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Comment by _wldu | Hacker News Reader

I hope we keep it. It matches the maps I have from 7th grade.

Reminds me of my 9th grade teacher who was refusing to call it USSR like everyone else and was insisting on saying "usre" (pronounced like a word). To this day still wondering if it was militant, or if she just read that on a map and thought it was a word.

I hope you keep it too. It's been like a decade and I still feel sad that .yu is gone.

Biggest tragedy of the early internet was losing .oz (Which was resurrected in the OpenNIC alternate DNS.)

Golden words

I strongly agree. When I take notes and put files in geographic directories, I still use .oz.

How was it used?

I'm guessing that's Australia.

Correct. Fun fact: For many years after the rest of Melbourne University moved to unimelb.edu.au the computer science department kept the domain cs.mu.oz as a nod to that history (and that they were one of the first institutions in the world to be part of the fledgling internet). I was a little sad to see that quirky disappear.

_But_ when Yugoslavia broke up, we got Montenegro with .me, which makes me smile.

And I am sure Rust folks are happy there is a place to call their own (.rs for Republic of Serbia, since .s[erb] was taken long ago :).

I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

Maybe remove history books, they also remind people about this.

Removing .su != burning books. I will tell you opposite: we should write in history books the truth about what in realty USSR was and teach children with it so tragedies like USSR never happen again.

He is not saying that "removing .su == burning books", even though both actions lead to permanent destruction of something, I suppose.

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

Replace "it" with "history books". You hope that we will not "keep" anything that: "reminds you how your country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union". By this reasoning alone we should not keep a lot of things (including history books) because a lot of things may remind people of something horrible. If you ask me, this is not a good basis of or justification for not keeping that something, which could be ".su", or "history books", or anything else.

>Replace "it" with "history books".

I am against even burning history books from USSR that glorify USSR. BUT we should not use those books to teach history now.

In which case it essentially boils down to: X reminds me of something bad, but I am personally OK with keeping it around. Y reminds me of something bad, too, but I am personally not OK with keeping it. All you did was being selective about it, but the underlying reason is essentially the same, you just apply it selectively based on your own values without considering anyone else's.

Although, this does not seem to meet the seemingly only criterion: "reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union". History books do that, but you do not seem to want to NOT keep them. So perhaps this is not the only criterion, there is something else. What is it? Could it be subjective value? If so, I still think that it is not a good reason to get rid of something because you have not found it valuable AND reminds you of something horrible.

I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it. This is just my personal feelings and position.

But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

> I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it.

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

It seems contradictory to me. According to the dictionary, "hope" = "to want something to happen or be true". Asking for something is "to want something to happen" as well. Is this incorrect?

I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it. I am asking to remove it based on:

>But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

I understand that, but you initially said:

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

You mentioned nothing of the sort that you are NOW mentioning as a reason. I am glad that you are not asking for or wanting its removal because it reminds you of bad things. Perhaps it was an innocent omission, or you changed your mind. Either way, glad we could get to the bottom of it.

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That being said, I disagree with its removal.

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> But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

>> USSR does not exist

Why is its existence a prerequisite for having a TLD for it? It does not necessarily have to exist in the present (or at all).

>> There is no reason to keep it

There are many reasons. One of them could be not taking people's domains away from them.

>> Using it is a kind of propaganda

Not necessarily. One might just use it for fun, for example: sudo.su.

Plus, all TLDs could be used for "propaganda".

>> Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

Such domains could point to valuable resources, they might be an online equivalent of a history book, for all we know. Why should information regarding USSR not be on the Internet, under this TLD? Seems like a good fit.

>I am glad that you are not asking for or wanting its removal because it reminds you of bad things.

I am glad you are glad.

.su was made because of USSR. USSR collapsed. .su should be removed because the reason it was made does not exists any more. Logic is simple.

Its reasons for today's existence can easily change. Luckily your hate won't win this battle.

USSR collapsed. I already won.

Nope. They've won as long as you still hate and remember them.

Every country has done something terrible to another country. There is not getting around that.

And deleting something permanently is very similar to burning something permanently.

