41–50 of 77 posts
Things 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]
I 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.
Did 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 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…
Here is the snippet of code that does the redirect:
try {
if (document.referrer) {
const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
}
}
} catch (e) {}
window.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?
I do have one exception: I whitelist youtube-ui.l.google.com. As much as I hate Google, everyone on earth posts their video to Youtube, and invidious is too janky to replace it. I hope I live long enough to see a world where humanity has found a more ethical video repository than Google.
Things 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]
I imagine in the next few years the referer header will just be blanked out always when crossing to a new domain. I believe the path was removed already.
I 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”. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He should redirect to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite as HN would easily get distracted.