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Comment by goldenarm | Hacker News Reader

Remember when the .tk TLD became free 20 years ago ? Every hobbyist took one, then scammers followed, then Facebook and antiviruses started blocking it.

I remember publishing a website for a class on my .tk domain, the teacher couldn't open it and I almost got a failing grade because of it.

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A friend almost failed an IT class because his website didn't render at all in IE6. This was during the time of IE9. The teacher just hadn't updated their browser in a long time.

I don't get how you get to be an IT teacher without knowing the most basic troubleshooting steps to get assignments to run.

I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.

Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?

Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book.

Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.

It’s getting so bad. My wife is in a remote school where they fail students occasionally to squeeze a little extra $$ out of them.

I’m sorry your wife failed some classes, but it’s probably not because the school wants some extra money.

They didn't say that.

They did seem to think that it's a problem for schools to fail students.

They didn't say that either.

What they did say is that the school sometimes fails students to get more money — supposedly implying that this was not because they did not meet the passing criteria.

This does not preclude failing students when they deserve it.

It is ok to question of what makes them believe they would have passed the exams without this financial motivation for the school, but they were pretty clear IMO.

Lets use names.

Western Governors University. Online 4 year degree. Classes are passed when you pass the "high stakes" (read: proctorio test). This means if you know the material, then you can pass a class in 1 day.

HOWEVER, when you do your final test, they only tell you pass or fail. They do NOT show you what questions you got right or wrong. If you fail, you have to wait 5 days and go through professor hoops. Of course, you naturally never actually talked to the prof. Its all online through ZyBooks.

But WGU benefits on failing people, and by hiding what you failed at. Because the longer you attend, the more they charge. Their response is basically "Get Gud Scrub but we're not gonna tell you how".

It’s not a problem to fail students. But when the online wing of the school has a 35% graduation rate, doesn’t hold lectures, and has a swarm of disgruntled reviews from people who feel like the school is in the business of taking Pell grants and maxing their student loans then stonewalling them when they hit mid 3rd year (right after you’re in for a pound) and start asking questions about where all the money went and why they were sitting at a B all semester then magically ended up with a 59 after the final, it’s a little sus.

How are you so sure?

There is so much shady things about academic env that it doesnt sound scary

Ive witnessed situation where "hard" prof was teaching and many ppl failed, and then thry received "easy" prof and they passed

But they had to pay for exams and retake, etc

When I had web design a bit after 2010, they still used Dreamweaver and yeah you could get a license for free via the university. That’s pretty normal (eg giving you a Visual Studio license, Office, all that). It was more crazy that the course was so incredibly basic (nothing more than static page building in dreamweaver) at this college compared to the other one I later transferred to

Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.

What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

There was a ton of... not exactly footguns, just things to keep in mind if you’ve wanted your site to work as you intended in all browsers. The webcompat nowadays is way better now.

That said, personally I’ve never understood Dreamweaver either. By the time I tried it, I’ve already got used to Notepad++ and writing HTML by hand, so I’ve just treated it as another text editor... and IIRC it just felt way more laggy than Notepad++, with a browser preview panel that took half of my 4:3 display. Maybe I’d discover some cool features if I’ve spent some more time in it? I dunno.

> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.

HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <title>Parsing Example</title>
    <p>Some text. <em>&#42;wow&#42;</em></p>

Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.

> HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML

Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents.

That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.

I never understood Dreamweaver. The first thing it asked me when making a new website was ... what the resolution of my user's screen is? I don't know that!

Its web development software from the 90s/00s, a period when websites were built by first having a designer meticulously mock everything up in Photoshop on a 640x480 canvas (maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 in later days), that mockup would then be handed over to a web developer (hi, that was me) who would take that mockup, slice it up into a billion little images, and then put them in a wildly complex set of nested HTML tables. The designer would then have a look over it and provide critique on the fact some element was 3px misaligned, or the font size was incorrect.

During this period I was berated by our studio lead for using new fangled technologies like CSS layout that could adapt to different sized screens instead of sticking to the trusty HTML soup Dreamweaver would spit out.

Don't worry, designers still complain about something being 3px off, or a font being weight 700 instead of 800.

This is exactly how I remember my early webdev days. Before Dreamweaver we were using NetObjects Fusion.

Just like AI vibecoded websites... Good luck understanding the code when the AI bubble explodes and you can't afford the insane price that AI will have by then.

Was that class taught by a certain woman who had a business making websites, per-chance?

You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.

Probably not, but then again, it's a small world! What state? Northeast?

Midwest.

I had a teacher who told us to make a website using Powerpoint..

Turns out you save save as HTML and any links you put between slides become anchor tags.

Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that

Hmm. Dreamweaver must be what the cool kids were using instead of Frontpage.

