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Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

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Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#2

Post by csl »

As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are.

Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#5

Post by dangrossman »

It's weird the way like-minded people somehow all find each other. There are several HN members along with myself who have ended up running bootstrapped SaaS businesses to make their living, who all played the same MUD (the text-based precursor to MMORPGs you could telnet into) in the 1990s/2000s. Creating "zmud triggers" to automate parts of that game was probably some of the earliest programming we all did.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#6

Post by daeken »

csl wrote: post #2

As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are. Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?

I've been on IRC non-stop since 1997; it's where the majority of my closest friends and I keep in touch. I also run an IRC channel for the class I teach, and it's the primary communication means for most students.

As for YC, there's the ##startups channel on Freenode, unofficially.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#7

Post by rachellaw »

my co-founder and myself met similarly through IRC, but we never exchanged irl names. Much much later, by coincidence, we ended up in the same grad school program and that's how we started our company

I think at a certain age/time, you tend to spend more time with friends rather than family and that's when it begins to happen. For non-hackers it's when they develop lifelong friends in work or school, for hackers/internet-people that's when you start thinking of your ICQ/IRC/fandom/LJ/pick your ancient platform as your true friends even if you've never met in person.

Re: Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

#9

Post by spindritf »

csl wrote: post #2

As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are. Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?

Absolutely. All day, every day.

There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary.

Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reasonably secure. There are even OTR plugins for many popular clients (♥irssi♥). There's also FiSH but that's on the inconvenient end of the paranoid spectrum.

It is perfect if people you're going to communicate with are proficient computer users.

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