On the flip side it is so crushing that the Cluely guys go to fancy school to help people cheat and, essentially, get away with not reading. I can't imagine an ethos so short sighted, not least because the technology they use was made by people who love science fiction and did a lot of extremely difficult homework their whole lives. These guys are the opposite of hackers, they're just hacks.

And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?

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

Minor nit, but you've spelt Stephen Hawking's name wrong in the clackset. It's "Stephen", not "Steven".

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.

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.

That's really nice. I hope you don't mind, but I run this website https://climbing-history.org/ and have borrowed your idea, except for climbers who have passed away.

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

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

Someone drafted a RFC some years ago, for Clacks-over-HTTP:

https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol

He was active on Usenet. I remember seeing his messages.

> 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.

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.

Not in the slightest! Do it, it helps the names of those who are no longer with us never be forgotten.

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

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.

The result is very strange. It's saying that South Korea has the most number of websites with the header and yet I don't see ANY search result in Korean. No writeup or whatsoever. Wonder what those websites would be.

My cynical mind would assume someone was trying to debug an unrelated issue and saw this header in a last known good version.

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...

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?

Chill. This is the defacto statement, they probably just copied it from somewhere.

GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness.

Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.

Fair point, I guess I now have to add the header to my web servers :)

Flying by the seat of my pants, this page of information has details which we can guess at - 27,799 are South Korea, 27,690 are Korea Telecom (so close that I'll say it's a 1-to-1 match). Wikipedia tells me as of 2015, KT ran more than 140,000 Wifi hotspots.[1]

Further down the info, we see 28,587 (almost the same number as above) HTTP titles are "Gargoyle Router Management Utility" - which is an opensource variant of the OpenWRT world which patches the code to include the Clacks header.[2]

I'm going to conclude that there's a direct correlation in this data (it all being one and the same endpoint/device pattern) and that 30,000 KT Wifi hotspots across South Korea have their management UI open on the public interface and not locked to the internal network or a VPN, etc. running this Gargoyle patch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KT_Corporation

[2] https://github.com/ericpaulbishop/gargoyle/blob/master/patch...

A good related book written by Gerard Holzmann and Bjorn Pehrson:

The early history of data networks https://archive.org/details/earlyhistoryofda0000holz

It makes for an interesting subplot in the (unabridged) version of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is mentioned in the Wikipedia article above.

Sorry, it's more likely he named them after the noise of navy signal lamps that use shutters: here's a video with the sound

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2G0wu-jbko

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.

>they probably just copied it from somewhere.

It would be nice if people read and meant something even if they copied it from somewhere.

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.

Interesting. Thanks for the insight.

No, it really was France, I'm afraid.

https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/the-modernisati...

> 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.

Asking marketing people not to lie. Good luck with that. Might as well ask water not to be wet.

GDPR goes way beyond cookies so that dichotomy is nonsensical.

I'm being downvoted because people like privacy regulations. And of course -- I do too.

But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.

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?

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.

Regulation is a moat. It costs money to build systems that comply.

Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations?

I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it.

Regulatory compliance is not free.

Regulatory compliance is frictionful.

I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.

What are those costs?

If it took "nearly a year" to satisfy GDPR, then your company's practices were, frankly, irresponsible (and perhaps still are), and it's a good thing you were forced to do that work. (Either that, or you misunderstood the legislation, and wasted thousands of hours when you could've just spent 3 hours reading it.)

GDPR-compliance in a greenfield project is cheaper than dirt, up until someone makes a GDPR request, at which point it's slightly more expensive than dirt because you had to take 15 minutes out of your day to satisfy the request. By your third or fourth GDPR request, it's perhaps worth taking time to implement an automated flow, but having that many customers is a lovely problem to have!