Nice project, but why do you need to redirect from HTTPS to HTTP? Besides being a bad security practice, it also breaks on Firefox when HTTPS-Only Mode[1] is enabled.
The HN search API does serve via HTTPS, and it also redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS. Demo: [edit: removed]
Well, I don't know what was my problem, but for some reason I couldn't make the HTTPS requests, and couldn't find any info about this. It does indeed work, and I believe I need to have some wine.
Thank you! I've re-deployed the page with https now.