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Footprints in the Sand

https://twitter.com/iruletheworldmo/status/2007538247401124177
1•cpr•2m ago•0 comments

15 Years at XING – Reflections and a Farewell

https://www.stefanimhoff.de/15-years-xing/
1•Aldipower•2m ago•0 comments

Gramsci's Warning (2025)

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/higher-ed-gamma/2025/03/17/old-world-dying-and-new...
1•robtherobber•5m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: EU soliciting feedback on law that could affect Open Access

2•Quanttek•10m ago•0 comments

Connecting portfolios, ATS, AI to simplify startup hiring

1•kathir05•11m ago•1 comments

Clawdbot Personal AI Assistant

https://clawdbot.com/
1•tobi_bsf•11m ago•0 comments

How to Do Great Work

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
1•Anon84•12m ago•0 comments

AI Systems Engineering Patterns

https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/ai-systems-engineering-patterns
1•weltview•15m ago•0 comments

List of Web Archiving Initiatives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_archiving_initiatives
1•frozenseven•16m ago•0 comments

Either micromanage your people or lean on them

https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/either-micromanage-your-people-or
1•weltview•17m ago•0 comments

The Internet Was Built for Humans. Now It's for Agents

https://chiefting.substack.com/p/the-internet-was-built-for-humans
2•mpraz•24m ago•0 comments

Ghost Archive

https://ghostarchive.org/
1•frozenseven•27m ago•0 comments

Paris court finds 10 guilty of cyberbullying France's first lady Brigitte Macron

https://apnews.com/article/brigitte-macron-ruling-cyberbullying-france-5f78de63dc14f765e509a00400...
1•perihelions•27m ago•0 comments

Delta Electronics: Taiwan's Power Supply Giant [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRKxKz2eiOo
1•mgh2•31m ago•0 comments

Who Owns the Memory? Part 1: What Is an Object?

https://lukefleed.xyz/posts/who-owns-the-memory-pt1/
1•lalitmaganti•31m ago•0 comments

Perfect and Imperfect Shuffles

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/01/01/perfect-shuffles/
1•ibobev•31m ago•0 comments

In-Shuffles and Out-Shuffles

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/01/01/in-shuffle-out-shuffle/
1•ibobev•32m ago•0 comments

Freestyle Linked Lists Tricks

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2025/12/31/
1•ibobev•32m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What kind of side projects are you working on?

2•chistev•33m ago•0 comments

We Come to Know Earth

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-to-know-earth-20250915/
2•nsoonhui•34m ago•0 comments

A Woman Who Predicted Tech Fascism – Paulina Borsook Was Right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL-kwZdkiOA
3•rasengan0•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A tiny tool that creates short business snapshots

https://frabjous-sundae-f249f4.netlify.app/
1•RafalPilla•38m ago•0 comments

Everything You Need to Know About Email Encryption in 2026

https://soatok.blog/2026/01/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-email-encryption-in-2026/
2•tempodox•38m ago•0 comments

8bitDo Reveals Flip-Style iPhone Controller for Portrait Mode Gaming

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/05/8bitdo-iphone-controller-portrait-gaming/
1•tosh•38m ago•0 comments

Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year, 1938 (1938)

https://time.com/archive/6598257/adolf-hitler-man-of-the-year-1938/
2•chistev•40m ago•0 comments

The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility

https://xogium.me/the-text-mode-lie-why-modern-tuis-are-a-nightmare-for-accessibility
1•robin_reala•43m ago•0 comments

Anna's Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension

https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension/
31•CTOSian•46m ago•4 comments

Visualizing neural network inference in 3D with WebGL and ONNX

https://www.erikjs.com/blog/building-neural-network-visualizer
1•csgod•46m ago•0 comments

The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/next-two-years/
1•headalgorithm•47m ago•0 comments

John Horton Conway: the most charismatic mathematician (2015)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-conway-the-most-charismatic-mathemati...
2•thunderbong•47m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

X-Clacks-Overhead

https://hleb.dev/post/x-clacks-overhead/
122•hleb_dev•1d ago

Comments

stevekemp•1d ago
Looks like the site uses the deprecated "Report-To:" header in responses too, something I've never seen before and had to lookup.
hoppp•1d ago
I am all for goofy headers. Its especially fun when randomly stumbling into it.
kotaKat•1d ago
I was poking at the AT&T U-Verse outage reporting endpoint and caught "X-Employment".

