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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

The returned file turns out to not actually be JSON (that'd be too easy, I guess) but some kind of javascript-code which is then probably eventually eval'd to get the data:

    /**/jQuery3110644358575
    2152035_1500757689075(
    /* json-data */)

Is that just JSONP?

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Yes this is just a standard JSONP response as served through jQuery; not sure why this wasn't clarified.

My guess is author has never heard of JSONP before. Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1053/

I have seen JSONP. But I'm not a frontend dev and in my experience the web suffers from a persistent overspecialization of terms. I didn't mention the term JSONP, because I didn't want to end up calling something JSONP just to have someone point out, that this isn't really JSONP, but floobleworp, which is when you use jQuery and add the comment-symbols to make it safe against XSS or something in that regard.

Also, I still consider JSONP an incredibly gross idea :)

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