Show HN: Use any text as a domain name • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#21

Post by asperous » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

One downside of this is that you're using a secure one-way hashing function. This means that if for some reason you have the hashed url you can't get the clean one back.

You could use something something like base64 instead.. might work better but it would remove the ability to use files as domain names.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#22

Post by elwell » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

infinitebattery wrote: post #6

elwell wrote: post #3

this is a bad idea that will never work /s

Why do you think that? Please elaborate! HackerNews isn't supposed to be about trolling. Personally, I like the idea and i'm going to use it. However, it relies on people downloading the extension. If there are enough people using it (which is definitely possible) then it would be successful.

/s indicates sarcasm

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#23

Post by byproxy » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

arn wrote: post #5

Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name…

Also, AOL Keywords.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#24

Post by EvanHahn » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this: hash collisions. Could problems arise from two keywords that hit the same domain?

Really cool idea, though.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#25

Post by desireco42 » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

I love the idea, I've been thinking along similar lines.

I would add less strict spelling, ie. spelling correction for existing domains, and for domains that are not recognized, go straight to search engine search (ie. google).

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#26

Post by eli » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:25 PM UTC

byproxy wrote: post #23

arn wrote: post #5

Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name…

Also, AOL Keywords.

And new.net, though I think that was basically malware. There were a lot of "DNS Alternatives" in the early 2000s.

Re: Show HN: Use any text as a domain name

#27

Post by gojomo » Wed, Jan 01, 2014, 9:27 PM UTC

Neat idea! One quibble: since the essence is specifying a domain-name in a new way, it'd be good if the 'escaping' convention didnt' clobber/assume a single protocol/scheme. As it stands, it's not clear how this would be used for other schemes, even 'https'.

Perhaps allow 'scheme#' (where naked '#' implies 'http#'), or move the convention entirely to the domain-name area rather than scheme area. ('#food in chicago' -> 'http://#food in chicago' -> 'http://f02970848a63988965aa40cd368ffcf9046209ca.com')