7 ms·
Zohran and the Short Link
- jimmydoe 1mo agodoes it matter? big tech has long canceled url on phones.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- api 1mo agoI can type a URL on today's iPhone just fine.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agothis is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access! hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
- jachee 1mo agoWhat if I told you there’s an existing protocol for doing Really Simple Syndication?
- tadfisher 1mo agoSorry, we're on the wrong timeline. The worse one, in fact.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agosounds like something only nerds would be aware of
- _kb 1mo agoAka POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- ewwe 1mo agoMamdani+ his team are genius at PR
- markdown 1mo agoIn an age where cameras are everywhere, all one has to do for good PR is good.
- inigyou 1mo agoOnly if you own the camera system, otherwise they won't publish the video of you doing good
- testdelacc1 1mo agoWhich is why another Democratic mayor in another blue city, who Mamdani considers “the most effective Democrat in office”, someone who inspires him - nobody knows that politicians name unless they’re really into politics. I’ll admit, even I’ve only heard of her because Mamdani name checked her. Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
- ambicapter 1mo agoI know her name, but I definitely can't name anything she's done.
- inigyou 1mo agoMamdani is the mayor of the largest city by far. Of course he has the most visibility of all the mayors.
- pjc50 1mo agoIt is actually annoying that as a UK user of bsky and HN, I hear more about Mamdani than about Sadiq Khan. Mamdani is everywhere. Mind you, I'm also hearing a lot more about the former mayor of Manchester these days.
- gravypod 1mo agoPeople are discovering go links from first principles.
- SwellJoe 1mo agoGiven how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium. Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agohttps://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov https://bsky.app/profile/mayor.nyc.gov
- SwellJoe 1mo agoAs I understand it, Bsky doesn't punish posts for including a link off-site, and doesn't require you to be logged in to view it. Whether they'll continue to behave in a responsible way forever remains to be seen, I guess.
- radicalriddler 1mo agoThe great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoNYC could also pipe their own PDS right into NYC mobile apps, email notifications, etc. in this context.
- 1mo ago
- GauntletWizard 1mo agoThe problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced. Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history. [1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
- pavo-etc 1mo agoLuckily these are merely redirects!
- markdown 1mo agoBrings to mind this: https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180 https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180
- qingcharles 1mo agoHa! That is genuinely confusing for a moment. What is the solution? Wipe the account and archive it all somewhere? That destroys all the meta-commentary that exists in other Tweets. Maybe just some system that lets you mark all previous posts with something that says "This account is for a government official. This post was made under the tenure of a prior holder of this position."
- markdown 1mo agoWhile clunky, I think what you suggest is the best method.
- stonogo 1mo agoThe lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time. A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kevitivity 1mo ago[flagged]
- mjmsmith 1mo agoIt's ok to keep our personal problems to ourselves.
- Aboutplants 1mo agoWhat specific policies do you disagree with out of curiosity
- klipt 1mo agoGovernment subsidized groceries seems like something that was already solved by food stamps. Having the government run entire grocery stores at a loss seems like a worse implementation of the same thing. I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing). If you really want something different to food stamps, India's subsidized canteens seem like a much more interesting idea: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias-rs-5-canteens-from-tamil-nadu-to-delhi-how-cooked-meals-fill-the-last-mile-gap/amp_articleshow/126272023.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias...
- the_gastropod 1mo agoI have my suspicions about what’s going to happen. I worry the demand is going to be too high to realistically deal with. But dammit am I excited to see someone try something a bit different to address a very obvious need. State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.
- klipt 1mo agoExactly what problem does it solve that food stamps cannot solve more simply?
- slopinthebag 1mo ago[flagged]
- bakies 1mo agoWorks on my machine. Didn't see any grammar errors.
- slopinthebag 1mo ago[flagged]
- bix6 1mo agoTap and tap again. Works for me. Also not seeing grammar errors…
- anigbrowl 1mo agoYou didn't even specify which link had the errors; 'the first one I managed to make work' is something known only to you. Complaining about a problem while not providing any hints on how to reproduce it is not a great way to win friends and influence people.
- slopinthebag 1mo agoOkay well I don't care about "winning friends" and "influencing people" on the internet.
- bakies 1mo agoThen stfu
- forestrywat 1mo agoOr, apparently, having a conversation on a forum for conversation.
