XKCD: Meeting | Hacker News Reader

XKCD: Meeting

companyname.website

100 pointsdceddia45 comments

I'm curious as to why/how this post thinks the URL is (companyname.website)? It's obviously from the comic, but I'm curious about the mechanics.

edit: derp. the url points directly at companyname.website and my Chrome build has a bug that prevented me from seeing that.

Because it is? Did you read the comic? It's part of the joke.

My Chrome build has a bug that doesn't show the URL when hovering over links. I didn't even realize that it was not pointed directly at xkcd. Doh!

Did you try typing companyname.website into your browser?

.website is a new TLD; Randall probably just registered it, and put a redirect to that specific comic.

I assume it's a redirect.

I'm mobile right now so can't confirm, but I'm guessing that Randall bought that actual URL and it's serving up a 301/302 redirect to the xkcd site.

There's a whole bunch of new tlds that are not, as of yet, in common use. 'companyname.website' might have been 'acme.com' 20 years ago (and you'd also have been laughing all the way to the bank, eventually).

Neat, I didn't notice!

I guess xkcd's author has bought it? I tried digging a bit with WHOIS, but didn't see any actual names.

It has a DNS A-record pointing at 184.168.221.2, which didn't have much content. Not sure how the forwarding happens, but didn't spend a lot of time on it.

Fun!

dig companyname.website

companyname.website. 3217 IN A 184.168.221.2

curl -i -i http://companyname.website

Location: http://xkcd.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Yes, it's a redirect. The domain is registered on GoDaddy and uses a domain anonymizer (you can't see who really registered it).

xkcd runs on IIS? I haven't seen an IIS header since 1997.

He probably just created a redirect in the domain host's web interface.

Just checked, and xkcd runs lighttpd.

thanks. that makes more sense. probably the registrar uses IIS, then.

got a downvote for that, btw. weirdest downvote ever. maybe I upset some hardcore IIS fan or something?

According to Netcraft, IIS (Microsoft) has about 27% marketshare, and I occasionally see an ASPX extension every now and then. No good reason you wouldn't see an IIS header, but I don't know why someone would downvote you for not noticing things.

[1]http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/01/15/january-2015-we...

I don't know either, but they're really into it. I'm in negative numbers on every comment in this subtree. (except, hopefully, this one.)

No, it's just because comments like "IIS sucks" or "my webserver > your webserver", like, "my programming language > your programming language", or, "my text editor > your text editor", are lame.

I'm not an IIS fan, and I didn't downvote you, but only because you were already < 1.

sure, but I didn't say anything like that. I said I had no idea it still existed. I legitimately thought it was discontinued around 15 years ago.

I was more concerned that Mr Monroe registered with GoDaddy.

As an XKCD comic, I thought this one was just ok, but what made me post it to HN was when I went to check the availability of companyname.website and found out it redirected to the comic :)

I get the context, but it's still not that funny.

I don't think it's really meant to be side-splittingly funny. Just a fun meta sort of thing.

oooh. awesome, thank you! I probably should have checked the actual link. I think my Chrome build has a bug where "show url on hover" gets disabled after some time. I guess I can blame my confusion on that ;)

I did the same thing this morning with the intention of recreating the web page from the first panel of the comic, but someone beat me to it to make this redirection (which have to admit I find less cool than my (and I guess many others) idea).

Someone? Didn't Randall do it? I believe that it's part of the joke.

Maybe I don't know, the whois info are hidden.

Because Randall Munroe owns companyname.website specifically so he can point it at this comic.

[Yes, you can own a .website domain too!](http://radixregistry.com/dot-website/)

I don't understand the joke.

Explain XKCD usually does a pretty good job at explaining what's going on: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1493

(bla, bla, obligatory notice about explaining jokes and dissecting frogs here)

It explains jokes on all panels of the episode, but I cannot find a joke connecting panels together.

If you read all the http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Comics_fe... , many/most of them follow similar themes to this. It's more of a continuation of a character than a self-contained joke.

So, XKCD is not actually all that funny in itself. Trying to "find a joke connecting panels together" is the wrong way to digest XKCD.

The joke in this case is the same as most of the Beret Guy jokes: He has some sort of alien view of the world which has mired him in a 9-year-old's mentality, so that when we see him appear we are seeing an overly literal concept of what the adult world is about. The humor is not "ha-ha" funny so much as a mind-state of vague bemusement.

This may be the reason XKCD has been so successful. By offering a comedic "buildup" which is insufficient to generate a "release" of hysterical laughter and all of the neurotransmittery goodness that comes with that, you are left trawling the archives for more and more humor.

> This may be the reason XKCD has been so successful. By offering a comedic "buildup" which is insufficient to generate a "release" of hysterical laughter and all of the neurotransmittery goodness that comes with that, you are left trawling the archives for more and more humor.

I dunno about that. One of the things I appreciate most about xkcd is its whimsy. Seeing things from a different point of view, or having a bit of absurdity pointed out, is fun.

All of the panels happen during the same business meeting. The meeting is for a company that is successful, but no one is quite sure why. The people working for the company don't seem to know what the company even does.

The domain name reminded me of those t-shirts that say "City Name Sports Team: Defeating Opposing Teams Since The Year We Were Founded". Poking fun at a fairy generic thing to say by saying something very generic.

The first character is called Beret Guy, he is a recurring character. He exists as a commentary on subjectivism. His shtick is that he is absurdly out of touch with reality. He not only speaks in buzz phrases, he gets those buzz phrases wrong. Much to the other characters' chagrin, he is still quite successful, as reality seems to distort around him, making his errors in understanding manifest in reality. So is he the one who is out of touch with reality, or are we, and we just happen to live in a bubble in which we have only come in contact with people who are equally out of touch? And in the end, if you're happy (and Beret Guy is always portrayed as happy), then what does it matter which is the "true" reality?

Don't worry, it isn't funny. It's more a of a collection of smart references than humor.

Is this Scott Adams' way of telling us that he has taken over XKCD?

Randall's been sitting on this since 20 Nov 2014?

I imagine he has a large amount of comics in reserve so he can work on comics such as http://xkcd.com/1491/.

Yet he has one finger on the pulse of the internet-nation, as evidenced by the previous comic: http://xkcd.com/1492/

Actually. he rarely has comics in reserve. He has a notebook of ideas and sketches, and each day a few hours before a comic is set to go up, he picks one and draws and inks it. I've watched the process firsthand, and I was surprised as to how little lead time there is.

When he knows he'll be busy he gets a few in the hopper, but it isn't his standard SOP (at least it didn't used to be).

Do you know him?

We've met a few times, but I learned this when I was escorting him around the Bay Area for a day during his book tour.

The man always has a plan...

I'd guess he bought the domain name with the assumption that he'd eventually find something to use it for.

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