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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking about it wrong. The overall effect is not that users will take control over their data, or whatever. The effect is that users will complain that the site is broken. And then the pointy-haired boss will demand that the pop-up is fixed. Now instead of "page weight" being "blah blah nerd bullshit," it is something the pointy-haired boss will demand from ad network partners, and the effects will spread across the web ecosystem.

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>And then the pointy-haired boss will demand that the pop-up is fixed.

Which they can do by finding a way to load a lot of JS that doesn't trigger the popup (someone below mentions running eval on a png). This will likely make the site even slower to users but there won't be a popup.

I've found it best to never assume that intelligent creative people will choose the specific approach I want to solve a problem.

It's always wise to be careful how you pick your targets because people optimise for them in ways you don't expect so if you pick the wrong ones then you get unwanted outcomes.

I've seen it happen in sales, you focus on add on warranties at head office, store level they convince customer to buy cheaper product and sell the warranty (now if the margin on the warranty is high enough to offset that might be a smart move) or in one memorable instance give everyone a discount equal to the cost of the warranty..

We did wonder how that branch was selling more warranties than the next three best performing.

Yup. I work in healthcare and one story I hear is about readmission rates to hospitals. Basically, you don't want people to have to go back to the hospital after a procedure due to complications. So it makes sense for Medicare to reward hospitals and surgeons with low readmission rates. All good. Except for one little problem, there's one kind of patient that never ever gets readmitted. A dead one. And studies have shown that decreases in readmission rates are correlated with increases in morality rates (at least for certain procedures).

I don’t see why the runtime/interpreter couldn’t keep accurate count of the amount of code it has loaded at any time. We trust the implementers to handle much harder things already.

Is that really meaningful when a single photo will have far more data than most JS payloads?

Judging it by KB of data just doesn't make sense, unless you apply it to everything. And then it would show on pretty much every site.

Javascript also has the overhead of parsing the source code in addition to network transfer, which can easily take multiple seconds with a multi-megabyte bundle and that's a penalty even when the js is served from the browser cache

True, but JS with a really inefficient loop can do the same. That's the problem in judging by KB, it isn't really very conclusive. Browsers already alert on long-running scripts, maybe the threshold on that should be brought down instead.

Given the choice between a person with a particular hairstyle and a person who minimizes the value of others by mocking their appearance, I would choose to work with the former.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss

"Pointy-hair" is not a hairstyle that even exists in reality. It's a Dilbert reference.

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article7110907.ece/ALT...

I doubt the singer from Prodigy has ascended to any position of corporate authority.

Nevertheless, he does have the hair for it.

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