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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

Don't link to this guy's site. He has a serious personal problem with every reader of HN (including the vast majority he's never met and knows nothing about) and serves an NSFW image to anybody that has this site in the referrer request header.

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I find it insane that everybody is seemingly okay with the fact that websites get to know what a user was browsing before landing on their site. And that there's no straightforward way to disable this behavior without the use of extensions.

Highly recommend installing https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-referer

Hmm, the addon description says "has been largely superseeded by better browser defaults"

huh, no idea why it would say that, the only sane default is when referrer is not leaked to websites at all.

Doesn't seem NSFW to me at all. It's a skin textured egg with hairs in an egg cup.

https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png

Huh, looks like he changed the image in 2024 (based on url). Before today, I'd have said the jwz image was goatse.

It was always the hairy egg/scrotum.

This is a piece of Internet lore I'm not familiar with! Any good summary or article or anything you'd recommend?

Why do you need an article? Just find a link to some page on http://jwz.org somewhere on news.ycombinator.com, and click it. Note that you will get a (really quite tame) NSFW image. Said image will explain jwz's feelings regarding Hacker News.

Presumably they are looking for more than the 2 lines in the image that don't explain anything about why.

The lines do explain why, from the horse's mouth. I don't know what value-add you'd expect from an "article" - an interview with jwz?

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s... doesn't mention HN directly, but will give you a sense of his POV (copy-and-paste the link or you'll get the behavior described up-thread)

Alright, maybe "article" was a poor word choice? Thanks for an example of of what happens when you link to their site from here, I was just curious to read into the drama, it sounds like an interesting story from a pocket of the internet I'm not familiar with.

When I said "article," I guess I meant that I don't want to watch a youtube video detailing the drama or whatever, I was hoping to just read about it. Either way, thanks for the link and the explanation further down the thread.

There's nothing much to it. Jamie Zawinski just doesn't think highly of Venture Capital etc. He thinks that the first tech boom ruined San Francisco and he thinks that Paul Graham is terrible. That's pretty much it.

Considering that I've spent many a night at Bootie SF (back when it was at DNA Lounge) on too many drugs or alcohol to respond to on-call issues, it's entirely possible that he had more power over tech than it had over his life.

Like many people in San Francisco, he is an intelligent guy with great will to power and eccentric views.

Coders at Work has an interview with a pretty comprehensive backstory of his time in the tech industry. If you want to get more of his vibe, he's also in the documentary Code Rush.

Honestly it's refreshing to see someone in tech stand up to the VC-only vision of what tech can be. I still enjoy HN, but got a good laugh at image that popped up and agreed he has a point.

He seems to have a pretty good grasp of the average commenter here, I don't know what your problem is with him exercising his free speech rights on his own website to deal with people he feels that way about.

Sounds like you're the one with the personal problem. Let people read and link to what they want, and mind your business.

Get a better browser that doesn't leak the site you came from all over the place.

Yeah, I remembered that after, had to open another browser window to confirm it because otherwise I just got the cached one, and then edited.

You can hate jwz as much as you want but the fact remains that probably 95% of ycombinator funded startups couldn't exist without making extensive use of the gpl, bsd, Apache and similar licensed software produced by a lot of open source curmudgeons and greybeards.

Many of whom share his same opinion on VCs and late stage capitalism.

> You can hate jwz as much as you want

I don't hate him and didn't write anything of the sort. I've never met him. He might as well be the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny as fas as I'm concerned.

> the fact remains that probably 95% of ycombinator funded startups couldn't exist without making extensive use of the gpl, bsd, Apache and similar licensed software produced by a lot of open source curmudgeons and greybeards. Many of whom share his same opinion on VCs and late stage capitalism.

I've been using FOSS for personal use since I was a child. I'm a literal card-carrying supporter of the FSF. I'm more passionate about it than I am shitting on random people on the internet. If he has a problem with VCs then he can spam them with pictures of genitalia and ad-hominem attacks, not me, who's just some random dude who _isn't_ worth millions of dollars from a software business exit (along with thousands of others on this site).

It's a shitty move, I'll grant you, but it's also clearly a form of protest, and acts of protest are by-design intended to make the public uncomfortable in some way. As far as this kind of thing goes, I personally find it mildly amusing, mildly offensive, and mildly clever. I think the internet is more interesting for people like jwz doing things like this. Not necessarily "trolling," because this--for all its crude imagery and sardonic language--it's a very clever way to continuously raise awareness toward a larger issue they have taken with society. I was just motivated to read a pair of blog posts from 13-years ago, ones that required additional effort to access, and considered jwz's perspective on VCs and a hyper-aggressive work culture...for anyone who's ever attempted to publish any kind of content? That's kind of impressive.

Not that I would seek to deny your valid annoyance and offense. It's a non-consensual scrotum in a teacup. I personally would have gone a different direction, I get why that would raise someone's hackles.

> You can hate jwz as much as you want but the fact remains that probably 95% of ycombinator funded startups couldn't exist

wait, this would be a bad thing?

But without six different AI-enabled VSCode forks to choose from, how would I ever write software?

Sounds like a sensible and principled fellow.

Considering that Netscape used to have “about:jwz” as an Easter egg URL and he was influential in open sourcing Netscape…

Didn't any unknown about: string just lead to somebody's wwwhome with simple URL rewriting? At least, with some versions?

No there was a pretty small but interesting list of people in the source code.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/about-jwz.html

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