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by mtogo 5573 days ago
Please don't shorten links on HN.

the timeless http://www.pronetworks.org/v21/images/uploads/blog_images/xe...

vs. the new http://www.electricsistahood.com/images/ever/new_xerox_logo....

While we're at it, let's toss in MySpace:

the meh http://www.subscribersrule.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/my...

vs. the WTF-worthy http://studiokandm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/myspace_lo...

1 comments

While I agree that URL shortening stinks for all sorts of philosophical and practical reasons, it grinds at me that HN's crippled markdown doesn't let you specify text for links. It makes it hard to integrate multiple links into text, because I am forced to line-break after each to achieve a minimum of readability.

You can see that the HN formatter is sympathetic to this type of textual disaster and "shortened" your links, just by omitting the last 20 or so characters of each.