Off topic: is it new for HN to elide urls this way? I’ve never noticed it before but it really annoys me. I like that HN is just text, and preprocessing it this way adds no usability. It makes it harder to copy a URL, if anything, and it certainly isn’t prettier.
Personal preference I suppose. There are a lot of urls where the text of the url (or large parts of it) conveys no meaning. In that case it breaks up the comment without adding value. Sometimes you see people use a footnote format here because even the short url is in the way.
