Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren’t even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.
That clearly didn’t happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites (“flipmeat,” in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.
[…]
Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files — pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs — on Yahoo’s Del.icio.us Web site.
Every time that I use tinyurl.com, I think about how big their database must be. I have oft thought about using tinyurl for compression…. send a bunch of special URLs and get that 65536 characters turned into five characters which are indexes into a globally readable codebook.
i did some tests during the hackday with tinyurl and it happily tinyurl’d a 300k url string. I don’t know what the maximum length is.