Show HN: I made a URL expander because short links are too mainstream

https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site/

by error404x • 2 years ago

213 95 2 years ago

urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site

piyuv• 2 years ago

Love the design!

manchmalscott• 2 years ago

It generated a link too long to send over discord, even with nitro (over 4000 characters). That’s hysterical.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

After "checking my browser" I try to put in the URL I want to shorten, I click the button, and nothing happens. The URL is hardfault.life, for what it's worth.

sgarland• 2 years ago

It seems to need the scheme portion of the URL, not just the authority.

ks2048• 2 years ago

Yeah, not working for me. The button says "Checking if you're a bot..." and nothing happening. Console shows a warning regarding "The resource at “https://challenges.cloudflare.com/..."

cubefox2• 2 years ago

Well you tried to shorten it, of course it doesn't work!

rendall• 2 years ago

Here you go:

https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...

Syonyk5• 2 years ago

I am apparently a bot. :(

Beep Boop!

(I've let the page sit for a minute or so, and it hasn't concluded that I am not a bot yet, but also, I'm aware I look weird - Firefox, with Javascript JIT disabled, with no GPU acceleration)

I don't know what it's using on the backend, but it doesn't seem to pass for me, and doesn't give me the usual option to pick a baby chicken from a baby duck to prove I'm human.

skibbityboop• 2 years ago

Same boat, the attempt at bot detection prevents the page from working at all for me.

Syonyk5• 2 years ago

Console logs that look possibly interesting:

WEBGL_debug_renderer_info is deprecated in Firefox and will be removed. Please use RENDERER. v1:1:102781
Turnstile Widget seem to have crashed: 9icuj api.js:1:17810
Uncaught TurnstileError: [Cloudflare Turnstile] Error: 300030. https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur... B2SIiwBB.js:9

sigh

I don't have WebGL support, so I can't use a URL lengthener, because the bot checker appears to crash shortly after. Someone stop this timeline, I want to get off.

koito17• 2 years ago

I also disable WebGL. This alone breaks Turnstile. Also helps avoid websites that are "user-hostile". If a website considers curl or Firefox suspicious, then it's not worth proving humanity. I will let them continue calling me a robot in machine-translated Japanese...

The worst is probably hCaptcha. It asks up to 10 machine-translated questions involving machine-generated images to prove the user is not a machine. Something about this is funny to me.

akoboldfrying• 2 years ago

Same for me, with the most generic Chrome-on-Android browser config ever.

