skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Companies could easily avoid any cookie banner. Just don’t track."

It seems like a point dear to the author's heart, given the way he highlights this and puts it in bold at the top of the article.

But while it sounds good on the surface, it doesn't take much digging to show it's silly. If you store any kind of data about a visitor to make their life more convenient, is that tracking? Shopping carts? Notification preferences? etc.

It's actually a bit ironic to ask visitors if it's ok to track them. If they say no, you have to track them to at least remember that choice.
In that sense, we've always been in an Austrian system, i.e., one in which disaster is always just around the corner.
I'm 48 and I'm seriously considering nursing school. The tough part will be not working for 16 months or so while in school. Perhaps I can get part time work.

I'm at a director level position and I am just tired of the field and don't want to be an aging tech worker.
How does Tutanota work to make sure that TutaCrypt is indeed unbroken or at least so time consuming to break that it is not worth the effort?

Do you employ cryptographers? Do you have engineers who specialize in security?

And do you have a process set up for a sort of recovery from a failed encryption implementation?

edit: that is to say, what is the plan in the event your encryption is proven faulty and your customer's emails are leaked to the public due to this fault?
I would put it another way. Any legislation against doing something is almost always motivated by someone's desire to do that very thing. Legislation is usually a battle of interests where the legislator, ideally, wants to protect the overall interests of the public when they conflict with narrower private interests. When the narrower interests belong to powerful groups, you often expect to see some struggle, and if the private interests have a way of making the regulation seem more intrusive and annoying than the harm it's intended to cause, they would take advantage of that to sway the public in their favour.

So legislators do expect such a struggle, and the shape it takes may be partly their fault, but it's clearly not all their fault. The more power the private interests have, the more likely they are to find some way to fight the regulation. They will certainly do everything they can to convince the public that the legislators are bad at regulation.

In this particular case, however, websites showing banners are also harming themselves as their competitors now have an interest in not showing banners and offering a better experience -- i.e. the regulation makes it worthwhile not to display banners in competitive situations. So we'll see how this all turns out.
The law isn't that bad actually, just that the courts have been very slow. The dark UI patterns are actually illegal and have been judged so in court now. This realization just has to trickle down to the companies writing these cookie banners.
Program Counter Lusering
What's your threat model? Are you planning to bring down the US empire? If so, why are you using IT at all? Carrier pigeons and one time pads might be the only safe method of communication in that case.
Just in case this helps someone: you can just block cookie banners because before you click “accept” the default
is no tracking.

There are extensions like “I don’t care about cookies” for this but also uBlock Origin has a list checkbox for it.
It's a tabloid that's known for colorful rather than balanced reporting.
I mean, humanity is and always has been in big trouble. That's why history is full of disasters, mass death etc.

But I don't think it's that developers "can't" follow a DNT cookie. It's that they won't because it doesn't benefit their employer's financial interests.

Making a rocket that lands, on the other hand, does directly correspond to SpaceX's financial interests.
> Not only that, I'm not an EU citizen and I'm not browsing websites based in EU but I'm still bombarded with cookie banners non-stop.

Again, that's the fault of the companies putting those up, they could make it opt-in to collect your data, they could just put a small notice on the footer with 2 simples links "Accept all/Reject all". But they chose, they decided to pester you with those banners as annoyingly as possible to make you have exactly the reaction you're having.
This doesn't require a specific implementation just that informed consent is given. This could be implemented as a web standard alá Apple's ATT(App Tracking Transparency). There's nothing preventing the industry from creating such a standard, obviating cookie banners in the process. This would not only be a win for users, who could express their overall position on consent as a browser setting, but also save thousands of developer hours for website.
Agreed with Paul Graham here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39627573

HN loves EU regulations though. HN also loves Paul Graham. I got my popcorn ready to read what people will write.
Right, so does Intel in at least their high end chips. But a count of last-level misses is just one factor in the cost formula for memory access.

I appreciate it’s a complicated and subjective measurement: Hyperthreading, superscalar, out-of-order all mean that a core can be operating at some fraction of its peak (and what does that mean, exactly?) due to memory stalls, vs. being completely idle. And reads meet the instruction pipeline in a totally different way than writes do.

But a synthesized approximation that could serve as the memory stall equivalent of -e cycles for perf would be a huge boon to performance analysis & optimization.
I remember messing with a self-made blue box at my school's pay phone in the early 90s, mystifying and amazing my nerdy friends. That fun ended when the phone company visited the school, and it was blantantly obvious who was the culprit in the rash of telephone billing crimes committed from a single pay phone, only after 3pm. No charges pressed, but I had to promise some dude in a suit I had learned my lesson. I hadn't.
It's a tabloid. Facts aren't particularly relevant to them. Basically the pre-internet equivalent of clickbait (although of course they do have an online presence now).
>I think generally it should not be allowed. A big component of soap is phosphates, which promote algae growth so you really don't want it in your rivers.