- amazingamazing 1mo agoI like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url
- lzy 1mo agoThis is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg https://go.gov.sg links. Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.
- NSPG911 1mo agoit would be nice if they added a link preview not sure why they have never done that before
- tantalor 1mo agoWhat's a "link preview"?
- inigyou 1mo agoI think it means you can see the full URL before you click on it, so you can decide if it's a phishing scam. But why would Zohran send you to a phishing scam. If you think Zohran would phish you then don't enter his links at all.
- jojomodding 1mo agoAnd who is "they" in this case?
- WarmWash 1mo agoI'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.
- spiderfarmer 1mo agoJust admit you’re a fan. No shame in that.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoGenuine question, what is it you don't like about Mamdani? I don't live in NYC, so I don't have first-hand experience with him, but I've not seen many complaints about him (other than things like "he broke the dress code at the swimming pool that one time", which is "Obama's tan suit" levels of petty)
- piker 1mo agoHis policies are socialist. Some of us still perceive that as a bad thing.
- voidUpdate 1mo agoI mean, as far as I'm aware, "socialism" just means that the means of production are owned socially, instead of privately. But is there anything that he's actually done that is disagreeable, or is it just that many news outlets are saying "socialism = bad, Mamdani is socialist, therefore Mamdani = bad"?
- mercutio2 1mo ago“Just” is doing a lot of work in your argument. The government grocery store tender is filled with exceptionally bad ideas. When he’s a normal politician doing normal things, he seems great. When he’s sticking to his guns on naive populist things he’s part of a worrying affection for counterproductive government programs.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo agoThis makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth. Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
- mmooss 1mo agoAt least some traditional link shorterners let you choose the string.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoUntil they inevitably get acquired and all the links eventually break. Please don't use 3rd party link shorteners, host your own if you REALLY have to.
- cindyllm 1mo ago[dead]
- JaceComix 1mo agoAbout twenty years ago I used tinyurl.com/lvorv to link to a flash animation. I assume there's some divine intervention going on, but it still works!
- inigyou 1mo agoIt links to https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mudah https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mudah
- isityettime 1mo agoThe other advantage here is that it's really easy to tell at a glance if one of these "shortened" links authentically points to a real government website; just answer: does it start with nyc.gov? That's a really good thing.
- jancsika 1mo ago> click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.
- fny 1mo agoFlame wars. City council will soon debate two vs four spaces between traffic cones.
- penguin_booze 1mo agoI will not stand and watch tabs getting discriminated!
- afavour 1mo agoTypical, all this DEI naming, promoting minority formats no one uses, while they refuse to recognize the majority are perfectly happy with camelCase! (/s in case it is needed)
- dgl 1mo agoI put a short link on a family thing and someone complained it didn't work. Turns out iOS OCR recognised a "-" as a "=", so this isn't just people typing it wrong. Now my short links implement case insensitivity and striping all non alphanumeric characters, i.e. a "-" is optional and any other symbol character is also stripped. nyc.gov seems to do case insensitivity but doesn't strip "-", so you do need the "-".
- voidUpdate 1mo ago> "click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer" We didn't start the fire!
- thoughtpeddler 1mo agoThe meta on this post is that the minimalist blog design by iamwillwang.com is itself really cool. Great work!
- patcon 1mo agoImho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record But I appreciate the intent..!
- articulatepang 1mo agoI’m genuinely curious: why should it be on a separately managed DNS record?
- hebelehubele 1mo agoThere wouldn't be any benefit to it. They're not accepting user-submitted content. I doubt anyone working for the NYC would upload CP and share a link to it.
- madeofpalk 1mo agoWhat's the upside of this? Seems like it would only make links longer and more annoying to type in, when the intention is to make civic participation easier.
- dragonwriter 1mo agoThat would make sense if it was third-party content, but its not.
- fmajid 1mo agoThis is what happens when Boomer politicians are finally kicked to the curb.
- Obscurity4340 1mo agoFeels good, man. They need to eph off
- kmfrk 1mo agoWhat format would people generally prefer for shorturls if they were designing a website for readability, maintenance, and SEO? foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
- embedding-shape 1mo ago> foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person? Is "foo" part of "website" or is "foo" separate from other similar organizations? Subdomains you'd use maybe for a different department, but if it's the same department, prefer paths. Basically signals how connected it'd be to the main org. But all this is basically feelings and "common sense" rather than anything strictly specified. You'd be able to make use of foo.website.com as well as you'll be able to use website.com/foo in practice, very minutia detail.
