HN Explorer

Suggest PG: Alias/Redirect www.News.YCombinator.com to correct URL

18 points by vimalg2 ↗ HN
The annoying behaviour i'm referring to, is that news.yc DNS currently doesn't anticipate the default behaviour of browser auto-completes for "news.ycombinator"

Case 1: I verbally pass the url out to friends who are interested in learning from smarter people, and their view attempt fails without even an error message.

Case 2) My lazy self: When at another non-HN-user person's computer, typing news.ycombinator and CTRL+ENTER annoys me when it fails; and I have to retype it again in full. I'm pretty sure there are other lazy folk like me, who probably just don't think its worth mentioning. But, all the same, I think this is significant. @HN team: I hope you think this is worth fixing sometime when you do routine hacking on the HN server(and DNS).

Thanks in advance

23 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] thread
dedalus
change your host file to suit your convenience
simonw
"Case 2) My lazy self: When at another non-HN-user person's computer..."
slig
Doesn't solve the problem. The web server must be set up to handle the virtual host www.news.ycombinator.com too.
jacquesm
I'll bet you didn't test that before you wrote that.

Hint: it works just fine.

axod
Fix the browsers. Nothing should assume www. It's ridiculous.
vimalg2
That's true. But another generation I know of still thinks 'MUST-prepend-www.' for all things related to URLs.

Personally, I never use the www as a default for any property I'm responsible for. But, its still important to alias and re-direct the random end-user who types the wrong old-school URL out of habit.

thwarted
Catering to the ignorant doesn't encourage non-ignorance.
epall
Hell, even most of my peers in college always type the www. first.
gunyoki
How hard is it to type .com? And why should the YC admins be encouraged to create a 'news' subdomain just to work around your laziness?
vimalg2
I'm assuming you mean a 'www.news' subdomain. I'm not aware of any other Best practices used by webmasters to handle naive/new visitors.

Also, I don't know about the flexibility of news.yc's custom Arc webserver. I suppose it might be much more work than adding a new VHOST conf file.

jacquesm
A subdomain of 'news' in this context is everything that ends on news.ycombinator.com. That is what you are asking for.

Technically speaking ycombinator is a subdomain of com and news is a subdomain of ycombinator.com and so on.

www.news is not a valid subdomain name afaik, because it incorporates the separator in to the domain name.

So to make things work like you suggest a subdomain of news.ycombinator.com would have to be created.

ryanelkins
Or perhaps we could just think of it as a first level filter. OK, there's no way to not sound elitist saying this, but if people can't figure out that it shouldn't have a www in front of it, how much are they really going to learn from the articles here?
vimalg2
That's exactly what I was quite content to think all these years. ;)

But i'm growing up a bit. Who's to say an old-school non-computing-related engineer-ish sign-up couldn't have anything useful to contribute on HN. Isn't that motivation enough to fix it?

Personally, I love reading war stories from some of the older, wiser 'beards' on HN.

ryanelkins
Yeah, I do feel a little bad for saying it - and I'm not even 100% sure I agree with it, but it was my first thought upon reading the suggestion.

It's not so much that I think other people are idiots as much as I realize how much stuff is on here that is way over my own head. The thought wasn't that I don't want them here as much as it was "will they find anything here useful" but that really isn't my decision to make.

dotBen
It's not going to happen, but IMHO news.yc should live at a better (shorter) domain name.

Not only is the current one too long, it kinda belongs on it's own domain rather than a subdomain of ycombinator.com -- how many people using hacker news are here because it's affiliated with YCombinator?

All of this is analogous to when tech.memerandum.com became techmeme.

vimalg2
I believe http://hackerne.ws already aims to do this. I don't remember who started/maintains it though. Its was a DNS hack IIRC.
riffic
the behavior CTRL+ENTER gives is not a failure, it is working as expected.
kogir
The problem affects a vanishing small group of people. Most either:

1. have no trouble with it in the first place

2. open "the internet" (some search engine) and type it into the search box not knowing it's not the address bar. Then they pick the first result.

jacquesm
In firefox you could even type "news ycombinator" in to the url bar and hit enter.

Apparently it uses the first result from google.

vimalg2
I appreciate the point. But, If this was a website that made tangible revenue via Sales/webLeads, I suppose the tone of this discussion might change? ;)

One wouldn't then, be happy to rely on a 3rd party (Google/browser design committee) to tell users what to do.

Just saying.

BTW, I just noticed my 'reading' browser of choice (Opera) has a URL completion config option in Preferences>Advanced>Network>Server Name Completion. Can't say it works. Maybe a restart will fix it.

jacquesm
I think a good part of the 'reluctance' is that HN has plenty of problems accomodating the growth as it is, both on the technical front and on the change of atmosphere due to a large influx of new users.
tdoggette
I use a Blackberry, and when I select news.yc from my history, it automatically puts http://www in front of it, and I have to remove it every time.
tome
If it bothers you that much set up your own domain name of whatever you like to redirect to it.