the same factor as their redshift. Astronomical observations of distant supernovas' light curves shows the latter.

Here's a page focused on explaining this stuff:

https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm

- "The tired light model does not predict the observed time dilation of high redshift supernova light curves. This time dilation is a consequence of the standard interpretation of the redshift: a supernova that takes 20 days to decay will appear to take 40 days to decay when observed at redshift z=1."
I see your point, but then to have a constructive conversation Paul Graham should also give his two cents about how the law could be improved. I don't know him, so I'll ask here: did he do that?
I was fortunate enough to get one of the last physical reward checks which was accompanied by a printout of my e-mail, written on in pencil.

Fortunately, it survived a house flood which destroyed the book it was in, so now the envelope it's in is prominently displayed on a rack in my living room and would be one of the things I'd grab in the event of a fire.

Every so often, when a co-worker knows who Knuth is I bring it in to a workplace to show off.
Of course this is "doing sketchy shit with people's data".

Selling my personal info to external companies so that they can manipulate me easier is sketchy in my eyes if I don't consent
Why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational
>Why do you even bother running Windows with this crap going on ?

It runs the programs I use.
First it was tools to help humans code (Copilot) -- and no one complained because we still needed human coders.

Now it's a near fully-functional teammate that needs a bit of supervision -- still no one complained because it needs human team members to instruct it

Next it will be a full-functional teammate that is probably as good as a junior coder -- but no one will complain because senior coders will get paid more and companies will have to hire less

Then, there will be the expert AI coder, but still no one will complain because we will need system architects to design the system that the AI codes.

All along, no one will complain because those with jobs will still have them and those without will be too busy thinking about how to provide for their families. Get another job? Oh yeah, AI took that one too.

All along, we are incrementally improving AI because it is an intellectual amusement -- we simply never take into account the social consequences. This path of destruction is so blindingly obvious, it's incredible that everyone is still working on AI instead of trying to destroy it. But wait, I get it, those who jump on earliest still have a chance at a bit of profit....

...so it's all worth it in the end, right?
Sure, but is that situation worse than other traditional forms of advertising? Are we just saying that the advertising industry is so greedy that they want so much more of the pie than they used to have, that we should enable them?

> Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Feels like 99% of people would prefer this. Maybe advertising becomes less effective, but it may actually become more effective if it leads to more ads being visible since they are no longer ad-blocked.
Single binray is great! Maybe I misremember, or maybe it was different when I checked last time (or I checked compiling yourself?).

497MB is big, though, and 100 MB is as well, but I agree for desktop use in research it is more than OK.
The blog clearly works from the actual outcome lense. It's repeated. Several times. The companies could just not track.

The actual outcome is that they do want to track, and use adversarial patterns and malicious compliance to twist your arm and "force consent."

Paul Graham is still wrong.
This article just reminded me that I should always choose NO when asked.

And that probably can be automated...
HN is a uniquely weird bubble of urban tech people that wouldn’t know what a Scout is.

The Scout is well known and revered among people that are into off roading, or live in rural farming areas. It was built by International Harvester- a major and well respected tractor and heavy industrial equipment brand (now known as Case IH), and marketed to farmers and rural people. The Scouts build quality and offroad capabilities are legendary… it also came with some distinctly tractor like features such as a PTO (power take off), which could directly power farm equipment like pump, winches, plows, mowers, and augers from the vehicles engine.

I grew up in a rural area in the USA in the 90s and we had a scout, and so did many of our friends and neighbors.

I don't offhand know if the Scout was sold outside of the USA or not.
Is it macOS or the monitor not being responsive?
Also, if it's slow your laptop might be too old to properly support 4K or you might have misconfigured something.

At least Dell supports their hardware: have you tried updating the monitor firmware or submitting a report?
Why was this comment dead?
Anyone got a tl:dr; as a incentive hook to read through this? It is 20 lines of huge text with a navigation bar full of rendering errors so not that inviting for spending time on it.
With or without EU regulations, client software could decide to discard all cookies once the user has "left" the site. Or it could block cross domain cookies of its own volition. Yes, it doesn't fix the fundamental issue, but it does address it for those that want to fix it against the tide. Yes, it comes with drawbacks, but it is what it is so long as we don't collectively move towards paying for content, ideally in micro form.

