7 ms·

Macwright.com redirects HN readers away

111 points by Syeposxr 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
More polite than some.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
thomassmith65 4y ago
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 :)
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  > My pi.hole blocks google.com How is that working out for you? I would imagine half the internet stops working?
  - thomassmith65 4y ago
    I block google.com and subdomains. Surprisingly, it doesn't do much collateral damage. 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.
jsisto 4y ago
why is this worthy of being on the front page of hacker news?
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. This seems pretty interesting to me.
ericabiz 4y ago
Here’s what the author, Tom MacWright, has to say about it (which you can read on his blog, as long as you don’t click on a link from here): “If you’re lucky, you end up being good at a few things. If you’re really lucky, those are also the things you like doing. I’m good at writing articles that get upvoted and discussed on Hacker News, or news.ycombinator.com. But I don’t like it. Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse. I don’t like what Hacker News has become – or a lot of the web, for that matter. But I’m part of the discourse. I’ve written critical articles, mean tweets, silly comments, the whole lot of it. It’s impossible to separate one thing from another and neatly place blame. But it’s simple to notice a thing you want less of and turn it off. So I can flex the freedom of an independent blog by embracing what seems good and pushing away what I don’t like. Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web. Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now. Anyway, the RSS feed works great. The HTML site works pretty well. I tweet most new articles I write. Business as usual, just less of the orange site.”
brycewray 4y ago
Guess he’ll have to figure out how to block traffic from RSS readers, too.
tmpz22 4y ago
Eloquently explains how I’m increasingly starting to feel about link aggregators and how they impact my own behavior
- addicted 4y ago
  I’m not sure why I thought HN would be different. The same thing happened to /., Digg, Fark, etc. I guess it’s just in the nature of aggregators that get really popular and allow comments.
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    I think the fundamental truth is ~80% of discussion is personal anecdotes. This has a very strong appeal because you can make whatever you want from it, you can validate your own opinions or dismiss it off hand. Intellectual validation a la carte.
bombcar 4y ago
He should redirect to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite as HN would easily get distracted.
- w-ll 4y ago
  New https://wikispeedruns.com/ https://wikispeedruns.com/ to `Hair follicle` Got there in 69.
  - vinaypai 4y ago
    69 seconds? What was your path?
- Nicksil 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite
- desro 4y ago
  I 100% started reading that entire article until I remembered how I got there and snapped out of it. I love it.
mjb 4y ago
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 paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.
- js2 4y ago
  For every comment I’ve written here and clicked reply, I’ve written 10x more and just closed the tab. But that’s okay. Usually someone makes my point better than I ever could anyway.
  - vogt 4y ago
    Makes me feel a little better seeing someone with my same thought process. I don't know why. But I do the same thing, and think the same thing.
- catach 4y ago
  > being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading. Had my eyes opened recently by just how wild people can get with their inferences. Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.
  - krapp 4y ago
    > Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X. And then they either ignore you or call you a liar, because the only reason they bothered to comment was to post their manifesto against y anyway.
    - 4y ago
churching 4y ago
I think it's fine for an author to attempt to exclude some readers/virality. In general I sense a lot of HN-hate, and I get it: HN comments can be pedantic, can be know-it-all, can be Silicon Valley centric, and supports threading which often leads to bickering or uninteresting low-value tangents. I... ignore threads that don't interest me or that seem overly confident. I don't understand why stereotyping and hating happens, but it isn't new.
georgeoliver 4y ago
This does make me curious about the pattern of upvoting. It seems likely that usually people upvote without clicking on the referral link first, but I wonder what the percentage is. For the record I have macwright.com as well as the top upvoted HN links in my RSS feed.
flobosg 4y ago
What other sites redirect HN referers? I only know of jwz’s one. (Don’t try it at work!)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
joemi 4y ago
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 site doesn't seem to have comments, so why does it matter who reads it? I really must be missing something.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Maybe if you have SmartReferer, or for some reason your browser isn't sending it. I had to disable it to see it in action
- gdw2 4y ago
  Did you click through to it from news.ycombinator.com? Or some other site like hckrnews.com?
- divbzero 4y ago
  You must have a browser setting that blocks Referer headers or disables JavaScript by default. Here is the snippet of code that does the redirect: <script> try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; } } } catch (e) {} </script>
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
matt123456789 4y ago
Clever. Not an enforceable ban on members but still enough of a nudge to say “you can come here from HN, but don’t be that guy”.
