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I know plenty of people that had kids in their 20's - still didn't 'grow up' until their 30's. Just because they're not partying anymore doesn't mean they still don't act like adolescents when navigating complicated situations they're in (because they're had kids before they were necessarily 'ready') compared with someone in their 30's. I would argue that taking away that time in your late 20's where you can more easily make mistakes and try new things (while also having a bit of stability in terms of money) before having kids will lead to less maturity rather than more long term.

Probably not, the comment read more as a way to rant, self-boast, and judge others' lifestyles than anything insightful.

Why would the Japanese government back a company to build chips...in Korea?

The people who voted for Brexit have moved on to the next stupid bogeyman. In a few years we'll see the fruits of that with Reform in power demolishing what's left of the Uk economy. And still, the masses won't learn.

What are we supposed to learn? That the Tories are rubbish and Labour are even worse?

The real driver of all of this is the press. There's a lot of immigrant-blaming propaganda that diverts attention from real issues.

if the government wasn't incompetent in how they are handling certain immigration issues the anti-immigration parties would not have any momentum. for some bizarre reason the government is pursuing a course of action that is poisoning the well when it comes to immigration in the UK. i think immigration can bring a lot of benefits to the UK but by bringing in poor performing migrants into the UK it can end up turning the public against all immigration.

The anti-immigration parties have made immigration the cause of all our problems when it's the cause of practically none of them. Now the government are wasting time appeasing idiots who believe everything they read on X instead of actually focussing the real problems in the country. Anyone that believes Nigel Farage can come up with a functional plan to solve a single fucking problem is in for a surprise if he's ever in power. Unfortunately it shouldn't be a surprise because the last time they backed him it was a disaster too.

To me this reads as the 'stupid' UK legislation forcing the free-market to act where they never would have acted otherwise.

Fairly confident this was the plan all along. No way the world's largest profit driven porn vendor was ever going to argue for free access to porn.

It worked to highlight the insane amount of tracking every fucking website does. Unfortunately it didn’t stop it. A browser setting letting me reject everything by default will be a better implementation. But this implementation only failed because almost every website owner wants to track your every move and share those moves with about 50 different other trackers and doesn’t want to be better.

50 is not even close.

Those banners often list up to 3000 ”partners”.


The cookie law made this worse.

I used to use an extension that let me whitelist which sites could set cookies (which was pretty much those I wanted to login to). I had to stop using it because I had to allow the cookie preference cookies on too many sites.


You can fix that. I use an extension called "I don't care about cookies" that clicks "yes" to all cookies on all websites, and I use another extension* that doesn't allow any cookies to be set unless I whitelist the site, and I can do this finely even e.g. to the point where I accept a cookie from one page to get to the next page, then drop it, and drop the entire site from even that whitelist when I leave the page, setting this all with a couple of clicks.

* Sadly the second is unmaintained, and lets localStorage stuff through. There are other extensions that have to be called in (I still need to hide referers and other things anyway.) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/forget_me_not.... I have the simultaneous desire to take the extension over or fork it, and the desire not to get more involved with the sinking ship which is Firefox. Especially with the way they treat extension developers.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... does a similar thing.


I use the first of those extensions, its the cookie whitelist one that no longer works for me.

uBlock blocks most of those for me lately.

There could be an extension to block the banners, too. I think uBO has a feature to block certain CSS classes?

The only thing that works well for me is using an extension that automatically gives permissions and another that auto deletes cookies when i close the tab.

The problem with Ublock etc. is that just blocking breaks quite a lot of sites.


You can just set your browser not to send whichever cookies you don't want to.

Cookies are a client-side technology.

Why does the government need to be involved?


The website wouldn’t inform you about which cookies are doing what. You wouldn’t have a basis to decide on which cookies you want because they are useful versus which you don’t because they track you. You also wouldn’t be informed when functional cookies suddenly turn into tracking cookies a week later.

The whole point of the consent popups is to inform the user about what is going on. Without legislation, you wouldn’t get that information.


Because it's not like the browser has two thousand cookies per website, it only has one and then they share your data with the two thousand partners server-side. The government absolutely needs to be involved.

To begin with that isn't true, because the worst offenders are third party cookies, since they can track the user between websites, but then you can block them independently of the first party cookies.

Then you have the problem that if they are using a single cookie, you now can't block it because you need it to be set so it stops showing you the damn cookie banner every time, but meanwhile there is no good way for the user or the government to be able to tell what they're doing with the data on the back end anyway. So now you have to let them set the cookie and hope they're not breaking a law where it's hard to detect violations, instead of blocking the cookie on every site where it has no apparent utility to you.

