Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

It's an important topic, and I am glad you wrote about it, but even half a page of notes would have been enough to convey this. It would save me literally skim reading headings just to get past all the fluff.

Didn't even have time to finish their HN reply.

We don't fingerprint for ad purposes, and we destroy PII for humans as fast as we can because PII should be treated as radioactive. But we see customers that are constantly burned by abusive scrapers and the scrapers aren't slowing down.

The current approach to scraping is strip mining the Internet and is having the corresponding pollution effects that you'd expect. I'm fine with individuals doing whatever weird automation they want, more power to you, but it's this industrial scale crawling and extraction that's degrading the Internet from all angles.

Machine learning? (on a machine with no WebGL/WebGPU, I guess)

Pow is famously hard anyway because it's bivariate and there is no currently known way to work around the table-maker's dilemma (TMD). CORE-MATH even crashes upon a new required precision record, because it intentionally avoids Ziv's rounding.

Yes, fixed point can use simpler hardware. That's also a completely irrelevant consideration for software. The vast majority of processors are optimized for floats now and some operations (e.g. division) are actually faster.

The precision argument also falls apart. Any float with mantissa >= X+Y can get exactly the same results as a QX.Y fixed point. The float will actually perform better across the same range because you have to round it to perform like the fixed point. That means more precision, lower error, automatic normalization, better overflow behavior, a larger working range, etc. And it'll probably be just as fast, unless you're bottlenecked on memory bandwidth of inputs (unlikely). When you inevitably want an exp() or another special function, it's a heck of a lot easier to call libm than implement your own and it will perform better.

Floats are also much easier to get right for your coworkers that aren't numerical analysts.

It’s time to sign up with a virtual card, point it at my website, and see how to block them ;)

(To be fair, this one says so up top. Even so my eyes skipped over it.)

So I find the reaction helpful. I want to read posts in the best human style, but if the angry mob can’t motivate those, at least I can notice the pitchforks and torches, slap my forehead, and say, “Oh, that explains it.”

Key points to consider:

1. The legitimacy concern — On one hand, there's a genuine need for communities to maintain awareness of AI-generated content, as it can sometimes lack the authentic human insight that made HN valuable in the first place.

2. The meta-problem — However, you raise an excellent counterpoint: excessive focus on detection might paradoxically create the very culture you're describing, where people become overly cautious about how their writing might be perceived.

3. Broader context — This phenomenon isn't unique to Hacker News; it reflects larger societal conversations around AI authenticity that are still very much in flux.

Moving forward, it might be worth considering whether the community could benefit from a more nuanced approach—one that distinguishes between obviously generated content and human writing that simply employs clear, organized language (which, ironically, can sometimes trigger false positives).

Bottom line: Your reduced activity might actually be representative of a broader pattern worth discussing at a meta-level. Have you considered posting this as a Show HN discussion? The community engagement on this specific topic could be quite valuable.

Why give up information when you don't have to? Some people disable JS at least some of the time.

The OS doesn't really matter, the amount of entropy it contains is very low. As long as the anonymity set of browser-users is large it's all good. And I believe Tor Browser accomplishes this objective.

"Information gained via side-channel for the purpose of correlating individuals."

But you'd have to add an enormous amount of legalese after that to make it ironclad. They'll start arguing "this isn't a side-channel", "we're targeting bots, not individuals", etc. You'd have to define every word in that sentence very carefully.

I'd make it sweeping. "Individual" can mean "person", "bot", "suspected bot", "AI agent", "a piece of autonomous or non-autonomous software", basically anything. The "side-channel" definition might get trickier, but I'd rather legit use-cases get burned than privacy get burned.

The OP was downvoted, but I agree. I think fingerprinting should be in the same criminal category as an illegal wiretap.

If you did it in just your store, that wouldn't be a problem. The correct analogy, however, is "why should it be illegal for me to attach a perfectly traceable and invisible air-tag to you when you enter my store, without your explicit consent, and subsequently follow and document your every movement no matter where you go, as long as that location has a business relationship with my store, and also my store is the most popular chain on the planet that has business relationships with basically any relevant business that exists." And I don't think the answer to this one shouldn't be particularly difficult to arrive at.

It's passive surveillance on the order of billions of people. It's not a mom-and-pop shop.

(I have no idea, I don't know too much about this)

If you have that right, the public should have the right to know you're doing this before they enter your store, so they can avoid it.

Same with the websites, they should, legally, have to say they're about to fingerprint you so that you can close your browser tab and never come back.