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Bash IRC Quote Database

bash.org

263 pointsadnanh160 comments

I neither own nor operate bash.org. I wrote the scripts, collected the seed content, initially in quotes.txt, and operated at geekissues.org/quotes/ until its move to bash.org. AMA

How does one collect funny IRC contents via script?

It's funny that this should come up on the frontpage today, because just yesterday, I chose to go and find and install ircN, which still works just fine, by the way.

That is how I collected the quotes originally, by using ircN's quote commands, which saved them in a file called quotes.txt, IIRC.

Then, I would occasionally entertain the channel with random quotes.

Eventually, I converted quotes.txt to quotes.html and posted it on my website.

Then I built a PHP+MySQL database with a submission form, then some basic anti-abuse and moderation features.

Doesn't really answer the core part of the question - how did you fish out the funny ones?

Manually

Do you still use IRC?

Yes, I still love and use IRC, and I just recently installed mIRC and then ircN, and aside from nostalgic value, it's still great for conversation. irssi is my go-to client in general.

How are the quotes collected? Are they collated by users or by some algorithm? They seem too good to not have some user input in their filtering?

yes, the quotes are individually approved by moderators, and on bash.org, rejected quotes never see the light of day.

the submissions themselves are also put together individually.

My quote being #11 in the Top 100 is the closest I have ever been to fame.

http://bash.org/?207373

You legend, you.

I don't even remember when did I first read it. It's not close, it is it.

I would estimate 2005.

Yours is much better. http://bash.org/?946436

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.

I dont understand how anyone is still under the illusion that Twitter is inhabited by humans. Nothing there feels real to me.

As I often say, "real people don't use twitter". Its bots and trolls talking to each other, with the news treating it as research.

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

You're describing humans that are frighteningly close to "philosophical zombies" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Twitter is a pure pain box, but no one has the kindness of offering a gom jabbar.

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.

NPCs

Slide into their DMPCs

I once was a coder like you, then I took a carpal tunnel to the hand.

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.

Twitter has been the best thing to happen to my life in awhile. It has directly led to opportunities and people that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

Maybe this is an ML thing, though. The Twitter ML community is much tighter-knit.

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.

Did it really happen or did you come up with it?

It actually happened.

It's very funny because an exchange on Person of Interest is rumored to have derived from this one

http://bash.org/?23396

That would seem like an homage indeed....:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/characters/nm0009918

Every time I read this, I wonder what "WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD" is referring to. Anybody care to enlighten me?

Wow! I wonder how many of the famous Bash people are on HN (probably quite a few)!

Classic! This is one I clearly remember reading ages ago.

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.

Well hello there fellow Massassi Temple member!

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.

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 :/

Mine is 10 below you :)

http://bash.org/?258908

Is that real? Wouldn't it be better to keep quiet rather than quitting and revealing your hostname?

If real, were there any consequences?

I always imagined ChrisLMB looked at his hostname and was making a joke :)

on irc (unless the server hides it) your hostname is always visible.

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.

though, consider that the user's nick was "ChrisLMB", where "LMB" very possibly stood for "Lower My Bills" :)

Exactly, and he was online before ben posted his original message.

I have so many questions...

Is it that hard to find out who the CTO of Lower My Bills was?

Haha wow - that’s been one of my favorites forever. Right up there Michael Savu and hunter2.

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 :)

Here’s my favorite so far: http://bash.org/?5273

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.

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.

I got close to http://bash.org/?5273 recently.

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

That is terrifying. How do you plan to handle/dispose of that battery? I guess I'd unplug the Mac from AC and run the battery all the way down, but then you probably should have a fireproof bag to transport it to someplace that will accept it for disposal/recycling.

edit: ifixit instructions:

https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_batter...

I had someone to come and replace the battery and take the old one away. Not my problem any more.

I feel I have read an entire story with the same starting line as the above. Can anyone else recall something similar?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_serv...

"Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall."

Ha ha

The missing part in that story is that the system was an IBM PS/2 Model 9595. They were a complete tank.

Here is 3 random pages with info:

http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_95t3/ http://kentie.net/article/ps2/index.htm http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_95t4_586/

I had one running as a fileserver for years (OS/2). There was even a hack for the type 4 CPU complex that allowed you to put in a Pentium MMX Overdrive processor (you had to do some soldering). Worked like a charm. I think I had a 233MHz running on it.