- jcgl 1mo agoI’ve seen website.com/z/{initiative} before, and it worked quite well.
- jasoncartwright 1mo agobbc.co.uk/thing is the standard for URLs used like this at the BBC, and it works great there too. The ubiquity of BBC URLs on audio/video in the UK helps. Here's what it was like beforehand. Laughable! https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54 https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54
- knollimar 1mo agoLeft NYC around when he got elected (non political, just a job offer) Does he market by his first name now? It seems overly familiar and parasocial to use it in titles if not
- Finnucane 1mo agoPoliticians have been doing this for a while now. I think the idea is to project more of a 'one of us' vibe and not stand on formality, which creates a vibe of being part of a separate class.
- qgin 1mo agohttps://imgur.com/GB6fbxA https://imgur.com/GB6fbxA
- crabmusket 1mo agoNow? As an outsider just observing from acoss the internet, I always saw campaign materials featuring "Zohran" prominently. I thought it made sense, as it's very distinctive and kind of cool, and lots of people seem to have trouble pronouncing his surname.
- arionhardison 1mo agoI have been working on something for NYC. Its not ready yet but its basically an AI-native DOHMH. I took all of these https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics.page and turned them into guided protocols, staffed w/ the required agents and HITL. Here are the "Programs" - https://dohmh.codify.nyc/programs https://dohmh.codify.nyc/programs example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 I was hoping it would be enough to stand out and get an interview w/ the "PIT Crew" but no such luck, reach out if you want to chat or hack on some NYC/Civic stuff.
- Wilduck 1mo agoMy man, you're posting this project all over the HN comments, but I think you need to step back and really think about what you're building and what the user experience is. Your link to an example protocol: https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 https://dohmh.codify.nyc/protocol/71776 makes basically zero sense to me. Similarly the program page. What do you expect someone clicking on these links to take away from them?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Wilduck 1mo agoYour reply to this comment got flagged dead for some reason (not sure why, it seemed like a good faith comment) so I'm responding with a couple thoughts here. Looking at your set of steps, I'm definitely getting lost around step 3 "The program then guides you one step at a time. Each step is a small module: a short assessment (a few structured questions), a task, a referral, a verification, and so on. It adapts to your answers rather than dumping a wall of text." Am I wrong that this flow is not built yet? Or is completely inaccessible to me? Like, looking at the program page https://dohmh.codify.nyc/program/71776 https://dohmh.codify.nyc/program/71776 I don't see how I can follow any of the steps. You say this is drawn from DOHMH pages, so I found the corresponding one for this program: https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/stay-healthy.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/stay-healt.... I think this page is miles better than what you've built for a few reasons: 1. It comes with context in the form of paragraphs of explanation 2. It doesn't use undefined words like "program", "agent", "target". No where on that page is a string like "PersonalPrepTaskAgent". 3. It provides links to more resources, also written in nice human readable language I don't want to be too hard on your project though. I've had to interact with the Pennsylvania DMV website a number of times, and trying to understand how to meet the requirements for a residential parking permit when I moved into my house was crazy because I needed some non-standard documentation due to having out-of-state plates. I would have loved a someone to break down the steps to me in very clear, understandable language. But I'm not sure your site is doing that right now. As a last note, I wouldn't say you're "spamming" the comments, but I might recommend reaching out to potential users directly and asking them for harsh feedback. Posting into the void here clearly isn't getting you enough actionable feedback.
- dfxm12 1mo agoThese aren't case sensitive, which is good, but some are presented as CamelCase and some are separated-by-hyphens. They should pick one and run with it. I prefer no hyphens...
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago[flagged]
- forgotTheLast 1mo agoThe closest I could find to that claim was a Townhall article¹ mentioning that he posed for a picture with an imam whose mosque was attende by terrorists. Townhall as in the conservative radio/news site and not the NYC town hall. 1. https://townhall.com/news/jeff-charles/2025/10/20/fbi-agents-blast-mamdani-for-hanging-out-with-terrorist-sympathizer-n2665207 https://townhall.com/news/jeff-charles/2025/10/20/fbi-agents...
- snaptrial 1mo ago[flagged]