Hacker News

X-Clacks-Overhead

• 45 Comments
• My website returns a random person in a list for every X-Clacks-Overhead response header: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/877872b4d7db92b602683ecb4e99...
  I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.

    $ curl https://xeiaso.net --head | grep clacks
    x-clacks-overhead: GNU Satoru Iwata

  By xena 13 hours ago

• Love this idea. Maybe I'll make a gem or something to make enabling that easier.

  By WJW 9 hours ago

• The code is pretty trivial but in case it helps: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/internal/clackset.go

  By xena 7 hours ago

• Seeing Kris Nóva in that list hit hard. It is a beautiful idea, thank you Xe.

  By skowalak 7 hours ago

• The thing that struck me about "GNU John Dearheart" was how it feels like it _really_ deeply captures hacker culture, like Pterry wasn't just referencing the culture, but that he really got it. Which is remarkable, because he gave me that impression about many, many topics. Such a loss.

  By pdpi 12 hours ago

• Terry loved his characters in a way that's hard to express - unless they were pure evil (and he had a few) he did his best to understand their motivations in such a way that he came to portray them sympathetically.
  This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.

  By bombcar 10 hours ago

• Yup. Vimes going full-on berserker mode while screaming "Where is my cow?" should, by all rights, be extremely silly. Instead, it sent shivers down my spine.

  By pdpi 10 hours ago

• When clacks got introduced, the description of people who just enjoyed being there and spending time on coding messages and talking to unknown remote people.. well, it felt like early internet, fidonet, perhaps AM radio amateurs.
  It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.

  By riffraff 5 hours ago

• > It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
  He was definitely an early adopter of the internet, (and e.g. very active on alt.fan.pratchett), so that's no big surprise.

  By pdpi 4 hours ago

• > In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
  Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.

  By masfuerte 12 hours ago

• The Clacks is a copy of an optical telegraph system that was used in Sweden
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz
  Also UK used a system close to that. And a lot of countries along Europe developed their networks with different signaling devices.

  By rfmoz 10 hours ago

• Sorry; it's more likely they were named in tribute to the Chappe telegraph towers of France.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph
  The stations were more elaborate and there is even a recorded instance of a secret signal being passed on illicitly:
  https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du...

  By rhet0rica 7 hours ago

• Around 40,000 services on the Internet are currently including the header:
  https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+...
  For some reason, a lot of honeypots are also using that header so I filtered those out. The number of services has slowly increased over time:
  https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag...

  By achillean 36 minutes ago

• It's been a while I heard about X-Clacks-Overhead. I added it to my own page to commemorate everyone I lost along the way. After reworking my site from a custom blog engine to plain web, I forgot to re-add the custom headers. Thanks for the reminder today!
  There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.

  By MrGilbert 13 hours ago

• I added it to all the sites at my old workplace when I was there after a discussion on HN.
  One day I noticed that it disappeared, but then it returned, so someone on the inside cared and brought it back, that made me smile :)

  By kawsper 13 hours ago

• "We're obligated to inform you that this site uses cookies to do things like maintain your session and deliver personalised content. We also use third-party services from partners such as Google, who may also place cookies on your computer. Without cookies this site cannot function correctly. Please allow cookies from this website, otherwise features may not work."
  Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.

  By Animats 8 hours ago

• Absolutely. It is a disrespectful, shameful lie by the authors of the site.

  By MagnumOpus 8 hours ago

• No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation.
  Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
  I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
  And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?

  By echelon 8 hours ago

• Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation.
  ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.

  By wizzwizz4 8 hours ago

• > ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap.
  Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.

  By echelon 7 hours ago

• GDPR article 6.1(c) has you covered: no additional costs are incurred, if you're doing things properly. Did you have a specific issue complying with this legislation?

  By wizzwizz4 6 hours ago

• You're being downvoted, but you're right. At this point, I think it would be interesting if somebody did an analysis of the total cost spent for GDPR compliance against, say, a massive education campaign across the entire EU about how cookies work.

  By shadowgovt 4 hours ago

• I'm being downvoted because people like privacy regulations. And of course -- I do too.
  But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.

  By echelon 2 hours ago

• I'm downvoting you because you don't include the costs for not having the regulation at all. Complaining about it is like complaining that safely disposing of hazardous materials incurs costs to your business and how much stuff would've been possible if you were just allowed to throw it down the river.

