Hacker News

scott_karana · on Oct 2, 2015

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/17/th...

35 million Americans, ~10%, are of Irish descent. Not knowing would be unusual.

JTon · on Oct 2, 2015

Really interesting link (I had no idea). But the commenter above was clearly being facetious

briholt · on Oct 3, 2015

You're being optimistic. I'd bet the majority of Americans could not identify their ancestral country on a blank map[1]. HN is not a very representative sample.

[1] See any survey about Americans and geography ever.

newjersey · on Oct 3, 2015

I consider myself about average when it comes to general knowledge. I couldn't point you Burkino Faso in a map (I am not even sure if I spelled it correctly.) but that doesn't mean I can't tell you roughly about my ancestry. (:

Edit: I wish Washington Post defaulted to https. Kind of off topic but is there a reason to support https but not default to it? Browser compatibility issues? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/17/t...

chetanahuja · on Oct 3, 2015

"I wish Washington Post defaulted to https"

This can't be done because if you just type "washingtonpost.com" into your browser or some algorithm creates links out of plain text (like in an email)... the default is always http:// The internet expects http://yourdomain.tld to always work.

ptaipale · on Oct 4, 2015

I suppose previous poster meant that WP should default to offer its service over HTTPS, i.e. when you first connect over HTTP, the site immediately redirects you to a HTTPS connection. Like e.g. this site (HN) does (connecting to http://news.ycombinator.com/ gives you 301 Moved Permanently, location https://news.ycombinator.com/ ).

Symbiote · on Oct 4, 2015

The better solution is HSTS, which would tell the browser to use HTTPS for the site for the next year.

The main browsers come with a list of known HSTS sites, so you'll never use HTTP to access google.com (etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security