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Comment by ashray | Hacker News Reader

Is this not a terrible waste of bandwidth though ? At about 10 bytes per header (on the low end..) and say 100 million requests per day, that amounts to 1Gb of outbound bandwidth, if you count inbound bandwidth then that comes to 2gb in total. Not to mention the cumulative time spent by users downloading those bytes, thereby delaying resource display.

Okay, I see that I sucked the fun out of it :P

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Yeah it is a waste, but then so is sending CSS and Javascript that hasn't been minified. Or having multiple CSS / Javascript files when they could be consolidated. Or having long variable / class names in CSS / Javascript. Or constantly referring to Javascript as Javascript and not JS.

At some point you have to question whether you're being too stingy with bandwidth. Particularly when easter eggs like this could potentially bring you a few new visitors from the free advertising that happens when your site is discussed on blogs and forums like these.

But if nothing else; I think fun should be encouraged. After all, that's what Wozniak set out to do when he co-founded Apple :P

I wouldn't say a terrible waste of bandwidth given the novelty trade off it provides to people like us.

Besides, there's more wasted bandwidth from dubious user generated content per second floating around the internet at any second.

If you have 100 million requests per day, then you definitely have bigger problems such as your monthly CDN bill. :)

Maybe they're just sending the headers for user-agent "curl"?

Nope, tried with Chrome latest and Firefox latest. I wondered the same.

How many software engineers do you need to recruit via your http headers to offset the bandwidth costs?

pinterest.com seems to download ~700kB. Adding amusing http headers seems negligible.

1994 called, they want their bandwidth back! :)

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