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.
That's really nice. I hope you don't mind, but I run this website https://climbing-history.org/ and have borrowed your idea, except for climbers who have passed away.
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.
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.
On the flip side it is so crushing that the Cluely guys go to fancy school to help people cheat and, essentially, get away with not reading. I can't imagine an ethos so short sighted, not least because the technology they use was made by people who love science fiction and did a lot of extremely difficult homework their whole lives. These guys are the opposite of hackers, they're just hacks.
And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?
> 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.
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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.
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 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?
The result is very strange. It's saying that South Korea has the most number of websites with the header and yet I don't see ANY search result in Korean. No writeup or whatsoever. Wonder what those websites would be.
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
> 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.
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.
That's really nice. I hope you don't mind, but I run this website https://climbing-history.org/ and have borrowed your idea, except for climbers who have passed away.
Seeing Kris Nóva in that list hit hard. It is a beautiful idea, thank you Xe.
Love this idea. Maybe I'll make a gem or something to make enabling that easier.
Minor nit, but you've spelt Stephen Hawking's name wrong in the clackset. It's "Stephen", not "Steven".
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.
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.
On the flip side it is so crushing that the Cluely guys go to fancy school to help people cheat and, essentially, get away with not reading. I can't imagine an ethos so short sighted, not least because the technology they use was made by people who love science fiction and did a lot of extremely difficult homework their whole lives. These guys are the opposite of hackers, they're just hacks.
And to what end? To make less money than their moms do in internal medicine?
> 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.
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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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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...
The result is very strange. It's saying that South Korea has the most number of websites with the header and yet I don't see ANY search result in Korean. No writeup or whatsoever. Wonder what those websites would be.
I'm almost to this one in my read through! I'm excited to get to the "information age" arc
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
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
I try to add this to every project I work on.
I always read this as something that would need to be done at a lower level, like forwarding some arbitrary information in a BGP update.
If you happen to nominate or vote on the Hugo Awards, you may have seen this turn up.
great idea, just added it to my site
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> 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.
As an old favorite song of mine reminds me, "gravestones cheer the living, dear; they're no use to the dead."