I was a cool kid! I used FrontPage :D

Yeah that's what they all thought :P

Heh…I once was in a state-level coding event (it was a small portion of a larger competition) where half of the test was turning in code on a CD during the competition, with the written half during the event. My CD was deemed unusable for whatever reason (it had worked on XP and Fedora 6 or 7 at home) and didn't count towards my score. I still got second in the event. I declined to continue because I couldn't trust that the judges would be able judge my submission fairly and that with half of my score missing I still got second that I didn't need to prove anything else at the cost of more after-school practice hours and wrecking my perfect attendance record during my senior year to travel to nationals.

Does high school attendance matter for anything? Genuine question. Always seemed like pre-college schooling always wanted you to think everything was more important long-term than it really was.

It’s needed to get into college and that’s it, which is needed to get your first maybe second job and that’s it, which is needed to…

...attendance? I landed a spot in likely the best economics uni in Poland while having 52% attendance in my final HS year, out of which perhaps 10% of the absence was due to illness.

It all depends on the country and the local rules, which can also change from year to year. Attendence didn't matter much, if at all, in my day, but right now it matters. Extremely so. Student's couldn't, until this year (when this was finally revised) even visit the school nurse without getting a "no attendance", which would count negatively with respect to the mandatory attendance requirement for advancing further. And even for receiving the common stipend.

It goes in your permanent Record Of Achievement! I was always told that this would be very a very important set of documents once I left school, and I am sure that I have no reason to doubt their statements!

Not really, but you can get in trouble for truancy if it becomes a big problem (where I'm from, that was 3 unexcused absences or any absences without a doctor's note after 10. In practice, however, this wasn't that enforced)

Many states pay school districts based on attendance.

Attendance typically correlates with classroom success.

Attendance avoids truancy proceedings.

One of the kids in my elementary school got a hat for perfect attendance through 6th grade.

I've never seen attendance shown on a transcript though, but you could fill some space on a resume with it, especially if you have the hat to show for it.

An emphasis on perfect attendance can be harmful, though, if it means students come in when they are sick and spread it to the rest of class.

I dropped out of college (the UK version, I guess equivalent to senior high school in the US) shortly after discovering that the final assessment of my Computing project would be performed by the examiner reading a printed version of the source code, without ever executing it, because the exam board were so scared of examiners computers being destroyed.

When was this? If this was before virtualisation was common I can maybe understand that but any time in the last 20 years is pretty dumb and the last 10 so braindead I question if they would've been able to judge things properly

Oh this was in 2000, when virtualisation was only just becoming accessible so I can get of get the justification. It still made the entire exercise in writing some software feel pointless when I knew it would never get executed by anyone but myself.

Reminds me of Lord Vetinari from Discworld, reading sheet music instead of listening to adulterated performances by fat sweaty men squeezing the music through some tubes.

Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit (?)

> Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit

…and that’s how we got Java :p

And stuff like Pascal, too, so it’s not all bad.

You haven’t lived life until you’ve sat a Data Structures and Algorithms exam having to write all coding solutions with paper and pen

Perfect attendance is not a good goal to aspire to. Kids force themselves (or get forced by parents) to go to school while sick, which is probably bad for their health and also risks everybody else's health.

It's a built-in secret part of the teaching for any job where you interact with customers, they don't upgrade and they have no troubleshooting skills.

Or just ineptitude, but I'm hoping for the former.

Tenure. Or at least that was my experience with my comp sci teacher who required that we gave him printed out programs for our homework and then tossed them into the trash while making eye contact with you and gave you a grade later.

The schools admins told me he had tenure so there was nothing I could do.

Didn’t take me a whole year before I switched majors.

During the time of Internet Explorer 9, it was surprisingly common for people to still be using Internet Explorer 6. This was often out of their control, for instance if they had intranet sites that required Internet Explorer 6, or if they were stuck on an old version of Windows because they had outdated hardware.

Later versions of Internet Explorer had compatibility mode, but it often wasn’t enough to get things working, especially if there was ActiveX involved or the security policies were restrictive.

Schools were especially prone to this due to their limited budgets among other reasons, and IT teachers weren’t normally the decision makers who could do anything about it. You shouldn’t assume that a random IT teacher had the authority to spontaneously upgrade a school computer that needs to be used for things besides that one student’s assignment.

I will, however, assume that an IT teacher has the ability to recognise, "this isn't working because I'm using an ancient browser". If the teacher is completely unable to use a less ancient browser, the requirement for the project to work on IE6 should be clearly stated, which it was not.

However in this case, my friend just helped the IT teacher install Google Chrome on his computer and showed that the site rendered fine there. I don't know what sort of policies were in place but there were evidently no technical measures implemented to prevent people from installing a modern browser.

