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I wonder if the "?hn" at the end of the URL was added to get around repost prevention† or a favor for the people watching analytics at Wired?

† Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628952

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Almost certainly repost prevention... I tried to add this article yesterday and was upvote 4 on the previous link. It just didn't get the random boost it needed to make it to the front page.

Why would they need a special URL? Pretty much every 'analytics package' since '98 has showed referring URL.

There is no referrer in their logs for any visit from this page. Referrer headers are not sent across HTTPS->HTTP transitions; this is a secure page, and the link to Wired is not.

Note that the HTTP RFC mandates that browsers should not send referers when doing HTTPS -> HTTP, so this may not be the case here.

But, yeah, this was probably to work around the duplicate detector.

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