The fact that it's the only site I've seen that demonstrates the ability to read HTTP referral headers from hacker news shows who the real hacker is...

Not sure if serious, but looking at referral headers is commonplace and trivial

Please. The "real hackers" are proxying their requests and sending custom headers to begin with.

That, or he hates the HN hug of death.

Nah, just having a problem with the hug of death would be an explanation for redirecting to a polite static message saying "sorry, my site can't handle the load when HN links to it". What he has done instead is excessively diskish.

What has he done? Everyone’s commenting he doesn’t like HN but when I clicked the link everything looks fine. Serious question.

It redirects to an image with a hairy testicle and gives a low opinion of HN readers: https://web.archive.org/web/20191014203443/https://www.jwz.o...

You must be using Brave or a browser plugin which doesn't send referral headers. If you use a normal browser, it displays a testicle in an egg cup with a silly phrase complaining about the demographic of HN users.

I open everything for which I don't need to be logged in, in an incognito window, and this page worked fine.

An incognito window doesn't quite count as "if you use a normal browser". Unless your not using incognito is the unusual case for you, which it isn't for most users.

Given a choice between changing my browsing behaviour to see his content or just blocking it so it (the testicle redirect or the other content) will never both my vision again, I go for the latter option.

I’m using iOS safari with AdGuard. It’s probably AdGuard.