Sadly no additional challenge other than "If you are reading this, please consider a technology job at AT&T www.att.jobs".

NewJazz•1d ago
Eww why would they buy a .jobs domain what a joke.
atemerev•1d ago
The most important HTTP header (though clacks is a packet routing system, not an application-level streaming protocol)
kijin•1d ago
Well, there's no reason we couldn't have clacks-over-HTTP(-over-DNS)?(-over-avian-carrier)?, is there?
falcor84•1d ago
Of course, the good old CLOACA protocol (CLacks Over Avian CArrier), with the HTTP and DNS tunneling being OPTIONAL.
wiml•1d ago
True, perhaps it should be added as an IP option field or TCP option...
danaris•1d ago
GNU Terry Pratchett

"A man never truly dies until the his name is no longer spoken."

xena•1d ago
Whenever you load my blog, it randomly sends back a name from my configuration's clackset: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/ff8627975e5f6718fff33051d11a.... I hate that the list is so long but over time it will only grow longer.
dylanh•1d ago
Thank you for putting Matt trout there.
tapete1•1h ago
Damn. I was not aware that Kevin Mitnick has passed away.
dejj•1d ago
Does “saying the name lest he be forgotten” classify as Cargo Cult?
falcor84•1d ago
Why would it? Cargo Cutlting is when you believe that doing something symbolic will have a tangible effect on the world (e.g. bring you cargo from the sky), but this is just intended to be symbolic.
dejj•1d ago
I was curious, and you’re right. It would be Cargo Culting then, if we believed the ritual actually had an effect on Pratchett in the afterlife.
rcarmo•1d ago
I had that header set back when I ran my blog on my own HTTP server. Probably should spend some Cloudflare worker cycles to put it back now that it’s purely static…
NewJazz•1d ago
You don't need cloudflare workers for that. The blog post mentioned how to add it. And there are other options as well.
rcarmo•1d ago
I have a fully static site. And the backing storage doesn’t let me set custom headers
NewJazz•1d ago
Did you read the article? That method doesn't work for you?

What about this one? https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/transform/request-he...

thrtythreeforty•1d ago
There's a list of sites broadcasting X-Clacks-Overhead: https://xclacksoverhead.org/listing/the-signal
madeofpalk•1d ago
FYI - no need to prefix your custom header with X- !

> Historically, designers and implementers of application protocols have often distinguished between standardized and unstandardized parameters by prefixing the names of unstandardized parameters with the string "X-" or similar constructs. In practice, that convention causes more problems than it solves. Therefore, this document deprecates the convention for newly defined parameters with textual (as opposed to numerical) names in application protocols.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6648

nubg•1d ago
What supposed problems does it cause in practice?
Bratmon•1d ago
If a nonstandard X header becomes widely used and then adopted as the standard, there is a surprisingly lengthy and difficult transition period to the new name.

Both clients and servers have to support both the X name and the regular name for decades, and servers have to deal with questions like "What if both are present but different?"

lucideer•1d ago
If both are present but different the unprefixed version should be favoured. That seems uncontroversial & not complex to implement.

Sending two headers seems fine in most cases.

These are certainly downsides but hardly dealbreakers. On the other side, not prefixing has its own pros & cons, which seem more difficult to work around:

1. The obvious clash issue. If two pieces of software implement entirely different X-Value: headers, the standardisation effort clarifies the signal in the form of an unprefixed version. If both competing software applications start out unprefixed, the signal will always be ambiguous.

