Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

raffraffraff

Domain names of the old internet:

- penisland.net (sells pens)

- expertsexchange.com (renamed to experts-exchange.com)

- therapistfinder.com (find a therapist)

- whorepresents.com

View on HN

Not just the old internet! Ever considered visiting the Sierra Nevadas? Well there's a wonderful, outdoorsy place in California that's just waiting to welcome you: Lake Tahoe! Visit, uh, gotahoe.com, and keep in mind that the Nevada border, where certain things unrelated to outdoor sports are entirely legal, is right there.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Sort of? "Tahoe" isn't the problem. Sure, "hoe" is a substring of "tahoe" but it's pretty clear that "tahoe" is a placename in a string like "visitlaketahoe.com". IMO they absolutely knew what "gotahoe.com" would be parsed as, it's very clever. It'd be a Scunthorpe if the site was getting flagged for "hoe", but it's a parsing problem at the user layer, not censorship elsewhere.

Yeah, it's more a "CU in the NT" https://ntunofficial.com

> they absolutely knew what "gotahoe.com" would be parsed as, it's very clever

I'm not so sure :) goblah.com is one of the most popular tourism domain configurations that exist.

My employer did some work early in Dotcom for a company that owned the domain name "manufacturersexchange", when I pointed out that was a terrible name for a business they said "no business person would notice that". Business never got off the ground.

I mean even with a dash it's really not a very good name for a business. What does the company even do?

Mind you, self-descriptive company names and domains are more useful for local small businesses; big ones like Google start to get their own meaning. ycombinator? What?

Some businesses really can benefit from a good or memorable domain name.

But that market is much, much smaller than it used to be, and most businesses can live or die no matter what their domain name is.

They wanted to start a manufacturing equipment business like eBay, but for factories, which itself was rather silly given how difficult shipping machines would be. They wanted a preliminary design for a 3 month period, but took 3 months to negotiate the contract, so in the end I worked without any input. I think they were completely clueless about the internet or how difficult such a business would be to run, or even market.

I wonder what their argument would have been. "Business people just aren't observant enough to notice things in general shrug" ?

Based on their logo I'm pretty sure Pen Island knows exactly what they're doing.

Your pen is our business

Missing a comma after 'is'

The penisland website uses a line break:

Your pen is

Our business!

"We Specialize In Wood"

Looking at the FAQs they seem to know their business.

Q: Can I provide my own wood? A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all standard customs inspections.

I remember one called penismighty.com. Which was a silly online community similar to, well nothing, but I guess the closest thing would be somethingaweful.com it even had alternative themes to the site which would lean into the different interpretations of it's name which was awesome.

slutsofinstagram.com

> Welcome to Slütsof In Stagrâm an online fantasy series about a Princess duck named Slütsof and her adventurous journey across the mystical lands of Stâgram. Join her as she leaves her castle, searches for her long lost brother Brösof The Magical Goat and challenges a tyrant King who has claimed all of Stagrâm for himself. Here is some concept art to ignite your imagination! --New submissions below!

(The author of the site originally registered the domain for other reasons. Instagram tried to take legal action so they pivoted and back solved the purpose of the domain and why it wasn't infringing on the Instagram trademark)

- rim.jobs (Research in Motion (Blackberry) job postings)

dicks.com was previously NOT Dicks Sporting Goods...

Visiting all these cracked me up, thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com