4 ms·

Size doesn't always mean clever. I just plugged an HDMI cable into my TV all by myself, it shifts more than 7Billion bytes/SEC to the screen.

• mquander 16y ago
  That's right, and I suppose you don't give a lick of credit to the Chief Artist inside your television sifting through that data and drawing the picture on your screen, do you.
• wulczer 16y ago
  Just think about the availability constraints such service needs to comply with. I can't remember a bit.ly outage, and an outage would make half the Internet unhappy. Same for spam filtering, automatic reporting using the "+" links etc. At some scale level keeping up any service becomes a nontrivial task.
  • gaius 16y ago
    So don't use it, we already have DNS. If anything "url shorteners" are a step backwards, at least www.whatever.com is human-readable. I simply don't believe that we have enough computing power to add another layer to visiting a website but not enough storage for everyones URLs. It's just a stupid fad. Here's the new one: http://arseh.at/ http://arseh.at/ (real URL)
• jbooth 16y ago
  Yeah, but it's more than sending a few 301s or plugging a cable, a better analogy would be that if you wrote a sophisticated algorithm to mine patterns out of those bytes to the tune of 7 billion whatevers per whatever and produce interesting results, then you could call yourself a digital signal processing scientist. They're not just doing redirects, they're doing a lot of data science with exploring the statistics of what gets shared, clicked, etc.