I tried to use needle.head('https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/what-is-npm', ...) and got an error:

Error: unexpected end of file
      at Zlib._handle.onerror (zlib.js:355:17)

curl --head https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/what-is-npm works fine.

(I didn't try needle.get on this url)