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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating as the desktop computer and running Linux on it are, I find the blog's domain name (in Japanese, is it Katakana?) and HN's rendering of the URL even more riveting.

View on HN

The name as displayed on HN is the "real" domain name, it's a format called Punycode, used to allow Unicode domain names despite DNS only allowing a subset of ASCII characters.

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

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

Firefox users can set "network.IDN_show_punycode" to "true" in about:config (or your user.js preferences), which will help you identify phishing attacks using lookalike domain names.

I believe Chrome users can do this as well, however it requires an extension.

If anyone wants to convert those back, just a warning - don't do it blindly since there's a large number of confusable characters. At the very least, there's a table of the confusable characters available (https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp) so you can bail out early.

To piggyback on this comment: anyone know how this domain is pronouced, and what the story behind it is (if any)?

The literal translation is “mariusu” - I would guess this is the Latin-derived name Marius written in katakana (katakana are generally used for words of foreign origin).

My Japanese is rusty, but it should display as: マリウス "ma" "ri" "u" "su", which looks to be a foreign name (katakana), "Marius." That matches the username on this user's github email address, also at the same domain, which means their email address should be pronounced, "Marius at Marius dot com"

Well done, Marius. Well done.

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