  By gostsamo 15 minutes ago

• I tried making "real" clacks https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/2025/03/12/gnu-terry-prachet...
  I need more time and motivation to make a full network though.

  By KaiserPro 13 hours ago

• That is really quite a cool project and write-up.

     (I used to administer a laser link. go on, ask me why they aren’t very popular)
      I spent a lot of time working out how to create low powered laser transducer, capable of working on something battery powered.
  

  This is my favourite part; very real.
  I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.

  By Normal_gaussian 13 hours ago

• for a while I thought I might go to one of those uniquely nerdy colleges where they let you fuck around with dorm infrastructure.
  i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.

  By kurisufag 4 hours ago

• I love the idea! But to be true to the original, shouldn't the message be self-propagating?
  > [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
  How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?

  By lxgr 5 hours ago

• There isn't, it's just the people in the loop who can make it self propagating. But then, so did they in the original clacks.

  By riffraff 5 hours ago

• I'm almost to this one in my read through! I'm excited to get to the "information age" arc

  By marviel 11 hours ago

• I try to add this to every project I work on.

  By gardnr 9 hours ago

• mozilla.org doesn't do it anymore:

      < HTTP/2 301
      < server: nginx
      < date: Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:36:11 GMT
      < content-type: text/html
      < content-length: 162
      < location: https://www.mozilla.org/
      < strict-transport-security: max-age=60; includeSubDomains
      < x-backend-server: TS
      < cache-control: max-age=3600
      < via: 1.1 google
      < alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; ma=2592000
  

  Edit: Nope. I was wrong, if you follow that 301 it does:
  < x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett

  By cyberpunk 13 hours ago

• [deleted]

  By 13 hours ago

• Read Going Postal as a teen and absolutely loved it. But from today's perspective, I don't think this header as a general way of mourning is a good idea.
  It took two very specific bits from the Discworld lore (the Clacks overhead and GNU) and made it in a general ritual of mourning. But not every techie is a Discworld fan, and the obscurity of the name would draw more attention to the Discworld lore than to the people being mourned.
  The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
  (Reminds me a bit how the Berlin Pirate Party used to have a "Pony Time" paragraph in its charter, that members could use to request joint My Little Pony watching sessions on congresses. [1]
  Seemed like a good idea at that time as Bronies were a new thing and there was a lot of overlap with Pirate Party members. But seems pretty cringeful looking back from today, and also a tad disrespectful towards those who tried to do real political work within that party. Disclaimer: Only got to know about that from the outside, so if their own stance on that is different, I take it back)
  [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=joyV8SqeN6k

  By xg15 13 hours ago

• > The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
  You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age!
  If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you.
  The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.

  By Normal_gaussian 13 hours ago

• Hah, yeah agreed, it's really like ranting about the shapes of gravestones a bit.

  By xg15 13 hours ago

• obviously the difference is between the artistic merit of MLP and discworld.

  By mathgradthrow 9 hours ago

• Pony Time actually reminds me of the hard-boiled egg from the revolutionary rallying cry in another Terry Pratchett story.
  Part of me feels a little sad that they set it aside if I understand your story correctly. Real world politics is rife with this kind of tradition for tradition's sake. It's one of the things that ends up binding people together in the long run. Compare and contrast The Black Rod in the British Parliament and their role in summoning the Commons.

  By shadowgovt 4 hours ago

• I saw this header recently while profiling headers from feature phones. I think Opera Mini or another browser might’ve injected this header, which is odd because it’s meant to reduce bandwidth and sending it with each request goes against that

  By podlp 13 hours ago

• This is obviously the most important HTTP header, but HTTP is application-level, and clacks is a packet routing system.
  Perhaps something like IPv6's Hop-by-Hop Options can be used to pass names with every packet?
  Or, even better, we can use LoRa repeaters for something close to the actual clacks network.

  By atemerev 13 hours ago

• Someone drafted a RFC some years ago, for Clacks-over-HTTP:
  https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol

  By MrGilbert 12 hours ago

• If you happen to nominate or vote on the Hugo Awards, you may have seen this turn up.

  By offbyone 10 hours ago

• [flagged]

  By Dave_wick111 13 hours ago

• [flagged]

  By twatbastard 10 hours ago