I sometimes come across articles in local publications that ask me to subscribe - dude, seriously? Do you expect me to subscribe to an Alaskan publication when I live half the world away and could not care less of what happens there, but just want to read this one article that seems interesting?

So instead we have ad funded websites that have to do what they have to do in order to make some money and keep publishing whatever it is they publish. Hence tracking cookies.

Everyone's needs would be better served if we could pay for content the same way we did back in the day of printed newspapers. You buy today's edition and you get today's edition and no one except the newsagent is tracking you (if you happen to regularly buy the newspaper from her, she'll remember you, and she may even suggest additional newspapers to buy but it's implied, right? we dislike machine tracking, not humans remembering our buying habits).

Alas, we don't have that. We have intrusive tracking and subscriptions, even though technically it's something we could build in weeks (lest the payment companies didn't make it unfeasible, for their own benefit).

And people do sometimes try to figure it out. Bundles come to mind. Everything -- except micro transactions allowing you to purchase just. this. article. And while micro transactions don't exclude tracking, companies are more likely (is this wishful thinking?) to be careful with a paying customer's experience than with freeloaders, which is what we insist of being, while putting up demands as to what publishers can do with our data.
> If you store any kind of data about a visitor to make their life more convenient, is that tracking? Shopping carts? Notification preferences? etc.

If it is crucial to provide the service or the service is explicitely requested by the user (i'd argue a shopping cart is), I think you don't need consent (see Article 5 of Directive 2002/58/EC).
I agree with this. We recently removed all tracking (eg google analytics) from our homepage because we didn't want to have a cookie banner. The result: everything is going fine. Turns out we didn't need the tracking at all. Should've done it way sooner.

I hope the EU sticks to their guns. A few years ago, there was a flood of HN posts about optimizing initial page loads etc, because research showed that even a few hundred milliseconds slower load times measurably affected how often people clicked on buttons named "buy" and "sign up" and the likes. Then GDPR happened, and this somehow became a non-topic and instead we get 3-screen tall "TrustArc" modals that take half a second responding to a click? This makes no sense at all!

I hope, and believe, that it's just a matter of time before people re-discover that yes, actually, if you make a page fast and nice and friendly, you get more clicks/signups/purchases/$kpi, and that cookie banners hurt business.

If this is true, then what we're seeing now is just the initial path of least resistance: do what we did before, plus do what the lawyers tell us to. As the key GDPR rules have gradually become "common knowledge", we ought to be seeing gradually more sites switch their approach and focus on fast UX again, ie, no cookie banners and thus no tracking. Sure, it's work, and I bet the math doesn't always work out against tracking, but I bet often enough it does.
I think you might not have read beyond the first line of my comment. Why are you telling me that there are alternatives? I literally said that in my comment.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion.

But it seems like IFTTT doesn't have this particular recipe.

What other options do I have like the IFTTT "genre" and apart from that ?
The problem is that the system in the case of the economy is composed of billions of humans, not machines. The economy is much more complex, which makes it harder to understand and forecast where it’s going. That doesn’t mean one is right or wrong. It just means there are limits to our knowledge.
Linux isn't perfect, but neither is Windows and it's actually easier to make people switch than you'd think, because so many things suck really hard with Windows (the update process for instance!) and people are often tired of it.

In my experience, the switch is hardest for people who are savy with Windows and who'd need to re-learn everything in order to be as proficient with Linux, but fortunately, Windows changing menus and settings at every release can help making the switch (that was my case, I used to be a Windows XP power user got a little bit pissed off when moving to Windows seven and then transitioned to Linux instead of Windows 8).
(author here)

I'm a fan of second-order thinking and unintended consequences, so I'm with you there. How would you frame a "don't track people without consent" without unintended consequences?

The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.
Just because it was good for the blacks who migrated north, doesn't mean it was good overall for the entire world. Or even for most blacks honestly. Maybe we would have seen bigger change in the south if the driven people didn't leave but instead stayed and fought the oppression. It's hard to argue good or bad when we don't have a control group...
Yes, I know. It’s infuriating but understandable that the regulations aren’t enforced properly.