On: Ask PG: Can you display plus.google.com domains?

[jemfinch]

I'm not entirely sure why HN doesn't just display the full hostname. Displaying only the domain and TLD is actually harder than just displaying the full hostname, and I don't think there's a major risk of spammers using the hostname as some covert advertising mechanism.

[derefr → jemfinch]

> Displaying only the domain and TLD is actually harder than just displaying the full hostname

Perhaps it just reuses the result of some work it's already doing in order to cluster karma/number-of-replies/something else on a per-domain basis, for some sort of convenient analytics. Just a charitable guess.

[underwater → derefr]

It's broken in other ways though. It incorrectly truncates some country TLD's. I noticed "co.ke" being displayed for some domains recently.

[robryan → jemfinch]

Yeah, I haven't looked at the source but there isn't an algorithmic way to remove subdomains without a huge lookup list to cover all the edge cases.