First time I've come across the setup. Here are some interviews with a few other HN regulars:
http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/ http://aaron.swartz.usesthis.com/
_why is listed on their mainpage too but his interview seems to have been removed
http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/ http://aaron.swartz.usesthis.com/
_why is listed on their mainpage too but his interview seems to have been removed
Drawn and quirky (or precious, depending on your taste or mood) as normal for _why.
dig _why.usesthis.com
According to Wikipedia, the use of underscores in hostnames is illegal, but many implementations ignore this. Anyway, the interview is mirrored here: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/#7
Looks like underscores are valid in /domain names/ but not in /host names/.
You'll see underscores used many times for SPF records and in Microsoft's Active Directory.
Also, when you use dig I'm pretty sure it manually recurses the name server hierarchy while an application will just connect to your local name server which might have its own policies.
http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1123.html#sec-2.1 http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc952.html http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc921.html