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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, Fastly. But here's the thing - you are a pipe. You maybe a pipe with some brains and ability to do request collapsing but you are still a pipe. Just like I do not care that these headers may be upsetting Comcast, I do not care that they are upsetting you. If you don't like it, there other CDNs out there. And if I need to change any of my software to make you happy, you are just not going to have business, which is probably why your sales people are giving 20-30% discounts with $500 monthly commit. That level of a discount on that level of spend is unheard in a CDN industry.

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You must have read a completely different article than I did. The one I read was providing a useful resource on obsolete/insecure/dubious but still widely-used HTTP headers.

You seem to be making assumptions about the motivation for the article and then reacting strongly against it, but that's also dubious.

I think you may be taking the headline too seriously; I think the OP is really arguing that these headers constitute a reasonable amount of bandwidth, and maybe we should just switch them off if they're not providing any value?

Fastly charges for bytes transferred. It also charges for going back to origin.

In which case, continued usage of obsolete headers is to Fastly's benefit. Turning them off saves the customer money.

For what it's worth, the author is listed as a "Developer Advocate".

No, they are getting too many small customers and too many small customers ( see the part where now with $500/mo commit you can get 20-30% discount of the list without squeezing them hard) vary on too many headers which means it is blowing holes in their caches, which is making their Varnish-as-a-Service not work as well as it used to.

So it seems they are starting to fall into the propaganda mode to paint over the issue rather than admit that it is time for them to start innovating again.

Surrogate keys and quite cache busting used to be Fastly special sauce but since 2014 it is rather standard.

This is one of the most aggressively worthless posts I've ever read.

This is literally nothing more than a minor blog post that points out that some of us are still using headers we might not need to. Finding anything else in that is utterly baffling.

Man, what did fastly do to you?

Did you even read this article? A serious question, rather than a troll. It's not about what you seem to think it's about.

+1, some of the headers they deem unnecessary could be being used by the front-end or API clients (specifically `pragma` and `expires`)

The article specifically makes the point that both pragma and expires have long since been replaced by Cache-Control in anything even vaguely modern.

That's what fastly does, not their customers.

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