But the real question is, why does this have anything to do with cookies to begin with? If you want to ban data sharing or whatever then who cares whether it involves cookies or not? If they set a cookie and sell your data that's bad but if they're fingerprinting your browser and do it then it's all good?

Sometimes laws are dumb simply because the people drafting them were bad at it.


> If you want to ban data sharing or whatever then who cares whether it involves cookies or not?

Nobody. The law bans tracking and data sharing, not cookies specifically. People have just simplified it to "oh, cookies" and ignore that this law bans tracking.


> The law bans tracking and data sharing, not cookies specifically.

From what I understand it specifically regards storing data on the user's device as something different, and then cookies do that so cookies are different.


You could try and read the law yourself. After all, it's only been 9 years.

It covers all data processing whether automatic or manual.

The law literally doesn't talk about cookies. Or any other ways of tracking. (well, it does. In the preamble. The regulation itself is tech agnostic)


It doesn't have to contain the word "cookies" to describe the way they operate.

Again. You could literally try and read the law. After all, it's only been around for 9 years.

--- start quote ---

(1) The protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a fundamental right.

...

(6) Rapid technological developments and globalisation have brought new challenges for the protection of personal data. The scale of the collection and sharing of personal data has increased significantly. Technology allows both private companies and public authorities to make use of personal data on an unprecedented scale in order to pursue their activities. Natural persons increasingly make personal information available publicly and globally.

...

(14) The protection afforded by this Regulation should apply to natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence, in relation to the processing of their personal data.

...

(15) In order to prevent creating a serious risk of circumvention, the protection of natural persons should be technologically neutral and should not depend on the techniques used. The protection of natural persons should apply to the processing of personal data by automated means, as well as to manual processing, if the personal data are contained or are intended to be contained in a filing system.

...

(26) The principles of data protection should apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural person.

...

(32) Consent should be given by a clear affirmative act establishing a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her, such as by a written statement, including by electronic means, or an oral statement. This could include ticking a box when visiting an internet website, choosing technical settings for information society services or another statement or conduct which clearly indicates in this context the data subject's acceptance of the proposed processing of his or her personal data. Silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity should not therefore constitute consent. Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them. If the data subject's consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.

--- end quote ---

etc.


You keep saying to read the law, but did you? "The law literally doesn't talk about cookies." It does:

> (30) Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags.


"Such as". Not exclusively.

That is why: "In order to prevent creating a serious risk of circumvention, the protection of natural persons should be technologically neutral and should not depend on the techniques used."


That it also applies to things "such as" RFID tags isn't really that interesting. The salient part is identifiers. Because fingerprinting turns that into a mess.

Is your browser user agent string an "identifier"? It generally isn't unique, and requiring explicit consent to process it would cause a lot of trouble, but that and a few other things you could say the same thing about are collectively enough to be uniquely identifying.

Which is something different which they apparently hadn't considered and it's not clear how it's supposed to work. Do they become an identifier as soon as you have enough of them to uniquely identify someone? How do you even know when that threshold is passed? Does it require you to actually use them as an identifier, or is it enough just to have them because then they could be used retroactively? What if you provide a non-identifying subset of them to a third party in another jurisdiction who collects others from someone else and then combines them without explicitly notifying you?

They made a hash of it.


Not really, it disallows tracking even if you aren't storing anything (eg via fingerprinting):

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/


That link seems to say the opposite:

> The EPR was supposed to be passed in 2018 at the same time as the GDPR came into force. The EU obviously missed that goal, but there are drafts of the document online, and it is scheduled to be finalized sometime this year even though there is no still date for when it will be implemented. The EPR promises to address browser fingerprinting in ways that are similar to cookies, create more robust protections for metadata, and take into account new methods of communication, like WhatsApp.

If the thing they failed to pass promises to do something additional, doesn't that imply that the thing they did pass doesn't already do it?

And I mean, just look at this:

> Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.

> Preferences cookies — Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer, what region you would like weather reports for, or what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in.

So you don't need consent for a shopping cart cookie, which is basically a login to a numbered account with no password, but if you want to do an actual "stay logged in with no password" or just not forget the user's preferred language now you supposedly need an annoying cookie banner even if you're not selling the data or otherwise doing anything objectionable with it. It's rubbish.


> but if you want to do an actual "stay logged in with no password"

Wouldn't that be a session cookie (which is a strictly necessary cookie for accessing a secure area) with no expiration?

> or just not forget the user's preferred language

Why would you store the language preference client site anyhow? Isn't a better place the user profile on the server? I use the same language for the same site no matter the device I am logged in.


> Wouldn't that be a session cookie (which is a strictly necessary cookie for accessing a secure area) with no expiration?

