Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC? - <AUTHOR> Curious to know if people still use IRC?  Why or why not?  What do you use it for?  I frankly miss IRC from heavily using it in the 90s. <comment><USER5> You want to see one of the most fascinating uses of IRC in a focused, dedicated community let me introduce you to the player group known as the "Fuel Rats" of Elite:Dangerous[1]. They use IRC for far more than just a hub to congregate and socialize, 100% of their actual dispatch operations are planned, coordinated and excuted on IRC.

If you run out of "fuel" in game, and you need a Fuel Rat to come rescue you, you do it in IRC. Dispatch talks to you in their IRC channel, other dispatchers are communicating in NOTAM[2] like notation with pilots out 'rescuing' other players.

It's amazing to behold.

[1] [https://confluence.fuelrats.com/display/FRKB/Rescue+Standard...](https://confluence.fuelrats.com/display/FRKB/Rescue+Standard+Operating+Procedures#RescueStandardOperatingProcedures- IRCandCommunications)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM)

Disclosure: Fuel Rat 2010-2013, Retired.

<comment><USER6> Elite:Dangerous wasn't released even in alpha form until 2013. I assume you were a fuel rat for Elite 3.

When was the origin of Fuel Rats in the franchise?

Have they existed since the first game was first released in 1984? Or only after IRC came around a few years later?

Very curious about the history of Fuel Rats in the game series, as well the history of technology these used to communicate.

<comment><USER7> > I assume you were a fuel rat for Elite 3

No, these are actual In-Real-Life-People. Maybe parent got their dates a wee bit wrong.

When I started playing Elite:Dangerous (circa release date 2014?) I ran out of fuel in a system I couldn't refuel in (wrong type of sun or something like that)...and so was stuck. The only way out was to self destruct.

After some googling I discovered the Fuel Rats on Reddit and then their IRC channel. So as per their S.O.P. I put out a call for assistance on their IRC channel and within 10-15 mins or so one of their crew appeared in-system and refuelled me. I don't like to abuse the word "awesome", but these folks were awesome. They were like the AA or RAC of the galaxy :)

<comment><USER8> Do you pay for the service or something?

<comment><USER9> The service is entirely free, in game and out of game. Fuel Rat 'rescuers' (or just 'fuel rats,' there might be a better term they use) do it for the fun of it. It's an amazing example of emergent gameplay.

I've been saved once or twice by fuel rats. The process is fantastic and seeing the dispatchers in action is fascinating. After they refuel you, they give you a little talk and help you avoid running out of fuel again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love going on Freenode, simply because the people that lurk on any given project's room have always been incredibly helpful to me, and really nice too. I am in the #clojure room semi-often (asking silly questions), and occasionally the Haskell room if I'm up for learning a bit more about theory.

I like how simple IRC is, but I get why so many people have an aversion towards it. In the age of Slack, telling people to install Weechat and connect to a server manually is kind of scary. I largely embrace the transition to something new, but I do have an issue with the open-source world moving to a proprietary platform.

I wish XMPP were more popular, since I think a federated chat system with an open protocol is pretty neat, but sadly I fear that the Slack hype-train might be a bit too far-gone.

<comment><USER11> > I think a federated chat system with an open protocol is pretty neat

Have you looked into Matrix? It still has a few kinks to work out, but it seems to fit the bill, and the idea of bridging to other protocols (namely IRC and Slack) is an interesting idea for reducing friction.

<comment><USER12> I use XMPP with bridging to IRC (to access freenode). There would have been no need to reinvent that particular wheel. Sadly the hype-train comment upthread also applies to Matrix.

<comment><USER11> Well, yes - the hype train is the whole point, as they were looking for something more popular than XMPP.

Though I would disagree with there being no need for reinvention - historically (and AFAIK unchanged) there are several real issues with XMPP [0]. The idea of XMPP appeals to me, but its complexity and UX are costly, whereas Matrix just works well and is easy to use, which hopefully will allow it to spread beyond tech circles.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040848)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: My colleagues don't want to so I use it mostly for forums. Some programming languages have chat channels and I have heard that for open source dev it is still somewhat common but I suspect it is declining. It's a pity because I think Slack is stupid. Slack does not have the transparency of IRC and frankly the fact that you can share files and use fonts and indents are not selling points for me.

EDIT: Slack is stupid _for me_. To each their own I guess?

EDIT2: Just to make it clear, judging from other answers a lot of programmers use IRC _every day_. But not all of my colleagues are programmers. Some fall in the chasm between "data science" and programming and for such people IRC is unfortunately unfamiliar.

<comment><USER14> My bad Slack experience:

\- you should register for every channel

\- switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive

\- tons of sub-channels and collaborations between are painful

<comment><USER15> _you should register for every channel_

Some would consider that a feature, you only see the activity of the channels you've joined (but you can search for others at any time and you can preview messages in them before joining).

 _switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive_

isn't "/join #channel-name" the same way you switch channels in IRC?

<comment><USER16> Most IRC clients allow you to quickly switch to frequently viewed channels via shortcuts (even irssi, a terminal client, does that). With Slack it is a clunky Ctrl-K and a first few letters of the channel name that may or may not lead to what you really want.

<comment><USER17> ?? Slack has shortcuts for both of these. Cmd+0,1,2,3 to switch between orgs, opt+up/down to switch between channels. And also, as you mentioned, cmd+k for search-switching

<comment><USER16> I know Slack does support shortcuts, but search-switching is inferior to a direct shortcut. Let's say that you frequently use channels a and b in the org A and a channel c in the org B (this mode of operation is common). How do you get to a, b or c without even looking at the screen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes I use it all the time especially when I'm learning a new thing or researching a strange behaviour of a program. I prefer much better the freedom to ask/discuss anything and the fast ask/reply/clarify cycle of IRC than fe stackoverflow with its strict rules.

Freenode has channels with people that are very helpful and friendly. Some channels I am frequent and would recommend: #django, #elixir-lang, #kotlin, #android-dev. I also visit (and get help) #mysql and #postgresql.

Actually I wanted to write a blog post to urge people to learn about and visit IRC, but I hope that this HN thread will suffice...

Try IRC and you won't regret it!

<comment><USER19> For someone starting from scratch, are there any "best practices" for getting on safely and anonymously? How do I hide my IP?

<comment><USER20> I pay for and use irccloud. You can probably use a VPN on top of that if you dont want even then to have your IP. You can also setup a connection bouncer on a server. Basically you tell it what ircd to connect to and it connects to it for you masking your IP. This is what IRCCloud does under the hood tbh.

<comment><USER21> Additionally: you may request a cloak which hides your IP address, useful if you are to visit any dubious channels. on Freenode f.e. you simply ask an operator at the main channel for one and you have it. Secondly you could also setup a Digital Ocean droplet (server) with an IRC client and ssh into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Absolutely. Freenode is still running strong, and is probably the best place for live support for a ton of open source projects and Linux distros.

I've tried various other popular chat options (like Discord and Telegram) and have been really frustrated by some of their limitations -- particularly in regards to logging, where afaik there's no way to get the logs off their servers and on to my own machine for archiving, offline browsing/searching, advanced regex searches, etc. There's also no way to get the logs if you're not logged in, or if you ever lose access to the servers for some reason.

Discoverability on these alternate chat platforms is also really poor. At least on IRC I could always try typing in a channel like #gentoo or #linux or #debian or #ocaml or #scheme or #lisp or #emacs or #vim, etc, and have a pretty good chance of these subject-related channels existing. On Discord and Telegram, I have to find a link to the channel somehow or get invited. Which is great for private channels, but for channels that you want anyone with an interest in the subject to join, it's simply awful.

That said, they do have some advantages, like integrated images, video, and audio.. and if you need those features, then vanilla IRC certainly isn't good enough. But for me, who does 99.9% of my chatting in plain text, those other features are very rarely necessary and IRC suits my needs just fine. Also, with IRC one could at least always post links to external image/video/audio hosting sites, if you wanted to share that sort of media... which, again, is good enough for me most of the time. In fact, things like videos and images poping up all over the place on chat platforms like Telegram and Discord are just annoying most of the time anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just to note this here as it seems this hasn't been mentioned yet, the Twitch chat is based on IRC. They run their own servers and you have to log in with your Twitch credentials but you can user your usual IRC client to connect to the Twitch IRC.

In addition, special Twitch IRC clients have spawned, like TC [1] or Chatty [2] that include support for Twitch-specifics like Emotes, notifications and direct linking to the associated video streams.

[1] [https://gettc.xyz/](https://gettc.xyz/)

[2] [http://chatty.github.io/](http://chatty.github.io/)

<comment><USER24> It's amazing what people have been able to build because Twitch chose the open IRC standard.

Anyone interested in C++ and Twitch should checkout a project of good friends of mine [https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2](https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2)

A crossplatform chat client for Twitch in QT so no electron BS.

Personally I have also really enjoyed developing chat bots for fun tasks or logging. So IRC is definetely a big part why I love programming so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Every day. I have a long running tmux session running irssi on a community Linux host that's been humming along in some forgotten corner of a vast data center for the past 11.71 years[0]. My ~/.irssi/config has me on a number of channels on a handful of different servers. Some on networks like chat.freenode.net and irc.mibbit.net, and some on single servers hosted by different groups of friends.

Freenode has been really helpful for me. I've had great conversations on ##aws, #lfs, #tmux, and #hammerspoon in recent weeks.

[0]:

        root@eidolon:~# smartctl --all /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours | cut -c88-
        102567

<comment><USER26> Waait a minute. I know we used to love sharing uptime on IRC back in the 90s but these days it's just irresponsible to leave a server running for 11 years without reboots.

