

Because bigger is better, right?  - humanlever
http://www.hugeurl.com/

======
trominos
Watching N.YC become reddit is more painful than I thought it would be.

~~~
unalone
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.

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

~~~
hugh
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.

~~~
hugh
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...](http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/RandomWordPlus.aspx)
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.

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

~~~
kirubakaran
<http://decenturl.com/> in a way...

~~~
jim-greer
TinyUrl lets you make up your own descriptive identifier now.

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

------
kwamenum86
Is this part of a new generation of pointless web apps? I don't see how this
is useful?

~~~
ashleyw
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.

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

------
GavinB
edit: hugeurls don't work on HN.

------
frisco
nice glider favicon

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

~~~
reazalun
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?

~~~
frisco
<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.

~~~
tb
Because ESR is a tool.

------
mjnaus
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.

