[jloughry]

Technically, there is one single TLD at the top of the tree; the root zone is called empty-string-dot and exists at the end of every DNS name, although resolving software doesn't normally require it. But it's why news.ycombinator.com. works as well as news.ycombinator.com without the trailing dot.

[Buge]

Interesting that it works now. Previously some browsers at least would reject https sites like that for a cert name mismatch.