I'm not sure what you think the bug is... the link associated with the story is not valid, so HN links to the comments page instead.

Would you rather people ended up on an error page?

Oh.

The link is to http://coffeemakerspot/

I was redirected to http://coffeemakerspot.com/

But the redirection was done by my browser (Firefox). I had assumed that coffeemakerspot was resolving in its own right.

Either HN shouldn't accept the link, or it should show the domain name it putatively links to. As it is, it displays as if the link is to the comments page, but it is actually to the external url.

Think a bit. If unadorned custom TLDs were valid, the ownership and benefit of them would have been a huge topic on all our minds for years.

I vaguely remembered ICANN talking about allowing them. No idea where they are in the process. Don't really pay much attention to things like this as "unusual" domains are irrelevant unless you're being obtuse/cutesy or running a url shortening service.

Must be your browser doing some autocorrection then.

  % host coffeemakerspot. 8.8.8.8
  Using domain server:
  Name: 8.8.8.8
  Address: 8.8.8.8#53
  Aliases: 
  
  Host coffeemakerspot. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)