That's true. It seems like javascript disabling is just not on the minds of web developers. You have to be a special kind of masochist to use noscript these days... I used it for years, but ghostery covers most of what I liked about it.
Well I guess the overall improvement must be worth images not loading on this page and whining on HN. So, what's the problem again? O you think your setup should be added as an edge case, sorry non standard setups are often not worth catering to. If you want it to work just enable scrips, it's not that hard.
I did know what you meant by noscript, just using the plugin as an example of non-javascript users :-). No cookies? You are a masochist. Another reason I like ghostery -- it blocks the cookies that I don't like.
I figured it out after about 15 seconds from seeing one of the images load on-demand. Which is the time any self-respecting computer programmer should take.
I load links as background tabs and visit them later when I am on a slow connection. When sites do things like this I end up viewing the site for the first time several minutes after clicking on it only to find that I had been waiting for nothing.
Right, I'm in a position such as yours every now and then. Now I understand that you meant that you can't possibly know you have to force the images to load because you have not looked at the tab yet.