I neither own nor operate bash.org. I wrote the scripts, collected the seed content, initially in quotes.txt, and operated at geekissues.org/quotes/ until its move to bash.org. AMA
It's funny that this should come up on the frontpage today, because just yesterday, I chose to go and find and install ircN, which still works just fine, by the way.
That is how I collected the quotes originally, by using ircN's quote commands, which saved them in a file called quotes.txt, IIRC.
Then, I would occasionally entertain the channel with random quotes.
Eventually, I converted quotes.txt to quotes.html and posted it on my website.
Then I built a PHP+MySQL database with a submission form, then some basic anti-abuse and moderation features.
Yes, I still love and use IRC, and I just recently installed mIRC and then ircN, and aside from nostalgic value, it's still great for conversation. irssi is my go-to client in general.
Haha, wow. I read bash.org in my youth, and this exchange (among others) have stuck with me, such that I'd remember if someone pointed it out. I'm sure the quote has idly flowed through my head at some point too, when I've been on a random walk philosophizing or something. Clame to fame indeed :D
Funny seeing you here more than a decade later. Wonder how many other of those random encounters could happen with the people on HN. I remember stumbling across Brian Lozier from The Massassi Temple here last year, for instance.
It's already kind of weird to regularly get comments from or interact with geek 'celebrities' both big and small, (saurik, Alan Kay, etc.). Sometimes it bleeds over into the real world where I mention so and so said something to me about whatever topic we're on, and then I have to explain that it was a comment on a badly-styled website and try not to out myself at the same time.
But even weirder is how likely it is that many people that I used to know from various internet places (Massassi Temple, Something Awful, TTLG, IRC channels) are also active here. Not to mention that I know for sure that some techies I know are on here too.
I think what makes it feel weird is that HN is both relatively well-known and small at the same time. The places I frequented growing up were obscure enough that I wouldn't know anyone from 'somewhere else', whereas a site like Reddit is so pervasive that any comment I post gets lost in the noise (probably half of the thirty-something-and-under crowd I know is on Reddit).
EDIT: I think the weirdest 'celebrity' encounter I had was the time I had dinner guy who created CSS Zen Garden. That website was one of the resources that got me started on my web developer career.
Incidentally, The Massassi Temple and Jedi Knight level building/modding is what got me started with software engineering. COG programming both introduced me to programming and revealed my affinity for it :)
At the time, there were no peers in my life to challenge me intellectually, or even interested in many of the same things I was, so this community was a godsend that kept me sane through middle school. If I'd been born even five years earlier, that phase of my life would have been even more of a chore than it was in the first place.
No one at the time was discussing the Internet and computer games' role in socialization, friendship and becoming a well-rounded citizen!
Same here. While I've been programming since I was eight or so, working on a mod/total conversion for Thief and building levels for Jedi Knight was what got me properly on that track.
I don't miss the days of JED/JKEdit though. All those crashes and 'leaks' in the geometry... The Unreal Editor was a lot better, but even there these things would regularly happen.
Another fellow Massassi alum checking in. Not only did that get me started in programming, but it also piqued my interest in Linux. My time there was a huge positive influence on my life.
I have to admit, this is a bit odd to think about in 2020: 20k upvotes in a system where there is no mitigation, captcha, JS or cookie requirement, being considered high - then I click over to Twitter and see things that have hundreds of thousands of "likes" in minutes from posting.
In a way, it's much more frightening to operate on the assumption that, while there are bots, it mostly is actual humans. Simply put, a lot of the actual humans are bots (in the metaphorical sense of having incredibly un-nuanced takes and reactively responding to certain heuristic phrases that "trigger" them).
I don't have any stats on what % of twitter is bots so I'm not saying that it's not overwhelmed by bots, but we should be aware that there might be an even more chilling explanation here: that it actually _is_ humans causing the toxicity
I've semi-recently created a new Twitter account account in order to dive head on into the deepest cesspools of Twitter. The topics and accounts I follow are mostly what I'd call "bot bait"--stuff like Hong Kong, Trump, COVID--and it's been extremely eye-opening to see the ways that people will respond back-and-forth for multiple tweets in near real-time.
