We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703853 and marked it off-topic.

That's a picture of a man's testicle in a chalice. While puzzling and slightly impressive, I wish I hadn't opened that at work :)

All of JWZ's links do that, because he chose to break the internet for specious reasons. I doubt it even achieves his aim of reducing traffic from HN.

I've contacted HN staff about disabling autolinking for URIs in his domain for the reason you state. They're effectively no different than any other "spammy" link due to his HN-specific redirection.

I'm not sure what the best solution is. For now I guess we'll put it in the category that other penis picture sites go in.

I would like to clarify that this was just a testicle and should probably be filed in a testicle-only picture category.

Wow, that's... indisputable. What can't this community be relied upon to correct?

In hindsight, that's probably how it passed the penis filter!

Thanks for doing your mod thing and preventing genital pictures, i know it's generally thankless.

Adding 'noreferrer' to the link would fix it.

I'm loth to special-case that for just one site (besides which it would feel like responding in kind). But putting it in all links would be overkill.

You could also take out <meta name="referrer" content="origin"> from the pages, then there's no special casing and no referrer (in the https case). Aside from enhanced privacy it might serve as a disincentive to game HN since it becomes less obvious how much traffic HN brings in.

Perfect thanks for your attention to this issue.

That site seems to block hotlinking from HN: here's a mirror https://archive.is/jjS21

That's not hotlinking, that's just linking. Hotlinking refers specifically to embedding content (e.g. an image or iframe) from another host.

JWZ, despite being one of the main engineers at Netscape, does not seem to know what hotlinking means, and is (a) happy to break the web, and (b) happy to look like an asshole by making penises pop up on random people's computers because they didn't know "don't click a link to this random dude's site from HN".

HN mods, any chance of disabling autolinking for JWZ sites?

Your link is blocked too. As long as you paste it into a new tab you're fine. I'm not going to bother looking up the specific tweet he said this in but jwz has "no time for HN"

Found it: "@sloverlord Hacker News is a steaming cesspool and I don't have time or desire to deal with their bandwidth demands, so I just block them." ~jwz https://twitter.com/jwz/status/665658171415859200

Breaking the web in such a way is completely inacceptable. http://www.donotlink.com/hkjc

It's his website. By design, the Internet lets you do whatever you think is best, even if what you think is best is totally misguided.

I actually almost agree, that perhaps HN should create some sort of gateway that decreases the bandwidth costs of content creators.

I mean, I can walk around the street yelling "penis" at anyone wearing orange. Doesn't mean I'm not an asshole for doing so.

It's called CloudFlare (only a little tongue-in-cheek).

It will be fun to see someone lecturing JWZ on what he can do and what he cannot do on the web.

He can try to be an asshole, but no one – not even Sir Berners Lee – has the moral right to be an asshole just for the sake of it.

Torvalds behaviour is justified, as he provides, despite the rough tone, constructive criticism.

JWZ doesn’t even do that.

(Also, sending people a plaintext page explaining the issue would cost less of his traffic, and be less problematic)

JWZ actually blocks links from HN, specifically. No love lost there, it seems.

The New York Times talked about it too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark...