10 ms·

Your user agent saves the cookies. If you don't like it, change it.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
I do think cookies get unfair treatment. They are things that your browser happily rebroadcasts back to the server with no real UI for it outside of the shitty devtool bar made for devs, even after all this outcry about cookies. It reminds me of the meme of the guy riding a bicycle, throwing a branch into the spokes (rebroadcasting cookies), and then roaring in pain on the ground about how evil websites/advertisers are tracking him with cookies. That said, what a lame HN thread on a post about Haskell.
- eklavya 4y ago
  I have come to accept it and just ignore it. Many times there would be a long thread having to do absolutely nothing about the topic at hand. Not a tangent but like completely unrelated, why are we even discussing this here kind of thing. I wish there was a good way to visually differentiate when a new top comment starts except by squinting and figuring out the whitespace from the left of the mobile screen, more painful than necessary I presume.
  - Mindless2112 4y ago
    Use HackerWeb. Top-level comments are highlighted, and it automatically collapses threads to show only top-level comments when there are a lot of comments. https://hackerweb.app/#/item/31181595 https://hackerweb.app/#/item/31181595
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    I couldn't help myself. Always desperate to find an opportunity to shove my 2 cents into the world. So imagine my glee when you provided me with another one! Yeah, I think both (A) defaulting to auto-expanded threads and (B) making them annoying to collapse make HN worse than it could be. You tend to read the top-level thread because it's already there. And then it ends up being longer than you expected, or you're trapped in a subtree that just won't end, or you just want to see what other people are saying. And there's no good way to move past it. Would be nice to click the indentation to collapse the thread anywhere inside the tree.
    - boogies 4y ago
      I just scroll to the top and use the “next” link on the top comment (added with the prev and context links around October 27–28th last year I think).
      - eklavya 4y ago
        Thanks a lot for sharing boogies, much simpler now.
bawolff 4y ago
Ignoring the privacy bit - 125 cookies is quite a bit of per request overhead, especially in http/1.1 where they are not compressed. I would say its poor website design.
Rygian 4y ago
Why shift the burden on the user and the user agent? The website is the only one to blame here.
- meetups323 4y ago
  Blaming the website for your own agent doing something you don't want it to is learned helplessness. Every marketing cookie generates revenue for the website in some way or another. The website wants revenue, so it asks the user agent to maintain those cookies. The user agent agrees. Then the operator of the user agent gets upset that the website asked their agent to store the cookies? Get upset that your agent agreed, not that a request was made. Or better yet, don't get upset at all and just solve the darned problem yourself. Is this Hacker News or Complier News?
  - jstimpfle 4y ago
    Cookies as a mechanism are useful and required for a solid modern web experience. However, tracking cookies are arguably the opposite of that. A typical modern website with marketing comes with, I don't know, 100s of cookies. Are you really arguing that the user should be required to vet each individual cookie whenever following a link with unvetted cookies? Or how do you solve this problem? Personally, the most I can be arsed to do is install some Adblock Plugin. I did that only a few months ago and I'm not even sure that it improved my experience by a lot.
    - jimmaswell 4y ago
      There is no problem to solve, the cookies can't hurt you and the website needs to stay afloat.
      - jstimpfle 4y ago
        To state the obvious, some people don't love the extensive profiles that are created of them.
deathanatos 4y ago
Heh, so I actually do this. An incredible amount of the web just breaks. Twitter, Reuters, Imgur. Like it's one thing if, when I attempt to log in, your log in fails (and usually, logins fail to handle the error & will just loop back to the start, that's at least a start) but a lot of the web will have a flash-of-text and then nothing, & JS has crashed.

I do think cookies get unfair treatment. They are things that your browser happily rebroadcasts back to the server with no real UI for it outside of the shitty devtool bar made for devs, even after all this outcry about cookies. It reminds me of the meme of the guy riding a bicycle, throwing a branch into the spokes (rebroadcasting cookies), and then roaring in pain on the ground about how evil websites/advertisers are tracking him with cookies. That said, what a lame HN thread on a post about Haskell.

eklavya 4y ago
I have come to accept it and just ignore it. Many times there would be a long thread having to do absolutely nothing about the topic at hand. Not a tangent but like completely unrelated, why are we even discussing this here kind of thing. I wish there was a good way to visually differentiate when a new top comment starts except by squinting and figuring out the whitespace from the left of the mobile screen, more painful than necessary I presume.
- Mindless2112 4y ago
  Use HackerWeb. Top-level comments are highlighted, and it automatically collapses threads to show only top-level comments when there are a lot of comments. https://hackerweb.app/#/item/31181595 https://hackerweb.app/#/item/31181595
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I couldn't help myself. Always desperate to find an opportunity to shove my 2 cents into the world. So imagine my glee when you provided me with another one! Yeah, I think both (A) defaulting to auto-expanded threads and (B) making them annoying to collapse make HN worse than it could be. You tend to read the top-level thread because it's already there. And then it ends up being longer than you expected, or you're trapped in a subtree that just won't end, or you just want to see what other people are saying. And there's no good way to move past it. Would be nice to click the indentation to collapse the thread anywhere inside the tree.
  - boogies 4y ago
    I just scroll to the top and use the “next” link on the top comment (added with the prev and context links around October 27–28th last year I think).
    - eklavya 4y ago
      Thanks a lot for sharing boogies, much simpler now.

bawolff 4y ago

Ignoring the privacy bit - 125 cookies is quite a bit of per request overhead, especially in http/1.1 where they are not compressed. I would say its poor website design.

Rygian 4y ago

Why shift the burden on the user and the user agent? The website is the only one to blame here.

meetups323 4y ago
Blaming the website for your own agent doing something you don't want it to is learned helplessness. Every marketing cookie generates revenue for the website in some way or another. The website wants revenue, so it asks the user agent to maintain those cookies. The user agent agrees. Then the operator of the user agent gets upset that the website asked their agent to store the cookies? Get upset that your agent agreed, not that a request was made. Or better yet, don't get upset at all and just solve the darned problem yourself. Is this Hacker News or Complier News?
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  Cookies as a mechanism are useful and required for a solid modern web experience. However, tracking cookies are arguably the opposite of that. A typical modern website with marketing comes with, I don't know, 100s of cookies. Are you really arguing that the user should be required to vet each individual cookie whenever following a link with unvetted cookies? Or how do you solve this problem? Personally, the most I can be arsed to do is install some Adblock Plugin. I did that only a few months ago and I'm not even sure that it improved my experience by a lot.
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    There is no problem to solve, the cookies can't hurt you and the website needs to stay afloat.
    - jstimpfle 4y ago
      To state the obvious, some people don't love the extensive profiles that are created of them.

deathanatos 4y ago

Heh, so I actually do this. An incredible amount of the web just breaks. Twitter, Reuters, Imgur. Like it's one thing if, when I attempt to log in, your log in fails (and usually, logins fail to handle the error & will just loop back to the start, that's at least a start) but a lot of the web will have a flash-of-text and then nothing, & JS has crashed.