Top all-time · #443
Mark Nottingham
Personal blog · mnot.netwebsystems
Mark Nottingham's personal blog at mnot.net covers web and systems. Since 2007, 127 different Hacker News readers have linked it 183 times, most often “Everything You Wanted To Know About Caching”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 39 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mark Nottingham's posts on HTTP caching, REST and IETF standards, which commenters call a great caching introduction and an excellent versioning article.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Liked for caching, called excellent on API versioning and great on benchmarking; one says to read the HTTP core posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 39 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Mark Nottingham's home page
Most-linked posts?
- Everything You Wanted To Know About Caching11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-11-17
- Caching Tutorial7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-03-02
- How to read an RFC6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-07-31
- How to Think About HTTP Status Codes5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-05-11
- The State of Browser Caching, Revisited4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-03-16
- RFC 2616 is dead4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-06-07
- What RSS Needs3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-25
- On HTTP Load Testing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-05-18
- How the Next Layer of the Internet Is Going to Be Standardised3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-06-21
- A New Definition of HTTP3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-06
What Hacker News says?
The import from url feature is drawing a lot of initial skepticism - but I think once you look closer at it there are even more things to be wary of. The initial thing is the fear "whoa, that is hella insecure!" which, I agree NPM is basically the same problem... although, with NPM - Git system, you can 1. fork a version and use that version (which you can do with this, just host different url) or two you can freeze…
Comment linking /blog/2017/03/16/browser-caching
on “Deno 1.0”Submitted HTTP/2 Is Done as a story · 437 points
HN discussionOf course "you don't implement caching". I think it was clear that I was talking about designing a cache-aware application. Cf. http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/ .
Comment linking /cache_docs/
on “Ruby 2.0.0 Released”Submitted RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users as a story · 306 points
HN discussionThis is the same position Mark Nottingham ( http://www.mnot.net/personal/ ) takes and expresses in his talk "Leveraging the Web for Services at Yahoo!"( http://www.infoq.com/presentations/services-without-soap-yah... ). However, Mark created a service called "Is It RESTful?" ( http://isitrestful.com/ ) to deal with all the engineers asking him that question :)
Comment linking /personal/
on “Nobody Understands REST or HTTP”Submitted Server-sent events, WebSockets, and HTTP as a story · 299 points
HN discussionFrom the screening arranger's words: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2015/07/20/snowden_meets_the_ietf It’s important to point out that this was NOT an official IETF event, and neither was it giving external advocacy organisations a stage (as some have intimated); rather, it was entirely an effort of individuals, working within the rules for requesting a room at IETF meetings.
Comment linking /blog/2015/07/20/snowden_meets_the_ietf
on “Edward Snowden at IETF 93”Submitted What will a Chromium-only Web look like? as a story · 267 points
HN discussionAlso notice how the plan is to push not only DNS entries but also TLS certificates: "Right now, people are really keen to get HTTP/2 “out the door,” so a few more advanced (and experimental) features have been left out, such as pushing TLS certificates and DNS entries to the client — both to improve performance. HTTP/3 might include these, if experiments go well." https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/01/30/http2_expectati…
Comment linking /blog/2014/01/30/http2_expectations
on “A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS”Submitted Why 451? as a story · 245 points
HN discussionFetch came in around 2015, and XMLHttpRequest wasn't consistent in the way different verbs were handled, like redirects, as this blog post[0] from 2006 points out: > Basic redirect support is pretty universal, but things quickly fall apart on most browsers when you do tricky things like use non-GET/POST methods on redirecting resources. There were other things too, I'm not sure CORS supported anything but GET and PO…
Comment linking /blog/2006/01/23/test_xmlhttprequest
on “Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful”Submitted Snowden Meets the IETF as a story · 204 points
HN discussionYes, HTTP/2 is finally taking the opportunistic encryption seriously (think STARTTLS in SMTP), whereas the pre-Snowden http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2817 "Upgrading to TLS Within HTTP/1.1" never took off one bit. In fact, there are now not one, but like at least four different post-Snowden drafts to the effect of seamless behind-the-scenes encryption on top of the HTTP:// address scheme, which is the exact solution…
Comment linking /blog/2014/03/17/trying_out_tls_for_http_urls
on “RFC 7258 – Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack”Submitted RFC 2616 is dead as a story · 179 points
HN discussionIt requires a more modern browser to operate securely; it says nothing about whether it is perfectly secure against all threat models, and this particular website is hosted on the same IP as at least one other so requires SNI to operate securely indeed, and will hopefully in future support ESNI as the software implements it. BTW - if this site did not use SNI, and only served one website at https://www.mnot.net , th…
Comment linking /
on “RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users”Submitted Apple's HTTP POST caching is a bug as a story · 175 points
HN discussionIt's actually a relic of when I was testing to see how broad SNI adoption was -- see https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_yo...
Comment linking /blog/2014/05/09/if_you_can_read_this_youre_sniing
on “RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users”Submitted Will there be a Distributed HTTP? as a story · 149 points
HN discussionHere are some software engineering blogs from my RSS reader in addition to the ones listed in TFA. I honestly don't know how over or underrated they are, but I guess that varies depending on which communities you're closer to. Mikola Lysenko https://0fps.net Graphics programming, geometry and algorithms. --- Steven Wittens http://acko.net Not underrated in any sense of the word, but I have to include it in case ther…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Programming blogs”Submitted Everything You Wanted To Know About Caching as a story · 133 points
HN discussionThis[1] might be what you're looking for. [1]: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/06/http-core
Comment linking /blog/2022/06/06/http-core
on “RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)”Submitted If You Can Read This, You're SNIing as a story · 129 points
HN discussionNo need to wait; HTTP got a similar full overhaul across several RFCs. Read all about it from one of the editors: - https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/06/http-core - https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/08/http-extensions
Comment linking /blog/2022/06/08/http-extensions
on “RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)”Submitted How to read an RFC as a story · 125 points
HN discussionThat happened already, no? https://www.mnot.net/blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead
Comment linking /blog/2014/06/07/rfc2616_is_dead
on “RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)”Submitted Designing Headers for HTTP Compression as a story · 116 points
HN discussion> CDNs are an architectural misfeature that only exist because Fly.io wasn't around 20 years ago. I'm being extreme, but I think that's fundamentally true. ;) Spicy take :) Although building for a dynamic CDN (I'm thinking Varnish here) feels like building inside-out, I can't see a way to deliver pageviews as efficiently (in terms of CPU or Watts per view) without using a CDN and a lot of caching. With Fly I guess y…
Comment linking /blog/2011/10/21/why_esi_is_still_important_and_how_to_make_it_better
on “Run Ordinary Rails Apps Globally (2021)”Submitted Apple's Best Option: Decentralize iCloud as a story · 109 points
HN discussionThat's not true xmlhttprequest should support all methods but there are some quirks eg see http://www.mnot.net/javascript/xmlhttprequest/ to test though that does not cover PATCH.
Comment linking /javascript/xmlhttprequest/
on “Rails 4.0: PATCH will replace PUT as the primary HTTP method for updates”Submitted On HTTP Load Testing as a story · 109 points
HN discussion