But I've also come to roughly the same conclusion as you. I might be naive, but given the time I've spent on the internet, I'd like to think I can tell the difference between bots and humans. Some of the bots are obvious, some of the bots are non-obvious (blaming bots), but still definitely bots. But MOST of them, are probably real people. Really, really ignorant people, on all sides of the political spectrums. There's just these people out there now with phones and a Twitter account, and they're broadcasting their id.
Not really... philosophical zombies behave indistinguishably from "conscious" humans, we just don't believe them when they say they have internal experiences just like real people.
If a community would be comfortable among bots, it would be the ML community, wouldn't it? Joking aside, I think it is rather despite Twitter than because of it that it works.
It was real in the sense that ben174 was in fact working at LowerMyBills.com at the time, 2003-2004: http://www.bugben.com/ (His resume)
However, most likely that was not his CTO. Its more likely that someone ran the command
/whois ben174
and it returned the hostname associated with his IP, which on IRC was typically public at the time. Then this person trolled ben174 by claiming to be from his company.
It genuinely happens. I used to run some networking cables through the walls and forgot one went up into the loft where an old machine was! For a while I was using this machine and couldn't figure out where on earth it was hiding - it didn't help it was covered in the loft! I only remembered it was still at my parent's place after I moved out - I think they even changed router several times but plugged it back in thinking it was something like a printer or extender or something.
An old friend had a house where it was as if his room was built within a room, so there was some gap between his inner wall and and outer wall. He used to crawl around it and hide his servers there.
That made me laugh so much back in the day. But what was ridiculous back in the early 2000s is now a practically everyday event. My wife frequently uses a "find my phone" app to find her online device.
My god, I used to quote this with friends years ago. I miss the old days of IRC. Nice to know you're still hanging around here. Thanks for providing years of entertainment :)
So this was a real quote? It always stroke me as fake :D
Always loved reading through bash.org and qdb.us
Remember that I had to write my own rss feed for those sites to get the newest quotes. Was sad when it stopped piling :/
My work at one point had an OS X specific piece. So I got a wreck of a Macbook Air 2011 around 2013 or 2014, can't quite remember, the original owner tried to replace the LCD and failed spectacularly (I think replacing the screen now would require replacing the motherboard) and sold it screenless for cheap, perfect for my purposes. I added a Thunderbolt-Ethernet dongle to it, chucked it in the parts cupboard (it has slats so it airs well) and forgot about it when I changed primary clients in 2015 and I no longer needed it. A couple weeks ago I needed a Mac again and thought hey, I have a wreck. I checked LuCI and hey, there is wreck in the DHCP leases, that thing is still alive, I ran VNC against it, but what's my password? I haven't logged in for more than four years, let's reset the password. So I go to the cabinet, pull it out and https://i.imgur.com/SQbISmB.jpg URGH
E have an esp8266 device on a battery pack in deep sleep mode that still attaches to my WiFi network occasionally enough to appear in my unifi dashboard. I have no idea where it is; it's been like that for months now.
That is terrifying. How do you plan to handle/dispose of that battery? I guess I'd unplug the Mac from AC and run the battery all the way down, but then you probably should have a fireproof bag to transport it to someplace that will accept it for disposal/recycling.
I had this recently with my phone. It was on silent, so ringing wouldn't help. Still connected though.
I then looked at the signal values in my AP. Kicked the phone from one AP, so it would connect to the next. The signal strength was almost the same so I figuered it must be in a room with somewhat equal distance to the APs. I went to that room, no lights on, called and the display turned on.
I had one running as a fileserver for years (OS/2). There was even a hack for the type 4 CPU complex that allowed you to put in a Pentium MMX Overdrive processor (you had to do some soldering). Worked like a charm. I think I had a 233MHz running on it.
