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Comment by riiii | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't a "trend". It was Apache's way of automatically mapping a username to his home directory. I feel old.

My 90's ISP homepage URL makes more sense. inreach.net/~myusername

Actually, I miss when ISP's all came with some space for simple web hosting. It was a given that a lot of people would want to make their own sites, not just consume them.

  > It was a given that a lot of people would want to make their own sites, not just consume them.

I wouldn't say it was a given that a lot of people would want to host, but it was a given that people _could_ host.

Then Geocities came along and made the hosting easy, destroying the ISP-hosting market.

And now we have Neocities.

Not just Apache, but POSIX shell syntax! It's called Tilde Expansion[0], so in your dash, bash, whatever, ~USER expands to the home directory of USER. This is the general form of standard "bare tilde" syntax as a stand-in for $HOME.

[0]:https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

I am referring to the practice of escaping the tilde.

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