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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

It's an ID or hashcode, but in English words rather than hexadecimal.

Easier for humans to recall, communicate, and error-check.

An utter bitch to type compared to a short string of garbage, though, and typing a URL manually (friend gives you a URL over the phone or in person) is the only case I can think of where the URL itself matters.

Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'd rather type out "Ethiopian" than waste time finding out that someone said "bee" instead of "dee" or accidentally putting "e9800998" instead of "e9800098".

I've got a ton of pre-arranged neural circuitry, evolved over centuries, trained with decades of live data, all geared towards noticing typos and touch-typing words... It seems shame not to leverage it.

On mobile, perhaps, where you're pecking at a keyboard like a chicken, but with a keyboard it's easier to type.

I find it the opposite to be honest, but probably only because I'm using swype on mobile.

It's easy to hit random characters when touch typing on a full keyboard, but it's much easier to just swipe a couple words together in the url bar than it is to get the correct capitalization as well as having to hold down the key for about a second each time you need a number.

If I need a number, I just swipe down from the letter that the number appears under. No press-and-hold needed. Does that not work on your phone?

They should choose shorter words.

There appear to be some snags, though -- "Faraway" is lacking capitalization for the "away" bit, and, even more confusingly, "wolf" isn't capitalized either. Word boundaries aren't always obvious, but I feel certain that the "wolf" of "Ethiopian wolf" is an independent word.

So this string is easier to pronounce, but it's actually fairly tricky to communicate and error-check.

Actually, "faraway" is a whole word, used as an adjective as a location, e.g. "exotic faraway places".

I feel you wouldn't use it for actual locations, though, e.g. "it was too far away from me".

You'll note that I characterized "Ethiopianwolf" as being even more confusing than "Faraway", since "wolf" is definitely a separate word and it isn't clear whether "away" is or not. That unclarity still makes it difficult to communicate the capitalization in the case where capitalization matters.

Are they actually case-sensitive, though? Randomly capitalizing words seems to have no effect to me (unless iOS is sneakily autocorrecting it), so it's something of a moot point.

Capitalizing random letters in the URL didn't have any effect for me either. So I'm a little confused as to why they show the capitalization they do, but I withdraw the idea that there's a usability problem.

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