Shouldn't we ban people showering under the same logic? I use about the same amount of soap to wash my car as I do in the shower, but I shower a lot more often.
you are not wrong, but some things come with time because 99% of us are regular human beings who learn over time.

99 years old might not be wiser than couple of smart people, but their conclusion can be wise for other regular 30 years old hard working professionals who are losing their mind over their careers and never investing into personal relationships
That's how insurance underwriting works anyway, as gender, age, car model ect are all used to calculate a premium based on risk.

In the UK you can have a "black box" fitted to your car by insurance companies, where low risk driving get you a discount on your renewal.
It's not enough to write a law on principles alone. It must be clear and practical to comply and clear how it will be enforced. The EU should not have created a situation where the most practical solution for 1000's of companies is a cookie banner.
Shopping carts and notification preferences don't require a consent banner.
> TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator)

The title should be changed to indicate that this is an acronym.
Dahl said that his insurance agent told him the price increase was based on data collected by LexisNexis, which compiled a report tracking each and every time he and his wife drove their Chevy Bolt over a six-month period.

You can request your free LexisNexis report

https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/request
If you want to click “no” it’s often dozens of clicks (e.g. to explicitly disable each “trusted partner” with “legitimate interest”) alongside constant attempts to trick you into clicking “yes” accidentally.
The text referencing Figure 2 seems to mistakenly swap the top and bottom images.

When the legs are in the reverse recovery position (fig (fig2,2, bottom), the penis lies on the lower thigh and is protected. In this position the Achilles tendon of the leading foot can be inserted in the gap between the big toe and the first lesser toe to help correct a bunion.

Note that the top picture in Figure 2 shows the Achilles tendon of the leading foot between the big toe and adjacent toe of the trailing foot. I would conclude then that the top position is actually the one that protects the penis.
Whilst, I am very opposed to tracking; especially covert. I do believe the cookie law is bad. Fundamentally, websites can not store content on your computer without your consent. Your "User Agent" is what stores cookies; it is usually a piece of open source software fully in your control capable of only storing them based on any policy you like, including asking you for each site.
Whilst it would be nice for all sites to set an "Evil Bit" telling you which cookies are functional and which are for Adversing tracking, this is un-policable.
Apple's crowd is more tolerant to BS too.

See Apple still comparing M3 to M1 instead of comparing M3 to M2.

They will tell you "It's because M1 users are the most probable to upgrade" but nothing says Apple couldn't have compared to the M2 also.

That's the amount of copium one has to inhale when stuck to the whims of a single vendor.
And they're loving it, of course when they read stuff like "ignorant people are the loudest" they all feel like they're the knowledgeable quiet ones.
Standardization would certainly be nice, since we could automate it then (I imagine doing so now would require specific cases for most sites)
For your first point I disagree, my companies don't track and we don't have banner cookies.

On your second point, that is again a choice of said companies, not a problem with the law. The GDPR has proven very well that if they cared, they can segment who is affected or not, and not just big tech lots of random local news site and the likes are doing it just fine.

So again, you're aiming at the wrong culprit.
The article even has a book ad on the side
Those are perfectly fine reasons, but I just wanted to share my experience as maybe things are better since last time you used the other popular OS that permits upgradable hardware:

- Thanks to infusion from Valve, Wine now works really well. The recent game Helldivers 2 constantly crashes on my friends's Windows PCs, but it has not crashed for me. The Windows users are asking a Linux user to host the game!

- This will almost sound like a joke, but after JACK/ALSA/PulseAudio/GStreamer did not do the job, now there is yet another, the new PipeWire. Anyway, it works great and its bluetooth headset support is better than what I have experienced on android/osx/windows.
I like this approach it treats the problem like a reranker it would be interesting to byo classifiers you could do the embedding to match the hierarchy approach which is a good idea it seems. Also the code for Raptor came out recently and they are showing gains through a tree/hierarchy too.

https://arxiv.org/html/2401.18059v1
I wish the author a happy birthday. But - and I hope this is taken in a spirit of constructive kindness - the post is fairly generic and bland advice. I'm sure it is well meant, but I hope I never feel tempted to post something like this when I'm 72.
google a "telnet BBS" and see for yourself. the experience is the same, especially if you can set up a 1200 BPS serial connection.
And the outcome was ... ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)[1][2]

[1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms
Yes you can. See for example https://plausible.io/, which does analytics without using cookies, and without collecting any personal data.
I don't know, I used to catch gypsy cabs in London twenty odd years ago and you were taking your life into your own hands. There were some pretty shady operators. I can see why a government might want to license taxi drivers.

