Because bigger is better, right?
hugeurl.com
hugeurl.com
Just recently, I saw the first attempt at a pun. It was up at 2 points, though it got voted down. And stories like this bring back memories of Reddit 2 years ago.
I think that Hacker News has one thing going for it: the restriction on up/down-voting. It encourages people to at least be slightly inducted into how the site works before they begin having an effect on ups and downs.
It'd take any URL and convert it to something kinda medium-sized. 30 or 40 characters maybe, fill up a respectable chunk of the bar at the top of your browser window while leaving a nice bit of breathing room.
If the hashing worked with dictionary words, you could use it to make unreadable, unmemorizable URLs both readable and memorizable. Each new url could be assigned three random dictionary words, e.g.:
mediumsizedurl.com/acute_recovery_cable
(Thanks to http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/Random... for the random words)
And that'll give you something that's both medium-sized and readable. Without going into obscure words we can easily get 20,000 of 'em, so that's 8e12 possible combinations of three words -- shouldn't be an issue.
Somehow some guy thought creating this site was worth the price of the domain, the hosting, and his time...but there are easily worse sites with even stupider functionality out there.
The glider is an "animal" from conway's game of life and has been popularized as a "hacker" symbol for a while, though I don't think it ever caught on in a huge way.
The glider emblem was made famous by ESR: http://www.catb.org/~esr/hacker-emblem/
A lot of sites use the glider as their favicon.