The last 29 days, I just checked, I am paying 19 CAD for 143kWh. https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/screen-shot-2016-10... shows 4W but perhaps it's 4.6W because of the brick efficiency. Since this thing was running 24-7, that's 29*24=696 hours so we are looking at 3171 Wh or 3kWh. At the end, (4/.878 x 696/1000)/143
x 19 x 4 x 365/29=21.210 so we that's 21 bucks and change.
4/.878 watts
696 hours
1000 convert to kilowatt
per current monthly kilowatt to get to the fraction of consumption
times the cost of monthly consumption
the replacement battery and the guy doing the replacement, yeah that was a hundred alas. Oh well.
times four years
times the fraction of a year that monthly consumption comes to
Ah Bash! My friends and I found this at its heyday in the early 2000s right when we were becoming computer literate ourselves. We we not IRC people, but had a communal skype chat going[1] and recognized the conventions.
The hunter2 password joke is so iconic that I still see it referenced regularly. I always think about the "moral combat" top quote where someone is kicked with the input sequence for a fatality as a great example of internet wit[2]. In general, I think many of the top quotes succinctly capture the realities of membership in internet communities (the double-edged nature of having moderators, the daily trials of our fellow users, the delight of linguistic playfulness).
There were other quote sites out there. qdb.us comes to mind, though it seems to have lost all its content, you can still see it on the wayback machine:
[1] Skype, in its early days (and maybe still?), allowed group chats where other clients would send you the messages you missed automatically. We had no desire to run a server and this was in the era when Skype was nearly entirely peer-to-peer. I think of it as our own personal internet golden age.
(I can't believe I'm logging into HN to post this, but hey)
I read many of these quotes back in middle and early high school, pretty early in the DB's existence as I can remember when it moved to bash.org. I promptly forgot about its existence, but a bunch of the material remained wedged in my brain.
Fast forward 10+ years. I had recently started dating someone whose name is [redacted], and I was starting to meet a bunch of his friends and hang out with them more regularly. I made a reference to part of a quote, and one of his friends replied with the next line. Then said friend added, "you know that's [redacted] in that quote, right?" I very much thought that he was trolling me, so I looked at the quote, and... well, it certainly says [redacted] in the username, but more importantly, it matched the pattern how he liked to format/modify his usernames to indicate certain contexts.
When I think back over my childhood, there's nothing I miss more than the way being on the "old" internet felt. The Geocities sites, the webrings, ICQ, Trillian, mIRC scripting, stileproject, the birth and death of E/N sites, image macros, and a million other things that no longer exist and don't have any meaning to the vast majority of internet users today. It was a special club, almost nobody I knew in the real world had any idea that this stuff existed and wouldn't have cared if they did.
And then DALnet was attacked. Days of downtime extended into weeks and eventually months, and by the time it ended DALnet was a shadow of its former self. So many tens of thousands of people just moved on and it was never the same again. I tried moving to efnet as so many did but it didn't have the same vibe. I didn't realise at the time just how much I'd actually lost and how much things were going to change. Man I'd give anything to go back.
Edit: Speaking of netstalgia, here are a few random files from the archives that some might recognise:
Oh yeah, I feel you! I was also on DALnet, and saw the exodus to other networks, EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet, QuakeNet... But as you said, they just didn't feel "right". I.e. some of them had "weird-looking" services as opposed to the DALnet's ChanServ, NickServ etc... :-)
Do you remember "PHP-Nuke" craze, everyone was creating community portals where members were able to post news, polls, etc...
It's funny reading these again for me because when I first browsed bash.org I didn't speak English very well, so I didn't understand some of these jokes (or wasn't sure I understood them correctly). All these years later I can finally understand all the subtlety and nuance behind "what should I give sister for unzipping?".
