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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make this app work."

How annoying.

Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article, or at least something that doesn't require javascript to read?

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If you want to incapacitate yourself out of some irrational hatred for a programming language instead of just employing a tracking blocker like uBlock Origin, you kinda have to live with the consequences.

It's not irrational to not want to run arbitrary, poorly sand-boxed code just to read some text.

Enabling javascript means exposing myself to:

- javascript vulnerabilities

- tracking

- ads (which themselves are well known vectors of malware)

No thank you.

That's why he mentioned ublock - to prevent ads and tracking.

I do run uBlock, but it can't catch every novel JS tracking or advertising mechanism, while disabling JS can. In addition, I prevent exposure JS vulnerabilities and malware.

This is defense in depth, and has nothing to do with hating JS as a language, and everything to do with a desire for more security and privacy.

I approach defense similar to Swiss cheese model. You can't cover everything at every level, but if you have multiple levels, the probability of failure drops significantly.

You can decide not to drive a car in order not to die, at the cost of inconvenience and money because now you limit your options for groceries etc, and you limit the fun you have because your travel options are limited.

> some irrational hatred

Wasn't there a time when webcrawlers struggled to read such a site? And isn't there still at least a slight risk of being unindexable?

Regardless; the article is a page of text. It is pretty much exactly what the use case for HTML was envisioned to be. Even if people aren't browsing the web the way you want them to we should all take a moment of silence in awe of whatever fool butchered their site design so badly that it requires JavaScript to display formatted text.

I do hope Dr. Galloway didn't put money into this botch-job of a personal website.

Here is a sed solution.

cat > wp.sed

      1i\
      <pre>
   
      s|\"post_content\":\"|&</pre>|g;/\"comments\":/s||<pre>&|
      s|}]}|&</pre>|;s|{|\
   {|g;s|&lt;!-- \/wp:heading --&gt;||g;s|\\n||g;s|&amp;nbsp;||g;
      s|&lt;p&gt;&lt;em style=&quot;color:#7f7f7f;font-size:smaller&quot;&gt;||g;
      s|&lt;\\/em&gt;&lt;\\/p&gt;||g;s|&lt;!-- \\/wp:paragraph --&gt;|<br>|g;
      s|&lt;!-- \\/wp:image --&gt;||g;s|&lt;!-- \\/wp:heading --&gt;||g;
      s|&lt;!-- wp:paragraph --&gt;|<br>|g;s|&lt;p&gt;||g;
      s|\\u2019|\'|g;s|\\u2026|...|g;s|&lt;\\/p&gt;||g;s|&lt;p&gt;||g;s|\\u201c|\"|g;
      s|\\u201d|\"|g;s|\\u2014|--|g;s|\\u2018||g;s|&lt;!-- wp:heading --&gt;||g;
      s|&lt;|<|g;s|&quot;|\"|g;s|&gt;|>|g;s|\\||g;s|",\"|\
   &|g;s|comment_content\":\"|&</pre>|g;s|\",\"comment_approved\":\"|<pre>&|g;


   curl https://api.profgalloway.com/wp-json/pg/v1/nmnm/slug/capitalists-or-cronyists |sed -f wp.sed > wp.html

   firefox ./wp.html

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