Also, people are more knowledgeable about the field in which they work, so it makes HN strictly worse if the environment becomes so poisoned that they're disincentivized to participate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's not how I see that conversation:

* reaperducer was asking why it was useful for the browser to show that the page was one that usually loaded quickly/slowly

* As someone who had worked on an effort to speed up the web I replied with why I thought it was useful

* jfoster gave a good response describing why it might not have the effect I expected, since if users know a site is usually slow that may make them more patient

* I replied that this was still good, because users were in a position to make a better decision about whether to continue waiting for the site to load.

* You responded with something completely unrelated to what we were talking about.

* I tried to be helpful anyway, even though your comment wasn't something I knew much about.

* You continued in a direction that I don't know much about (how to communicate things like whether location tracking is on) and linked to a study which I didn't have time to read.

* This wasn't a discussion I was interested in, so I didn't respond. I don't see how the study you linked contradicted anything I was saying.

Jeff, you defended Google once saying that their decisions are motivated by wanting to help users make informed choices. The study was just to show that they have a track record of doing the exact opposite. Your characterization of Google was misinformed at least on that occasion. I made an educated guess that if you were willing to defend one stance that was proven wrong (that Google has any vested interest in helping users make informed choices) then it's possible you may make the same mistake again.

But dang is right, in the spirit of collegiality I should have found a better way to point out this mistake or even not do it at all.

I would be very curious as to how you’d prove this is or isn’t happening with a reasonable degree of accuracy considering all the factors involved in ad targeting. Unless you’re willing to give us access to all your source code and SSH access to the systems running it, it’s reasonable people have their doubts.

An external study to evaluate whether Google is using fingerprinting would be some work, but pretty doable. Targeted advertising is generally very blunt: if someone thinks you're especially interested in a valuable category they'll often pay a lot to advertise to you. So you could set something up where test browsers visit pages related to high-value categories (mattresses, asbestos cancer, credit cards, ...), clear client-side data, and then visit a site that loads ad scripts only from Google (to make sure you're not getting someone else's fingerprinting) and see whether the ads differ from a control group that never visited those pages.

And surprisingly for most of HN readers, Google has been pretty transparent on the policy of its ads business. In fact, Google has pretty strong incentives for transparency in this area due to advertisers, who give all the money anyway.