I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.
The thing that struck me about "GNU John Dearheart" was how it feels like it _really_ deeply captures hacker culture, like Pterry wasn't just referencing the culture, but that he really got it. Which is remarkable, because he gave me that impression about many, many topics. Such a loss.
Terry loved his characters in a way that's hard to express - unless they were pure evil (and he had a few) he did his best to understand their motivations in such a way that he came to portray them sympathetically.
This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
Yup. Vimes going full-on berserker mode while screaming "Where is my cow?" should, by all rights, be extremely silly. Instead, it sent shivers down my spine.
When clacks got introduced, the description of people who just enjoyed being there and spending time on coding messages and talking to unknown remote people.. well, it felt like early internet, fidonet, perhaps AM radio amateurs.
It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
> In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
It's been a while I heard about X-Clacks-Overhead. I added it to my own page to commemorate everyone I lost along the way. After reworking my site from a custom blog engine to plain web, I forgot to re-add the custom headers. Thanks for the reminder today!
There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
"We're obligated to inform you that this site uses cookies to do things like maintain your session and deliver personalised content. We also use third-party services from partners such as Google, who may also place cookies on your computer.
Without cookies this site cannot function correctly. Please allow cookies from this website, otherwise features may not work."
Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation.
Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation.
ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
GDPR article 6.1(c) has you covered: no additional costs are incurred, if you're doing things properly. Did you have a specific issue complying with this legislation?
Regulation is a moat. It costs money to build systems that comply.
Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations?
I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it.
Regulatory compliance is not free.
Regulatory compliance is frictionful.
I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.
You're being downvoted, but you're right. At this point, I think it would be interesting if somebody did an analysis of the total cost spent for GDPR compliance against, say, a massive education campaign across the entire EU about how cookies work.
I'm downvoting you because you don't include the costs for not having the regulation at all. Complaining about it is like complaining that safely disposing of hazardous materials incurs costs to your business and how much stuff would've been possible if you were just allowed to throw it down the river.
(I used to administer a laser link. go on, ask me why they aren’t very popular)
I spent a lot of time working out how to create low powered laser transducer, capable of working on something battery powered.
This is my favourite part; very real.
I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
for a while I thought I might go to one of those uniquely nerdy colleges where they let you fuck around with dorm infrastructure.
i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
I love the idea! But to be true to the original, shouldn't the message be self-propagating?
> [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?
Read Going Postal as a teen and absolutely loved it. But from today's perspective, I don't think this header as a general way of mourning is a good idea.
It took two very specific bits from the Discworld lore (the Clacks overhead and GNU) and made it in a general ritual of mourning. But not every techie is a Discworld fan, and the obscurity of the name would draw more attention to the Discworld lore than to the people being mourned.
The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
(Reminds me a bit how the Berlin Pirate Party used to have a "Pony Time" paragraph in its charter, that members could use to request joint My Little Pony watching sessions on congresses. [1]
Seemed like a good idea at that time as Bronies were a new thing and there was a lot of overlap with Pirate Party members. But seems pretty cringeful looking back from today, and also a tad disrespectful towards those who tried to do real political work within that party. Disclaimer: Only got to know about that from the outside, so if their own stance on that is different, I take it back)
> The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age!
If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you.
The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.
Pony Time actually reminds me of the hard-boiled egg from the revolutionary rallying cry in another Terry Pratchett story.
Part of me feels a little sad that they set it aside if I understand your story correctly. Real world politics is rife with this kind of tradition for tradition's sake. It's one of the things that ends up binding people together in the long run. Compare and contrast The Black Rod in the British Parliament and their role in summoning the Commons.
I saw this header recently while profiling headers from feature phones. I think Opera Mini or another browser might’ve injected this header, which is odd because it’s meant to reduce bandwidth and sending it with each request goes against that
My website returns a random person in a list for every X-Clacks-Overhead response header: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/877872b4d7db92b602683ecb4e99...
I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.
Love this idea. Maybe I'll make a gem or something to make enabling that easier.
The code is pretty trivial but in case it helps: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/internal/clackset.go
Seeing Kris Nóva in that list hit hard. It is a beautiful idea, thank you Xe.
The thing that struck me about "GNU John Dearheart" was how it feels like it _really_ deeply captures hacker culture, like Pterry wasn't just referencing the culture, but that he really got it. Which is remarkable, because he gave me that impression about many, many topics. Such a loss.
Terry loved his characters in a way that's hard to express - unless they were pure evil (and he had a few) he did his best to understand their motivations in such a way that he came to portray them sympathetically.
This is most noticeable in his caricatures that became characters that became badasses over multiple novels; the Watch has a few of these, but there are others.
Yup. Vimes going full-on berserker mode while screaming "Where is my cow?" should, by all rights, be extremely silly. Instead, it sent shivers down my spine.
When clacks got introduced, the description of people who just enjoyed being there and spending time on coding messages and talking to unknown remote people.. well, it felt like early internet, fidonet, perhaps AM radio amateurs.
It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
> It really seemed like Pratchett knew something of this niche cultures, way more than I expected.
He was definitely an early adopter of the internet, (and e.g. very active on alt.fan.pratchett), so that's no big surprise.
> In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
Surely named "Clacks" because of the clacking sound the system makes.
The Clacks is a copy of an optical telegraph system that was used in Sweden
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Niclas_Edelcrantz
Also UK used a system close to that. And a lot of countries along Europe developed their networks with different signaling devices.
Sorry; it's more likely they were named in tribute to the Chappe telegraph towers of France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph
The stations were more elaborate and there is even a recorded instance of a secret signal being passed on illicitly:
https://blog.franceinfo.fr/deja-vu/2017/10/10/le-piratage-du...
