from Hacker News

The million dollar mystery behind Milk.com

by danso on 9/4/25, 10:13 PM with 50 comments

• by thomassmith65 on 9/7/25, 1:05 PM

    Back in the internet's early days, it was easy to get a domain name. They were cheap or even free.
  

  That is not exactly how I remember things. Everyone bought domains from one registrar (was it Network Solutions?) and the cheapest domain started at around $100. There were all sorts of short and trademarked dot-coms available though, that is true.

  I'm going by ancient memory here and would love it if someone corrects me.

• by Waterluvian on 9/7/25, 12:46 PM

  If he’s sitting on a domain that’s actually worth millions and has a well-paying job, maybe he’d get a bite for “I’ll accept less than 10 if you match it 1:1 with a donation to <charity>.”

  It’s his and he can do what he wants. In fact I think it’s cool that there’s still a Classic Web holdout like this. But there’s latent joy locked away in that url.

• by vitalnodo on 9/4/25, 10:26 PM

  I found out about milk.com when I was thinking about how to make an Android app completely from scratch (assembling DEX bytes from zero, kind of like writing an assembler for the Dalvik VM). That’s when I came across the author of the DEX format, Dan Bornstein — and I was surprised he actually owns a domain like that.

• by Brajeshwar on 9/7/25, 11:57 AM

  In a weird way, when someone mentions something about milk with a domain name, it always remind me of the Milk Table.

  https://milk.dk

• by m-hodges on 9/7/25, 1:39 PM

  I thought this was going to be about Kevin Rose.¹

  ¹ https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/26/milk-completes-1-5-million...

• by rwmj on 9/7/25, 1:05 PM

  purple.com was a similar thing. Originally the site had just a FAQ page about how they didn't want to sell the domain:

  https://web.archive.org/web/20090226000820/http://www.purple...

  https://web.archive.org/web/20090225184613/http://www.purple...

  I just checked now and it's one of those mattress drop-shipping sites :-(

• by indigodaddy on 9/7/25, 1:14 PM

  I believe this was one of, if not the first site to implement a barcode/UPC generator. Current iteration here:

  https://milk.com/barcode/

• by oulipo2 on 9/7/25, 1:58 PM

  The guy pretends he doesn't want to sell the website, all while hinting exactly at who might want to buy it and for how much... lol

• by dr_dshiv on 9/7/25, 12:50 PM

  This guy worked at Danger! Man I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick

• by Mistletoe on 9/7/25, 12:38 PM

  https://milk.com/value/

  I think he’s aiming a bit high with 10 milly. I’d take 1 or 5.