The gdpr.eu website literally says that a cookie that allows the website to remember "what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in" is a functional cookie rather than a strictly necessary cookie.

> Why would you store the language preference client site anyhow?

You're not storing the language preference in the cookie, you're storing a cookie that identifies the user so that the server can remember their language preference.

Consider the two possible ways that this can work: 1) if the cookie identifies the user then using it for anything outside of the "strictly necessary" category requires the cookie banner, or 2) if the cookie is used for any strictly necessary purpose then you can set the cookie even if you're also using it for other purposes, in which case anyone can set a strictly necessary cookie and then also use the same cookie to do as much tracking as they want without your consent.

Both of these are asinine because if it's the first one they're putting things like remembering your language preference outside of the strictly necessary category and requiring the dumb cookie banner for that, but if it's the second one the law is totally pointless.


> The gdpr.eu website literally says that a cookie that allows the website to remember "what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in" is a functional cookie rather than a strictly necessary cookie.

But one row before it mentions "such as accessing secure areas of the site.". If the secure cookie has 12 months validity, this is basically a different way to implement "remember username/password".

Besides, all my browsers (Firefox, Chrome) remember the users and passwords for all the site I access, so are we even talking about this? Is Safari that bad that it doesn't remember your user/password (no experience with that one)?

> You're not storing the language preference in the cookie, you're storing a cookie that identifies the user

Ok, I agree that for sites without username / password that will not work. On the other hand, personally I rarely end up on any site that is not in a language that I can read and on top the browser has a language preference : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l... . So, in practice, I think there are extremely few cases for sites require a language cookie for a not authenticated user.


> But one row before it mentions "such as accessing secure areas of the site."

Which could be read as allowing session cookies but not ones that allow you to save your login if you come back later. But it's also kind of confusing/ambiguous, which is another problem -- if people don't know what to do then what are they going to do? Cookie banners everywhere, because it's safer.

> Ok, I agree that for sites without username / password that will not work.

How would it work differently for sites with a username and password? The login cookie would still identify the user and would still be used to remember the language preference.


> allow you to save your login if you come back later.

Again, is there any browser nowadays that doesn't save the login? I don't know any, personally but I do not know all of them. And if they are, how much market share they have? (If I myself build tomorrow a browser without the functionality, that can't be an argument that the legislation is wrong...)

> How would it work differently for sites with a username and password?

Generally for sites where you use a username, the site will load from the server several information to display (ex: your full name to write "Hello Mister X", etc.). In the same request you can have the user preferences (theme/language/etc.), and the local javascript uses them to do whatever it needs to do. Even with a cookie, there needs to be some javascript to do some actions, so no difference.

Or you could just redirect via a URL that has the user preferences once he logged in (ex: after site knows you are the correct user it will redirect you to https://mysite.com?lang=en&theme=dark)

There are many technical solutions, not sure why everybody is so crazy about cookie (oh, maybe they think of the food! Yummy)


Actually it often is a separate cookie per tracker because that's convenient for the trackers. But the only reason they don't put in the effort to do it the way you said is that browsers don't have the feature to block individual cookies. If they did, they would.

Some browsers like Midori do the sensible thing and ask you for every cookie, whether you actually want to have it. Cookie dialogs are then entirely redundant. You can click accept all in the website, and reject all in the browser.

Which is presumably the reason nobody uses Midori

I liked it. The reason I don't use it is because it doesn't support modern JS heavy websites.

Not all cookies are bad for the user, for instance the one that keeps you logged in or stores the session id. Those kind were never banned in the first place.

Blocking cookies locally doesn't allow you to easily discriminate between tracking and functional cookies. And even if the browser had a UI for accepting or rejecting each cookie, they're not named such that a normal user could figure out which are important for not breaking the website, and which are just for tracking purposes.

By passing a law that says "website providers must disambiguate" this situation can be improved.


Cookies that keep you logged in or maintain a session don’t need consent

Blocking cookies client side will block all cookies regardless of value. Hence the usefullness of law to disambiguate.

Of course, let ME decide if I want to keep fdfhfiudva=dsaafndsafndsoai and remove cindijcasndiuv=fwíáqfewjfoi. I know best what those cookies do!

If there's no regulation, nothing stops a website from telling hundreds of third-party entities about your visit. No amount of fiddling with browser settings and extensions will prevent a keen website operator from contributing to tracking you (at least on ip/household level) by colluding with data brokers via the back-end.

Because it's not about cookies. Ad trackers shouldn't store my precise geolocation for 12 years for example: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

I think that’s already been shown (at the very least I’ve read news articles with anecdotes).

I am 100% a layman here so apologies if this is a stupid analysis. But I have read that fasting can improve odds and improve side effects during chemo. Would GLP-1 stabilising blood sugar be having the same effect?