AlienRobot2• 2 years ago

It just turns URLs into this

urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site/inccrimsoncrawdadbarbadosmandaringratianaplokoon982helpfulbluegiraffenicaraguabelarusianchickielobotjuniorreddormouseunitedstateschhattisgarhirosalindeyodadistantambertunavaticancitydeccanlisettedexterjettsterrunningamaranthbadgeriranturkmenellettericoli271mixedscarleterminediegogarciadutchmabeldudboltworldwidescarletsquirrelgermanyswedishdarceyanakinskywalkeroriginalcoffeetigermontenegrogermanshirleeslymoorevoluminousgreenharrierniuekhmernataleewilhufftarkinmagnificentwhiteguineafowlgreenlandczechfedericafinisvalorum998uniquecoralcranemalaysiafrenchcamilejektonoporkinsconsistentblackgeckocubaxiangdorolisationmedoncheapblackrattlesnakestkittsnevisawadhilonnieyodapleasedvioletcephalopodmoldovaenglishdulcidormthaithaithaigeneticchocolatecaniddiegogarciajavaneseursalationmedondirectlavendercockroachbangladeshkurdishlaurenetarffuldevotedorangemosquitogreecesundaneseannmariebiggsdarklighterpuzzledroseladybugpakistanxhosailysadarthvaderlinguisticorangemackerellibyaukrainianaleecejabbadesilijictiuretastyteallungfishsouthafricagreekhermionegasganoenthusiasticredemugibraltarbalochioliycordpogglethelesserpogglethelesserpogglethelessermedievalvioletgalliformlesothokonkanimarshawattamborviciousbronzemonkeyswedenbelarusianginniferchewbacca712obedienttealplatypusmaldivesromanianjamieniennunb320visibleemeraldopossumazerbaijanmalagasysissiesaeseetiinripescarletswifttristandacunhailocanomellaaylasecura423formidablegreenguanacoswazilandkazakhcorabelleslymooreholyivoryhippopotamuscookislandsmalagasyelonoregregartyphopetiteaquamarinepeacockalgeriasinhalabarbrapadmamidalaoutstandingoutstandingoutstandingnativeamaranthaardwolfbruneivietnamesegillanlandocalrissian619gangangannetgreenlandfowlecuadormalagasyestrellitabibfortunashakysapphirecanideritreasylhetielsayaraelpoof923funpeachgayalindiasinhalarhetahansolovisibletealparrotfishlaoskoreandaniellamasameddaintacttealwoodpeckerswazilanddeccandaveenroostarpalstopcopperperchphilippinesminansticeyodaquintessentiallimeheronfrenchguianaakanronnidarthvaderneutraltancaribouunitedstateszulunathaliequarshpanakaserbiaserbiaserbiacruelaquashrewchristmasislandmaithilicherinsanhillsecurecoffeehummingbirdguadeloupeakansarajanewattamborracialtancaterpillarcomorosxhosacorinnecord487resultingrednarwhalpitcairnislandsrussiancatidookugrossindigodovepanamahindifaydrajarjarbinksplannedvioletrabbitnetherlandsspanishalissadarthmaulfranticscarlettarsiermontserratsylhetijudithamonmothmapatientplumgorillairelandmarathichristianzamwesellrareturquoisebasiliskarubasaraikisuehansolo740governingredbatargentinamossialyseniennunbvagueamethystwaspfinlandpunjabicherrieethkoth601diplomatictansilverfishtokelaugankelliedormmandarinmandarinmandarinrelaxedharlequinfroggrenadaukrainianalviniawattamborattractiveblackprawnisraelquechuasherriemacewinduoldcyansquirrelaustraliajapanesemerridiec3pocheerfulamberparrotslovakiauyghurstefaniadarthvadermixedcopperbasilisktanzaniateluguzarahlamasuvocationalwhitemammalliberiaurdujemimabiggsdarklighterimportantazurechimpanzeeseychellesharyanvileeseplokooncausalyellowbarracudamaltahmonggertrudchewbaccaagreeableivoryclamguatemalatamilpapagenaslymooresmoggyvioletarmadilloascensionislandchewaconstancefinisvalorumserioustealthrushfrenchguianaigboclaudinaraymusantilles929sensiblefuchsiacapybaraelsalvadorbalochimirabellapadmamidalaslimyharlequinbuzzardjapansaraikimildridr4p17107dailydailydailymanypurplechameleonnigeriahindihillarychewbaccasingleturquoisebarnaclemartiniqueburmesefarandbobafettcooltealperchsouthgeorgiasouthsandwichislandsmarwaritiertzadexterjettstercapitalistmagentaunicornunitednationssylhetilannyroostarpalsamazingazurecrayfishmaldivesmandarinstormynutegunrayretiredbronzehorsecubajapanesecaroyodacolonialgreenboobystvincentgrenadinessindhisapphirekiadimundiromanticamethystplanariancameroonrussiankaritaluminaraunduli650remarkableapricotpigeonrunionchhattisgarhilelawicketsystriwarrickslipperywhitemolealbaniamadureseednawattambor239

Syonyk5• 2 years ago

I get that.

And I have friends who would appreciate such things. Just, ideally, with something that absurd going to as short a site as possible. My gripe is that my browser is apparently too-bot-like for something serving a tiny number of requests.

neilv• 2 years ago

Also wasn't able to use it here, after unblocking the third-party requests to CloudFlare for this site.

This isn't the first time CloudFlare blocks me, but usually it's a CloudFlare page shown before the actual site's page renders.

Internet Service Denier

amatecha2• 2 years ago

Yeah, mine just says "Checking if you're a bot..." indefinitely. OpenBSD, Firefox, Chromium. Cloudflare sometimes blocks me from sites because, well, reasons - it doesn't actually say why, but I suspect the whole "weird OS + strict privacy settings in Firefox", because the same sites load just fine on my other machines. /shrug

AnonC• 2 years ago

Same experience here with Firefox Focus on iOS (with enhanced tracking protection on). It’s just stuck at the checking if you’re a bot stage.

bartread• 2 years ago

Same with boring old Safari on iOS.

Poorly implemented and overly aggressive bot checkers are really ruining the web.

Used to be that I was seldom troubled by captchas and similar. Now it seems to be multiple times per day.

mewpmewp23• 2 years ago

How are you going to make sure it handles the scale though?

pbiggar• 2 years ago

The challenge with scaling a url _shortener_ is that multiple urls might end up with the same short url. That presents a scaling challenge where you have to deliberately design a coordination framework across your set of machines, which introduces coordination, a DB, prefixes, and all your favorite answers to the interview question de-jour of the late 2010s.