none_to_remain 4y ago
- ajkjk 4y ago
  This is probably what he was talking about.
  - none_to_remain 4y ago
    Of course.
maerF0x0 4y ago
> I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. And this is one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time. Everytime I encountered it it was often just a pissing contest about things anyone could easily look up and prove both the arguing assholes were both wrong / right as often was the case.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time There's a reason why "Ackchyually Guy" and The Simpsons Comic Book Guy resonate.
gnarbarian 4y ago
good for him. I hate all of you miserable bastards too.
bdcravens 4y ago
If you look at most of the submissions over the past year and a half, most of them appear to come from 2 submitters who are in the HN top 10, often posting the same link more than once. (many of the most prolific submitters spam the site with 20-30 links per day, and I assume they make the rounds to many of the typical sites we see here often when farming karma)
riffic 4y ago
orange site is the worst subreddit and are we supposed to know who this author is? Context, please?
BeetleB 4y ago
I'm reminded of PG's "How To Write Usefully": > Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if they're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned person might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also model the way such an idea would be discovered. > But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes. But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill. http://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html http://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html
- jwilber 4y ago
  Somehow I think being compared to PG is exactly the sort HN-specific thing Tom wouldn’t be too keen on. (Not saying it’s bad, just made me chuckle).
googlryas 4y ago
Why does anything send referrer headers anymore?
slyall 4y ago
At least it's a bit nicer than JWZ (whose car got cut off by some techbro once) does. His site (not linked to obviously) displays a rude image if it detects a HN link incoming.
funOtter 4y ago
Blocking Hacker News and writing about it is a great way to get a story on the front page of Hacker News. This guy can't lose.
raynr 4y ago
The point about the effects defensive writing has on writing quality resonates. Writing is a big part of my work and I've begun to realise that I write defensively - spending time couching things in a context, inserting caveats everywhere, going on asides to deal with potential challenges - it makes for a terribly long and meandering read, whatever point I had to make buried beneath shields of parentheses and moats of footnotes. Unfortunately, I don't see how to escape it, at least for me that's just the nature of the work. Also I use NoScript so the redirect didn't work for me.
tbrownaw 4y ago
Interesting, even "Open link in private tab" (ff mobile) gets the redirect. I'd been assuming that that wouldn't send a referer. I suppose it probably doesn't ignore the "ping" attribute either...
white_dragon88 4y ago
[dead]
czbond 4y ago
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]
- Gigachad 4y ago
  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.
  - cyral 4y ago
    For now website owners can also remove it the referrer header if they would like to with Referrer-Policy: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
- gnicholas 4y ago
  When I command-clicked the link it opened in a new tab and redirected. I'm using Brave on a Mac, FWIW.
collegeburner 4y ago
if y'all want a less friendly example of the same check out jwz's site: https://www.jwz.org/blog/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
He needs to block this at the server level. JS isn't going to work for a good portion of the HN crowd.
- wanderingjew 4y ago
  I've got a script on a few of my sites. Initially, the redirect is off. If it passes 100 incoming hits from HN in an hour, I assume it's on the front page. Then I just do some messy scripting to re-enable the script for a few minutes every hour. One minute on, seven minutes off. That sort of thing. Basically, the goal is to redirect the maximum number of people, and you can't do that if it redirects everyone. No, I won't be sharing these scripts with anyone but mostly because they're all terrible kludges that do not deserve to see the light of day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
synu 4y ago
I’ve thought about writing an extension to hide the top comment on every article because it’s often a pedantic disagreement with whatever the article is about, but not always (like in this case). I do totally agree that the best writing comes not when you’re trying to build the ultimate defense against takedowns, but when you can express yourself more creatively.
renewiltord 4y ago
Sick dude. The commentary on this website is often kind of lame and I've found that lots of people who frequent it make the mistake of trying to pre-empt middle-brow comments. Don't do that. Write for those who get you. Overly pedantic intentional misunderstandings pervade comments here and if you react to those by trying to defend against them you weaken yourself. Love it!
firloop 4y ago
I'm grateful it's not traumatizing like Jamie Zawinski's HN redirect.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
system2 4y ago
If you open it incognito, you can read the actual post. try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; https://google.com/'; } } } catch (e) { }
stevage 4y ago
I'm lucky enough to have met Tom. So much of his writing and online persona made a lot more sense to me having had that experience. He's a really excellent person, and I'm glad he does the things he does.
lostmsu 4y ago
If only I needed to run his childish JavaScript.
beeboop 4y ago
Hckrnews.com supremacy

