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My issue with your comment is that you jumped on a /bug/ in Facebook to push your cause.

Analogy: Let's say I had a car company that competed with a fictitious competitor, Toyonda. There was a news story on HackerNews about a software bug that caused all Toyonda Freerunners to crash whenever somebody pushed the gas too long. I then posted a comment that my car, the Legendary Esquilax, doesn't have that bug. It's self-serving and adds nothing to the conversation.

Now, if you said something like, "Our Esquilax line of cars uses an O(1) lookup on the rotor hashtable to avoid a backup of 'gas' events which caused the bottleneck bug at the root of the Toyonda issue." That would be interesting, provide useful news about competing products, and potentially spark a discussion about the "right" gas pedal algorithms.

About your comment on lecturing: I signed up with Hacker News to post a comment. Every person needs an impetus to join a community, and your comment provided that for me.

Thanks for following up. I understand where you're coming from now. Unfortunately in this instance there's not a lot of potential for interesting discussion about the "right" way to form semi-private URLs on a host that isn't doing authentication. You need enough randomness; that's obvious. Apparently it wasn't obvious to Facebook.

PS Welcome to HN.

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