5 ms·

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be l

• Mtinie 10y ago
  Should be easy enough to confirm. I'll test it out tomorrow and see if they've changed something.
  • frozenport 10y ago
    What if it crashes the browser!
    • Mtinie 10y ago
      That in itself is an indication of something, no?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• NelsonMinar 10y ago
  Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.
  • greglindahl 10y ago
    That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thing open for 24 hours would be best.
    • angersock 10y ago
      They made it pretty clear--leaving the browser open just belabors the point.
    • NelsonMinar 10y ago
      Perhaps the LA Times webmasters could apply your suggested methodology and come up with a more accurate estimate and share it with us here. I've already done my service in pointing how how broken their ad scripts are on a normal page. I don't need to set up a full bandwidth monitoring rig for them, too. To answer your question about the title, I did not change my blog post. Hacker News' silent moderators seem to have applied their usual policy of rewriting post titles to the article title, no matter how dull it may be.
    • anigbrowl 10y ago
      Oh yeah, like all the extra effort is going to make any actual difference. Sorry, demanding better data or methods on a casual observation is a way to avoid engaging with the problematic behavior. If publishers use bullshit methods to drive revenue then they must expect to receive bullshit critiques of their bullshit methods.
    • uxp 10y ago
      In the time since I read the linked article, I opened the LA Times site and navigated to a story, opened my network console, and read some comments on HN about the article. Safari says it's been about 12 minutes. It's requested over 1000 resources (it pegged 999+ at ~2 minutes). It's downloaded 88.4 Megabytes of data. It appears to be continually firing pixels from a multitude of places (openX and doubleclick are common). It's also downloading a number of different videos. The article I opened does not have any videos related to it's content. This article is open in an unfocused window; I have not fired any scroll, click, or touch events natively after the few seconds I opened the link, scrolled a bit, then came back to HN. 88.4 megabytes in a few minutes. I remember when my modem couldn't download more than a couple megs in dozens of minutes, and I'm a shitty stupid millennial, not some graybeard. Maybe it could hit a gig, or 14, in a day, but the point really remains set: the LATimes site is absurd.
      • 10y ago
  • lelandbatey 10y ago
    For the reference of others, I opened the LA Times on my computer and left the front page open for 10 minutes, and in that time it downloaded 48.7 MB of data.
    • andai 10y ago
      I opened a random article, it caps out at 19mb after the first 5 minutes (reached 12mb in 30 seconds).
    • NelsonMinar 10y ago
      Only 7 gigabytes a day! Perhaps the LA Times has already made their web site twice as efficient.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]