<story><title>AdFlush</title><url>https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3589334.3645698</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pradn</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s fascinating here is AdFlush is a classical feature engineering approach: define a bunch of features on the data manually, and then use ML to figure out the most useful &amp;#x2F; impactful ones. This is not the &amp;quot;throw terabytes of data and see what happens&amp;quot; approach we see with LLMs. It&amp;#x27;s a bit funny to even point this out because I don&amp;#x27;t recall the last time a feature-engineered ML project made it to the HN front page.&lt;p&gt;Features can be brittle, but they are understandable. The paper&amp;#x27;s appendix [1] lists the 27 features that will likely make a request&amp;#x2F;resource &amp;quot;ad-related&amp;quot;. These include interesting ones like JS AST depth, average JS identifier length, the &amp;quot;bracket to dot notations ration in JS&amp;quot;, and a number of graph measures for the graph of scripts.&lt;p&gt;And contrary to what comments in this thread are saying, they do compare against a blocklist-based adblocker: uBlock Origin. That&amp;#x27;s in section 5.5. They say they outperform uBlock Origin. But even they say they don&amp;#x27;t reduce overall page time bc their algorithm is expensive.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dl.acm.org&amp;#x2F;doi&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;10.1145&amp;#x2F;3589334.3645698&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dl.acm.org&amp;#x2F;doi&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;10.1145&amp;#x2F;3589334.3645698&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>AdFlush</title><url>https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3589334.3645698</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>YmiYugy</author><text>Without comparison to the accuracy of crowed sourced blocklists it&amp;#x27;s not that valuable. 
Maybe there is a group of hopelessly overworked blocklist maintainers&amp;#x2F;contributors, that I&amp;#x27;m not aware of. If so, their cries for help don&amp;#x27;t seem to make the HN front page.
From a user perspective, blocking banner ads feels like a basically solved problem. I think the real pain point here is that for large chunks of the web, there is no distinction between ads and content.</text></comment>