Why should hacker news redirect to https url?

[critiq]

http request to news.ycombinator.com redirects secure URL, I can't imagine reason behind it.. is it to avoid some one hijacking browser requests on client side?

> GET / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.12.6.2 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.2.2 > Host: news.ycombinator.com > Accept: / > < HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently < Server: nginx < Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:13:39 GMT < Content-Type: text/html < Content-Length: 178 < Connection: keep-alive < Location: https://news.ycombinator.com/

[vy8vWJlco]

It's probably easier than differentiating between logged in and not-logged in, when it is understandably desirable to secure logged in traffic (which had been lacking for some time).

Curl can handle the redirect automatically (as well as HTTPS). Try something like:

curl -L http://news.ycombinator.com

or just point it to HTTPS directly.