If this was a real product, this would clearly not be my advice. But it's not. It's just HN. The worst case to an attack here is not all that bad.

There's some goofy YC stuff that happens through this site. If asked, my advice regarding security and YC would not be "make HN more secure so the YC stuff is safer". It would be "get the YC stuff the hell off HN."

</really really dumb question>

Thanks in advance.

This is not to say that I agree with him - the worst-case scenario isn't that bad, but setting up SSL is easy and the right thing - but he's not babbling nonsense or anything.

Not surprised. Just trying to verify if he had the subject matter expertise I thought he had or not so I can better understand the discussion. Since I am a member here, security of the site does matter to me as it potentially directly impacts me. But I lack your depth of knowledge of the subject. So the credentials of different speakers matters to my understanding. For someone like me, whether he is being downvoted because he has no clue what he is talking about or for some other reason entirely makes a significant impact on my understanding of the situation.

Thank you for your helpful reply.

Fifty bucks worth of work, once, which pays a dividend each and every time a security conscious user visits the site. That's not a waste of time, that's a no-brainer.

He took a lot of flack for, what was surely just a 2 minute job editing some html template, but I can kind of see that logic now.

When you add the link, it signals that you deem "Searching Archives" as an important feature of the site and then it's suddenly no longer just a simple href= entry in a text file somewhere.

Dealing with SSL could be in the same boat. By adding it, you're implicitly saying that 'this site is serious enough to warrant proper security measures' and then that's another rabbit hole that's difficult to get out of.