> Why shouldn't you be able to start what you call a 'gypsy taxi business.' what's the need for arresting you? Is it that authoritarian of a nation?

Why do we bother licensing drivers then too? Are we that much of an authoritarian nation that we need to control who drives a car? Should Uber drivers be allowed to drive without a driver's license too?
Doesn't really matter, because:

> It’s usually better to be nice than right.
Which can change minutes before boarding. You’d have to fly a non-alliance airline with single-type fleet like JetBlue or Southwest, and even then, a cancellation could pop you on another airline.
I'm also not an expert, but the article states "It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved."
On most websites I use, it's 1 click. On the rest, it's 2. I've never once encountered a website that required "dozens" of clicks
The fact that companies are doing that says more about the bad law than the companies which is exactly Paul Graham's point.
No, you can just download Adoptium, Azul and probably other builds. They're up to date and will be for few years. Not sure about Oracle, but wouldn't recommend it anyway.
Taleb would dislike himself if he could hear himself talk.
Doesn't that argument work both ways? If you interpret the EU's regulation with the "lens of game theory", it is an unintended consequence of aggressive corporate data collection. Not sure why it makes sense to complain about the EU and not the companies.
My bar for annoyance must just be very high.
The EU in this scenario believes in the open market: let the web browsers and web sites find a technical solution.
Which sort of defeats whole purpose for >95% of the target market - super loud machines are extremely annoying to everybody, and all non-it (and most it) folks look at them as failed engineering/pc building effort.
Just looking at the past decade I think most people would agree that what isn't spying on you, will be.

Or if that's not popular how about what isn't spying on you would be if they could.

(And while I'm ranting, I'm sure manufacturers would love a subscription model for the clothes I wear as well but they haven't yet figured out how to do that.)
It would be 100% ok for it to be a browser setting. It isn't though, because that would make too many people opt out. That's what the article is about.
> But while it sounds good on the surface, it doesn't take much digging to show it's silly. If you store any kind of data about a visitor to make their life more convenient, is that tracking? Shopping carts? Notification preferences? etc.

A tracking warning a login/sign up would be enough. No need to ask for cookie consent at every visit. It would just be part of the typical T&C.

> It's actually a bit ironic to ask visitors if it's ok to track them. If they say no, you have to track them to at least remember that choice.
Easily solved with a cookie that says "don't track". If cookie is set, don't track anything.
> This shall not prevent any technical storage or access ...or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.

If the functionality explicitly requested by the user -- e.g., logging in, or changing the default language or currency, or what-not -- no consent is necessary to keep cookies. Cookies are only necessary for things the user didn't implicitly ask for, like tracking.
OpenAI free version of GPT3(3.5) is pretty decent.
For $20/month you can get access to OpenAI GPT4 (if memory serves).

I can use Bing GPT4 for free (at least for a while).

I would expect GPT4 to be better than the older version,
yet the Bing version seems markedly worse than the OpenAI
version.

Are they trained on different sets of data?

Why is one so much worse?
You can use something like Plausible Analytics which does not use cookies.
I clicked on that link and immediately got a cookie banner. Am I missing something?
I'm currrently re-reading Jurassic Park, and I can't help but wonder whether we are committing the same mistakes with AI as the scientists in the book...

AI seems to be the ultimate example of "shoot first, ask questions later". We have no idea how AI will effect society, the marginal benefits to people are near-zero (measred in terms of the difference before any adoption to widespread adoption, not incremental intermediate stages), and most of the effects will likely be disastrous (much more efficient propaganda, much more efficient drug-in-the-form-of-media production to distract us from the true ills of the world to prevent a true revolution for good, and a huge wealth concentration towards tech companies).

This wanton development of AI seems exceptionally reckless...
> No, people cannot escape responsibility by saying "the law made me be belligerent toward my users".

Correction: people should not be able to escape responsibility by saying this.

The problem is that right now people do escape responsibility for saying this because the EU is not properly enforcing these new laws.

Introducing a law and then not enforcing it has consequences, and those consequences should have been foreseen. Either the law is unenforceable due to practical constraints, in which case it's a bad law, or the EU is failing to enforce it due to inability.

Hopefully the EU starts putting more focus on enforcing its existing laws rather than creating new ones.
One of those lessons learned is we now look askance at people who say things like:

> I absolutely think we should genetically engineer methods which result in the extinction of all blood sucking animals. Leeches, mosquitoes, all flies, bed bugs, you name it.

