Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR
It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.
You’re making the usual HN mistake of focusing on the technical aspects
Zohran and the Short Link
71–80 of 237 posts
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov
A little sad that it's often posting screenshots of X posts there. At least the screenshot has alt text, but if you're doing alt text, why a screenshot in the first place?
What makes you think it’s a screenshot from X (formerly Twitter)?
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not from NYC (nor do I have the same difficulty seeing past politics that gp seems to have), so I didn't research this stuff so closely. But from what I saw, it seemed that a lot of his policies seemed populist. - Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't fin…
If you don't live in NYC then your opinion of their mayor doesn't really matter does it?
Do you have opinions on laws surrounding abortion in a state you don't live in? People can and often do have valid opinions about things that don't directly concern them. I will say I'm not sure my opinion is one of them--I even went out of my way to say my opinion was probably insufficiently researched.
That being said, the person I was responding to was trying to understand what negative views someone could have on Mamdani's policies, so I was trying to give a data point.
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not from NYC (nor do I have the same difficulty seeing past politics that gp seems to have), so I didn't research this stuff so closely. But from what I saw, it seemed that a lot of his policies seemed populist. - Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't fin…
So far everything they're doing is working out how they said it would
The points I was raising have long time frames, there hasn't been enough time to see if they've succeeded.
"So far global warming hasn't caused catastrophic damage to our crop outputs, looks like everything's working out great!"
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#75The 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
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 t…
In this day and age it makes sense to amend Tim's statement to "canonical urls don't change". And cool web sites have a canonical URL for most pages.
That way we a) don't lose track of relevant content but b) can have nice things such as short URLs with good names.
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.
You’re making the usual HN mistake of focusing on the technical aspects
I did the non-technical aspects too and yet I'm somehow still just a shmuck doing his job while these guys are geniuses.
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#77> 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.
> "click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer"
We didn't start the fire!
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#78Imho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record But I appreciate the intent..!
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.
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#79What 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?
Re: Zohran and the Short Link
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re making the usual HN mistake of focusing on the technical aspects
I did the non-technical aspects too and yet I'm somehow still just a shmuck doing his job while these guys are geniuses.
You literally only said you made a link shortener, and even now give no indication you understand what aspects of the Mamdani communication strategy are being praised.