At least it's a bit nicer than JWZ (whose car got cut off by some techbro once) does. His site (not linked to obviously) displays a rude image if it detects a HN link incoming.
Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#32Blocking Hacker News and writing about it is a great way to get a story on the front page of Hacker News. This guy can't lose.
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#33The point about the effects defensive writing has on writing quality resonates. Writing is a big part of my work and I've begun to realise that I write defensively - spending time couching things in a context, inserting caveats everywhere, going on asides to deal with potential challenges - it makes for a terribly long and meandering read, whatever point I had to make buried beneath shields of parentheses and moats of footnotes.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to escape it, at least for me that's just the nature of the work.
Also I use NoScript so the redirect didn't work for me.
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#34window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; That snippet redirects people who arrive at macwright.com from Hacker News. My pi.hole blocks google.com, so the redirect failed and macwright.com loaded as usual. To be fair, my comment probably allays whatever doubt the author might have about blocking HN :)
> My pi.hole blocks google.com
How is that working out for you? I would imagine half the internet stops working?
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#35Did he disable it for this article? Because I got through without doing anything unusual. But also: I don't really get why he'd want to do that. I read the article, and I get his complaints, but they don't really seem to have anything to do with other people reading his site. They sound like reasons for _him_ to not post to and engage on HN, not reasons to try to stop people coming from HN from reading his site. His…
Did you click through to it from news.ycombinator.com? Or some other site like hckrnews.com?
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#36Interesting, even "Open link in private tab" (ff mobile) gets the redirect. I'd been assuming that that wouldn't send a referer. I suppose it probably doesn't ignore the "ping" attribute either...
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#37[dead]
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#38Things I learned today. Apparently, opening a link in a new tab doesn't set the referring host domain. [discovered by, opening story in a new tab and wondering what the author meant]
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#39I agree with all of that. The defensiveness that comes with writing for HN (and Twitter) makes me a worse writer too. It's not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading. Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the…
I’m in the middle of writing a series of security articles on my blog and a couple of people have told me that some of them are too long.
They are long because I was trying to be thorough, but more so I was trying to make sure I pre-addressed all of the arguments I knew would come (particularly in my enterprise DMARC deployment article).
I realize that what the author talks about here is part of why I do that.
Re: Macwright.com redirects HN readers away
#40I agree with all of that. The defensiveness that comes with writing for HN (and Twitter) makes me a worse writer too. It's not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading. Perhaps more unfortunately, I find that writing for academic conferences and journals makes me a worse writer too. It's different, but having to laser focus on 'selling' the…
> It’s not just about being careful and precise, but about being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading.
That’s a shame because one of HN’s explicit guidelines [1] is to respond to the “strongest possible interpretation of what someone says”.