Zohran and the Short Link

At least some traditional link shorterners let you choose the string.

My man, you're posting this project all over the HN comments, but I think you need to step back and really think about what you're building and what the user experience is.

Your link to an example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 makes basically zero sense to me. Similarly the program page. What do you expect someone clicking on these links to take away from them?

Stop what you are doing and please for the love of god waste your time and tokens on something, anything else before you get yourself fined.

Who is Alister Martin and why would I willingly verbally tell this page my medical or mental health symptoms? What kind of data protections does this LLM have against erroneously sharing HIPAA PHI, because that alone looks like a HIPAA violation waiting to happen. Am I signing a HIPAA release form to allow Alister to share my Protected Health Information with the Counselors, SMEs, clinics, and clinicians it finds?

If you have not even conisdered HIPAA compliance, which it looks like you haven't, now that you've been made aware that this needs addressed it can be considered neglect and YOU ARE RISKING UP TO A $73,000 FINE PER HIPAA VIOLATION!!!!

The protocol is a mess that seems to have nothing for the user to actually do, and is full of what are apparently prompts to an LLM? It's laid out like a flowchart, but it has absolutely no intuitive or indicated flow. When I click on things it's locked. How exactly is protocol population relevant to staying healthy? Why on earth would I ever hand my medical history over to an LLM?

What is this site supposed to actually do? When I click start program I get brought to what looks like an LLM dev environment, not a step-by-step program to follow. Am I supposed to give it all my personal information and medical history then tell it I want to kill myself so it can recommend mental hygiene like getting better sleep and trying to avoid noise in NYC, or tell me it's ok, that I'm not ending it all, and that I will be joining it in the digital afterlife?

You're really trusting these agents to make the determination that someone is in crisis? When I'm in crisis, I shut down. I'm not reaching for my phone or laptop. I don't even interact with my loved ones in that state; interacting with a chatbot who tells me to call 988 would be the very thing that makes me actually kill myself. It's already insulting enough when I'm googling my thoughts trying to find other real people who have dealt with them and gotten through and it takes up the whole page to tell me to call some person ignorant of my situation so they can say "damn that's crazy, don't kill yourself tho it gets better" for 40 minutes while I sob.

Nobody wants or needs AI-native "Mental Hygiene". The product is giving vulnerable people AI psychosis. The very last thing that should be introduced is an "AI" "mental health resource" from a trusted government agency.

I truly, sincerely hope the PIT crew saw AI-native and put you on a permanent blacklist.

The site is not well built in any sense of the word. Have YOU even used the site, critically, as though you were seeing it for the first time? It is befuddling at best, and actively confusing on main. The site is not navigable, because there is no top bar, hamburger menu, or nav links anywhere on the Program page.

When I visit the programs link (which is inaccessible from any page but itself or a protocol page), and then go to the second page of programs, the link turns into this monstrosity: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/programs/0-all/0-all/0-all/0-all/0-...

What is the purpose of the 8 load bearing '0-all's? If I remove one of them, I get a page with no programs. They don't stack by what page of results you're on, that's the number at the end. Then you also handle sort and popularity sort in the URL (with popularity sort cryptically using one of the last two '0-all's for some reason), indicating that those are SSR pages, but upon inspection, the sorted data is provided as a JSON payload parsed by your page script. Why change the URL if you are getting the data via JSON payload from the server? Why not just hydrate the data within the structure of the page and show a UI indicator for the current sort (which you currently do NOT do at all for popularity).

"Browse through thousands of programs" > There are 212. I dunno about you, but I'm pretty sure you're a significant digit short there. I learned that thousand had four digits, not three, when I was 4 years old.

While inspecting I found the structure behind that URL above: "pages/programs/_category/_tag/_level/_signs/_time/_access/_order/_popular/_search/index", but that doesn't explain why the category,level, signs, time or access are '0-all', or what that indicates for the page.....OH MY GOD! is the /_signs/ section of that URL so that you can URL-encode what currency symbol (price sign, as you put it) to use, such as dollar sign, Euro, Pound???!! Please tell me this is not the case.

I don't even want to see the source code for this. I could almost guarantee you have hardcoded secrets and credentials in the running production codebase.

I'm sorry, I know that this strays pretty far from the HN guidelines and ethos but I just can't restrain myself here. This is so unbelievably, utterly dispiriting as someone who's cared about technology and it's development and good practices for much of my life. I can't approach this with anything but a sharp tongue and critical eye, because if you won't look at it yourself (and you didn't), someone else has to tell you what they see.

it would be nice if they added a link preview

not sure why they have never done that before

Genuine question, what is it you don't like about Mamdani? I don't live in NYC, so I don't have first-hand experience with him, but I've not seen many complaints about him (other than things like "he broke the dress code at the swimming pool that one time", which is "Obama's tan suit" levels of petty)

You can omit the first part, being neutral towards a controversial figure is okay!

Just admit you’re a fan. No shame in that.

In an age where cameras are everywhere, all one has to do for good PR is good.

It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.

> foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?

Is "foo" part of "website" or is "foo" separate from other similar organizations? Subdomains you'd use maybe for a different department, but if it's the same department, prefer paths.

Basically signals how connected it'd be to the main org.

But all this is basically feelings and "common sense" rather than anything strictly specified. You'd be able to make use of foo.website.com as well as you'll be able to use website.com/foo in practice, very minutia detail.

Idk how they pick the one they use in the video, but it looks like they reserve all casings:

nyc.gov/RentalRipoff nyc.gov/rental-ripoff

What's the upside of this? Seems like it would only make links longer and more annoying to type in, when the intention is to make civic participation easier.

I’m genuinely curious: why should it be on a separately managed DNS record?

The closest I could find to that claim was a Townhall article¹ mentioning that he posed for a picture with an imam whose mosque was attende by terrorists. Townhall as in the conservative radio/news site and not the NYC town hall.

1. https://townhall.com/news/jeff-charles/2025/10/20/fbi-agents...

Politicians have been doing this for a while now. I think the idea is to project more of a 'one of us' vibe and not stand on formality, which creates a vibe of being part of a separate class.

Aka POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

What if I told you there’s an existing protocol for doing Really Simple Syndication?

I put a short link on a family thing and someone complained it didn't work. Turns out iOS OCR recognised a "-" as a "=", so this isn't just people typing it wrong.

Now my short links implement case insensitivity and striping all non alphanumeric characters, i.e. a "-" is optional and any other symbol character is also stripped.

nyc.gov seems to do case insensitivity but doesn't strip "-", so you do need the "-".

> "click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer"

We didn't start the fire!

Flame wars. City council will soon debate two vs four spaces between traffic cones.

Typical, all this DEI naming, promoting minority formats no one uses, while they refuse to recognize the majority are perfectly happy with camelCase!

(/s in case it is needed)

The public doesn't need an immutable history of URLs, they need URLs they can freaking type. When you've got pages people actually care to go to, then you can create your museum of URLs.

The internet isn't an append-only archive. It changes quite frequently in fact. Sorry dawg.

Luckily these are merely redirects!

Brings to mind this: https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180

The lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time.

A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.

Easily solved by adding an interstitial whenever a URI becomes replaced and is therefore no longer immutable, and showing the history of what it used to point to as well (in case you're coming along from an old link). By default, after 5 seconds, it could redirect to the current destination.

I can type a URL on today's iPhone just fine.

Works on my machine. Didn't see any grammar errors.