Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#31

Post by fwez » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:01 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #12

jbooth wrote: post #4

Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.

You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting? I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.

I keep the client running in the background (not even minimized). I have it set to save a log of all chats. I occasionally glance through those logs 2-3 times during the day. That's also the same frequency with which I check my mail.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#32

Post by phicou » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:03 PM UTC

We (developers and sysadmins) use it at the big corporation where I work. Keeping irssi open in screen (GNU screen) means I can connect remotely from anywhere with a single session, and it doesn't appear when I'm focused on something else in a different screen session. Each project gets its own channel. It's way better for collaboration than having to match schedules for each little question.

It's also very helpful for asking specific questions about OSS projects, as mentioned. The people actually developing projects hang out in IRC, not at StackOverflow.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#33

Post by notmyname » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:06 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #12

jbooth wrote: post #4

Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.

You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting? I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.

I use an IRC bouncer to stay logged in to the IRC servers. I connect to the bouncer, which replays anything I missed on the IRC server while I'm not logged in to the bouncer.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#34

Post by digitallogic » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:08 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #12

jbooth wrote: post #4

Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.

You mean you actually keep a chat window open all day long? Isn't that ridiculously distracting? I check my email twice a day, and HN the same. Anything else that could potentially distract me from what I'm doing gets turned off. I couldn't imagine giving random strangers the ability to intrude into my train of thought whenever they wanted.

I keep it running in a seperate screen session that I open occasionally throughout the day.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#35

Post by bch » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:09 PM UTC

jbooth wrote: post #4

Whatever OSS projects you use have channels on freenode. Keep those open all day and lurk, you'll be amazed how much you learn from osmosis. If someone comes by with an easy question, answer it and you'll have social karma to get help from others when you need it.

If you can't lurk and review in realtime, setup logging on your irc client and review later. I do automatically no matter what, happy that if a great conversation occurs, it's automatically captured. Screen, tmux, or similar may be helpfull in this case; setup your client in tmux on appropriate computer, detach, and review later.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#36

Post by thu » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:09 PM UTC

Yes, for instance, a lot of haskellers are on #haskell on freenode.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#37

Post by megamark16 » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:11 PM UTC

On Freenode: #django, #startups, #python, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#38

Post by x0t » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:13 PM UTC

I was pretty active in the suse project with bug testing and whatnot for a while, so that got me on freenode. I lurk about 15 channels there.

I'm on two private networks with about 5 channels between them and I lurk on Undernet out of nostalgia. I'll hit up Efnet if I'm looking for security related topics.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#39

Post by philcrissman » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:15 PM UTC

Yes.

#rubymn (Minnesota ftw)

#railsbridge (if you're interested in ruby on rails; the http://railsbridge.com community)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?

#40

Post by phaylon » Fri, Jul 30, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

I telecommute, and most of my day-to-day conversations go over IRC. My IRC client has ~50 open windows at the moment, but less than half of them are actual Open Source channels, many of them are direct queries with the user. And thanks to screen, I never log off and don't miss discussions, someone trying to get in touch, commit and release messages to -dev channels, and so on.

If it suits one's style, it's an easy and nice way to stay linked to one or more communities.