Because when has it ever been patched? You know vulnerabilities in IRC clients do exist. That's why we were always told to not irc with root back in the days of BitchX.

<comment><USER27> I think that command is showing you the total number of hours the system has been running, not the uptime - so it could have been rebooted for patching

[Edit] - Slightly pedantically, it's the number of hours one of the disks has been powered up

<comment><USER25> That's right. We've got 4 bog standard 750G WD Caviar Blues in a software RAID array in that machine, all powered up for 11+ years, none of which appear to have caught any errors during that time. Pretty amazing.

The OS has been updated and the box rebooted for kernel updates a number of times over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Freenode is still pretty active. I self-host an instance of The Lounge[0], which basically acts like an IRC bouncer + an account system to easily get friends/coworkers to use IRC.

I primarily use it for giving/getting help on technologies and open-source projects that I'm using.

[0] [https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge](https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge)

<comment><USER29> While Freenode may not compete with Facebook, it's still pretty huge :)

        There are 99 users and 84066 invisible on 32 servers
        36 IRC Operators online
        16 unknown connection(s)
        53438 channels formed
        I have 5185 clients and 1 servers
        5185 5972 Current local users 5185, max 5972
        84165 94773 Current global users 84165, max 94773
        Highest connection count: 5973 (5972 clients) (476397 connections received)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I still use it as my primary form of communication. Only one job in my professional career have I NOT gotten from IRC. I use it mainly for conversational chats these days, though I still do get/give support on Freenode occasionally.

I know Slack is the new darling for these things, but their WebUI is so inefficient compared my IRC muscle memory. Wee-slack is great for the Slacks I can use it on (but nearly none of the community Slacks have open API slots for it.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Yep, I use IRC all day, every day. I keep in touch with many of my friends on IRC, hang out in social and technical channels, organize developers on my projects, provide support channels on IRC, ask questions and reach out to projects I'm collaborating with... I'm in hundreds of channels on a dozen networks. I run a dozen IRC bots. IRC is still king. Nothing beats plaintext communication on a well-established protocol with hundreds of implementations. Least of all a proprietary walled garden like Slack, Discord, etc

</comment><comment><USER32> If you think you don't like Slack, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Teams ... Slack is really focused, performant, and an absolute joy to use in comparison.

<comment><USER33> This is just a specific case of the more general: "If you think you don't like X, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Y."

<comment><USER34> Is that a law? I feel like that should be a law:

If you think you don't like X, just wait until your company forces you to use Microsoft Y.

\- _emacsomancer_'s law

I've used slack for school, and it was pretty useful. I'm using Teams at work, and it seems remarkably less so. I'm not sure if it's because nobody's comfortable using it for anything other than skype meetings, or because it somehow seems less intuitive or well thought out as slack. Probably a bit of both.

One thing that kind of kills me - we use visualstudio.com too for git (incidentally, it's interesting to see a strong tfs team struggling with git - vs/git integration is useful only if you're relative comfortable with git in the first place), and there doesn't seem to be any kind of strong integration between vs.com and ms teams. That's weird. I see my team on teams, I converse with them on teams, I have access to my backlog items on teams (with an azure plugin), but why can't I see my team's board? vs.com's UI takes some getting used to, but at the very least it seems like it should be accessible, with very little additional work, within teams.

Teams feels a lot like a half-baked (maybe 3/4 baked) response to Slack that could really be so much more.

<comment><USER35> "and there doesn't seem to be any kind of strong integration between vs.com and ms teams"

Is Teams the bastard stepchild of Microsoft? I haven't used Teams, but I recall reading a personal account probably 6 years ago about what working on Google+ was like. Every time something integrated to it, it was a mess and dragged the other products down. Word got around and groups actively avoided the Google+ team and were scrambling for justification as to why they shouldn't get integrated.

0 chance I could find the comment now, but it stuck with me all these years.

<comment><USER36> _Is Teams the bastard stepchild of Microsoft?_

Teams is replacing Skype for Business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> IRC is still the backup communication network at large tech firms - I can personally attest to its use at Amazon and Facebook. Typically there are other, more advanced chat platforms in use for day-to-day (Amazon Chime and WorkChat, respectively), but when shit hits the fan those have deep dependency chains, whereas IRC basically just needs a single box with a network connection...

<comment><USER38> Google SRE too according to [https://landing.google.com/sre/sre- book/chapters/managing-in...](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre- book/chapters/managing-incidents/)

And as everyone knows Google have a lot of chat products!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I used to be on Efnet and DALnet and ETG servers a lot in the 90s and 00s for anime. Now I'm on Freenode _all_ the time for #python, #django, #ubuntu, #debian, etc. It's a good place to ask quick questions. But even more importantly, I use it for rubberducking ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)), especially when I'm digging deep into an issue in a particular piece of software and I don't expect my colleagues in the office to (immediately) understand what I'm talking about.

I'm even in ##latin to learn, you guessed it, the Latin language.

<comment><USER40> Weirdly this is the first time I've hearing the term, even though it is something I've practiced for years. Basically I was taught that if you ever really wanted to understand or proof something, teach it to someone else.

Thanks! Now I have a term for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Been using IRC pretty much daily for over 25 years, and I'm not stopping. That's where my friends are, most of whom are old-ish farts like me.

Also I like the barrier to entry IRC has, it keeps the worst of the worst out because you need some technical skill to even get in. That's why most programming language / distro channels on IRC are of better quality than random slacks or discord servers.

<comment><USER42> Technically, the barrier to entry is as low these days as any other messaging service: you can sign up on IRCCloud and instantly have a friendly browser- based experience without worrying about setting up a persistent client, logging etc. by yourself, and mobile and desktop clients are available.

These days the network effects just favour old farts and engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yes! I am one of the IRC operators for the IRC network Tilde Chat[0]. It is the main source of communication for the Tildeverse[1] community which is a group of Linux/BSD servers that offer free shell accounts to whoever wants one. It's a niche little community, but if you like unix and chatting on IRC then you'll feel right at home.

[0] [https://tilde.chat](https://tilde.chat)

[1] [https://tildeverse.org](https://tildeverse.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tilde was just mentioned in the front page story of Wired.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense- difficu...](https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense-difficult- industry/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use irccloud and I go on the DarkScience[0] IRCd. I even went as far as paying for the 1 year, I like just having it all in 1 client that never drops. I know I can setup a bouncer, but oh well. I prefer smaller communities. When I need programming or OS help I go on freenode where plenty of language communities are. Edit: Found out irccloud now supports connection bouncing, so you can use any irc client with them too[1].

[0]: [https://www.darkscience.net/](https://www.darkscience.net/)

[1]: [https://blog.irccloud.com/bouncer/](https://blog.irccloud.com/bouncer/)

<comment><USER44> Another vote for DarkScience. I'm currently using weechat on my home NAS but considering IRCCloud, especially with that announcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love IRC, particularly #freenode. I really detest having to first search out then go through the whole process of signing up for yet another Slack group.

</comment><comment><USER46> We use IRC heavily at work. Slack is banned since it's communicating though a 3rd party service. I prefer IRC anyway.

<comment><USER47> What setup do you use? Do you manage your own servers? What about non-devs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Tech support, guidance on opening bug reports, etc. There are some projects where there's not an open forum to post questions, but opening an issue or filing a bug report will immediately get your head bitten off by an angry dev unless you've read X number of docs, combed through closed issues to make sure it hasn't been asked previously, reproduced the issue, provided a GDB stacktrace of the issue occurring, etc.

IRC support channels can provide some immediate front-line support and allow you to ask basic questions without being told to go die in a fire.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess double edged sword. People can use it however they like (which is great) but also not always open to newcomers who don't fall in line yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Freenode traffic on certain channels has gone way, way down, like dead, no action, long-term lurk only. I suspect many 20-somethings (or younger) have never heard of Freenode, and why would they, it does not work on a smart- phone. Meanwhile, rich content services that _do_ work on phones, seem to be very, very popular and growing constantly. Personally, I do not trust all communications to a corporate entity. It would be a better world if distributed FOSS systems, perhaps Freenode? get better somehow

<comment><USER50> All it takes is an IRC app.

<comment><USER51> Phone IRC apps are the most annoying things in the world. Constant join and part messages as they disconnect and reconnect. That's one advantage of things like Slack; they handle persistence at the server level, rather than relying on the client. That being said, I'm a huge IRC fan and use it at work all day every day on two internally managed servers.

<comment><USER52> IRCCloud

<comment><USER20> I agree there. I dont worry about anything with irccloud. You might be able to achieve the same with a bouncer but then you still gotta invest in hosting one too.

<comment><USER53> If you don't want to pay for IRCCloud I would totally vouch for Matrix. I've hosted Quassel, ZNC and The Longue and different times but moving to Matrix and their IRC bridge has made my life much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I use rcirc [1] on Gentoo from exwm [2]. I frequent freenode, oftc [3]. Honestly, I love irc. Also, exwm changed how I work in a very positive way. Next, I want to try the Next browser written in Lisp [4]. Although I have never used it, I know of people that use Bitl Bee [5] to interface with slack from emacs irc clients.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rcirc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rcirc)

[2][https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm](https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm)

[3][https://www.oftc.net/](https://www.oftc.net/)

[4][https://next.atlas.engineer/](https://next.atlas.engineer/)

[5][https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BitlBee](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BitlBee)

</comment><comment><USER55> Everyday.

It's a fix point of internet chatting. It has just enough, people on it are either ~ok or great, it requires barely nothing.

I may have ran slack once but didn't stay. I used discord to talk to collapse minded groups, and although discord seems a great piece of work (audio chat is neatly done), both the resources required and the structure/format made chatting way less flowing compared to IRC.

</comment><comment><USER56> Every day, for nearly 20 years. I won't stop until it's gone. Social networks come and go... IRC has outlasted all of 'em.

</comment><comment><USER57> Disclaimer: I work at Google.

IRC is still actively used as a main communication channel internally at Google to coordinate during outages due to its reliable and low-dependency nature (where a Slack equivalent app relies on hundreds of service dependencies). I know for a fact that Google is not the only company, and many others that practice SRE-like roles do the same.

</comment><comment><USER58> Yes, Freenode! IRC is way better because it's minimal, fast, immediate feedback and people seem to be more interested in exchanging ideas, help, etc - the community seems to be way more skilled than the new generation of coders who use those web-based chat services. There are no photos, etc. You need to think before posting a question, needs to be clear. If you visit one of these web chat thingies, you'll notice that people take ages to reply if they do end up replying back to you; In IRC it's live!

</comment><comment><USER59> If you work for a company that provides a popular chat service and your team is one of the main dependencies then you use IRC while working on finding and fixing the cause of the outage. It's not sexy but when everything else fails it does the job.

Source: I worked on one of those teams.

</comment><comment><USER60> Of course, Ryan @ Co-Founder of Advertising Your Business.io. Since 1995 and my usage has only increased over the years.

</comment><comment><USER61> I use it most days - I have a Quassel ([https://quassel- irc.org](https://quassel-irc.org)) core set up on my raspberry pi, and connect to it with my phone/laptop. Official support communities for most Linux distros, general chat, and more technically-focused communities are there. It's the only form of 'social network' I use - otherwise I just don't use social networks.

</comment><comment><USER62> Every single day! Both to grouse about technology in channels dedicated to them and to speak socially with friends.

I find it pretty confusing that I see posts like "is IRC dead?" or "does anyone still use IRC?" as often as I do. I find IRC is a very active and I'm constantly discovering new corners of it. I'm on about 15 networks and know there are many, many more I haven't explored.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm on Freenode from time to time, mostly for Wikimedia and a bit for free software support as well. I'd be there all the time if I had more time.

I've seen a lot of people switching to XMPP, then Facebook, then Gitter, then Discord, then Slack, then… At the end, the result is mostly a fragmented community because not everyone is moving to the next trendy protocol, and there is an increasing number of alternatives. Sure, there's some merit in lowering the effort for newcomers, but it doesn't fully outweight its cost, IMHO.

IRC is the only protocol that remains widely used in the (very) long run and doesn't die when it gets out of fashion (see: it's been out of fashion since before fashion protocols were born).

I'm closely following Matrix, though, because of the bridges (especially the IRC bridge, obviously).

</comment><comment><USER64> I still run an IRC network with over 400 users.

Not sure what I'd do without them, it feels like a "real" social network, where we are different people chatting in real time over several days, the simplicity of the protocol forces people to be clear in their words and not use excessive emoji (although, yes, IRC does support emoji)

If anything the decline of other groups running their own IRC has been good for mine, as their groups decide to continue living by becoming a channel on my network- then their members bleed into all of our social groups in addition to their own, obviously it won't last. But for now it feels very natural and organic.

If you want to join we're on irc.darkscience.net/+6697 (SSL) #darkscience

however, I used to use IRC at work, that seems to have been taken over by slack in most companies though.

</comment><comment><USER65> I use it all the time at work. Along with Mattermost (yuck) it is a solution that works on a secured network. If your computer can reach something like Slack, your computer is exposed.

At home I recently used it to chat with open source developers about a bug. They found the cause, then my son and I fixed it.

<comment><USER66> I'm very curious why you dislike Mattermost, my company has been considering moving over from Slack, but we've not spent a lot of time evaluating it - <USER2> seem very similar on the surface?

<comment><USER65> You might be happy with Mattermost. It's not IRC, and that is reason enough for me to grumble about it.

Anything that help to break the addiction of putting trade secrets on internet-connected computers is an improvement over slack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Not only do I use it quite often (wow, the developers you can talk to who hang out on linux forums), but I know a number of companies where the entire tech team just hangs out in the company channel, getting things done. Faster than email, the terminal is always open, live chat...

</comment><comment><USER68> The NetHack community is pretty much centered around IRC. After the demise of Usenet, much of the discussions shifted to the Freenode IRC networks with [https://nethackwiki.com/](https://nethackwiki.com/) being the place for dumping less fleeting information.

There are various channels for NetHack variants and for the different public servers that offer online play. Most discussions happen on the public server du jour channel, currently this would be #nethack-hardfought.

Lately, there has opened up a connection to the roguelikes Discord server ([https://discord.gg/vg9WWf2](https://discord.gg/vg9WWf2)) with two-way bridges from Discord to IRC and back.

</comment><comment><USER69> IRC remains in use in the Japanese manga/anime fan translation community on Rizon.

</comment><comment><USER70> Every day. I run my own "thelounge" instance, which is a node app sitting on one of my VPS servers. It's web-based and running all the time, so it's very easy to read stuff I missed while I was "offline".

<comment><USER71> How can you open up thelounge without compromising everyone on the same box? Is there any in built protection in thelounge against people abusing your service to enter irc? Basically I don't want to get myself K-lined for someone else's wrongdoings

<comment><USER72> You can use private mode which requires logging in.

For public instances, you can contact the server about setting up / using WebIRC to handle multiple connections from the same box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I am logged into several channels 24/7, in one (with a close group of friends) pretty much without a break since about 1999. I also frequent some channels with technical topics.

IRC appeals to me by its simplicicy, just like good old plain text email does. It is a great design that has outlived many of the better, more colourful or more modern alternatives, and will continue to do so.

Like everywhere on the internet there is a resident braggart, a few weirdos and a few ever silent lurkers in every channel, but after 20+ years on this medium my mental filters are well honed.

</comment><comment><USER74> When I have questions that I don't really expect Google to have answers for, I use IRC.

Mostly about second opinions, in depth technical stuff, or when I don't have time to create a question on stack overflow because Google can't always find the lexical context between my Google search and the actual solution.

Chat is also much better than forums when you want to interact. Slack and discord are bloated software, which are centralized. IRC is much more lightweight and simple, and most of the time logs are available. It's more open.

</comment><comment><USER75> I still use IRC heaps! I idle on efnet just for old times sake (I hang out in #LiCe and #epic, I still maintain the LiCe IRC Script which was popular back in 1994. Yes, 25 years ago. I hang out in PfSense, Proxmox and rspamd to offer (and get) assistance with those OpenSource projects. And a number of the private trackers I use still heavily rely on IRC as a means of communication.

So yea, it's still used. But it's certainly dwindling.

</comment><comment><USER76> All the time. Easily the best forum I've found for asking a quick question on occasion. Not every community is super lively but there's some good ones and it's nice to see the regulars after all these years.

And it's nice that after a while just by taking a break and checking the conversation out, you'll start answering people's questions too. Always nice to help someone out.

Freenode will always have a place in my heart and an open window on my desktop.

</comment><comment><USER77> I almost got into IRC ten years ago, when I was active in a programming community that used it in addition to their message board. The idea of having to keep my computer on all the time in order to stay in the loop, and having to learn yet another set of arcane commands for a _chat window_ , was a big turn off then. I wouldn't even consider it today unless there was a specific need to use it, sorry.

<comment><USER78> There are probably over 100 IRC clients that don't require arcane commands and you certainly don't need to keep your computer on all the time.

mIRC is an IRC client that has been around for 24 years and makes IRC very easy.

I stopped using IRC about 20 years ago but I got a lot of knowledge out of my time on DALnet and then Undernet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Google does. Their SREs are big fans as I understand it.

<comment><USER80> Weirdly I found their GAE channel unfriendly and unhelpful when google took my startup offline as part of non sensical upgrade process

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> The Archive Team of independent website archivists use IRC, on Efnet, to communicate, coordinate, and plan. I got to witness and particiate in the "googleminus" project which succeeded in capturing 98% of public Google+ content before that site went down.

The ability to collaborate, combine and share information, and respond to contingencies on the fly was impressive.

</comment><comment><USER82> Been using it since the late 1990s. Freenode is still very active for tech.

</comment><comment><USER83> I like IRC, and I'd like to use it more, but it all depends on the community.

Back when I was getting to grips with .NET, the #csharp channel was invaluable in getting immediate technical help. They were the ones that introduced me to LINQ, Hangfire, and reverse proxying with nginx. Despite also being an avid Stack Overflow user at the time, #csharp was a far more approachable place, and I'll always be thankful for their support.

Nearly two years ago I picked up Ruby, but sadly the IRC communities around Ruby and Rails seem pretty dead, especially compared to Slack. I'm sure it's mostly lurkers, but I've always preferred to see lively IRC channels, where you could jump in at any point and see technical discussion or just shooting the breeze. Sometimes, I'd just go to a channel to chat about my day, or about the tech scene where I am compared to where others live.

</comment><comment><USER84> Yep been using IRC for over 10 years now and still love it. Always seem like any gui base chat client required more resources then they should. Also the clients didn't allow for modifications I would want/need. Also at the time getting into desktop chat clients one of the popular ones to make profit turn their client into a massive botnet selling cpu power to business. This lead me to distrust gui clients early on.

I recently had a handful of friends that wanted to get away from IRC mainly because smart phone interaction is not the best. Since we switched to keybase I feel like we talk less. Also the desktop client doesn't close without using kill command which makes me open it less.

I use IRC just for chatting with friends and strangers on internet. Shout out to the #csharp channel on freenode some great people that regularly answer questions and help people out.

</comment><comment><USER85> Python, Rust, and Postgresql have all had really great IRC communities. Unfortunately, stakeholders in Rust decided to move to discord and decommission the Mozilla server, but there remains a determined smaller community on Freenode, ##rust.

IRC remains one of the best ways to connect with technologists and talk shop.

<comment><USER86> To be clear, the Rust teams decided (mostly) to move to Discord and Zulip; Mozilla decided to disband its IRC. These decisions were made by disjoint sets of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> IRC is great. I've been on Freenode since I was an obnoxious teen. There are upsides and downsides to not (generally) having server-side channel history; one big upshot is that nobody needs to maintain the infrastructure to store, curate, and archive 30 years of IRC logs for a whole network.

XMPP is still a mess after all these years; there is no reason you should have to send so much XML just to send an IM or update your presence.

I'm kinda waiting for SMTP to receive the slight adaptations it requires to be a decent IM protocol. As a long time SMTP operator, I think it's pretty darn close (especially looking at the way Gmail and Inbox [RIP] show threads), if SMTP daemons would cache trusted/known well behaved hosts, or batch/stream envelopes, that's prettymuch all that's missing on the server side.

</comment><comment><USER88> I used IRC from 1992 to 2019, and was gradually pushed away from IRC by years of harassment from anonymous/registered accounts. It turns out that IRC's anonymity is incompatible with harassment swarming behaviors. I'm sad to see it fail as a social platform, but I won't miss it.

<comment><USER89> Any vaguely modern IRC server runs nameserv and allows you to block unregistered nicks from channels. It's not by any means a solved problem but it's a good stopgap against spam floods and the like.

<comment><USER88> Yes, that was available, and didn't help. But I appreciate the thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I've been constantly logged in to IRC at home since 2002 or so. I am active nearly every day.

At work most of the coordination between programmers is via IRC--even though we're all in the same room.

So yeah, IRC is still used.

Anecdotally the population of some popular channels on freenode that I frequent has never been higher.

</comment><comment><USER91> Yes. I co-run a small, quirky IRC network/channel. We welcome all peoples who enjoy fun and discussing programming/hardware/technical stuff. Details here [https://irc.darwin.network/](https://irc.darwin.network/)

</comment><comment><USER92> Of course. I use IRC for a bunch of different reasons. I have some bots, I occasionally frequent a few channels related to specific topics and it's a place where the snr can be quite high at times thanks to the fact that most of the noise is on other networks.

</comment><comment><USER36> I use a chatroom which is bridged between IRC/Slack/Discord. I stuck with IRC for a while out of hate for Slack and then I moved to Discord out of hate for Slack.

General experience is, the worst inputs come from the IRC interface. Occasionally that is a regular with a long running connection, or a genuine interaction with a normal person, but handwavingly-mostly the IRC side is someone who has clicked on a web IRC gateway, doesn't know what they're looking at, wants a "give me the codes" style answer or just wants to rant, doesn't respond to people when they offer help, and doesn't stick around. Most people who join IRC and stick around, join and ask "oh there's a Discord, how can I get an invite?". The only genuine spam I've seen came from the IRC side, things like religious spam/flood messages. The biggest restrictions on things like inline-code are that the IRC interface can't deal, because it risks getting rate-limited for "flooding" the IRC servers because one bot user is echoing all the chat from every other user. Markdown which works well enough in Slack and Discord is left as Markdown markup and makes examples look broken in most (all?) IRC clients. The slack and Discord can usefully impersonate each other's users with a hint that you're looking at text from a relay, IRC can't so all the text actually comes from a relay bot user which breaks nick highlighting, nake autocomplete, channel connected user lists.

The Slack experience is still user-hostile and indefensibly poor, I yearn for the days when typing some plain text didn't have 5-10 seconds of lag all over the place, but the Discord user experience side is tolerably fine in almost every way, and better in many ways, except the ideology of it being proprietary and closed source and slurping data into the cloud forever.

I leave my IRC bouncer running, and for a while I used it to join other IRC channels. But IRC increasingly felt like that's all anyone does - <USER3> experience of finding a random channel - dozens of users and nothing but join/parts for the past couple of days.

[just wants to rant / hate for Slack - this also includes me, btw]

<comment><USER93> _...typical experience of finding a random channel - dozens of users and nothing but join /parts for the past couple of days._

Often you'll find that if you ask a question and wait long enough for people to notice, that'll spark quite an active conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Yes, irssi is still my favorite. Channels I like hanging out on #django, ##linux. Keeping an eye on ii. This: [https://tools.suckless.org/ii/](https://tools.suckless.org/ii/)

</comment><comment><USER95> It's my understanding that [https://www.irccloud.com](https://www.irccloud.com) is a good contender for getting a slack-like experience for irc, i.e. good mobile client etc.

<comment><USER96> I was an IRCCloud customer for a while. It was really good, and I left because my friends switched to a slack. :(

Idling in IRC was 10x better than slack.

<comment><USER95> I feel like there's gotta be a way to re-create the irc/slack interface with the right sort of scraper setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> One more "yes, daily" here. I'm on Freenode for tech topics: #octave, ##matlab, #zsh, #bash, #machomebrew, and #macports are active and useful.

And I have a group of friends who are on a private IRC server and have been for years. We recently considered switching to a "modern" chat platform. Tried Slack, Matrix, Mattermost, Zulip, and a couple others. Decided we still liked the "feel" of IRC best. (I hate all the whitespace and decoration that modern PWAs use.)

Bouncers or IRCCloud solve the offline-delivery problem, and I can live without the other features that newer chat systems provide.

</comment><comment><USER98> I do on occasion but just for social purposes, not for work.

I'm still confused/impressed at how slack took a free service, stuck something similar but not quite as good in a browser, sold subscriptions and got rich doing it.

<comment><USER99> Emojis.

<comment><USER66> giphy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I'm using it extensively for open source development. Mostly Linux kernel and Uboot.

I have a "the lounge" server running on digital ocean droplet so I can connect easily.

Giving free users accounts to my server if anyone is interested.

Drop me a line.

</comment><comment><USER101> I do! I have 91 windows open in my current irssi session. I think only 50 of those are actual channels and the other half is active or dead queries between people.

I use have slack for some group of friends, but I have been less active after they removed the IRC bridge. I try to avoid Discord.

IRC is also used for my core group of friends, some of them I got over when we started University together as I couldn't stand Facebook messenger. A lot of time is also spent on various open-source projects, mainly Arch Linux but also security related channels and misc projects.

</comment><comment><USER102> Off and on I've used it for technical discussions, questions, etc, around various open source projects. I've shut down all my IRC servers. Most folks moved to Discord or Slack.

</comment><comment><USER103> Yes, I still use IRC. I use it on Freenode and also a few others. I would like to have server-side logging (and have implemented it in a IRC server software once experimentally), but nobody else seems to have that. (It has nothing to do with the protocol, but rather, with the implementation.)

Since now some people are using Discord instead, I am not communicating with them. IRC is much better than Slack and Discord and Matrix. (I also think that they should make this Hacker News available with NNTP, too.)

</comment><comment><USER104> Yes of course. Both for technical and for social activities.

Side note, there's a very nice IRC log service ran by Whitequark [1] - yes, the one of Glasgow fame. The source is available[2], so you can set up your own too.

[1] [https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/](https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/whitequark/irclogger](https://github.com/whitequark/irclogger)

</comment><comment><USER105> Yes.

I hate Slack with a passion. I am on 14+ servers and it's completely impossible to manage, mostly because of memory.

Recently, I've decided to make a chat client (desktop) natively with C++ for Windows, Linux, and OSX that has a smooth layout like the original AIM (very easy to use). Including, with future plans to do audio/video chats and screen sharing including file sharing.

I just hope that within time, I will be able to release something to the world.

</comment><comment><USER106> I use IRCCloud, and sit mostly on a few Freenode channels. It's still pretty common for open source developers to congregate on IRC.

I used to run a personal ZNC instance when I still used IRC to socialize, but Discord killed it all, and honestly as stuff got "too big" I even left a lot of the Discord servers as well to escape the nasty annoying drama. Now IRC Cloud makes more sense because it gives me push notifications; I don't actively sit on IRC much now.

</comment><comment><USER107> Yes. In a weird way, it acts like a third place ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) ) online. If I join #mountaincycles, there's bound to be people there who are somewhat interested in mountain cycles. The discussion usually is in no way moderated or limited to be just about cycles, though.

</comment><comment><USER108> I don't, but I use weechat (wee-slack) for 99% of my desktop slack. Less obtrusive than the stand alone and web clients. And way less resource hungry.

I don't use slack outside of work, but I always have the idea of using weechat more - for irc and/or other protocols.

[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack](https://github.com/wee-slack/wee- slack)

</comment><comment><USER109> Yes! I'm an active IRC user for professional open source work (and personal projects) for the last 10-ish years. And still going strong.

What many people say IRC "lack" in comparison with Slack (or whatever new- fangled tool of the day is) are its _strengths_. What I value in IRC: lack of clutter, simplicity, bloat-freeness, open standard, and not least of all, blazing fast, among others.

Sure, IRC has its limitations, and is not suitable in certain scenarios. But is still shines brightly when it comes to distraction-free, text-based communication.

(I'm also hoping the Matrix protocol takes off.)

Obligatory XKCD reference:

[https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/) \-- Team Chat

<comment><USER110> I also hope Matrix takes off. I have been using riot.im for some time to check if it could replace the many chat applications one is forced to use these days (FBMessenger, Slack, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc).

It does have its quirks but I'm finding the ability of having e2e-encrypted chat with multiple parties in a way I can move across devices quite useful. It also does support some more modern features like sharing pictures, files, and emojis without major issues.

Didn't bother to find and try a text-based client yet, although matrix does seem to have an IRC gateway (of course): [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/as/irc- bridge.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/as/irc-bridge.html)

<comment><USER111> weechat-matrix ([https://github.com/poljar/weechat- matrix](https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix)) is an excellent text- interface client with full E2E support, fwiw :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Every single day. Logged in > 30 channels and talking to >20 people every day. It's a prereq for work anyway (more than half the company is actually on IRC). I also vastly prefer it to other solutions (yes, I tried slack, matrix, mattermost, discord, skype, google chat/hangouts/meet/whatevergooglecallsitthesedays - they all in some way)

</comment><comment><USER113> I love IRC.

Only really been on Freenode and a few other smaller networks (since the glory days of EFNet et al were before my time) but since 2008 I've met countless friends, some of which I know in person and I love working on open source projects with small but dedicated communities, which often use IRC.

Now if you excuse me I need to go move my bouncer to another box :)

</comment><comment><USER114> I have at various points used IRC more or less actively. It's necessary for Bitcoin r&d more or less. I've also used Zephyr more often in the past (MIT has a lot of users), and found it's ability to handle topics in a channel (and diversions) easier to work with than IRCs single stream.

</comment><comment><USER115> Yes. While it certainly has it's faults, it provides simple basics and has a wide variety of clients (which IMHO is the biggest downside of many alternatives, in that they either do not have alternative clients or the alternative clients do not function quite as the main ones)

</comment><comment><USER116> I have Freenode #haskell open pretty much all the time. There's some exceptionally clever people in there, and they're all polite, friendly, and generous with their time.

Also the #postgresql channel is great.

I'm using the weechat client, which I found much easier to use and more polished than irssi.

</comment><comment><USER117> I do. For everything: Twitter, Mastodon, Jabber, and of course IRC, everything goes over IRC.

And while I am sorry to see people reinventing the wheel with all those crazy web-based protocols, I can't help but think it's kind of nice with less people around. :p

</comment><comment><USER118> I collaborate (er, troll and shitpost) on Freenode in #postmarketos, #reprap, and #devuan

</comment><comment><USER119> I wish people would be able to keep things simple and still use IRC instead of bullshit "productivity" apps like Slack

<comment><USER120> does irc show link previews?

<comment><USER121> IRC is a protocol, not an app. Many apps can connect to it. An app can show previews if it wants to.

<comment><USER119> Good point.

What I meant is use an open protocol to which simple applications (or whatever you prefer to use) can be plugged.

Because my company uses Slack I now have to use their stupid UI proprietary implementation.

I'm also annoyed that popular open source projects like Kubernetes moved to Slack because it's "discriminatory" to use IRC apparently.

<comment><USER122> Discriminatory? Link?

<comment><USER123> Here's an example from Mozilla:

> While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and > harassment for many of our colleagues

[http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous- text/?s](http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/?s)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763276](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763276)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> I miss IRC too. Unfortunately I cannot find a good mac IRC client and that seriously has inhibited my desire to use it.

I used to use gamesurge and enterthegame servers mainly to hang and chat with other gaming buddies. So much has changed since then

<comment><USER125> I like LimeChat [http://limechat.net/mac/](http://limechat.net/mac/) for an open source app, it's been somewhat dormant but it got an update semi- recently.

Textual [https://www.codeux.com/textual/](https://www.codeux.com/textual/) is a proprietary paid app that seems to be under more active development. I used it for a bit and enjoyed it, but prefer FOSS when possible and switched back to LimeChat when it got updated again.

<comment><USER97> LimeChat is great. I use their mobile version, and it is about the _fastest_ iOS app I've ever used.

I'm still Textual on the desktop, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> I do indeed. I use Monochrome as my client - written by the author of foobar2000 [https://perkele.cc/software/monochrome](https://perkele.cc/software/monochrome)

</comment><comment><USER127> Yes, I use it quite a bit. There are a couple of good Mac-focused channels on Freenode. I think I originally went there for the Hackernews #startups channel where there were interesting peopple talking about interesting things.

</comment><comment><USER128> Daily, it's my primary online social communication tool. Nothing else compares.

</comment><comment><USER129> I use it.

It's neat for finding those wonderful little crazy communities that are hiding out in the anonymizing crypto nets (Tor, I2P, LokiNet, ..)

It's the only place left where there are ONLY real terminal junkies and nerds. No normies. I can relax.

</comment><comment><USER130> Yes. (With Hexchat, if you're interested.)

There are various tech support channels on freenode (like #debian) and other networks like moznet.

I also enjoy a smallish but active discussion channel which I won't name here for fear of it being HN'd.

</comment><comment><USER131> Absolutely. Every time I want to learn about a new tech or have questions about an open source project, my first port of call is freenode. I've had some excellent help and discussions, even in the last couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER132> Of course. I use it every day for keeping in touch with technically minded communities and some talking channels. Irssi is my wagon, it runs on my server in a screen and I use ssh to access it, both on desktop and mobile.

</comment><comment><USER133> I search questions on Google/Stackoverflow, I post questions on IRC because I do not want to put all of it out there and get berated by the SO community. Though I still know that most IRC channels have public logs.

</comment><comment><USER134> Yes -- though my company is looking to move away from it sometime soon (sadly?), so my use will decrease. It won't disappear entirely, at least for now, as there are other uses outside the company's control.

</comment><comment><USER135> Yes. I use IRC to chat, to roleplay, to interact with people and the like. Basically, I both can't and won't use Discord (too much Google reliance - <USER4> client program is in unheaded Chrome). So I use IRC.

</comment><comment><USER136> Yes, every work day.

I work remote for a great Open Source company. We've got people all around the globe, IRC is the glue that holds everything together.

Some pockets of the company are trying Slack, etc. but IRC is still the backbone.

</comment><comment><USER137> AWS IRC chat channel can be a God-send when you are stuck and need direction pronto. The only caviat maybe that its best to hit the AWS IRC chat channel during North American (especially EST) work hours.

</comment><comment><USER138> Obligatory xkcd [https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

</comment><comment><USER139> Every single day. I hang out on #pocoo on freenode. It's the channel for the Flask python framework and related libraries

I lurk and help out the people new to flask. There's new people all the time

</comment><comment><USER140> Yes, on freenode, irc.tildeverse.org, irc.sdf.org, and several others. I find peer groups and support on my tools, languages, and hobbies. IRC is the best. It's not going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER141> What alternatives would you propose? If it is Slack and the other proprietary abominations designed to take away your freedom, then the choice seems pretty obvious to me.

</comment><comment><USER142> IRC was a pretty big part of my life. I remember when EFnet split to form IRCnet like it was yesterday. I'm probably still connected in a detached screen(1) session somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER143> Yes! It has been around a very long time and is robust and well understood, and is not proprietary, and is decentralised. I hope it stays around for the next few decades.

</comment><comment><USER144> I did to get some Haskell help about 4 years ago, and it was very good for that. But that's mainly down to other humans, not something special about IRC itself.

</comment><comment><USER145> I try it from time to time for asking questions on what I think will be technical forums, with mixed results. (Yes, I know how to ask technical questions...)

</comment><comment><USER146> Yes, though I can't deny it's dying. If I had my way everyone would be on IRC, but if everyone is on discord, then I guess I'll follow them.

</comment><comment><USER147> Slack+Twitter seem to have replace my IRC alternate life.

</comment><comment><USER148> i have a linode box that runs irssi in a tmux session 24/7 and that's all it's for.

i have learned more about python emacs sql and gentoo on irc than anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER149> Yeah, I love IRC. I'm only on freenode now with any frequency, though. Maybe I'm missing out on some other great servers? I'm unsure.

</comment><comment><USER150> Some use IRC, some use discord. A friend wrote a bot so people in our IRC chat can communicate with people in our discord chat (and vice versa).

</comment><comment><USER151> Freenode on occasion. I used it regularly for more than 20 years but nowadays casual chichat moved to Discord. I'm keeping an eye on Matrix.

</comment><comment><USER152> Yes, lots of people. Discord has become popular, but not enough & there are often bridge-bots running. I imagine Slack is in a similar boat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't gotten into Discord yet. Isn't it a pain that there are so many Discord servers and you can't just have one server with all the channels (ala Freenode)?

<comment><USER153> Not at all!

It is normal to be connected to multiple servers at once, and the UI makes it easy to keep track of them.

As the other commenter said, it is much better to think of each server as a channel. A Discord server is typically dedicated to a single topic or organization. My old World of Warcraft guild has a Discord server. On that server, you'll have separate channels for general chat, announcements, and several voice channels for groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER154> Yes, daily. Access to a network of friends and people I can ask for advice and provide advice in return.

Several channels for open source projects.

Sadly not for work anymore.

</comment><comment><USER155> A couple of years ago I logged into a channel on Dalnet I used to frequent when I was 16 in 1998.

Some of the SAME people were there. Nearly 20 years later.

</comment><comment><USER156> [https://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd](https://github.com/lukeb42/psyrcd)

</comment><comment><USER157> Yes. I mostly hang out in ##frontend, #indieweb, and #whatwg.

The people I met in ##frontend were extremely helpful and made them good friends.

</comment><comment><USER158> yes because it's free, simple to extend, low bandwidth compliant. there are some problems people still want to solve (see [https://ircv3.net/](https://ircv3.net/) and [https://irc.com/](https://irc.com/))

</comment><comment><USER159> The torrenting community is on it. I was getting some help setting up software on a seedbox there yesterday in fact.

</comment><comment><USER93> Yeah, still using IRC (mostly Efnet but I keep a weather eye on Freenode for a project I maintain).

I think I just feel at home there.

</comment><comment><USER160> I barely use it, so maybe people can correct me on this one if I've got it wrong, but: It seems to me like it's now used almost exclusively for communication around underworld/illegal stuff. I would definitely be quite scared to hang around IRC not being anonymous (not talking about freenode here, of course, which is where open source developer folk hang out).

</comment><comment><USER161> Absolutely. On Freenode, #rhel, ##electronics, #django, #mercurial, #mysql, #python are all great.

</comment><comment><USER162> All the time. We have an IRC server at work, but it's less popular than Slack unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER54> I just discovered ##hackernews on freenode :-P Also, #startups is the official hackernews chan.

</comment><comment><USER163> Yes, I use IRC through a Matrix bridge in the Riot client. It just works, provides persistence.

</comment><comment><USER164> Yep. I'm on Freenode quite a bit. #ai, #agi, #startups, #machinelearning, #trilug, etc.

</comment><comment><USER165> IRC needs to evolve to meet the standards of now. Which means, make it more easily accessible, like easy as opening a website.

And two, I feel there should just be a single network. Either that or make it easy to explore other networks. The kids these days are not going to bother understanding or picking and choosing which network to go.

It's got to be super simple.

<comment><USER166> I think, there's a web client for every major IRC network. Just enter a nickname and start chatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER167> Yes.

I use it to talk to friends. We've been at it for decades and see no reason to stop. Old habits.

</comment><comment><USER168> Yup. It's still the best place to find ebooks when sailing the high seas.

</comment><comment><USER169> Stopped 4 years ago. I only come back for the yearly CCC conference channels.

</comment><comment><USER170> I use it with a bunch of friends in a private channel since 20 years back.

</comment><comment><USER171> I wish I could; it's blocked at work, for fear of bots...

</comment><comment><USER80> I use IRSSI in my shell whenever I have a tech question

</comment><comment><USER172> Yes. Most of my contact with friends is through IRC.

</comment><comment><USER173> Every single day.... it's unbeatable imo

</comment><comment><USER174> IPFS and it's sister projects use it.

</comment><comment><USER175> Yep. I run a server on a small IRC network.

</comment><comment><USER176> I control my bots via private IRC server.

</comment><comment><USER177> Connecting to IRC via Biboumi from XMPP

</comment><comment><USER178> Every day, still keeping EFNet alive.

</comment><comment><USER179> <3 IRC, contemplating Discord

</comment><comment><USER180> Yes

</comment><comment><USER181> yes there is actually a #startups on freenode.

</comment><comment><USER182> /me nope ;)

</comment><comment><USER183> Yes every day.

</comment><comment><USER184> Red Hat does.

</comment><comment><USER185> We use IRC as a central way of communication for our LAN parties, starting in 1998 and spanning at least eight directly connected party series/"brands" over all those years.

The number of attendees ranges from about 100 up to 3,500+ (German record, 2005, still holds), including roughly two dozen parties with 1,000 to 2,500 attendees.

On the orga side, we use it daily for internal discussion and notifications. Events from our own LAN party platform's [1] party web sites (accounts, orders, forum posts, etc.), internal forums, GitLab (issues, CI build results), and social media (followers, mentions) are announced there – using a combination of web hooks, RSS, Zapier, and custom tools ([2], [3]).

These days we use IRC in tandem with a self-hosted Mattermost [4] instance, a bot to bridge between both, and the option to connect to Mattermost with an IRC client. A few things like embedded images get lost on the way, though.

On the parties itself, we run a local IRC server. There is a main party channel with auto-join. Organizers are on IRC both for internal collaboration and monitoring (e.g. [5]) as well as user support.

Tournament players are required to be present in the respective IRC channels for the tournaments they participate in.

Events from the local party intranet [1] (news posts, forum posts, tournament updates) are announced on IRC as well.

A modified version of The Lounge [6] is provided as a simple, web-based alternative as part of our intranet for everyone not used to, or too fond of, a "classic" IRC client.

Last but not least, there's #quiz, running the same MoxQuizz [7] version for ages with questions from the mid-2000s.

That said, our guests usually provide multiple locally public TeamSpeak servers for voice communication.

So while we added some more modern tools and services to the mix (for example a Telegram channel for announcements, reminders and other tiny bits of information), and are considering others (for example Discord, but dependence on Internet connectivity and third-party terms are a massive downside for us), both IRC and LAN parties are totally not dead for us.

[1] [https://github.com/byceps/byceps](https://github.com/byceps/byceps) [2] [https://github.com/homeworkprod/weitersager](https://github.com/homeworkprod/weitersager) [3] [https://github.com/homeworkprod/gewebehaken](https://github.com/homeworkprod/gewebehaken) [4] [https://mattermost.com/](https://mattermost.com/) [5] [https://github.com/homeworkprod/syslog2irc](https://github.com/homeworkprod/syslog2irc) [6] [https://thelounge.chat/](https://thelounge.chat/) [7] [http://moxquizz.de/](http://moxquizz.de/)

</comment><comment><USER186> yes, i use it a lot!

</comment><comment><USER187> Yes, it's called Skack now.

</comment><comment><USER188> slack

</comment><comment><USER189> I do. Much better than the alternatives, especially if you value your privacy and being able to use whatever client you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> What client do you use? Haven't found a good one for Mac.

<comment><USER18> I am behind a firewall at work so I use web clients. I used to use [https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/](https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/) but now I've moved to [https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/) (the free version).</comment></comment></comment>


Forget new year's resolutions and conduct a 'past year review' instead - <AUTHOR> https://tim.blog/2018/12/28/past-year-review/ <comment><USER2> I've found Alex Vermeer's 8,760 Hours guide[1] immensely valuable. It's also a guide to doing an annual life review. Maybe one of the best things I've started doing in the last few years.

Be aware that it will take much longer than 30-60 minutes like the OP. I set aside 2 or 3 days for it at the end of each year and do 3-5 hours per day.

I follow roughly the template described in the guide, but collapse some of the 12 life areas together into 8 or so.

Even if you can't commit the time to do the whole thing, have a look at the 12 life areas he lists. It can help improve any kind of annual review process you might have. Just seeing the list can help prompt consideration of aspects of your life you may have been overlooking.

[1] - [https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/](https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/)

</comment><comment><USER3> YearCompass [1] is a also a great resource for doing this. It's well structured and I found it pretty valuable. Used it last year and plan on filling it out over the next few days again. I initially discovered it via reddit.com.

[1] [https://yearcompass.com/](https://yearcompass.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a big fan of introspection/retrospection over goal setting. Some goals connect to meaningful objectives, but I've always felt goal setting to feel inauthentic and rigid. I end up prioritizing what feels important from day to day anyway, and I have more trust in those decisions than my big long term goals.

This is also probably why I don't often finish huge projects, so my approach isn't without its drawbacks. But I'm okay with that.

<comment><USER5> I agree with this. Ever since I started doing bi-weekly retrospectives with my teams, we've gotten much better at improving the things that really need improving. Goal setting from the top down can be very artificial. I find it works much better to let the teams discuss their own concerns (and positives) with how things are going, and provide my own input. We then prioritize just the top couple of items to action for the next two week period.

It happens quite commonly that the things that I think are most important to be addressed, are actually not, and more pressing matters are raised. I get way better buy-in with my teams doing things this way and the improvements we're making are more tangible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife and I rather have a new year intention. Something to focus on all year. My last years was Mental Health as I got into a dark place mentally for a while and my coming years is Will Power. The single focus has been working well for us.

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny to read that now, as my wife have made our kids (9 yo) do it on paper today.

She also told them to keep it when they feel down to remember all their past achievements.

I should do it now I guess as it seems a good booster.

</comment><comment><USER8> My wife and I always do both in the last 7 days (so now) of the year. Review is good but coming year resolutions (which are goals) is also good.</comment>


Russia Influence Warning Letter from NSA Members - <AUTHOR> https://www.scribd.com/document/326759183/Russia-Influence-Warning-Letter-from-NSA-members#from_embed <comment><USER2> So this is basically..In the coming weeks you're going to learn some more bad stuff about your government and even though all the other terrible stuff is true, don't believe this stuff because we need you to "vote" a certain way.</comment>


List of unsolved problems in physics - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics <comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia has some interesting lists, including this one of a more general list of unsolved problems across many fields: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems)

<comment><USER2> Speaking of list of list on wikipedia, there is also this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists), to which I just added your "lists of unsolved problems".

<comment><USER3> [http://www.raikoth.net/lololol.html](http://www.raikoth.net/lololol.html)

List of lists of lists of lists

<comment><USER4> That URL reminded me of this [1].

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJL4Y3aGPuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJL4Y3aGPuA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone else feel inspired by reading this list? And fantasize about being able to dedicate multiple lifetimes purely to the pursuit of knowledge?

<comment><USER6> Count me in... Can we imagine a society dedicated only to this and would it be viable? Hmmm...

<comment><USER7> A society dedicated only to the pursuit of some so-called objective physical truth? I don't see how that could ever become a technofascist state!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is amusing in the late 1800s some physicists were declaring physics a dead end because most problems had been solved, save for a few rough edges.

There are people today making the same claim.

<comment><USER9> I have reconciled to the fact that, we will never be able to solve physics. There is recursive why, which we can never stop with, there will be always smaller and bigger things to deal with.

<comment><USER10> By what reasoning did you come to the conclusion that there will 'always be bigger and smaller things to deal with?'

I'm interested in if there is a compelling reason to believe this? I'm not attempting to argue that we are near complete knowledge of the universe (and especially what potentially may lie beyond or outside of it, if there is anything or not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> are there any unsolved problems in classical mechanics?

<comment><USER12> Absolutely. A lot of my thesis could be considered classical mechanics (orbital dynamics, specifically). A very old problem that is still open is the question of whether the solar system is stable. (Newton worked on this question 300 years ago.) The state of the art can only reliably integrate orbits for the next few million years. After that, numerical limitations and chaos make it hard to predict exactly what the dynamics in the far future will be. All we can do is make statistical predictions (which we hope are unbiased).

The best predictions are that there is a ~1% chance that two planets will collide before the Sun dies. Here's a nice article:

[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_s...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_system)

<comment><USER13> Does this count as having testable solutions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some things should be probably updated on that page, I think the Sonoluminescence problem has been mostly explained.

<comment><USER15> I've not yet seen a conclusive resolution of the sonoluminescence problem. Have a reference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The fact that there is an actual (short) list boggles my mind. (And yes I understand this is a case of "questions raise more questions" but still).

<comment><USER17> These are general overall topics. Dive into any one of them and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of open questions. My particular field was amorphous solids and the glassy phase transition but yeesh boiling it down to just one questions is big over simplification.

Don't worry, plenty of things out there we don't understand :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are many open ended questions here. There's more flexibility to sci Fi then I thought.</comment>


Haskell Is Not for Production and Other Tales by FB's Katie Miller [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 <comment><AUTHOR> The announcement of the talk: [https://linux.conf.au/schedule/30363/view_talk](https://linux.conf.au/schedule/30363/view_talk)</comment>


Trump Asserts He Can Force U.S. Companies to Leave China - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/world/europe/trump-g7-summit.html <comment><USER2> When you give too much power to the president, sooner or later there will be an abuse of that power.</comment>


IPads are easy to sell, hard to make - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/09/ipads-are-easy-to-sell-hard-to-make/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this is also the point where Foxconn is actually becoming better at high-tech manufacturing than US companies, not just cheaper. Or maybe we've long passed that point.

<comment><USER3> It'd be nice if they treated workers better especially if they have that knowledge/productivity rate.</comment></comment>


Saul Steinberg celebrated the home as a 'cocoon for creativity' - <AUTHOR> https://ny.curbed.com/2020/4/9/21200169/saul-steinberg-cartoonist-virtual-exhibit-pace-interiors <comment><USER2> I always felt the same, until I was locked into it for 30 days straight....

<comment><USER3> or as seen on Twitter[1]: "Every January: One month hiatus from work, and I could finally publish my draft of the next bestselling novel

April 2020: Today I alphabetized the jelly beans"

1: not a reference to any specific tweet, just the general tendency of people to speak about grand plans and then never execute on them.

<comment><USER4> I think it has something to do with the background anxiety. Even if you're not particularly scared of the virus because you've been practicing impeccable social distancing and you still have a job, the uncertainty of it all can completely kill flow. And if you have a partner or kids, household management is disruptive even in the most organized families.

I've been blaming myself for the drop in my productivity and thinking something is wrong with me. It just realized that I must be kind to myself during these times.

<comment><USER2> Background anxiety is a perfect way to describe it, in fact that's what I'm going to say from now on, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Worth a look if you want something uplifting. His work was simultaneously fun, childlike, insightful, insanely original, hilarious, timeless, and fresh. Few artists have been so purely enjoyable IMO.

</comment><comment><USER6> Monet disagrees.

[https://www.cmonetgallery.com/en-plein-air- painting.aspx](https://www.cmonetgallery.com/en-plein-air-painting.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER7> Before Netflix, Facebook, Twitter and cable TV it probably was.

<comment><USER8> I don't access any of these, but still it isn't very productive :) It is relaxing though, and the sky seems bluer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Saul elevated cartoons to Art without sacrificing wit or humor.. Archive.org throught their NEL has some of his works, among them perhaps my favorite:

The Labyrinth [https://archive.org/details/steinberg0000unse](https://archive.org/details/steinberg0000unse)</comment>


Birds who freely choose their own mates have more offspring - <AUTHOR> http://www.natureworldreport.com/2015/09/birds-in-love-produce-more-babies/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/09/16/study-birds- fall-i...](http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/09/16/study-birds-fall-in-love- reproduce-more-when-they-do/), which points to this, which admittedly isn't an original source either.</comment>


Guess the Correlation Game - <AUTHOR> http://guessthecorrelation.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's really interesting how often I can get it very close and sometimes I am just way way off.</comment>


Responsive Ads in the Real World: Ad Server Implementation - <AUTHOR> http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/responsive-ads-real-world-ad-server-implementation

<comment><USER2> > I'll break the bad news to you up front: you have to stop worrying about > what happens when people resize their browser. First of all, no one does > this. Yes, YOU like to resize your browser and watch DOM elements bend to > your will—and so do I—but real-life regular people users don't. And of > course it's not even possible on mobile and tablet devices.

> This whole responsive thing isn't about passing a CSS fluidity test. So > let's let it go.

Thank god someone finally brought this up.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Unfortunately, I can't actually read the text on this site because it doesn't resize when I use my browser's zoom controls.

Forget resizing browsers, let me resize the text!

<comment><USER4> Sorry about that! It's fixed now. That was a mobile-specific style that I'd accidentally applied globally.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! You probably don't get many higher res (2560x1440) visitors. :)

Fun fact: I actually have to zoom in 3 times to make HN readable from a normal viewing distance. Yes, 9pt fonts in 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get it.

The whole point of having an ad server is to make sure the right ad is served to the right person. You can serve desktop ads to desktop browsers and mobile ads to mobile in DFP. Or, you can book a mobile version into a mobile placement and a desktop one into a desktop placement.

Either way, this is something that can easily be handled on the server with existing tech. I don't see much practical use of his example.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm the author of the post. The examples you mention are server side solutions requiring some form of server side detection. You're talking about serving ads to separate mobile and desktop sites.

The goal with responsive design is to serve the same site—the same mark-up, the same assets—to all devices. Which means that any conditional serving of ads has to happen client-side.

<comment><USER6> Hey Rob, sent you an e-mail a bit ago.

Do you see publishers getting on the bandwagon with serving the same assets across all platforms? The ones we work with have already sunk thousands and thousands into separate rigs for each place they run content.

<comment><USER4> Hi Brad,

Just wrote you back! You know, I actually don't see major publishers embracing responsive design, at least in the short term. I think mobile-specific sites and dedicated apps are much more inline with how they see the world. It's also a business opportunity for them to sell separate experiences as separate products, right? Merging everything into one isn't necessarily a win.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf <comment><USER2> One of the sad consequences of perpetual copyrights is that copies of interesting items are not being made, and hence risk getting lost completely.

<comment><USER3> A good example of this is the early iOS game _Rolando_. Once the _Angry Birds_ of its time, it's now just... gone.

<comment><USER4> This Rolando?

[http://rolando.ngmoco.com/](http://rolando.ngmoco.com/)

<comment><USER5> Yes. I remember it from 2008, when gaming press for iOS was trying to become a thing, some guys have published a great and expensively produced video reviews of iOS games, and this was one of the best games they ever reviewed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py As someone who doesn't care about proprietary 80s laserdiscs but does care about software produced in 2016, 'depend on the oldest still-used technology' is an interesting (non-horrible) design choice.

The python PEP for universal linux binaries advises building on an ancient version of fedora for ABI compatibility.

If you think about it, supporting many different deployment targets is kind of like time travel.

<comment><USER6> The "ancient version of fedora" is the OS I work on for one of my deploys. It takes a 3-level bootstrap to get a working C++11/C11 compiler.

<comment> awinter-py ok so there are downsides to being a time traveler. But buildsystem blues is a small price to play for passing your final history exam, saving your parents' prom, or finding carmen sandiego.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They mention Lincos, there's another project inspired by it that attempts to transmit Scheme called CosmicOS: [https://cosmicos.github.io/](https://cosmicos.github.io/)

<comment><USER8> As a sidenote, I like the (A B | C | D) and $A ideas from it, it would be some nice syntactic sugar for an actual lisp that we use today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The Computer History Museum, run by "hardware guys," has an extensive and > impressive collection of vintage hardware of all kinds and from all eras, > but it sits there as a collection of lifeless beige boxes.

And yet The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge has its exhibits powered up - including a collection of several Domesday Machines.

<comment><USER10> I think this is the point of the Living Computer Museum - [http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/](http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...and that's why I like to shoot film. It seems improbable that JPG or TIFF will go obsolete any time soon, but—someday—they will. The RAW files from my digital cameras are far less likely to be readable ten years from now.

But a negative or a positive image? Not a problem. Never gonna be unreadable. There's a time and place for both formats, just like there is a time and a place for both a Kindle book and a real paper book, and it's important that we make a point of thinking carefully about which the circumstances dictate: convenience or long-term survival.

<comment><USER2> Having a lot of faded old photos, I am not convinced of their longevity.

<comment><USER11> My fiber-based prints, properly fixed, washed and toned, are likely to survive for 150+ years.

<comment><USER2> Famous last words :-)

But seriously, how many photos does anyone bother to preserve on archival quality materials? I've lost family photos due to fading, floods, and simply losing them. I've digitized most of the remainder, in order to preserve them.

<comment><USER11> For me? All of them that matter. I mostly print on gelatin silver paper in a darkroom, and I don't use digital inkjet paper that contains OBAs.

I have digital copies, of course, too, and those are stored on my iMac, in a backup hard drive, in Backblaze, and on S3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Searchable online version of the BBC Doomsday data:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday)

<comment><USER13> Excellent, except it's half missing as the article mentioned. This turned out to be a dramatic demonstration of how difficult it is to preserve data even when you're trying and you're as big as the BBC.

"You may remember collecting data for the 'National Disc' which, unfortunately, we have not been able to re-publish at this time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The other day I was thinking about what would be required to preserve all scientific knowledge. There are a great deal of papers that have been made available by hackers, but the filesize is quite large. Many of them are scanned documents.

Raw text itself is pretty compressible, but pdfs record everything about the layout and typesetting, font choice, small smudges on the page, etc. You could maybe run OCR on them and get the text (if the OCR is reliable enough.) But then you lose equations, figures, unusual symbols, and other important info.

<comment><USER15> There has been some effort in Project Gutenburg to typeset public domain books (and at least one journal issue) in mathematics: [http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29](http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29) Doing this for all of the scientific literature is rather daunting, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cuneiform Tables vs 2013/2014:

[http://imgur.com/IaiqCXX](http://imgur.com/IaiqCXX)

<comment><USER14> Yes but the storage space of the clay tablet is a dealbreaker. It could maybe store 1 kb. And the file format has been lost, and is only usable by historians that have spent decades decrypting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This paper is a major contribution to digital archival. I'm embarrassed that I hadn't read it until now. Thanks, HN!

I've been thinking a lot about how to solve this problem myself.

Kay says their Smalltalk virtual machine for the 8086 was 6 kilobytes of machine code; I think we can do several times better than that. The most recent BF interpreter I wrote, in 2014, [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/brainfuck.c](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/brainfuck.c), is a bit over a page of code, and with -Os, it compiles to 863 bytes of i386 code (768 bytes .text, 38 bytes .init, 23 bytes .fini, 34 bytes .rodata). Maybe the ideal archival architecture would take a little more code than BF to interpret, because an actually efficient BF implementation has to do all kinds of somewhat unpredictable optimizations.

Some kind of Forth machine, like Calculus Vaporis [https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis](https://github.com/kragen/calculusvaporis), is one possibility.

Another would be a simple register machine, something like the PIC; also in 2014, I wrote a proposal for a nearly-MOV-machine version called "dontmove" at [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/dontmove.md](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/dontmove.md). The C implementation at [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/dontmove.c](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/dontmove.c) compiles to 855 bytes of i386 machine code (38 .init, 784 .text, 23 .fini, 10 .rodata) and is dramatically more efficient than a simple BF implementation, and unlike BF, it has features like memory indexing and subroutine calls; but it's not as well tested.

Each of BF and Dontmove took me about half an hour to implement. Even though a simple Dontmove implementation is exponentially faster than a simple BF implementation, it's still orders of magnitude slower than native code. I'm still exploring how to better bridge that gap; ideally implementing the virtual machine wouldn't take the entire afternoon that is the goal of Chifir, and it wouldn't run as slow as Chifir. I suspect that some kind of SIMT architecture (like GLSL and GPUs in general) might be the right path, allowing a simple emulator to amortize interpretation overhead over many lanes of data. I expect Alan would be allergic to this idea.

As mentioned in the Cuneiform paper, Lorie and van der Hoeven have published some papers on what they call a Universal Virtual Computer, directed at archival, but unfortunately some of the design decisions in the UVC run strongly counter to the goal of ensuring that from-scratch implementations have a good chance of being compatible: bignum registers, for example, and complicated fundamental operations like float division. The consequence is that writing emulators to run on the UVC should be very easy, but no two implementations of the UVC will be compatible, so those emulators will not run successfully on new implementations of the UVC written after we are all dead.

An issue barely mentioned in this paper is I/O devices. You'll note, for example, that Chifir has no mouse and no real-time clock, although it does have a keyboard and a framebuffer; its keyboard interface is somewhat underspecified but appears to lack control, alt, or other similar modifier keys, and there are no key-release events, and as abecedarius points out, _reading the keyboard is blocking_. This means that it will be impossible to write simple video games for Chifir that move your guy only as long as you hold down a key, and the lack of a real-time clock means that it can't do animations at a constant speed. It's likely that the specification and implementation of I/O devices for an archival virtual machine will require as much effort as that of the CPU.

</comment><comment><USER18> Somehow my brain turned off for the logo & the authors and I just started reading the main text. So somewhere in section 5, I started thinking, "Wow, this is great, it's like several talks I've heard from Alan Kay. ... ... Wait a minute..." Yep, he's the coauthor.

</comment><comment><USER19> But there is mere 3-4 decade gap separating (1) when incomprehensibly complex but working computer systems are created, and (2) when sufficiently powerful reverse engineering systems can simulate those obsolete systems.

</comment><comment><USER20> I went to UCLA with one of the authors, weird to see this pop up on HN.

<comment><USER21> They wrote a paper with Alan Kay, why wouldn't it pop up on HN?</comment></comment>


A Case for a OneToMany Relationship in Django - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amir.rachum.com/post/53019452363/a-case-for-a-onetomany-relationship-in-django

<comment><USER2> "Musicians" and "Bands" are a bad example for this. A band obviously has more than one musician. But a musician may belong to more than one band. And also a musician may be a different kind of musician in each of his or her band...lead singer in one band, guitarist in the other, etc.

Also if this is a many-to-many relationship, it gives you the flexibility (in the joining table) to define when a musician was part of the band and when he/she left and other such metadata that might be useful in a band app

<comment><USER3> > A band obviously has more than one musician.

There are single-musician bands though :)</comment></comment>


This $24k Swiss watch makes Apple feel the burn - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/01/07/get-a-life-get-a-mechanical-watch/ <comment><USER2> Related: [https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-h-moser-and-cie- swiss-...](https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-h-moser-and-cie-swiss-alp- watch-a-not-so-subtle-jab-at-the-apple-watch/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this whole article talking about the Apple watch while this watch barely has anything similiar to it? Sounds like a lazy marketing approach.</comment>


JS1k, 1k Javascript demo contest - <AUTHOR> http://js1k.com/home <comment><USER2> Looks like a burgeoning Javascript demoscene. Good luck to everyone who wants to top the 284 byte ray marcher, though: <http://www.p01.org/releases/512b_jspongy/>

It runs super slow on Firefox, it does much better in Chrome.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully, <http://js1k.com/demo/49> will top JSpongy ;)

This time I wrote a Quaternion Julia fractal raymarcher using the Hubbard- Douady distance estimation and tried to wrap the all thing with a nice design.

Hope you like this first entry to JS1K and appreciate the efforts.

PS: It works at a good 20fps in Firefox on my 2yo machines.

<comment><USER4> Good job; it looks amazing... That one's my favorite (although the tunnel is also nice).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't tell you guys how happy this makes me, it is the kind of programming that I really think should be done more often because it really makes you a better programmer to be able to work within such a restrictive environment.

Some of the demos are absolutely stunning for their size. I'm more and more convinced that javascript will be the dominant 'starter' language for new programmers in the future and these small programs are just the right size for enthusiastic kids to pry apart and learn from.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've found trying to squeeze my demo down really addictive.

My first version was about 990bytes, my second did the same stuff in 934. I then spent about 6 hours trying to squeeze a blur routine into the last 90 bytes. I've now got everything I want in and I've got 8 bytes to spare.

Of course, now I'm wondering what I can get into those last 8...

I've only just submitted the last verion (with blur) so it's not on yet but the previous one is here: <http://js1k.com/demo/59>

</comment><comment><USER7> This one is amazing: <http://js1k.com/demo/39> (move your mouse to change the colors).

This one is also nice: <http://js1k.com/demo/12>

<comment><USER3> The 39 one reminds me of pNebula and Mars, two 256b JS prods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This one <http://js1k.com/demo/41> is really remarkable for 1K.

</comment><comment><USER9> I just submitted mine! It's a shortened version of this (don't click if using firefox on linux because of bug #550845): <http://cs.uiowa.edu/~mltucker/js/chaos/> ... although bit simpler and without jquery of course.

I love this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> Demo #15 rocks. I wonder if a modern Zaxxon can be created based on that.

<http://js1k.com/demo/15>

</comment><comment><USER11> Can somebody please explain rule #4 to me? Thank you.

"4. Must work on current fx, sa, ch and o. (Let's level the playing field)"

<comment><USER12> firefox, safari, chrome, opera

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You could almost embed these in a QR Code.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, big fan of <http://js1k.com/demo/15>

Also nice to see mrdoob on there. I like his canvas experiments.

<comment><USER15> That one's _awesome_. Runs smoothly too, which is always a plus :)</comment></comment>


Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects - <AUTHOR> http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/ <comment><USER2> Awesome work !! This breakthrough opens a new avenue! Also appreciate how far you went in terms of developing new algorithms and 3D printing objects ! Would be interesting to see if this can also work with ensemble of neural networks as well as whether fooling an ensemble automatically leads to transformations fooling individual neural nets within it !</comment>