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Comment by mattvot | Hacker News Reader

There is:

    "Storing a document in a URL is nifty, but not terribly 
    practical. Hashify uses the [bit.ly API][4] to shorten 
    URLs from as many as 30,000 characters to just 20 or so.
    In essence, bit.ly acts as a document store!"

http://tinyurl.com/3n6h8px

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hence the "bit.ly – "rate limit exceeded" :\" message on top...

maybe switch to goo.gl?

This was my point, they're passing their 30,000 char URL to bit.ly to return a short URL (20 chars)

But what happens if bit.ly just say "Sorry incoming URLS (long urls) can only be a maximum of 1500 chars"?

And then the next paragraph:

  While the HTTP specification does not define an upper limit
  on the length of a URL that a user agent should accept,
  bit.ly imposes a 2048-character limit.

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