I found a Raspberry pihole that I forgot existed when I moved out of my last place.

I see your Macbook Air put on its floaties!

What is going on in that picture?

Bloated batteries real bad.

Batteries are damaged. This can happen through normal use. There is some risk of fire or the release of toxic gasses. Check out /r/spicypillows:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/

Posted. https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/comments/grxje3/my_old...

E have an esp8266 device on a battery pack in deep sleep mode that still attaches to my WiFi network occasionally enough to appear in my unifi dashboard. I have no idea where it is; it's been like that for months now.

I had this recently with my phone. It was on silent, so ringing wouldn't help. Still connected though.

I then looked at the signal values in my AP. Kicked the phone from one AP, so it would connect to the next. The signal strength was almost the same so I figuered it must be in a room with somewhat equal distance to the APs. I went to that room, no lights on, called and the display turned on.

You got it cheap but that idle computer must have costed you about an extra hundred buck in electricity over 4 years...

The last 29 days, I just checked, I am paying 19 CAD for 143kWh. https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/screen-shot-2016-10... shows 4W but perhaps it's 4.6W because of the brick efficiency. Since this thing was running 24-7, that's 29*24=696 hours so we are looking at 3171 Wh or 3kWh. At the end, (4/.878 x 696/1000)/143 x 19 x 4 x 365/29=21.210 so we that's 21 bucks and change.

4/.878 watts

696 hours

1000 convert to kilowatt

per current monthly kilowatt to get to the fraction of consumption

times the cost of monthly consumption

the replacement battery and the guy doing the replacement, yeah that was a hundred alas. Oh well.

times four years

times the fraction of a year that monthly consumption comes to

Ah Bash! My friends and I found this at its heyday in the early 2000s right when we were becoming computer literate ourselves. We we not IRC people, but had a communal skype chat going[1] and recognized the conventions.

The hunter2 password joke is so iconic that I still see it referenced regularly. I always think about the "moral combat" top quote where someone is kicked with the input sequence for a fatality as a great example of internet wit[2]. In general, I think many of the top quotes succinctly capture the realities of membership in internet communities (the double-edged nature of having moderators, the daily trials of our fellow users, the delight of linguistic playfulness).

There were other quote sites out there. qdb.us comes to mind, though it seems to have lost all its content, you can still see it on the wayback machine:

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.

[2] http://www.bash.org/?205195

Just today I muttered 'hunter2' while typing my password in on a screen share. At least two other people got the joke.

Being honest, the guest password for my NAS is hunter2. Better than 0, and yet still common enough to be funny.

qdb.us succumbed to PHP 5.x -> 7.x compatibility issues, but should be returning soon.

Do you have a source for this? I think I had a quote in the top 100 that I felt kinda bad about losing. lol

I am the admin :)

I swear, HN really is the old boys' secret clubhouse.

What a flex.

Thanks for the heads up; looking forward to it coming back online!

Thank you for your enthusiasm, it really helps me stay motivated and keep working on it.

(I can't believe I'm logging into HN to post this, but hey)

I read many of these quotes back in middle and early high school, pretty early in the DB's existence as I can remember when it moved to bash.org. I promptly forgot about its existence, but a bunch of the material remained wedged in my brain.

Fast forward 10+ years. I had recently started dating someone whose name is [redacted], and I was starting to meet a bunch of his friends and hang out with them more regularly. I made a reference to part of a quote, and one of his friends replied with the next line. Then said friend added, "you know that's [redacted] in that quote, right?" I very much thought that he was trolling me, so I looked at the quote, and... well, it certainly says [redacted] in the username, but more importantly, it matched the pattern how he liked to format/modify his usernames to indicate certain contexts.

And now we have been married for almost 6 years.

Internet???

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Posted this for sentimental reasons, it hits all the right spots when reading these quotes.

Another oldie but goodie that still seems to be around is the Internet Oracle: https://internetoracle.org/ .

When I think back over my childhood, there's nothing I miss more than the way being on the "old" internet felt. The Geocities sites, the webrings, ICQ, Trillian, mIRC scripting, stileproject, the birth and death of E/N sites, image macros, and a million other things that no longer exist and don't have any meaning to the vast majority of internet users today. It was a special club, almost nobody I knew in the real world had any idea that this stuff existed and wouldn't have cared if they did.

