Human Headers

Dev tools

http headers

SHOW HN2014

25points
17comments
#1,101of 2,272 in 2014
Top 49%of 2014 by points

How HN took it

RoastedHalf or more of the comments are critical

1 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 5 critical, out of 9 comments about the project. Thread score -0.36.

Idea: 1 for, 4 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Fun idea and a nice concept

    From 2 comments
    • Hmm, human headers. I like it.
      Raphael on HN
    • Nice idea, there is always humans.txt (which a surprising number of sites have, try google for example). http://humanstxt.org/
      RossM on HN

Objections

  • Extra headers on every request add bandwidth overhead

    From 2 comments
    • At first, I liked this idea. It's an ego boost. But then I realized this extra HTTP header information is going out with every request, and really only serves to increase…
      whileonebegin on HN
    • To me this shouldn't be a header. Why not create something like humans.txt? Better to do something you can opt into, instead of jamming an extra header on some guys poor cellular…
      michaelmcmillan on HN
  • humans.txt already does this without header cost

    From 2 comments
    • I'm with the others who mentioned humans.txt. No header overhead (little as it is), no need to have access to the web server (apache, nginx, etc) (how many professional devs are…
      thebouv on HN
    • To me this shouldn't be a header. Why not create something like humans.txt? Better to do something you can opt into, instead of jamming an extra header on some guys poor cellular…
      michaelmcmillan on HN
  • Information could simply go in the HTML or About page

    From 2 comments
    • Why not put this information in the html? Then it's only available on one page.
      coherentpony on HN
    • What's wrong with putting this kind of information on the site's "About" page, which doesn't require any special browser extension to display?
      greenyoda on HN

Requests

  • Use an opt-in mechanism such as a request header sent only by the extension

    From 1 comment
    • Great point. With the goal being that this can run in your browser as you browse the web, would it be more expensive to make an additional entire HTTP request to a, possibly…
      randomdrake on HN

Questions

  • Would a per-domain humans.txt fetch cost more than adding bytes to headers?

    From 1 comment
    • Great point. With the goal being that this can run in your browser as you browse the web, would it be more expensive to make an additional entire HTTP request to a, possibly…
      randomdrake on HN

Alternatives named

  • humans.txt

    From 2 comments
    • Nice idea, there is always humans.txt (which a surprising number of sites have, try google for example). http://humanstxt.org/
      RossM on HN
    • I'm with the others who mentioned humans.txt. No header overhead (little as it is), no need to have access to the web server (apache, nginx, etc) (how many professional devs are…
      thebouv on HN
  • Information in the HTML or the About page

    From 2 comments
    • Why not put this information in the html? Then it's only available on one page.
      coherentpony on HN
    • What's wrong with putting this kind of information on the site's "About" page, which doesn't require any special browser extension to display?
      greenyoda on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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