111 points by Syeposxr 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

More polite than some.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

thomassmith65 4y ago

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 :)

perryizgr8 4y ago
> My pi.hole blocks google.com How is that working out for you? I would imagine half the internet stops working?
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  I block google.com and subdomains. Surprisingly, it doesn't do much collateral damage. 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.

jsisto 4y ago

why is this worthy of being on the front page of hacker news?

gwbas1c 4y ago
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > What to Submit > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. This seems pretty interesting to me.

ericabiz 4y ago

Here’s what the author, Tom MacWright, has to say about it (which you can read on his blog, as long as you don’t click on a link from here): “If you’re lucky, you end up being good at a few things. If you’re really lucky, those are also the things you like doing. I’m good at writing articles that get upvoted and discussed on Hacker News, or news.ycombinator.com. But I don’t like it. Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse. I don’t like what Hacker News has become – or a lot of the web, for that matter. But I’m part of the discourse. I’ve written critical articles, mean tweets, silly comments, the whole lot of it. It’s impossible to separate one thing from another and neatly place blame. But it’s simple to notice a thing you want less of and turn it off. So I can flex the freedom of an independent blog by embracing what seems good and pushing away what I don’t like. Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web. Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now. Anyway, the RSS feed works great. The HTML site works pretty well. I tweet most new articles I write. Business as usual, just less of the orange site.”

brycewray 4y ago

Guess he’ll have to figure out how to block traffic from RSS readers, too.

tmpz22 4y ago

Eloquently explains how I’m increasingly starting to feel about link aggregators and how they impact my own behavior

addicted 4y ago
I’m not sure why I thought HN would be different. The same thing happened to /., Digg, Fark, etc. I guess it’s just in the nature of aggregators that get really popular and allow comments.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  I think the fundamental truth is ~80% of discussion is personal anecdotes. This has a very strong appeal because you can make whatever you want from it, you can validate your own opinions or dismiss it off hand. Intellectual validation a la carte.

bombcar 4y ago

He should redirect to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite as HN would easily get distracted.

w-ll 4y ago
New https://wikispeedruns.com/ https://wikispeedruns.com/ to `Hair follicle` Got there in 69.
- vinaypai 4y ago
  69 seconds? What was your path?
Nicksil 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite
desro 4y ago
I 100% started reading that entire article until I remembered how I got there and snapped out of it. I love it.

mjb 4y ago

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 paper throughout the paper makes it hard to communicate. Many of my favorite CS papers could never be published in a 'good' journal or conference today. Good research writing is really hard, but it seems like the publication process makes it harder, not easier.

js2 4y ago
For every comment I’ve written here and clicked reply, I’ve written 10x more and just closed the tab. But that’s okay. Usually someone makes my point better than I ever could anyway.
- vogt 4y ago
  Makes me feel a little better seeing someone with my same thought process. I don't know why. But I do the same thing, and think the same thing.
catach 4y ago
> being super defensive to avoid the most uncharitable possible reading. Had my eyes opened recently by just how wild people can get with their inferences. Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X.
- krapp 4y ago
  > Defense is impossible when you're asserting X, but also have to explicitly assert the entire universe of not-X. And then they either ignore you or call you a liar, because the only reason they bothered to comment was to post their manifesto against y anyway.
  - 4y ago

churching 4y ago

I think it's fine for an author to attempt to exclude some readers/virality. In general I sense a lot of HN-hate, and I get it: HN comments can be pedantic, can be know-it-all, can be Silicon Valley centric, and supports threading which often leads to bickering or uninteresting low-value tangents. I... ignore threads that don't interest me or that seem overly confident. I don't understand why stereotyping and hating happens, but it isn't new.

georgeoliver 4y ago

This does make me curious about the pattern of upvoting. It seems likely that usually people upvote without clicking on the referral link first, but I wonder what the percentage is. For the record I have macwright.com as well as the top upvoted HN links in my RSS feed.

flobosg 4y ago

What other sites redirect HN referers? I only know of jwz’s one. (Don’t try it at work!)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

joemi 4y ago

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 site doesn't seem to have comments, so why does it matter who reads it? I really must be missing something.

yellow_lead 4y ago
Maybe if you have SmartReferer, or for some reason your browser isn't sending it. I had to disable it to see it in action
gdw2 4y ago
Did you click through to it from news.ycombinator.com? Or some other site like hckrnews.com?
divbzero 4y ago
You must have a browser setting that blocks Referer headers or disables JavaScript by default. Here is the snippet of code that does the redirect: <script> try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; } } } catch (e) {} </script>
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

matt123456789 4y ago

Clever. Not an enforceable ban on members but still enough of a nudge to say “you can come here from HN, but don’t be that guy”.

none_to_remain 4y ago

ajkjk 4y ago
This is probably what he was talking about.
- none_to_remain 4y ago
  Of course.

