33 replies
23h18m
Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web
Indeed. Well, hyperlinks and URLs.
URLs are the cornerstone of the web. A precise, universal (hopefully), long-lasting (hopefully) way of referencing articles and other resources. It's always frustrating to see people fail to appreciate their brilliance, e.g. search this on YouTube rather than just pasting a link into a message. Giving a write-up a permanent home on the web can certainly help give it visibility, and help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again.
Related classic essay: Cool URIs don't change. [0][1]
Two under-utilized properties of URLs are also that:
- there's a near-infinite supply of them
- they support forward declaration
Together the practical upshot is that if you're having a conversation with someone or responding during the Q&A of a talk or whatever and you want to be able to say, "Yeah, we thought about that, and we have some information about it on our site—just visit acmeinitiative.example.com/skub," except that you haven't already written the /skub article yet, that doesn't preclude you from being able to say in the moment (i.e. live) that /skub is effective immediately now the designated handle for such an article, it's where the article will appear once you do write it, and it's how any interested party should retrieve it once it does appear—whenever that is. (The same goes for articles published by other people/organizations and other third-party resources that you want to reference—just mint a URL from your namespace on-the-fly and then whenever you get a chance, set up a redirect to whatever it is you wanted to link to.)
There are so many recordings (podcasts episodes, etc.) that I've listened to involving smart, technical people who definitely control their own domains but don't think to take advantage of this. Usually they sort of mumble some description that you might be able to use to find whatever they're talking about, or they manage to only get half the words in the title wrong when they're trying to recall it for the host, and then you and every other interested listener has to individually squander time and attention if you want to track it down. It results in a huge waste of collective energy.
This is not a criticism of URLs per se, but I find it troubling that the mere act of visiting one is something that we have to warn people away from. It's like:
Ok, that sounds like good advice, and easy do follow.
That's unreasonable. What kind of madman wrote the rules for this universe?!
When I try to imagine a better way, it usually disallows the referents of a URL-equivalent from changing after they're created--that way trust bestowed once can be reused without prompting the user a second time for the "same" thing.
For that reason, I'm not a fan of placeholder URL's like you're describing. The instability of URLs to me feels like more bug than feature.
I don't know what you're talking about at the end, but you're definitely applying an inconsistent (double) standard at at least one point in your comment. The status quo is one where the reference is either completely unresolvable, or the referent accessible only after some effort that would have been better avoided. Forward-declared identifiers don't exacerbate any of these issues. Meanwhile, the set of things ameliorated by them is non-empty.
Basically I'd rather be using cryptographic hashes of the page instead of URLs so that if I trust the hash then I have an obvious mechanism for determining if I should trust the payload that the hash refers to.
Stability like that would severely limit the places that a malicious payload could hide, and it would enable users to compare notes about what is or is not trustworthy.
If the identifier can exist before its referent, then any such verify-the-payload-given-the-id activity becomes much more complicated because we now have to wonder if we're getting different versions of the page for the same identifier (e.g. like when airlines present different prices based on which browser you've used even though you used the same link in each. I'm trying to dream up a web where that's not possible).
Hashes are not memorable. I can’t give my gramma a hash, but I can give her example.com/recipe123. If she trusts example.com, or me, she should be able to trust the content. If she does neither, a hash will not save her because she needs to have seen the content first to make a decision to trust it.
It's fairly common to create "link" objects which have both a human readable component and a URL component. Not much would be lost if the URL got less readable, we'd just have to be more diligent about associating a human readable string with the link. This could be done automatically if the content happens to provide its own "name" field. Otherwise you'd just have to give your link a name.
Links which are displaying an ad-hoc name can show up in one color. Links which display whatever the content names itself can show up in another color. We can have different fonts for whether people you trust have flagged the content as trustworthy or whether the've flagged it as malicious. Nobody needs to see the hash itself. But none of that works if a link might resolve to different content at different times.
As far as needing to see the content before you know you can trust it... There's no harm in fetching malicious data and taking a peek at it. Just don't act on it.
If we train people to not even look at the threats then they're not going to have a feel for what threats actually look like.
My chain of thought went: "QR code containing a bobby drop tables! What would a human version of this be? Viral memes, in the original sense, that cause psychic damage? Oh wait, photosensitive epilepsy is a thing."
https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
I think there was such a thing in Snow Crash
The UX is not good enough yet. We would have to 1) show that it is reserved to people going on the link and 2) offer good/enough ways to be notified once the link becomes online and 3) need to know the likelihood of the link to actually work in the future based on prior commitment.
AND I probably forgot a couple of issues.
I think the idea is that if you were recording a podcast it wouldn’t be live (I know the parent used the word live but I think they meant “live” during recording or in conversation while the episode is being created), so you are free to make references to soon to be declared URLs.
You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload or publish your episode for your listeners.
You don't even have to do that, though. It suffices to say, "I'll wire these things up on Monday."
