I don't know why so many comments are discussing "if it's intentional troll or hypocrisy", when it takes 10 seconds to check one of the other blog posts and see if the text there is selectable :(

Because people don't understand what a joke is sometimes, even on that's obvious like this.

Or some people just have a desire to vent of lots of that anger boiling inside them and are just looking for a excuse to shout at something ..

That I can relate to, and that’s how some of my blog posts get born. Like this one.

That’s a lot of work, and I don’t expect all readers to open more than one page on my blog. But yeah, great that it sparked some debate.

> nor "ironic", but an intentional effort to demonstrate how annoying

That would in fact be a deliberate use of irony.

I'm reminded of the Archer scene where he explains irony (in the middle of a car chase / gunfight), and then Pam asks:

> Oh. Okay, so then what's satire?

> Nobody really knows!

Yes but the joke is moot, because on the web, you can't really make text non-selectable (you can try, but it can be defeated extremely easily).

In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least, above my pay grade).

This is one of a million reasons why apps are so bad.

> In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least, above my pay grade).

In my experience it is above the average user's pay grade to work around it in a browser too. Even power users will probably give up if the usual ways don't work out (holding alt, browser extension, reader mode). The power-est of users might glimpse at the inspector, but they'll give up if the nodes are obfuscated.

All this to say that with things like Circle To Search or Apple's built-in screenshot OCR nowadays websites and apps are finally on a level playing field when it comes to anyone being able to circumvent text protection.

It was pretty easy to get a Bookmarklet from Google and add it to my iPhone Safari and use it.

on Mac/iOS you can just take a screenshot and then select out of the image.

Google pixel devices have had this for years. It's one of the few things that keeps me glued to this platform.

Just push the button to go to the task switch view and as long as the window preview thumbnail isn't blanked out, I can just get the phone to OCR any part of the screen in real time.

whoa, didn't know I could do that! thanks for the tip.

iPhone has had this for years.

Yeah, and I think it was there for longer than on Pixels.

Yup, I've used this for years. See also: not being able to select certain text without clicking a link (say, in a search result).

Alt+click avoids that in Firefox at least. Blew my mind when I learned about that, and I use it way more often than expected.

I can pretty much guarantee that an app like Bumble is not a webview wrapper.

You can never know nowadays. But yeah, it must be a native app, at least on iOS with its PWA-hostile policies.

You can know. There is always telltale jank in web apps. And there are things that are basically impossible to do in web apps, like reliable camera integration.

But unlike Hinge, Bumble is usable on desktop (where getting the text would be a lot easier).

People's stupidity will always surprise me. I mean... it's such a basic irony trick given the subject matter that it doesn't even deserve to be mentioned, let alone questioned.

In uBlock:

    *##html, body, body *:style(user-select: auto !important)

Wouldn't recommend applying this _everywhere_; the `body *` selector may have a significant performance impact on some pages.

Not any more. All modern browser engines read right to left.

Yep, it's clearly deliberate. It's also annoying enough that I'm not reading the text of the blog.

I hope the author doesn't have any point beyond: "it's annoying to disable text selection"

Lol, that’s a good proof for my point. And a fun one at that! Thanks.

Nice catch. Luckily I can use uMatrix to disable css and select and copy the post. Oddly the selection is transparent. Firefox Android.

> I’m lonely. Like everyone-ish else. Naturally, I’m on Bumble

No browser extensions necessary, just right click > inspect element > select <body>, then turn off the CSS rules you don't want.

That's not an option on mobile.

There are many ways to bypass that. User scripts and user styles too. But the point is delivered: one can disable selection, with just a couple of lines of CSS/JS, and cause a lot of pain for the reader.

Within seconds of opening the article, I tried selecting text, and upon realizing that I couldn't, I chuckled, knowing that it had to be intentional.

It was.

You’re right with your analysis, but I still find this device ironic in addition to what you said.

