[jonny_eh]

It's also an issue when you don't even fully control the client, which in this case is the web browser. A game at least behaves exactly as you program it. Browsers are not necessarily consistent, especially when you throw in extensions.

[jedberg]

Yes excellent point. Some browsers/plugins will prefetch every GET on the page to speed up browsing.

[Rebelgecko]

Some browsers also show a "here's your top 10 most visited webpages" shortcut when you make a new tab, which does a GET. I ran into that one when I was being lazy about building/testing an API.

[justinhj]

In the Hacker News case there isn't a GET request on the page, it's triggered by the javascript so this would not happen