I think your friend might have used portableapps.com, they offer many types of browsers . These programs are packaged to install under a restricted account, without requiring admin rights.

And the IT teacher could have done the same, if he was competent.

I left community college after a week because my "computer" teacher required us to change our monitors to 640x480 and print out ever step that we completed in things like Notepad or Configuring the Desktop and then every day we'd punch it out and would add it to a three ring binder of all the things we've done.

Full Color.

I took a computer class in college (like 25 years ago now?) and corrected the teacher multiple times every class. And it was like 95% things that were in the book that was issued, so I could even point out the page it was on. It was absolutely embarrassing.

In college I one year had a physics teacher who refused to believe that you could hear the harmonics of a guitar string simply by lightly touching the string at the right place, e.g. in the middle (12th fret) to hear the octave. Nothing could convince him that this was possible. That year was when several of us spent a good part of the week bowling in a nearby bowling hall, either because we didn't have to take the class (the curriculum was years behind what we had already done before college), or the teachers were so incompetent that there was no point attending. Fortunately the other educational years (everything after middle school, that year excepted) were great though.

640x480 in 16 colors is the resolution as it was prescribed in the Bible.

Amen

though shalt not wear garments of mixed pallettes

Terry Davis quote?

> God said 640×480 16 colour is a covenant like circumcision.

https://clotmag.com/oped/deus-ex-machina-deconstructing-digi...

if i may rant, my middle school and high school aged kids have to literally take pictures of their homework assignments with their chromebook camera then put it the pictures in a google slides deck then submit the deck through a form all to just turn in their paper HW assignment! ridiculous.

Can’t you just hand it in?

I assume this was at a highschool and not at university? My IT teacher in highschool was the chemistry teacher, because.. he knew how to use Word, I guess?

He knew we were computer nerds so didn't really care about teaching us (we knew more than him anyway). And we didn't mind that he just sat there drinking coffee and reading a book, as it meant we could just play videogames for an hour. Good times.

Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach.

Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.

Surely you could have made essentially the same point without regurgitating one of the most perniciously derogatory lines ever concocted to describe teaching?

All of the market forces you describe are real, but they are partly sustained by cultural templates that make teaching a low-status job among those with technical qualifications and lead to an assumption that every teacher is either (a) internally motivated and doesn't "need" competitive compensation or (b) a washout from a more prestigious track and doesn't "deserve" competitive compensation. This affects administrators, policymakers, voters, and teachers themselves, giving us the status quo where teachers are paid and treated like shit (ask a K-12 educator about the most psychotic parent they met this year and whether admin had their back) so that even many people who love teaching gradually evaporate out of the field if they can.

I suppose I'm not even arguing that the material result is much different than you describe it, just that it's lazy, amoral thinking to frame it as a market quirk or the immutable nature of teaching rather than a slow-motion sociocultural trainwreck over which we can exercise some iota of agency. (One such iota might be to simply not say "those who can..." in earnest ever again.)

I'm lucky both of my schools IT teachers were actually competent, they were both technically business teachers but were good with code.

That first teacher died shortly after, she had terminal breast cancer. I miss her a lot

OTOH this is an opportunity to learn yo add guardrails to the cide to check for browser capabilities and display a page inviting to move to new stuff

This feels like a good place to reel out my favourite anecdote; community college IT (or for the natives; BTEC), 1998; our programming tutor told us to "ignore the internet" because it's a fad.

Almost 30 years, and every so often I still wonder about where that got him.

What a memory you have unlocked. They were everywhere. I remember the urban legend that .tk domains were X% of their GDP

10% apparently for .tk. I also remember .tv windfall, which is 8-9% of their GDP.

And the .sy boom until startups got enough heat for, you know, funding the Assad regime.

Apparently nobody cares that .af is now funding the Taliban

The terms of using that tld say it must comply with Sharia law

pretty strict and apparently the Minister of that agency doesnt care that .af is a domain hack for “as fuck” in the west

In other words, he doesn't give a fuck

yeah it was right there

Perhaps he does - dontgive.af does not resolve.

1. Be Sharia law

2. Sell domain name that's against Sharia law

3. Retake it back when someone buys it, because it's against the law

4. Repeat and profit

What website/service actually uses that?

A Mastodon instance used it: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/12/24071036/queer-af-mastodo...

During Pride Month?!?

I thought that ended up being because the registrar didn't pay it's bill to the Afghan government?

The .ai TLD is some tiny island with a few thousand people

.io is (British) Indian Ocean (Territory).

haha yeah I've bet the last 12 months of my career on a .io

I always thought these TLDs were a flight risk to be used in any serious capacity. What if the random state decides you/your business are in violation of [whatever] and kick you off?

