Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

masnick

LinkedIn URLs are by far the worst. For example, the first profile that came up when I searched for Paul Graham:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23081590&authTyp...

View on HN

Some poor PI is going to freak out when he checks his 'recently viewed your profile' stats.

Yes, all those *2s could easily have been optimised into a left shift operator.

Oh so the *2s have some sort of meaning beyond random URL garbage? Please explain! I've always been curious.

No, I think it is just a joke: if you parse "*2" as "times two" you could optimize it in code by shifting the bits left since bit shifting operations are cheaper than multiplication.

#b0001 = 1

#b0010 = 2

#b0100 = 4

#b1000 = 8

Haha thanks for the explanation.

And to continue on this tangent, if your code is multiplying by the constant 2 (e.g. "x = z * 2") the compiler's probably going to optimize that into a shift anyway, so just keep the "* 2" to keep future human readers of the code happy.

I was just going to say that! Before I saw this post I was on LinkedIn looking for something, and you simply cannot miss when something like this shows in your address bar:

...gid=3396514&goback=%2Enpv_152562310_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_1_*1&trk=NUS_JGRP-grp-nm

You can have a public URL for linkedin in the format /in/CustomName

E.g.:www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama

Too bad that seems like only an external reference method, and the site never uses those URLs internally.

Yeah, I want to know what they're doing internally with these insane URLs. It's just ugly -- poor craftsmanship IMHO.

Yeah, nothing screams good craftsmanship like armchair-quarterbacking someone else's work that clearly works well.

FWIW, it seems to be some sort of encoded state, essentially HATEOS.

Works well?

"Oh you want the URL of your LinkedIn Profile? Don't use the URL in the address bar, silly! Use this other URL we are providing randomly down the page."

I was referring to the URL-scheme of the LinkedIn app in general, not just the profile page - I somehow missed that this subthread was only about the profile page. Yes, I agree they dropped the ball completely on that. Especially tragic as they could fix the 80% case with a front-end one-liner (window.history.replaceState).

Apparently he is a 3rd connection. o.O

Reply on news.ycombinator.com