2. Implementation changes. If any lessons are learnt during initial use of a prefixed header, these can be applied by standardising on a slightly improved unprefixed version.

garblegarble•1d ago
> If both are present but different the unprefixed version should be favoured. That seems uncontroversial & not complex to implement.

oops, you just enabled smuggling where there's a mismatch between what a proxy/firewall/etc supports and what an internal service supports.

    X-Do-Evil: true
    Do-Evil: false
lucideer•1d ago
Smuggling is a general concern whenever two headers have functionality that interact - it's not specific to prefix masking & given how implementation-based it is, it's not even likely to occur to any arbitrary prefix mask.

That's not a reason not to consider it a threat vector when implementing, but no more than when implementing any header (that interacts with another)

MrJohz•1d ago
But isn't the problem with X- headers that if they ever get standardised, they necessarily create this smuggling issue? Whereas if you start with an unprefixed header and standardise it under the same name, you avoid this issue.

You could also solve the problem by standardising the header with the X- prefix, but this is more confusing to users and violates the idea that X- always means "not standardised", at which point the prefix is useless anyway.

Bratmon•1d ago
> That's not a reason not to consider it a threat vector when implementing, but no more than when implementing any header (that interacts with another)

But the header wouldn't have interacted with another header if we hadn't decided to do this X-prefix nonsense!

lucideer•1d ago
It might not have but it's a lot more likely that it would.
wowczarek•1d ago
I have been guilty of adding a custom header to all of my emails: "Yo-Momma: Fat". For years. In a professional setting. Nobody noticed.
akoboldfrying•1d ago
Discovering this at work one day would have brought a smile to my face!

Perhaps there's a whole new joke format here.

Long-Face-Reason: horse

maxmcd•1d ago
Is this possibly an intentional reference to GNU Linux, or unrelated?
shadowgovt•1d ago
Quite intentional.
kingsfoil•1d ago
Within the book itself the clacks system has its own technical protocol which is briefly touched upon. The "overhead" is essentially packet or request metadata.

From the LSpace wiki, GNU is a metadata that means:

    G: Send the message onto the next Clacks Tower.
    N: Do not log the message.
    U: At the end of the line, return the message.

And yes, it is almost certainly a reference to GNU as in "GNU's Not Unix". =)

https://wiki.lspace.org/GNU_Terry_Pratchett

TRiG_Ireland•1d ago
It's Terry Pratchett, so of course it's an intentional reference.
nindalf•1d ago
I miss Terry Pratchett. Just a good guy, writing joyful books. None of that "gritty realism" here. There's only about 40 books by him, so I read 2 a year. By the time I get to 40, I figure I would have forgotten the first few and I can start again.

My blog has had this header since the day he died.

sandermvanvliet•1d ago
stackoverflow.com and all stack exchange sites also include X-Clacks-Overhead in the response thanks to yours truly
regularfry•1d ago
I think strictly speaking any node on the network which receives the header should forward it on. So if your browser ever sees it, it should use it for all HTTP requests from that point. And if a server ever receives it, it should pass it to all clients.
gclawes•1d ago
There are Chrome and Firefox extensions to indicate the presence of the header.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clacks-overhead-gnu...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/x-clacks-over...

kingsfoil•1d ago
A while back I wrote a tiny piece of Phoenix middleware to add the GNU message for an arbitrary name to phoenix applications:

https://github.com/alex0112/ex_clacks_overhead

I haven't touched it in years, so it's possible that it no longer works. But maybe this post is a kick in the pants for me to go test it again.

Thanks for keeping it in the overhead. GNU Terry Pratchett.

> "A man's not dead while his name is still spoken"

achillean•1d ago
Honeypots are advertising that header as well nowadays:

https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead

Most of the non-honeypot results are for the Gargoyle Router Management interface exposed by Korea Telecom:

https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+...

The results have increased significantly over time:

https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead

satvikpendem•1d ago
> But sometimes small, unnecessary things are exactly what make the internet better.

Or, worse? I don't think this is the point you're wanting to make but it's not always the case that it's better.