Zohran and the Short Link

210

wwxw about 12 hours ago 82 commentsRead Article on iamwillwang.com

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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

cosmic_cheese•about 10 hours ago

This makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.

Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.

mmooss•about 9 hours ago

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

lzy•about 10 hours ago

This is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg links.

Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.

NSPG911•about 10 hours ago

it would be nice if they added a link preview

not sure why they have never done that before

kmfrk•about 2 hours ago

What format would people generally prefer for shorturls if they were designing a website for readability, maintenance, and SEO?

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?

embedding-shape•43 minutes ago

> 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.

gravypod•about 11 hours ago

People are discovering go links from first principles.

thoughtpeddler•about 6 hours ago

The meta on this post is that the minimalist blog design by iamwillwang.com is itself really cool. Great work!

WarmWash•about 10 hours ago

I'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.

patcon•about 5 hours ago

Imho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record

But I appreciate the intent..!

madeofpalk•about 2 hours ago

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.

articulatepang•about 4 hours ago

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

hebelehubele•about 1 hour ago

There wouldn't be any benefit to it. They're not accepting user-submitted content. I doubt anyone working for the NYC would upload CP and share a link to it.

ewwe•about 11 hours ago

Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR

SwellJoe•about 11 hours ago

Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.

Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.

toomuchtodo•about 9 hours ago

https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov

fmajid•about 4 hours ago

This is what happens when Boomer politicians are finally kicked to the curb.

jasoncartwright•about 1 hour ago

bbc.co.uk/thing is the standard for URLs used like this at the BBC, and it works great there too. The ubiquity of BBC URLs on audio/video in the UK helps.

Here's what it was like beforehand. Laughable! https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54

micromacrofoot•about 11 hours ago

this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!

hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise

jachee•about 11 hours ago

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

tadfisher•about 11 hours ago

Sorry, we're on the wrong timeline. The worse one, in fact.

amazingamazing•about 11 hours ago

I like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url

jancsika•about 8 hours ago

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

I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.

dgl•about 4 hours ago

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 "-".

fny•about 7 hours ago

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

penguin_booze•about 5 hours ago

I will not stand and watch tabs getting discriminated!

voidUpdate•about 2 hours ago

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

We didn't start the fire!

afavour•about 5 hours ago

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)

GauntletWizard•about 11 hours ago

The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

pavo-etc•about 11 hours ago

Luckily these are merely redirects!

markdown•about 10 hours ago

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

stonogo•about 10 hours ago

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.

jimmydoe•about 11 hours ago

does it matter?

big tech has long canceled url on phones.

api•about 11 hours ago

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

slopinthebag•about 11 hours ago

This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.

bakies•about 11 hours ago

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