And then DALnet was attacked. Days of downtime extended into weeks and eventually months, and by the time it ended DALnet was a shadow of its former self. So many tens of thousands of people just moved on and it was never the same again. I tried moving to efnet as so many did but it didn't have the same vibe. I didn't realise at the time just how much I'd actually lost and how much things were going to change. Man I'd give anything to go back.

Edit: Speaking of netstalgia, here are a few random files from the archives that some might recognise:

https://n1ckn4m3.com/?page_id=976

https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/romjul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ljsPqIfPD0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3sexvJM5Go

Oh yeah, I feel you! I was also on DALnet, and saw the exodus to other networks, EFnet, IRCnet, Undernet, QuakeNet... But as you said, they just didn't feel "right". I.e. some of them had "weird-looking" services as opposed to the DALnet's ChanServ, NickServ etc... :-)

Do you remember "PHP-Nuke" craze, everyone was creating community portals where members were able to post news, polls, etc...

Good old times :)

Haha yeah, PHP-Nuke sites and vBulletin forums, what a duo!

This has already been around when I was a kid. Which was like fifteen years ago.

Oh, timelessness.

Did somebody say 'timeless' in the context of tech humor?

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.en.html

That's utterly beautiful. I really lost it at:

alias vi 'rm \!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/.cshrc > ~/.z; mv -f ~/.z ~/.cshrc'

...which is of course utterly evil:)

Yup; it's packed full of such gems.

I might borrow some of these aliases too.

    alias rm 'rm -rf \!*'
    alias hose kill -9 '`ps -augxww | grep \!* | awk \'{print $2}\'`'
    alias kill 'kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!*'
    alias renice 'echo Renice\?  You must mean kill -9.; kill -9 \!*'

That's mean

Lessee, this:

1. Creates an alias named "vi", so that next time the user runs the text editor vi, it will run this script instead. 2. Deletes whatever files the user was planning to edit in vi. 3. Removes this "vi" alias, reverting the behavior to just running vi in the future. 4. Removes every line from the .cshrc which contains the string "BoZo".

If you put this in someone's .cshrc file, the next file they attempted to edit with vi would be deleted along with the evidence that anything malicious had been done to you.

Why is the idiot compressing everything?

'back in the day', storage space was always at a premium. (As was RAM, CPU, ...) UNIX system administrators spent a lot of time thinking about saving space. I suspect the joke is that the idiot just got fixed on that one aspect.

> The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer

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 :-(

Tbh it doesn't really make sense. Queer/trans people are accused of many things but not COBOL.

FWIW, I emailed the webmaster address for gnu.org, and they thanked me for my report and removed the slur. (I suspect it only snuck in there in the first place because it's obscure enough that nobody recognized it. Or at least I hope so.)

Hah, I list my occupation as IT THUG.

It's funny reading these again for me because when I first browsed bash.org I didn't speak English very well, so I didn't understand some of these jokes (or wasn't sure I understood them correctly). All these years later I can finally understand all the subtlety and nuance behind "what should I give sister for unzipping?".

To save anyone else from looking it up:

    <mage> what should I give sister for unzipping?
    <Kevyn> Um. Ten bucks?
    <mage> no I mean like, WinZip?

I'm somewhat surprised that no-one mentioned https://bash.im (formerly bash.org.ru) yet. It started as a Russian equivalent of bash.org (the very first "quote" https://bash.im/quote/1 is infamously a translation of http://bash.org/?74629; and is still know as "bash org" even after the domain name change), but become a phenomenon of the Russian internet segment over the years.

>no-one mentioned yet

I don't think the bulk of the audience here can read russian

Говори за себя.

[машет вам из гугл переводчик]

Miaow?...

It was at bash.org.ru for a while. They recently redesigned it.

If you want to see what the previous designed looked like, try http://bashorg.org/

There's also https://danstonchat.com/ in France (formerly known as bashfr)

The nethack equivalent: https://nhqdb.alt.org/?latest

There's an Eve Online equivalent too: http://www.omgrawr.net/quote/top

http://bash.org/?330261

<i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b <BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?

Ah, a classic.

