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Show HN: httpclock. A useless way to tell the time with HTTP status codes… (httpclock.com)
5 points by scottmf 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
I made this a few months back as a fun little project and it has absolutely no utility whatsoever.

The server returns the current time in the request's status code — i.e., as long as the time can be mapped to a valid HTTP status code (e.g., 4:04pm -> 404 Not found) the server returns that status code for the request.

Example: https://x.com/scottinallcaps/status/1827211120194486597

The httpclock.com domain detects timezone by IP and redirects to the respective subdomain such as pt.httpclock.com (but will fall back to UTC)

A browser will show a blank page for most of the day given the number of valid status codes, but you can check other timezone subdomains, e.g. `curl -I https://cet.httpclock.com`

Note: "Invalid" times will return 999 with no content.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this very useless clock. I plan to post the code on GitHub soon since I may as well. Thanks!




(edit) As it's now 4pm UTC I'd recommend https://utc.httpclock.com

Although Central European Time (https://cet.httpclock.com) will be valid too, as well as a few other time zones (for maximum coverage it uses 12 hour time format)

And yes I understand an empty response the majority of the time is perhaps a little confusing, and from the logs it looks as if most visitors are receiving such a response, so while I wished to keep it as "pure" as possible I probably should add a simple "about" page.


What are the available timezones? I am getting a 999 response for every time zone I tried.




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