Hacker News Reader

Comment by taesu | Hacker News Reader

how does a link like this gets to the front page of hn?

It's interesting because it's still in use, even though the Soviet Union doesn't exist. ICANN hasn't been successful in forcing the retirement.

Compare to the .cs TLD for Czechoslovakia which was phased out and replaced with new TLDs.

.an also was phased out when the Netherland Antilles dissolved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an

I see. I thought it was very strange as no comment & so random.

I don't think ICANN should retire a domain namespace just because a political entity that it used to represent no longer exists. Cool URIs don't change [1].

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

I suppose it avoids awkward politics. It's not clear to me, at least, which country would get to control the former Czechoslovakia TLD.

Also interesting is who is still using it:

> Among the institutions still using this domain is the Russian pro-Vladimir Putin youth movement Nashi, as well as by the pro-Russian armed insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. Some organizations with roots in the former Soviet Union also still use this TLD.

> The domain has been reported to host many cybercrime activities due to the lax, outdated terms of use, and staying out of focus (2% usage comparing to the primary .ru zone).

By the way, Honduras has the ".hn" toplevel domain name.

You click the "submit" link at the top of the page. Then enter the URL you want to submit. It will then appear in the list you can see under the "new" link.

If people find it interesting, they can then upvote it by clicking the little up arrow beside the submitted link. If enough people do that, then it will end up on the front page. And that's all there is to it!

That was quite courteous way to perceive the question and respond. I can do one better:

The link is to a Wikipedia page with a long url. You can submit a title to mask the link. The op posted ".SU" and so .su isn't a link, it's just a title.

There's also the second-chance process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com