.su is for country USSR. That country does not exists any more. And that country have done many bad things to humankind. There are no reason to use it as like USSR exist now too. USSR is a history and lets keep it in the history.

I agree with you about the horrors of the Soviet Union, but if you want people to know what happened, why remove a bunch of highly accessible primary sources?

>why remove a bunch of highly accessible primary sources

I agree with you that we should not remove "a bunch of highly accessible primary sources" .su is not that kind of source. .su "was assigned as the country code top-level domain" and that country does not exists. It is not like picture, book or building. Why should we use it now?

In what sense is it not like a picture?

In that domain literally zero sources of information

And that domain online just because of his owners greed

If there were a .nazi TLD, would there be debate about how proper it is?

Depends on how it was used.

Holocaust museum? OK.

Michigan Militia. Nope.

At the moment .su is not used fro museums. You can use it for everything and it is not right.

Imagine if the Confederate states had had a TLD. What do you think, what kind of people would be using it nowadays?

Which one was that?

I believe he is speaking of Ukraine. It is trendy today to say things like that in Ukraine.

Maybe because it was trendy to starve Ukrainians when the Soviet Union existed?

They also numbered three out of nine PCUS general secretary.

Ukrainians were not the only ones to suffer from the famines back then. Multiple parts of the USSR actually did. It doesn't seem like a targeted action on behalf of the govt.

Communism was such a disaster you can barely tell whether its genocides were intentional!

>Multiple parts of the USSR actually did.

Yes but not like in Ukraine.

Yeah, sure.

Poland I guess...

There are many things that remind people of bad things. That's not an appropriate reason to remove them.

Demonstrating symbol of ex "country" in which there was dictatorship, occupation, annexation and genocide is act of glorification/act of paying respect of/to that "country" and its behavior.

What are your thoughts on the North Korean TLD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kp ?

if it offends you personally, just look the other way. do not preach to others, they may have different opinion, which is just as good as yours.

Can you imagine if there were a .nazi TLD? Would you think it appropriate to discontinue its use, despite its historical significance?

Joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ss

That is not the point. There are a lot of things in the world that may remind someone of something bad. Take a look at history books. Should we not keep them either because they remind people of bad things? Of course we could use a zillion other things besides "history books" or ".su", the point is the reason behind not keeping or removing them.

"History books" have value in aggregating and presenting information with historical context. TLDs are artifacts without context. A history book that covered the 20th century and blandly mentioned that the Soviet Union was a collection of communist states, without mentioning any other events or context, would be similarly irrelevant, and should be relegated to the trash heap. Same with the .su TLD. We should definitely keep the historical records that it existed, but there is no reason to continue its actual existence at this point.

Thousands of people own .su domains (I'm not one of them, FWIW). That's the reason for its actual existence at this point.

A few years ago a friend found binaries of GCC and gzip for Xenix on a .su domain: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2010/03/20/gzip-for-xenix...

We were looking into Xenix as retrocomputing enthusiasts and we didn't have any compiler, so that had plenty of value for us.

Those domains have value, too, to the owners, for one, and perhaps to its visitors.

> there is no reason to continue its actual existence at this point.

I might as well just reply: there is no reason to not continue. Why should we take away people's domains just because you think there is no reason to continue its actual existence? Put yourself in other people's shoes, please. Imagine if someone used this reasoning to get rid of or take away whatever you are fond of.

Perhaps these domains have no value to you, which is fine, but we should not get rid of anything just because they have no value to you.

I'm reminded of the confederate general statues in the USA.

My usual response to this is "keep it, but turn it into / put it in a museum". However, that seems impractical here. .su can't go in a museum any more than pi can go in a museum.

It could be a museum, but it would by nature be the only one of its kind on this topic -- so, who would get to decide what goes in the museum? The history there is too recent and too global to really find an impartial administrator anywhere.

By that logic, we should certainly get rid of .uk and .us. Even the extremely biased accounts of the USSR that you seem to believe don’t match the continuing brutality of Anglo imperialism.

Read some history, perhaps.

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