I would hesitate to draw a conclusion without more evidence. One way or another.

Do something about it then. Start by learning to make arguments that aren't so poor you yourself think they're rough and full of holes. Get involved in politics, activism, or campaigning. Vote. Convince others to vote in the same manner you do.


>> there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I hope I'm misunderstanding it.


He wasn't 'humblebragging'. He was answering a question on an anonymous forum honestly.


The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.

The world is a very confusing place these days.


To make it even more confusing I’m a rich guy cheering for people like Mamdani.

I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.

If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.


> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial

this is probably just regular bragging, right?

now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!

thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!


I'm just a lowly peon and don't make anywhere near that kind of money, but I do NOT consider that bragging in this context.


"I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging. What a weird ass corner of the internet where it's just assumed everybody earns $millions. Like, lol, no outside SV, London, and NYC, that's truly exceptional. Like, the average CEO in the US doesn't even clear $1 million (according to Google's AI search results).


> "I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging.

Except that's not what they wrote / how they framed it.

Perhaps that's just how you perceived it. I think that speaks more about you, than it does about them.


You can construct a philosophical argument that value is all relative without having to casually drop anecdata demonstrating that you personally spend many hundreds of times more on an everyday object than is typical without consideration.

Simmel managed it ok. [1]

[1] https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1900.html


Can you describe a way of communicating that same point without it being bragging in your eyes? I guess I could’ve engaged in the gymnastics of saying SWIM like they used to do on some drug forums :)


"I have spent more than $500 dollars on pants before, because I'm lucky to be in a position where for me these things are a matter of taste and whim, rather than budget, and don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them."

I don't think I have to explain to you how the gap between what you said, and what I wrote above, is what is causing offense here. You likely deserve 100% of your success, but its just common sense to obscure the specifics of it if you are way out of band in relative terms.

Its like saying: "You know, I never really get ill" at the cancer ward. Sure, its true, but read the room.


Well, after all it’s HN and this is the kind of content that attracts much of the users. I’d certainly be more careful with that wording on a website that caters to a very different audience, but it’s not long ago when indiehackers posts of people “bragging” about their successes were consistently at the top of the front page.

Not convinced I misread the room, especially considering the upvotes.


"you can lead a horse to water"

> don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them

Isn't this the same brag as before?

I can't tell how this is different than throwing some numbers in the mix, the person relating their personal experience expresses they have fuck-it-bucks either way


Not naming numbers is precisely the point, because you obfuscate the reality of the size of the gap, which in the end is what everything is about. The gap creates the offense. Everybody knows there's rich people, but being confronted by exactly how rich, to the detail of a number, is the offensive part (if done by that rich person without any clear reason).

I'm not sure why people keep piling up to pretend this is such a normal thing, this is literally why people don't discuss salaries despite it technically being in their own interest: specifics ground the fuzzy notion of inequality into reality like nothing else.

The offensive post inflates the perceived inequality from "500$ pants is too much for pants" to "10k means nothing to me" while my version leaves the specifics outside of the conversation. In my version, the person could put the level of "too expensive for pants" at 1k, still an order of magnitude lower than the offensive post.

Finally, I acknowledge that this is a privileged position to be in explicitly, because that signals that you are aware that this is an exceptional situation to be in (which I'm not sure the offensive post author is aware of, even now).


Thanks for elaborating your perspective, I wouldn't have thought of it that way

You could have omitted "but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial." and come across more matter-of-fact than brag. IMO.


Sure, you could just omit that entire sentence, no? Retains readability but avoids unnecessary specifics.


I think without that sentence it fails to communicate the absurdity of trying to figure out a generic answer to whether or not something is worth it.

With a total rewrite I could certainly have communicated that point in a much more clinical manner. I just don’t see the point.


No it doesn't. He's establishing the fact that he can afford very expensive clothes and why, from personal experience, he believes them to be worth it if you can afford it. If you omit the entire sentence the whole meaning of the post changes. I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.


Also later tried to briefly establish the fact that had I been offered such products a couple of years ago, I too would’ve found the pricing completely ridiculous.


I've had a similar journey to yours, albeit on a smaller scale. I used to think that buying jeans that cost over $40 was outrageous, but more recently I learned the value of buying nice raw denim jeans that can cost upwards of $300-400. They last way longer and look so cool after years of wear. With a little maintenance they can be permanent additions to your wardrobe.

> I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.

Aw, Mark; that's not it, pal. His last paragraph about tailored clothing captures the thought well without throwing around dollar amounts or brand names. But thanks for trying to defend your capitalist masters like a good little right-winger!


Nope, he's stating how he feels about something.


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