...and URLs being forever cuts both ways. Want to reorganize your domain's structure? Better set up 301s to forward the old address, forever, and hope (or avoid) any overlap between the old schema and the new.
Transfer of ownership? Well, all those hyperlinks from other sites don't know.
as a podcaster i feel this, but 1) its hard to look up precise references without interrupting conversation flow (im optimistic llms will help here) and 2) some people would want to tell u to search their name more because that helps The Algorithm
It's like you didn't understand anything that I wrote.
It's easy enough to tell someone to click on https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ, but how do you transfer that URL verbally, over a phone call or some other voice-only medium like podcasts with out resorting to an equally hard to memorize url shortener?
In BTC, they have devised a way to transform the private key, to twelve words. I don't know how that technique is called or where on github it is, but there is for sure a way to for a YT url to be made into words.
seed phrases are a thing, sure, but how is that more memorable than searching for what the podcast was talking about?
you can make an url shortener that uses short phrases; the s/key word list represents 11 bits per word, so two-word phrases like ode-beam, halo-cham, or jail-heal cover the first two million urls. in my own password generator http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords.... i use a custom '12-bit words of 5 letters or less' list which does 12 bits per word, so phrases like acute-doc, cups-forms, or crypt-swap cover your first 16 million shortened urls. these options also give you some degree of error correction
using an url shortener has the advantage that it takes you to the thing the podcast wanted to take you to instead of what a search engine chose to sell you
Do you speak this way? I notice a lot of "an" usage online which is not in line with how people speak, e.g. "an horoscope". "An url" is likewise not reflective of normal English pronunciation.
probably you are thinking 'youarell', but i say 'earl'
Well, twelve words can certainly be transferred verbally, even though the generated words are not that memorable.
Encoding a link to a much better memorable scheme could be done through a url service which parses a web page through an LLM, generates some tags, and creates custom routing using the tags. Rails or a more modern tool like Actix-web can do that easily.
For example i asked Llama-8B to suggest tags for this HN thread using the title and the first 2 comments, and it suggested: web, URLs, hyperlinks, online-identity, permanence, flexibility, referencing, resource-management, web-architecture.
The user can select which tags better represent the link, and create custom routing as such: https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/
And then the web service that routes the links with those memorable words goes down and now all your links are dead all at once
For podcasts the answer is to use the show-notes feature to post the URL.
For phone calls the answer is to send a text message.
If you're communicating by audio and have no textual 'side-channel' then yes things are more awkward, unless it's a simple and memorable URL (e.g. example.com).
I hate the "search on <whatever>" statements.
1. It triggers my "AOL Keyword" yuck response immediately.
2. It completely ignores the concept of search bubbles. The results you and I get when searching the same term can be wildly different.
3. URLs and hyperlinks are right there. Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. That way I can see your exact reference instead of wading through a bunch of reaction videos to the video you wanted me to see.
The flaw there is that, equally, malicious actors can do the same and, often with today's obfuscated URLs, you have no idea which is which.
Quick - which of these is the video about puppies and which is a shock video?
1. https://video.site/watch?v=SDKiaA3r8Ol
2. https://video.site/watch?v=ilsAQIp091j
Cybersecurity is a big topic, and issues of trust aren't exclusive to URLs. Search engines are often manipulated into showing malicious pages high in their listings.
If you're communicating with someone you trust, it's better if they send you the URL directly.
FWIW I’ve heard ad spots on NPR where a brand says “search for “my financial adviser” and click on Some Brand”. Obviously trying to bump up their rankings by increasing CTR for that term in Google Search. They don’t even need to say “Google it” because they know most people already will.
The walled gardens increasingly block URLs
- FB blocks many sites for sharing copywrited content (even random blogs) - reddit blocks all dot ru, may archival sites, telegram links etc. etc. - twitter blocked some blogging platforms - also many smaller sites block discord (which is justified)
Hopefully this will motivate people to leave them.
Yeah, this is so frustrating. The contortions people have to go through on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and now increasingly Twitter to work around the "algorithm" punishing or forbidding links is infuriating.
"Link in bio" culture is the reason companies like Linktree even exist! And good for them, they're providing a sadly necessary service.
Likewise it's difficult to link to content within those platforms.
But the reason they don't like external links is that If they can't easily follow, external links, they are more likely to shrug and keep scrolling, instead of doing something else. That means marginally more ad impressions shown.
Oh, how I wish!
Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it encroaches on their "attention territory".
If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or censored for "promoting".
More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more deeply.
There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in systems that control expression.
Point taken, but even in the context of Hacker News, if your write-up exists as a blog post with its own URL it can be submitted for discussion in a thread of its own, linking to the blog post.
From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste the relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. None of us are in the habit of following every link. Even if you do have to copy+paste in this way, at least the text you're copying from has a permanent home.
The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contributing to the discussion.
Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to try to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.