J
Joshua Schachter
joshua.schachter.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, writes about URL shorteners, web design, auto-increment IDs and behavioral economics.
What HN saysHN commenters link his post against URL shorteners as a strong argument, and cite his proxy and amateur economics posts.
23HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
18stories submitted
351story points
2 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Joshua Schachter: Autoincrement considered harmful5 people · 10 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Url Shorteners (2009)5 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 3The problems with url shorteners4 people · 94 points · first shared 2009 · 56 comments on HN
- 4Joshua Schachter on blogging tools3 people · 12 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Joshua's blog: put a proxy in front3 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Lecture overclocking2 people · 42 points · first shared 2008 · 21 comments on HN
- 7My fun experiment with Mechanical Turk and behavioral economics2 people · 39 points · first shared 2008 · 8 comments on HN
- 8Beyond REST2 people · 30 points · first shared 2008 · 6 comments on HN
- 9Presentation for art project I did with mechanical turk2 people · 1 points · first shared 2007 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Introducing human.io1 people · 103 points · first shared 2012 · 102 comments on HN
- 11Joshua Schachter: Elevator camera obscura1 people · 9 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
- 12The other way1 people · 4 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 13An Absolution Exchange and Mechanical Turk1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 14Seven on Seven: Guilt Marketplace1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 15That sucked1 people · first shared 2023
What HN people wrote when they linked it
madhouse · 2015-06-03
Why do you need an URL shortener to begin with? (See http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners for some great reasons against them)
joshu · 2012-01-06
I also recommend reading Fortune's Formula.
I took a stab at Prospect Theory myself: http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/09/amateur-economist.html
Took a few hours of work.
pvg · 2009-09-09
There are lots of good reasons that go beyond content caching (which is the topic of the article).
Somewhat terse write-up here:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html
The basic idea is that there's fair bit of useful logic that can be handled by a simpler, lighter-weight, more easily securable front-end system than the lumbering tank that is your app server. This includes basic load balancing/failover, partitioning (requests of type foo go to these servers, all the low-latency ajax stuff over there, static content somewhere else), babysitting slow clients, blackholing malformed requests, etc.
calambrac · 2009-07-20
See current DiggBar scandal. These shorteners put a middleman in between your links and your content, allowing them to, at any point they like, do whatever they want, including sending all those links to themselves, to a competitor, to a landing page strewn with ads with your content framed inside, whatever. As much as we all love middlemen in other industries, seems like a great idea to let them in here, doesn't it?
Joshua Schachter wrote the definitive anti-shortener argument:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
bootload · 2007-09-28
"... I won't be able to do anything full time until 2011. ..."
try the delicious model, build product, refine to user requirement. Then create company around product ~ http://joshua.schachter.org/
bofh23 · 2024-07-19
Critical article from Apr 2009:
on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.
Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.
nathancahill · 2016-07-08
I'd argue that link user experience starts before you actually click a link. Maybe when you're deciding whether or not to click?
Same reason that URL shorteners are bad UX. Source (creator of Delicious): http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
bl4k · 2010-10-22
auto increment considered harmful, from joshu:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html
Your tables almost always have a better unique key to use as a primary key other than auto increment (which sorts your table by the order they were inserted in - almost always useless outside of a blog).
Getting out of the habit of beginning the design of your tables with ID int autoincrement is a good thing. Even better if web frameworks stopped depending on it and setting it as the default primary key and ID used in views/routes.
tptacek · 2010-10-11
The authoritative place to start is probably 'joshu's article:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html
Yes, there is definitely a concerted effort to get rid of URL shorteners.
raghus · 2008-01-28
Joshua Schachter's (del.icio.us) views on auto-incrementing: http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html
jjwiseman · 2010-12-27
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670218, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818166, joshu: http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52429 )
Foursquare growth in 2009 inferred from autoincrement IDs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallofhair/4232092914/