1. Creates an alias named "vi", so that next time the user runs the text editor vi, it will run this script instead.
2. Deletes whatever files the user was planning to edit in vi.
3. Removes this "vi" alias, reverting the behavior to just running vi in the future.
4. Removes every line from the .cshrc which contains the string "BoZo".
If you put this in someone's .cshrc file, the next file they attempted to edit with vi would be deleted along with the evidence that anything malicious had been done to you.
> Originally: a hermaphrodite; a person having both male and female sex characteristics. In later use also: a homosexual man or woman, especially one overtly manifesting features or attributes regarded as characteristic of the opposite sex; a transvestite.
FWIW, I emailed the webmaster address for gnu.org, and they thanked me for my report and removed the slur. (I suspect it only snuck in there in the first place because it's obscure enough that nobody recognized it. Or at least I hope so.)
'back in the day', storage space was always at a premium. (As was RAM, CPU, ...) UNIX system administrators spent a lot of time thinking about saving space. I suspect the joke is that the idiot just got fixed on that one aspect.
I'm somewhat surprised that no-one mentioned https://bash.im (formerly bash.org.ru) yet. It started as a Russian equivalent of bash.org (the very first "quote" https://bash.im/quote/1 is infamously a translation of http://bash.org/?74629; and is still know as "bash org" even after the domain name change), but become a phenomenon of the Russian internet segment over the years.
I feel like early IRC was when people were much more involved in communicating over the not so popular internet. Sitting and chatting was a way of spending time by itself. Brings back warm feelings.
Back in the 80s, Radio DJs were not allowed to say "suck" on the air, so they switched to "vacuums". As a kid, I just remember how dumb the government must be to implement such a lame rule. As an adult, my opinion overall of government hasn't really improved.
When the original iPhone came out, bandwidth on Edge was so slow that Bash was just about the only site I could load with a good ratio of load time to enjoyment. I read a lot of bash, then.
Dunno if you know, but the ZZT community had a revival of sorts with the release of the reconstructed source code. Unfortunately it's on discord, but a few mzx people hang around too.
Well, this may totally destroy my productivity today...
Also, just a note: you may want to make it more apparent that the "Top 100-200" is 2 different links. Took me a while to figure out why I ended up in two different places on my desktop and laptop.
A quote of mine, from an eternity ago, is still floating around on the top 100-200 section after over ~15 years. It's amazing (and weird?) that a 10 year old's funny IRC chatlog is going to be immortalized on this site foreermore.
Anyone remember the bash.org equivalent for the xkcd IRC channel, where you were only allowed to send messages that had never been sent before? I can't seem to find it anymore — there were some gems that riffed on popular bash.org quotes.
<DmncAtrny> I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING."
<DmncAtrny> And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
The first season of IT Crowd on DVD has subtitles in "l33t". What this actually meant was each episode had a different subtitle gimmick. One of them had the "HEY EURAKARTE" quote http://www.bash.org/?23396
(and get off my lawn kids, : I remember when that quote's votes were in the hundreds :p)
This is not just some random schoolyard humor, this is a whole generation of internet citizens' common childhood (adolescence, to be more precise). If you don't find anything of value in them, it's okay. Not everyone has to like punk or hiphop either.
The people upvoting this now are the people who were the teenagers when this was new. I don't think having a shared cultural history means anyone necessarily still agrees with this stuff. The fact that it's so shockingly out of place compared to what you usually see on HN just tells me we all (mostly) matured and aren't like this any more, and you might be surprised how many women grew up on this too.
As a data scientist with access to large amounts of private messages between individuals I can assure you that women are capable of participating in puerility.
What's your exact point -- that women will be seriously prevented from making a career out of their interest in programming because they see some rape jokes?
If so, why haven't the ubiquitous writings on high school toilets destroyed the careers of most men?
A quick win for readability is to align the first character of each chat message. Perhaps some colors would be useful too. I noticed I had to expend quite some mental power just to follow the chats linked here.
