Haha, wow. I read bash.org in my youth, and this exchange (among others) have stuck with me, such that I'd remember if someone pointed it out. I'm sure the quote has idly flowed through my head at some point too, when I've been on a random walk philosophizing or something. Clame to fame indeed :D
Funny seeing you here more than a decade later. Wonder how many other of those random encounters could happen with the people on HN. I remember stumbling across Brian Lozier from The Massassi Temple here last year, for instance.
It's already kind of weird to regularly get comments from or interact with geek 'celebrities' both big and small, (saurik, Alan Kay, etc.). Sometimes it bleeds over into the real world where I mention so and so said something to me about whatever topic we're on, and then I have to explain that it was a comment on a badly-styled website and try not to out myself at the same time.
But even weirder is how likely it is that many people that I used to know from various internet places (Massassi Temple, Something Awful, TTLG, IRC channels) are also active here. Not to mention that I know for sure that some techies I know are on here too.
I think what makes it feel weird is that HN is both relatively well-known and small at the same time. The places I frequented growing up were obscure enough that I wouldn't know anyone from 'somewhere else', whereas a site like Reddit is so pervasive that any comment I post gets lost in the noise (probably half of the thirty-something-and-under crowd I know is on Reddit).
EDIT: I think the weirdest 'celebrity' encounter I had was the time I had dinner guy who created CSS Zen Garden. That website was one of the resources that got me started on my web developer career.
Incidentally, The Massassi Temple and Jedi Knight level building/modding is what got me started with software engineering. COG programming both introduced me to programming and revealed my affinity for it :)
At the time, there were no peers in my life to challenge me intellectually, or even interested in many of the same things I was, so this community was a godsend that kept me sane through middle school. If I'd been born even five years earlier, that phase of my life would have been even more of a chore than it was in the first place.
No one at the time was discussing the Internet and computer games' role in socialization, friendship and becoming a well-rounded citizen!
Same here. While I've been programming since I was eight or so, working on a mod/total conversion for Thief and building levels for Jedi Knight was what got me properly on that track.
I don't miss the days of JED/JKEdit though. All those crashes and 'leaks' in the geometry... The Unreal Editor was a lot better, but even there these things would regularly happen.
Another fellow Massassi alum checking in. Not only did that get me started in programming, but it also piqued my interest in Linux. My time there was a huge positive influence on my life.
I have to admit, this is a bit odd to think about in 2020: 20k upvotes in a system where there is no mitigation, captcha, JS or cookie requirement, being considered high - then I click over to Twitter and see things that have hundreds of thousands of "likes" in minutes from posting.
In a way, it's much more frightening to operate on the assumption that, while there are bots, it mostly is actual humans. Simply put, a lot of the actual humans are bots (in the metaphorical sense of having incredibly un-nuanced takes and reactively responding to certain heuristic phrases that "trigger" them).
I don't have any stats on what % of twitter is bots so I'm not saying that it's not overwhelmed by bots, but we should be aware that there might be an even more chilling explanation here: that it actually _is_ humans causing the toxicity
I've semi-recently created a new Twitter account account in order to dive head on into the deepest cesspools of Twitter. The topics and accounts I follow are mostly what I'd call "bot bait"--stuff like Hong Kong, Trump, COVID--and it's been extremely eye-opening to see the ways that people will respond back-and-forth for multiple tweets in near real-time.
But I've also come to roughly the same conclusion as you. I might be naive, but given the time I've spent on the internet, I'd like to think I can tell the difference between bots and humans. Some of the bots are obvious, some of the bots are non-obvious (blaming bots), but still definitely bots. But MOST of them, are probably real people. Really, really ignorant people, on all sides of the political spectrums. There's just these people out there now with phones and a Twitter account, and they're broadcasting their id.
Not really... philosophical zombies behave indistinguishably from "conscious" humans, we just don't believe them when they say they have internal experiences just like real people.
If a community would be comfortable among bots, it would be the ML community, wouldn't it? Joking aside, I think it is rather despite Twitter than because of it that it works.
It was real in the sense that ben174 was in fact working at LowerMyBills.com at the time, 2003-2004: http://www.bugben.com/ (His resume)
However, most likely that was not his CTO. Its more likely that someone ran the command
/whois ben174
and it returned the hostname associated with his IP, which on IRC was typically public at the time. Then this person trolled ben174 by claiming to be from his company.
It genuinely happens. I used to run some networking cables through the walls and forgot one went up into the loft where an old machine was! For a while I was using this machine and couldn't figure out where on earth it was hiding - it didn't help it was covered in the loft! I only remembered it was still at my parent's place after I moved out - I think they even changed router several times but plugged it back in thinking it was something like a printer or extender or something.
An old friend had a house where it was as if his room was built within a room, so there was some gap between his inner wall and and outer wall. He used to crawl around it and hide his servers there.
That made me laugh so much back in the day. But what was ridiculous back in the early 2000s is now a practically everyday event. My wife frequently uses a "find my phone" app to find her online device.
My god, I used to quote this with friends years ago. I miss the old days of IRC. Nice to know you're still hanging around here. Thanks for providing years of entertainment :)
So this was a real quote? It always stroke me as fake :D
Always loved reading through bash.org and qdb.us
Remember that I had to write my own rss feed for those sites to get the newest quotes. Was sad when it stopped piling :/
http://bash.org/?207373