I feel like early IRC was when people were much more involved in communicating over the not so popular internet. Sitting and chatting was a way of spending time by itself. Brings back warm feelings.

my favorite so far

http://bash.org/?835030

ah, yes, trove of witty banter that i read obsessively in 1999 or so.

To this day, if you ask me "hey do you know what sucks?" my reflexive answer is gonna be "vacuums!"

same!!!

Back in the 80s, Radio DJs were not allowed to say "suck" on the air, so they switched to "vacuums". As a kid, I just remember how dumb the government must be to implement such a lame rule. As an adult, my opinion overall of government hasn't really improved.

http://bash.org/?362137 karma?

Man this brings back memories. Oh how I miss the '90s

When the original iPhone came out, bandwidth on Edge was so slow that Bash was just about the only site I could load with a good ratio of load time to enjoyment. I read a lot of bash, then.

Always fun to see this pop up now and then. My old handle and young wisdom http://bash.org/?7717

Impressed by the amount of hn crew claiming they have quotes on there. Maybe not all of it is fake after all

A couple of mine are still around: http://bash.org/?105643 http://bash.org/?105259

The MegaZeux community was awesome

Dunno if you know, but the ZZT community had a revival of sorts with the release of the reconstructed source code. Unfortunately it's on discord, but a few mzx people hang around too.

I've heard about the ZZT reconstruction project. It's pretty exiting to see. Both communities have always been somewhat related.

Well, this may totally destroy my productivity today...

Also, just a note: you may want to make it more apparent that the "Top 100-200" is 2 different links. Took me a while to figure out why I ended up in two different places on my desktop and laptop.

A quote of mine, from an eternity ago, is still floating around on the top 100-200 section after over ~15 years. It's amazing (and weird?) that a 10 year old's funny IRC chatlog is going to be immortalized on this site foreermore.

Also, there was qdb.us:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190802095853/http://www.qdb.us...

Mozilla runs a DB of their own: [0]. Although their IRC network closed down recently, so this might not last long either.

And there's also XKCDB [1].

[0]: http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/browse

[1]: http://www.xkcdb.com/

Fork of the Rash QDB: https://github.com/paxed/rash-qdb-fork

One of my first full web apps was a clone of Bash.org with AJAX for the upvote/downvotes for a web forum I helped moderate. Must've been early 2000s?

heh mine is still there too http://bash.org/?605501

This is by far my favorite: http://bash.org/?23396

I though it went down.. Hmm, it didn't so I'll start reading that again ^_^ Thanks!

I have a few comments listed on there, haven't visited that site or used IRC in ages.

AMA request: the hunter2 guy

This used to be on my daily read list, def some quotes from me on there.

Anyone remember the bash.org equivalent for the xkcd IRC channel, where you were only allowed to send messages that had never been sent before? I can't seem to find it anymore — there were some gems that riffed on popular bash.org quotes.

EDIT: Found it! http://www.xkcdb.com

ah sigh, I too have some quotes in bash.org qdb.

hunter2 is one of the best: http://bash.org/?244321

yeah, and 'I put on my robe and wizard hat' is right there as well.

http://bash.org/?104383

<DmncAtrny> I will write on a huge cement block "BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING."
<DmncAtrny> And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer

<DmncAtrny> and run like hell

10/10 social commentary on the legal system

It was later referenced in a TF2 item description:

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Conjurer%27s_Cowl

Robe and wizard hat is epic.

Never fails to make me laugh my belly out.

Haha I still say that sometimes before I need to go do some random thing. Usually goes unnoticed, but every now and then I get a chuckle

Makes me feel better to know I'm not the only one. I mean, I suspected, but it's nice to get a confirmation!

The first season of IT Crowd on DVD has subtitles in "l33t". What this actually meant was each episode had a different subtitle gimmick. One of them had the "HEY EURAKARTE" quote http://www.bash.org/?23396

(and get off my lawn kids, : I remember when that quote's votes were in the hundreds :p)

The current link to https://bash.org/ is broken. Only http://bash.org/ works right now.

Changed now. Thanks!

https://web.archive.org/web/20200525212839/https://bash.org/

the 'bottom' quotes are still accessible at ?bottom if anyone misses all the racist ones

A quick win for readability is to align the first character of each chat message. Perhaps some colors would be useful too. I noticed I had to expend quite some mental power just to follow the chats linked here.

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