With a URL _lengthener_ though, you don't need it at all. The sheer amount of possible outcomes means that the odds of ever getting two of the same is infinitesimally tiny.

mewpmewp23• 2 years ago

That's a good point, if I ever get that interview question I will push back and say we should build an URL lengthener instead.

cortesoft2• 2 years ago

With a lengthener, you can make it completely deterministic with zero collisions, so you don't even have to store any state

dullcrisp2• 2 years ago

But how are they going to handle the scale of the URLs, like, emotionally?

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

There are some challenges in having multiple machines storing the URL lookups. But those all apply to both shorteners and lengtheners.

The only issue unique to shorteners is avoiding collisions, but giving each machine a different range can be done super easily by hand. No frameworks.

Arch-TK• 2 years ago

That's only a challenge for a url shortener if it's going to need to scale to an enormous number of users. I think that's a good example of one of those "leave it for when you can't just make your one-machine more powerful or optimise your code more" situations.

skykooler• 2 years ago

Apparently, by making the bot checker reject most users so that the total number stays small.

usmanity• 2 years ago

this is great, my succinct little domain that's 6 characters long including TLD was turned into 4000 characters, awesome!

lionkor• 2 years ago

Two change suggestions:

- add a donation button and buy a dedi from it - turn off the bot detection

thank me later ig

melvinmelih• 2 years ago

Why .site?

urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.com is still available

david_allison• 2 years ago

.site is longer

tredre3• 2 years ago

The more likely reason is that .site was cheaper.

AlienRobot2• 2 years ago

theofficialabsolutelongestdomainnameregisteredontheworldwideweb.international finally has a worthy opponent.

MarkSweep• 2 years ago

I like the concept. A similar idea that is no longer on the web was “shady url”. It would make links that looked like http:// shadyurl.com/nader-for-president.exe

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

The partner project to shadyurl.com was hugeurl.com, which is exactly the same concept as here. hugeurl.com seems to have gone down.

cubefox2• 2 years ago

That's hilarious.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

I had one that would turn the urls into wild news stories. I had news-sounding domains like nyeveningpost.com and an auto-generation of bogus stubs such as nyeveningpost.com/breaking/mit-demonstrates-time-travel

Then it would either redirect humans like a normal service or serve a page with meta tags to the crawlers so the card info on social media would have a thumbnail saying "breaking news" and a markov generated caption such as "Earlier today researchers successfully demonstrated time travel at MIT" with the stub matching the title just to increase the chaos.

Ran it a couple of years. Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.

Lesson: People enjoy facsimiles of things they find repulsive when it becomes too real. All things have an uncanny valley. It's why people, for example, don't go to butcher shops and pick up animal organs for Halloween decorations.

I find the uncanny valley to be a wonderful artistic experience, like a psychological rollercoaster where there's always something new. But that's a very niche response

justin_oaks2• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Just the idea of it is entertaining and makes me smile.

Not only did nobody use it but the response was universally discouraging and negative.

What were the negative things that people said?

elicash• 2 years ago

It's the perfect con.

If it were TRULY shady, no way they'd use such an obvious URL. Must be safe and a joke!

ilikeitdark• 2 years ago

This is pure awesomeness. You gotta be an OG to appreciate maybe.

joshdavham• 2 years ago

Thanks! This helped make my cloud run url even longer.

frabjoused• 2 years ago

Your bot checker needs some UX help.

farmeroy• 2 years ago

This is great but it's stuck checking if I'm a bot... i get this in the console: ``` auto/:1 The resource https://challenges.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform... was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it has an appropriate `as` value and it is preloaded intentionally. ```

nojs• 2 years ago

it's stuck checking if I'm a bot

Man I am seeing this _everywhere_ now. If you don’t have a clean residential US IP half the internet doesn’t work.

amatecha2• 2 years ago

Make sure you're using Windows or MacOS, too. Anything else is clearly Teh Hax0rz!! :-O

palmfacehn• 2 years ago

The silver lining is that I rarely need to use these sites for productive purposes. It is a gentle reminder to return to the text editor.

popcalc• 2 years ago

If you're an American abroad you can't even use taxact.com or payusatax.com to file your taxes (which you have to because we're the special ones with citizenship-based taxation) because they block every non-American IP, even western Europe. Intuit surprisingly comes out as the less braindead one here.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

Same. I have EFF "Privacy Badger" installed on chrome, I guess that's it?

error404x3• 2 years ago

Sorry, CAPTCHA caused issues. My other project got a bot attack, so I have added CAPTCHA to all my projects. I didn't realize captcha was causing problems to users

efokschaner• 2 years ago

Fun site, I found an Easter egg:

https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...

This reminded me of a backend-less filesharing site I once made

https://efokschaner.github.io/furl-unfurl/#/

v3ss0n2• 2 years ago

Nice One. Never expected such quality Easter egg. Will find more again 10/10.

antegamisou• 2 years ago

The adaptation is too retro I feel.