maerF0x0 4y ago

> I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. And this is one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time. Everytime I encountered it it was often just a pissing contest about things anyone could easily look up and prove both the arguing assholes were both wrong / right as often was the case.

cratermoon 4y ago
> one reason I've been resistant to identifying with nerd / hacker culture for a long time There's a reason why "Ackchyually Guy" and The Simpsons Comic Book Guy resonate.

gnarbarian 4y ago

good for him. I hate all of you miserable bastards too.

bdcravens 4y ago

If you look at most of the submissions over the past year and a half, most of them appear to come from 2 submitters who are in the HN top 10, often posting the same link more than once. (many of the most prolific submitters spam the site with 20-30 links per day, and I assume they make the rounds to many of the typical sites we see here often when farming karma)

riffic 4y ago

orange site is the worst subreddit and are we supposed to know who this author is? Context, please?

BeetleB 4y ago

I'm reminded of PG's "How To Write Usefully": > Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if they're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned person might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also model the way such an idea would be discovered. > But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes. But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill. http://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html http://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html

jwilber 4y ago
Somehow I think being compared to PG is exactly the sort HN-specific thing Tom wouldn’t be too keen on. (Not saying it’s bad, just made me chuckle).

googlryas 4y ago

Why does anything send referrer headers anymore?

slyall 4y ago

At least it's a bit nicer than JWZ (whose car got cut off by some techbro once) does. His site (not linked to obviously) displays a rude image if it detects a HN link incoming.

funOtter 4y ago

Blocking Hacker News and writing about it is a great way to get a story on the front page of Hacker News. This guy can't lose.

raynr 4y ago

The point about the effects defensive writing has on writing quality resonates. Writing is a big part of my work and I've begun to realise that I write defensively - spending time couching things in a context, inserting caveats everywhere, going on asides to deal with potential challenges - it makes for a terribly long and meandering read, whatever point I had to make buried beneath shields of parentheses and moats of footnotes. Unfortunately, I don't see how to escape it, at least for me that's just the nature of the work. Also I use NoScript so the redirect didn't work for me.

tbrownaw 4y ago

Interesting, even "Open link in private tab" (ff mobile) gets the redirect. I'd been assuming that that wouldn't send a referer. I suppose it probably doesn't ignore the "ping" attribute either...

white_dragon88 4y ago

[dead]

czbond 4y ago

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]

Gigachad 4y ago
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.
- cyral 4y ago
  For now website owners can also remove it the referrer header if they would like to with Referrer-Policy: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
gnicholas 4y ago
When I command-clicked the link it opened in a new tab and redirected. I'm using Brave on a Mac, FWIW.

collegeburner 4y ago

if y'all want a less friendly example of the same check out jwz's site: https://www.jwz.org/blog/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

He needs to block this at the server level. JS isn't going to work for a good portion of the HN crowd.

wanderingjew 4y ago
I've got a script on a few of my sites. Initially, the redirect is off. If it passes 100 incoming hits from HN in an hour, I assume it's on the front page. Then I just do some messy scripting to re-enable the script for a few minutes every hour. One minute on, seven minutes off. That sort of thing. Basically, the goal is to redirect the maximum number of people, and you can't do that if it redirects everyone. No, I won't be sharing these scripts with anyone but mostly because they're all terrible kludges that do not deserve to see the light of day.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

synu 4y ago

I’ve thought about writing an extension to hide the top comment on every article because it’s often a pedantic disagreement with whatever the article is about, but not always (like in this case). I do totally agree that the best writing comes not when you’re trying to build the ultimate defense against takedowns, but when you can express yourself more creatively.

renewiltord 4y ago

Sick dude. The commentary on this website is often kind of lame and I've found that lots of people who frequent it make the mistake of trying to pre-empt middle-brow comments. Don't do that. Write for those who get you. Overly pedantic intentional misunderstandings pervade comments here and if you react to those by trying to defend against them you weaken yourself. Love it!

firloop 4y ago

I'm grateful it's not traumatizing like Jamie Zawinski's HN redirect.

the_third_wave 4y ago

system2 4y ago

If you open it incognito, you can read the actual post. try { if (document.referrer) { const ref = new URL(document.referrer); if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') { window.location.href = 'https://google.com/'; https://google.com/'; } } } catch (e) { }

stevage 4y ago

I'm lucky enough to have met Tom. So much of his writing and online persona made a lot more sense to me having had that experience. He's a really excellent person, and I'm glad he does the things he does.

lostmsu 4y ago

If only I needed to run his childish JavaScript.

beeboop 4y ago

Hckrnews.com supremacy