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Comment by dano | Hacker News Reader

The book "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" was mentioned by one of the co-inventors of Usenet, Tom Truscott. "He decided it would be neat to have a homework machine." [1]

1. http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book-pdf/CHAPTER%2010.pdf

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That's weird, if I open that link in Firefox (though with the HTTPS-only mode on), Tor Browser with default settings, and Ungoogled Chromium with default settings, it 404s (after going to a https link). If I directly wget on the http link it works though.

I also force all http to https using a proxy and I get a 404, too. If want to use https to retrieve the PDF, can use Wikiwix cache:

https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?rev_t=999999999...

PDF looks like crap anyway. Here's the original text-only version, available via https:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111215195747if_/http://www.col...

As http and https are separate origins, and this website might want to have secure cookies, I'm guessing that a while back they started moving to a more modern / secure web stack but had to figure out how to deal with legacy ~ URLs and made the decision not to break all of those URLs but instead just continue to serve them only as http and then have the rest of the website redirect to https. The reality is that, if you insist on redirecting http to https even when the underlying website doesn't want you to, you are going to end up with a broken experience sometimes and it frankly isn't notable.

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