Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shortest URLs on the Internet

jameswillia.ms

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 208 posts

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#91

Post by cldellow »

zfxfr wrote: post #83
fennecfoxen wrote: post #63

I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.

From my experience if you give people any email address with a custom domain people will usually be confused and ask you to repeat even if it's very clear and easy to remember. Last time i gave my mail which is something like :myname@LLL.fr i was asked : are you sure ?

I had to deal with an accountant to get advice on how to file taxes after the sale of a private company.

They needed information from a third party. I gave the accountant the third party's email address, firstname@lastname.co.

The transaction was taking a while to get resolved. After repeated followups, the accountant finally told me that he was having a hard time getting a hold of the third party. Was I sure that their address was firstname@lastname.com?

Like... what the heck. We're all corresponding over email. You could have literally clicked the email address in the email that I sent you. But instead, somehow you've mangled it and are confused that it doesn't work?

That was instructive for me. .com TLDs only going forward!

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#92

Post by Aachen »

TimLeland wrote: post #49

Check out the URL Shortener T.LY. It's one of the shortest domain that allows you to create short links that I know of. >> https://t.ly/

Tough competitor! I think dro.pm wins by one character because the URIs are shorter, at least on days where I didn't post it to HN. And that can be used for pastes and file hosting directly. The caveat being that it expires; it's meant as something you can write on a whiteboard on a conference or pass over the phone easily without needing to send a random URL to someone via chat, sms, or email or something.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#93

Post by jbkkd »

camoufleur wrote: post #88
ktpsns wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can type "ai." (including the dot, excluding the quotation) in your browser. Works in firefox (tested in 104), however does not work in Chrome (tested in Chromium 105).

" http://ai ." works in Chrome

Doesn't work on Chrome on Android

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#94

Post by judge2020 »

KMnO4 wrote: post #23
themoonisachees wrote: post #6

Cool to know, i guess. TIL that dotless record on newer gTLDs is forbidden, which explains my age-old question: "if google holds google., why are they only using it on domains.google? Surely having the url https://google would be desirable for the folks in marketing?". The answer is that they can't possibly because the ban was added precisely because of this.

Google actually serves a bunch of pages through their TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google

I think it’s obvious that they use their TLD, just not via a root A record, so resources aren’t loaded via https://google/some.js

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#95

Post by Nextgrid »

Aachen wrote: post #90
megous wrote: post #82

Shortest address is http://1 Not on the internet, though. Just on the network. Kinda surprised Linux routes 0.0.0.1 to my router, when used as a destination address. Might be fun to use it as a local redirector whitout having to do any DNS shenanigans. Edit: yep, it works

Shorter: ftp://1 Anyone knows a shorter protocol name that is widely supported/known?

I think on Windows machines you can use `\\` to access a machine via SMB, so `\\1` would be the shortest if you're happy with Windows-only.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#97

Post by vesinisa »

Aachen wrote: post #90
megous wrote: post #82

Shortest address is http://1 Not on the internet, though. Just on the network. Kinda surprised Linux routes 0.0.0.1 to my router, when used as a destination address. Might be fun to use it as a local redirector whitout having to do any DNS shenanigans. Edit: yep, it works

Shorter: ftp://1 Anyone knows a shorter protocol name that is widely supported/known?

Both Chrome and Firefox have actually recently removed support for ftp:// for security reasons.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#98

Post by vesinisa »

All the domains have an invalid TLS certificate. Now, it would be very interesting to see the process for actually obtaining a valid certificate for one of these. Anyone know if there are reasons one could not be obtained?

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#99

Post by AviationAtom »

zfxfr wrote: post #83
fennecfoxen wrote: post #63

I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.

From my experience if you give people any email address with a custom domain people will usually be confused and ask you to repeat even if it's very clear and easy to remember. Last time i gave my mail which is something like :myname@LLL.fr i was asked : are you sure ?

I usually get: "@gmail.com?"

"No, no. Not everyone has to use Gmail!"

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#100

Post by axiolite »

It would be great if someone with an ultra-short URL could run one of the "what's my IP address" sites on it, like:

ifconfig.co

ifconfig.pm

ifconfig.show

ipaddr.in

ipconfig.io

They return plain-text IP address to curl/wget, while serving up a more detailed web page to other web browsers.

Post reply on HN