_why the lucky stiff on The Setup | Hacker News Reader

_why the lucky stiff on The Setup

_why.usesthis.com

116 pointsmickeyben39 comments

I just love the way he doesn't take any of the questions seriously. I also love the fact that despite this they still left his answers in. :)

I cracked the code

Who are you and what do you do? http://why.usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.1.jpg

What hardware are you using? http://why.usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.2.jpg

And what software? http://why.usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.3.jpg

What would be your dream setup? http://why.usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.4.jpg

It's down, does anyone have a mirror? It's been down for a couple of weeks now.

It's up for me.

Yeah, down for me too, but http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/_why.usesthis.com says it's up. Weird

I seem to recall there being some browser/OS combination that could not handle underscores at the beginning of addresses. What are you using, and can you access it with another browser?

Not the problem:

    $ curl http://_why.usesthis.com/
    curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host '_why.usesthis.com'

It's definitely the underscore: http://usesthis.com/ is accessible, as are all the other interviews, but http://_why.usesthis.com/ isn't.

And it doesn't seem to be the browser's fault:

  $ ping richard.stallman.usesthis.com
  PING richard.stallman.usesthis.com (74.207.245.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from waferbaby.com (74.207.245.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=63.6 ms

  $ ping _why.usesthis.com
  ping: unknown host _why.usesthis.com

So I can't resolve the domain name for some reason. This happens on both my home Gentoo box and my Slicehost Gentoo server.

It's a DNS resolution issue. Underscores in domain names are invalid, but some DNS host software still resolves them, while others stick to the spec.

I'd call this a fruit of this kind of DNS abuse. Yeah, OK, it looks nice, x.usesthis.com or whatever it is, but it forces you to make a new DNS lookup for each page, instead of using cached www.usesthis.com/something. And, as we can see, you can even make the address invalid. It's quite sad. :-/

Web content that is invalid according to one or more standards? Surely you must be joking.

Underscores have been allowed in domain names for quite some time. DNS based Service Discovery even requires their use.

EDIT: If I'm interpreting the specs correctly, underscores are fine in a domain name but not in a hostname.

On Linux, neither Chrome nor Firefox are working for me, yet:

    $ host _why.usesthis.com                                                       
    _why.usesthis.com has address 74.207.245.100

odd.

[Edit: Looking at darshan's post below, I understand why: host (part of the BIND distribution) uses its own resolver; everything else goes through the system facility (i.e. glibc). I still don't know how to fix it, though.]

I've got to it by visiting the main site and using Tamper Data to set the host in the HTTP headers to '_why.usesthis.com' - not idea but works!

Remove the underscore:

    $ ping _why.usesthis.com
    ping: unknown host _why.usesthis.com
    $ ping why.usesthis.com
    PING why.usesthis.com (74.207.245.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from waferbaby.com (74.207.245.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=178 ms
    64 bytes from waferbaby.com (74.207.245.100): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=178 ms

That doesn't help much, as the web server just serves the root document in that case.

The underscore makes it an invalid hostname. :-(

It is accessible in google cache, except _why's answers are images, which are not cached. Aaargh! So close. http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:QtwetYZV3HgJ:_why.usest...

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc952: "A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus sign (-), and period (.)."

I worked around it by adding the following to my host file: "74.207.245.100 _why.usesthis.com"

I talked to the guy who did the interview a month ago and told him about the problem and advised him to change it to why.usesthis.com and his last words were "you know, i think i might do that. :)" So.

You still can use the workaround: http://usesthis.com/interviews/_why

Thanks to the code:

  get '/interviews/:slug/?' do |slug|
    @interview = Interview.first(:slug => slug)
    raise not_found unless @interview

    haml :'interviews/show'
  end

A way to access the content no matter the underscore problem:

Who are you and what do you do? http://usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.1.jpg

What hardware are you using? http://usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.2.jpg

And what software? http://usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.3.jpg

What would be your dream setup? http://usesthis.com/images/interviews/_why.4.jpg

add this line to your /etc/hosts

  74.207.245.100  _why.usesthis.com

and it will work

just remove the underscore: http://why.usesthis.com/

You can use Google's DNS servers or OpenDNS and it'll resolve.

Here are two more ways of accessing the interview:

http://usesthis.com/feed/ (then scroll down)

http://viewsourcecode.org/why/#7 (_why's Estate mirror)

I still miss _why and wish he would come back in any form he chooses.

There are other _why-like programmers, teachers out there.

name two?

1. Bonus500 ( Learn You A Haskell For Great Good: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ ) ( http://twitter.com/bonus500 )

2. Mononcqc (Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/) ( http://twitter.com/mononcqc )

I can name some more, if you want.

I do want, thanks :-D

3. Jeremy McAnally ( Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book: http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/ ) ( http://www.jeremymcanally.com/ )

4. Marijn Haverbeke (Eloquent Javascript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/ ) ( http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/ )

5. Young Zed Shaw ( http://www.zedshaw.com/ ) ( Older Zed Shaw is just a little bit less out there )

And a few more can be found on Bonus500's Twitter Follow list.

And here I was wondering why random people started following me on twitter.

Thanks for the reference!

The eloquent javascript guy

http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter4.html

I'd say Chris Wanstrath (GitHub cofounder, http://defunkt.github.com/projects.html) is when it comes to hacking on awesome OSS projects. Rip, hurl, some cool emacs scripts, hub, repl, and plenty more.

I don't know Mr. Wanstrath specifically, but it really isn't about hacking awesome OSS projects. It's about feel and attitude. _why was footloose, insane, and absolutely fun.

Yeah, I know. Chris is a lot more sane and doesn't have quite as much of a "fun" attitude, but he has a pretty cool attitude.

I strongly recommend reading his keynote from railsconf 09. The first half is him totally mocking the whole "rock star/ninja" idea: https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02

His designs are pretty neat, and his ideas pretty cool too. I'll have to look into it more! Thanks for the link :)

I like to think that somewhere in some obscure part of the open source world, he's back. Under a new name, probably, but he's still back, quietly working by himself and churning out some awesome code.

I don't think you can really hide a personality like that. I think he's doing something else entirely, something AFK like just being a father or some such.

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