Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,616 posts.

Networking & Internet
Any year
1601

Why HTTP?

The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will…

1611

HTTP Conversation Codes

I mapped HTTP status codes to workplace conversation snippets. "404: I have no idea what you're talking about." "502: Bob is refusing to work with me on this." Now available as a poster. Note how the spec reveals programmers always blame the client.

1613

Comcast caught hijacking web traffic

On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…