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nextthing.org
Personal blog · nextthing.orgwebsystems
nextthing.org is a personal blog at nextthing.org about web and systems. Since 2007, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Fun With HTTP Headers”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's 2005 post on unusual HTTP headers, found by a systematic search, plus posts on office hours, spam-blocking CAPTCHA alternatives, and web encoding detection.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Fun With HTTP Headers9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-02-11
What Hacker News says?
Back when I worked at Google on the indexing system, the guy who sat next to me introduced http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfiel... . In his defense, it was someone else's code that he started using more broadly, and there was a latent bug in the third person's code that didn't special-case a sentinel value used for one of the similarity metrics. So, he added some analysis, and all of a sudden…
Comment linking /archives/2006/10/26/rolling-garfield-ninja-turtles
on “Amateur Radio Sleuthing Pins Down Source of Strange RF Interference”Submitted Fun With HTTP Headers as a story · 144 points
HN discussionThe idea of hard coding a URI, like is done for robots.txt is a bad idea. Let's not continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. -- http://bitworking.org/news/No_Fishing Fair comment here[1] about the specific case of robots.txt, but lets not do this kind of thing gratuitously. Maybe what we need instead is the X-BOFH header[2]: X-BOFH: http://www.xxxxx.de/bofh/xxxxxx.html The actual URL it points to has…
Comment linking /blog/cache/bofh_edited.html
on “Humans.txt, like robots.txt, but for humans.”Submitted Fun with HTTP headers as a story · 128 points
HN discussionNeat. I might start up my office hours again. For anyone thinking of starting their own, it's totally worthwhile. I wrote about mine a couple of years ago: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2008/10/30/office-hours
Comment linking /archives/2008/10/30/office-hours
on “Tell HN: We're building a "HN Office Hours" app. Help us.”Submitted The robots.txt Adventure as a story · 26 points
HN discussioncurl -i http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h...
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “Fun with HTTP headers”Submitted Fun with HTTP Headers (2005) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionhttp://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h...
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “EFF adds ASCII art to its DNS”Submitted Fun with HTTP headers (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is a blog post with some classic HTTP headers (2005): http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h... The cool thing is that the approach to find these unusual headers was pretty systematic.
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “HTTP Headers For Fun & Profit”Submitted The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI once had a blog post get 100,000 uniques in a day: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h... That was back when Digg could still drive traffic. The Apple interns e-mail list liked my post, and they all upvoted it on Digg (there were a lot of interns).
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “Getting 60 thousand pageviews with 2 carefully constructed posts”Submitted Robots.txt Adventure as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSpammers are lazy. They like to target lots of sites at once. A post of mine from a few years ago explains the rationale behind one off schemes such as this: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/07/16/a-few-upgrades My own has worked fairly well for me since then.
Comment linking /archives/2005/07/16/a-few-upgrades
on “They Make Apps' slider-based alternative to CAPTCHA”At web scale, this won't work very well (although it's a good start). For example, I found this one the last time I was doing encoding detection work: http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2007/03/31/microsoft-web
Comment linking /archives/2007/03/31/microsoft-web
on “Divining encodings on the Web”See here for a likely explanation: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=81954 http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-h... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913284
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “Ask HN: Typo in Facebook's HTTP header "X-Cnection: close" intentional?”Was going to delete this item but maybe someone will find this useful. I assumed JS was active since the query string contained the variable "post_form_id_source=AsyncRequest" which to me seemed like an obvious nod the now ubiquitous xmlHTTPRequest being used. While it doesn't prove conclusively that there wasn't JS running, it does make it plausible that it was purely an HTTP connection kept alive by X-Cnoection he…
Comment linking /archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers
on “Ask HN: Would like a 2nd set of eyes to look over some http traffic captures”
