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Because bigger is better, right?

hugeurl.com
35 pointshumanlever21 comments
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Watching N.YC become reddit is more painful than I thought it would be.

Yeah. It's happening slowly, but it's beginning to dilute.

Just recently, I saw the first attempt at a pun. It was up at 2 points, though it got voted down. And stories like this bring back memories of Reddit 2 years ago.

I think that Hacker News has one thing going for it: the restriction on up/down-voting. It encourages people to at least be slightly inducted into how the site works before they begin having an effect on ups and downs.

Another innovation that I wish I implemented first! :-(

Not to worry, the world still needs mediumsizedurl.com

It'd take any URL and convert it to something kinda medium-sized. 30 or 40 characters maybe, fill up a respectable chunk of the bar at the top of your browser window while leaving a nice bit of breathing room.

I hate to reply to myself, but... I was just thinking about that a bit more and I think it could actually be made quasi-useful.

If the hashing worked with dictionary words, you could use it to make unreadable, unmemorizable URLs both readable and memorizable. Each new url could be assigned three random dictionary words, e.g.:

mediumsizedurl.com/acute_recovery_cable

(Thanks to http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/Random... for the random words)

And that'll give you something that's both medium-sized and readable. Without going into obscure words we can easily get 20,000 of 'em, so that's 8e12 possible combinations of three words -- shouldn't be an issue.

That already exists. I forget the URL, but I've definitely seen that.

TinyUrl lets you make up your own descriptive identifier now.

That's the one I was thinking of. Thanks.

Reminds me of BroadVision's 3-page long URLs of dot com boom fashion.

Is this part of a new generation of pointless web apps? I don't see how this is useful?

I don't think its meant to be...

Somehow some guy thought creating this site was worth the price of the domain, the hosting, and his time...but there are easily worse sites with even stupider functionality out there.

I wonder if he makes much off Google Ads? This has been on Reddit a few times before.

edit: hugeurls don't work on HN.

nice glider favicon

Feh. Looks chunky without anti-aliasing. Compare to this one: http://foohack.com/favicon.ico

If you rotate the favicon of HugeURL by 90 degrees to the left,you'll get the favicon of Foo Hack. Were they made by the same person?

You don't get quite the same image, though. Note that mine is anti-aliased, and thus the circles appear a lot more circular.

The glider emblem was made famous by ESR: http://www.catb.org/~esr/hacker-emblem/

A lot of sites use the glider as their favicon.

http://catb.org/hacker-emblem/

The glider is an "animal" from conway's game of life and has been popularized as a "hacker" symbol for a while, though I don't think it ever caught on in a huge way.

Because ESR is a tool.

They probably picked up some 10+ million $ in VC money, were instantly covered by Techcrunch as the next big thing in URL production and will soon get bought by Yahoo.

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