What if an elephant steps on the power cable to the server room?

The owners of `queer.af` thought that AF only meant “as f*ck”, without realizing that AF also happens to the be the ISO 3166 code for a country controlled by the Taliban, who didn’t like their domain name [1].

Brits that had `.eu` domains lost their domains due to Brexit [2] (unless they had some other EEA ties).

And if the Chagos deal goes ahead [3] and the British Indian Ocean Territory ceases to exist, then all `.io` domains might disappear too (although considering that `.su`/Soviet Union domains are still a thing, they probably would have stayed around).

[1]: https://www.404media.co/taliban-shuts-down-queer-af-domain-b...

[2]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/registering-and-renewing-eu-doma...

[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9m47y1ez2o

>Brits that had `.eu` domains lost their domains due to Brexit

Ouch, that must've hurt. Brexit is the most stupid thing that Britain has ever imposed on itself.

After the restoration of the monarchy of course

Assuming the British/American air base remains on some agreement with the Mauritian government, then the Chagos Islands may remain as a special territory of Mauritius, justifying the continual existence of an ISO 3166 code for it.

Actually, Diego Garcia (the British/American military base) already has it's own ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, DG: [1]

It's "Exceptionally reserved" "at the request of International Telecommunication Union (ITU)".

Although my gut feeling is that if the deal happens, Mauritius would probably ask to exceptionally reserve `IO` as well. Still, I'm not sure if I'd risk using a `.io` domain since it's not guaranteed.

[1]: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:code:3166:DG

I seem to remember bit.ly had some issues when turmoil happened in Libya

Notion just migrated from their Somali domain to a normal .com

My latest domain (five chars!) that I am actually using recently went down because my registrar is (was?) in Gaza.

The registry thankfully was able to sort it out and I was able to get it back and registered with a regisrar not currently being actively genocided.

I felt like a real dick, emailing people in Gaza in 2026 how to renew my domain.

What if they sent out a hit squad to your house?

Anguilla

At least https://tcl.tk redirects => https://www.tcl-lang.org/

I was hoping to see the classic doctor redirect banner when I hit that link. Still so very cool that they kept their domain active this whole time!

that's the first thing I thought of when I saw .tk. I may just be too tclish, however

Core memory unlocked

Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting

Double unlock.

In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”

My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.

Those were the days.

Those were the days indeed. A big part for me is probably because I was a teen at the time with little responsibility, but getting to be a part of the wild west days of the internet was a magical experience.

Magical indeed!

I once mailed $70 cash (multiple months of allowance) to someone to code a MVP of something I wanted to build.

They ripped me off and disappeared.

And… that’s when I decided I needed to learn to code!

Somewhere out there is a developer telling this exact same story. ‘I once agreed to build an MVP for a kid who promised to mail me cash. Never showed up. And THAT’S when I decided to get a real job.’

Except I mailed the cash in advance! It’s okay, it was probably another 14 year old.

My parents were not happy when I told them I sent cash to a stranger. I remember having to do it in secret because they were very not okay with the idea that you can meet strangers online. Hah.

I think they're describing a scenario where the cash was stolen by a postal worker or for some other reason didn't make the full trip.

I once got half a bitcoin on IRC for coding up a website scraper.

In my case, ignorance unlocked. I never heard of tk and I remember 36k modems so old enough.

I think reason is I went to work, slung .NET and didn't think much about computers otherwise except occasional reading some C++ books for "fun".

> In my case, ignorance unlocked. I never heard of tk and I remember 36k modems so old enough.

Might be too old then. I used my parents speedy ADSL modem (4mbit/s down, 1mbit/s up) :D

Probably: I similarly go back to 2400bps modems (9600 and 14400 when dial-up internet showed up here — 33.6k was the time of soft/winmodems other than the ultra expensive US Robotics ;)), and I skipped the .tk domains too — probably already employed and in possession of 10 .org/.net domains by then.

I remember that. The one thing I would add is I think the usage was much more general purpose. "Free stuff" sites were a big deal and huge source of traffic and .tk was widely shared on those. You could have a banner with ads and have the domain for free.

I still have a .tk domain, paid since 2008, because it was the only one with my surname available.

Haven’t had much issues but surely if could go back and i’d pick a different tld.

Wow this brought back a flood of memories. I'll never forget spinning up lycos and geocity sites with .tk domains

tk and cc, the domains i used to use for php reverse shell haha, bring back memories!

RIP .tk. Those were the days.

And then everybody left, yeah, I remember this exactly.

those were the days!!

>One Person, One Subdomain

Indeed. That's the necessary

Yes, one of the key principles we follow is that all the perks we aim to provide must come with some limit to prevent abuse.

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