Around 40,000 services on the Internet are currently including the header:
https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=x-clacks-overhead+...
For some reason, a lot of honeypots are also using that header so I filtered those out. The number of services has slowly increased over time:
https://trends.shodan.io/search?query=x-clacks-overhead+-tag...
It's been a while I heard about X-Clacks-Overhead. I added it to my own page to commemorate everyone I lost along the way. After reworking my site from a custom blog engine to plain web, I forgot to re-add the custom headers. Thanks for the reminder today!
There are also browser extensions, which show when a website broadcasts the "X-Clacks-Overhead" - header.
I added it to all the sites at my old workplace when I was there after a discussion on HN.
One day I noticed that it disappeared, but then it returned, so someone on the inside cared and brought it back, that made me smile :)
"We're obligated to inform you that this site uses cookies to do things like maintain your session and deliver personalised content. We also use third-party services from partners such as Google, who may also place cookies on your computer. Without cookies this site cannot function correctly. Please allow cookies from this website, otherwise features may not work."
Amusingly, that's not true. The only cookie they send is Google Analytics, which has zero value to the user. The site works fine with it blocked.
Absolutely. It is a disrespectful, shameful lie by the authors of the site.
No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation.
Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort.
I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars.
And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?
Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation.
ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
> ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap.
Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.
GDPR article 6.1(c) has you covered: no additional costs are incurred, if you're doing things properly. Did you have a specific issue complying with this legislation?
Regulation is a moat. It costs money to build systems that comply.
Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations?
I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it.
Regulatory compliance is not free.
Regulatory compliance is frictionful.
I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.
You're being downvoted, but you're right. At this point, I think it would be interesting if somebody did an analysis of the total cost spent for GDPR compliance against, say, a massive education campaign across the entire EU about how cookies work.
I'm being downvoted because people like privacy regulations. And of course -- I do too.
But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.
I'm downvoting you because you don't include the costs for not having the regulation at all. Complaining about it is like complaining that safely disposing of hazardous materials incurs costs to your business and how much stuff would've been possible if you were just allowed to throw it down the river.
I tried making "real" clacks https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/2025/03/12/gnu-terry-prachet...
I need more time and motivation to make a full network though.
That is really quite a cool project and write-up.
This is my favourite part; very real.I think you're right; I suspect Terry would have been tickled by the header, but if there were any physical world implementations I think he would have been overjoyed. One of my favourite Terry stories is of him making his sword, which feels similar.
for a while I thought I might go to one of those uniquely nerdy colleges where they let you fuck around with dorm infrastructure.
i back-of-napkin'd a whole packet-over-laser relay system based conceptually on the clacks that'd give every room/station its own serial-interfacible (up|down) link. you could link buildings out of windows and stuff. horribly impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the kind of thing that could only happen in a university on-campus environment.
I love the idea! But to be true to the original, shouldn't the message be self-propagating?
> [...] header that can be transmitted from server to server [...]
How so? In HTTP, there's always one client and one server. Am I missing some way to make this sticky or self-propagating, e.g. browsers or other clients that will cache received headers and then send them to other servers?
There isn't, it's just the people in the loop who can make it self propagating. But then, so did they in the original clacks.
I'm almost to this one in my read through! I'm excited to get to the "information age" arc
I try to add this to every project I work on.
mozilla.org doesn't do it anymore:
Edit: Nope. I was wrong, if you follow that 301 it does:< x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
Read Going Postal as a teen and absolutely loved it. But from today's perspective, I don't think this header as a general way of mourning is a good idea.
It took two very specific bits from the Discworld lore (the Clacks overhead and GNU) and made it in a general ritual of mourning. But not every techie is a Discworld fan, and the obscurity of the name would draw more attention to the Discworld lore than to the people being mourned.
The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
(Reminds me a bit how the Berlin Pirate Party used to have a "Pony Time" paragraph in its charter, that members could use to request joint My Little Pony watching sessions on congresses. [1]
Seemed like a good idea at that time as Bronies were a new thing and there was a lot of overlap with Pirate Party members. But seems pretty cringeful looking back from today, and also a tad disrespectful towards those who tried to do real political work within that party. Disclaimer: Only got to know about that from the outside, so if their own stance on that is different, I take it back)
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=joyV8SqeN6k
> The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.
You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age!
If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you.
The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.
Hah, yeah agreed, it's really like ranting about the shapes of gravestones a bit.
obviously the difference is between the artistic merit of MLP and discworld.
Pony Time actually reminds me of the hard-boiled egg from the revolutionary rallying cry in another Terry Pratchett story.
Part of me feels a little sad that they set it aside if I understand your story correctly. Real world politics is rife with this kind of tradition for tradition's sake. It's one of the things that ends up binding people together in the long run. Compare and contrast The Black Rod in the British Parliament and their role in summoning the Commons.
I saw this header recently while profiling headers from feature phones. I think Opera Mini or another browser might’ve injected this header, which is odd because it’s meant to reduce bandwidth and sending it with each request goes against that
This is obviously the most important HTTP header, but HTTP is application-level, and clacks is a packet routing system.
Perhaps something like IPv6's Hop-by-Hop Options can be used to pass names with every packet?
Or, even better, we can use LoRa repeaters for something close to the actual clacks network.
Someone drafted a RFC some years ago, for Clacks-over-HTTP:
https://github.com/clacks-overhead/clacks-protocol
If you happen to nominate or vote on the Hugo Awards, you may have seen this turn up.
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