I have a bookmarklet just to deal with this kind of websites lol

Would you share perhaps?

```

javascript:(function()%7B%0A%20%20function%20R(a)%7B%0A%20%20%20%20var%20ona=%22on%22+a;%0A%20%20%20%20if(window.addEventListener)%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20window.addEventListener(a,function(e)%7B%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20for(var%20n=e.originalTarget%7C%7Ce.target;n;n=n.parentNode)%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20n%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%7D,true);%0A%20%20%20%20window%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20document%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%20%20if(document.body)document.body%5Bona%5D=null;%0A%20%20%7D%0A%20%20R(%22contextmenu%22);%0A%20%20R(%22click%22);%0A%20%20R(%22mousedown%22);%0A%20%20R(%22mouseup%22);%0A%20%20R(%22selectstart%22);%0A%20%20//%20Remove%20CSS%20user-select%20restrictions%0A%20%20var%20style=document.createElement('style');%0A%20%20style.innerHTML='*%7Buser-select:auto%20!important;-webkit-user-select:auto%20!important;-moz-user-select:auto%20!important;-ms-user-select:auto%20!important;%7D';%0A%20%20document.head.appendChild(style);%0A%7D)();

```

This enables text selection and right clicking.

Yeah, do share it!

Are people these days so dense (i.e. stupid) they couldn't figure out it was a joke by the author?

I recently read something that stated we've never really had more than 30% of students in the US at a level of mathematical understanding where they can tell that 3/4ths and 0.75 are the same thing, conceptually.

I cannot stop thinking about this; it honestly explains so much.

The third-pound burger flopped because consumers failed to understand that one third is bigger than one fourth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger#Marketing_f...

Thank you! I heard that on the radio decades ago but never saw a source to point people to. Wikipedia, who knew?

Should have promoted a quarter-plus-twelfth burger! That's about 37%!

Why complicate it: just advertise a fifth

With a price markup.

Thanks for this, wow.

I would hope fervently that HackerNews would be subject to selection bias and would be an exception, but who knows.

Indeed, one thing I keep in mind is that almost all progress, social, technical, political, etc. are wrought by an exceedingly small proportion of people. These are usually the people derided as deviant, nonconforming, abnormal.

Left to the vast majority of "normal" people who want to half-ass everything, there'd be absolutely no progress whatsoever, and what is more, society might actually fall apart.

I like Kandinsky’s metaphor of a flying pyramid with progressors at the tip and more down-to-the-earth people at the base. Such a good idea.

Even harder to understand that 1 part vinegar and 3 parts olive oil isn't 1/3 vinegar.

One cup vinegar and three cups olive oil will give you four cups salad dressing.

That’s probably one of those cases where they use two different statistics to assume a conclusion, e.g. maybe only 30% of students pass a particular profiency test, and then add to the fact that that test is the minimum level where fractions/percentages are expected to be known, and combine it to make a scary sounding headline.

You might be right but, citation needed.

Sure: https://www.nagb.gov/naep/mathematics.html

Additionally: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

22% of 12th graders are considered proficient in Math. This means:

NAEP Basic - Apply single-step percentages to solve real-world problems.

NAEP Proficient - Analyze information to solve real-world problems with proportional reasoning.

NAEP Advanced - Solve multi-step, real-world problems using percentages.

Specifically, for 12th-grade math, the cut scores are 141/300 for NAEP Basic, 176/300 for NAEP Proficient and 216/300 for NAEP Advanced. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/achieve.as...

The score is an aggregate over questions testing many different skills, so while getting a low score suggests that a student is less skilled, it doesn't immediately tell you which skills they're bad at in particular. So this is exactly the scenario that 'ninkendo was talking about. If you want to know how many students correctly answered a specific question testing a certain skill, you would need the raw disaggregated data, which I don't think NAGB publishes.

I'd like to add that it's intentional that there are substantial numbers of students in each of the four buckets defined by the three thresholds, since the goal is to track the performance of the overall population, not just a few very bad or exceptionally good students.

I should've clarified it was an example, not that literally that one highly particular thing is what all American students are bad at, or that knowing .75 == 3/4ths == 75% somehow causally affects your future or whatever.

Being unable to get the joke here implies that someone is obtuse or unable to grasp social cues (ie autism-adjacent), not that they are stupid.

Which is further confirmed by the fact that HN's audience skews towards the former and away from the latter.

I wouldn't make assumptions. There are a lot of people here...

This is a good clarification, thank you.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the joke. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of CSS the joke will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also the author's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his post - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Chris Coyier's classic blogs, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of this joke, to realise that it's not just funny - it says something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who criticise being unable to select text within the blog post truly ARE idiots. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Bologov's genius wit unfolds itself in their browsers. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a tattoo of the Lobotomized Owl selector. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid.