the submissions themselves are also put together individually.
That is how I collected the quotes originally, by using ircN's quote commands, which saved them in a file called quotes.txt, IIRC.
Then, I would occasionally entertain the channel with random quotes.
Eventually, I converted quotes.txt to quotes.html and posted it on my website.
Then I built a PHP+MySQL database with a submission form, then some basic anti-abuse and moderation features.
Funny seeing you here more than a decade later. Wonder how many other of those random encounters could happen with the people on HN. I remember stumbling across Brian Lozier from The Massassi Temple here last year, for instance.
It's already kind of weird to regularly get comments from or interact with geek 'celebrities' both big and small, (saurik, Alan Kay, etc.). Sometimes it bleeds over into the real world where I mention so and so said something to me about whatever topic we're on, and then I have to explain that it was a comment on a badly-styled website and try not to out myself at the same time.
But even weirder is how likely it is that many people that I used to know from various internet places (Massassi Temple, Something Awful, TTLG, IRC channels) are also active here. Not to mention that I know for sure that some techies I know are on here too.
I think what makes it feel weird is that HN is both relatively well-known and small at the same time. The places I frequented growing up were obscure enough that I wouldn't know anyone from 'somewhere else', whereas a site like Reddit is so pervasive that any comment I post gets lost in the noise (probably half of the thirty-something-and-under crowd I know is on Reddit).
EDIT: I think the weirdest 'celebrity' encounter I had was the time I had dinner guy who created CSS Zen Garden. That website was one of the resources that got me started on my web developer career.
If real, were there any consequences?
An old friend had a house where it was as if his room was built within a room, so there was some gap between his inner wall and and outer wall. He used to crawl around it and hide his servers there.
Always loved reading through bash.org and qdb.us Remember that I had to write my own rss feed for those sites to get the newest quotes. Was sad when it stopped piling :/
My work at one point had an OS X specific piece. So I got a wreck of a Macbook Air 2011 around 2013 or 2014, can't quite remember, the original owner tried to replace the LCD and failed spectacularly (I think replacing the screen now would require replacing the motherboard) and sold it screenless for cheap, perfect for my purposes. I added a Thunderbolt-Ethernet dongle to it, chucked it in the parts cupboard (it has slats so it airs well) and forgot about it when I changed primary clients in 2015 and I no longer needed it. A couple weeks ago I needed a Mac again and thought hey, I have a wreck. I checked LuCI and hey, there is wreck in the DHCP leases, that thing is still alive, I ran VNC against it, but what's my password? I haven't logged in for more than four years, let's reset the password. So I go to the cabinet, pull it out and https://i.imgur.com/SQbISmB.jpg URGH
edit: ifixit instructions:
https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_batter...
I then looked at the signal values in my AP. Kicked the phone from one AP, so it would connect to the next. The signal strength was almost the same so I figuered it must be in a room with somewhat equal distance to the APs. I went to that room, no lights on, called and the display turned on.
4/.878 watts
696 hours
1000 convert to kilowatt
per current monthly kilowatt to get to the fraction of consumption
times the cost of monthly consumption
the replacement battery and the guy doing the replacement, yeah that was a hundred alas. Oh well.
times four years
times the fraction of a year that monthly consumption comes to
The hunter2 password joke is so iconic that I still see it referenced regularly. I always think about the "moral combat" top quote where someone is kicked with the input sequence for a fatality as a great example of internet wit[2]. In general, I think many of the top quotes succinctly capture the realities of membership in internet communities (the double-edged nature of having moderators, the daily trials of our fellow users, the delight of linguistic playfulness).
There were other quote sites out there. qdb.us comes to mind, though it seems to have lost all its content, you can still see it on the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120131065558/http://qdb.us/top
[1] Skype, in its early days (and maybe still?), allowed group chats where other clients would send you the messages you missed automatically. We had no desire to run a server and this was in the era when Skype was nearly entirely peer-to-peer. I think of it as our own personal internet golden age.
I read many of these quotes back in middle and early high school, pretty early in the DB's existence as I can remember when it moved to bash.org. I promptly forgot about its existence, but a bunch of the material remained wedged in my brain.
Fast forward 10+ years. I had recently started dating someone whose name is [redacted], and I was starting to meet a bunch of his friends and hang out with them more regularly. I made a reference to part of a quote, and one of his friends replied with the next line. Then said friend added, "you know that's [redacted] in that quote, right?" I very much thought that he was trolling me, so I looked at the quote, and... well, it certainly says [redacted] in the username, but more importantly, it matched the pattern how he liked to format/modify his usernames to indicate certain contexts.
And now we have been married for almost 6 years.
Internet???
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And then DALnet was attacked. Days of downtime extended into weeks and eventually months, and by the time it ended DALnet was a shadow of its former self. So many tens of thousands of people just moved on and it was never the same again. I tried moving to efnet as so many did but it didn't have the same vibe. I didn't realise at the time just how much I'd actually lost and how much things were going to change. Man I'd give anything to go back.
Edit: Speaking of netstalgia, here are a few random files from the archives that some might recognise:
https://n1ckn4m3.com/?page_id=976
https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/romjul
Do you remember "PHP-Nuke" craze, everyone was creating community portals where members were able to post news, polls, etc...
Good old times :)
Oh, timelessness.
<mage> what should I give sister for unzipping?
<Kevyn> Um. Ten bucks?
<mage> no I mean like, WinZip?alias vi 'rm \!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/.cshrc > ~/.z; mv -f ~/.z ~/.cshrc'
...which is of course utterly evil:)
https://www.lexico.com/definition/morphodite
> Originally: a hermaphrodite; a person having both male and female sex characteristics. In later use also: a homosexual man or woman, especially one overtly manifesting features or attributes regarded as characteristic of the opposite sex; a transvestite.
Oh wow, TIL a new homophobic slur :-(
If you want to see what the previous designed looked like, try http://bashorg.org/
I don't think the bulk of the audience here can read russian
<i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b <BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?
To this day, if you ask me "hey do you know what sucks?" my reflexive answer is gonna be "vacuums!"
The MegaZeux community was awesome
Also, just a note: you may want to make it more apparent that the "Top 100-200" is 2 different links. Took me a while to figure out why I ended up in two different places on my desktop and laptop.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190802095853/http://www.qdb.us...
And there's also XKCDB [1].
EDIT: Found it! http://www.xkcdb.com
<DmncAtrny> And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
<DmncAtrny> and run like hell
(and get off my lawn kids, : I remember when that quote's votes were in the hundreds :p)