We know better now.
Social Capital AI Startup Deal Led Palihapitiya to Fire Partners
No GM took it back a couple years ago. I would bet GMs recent refreshes for SUVs grabbed a little bit of market share. Toyota lagged a little bit and had the same models/versions for a decade. I’d expect it may reverse now that Toyota has a ton of refreshed models coming out, Land Cruisers, 4Runner, and the Lexus GX are a few examples.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/249375/us-market-share-o....
The 4 no’s doesn’t counter my point. Just because Vietnam won’t openly side with one nation doesn’t mean that Vietnam doesn’t hate China. It also doesn’t mean that they will not take steps to counter China. It will just be a more subtle response.
You want 722 really, one of the choices for "HD voice", it mangles it much less than even 711
None. That doesn't mean they don't care. As I said, most people I know are annoyed by this but take these banners and tracking as a given because they don't understand enough about technology and see them everywhere. And let's be honest here, if you were to stop visiting sites that track you, you could just stop using more or less the whole internet. It's not about stopping to use these sites, it's about stopping those sites from tracking you, which almost everyone I talk to is ok with. The only people I see that defend the amount of tracking happening on the web are commenters online (here, on reddit, etc.). That leads me to believe it's mostly corporate accounts.

To the point: Not using a site is not the point of it. Insert "yet you participate in society" meme
Exactly this.

The law could have been written in such a way that we could use a browser setting and avoid incessent popups which irritate users and desensitise them to genuinely useful warnings.

Whatever the good intentions of EU lawmakers, they seem inept at technical legislation because they ALLOW companies to continue doing shady things, and rather than tackle it, the legislators create a law that merely annoys users.
I think the goal was to give citizens the possibility to make informed decisions about where their personal data is being used.

If you don't care about tracking, ok. But some do. The EU tried to cater to both audiences which I think is fair. Turns out most people that did not care about tracking would also not consent when they are asked about it specifically and there are no immediately perceived downsides visible.
This is addressed in the article. They could track you, with your consent, in many different ways. The fact that they are choosing to force this cost upon you is what is ridiculous.
Also; if you really, really want the old-skool feel of the Trident 8900 SVGA card you had in your early 90s PC-compatible, or your Toshiba laptop from the same period:

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
This is actually in violation of the rules. Withholding consent is supposed to be as easy as giving consent.
The law is not bypassed, the annoying banners with no simple option to reject are illegal. The issue is that enforcement is slow, not that the law is badly written.

GDPR's Article 7 [0] is very clear:

> 3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent. [emphasis mine]

[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...
And all that tracking comes down with inability to take risk on business side. Ad company wants to be 100% sure that ads are shown to humans, and pay only for those shown to humans(going deeper - to specific cohorts of humans, which in the past was approximated by content of the site showing ads).
Whereas sites serving ads want to extract as much money as it is possible from advertisers based on their audience count.

The incentives are on both sides to to one-up each other without tracking - hosts by inflating visitor numbers, advertisers by disputing that.

In a perfect world ad(wouldn't exist i know but bear with that) companies would pay X/month for site with Y visitors, where X depends on Y. No need for tracking, and roughly over multiple sites and multiple months it averages out.

Not enough conversion rates(risk for ad company - they could pay less)? offer lower rate per visitor next period.
Site gets spike in visitors(risk for host - they could charge more)? report higher estimated Y for next period.

What we got instead is an insane tracking infrastructure that costs way more than any possible profit gained for both sides. It's not even profit - it's avoiding being 'scammed', avoiding risk.

Remember that all that tracking bullshit started before targeted advertising was mainstream and widespread. It all started with bots and inflated click numbers, and inability to accept risk.

Tl;dr banning targeted advertising won't remove all tracking bullshit
I consider it a good outcome when I can clearly identify shitty websites and just click the back button.
We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of compute power yet all software is still incredibly slow because we and up slowing down everything by a "negligible" amount here and another "negligible" amount there and so on.

> In almost all cases you cannot just walk up to a production Linux system and do meaningful performance analysis without serious work

So? That's one very very very specific use case that others should not have to pay for. Not even with a relatively small 1% perf hit.
You can also update a AWS Lambda in a few seconds if you use the aws sdk. Or in a few more seconds if you use pulumi or terraform. It's a problem entirely related to how CloudFormation works in detecting changes.
Having read comments here first, I was surprised when I visited the article and found that while the thrust of the article was that pg was incorrect about the existence of a law about "cookie banners", the tweet referenced in the post -- and screenshot, even -- does not even imply that pg thinks that there is a law specifically mandating cookie banners.