

Tell YC: "Hacker News" needs clean profile URLs - jonallanharper

I would personally like to link to my YCombinator profile via:
http://news.ycombinator.com/user/{username}<p>Do you guys agree this would be valuable?
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brk
Nice suggestion, but no, it really doesn't "need" clean URLs.

The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well.

~~~
bootload
_"... The current system works more than adequately and is indexable as well.
..."_

And is subject to breakage & link rot if any of the link structure changes.
This happened when the "comments" term was replaced by "item" a long way back.
So all the links I collected failed until I checked them. For instance try:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3754> (FAIL)

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754> (OK)

Clean URI's are cool. They last a long time and just work ~
<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI> These URI's smell funny. Having said
that it doesn't really effect the running of the site, indexing or searching
and require coding changes. But it will bite you at some time in the future.

I mentioned these type of things a while ago ~
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671> so I don' think anything is going
to change soon.

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alaskamiller
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonallanharper> isn't clean enough?

~~~
jonallanharper
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user/jonallanharper> is more valuable from a
search engine perspective, I think.

~~~
alaskamiller
that's to assume pg wants search traffic

semantic urls are nifty but not that nifty

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jonallanharper
He wants people to take pride in their comments/submissions. Knowing your info
is easily searchable by your handle influences you to create more valuable
content.

~~~
alaskamiller
for what it's worth, my HN profile pops up within the top 5 google search
results