It should instead append at the end of the URL some 1000-character long token with a ton of other irrelevant arguments.

You know, exactly how Google Search loves to do when you right-click a search result and the address gets brutally scrambled.

rc_kas• 2 years ago

This is so stupid, but I do love it.

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

I don't understand how you're supposed to use this. How do you pass the bot check? There's just a button that says "checking if you're a bot..." and clicking it does nothing.

petee• 2 years ago

On my phone it takes about 10-15 seconds before the bottom enabled, and I didnt click it; i assume their bot prevention is literally just timing them out

is_true• 2 years ago

By not being a bot. Unfortunately I just learnt I'm a bot.

rolph• 2 years ago

use cURL, or httrack.

dmitshur• 2 years ago

There also was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40543196 4 months ago.

tkgally3• 2 years ago

From 1999, according to the page footer:

© 1999 url shorteners are so yesterday try this amazing super long url expander . All rights reserved.

I tried to confirm that, but the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine are still down.

arendtio• 2 years ago

The same here. If you ask me, the first appeared a few years later, but human memories are erroneous.

oefrha• 2 years ago

It's a Show HN. People typically don't post Show HNs for what they made 25 years ago.

  > whois urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongurlexpander.site
  ...
  Domain Name: URLSHORTENERSARESOYESTERDAYTRYTHISAMAZINGSUPERLONGURLEXPANDER.SITE
  Registry Domain ID: D492058866-CNIC
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.hostinger.com
  Registrar URL: https://www.hostinger.com/
  Updated Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:33.0Z
  Creation Date: 2024-10-08T18:01:29.0Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2025-10-08T23:59:59.0Z
  ...

so no, it can't be more than four days old.

tkgally3• 2 years ago

Thanks! I didn’t think to check the domain registration.

The page design is nevertheless charmingly retro.

andys627• 2 years ago

lol https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...

crazygringo• 2 years ago

Ha! Hilarious.

Most of all, I love the fact that, unlike URL shorteners, there's no need to maintain a database of redirects.

I do wonder what the actual encoding scheme is, and how robust it is to lopping off chunks of the URL, since there's presumably lots of room for redundancy...

bobbylarrybobby• 2 years ago

I deleted one character from the expanded url and got sent to a very interesting webpage indeed

move-on-by• 2 years ago

I followed your directions and am pleased to inform you that findings are reproducible.

edm0nd• 2 years ago

Damn, its been a minute since I got got.

v3ss0n2• 2 years ago

You monster.. whoever hate AI and LLM should start using it daily. It will make a lot of semantic tokenizers gone crazy.

Nice bait mate.

etewiah• 2 years ago

Ha ha, love this.

It just so happens that I am working on a tool that ends up expanding hacker news urls. The problem I was solving was that of managing lots of replies to a successful post.

I allow you to replace the "ycombinator" in a hacker news item url with "gipety" so this current thread would point to:

https://news.gipety.com/item?id=41780255

You will then get a page that remembers the comments currently displayed. On subsequent refreshes you will see any new comments highlighted in green.

As I worked on it I decided to also add a slug as I got tired of not recognising what the urls I was copy pasting were referring to.

The above will for example end up generating this:

https://news.gipety.com/hn/41780255/k/67/s/show-hn-i-made-a-...

elonmusk89• 2 years ago

Okay, good job creating something useless

abcd_f• 2 years ago

It shows "Checking if you are a bot" and nothing is tappable.

I am on a recent iOS.

m0d0nne11• 2 years ago

As with so many sites lately, the "checking if you're a bot" stuff is dainbramaged and b0rken...

drunkonvinyl2• 2 years ago

A topic near and dear to me: https://othernotherone.github.io/posts/i-bought-the-longest-...

oniony• 2 years ago

404

drunkonvinyl2• 2 years ago

https://othernotherone.github.io/posts/i-bought-the-longest-...

ricoche• 2 years ago

I have a thing for cool but totally pointless stuff like this

amelius• 2 years ago

I don't.

But I do wonder what will happen when you keep feeding it its own output.

sleepychu• 2 years ago

Ah, I thought this might be for turning tiny/tracking URLs into their targets like my Hacktoberfest project from a few years back

https://off-the-rails.netlify.app/

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Impressive:

<https://urlshortenersaresoyesterdaytrythisamazingsuperlongur...>

FerretFred• 2 years ago

LOL, I'm gonna need a bigger business card

error404x3• 2 years ago

Omg, I didn't check HN for a few days. Sorry, Turnstile was causing issues for everyone, so I have removed it for now. This is just a fun project :)

Show HN: I made a URL expander because short links are too mainstream

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