alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I made a URL expander because short links are too mainstream
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I like the concept. A similar idea that is no longer on the web was “shady url”. It would make links that looked like http:// shadyurl.com/nader-for-president.exe
It generated a link too long to send over discord, even with nitro (over 4000 characters). That’s hysterical.
Fun site, I found an Easter egg:
https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...
This reminded me of a backend-less filesharing site I once made
I don't understand how you're supposed to use this. How do you pass the bot check? There's just a button that says "checking if you're a bot..." and clicking it does nothing.
You monster.. whoever hate AI and LLM should start using it daily. It will make a lot of semantic tokenizers gone crazy.
Nice bait mate.
There also was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40543196 4 months ago.
From 1999, according to the page footer:
> © 1999 url shorteners are so yesterday try this amazing super long url expander . All rights reserved.
I tried to confirm that, but the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine are still down.
Ha ha, love this.
It just so happens that I am working on a tool that ends up expanding hacker news urls. The problem I was solving was that of managing lots of replies to a successful post.
I allow you to replace the "ycombinator" in a hacker news item url with "gipety" so this current thread would point to:
https://news.gipety.com/item?id=41780255
You will then get a page that remembers the comments currently displayed. On subsequent refreshes you will see any new comments highlighted in green.
As I worked on it I decided to also add a slug as I got tired of not recognising what the urls I was copy pasting were referring to.
The above will for example end up generating this:
https://news.gipety.com/hn/41780255/k/67/s/show-hn-i-made-a-...
As with so many sites lately, the "checking if you're a bot" stuff is dainbramaged and b0rken...
Ha! Hilarious.
Most of all, I love the fact that, unlike URL shorteners, there's no need to maintain a database of redirects.
I do wonder what the actual encoding scheme is, and how robust it is to lopping off chunks of the URL, since there's presumably lots of room for redundancy...
Omg, I didn't check HN for a few days. Sorry, Turnstile was causing issues for everyone, so I have removed it for now. This is just a fun project :)
After "checking my browser" I try to put in the URL I want to shorten, I click the button, and nothing happens. The URL is hardfault.life, for what it's worth.
Ah, I thought this might be for turning tiny/tracking URLs into their targets like my Hacktoberfest project from a few years back
The adaptation is too retro I feel.
It should instead append at the end of the URL some 1000-character long token with a ton of other irrelevant arguments.
You know, exactly how Google Search loves to do when you right-click a search result and the address gets brutally scrambled.
It shows "Checking if you are a bot" and nothing is tappable.
I am on a recent iOS.
this is great, my succinct little domain that's 6 characters long including TLD was turned into 4000 characters, awesome!
Love the design!
theofficialabsolutelongestdomainnameregisteredontheworldwideweb.international finally has a worthy opponent.
Your bot checker needs some UX help.
Two change suggestions:
- add a donation button and buy a dedi from it - turn off the bot detection
thank me later ig
Why .site?
urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.com is still available
This is pure awesomeness. You gotta be an OG to appreciate maybe.
Thanks! This helped make my cloud run url even longer.
A topic near and dear to me: https://othernotherone.github.io/posts/i-bought-the-longest-...
Okay, good job creating something useless
LOL, I'm gonna need a bigger business card
This is so stupid, but I do love it.
I am apparently a bot. :(
Beep Boop!
(I've let the page sit for a minute or so, and it hasn't concluded that I am not a bot yet, but also, I'm aware I look weird - Firefox, with Javascript JIT disabled, with no GPU acceleration)
I don't know what it's using on the backend, but it doesn't seem to pass for me, and doesn't give me the usual option to pick a baby chicken from a baby duck to prove I'm human.
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This is great but it's stuck checking if I'm a bot... i get this in the console: ``` auto/:1 The resource https://challenges.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform... was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it has an appropriate `as` value and it is preloaded intentionally. ```